The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality

"I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World . I particularly appreciated The Journey of Humanity because it is an ambitious and deep story about the past tens of thousands of years of economic development that is also well grounded in a growing economics literature into the deep origins of growth that is rigorous, empirically grounded, and peer-reviewed—a literature that Oded Galor has been an important contributor to. The book synthesizes and extends this literature, it is not just ungrounded speculation but the product of genuine scholarship. Galor’s headline idea is that the Malthusian view of the world was largely correct for tens of thousands of years—that as humans improved their technology, they mostly made more humans rather than higher incomes per capita. When humanity eventually reached the point where growth finally took off, it did so extremely unevenly. Galor interprets the take-off in growth as a virtuous circle between education and technology, which has left us with enormous global inequality. Almost everyone in the world used to be poor; now some people are very rich, while others remain very poor. Galor locates the roots of global inequality in factors that go back tens of thousands of years, including geography and genetic diversity, which have been mediated and reshaped through culture and political and economic institutions—along with a dose of contingency. Some sweeping histories become a bit like the cosmology you get from modern physics. You get a grand story that’s internally consistent and consistent with data, but you’re not sure that it’s true. Galor’s evidence, which was published in top economics peer-reviewed journals, helps him coalesce a convincing argument. The deepest argument, but not the only one, is: If you have lots of genetic diversity, it’s hard for people to cooperate and if you have very little genetic diversity, it’s hard to have the variations that can lead to excellence, and so, you want something in between. That’s certainly not all there is to the story of economics. Am I a hundred percent sure it is true? No. Am I excited to have his formulation in mind as I attempt to understand our world? Absolutely."