Among the billions of beings in the world, only human beings can live a rich life without worry. Where did humanity's economic prosperity come from? How did the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the demographic transition occur? Why is there such a huge disparity in the level of global development? Throughout the ages, countless people of insight have tried to explore the reasons behind this, trying to solve the ultimate question of the mystery of growth.
The authors of The Journey to Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality will use the original "Unified Growth" framework to take us back in the history of human development since Homo sapiens left Africa. The author believes that geographical factors and migration processes affect the culture and system of various societies, and act on the "giant historical gear" between population size, demographic structure and technological progress, which ultimately determines the timing and way for various societies and countries to enter modern civilization, and forms the development pattern of today's world.
The impact of history is far-reaching and long-lasting, but the future is not destined. The cogs of history will continue to operate, and the adoption of appropriate policy measures and values tailored to local conditions will help achieve universal human prosperity.
The Human Journey: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
[Beauty] Odaed Geller
Translated by Yu Jiang
CITIC Publishing Group August 2022 edition
Introduction The Mysteries of the Human Journey
In a Venetian Gothic building at Brown University, USA, a squirrel is running along a window sill. It paused for a moment and caught a curious glimpse of someone in the room who was writing a manuscript, rather than devoting its energy to searching for food. The ancestors of this squirrel once spread throughout the virgin forests of North America thousands of years ago. Like its distant ancestors and contemporary counterparts around the globe, it spends most of its life gathering food, hiding from predators, searching for a mate, and finding shelter in bad weather.
In fact, since the emergence of homo sapiens as a unique species about 300,000 years ago, for most humans, the basic motivation for life is actually quite similar to that of the squirrel, which is to survive and reproduce. For thousands of years, around the globe, humanity has been at a basic level of survival and has rarely changed. What is puzzling, however, is that in just a few short centuries, our way of life has changed dramatically. Judging from the scale of long history, the quality of human life can be said to have been greatly improved overnight.
Suppose a few residents of Jerusalem who lived in the time of Jesus two thousand years ago stepped into a time shuttle and traveled to Jerusalem ruled by the Ottoman Empire in 1800 AD. They will no doubt marvel at the spectacular new walls, the enormous population growth, and the emergence of inventions. However, although Jerusalem in this period was very different from that of The Roman era, these time travelers were able to adapt to the new environment with relative ease. They must, of course, behave in accordance with the new cultural practices, but they can largely retain the occupations they had held at the beginning of the 1st century AD and be sufficient to make a living, because the knowledge and skills acquired at that time were still useful until the beginning of the 19th century. They will also find themselves facing certain dangers, diseases or natural disasters similar to those of Roman times, and that life expectancy will not change much.
What if these time travelers were to walk into the shuttle again, fast forward 200 years, to Jerusalem in the early 21st century? They will be completely shocked. At this point, their skills will be completely obsolete, as most occupations presuppose formal education, and many of the techniques that appear to be witchcraft become necessary for everyday life. Also, with the eradication of a number of deadly diseases of the past, their life expectancy can be doubled almost instantaneously, which requires a very different mindset and a longer-term plan for life.
The trenches of the times make it difficult for us to even imagine the world of not so long ago. The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes admitted that life is ugly, rough and short. 1 At that time, about a quarter of newborns died of cold, hunger and various diseases before the age of one, women often suffered misfortune during childbirth, and life expectancy rarely exceeded 40 years. As soon as the sun goes down, the whole world goes into darkness. Men, women and children spend a long time fetching water for their homes, rarely bathing, and trapped in smokey houses for months in winter. Most people during this period lived in vast rural areas, rarely left their birthplaces, lived off poor and monotonous diets, and could not read or write. The effects of the economic crisis at that time were far from just tightening the belt, but would lead to mass famine and death. Many of the daily chores that upset people today are nothing compared to the hardships and misery faced by our not-so-distant ancestors.
For a long time, it was widely believed that the standard of living has continued to rise throughout human history, but this is an illusion. Although technological progress is largely a gradual process and is gradually accelerating, it has not brought about a corresponding improvement in living conditions. The amazing improvement in quality of life over the past few centuries is actually the result of a sudden transformation.
