The Journey of Humanity: And the Keys to Human Progress

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Written by one of the most influential economists in the field of growth and development, this book is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Oded Galor’s initial research in the early 1990s highlighted the negative effects of income inequality on economic growth, with the research being published just as the topic was about to become fashionable. Not surprisingly, that paper remains one of the most widely cited in the field. Subsequently, he developed, with peers and doctoral students, a series of progressively more ambitious mathematical models, and rigorous empirical research on the interactions between technological progress, income inequality, and economic growth ultimately leading to a research agenda that went well beyond just encapsulating the 20th century to first, the industrial revolution, then Malthusian epoch, and ultimately covering the entire history of humanity. It would not be an understatement that he is possibly one of the most ambitious thinkers today. This book synthesizes much of his own work complemented by a very active area of quantitative and empirical research in economics, history, and quantitative anthropology, that has benefitted from the data revolution. Moreover there is a lot that it does not explain, that probably depends on the more mundane issues covered by more proximate theories of growth and some of the standard economic policy issues like the importance of avoiding and resolving crises. For example, why is the United States so much richer than Argentina? Or why did China take off when it did but Brazil did not? Or even just variations in income within regions. We have the big civilisations first in water based areas. Homogenous civilisations. Control, stability. Europe for example could only thrive much later with better technology as competition drove growth and sutible differences in political institutions, coupled with fewer though better educated children, allowed for the escape from the poverty trap. Oded Galor staat aan de basis van de Unified Growth Theory die unieke factoren beschrijft die ervoor gezorgd hebben dat sommige landen een ongekende economische groei hebben doorgemaakt en andere landen juist niet. Centraal in deze theorie staat het uitgangspunt dat de economische groei, startende met de Industriële Revolutie, leidde tot een val in geboortecijfers omdat ouders - dankzij het groeiende belang van onderwijs - hun schaarse tijd en mogelijkheden aan enkele kinderen moesten verdelen, die tegelijkertijd met de groei in welvaart, steeds een grotere kans hadden om hun volwassen leeftijd te bereiken.

Don't get us wrong. It is not that something in his approach to economic development is not true (although there are things that a historian would never accept), it is that the perspective is scientific, ahistorical, anti-philosophical, uncritical... It looks like political propaganda, politically correct...aiming at understanding the whole with broken toys. What I also missed was a clear taxonomy on what factors matter the most. Again, I get that the scope is huge and the world is complex, but I'm missing a bit that Galor explains what matters most (which I see in Fukuyama 2011, Jared Diamond "Guns Germs and Steel" and Sowell "Wealth, Poverty and Politics"). I'm not going away from the book with a clear argument on what drives growth - which is OK, but disappointed when the book itself promises a unified theory, but ends a bit scattered. In short, the entire book is flooded with a series of a priori (and general historical ignorance) that is only saved because, in the second part, at least comments certain anecdotal facts. True facts (in part), well known to historians (by the way). The thing is that, even here, they are a kind of puzzle that he makes fit as he wants within the utopian logic from which he started from the outset. In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, world-renowned economist and thinker Oded Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity's great mysteries. Unparalleled in its scope and ambition…All readers will learn something, and many will find the book fascinating.” — The Washington PostThere is so much Oded Galor forgets or ignores... it all comes down to weak correlations! But, anyway, they look so PERFECT that people could believe this is the truth. Galor tells this big story while drawing on a range of recent academic research, much of it is his own but also Daron Acemoglu, Melissa Dell, and many other economists who are using modern empirical methods to exploit quasi natural experiments to study how (possibly) random differences in the past cast a shadow centuries or even millennia later. This thorough grounding in research sets it apart from some other more speculative big think books—although some of the research ends up confirming, or at least corroborating, various speculations. A wildly ambitious attempt to do for economics what Newton, Darwin, or Einstein did for their fields: develop a theory that explains almost everything.An inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork, the boldest possible attempt to write the economic history of humanity.”— The New Statesman

Yet his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth. It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic. Sad to say they would also have made it less optimistic. Humanity, as Kant said, is made of crooked timber from which nothing entirely straight can be made. Galor’s book would have been the stronger had he leavened his sunshine with some shadows. Galor’s project is breathtakingly ambitious. He proposes a fairly simple, intensely human-capital-oriented model that will accommodate the millennia of Malthusian near-stagnation, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath of rapid growth, the accompanying demographic transition, and the emergence of modern human-capital-based growth. And the model is supposed to generate endogenously the transitions from one era to the next. The resulting book is a powerful mixture of fact, theory, and interpretation.”— Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics For most of human history, we were caught in a stagnation trap. Improvements in technology and productivity led to population increases, and all those new people gobbled up the surplus, so that overall living standards always reverted to the historical average, barely above subsistence. Thomas Malthus, the unfairly maligned English clergyman, assumed this would always be the case. And yet, at least in the fortunate global north, things have been very different for the last century or so. How come? I was pretty disappointed on the chapters on institutions and culture. There didn't seem to be a unified theory here, but rather a review of important papers (Acemoglu, Putnam etc.) which were a bit too familiar to the reader of comparative litterature. I get that this is a book with a huge scope (grand historical development), but I was simply a bit too bored when reading the description of various papers that got the label "growth". Brilliantly weaves the threads of global economic history. A tour de force! ” —Dani Rodrik, author of Straight Talk on TradeA completely brilliant and utterly original account of humanity’s transit from crude beginnings to a deeply divided planet. A vastly readable insight into why our world is as it is. A book for our epoch.” —Jon Snow, former anchor of Channel 4 News (UK) He ends his recapitulation of the same argument here by asserting that “geographical characteristics and population diversity” are “predominantly the deepest factors behind global inequalities”, which sounds rather like we can’t do anything about them. Happily, at least, he does suggest that a country such as Ethiopia, which in his view is too diverse, might be helped by “policies that enabled diverse societies to achieve greater social cohesion”. Meanwhile, Bolivia, which is allegedly too homogeneous, could achieve better economic growth by being more diverse and so benefiting from more “intellectual cross-pollination”. And so, though it has often seemed as if we can do little about his hidden “great cogs” and “fundamental triggers”, it appears cheeringly in the end that politics and ideas might at least sometimes trump their effects on the story of how we got here and where we might go next. En toch ... hoe kan het zijn dat we de laatste paar eeuwen een nooit eerder vertoonde economische groei hebben doorgemaakt? Dat is de vraag die Oded Galor in dit boek centraal stelt. Wat zijn de oorzaken, en hoe hebben die er voor gezorgd dat we uit deze Malthusian trap zijn ontsnapt?