64 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
WHY IS THE
Anglo-Saxon world so individualistic, and why has
China leaned towards collectivism? Was it Adam
Smith, or the Bill of Rights; communism and Mao?
According to at least one economist, there might be an
altogether more surprising explanation: the diff erence
between wheat and rice. You see, it’s fairly
straightforward for a lone farmer to sow wheat in soil
and live off the harvest. Rice is a diff erent aff air: it
requires extensive irrigation, which means cooperation
across parcels of land, even centralised planning.
A place where wheat grows favours the entrepreneur;
a place where rice grows favours the bureaucrat.
The infl uence of the “initial conditions” that shape
societies’ development is what Oded Galor has been
interested in for the past 40 years. He believes they
reverberate across millennia and even seep into what
we might think of as our personalities. Whether or not
you have a “future-oriented mindset” – in other words,
how much money you save and how likely you are to
invest in your education – can, he argues, be partly
t r a c e d t o w h a t k i n d s o f c r o p s g r e w w e l l i n y o u r a n c e s t r a l
homelands. (Where high-yield species such as barley
and rice thrive, it pays to sacrifi ce the immediate gains
of hunting by giving over some of your territory to
farming. This fosters a longer-term outlook.)
Diff erences in gender equality around the world have
their roots in whether land required a plough to cultivate
- needing male strength, and relegating women to
domestic tasks – or hoes and rakes, which could be used
by both sexes.
Galor has been interested in a lot more besides;
his book, The Journey of Humanity, stretches from
the emergence of Homo sapiens to the present day, and
has a lot to say about the future, too. In just over 240
pages it covers our migration out of Africa, the
development of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution
and the phenomenal growth of the past two centuries.
It takes in population change, the climate crisis and
global inequality.
There will be inevitable comparisons with Yuval
Noah Harari’s Sapiens , not least because this too is a
work of “macrohistory” and Galor is also from Israel,
though he has taught at Brown University in the US for
the past 30 years. “If you’re born in a place that is
incredibly rich in history, you understand that you’re
part of a long, long lineage. You see the Temple Mount
that was there 3,000 years earlier. You’re really walking
i n h i stor y. S o t he l i n k to ea rl ier st a ges of development
i s v e r y m u c h p a r t o f m y u p b r i n g i n g i n J e r u s a l e m .” T h e
Journey of Humanity is certainly being pitched, at least
in terms of impact, as another Sapiens – translation
r ig hts have a lready been sold in 27 la ng uages. But the
similarities may be quite superfi cial. Sapiens was fi rst
published when Harari was a young professor, based
on a series of lectures to undergraduates. The Journey
of Humanity is the culmination of Galor’s career , the
recasting of an earlier work, a maths-and-data-heavy
book called Unifi e d G r o w t h T h e o r y, i n d i g e s t i b l e f o r m.
And while Sapiens ends on an equivocal note,
warning that present-day civilisation teeters between
the singularity and armageddon, the signal
characteristic of The Journey of Humanity is its
optimism. If you need an evidence-based antidote to
doomscrolling, here it is. The extraordinary increases
in standards of living, huge falls in child mortality,
incredible gains in knowledge and technology – these
are the products of inexorable forces that are not going
anywhere, Galor argues, and will only augment as time
goes on. Even pandemics and wars, horrifi c as they are
for the millions caught up in them, “cannot divert the
journey of humanity from its long-term path”.
Surprisingly, given the circumstances we fi nd ourselves
in, the book is highly persuasive: Galor builds his case
meticulously, always testing his assumptions against
the evidence, and without the sense of agenda-pushing
that accompanies other boosterish thinkers – the Steven
Pinkers or Francis Fukuyamas of this world.
What sets him apart, perhaps, is a grounding in
numbers. “I was an unusual economist in the sense
that I always had sort of a deep interest in the
mathematics of discrete dynamical systems,” he tells
me. Examples of discrete dynamical systems include
populations of bacteria or human beings that evolve
constrained by things such as food supply or
susceptibility to disease. Zooming from his offi ce in
Rhode Island, Galor speaks evenly, sounding as though
he is always about to break into a half-smile. Like Pinker,
he has a shock of silvery hair that approaches his
shoulders. “I was sort of an interdisciplinary student,
very interested in macro-history, very interested in
political science, very interested in economics, and
very interested in mathematics. So part of my ability
to construct this unifi ed theory of economic growth
was those deep mathematical foundations.”
What is his theory, then, and how does it appear to
break new ground? Economists have always found it
diffi cult to reconcile two distinct eras. During the fi rst,
any increase in resources led only briefl y to greater
prosperity. More food, for example, meant people could
raise more children. But the gains were lost
because a bigger population meant everyone had a
smaller share of the pie. This is known as the
“Malthusian trap” after the gloomy clergyman and
demographer Thomas Malthus , and it lasted a couple
of hundred thousand years.
Then, suddenly, beginning in the 18th century,
everything changed. In an increasingly technological
w o r l d , i t p a i d t o b e l i t e r a t e a n d b e t t e r t r a i n e d. A s a r e s u l t ,
parents focused their resources on raising a smaller
number of children equipped with the skills they
n e e d e d t o m a ke i t i n t h e wo rl d. T h e y w e r e i n v e s t i n g i n
“human capital”, and soon the state did too: quite
quickly the whole population became much betterIllustrations: Brett RyderPETER GOLDBERGeducated. That meant it was more likely to invent new
t h i n g s t h a t m a d e i t e a s i e r t o p r o d u c e w e a l t h , w h i c h w a s
in turn ploughed back into human capital: a virtuous
c yc le. The roc ket sh ip of prog ress took off.
You might assume that diff erent rules were operating
in these two diff erent periods. Galor’s “unifi ed” theory
yokes them together, arguing that the underlying
engine of growth has always been the same. “I
basically model how the advancement of technology
feeds back into both the scale of the population
and human adaptation, and how in turn, human
adaptation and the scale of the population advances
technology.” This has been going on, he says, since
“the very dawn of the human species”. So why that
s u d d e n c h a n g e a r o u n d 17 6 0? G a l o r l i k e n s i t t o a n o t h e r
kind of dynamical system – water boiling in a kettle.
The heat of innovation begins the moment you switch
it on, but only at a certain point near the end do bubbles
riotously break the surface. The accumulated increase
in temperature brings the system to a tipping point.
The Malthusian trap, Galor says, simply “vanishes”,
just as water turns to steam. But unlike with a
kettle, there’s no off switch, because the “heat” of
technological innovation is a self-reinforcing process.
V ie we d i n t h i s w ay, t h e I ndu s t r i a l R e volut io n w a s a