Centuries ago most people lived in a much closer condition to their ancient ancestors thousands of years ago, and to most others around the world, and far from who we are today. The standard of living of The English peasants in the early 16th century was not much different from that of the Chinese serfs of the 11th century, the Mayan farmers of more than 1500 years ago, the Greek herders of the 4th century BC, the Egyptian farmers of 5000 years ago, and even the Jericho shepherds of 11,000 years ago. However, since the beginning of the 19th century, from the entire history of mankind, people's life expectancy has more than doubled, the per capita income in the most developed regions has increased to 20 times that of the past, and the global average has increased by 14 times.
This continuous improvement is so earth-shattering that we often forget how unusual this period was compared to previous history. How do we explain this "growth puzzle": health, wealth, education, etc., reflect the incredible improvement in quality of life over the centuries, dwarfing all other advances made by the intelligent race since its inception?
In 1798, the British scholar Thomas Malthus proposed a theory to explain the mechanisms that have led to the relative stagnation of living standards and caused society to fall into traps since ancient times. Malthus argues that whenever societies obtain food surpluses through technological innovation, the increase in living standards is only a temporary phenomenon, because this will inevitably lead to an increase in the birth rate and a decline in mortality. So sooner or later, population growth will deplete surplus food, return living conditions to basic subsistence levels, and societies will become as poor as they were before technological innovation was developed.
Indeed, in the so-called "Malthusian age", the entire history of mankind before the recent great leap forward, the fruits of technological progress were mainly translated into larger and denser populations, with little effect on long-term prosperity and affluence. The population is growing, but the living conditions are stagnant, struggling at the basic level of subsistence. Differences in technological achievement and land productivity between regions are mainly reflected in population density, but only have a short-term effect on living standards. Ironically, however, just as Malthus was finishing his book and declaring that this "poverty trap" would last forever, the mechanisms he had discovered suddenly faded, and the metamorphosis from stagnation to growth had already taken place.
How did humanity escape this poverty trap? What are the basic reasons for the continuation of the stagnation era? Figuring out what caused the long economic ice ages and what helped humanity escape could help us answer: Why are there so many differences in living standards around the world?
Both the idea and the evidence suggest that to explain the vast differences in affluence around the world, it is necessary to understand the fundamental drivers behind the overall development process. Therefore, I propose a unified theory that attempts to cover the entire course of human development, in order to analyze the dynamics of the transition from the era of stagnation to the era of continuous improvement of living standards, so that we can see the imprint of the distant past on the fate of various countries.
In the first part of this journey of exploration, we will examine the puzzle of growth, focusing in particular on the mechanisms that led humanity to confine itself to a basic state of existence for most of its history, and the transformative power that ultimately allowed certain communities to break through this trap and allow many of today's inhabitants to enjoy unprecedented prosperity and abundance. The journey will begin with humanity itself, namely the emergence of Homo sapiens in East Africa about 300,000 years ago. This will follow several key milestones in the journey of human development: Homo sapiens who left Africa tens of thousands of years ago and dispersed to all continents of the world, societies that gradually transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to settled agricultural communities, and more recently, the Industrial Revolution and demographic transitions.
Human history is rich in interesting details: great civilizations have risen and fallen, legendary kings have led conquests and suffered setbacks, artists have left immortal cultural treasures, philosophers and scientists have expanded our understanding of the universe, and there are many communities and hundreds of millions of people who are not familiar to ordinary people. It's easy to get lost in such a vast ocean, floating with the waves, unaware of the grand ocean currents below.
Instead, it is these grand undercurrents that this book explores and discerns: the forces that govern the process of development. This book will show how these forces have worked silently throughout human history and during the long economic ice age, accelerating frequency until the rate of technological progress breaks a tipping point in the Industrial Revolution, necessitating a basic education to acquire the competencies needed to adapt to a changing technological environment. At this time, the fertility rate began to decline, and the improvement of living standards was able to escape the reverse effects of population growth, resulting in long-term prosperity that continues to expand to this day.
At the heart of this discussion is the long-term sustainability of the human species on Earth. In Malthusian times, unfavorable weather and plague led to the catastrophic loss of population. Today, environmental degradation and climate change triggered by growth processes present serious challenges: how can our species survive and avoid the terrible population losses of the past. I will offer a reassuring outlook: the tipping point that the world has recently crossed has caused a permanent decline in fertility, as well as an acceleration in human capital formation and technological innovation, which allows humanity to mitigate the harmful effects of development and is a central reason for achieving the long-term sustainable survival of the human species.
Author: [U.S.] Odaid Geller
Editor: Jiang Chuting