Note: As usual, these are my personal guesses and opinions, not those of my employer.
In How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?, I looked for measures (or proxy measures) of human well-being / empowerment for which we have “decent” scholarly estimates of the global average going back thousands of years. For reasons elaborated at some length in the full report, I ended up going with:
- Physical health, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
- Economic well-being, as measured by GDP per capita (PPP) and percent of people living in extreme poverty.
- Energy capture, in kilocalories per person per day.
- Technological empowerment, as measured by war-making capacity.
- Political freedom to live the kind of life one wants to live, as measured by percent of people living in a democracy.
(I also especially wanted measures of subjective well-being and social well-being, and also of political freedom as measured by global rates of slavery, but these data aren’t available; see the report.)
Anyway, the punchline of the report is that when you chart these six measures over the past few millennia (data; zoomable), you get a chart like this (axes removed for space reasons):
(And yes, there’s still a sharp jump around 1800-1870 if you chart this on a log scale. 1 )
Basically, if I help myself to the common (but certainly debatable) assumption that “the industrial revolution” is the primary cause of the dramatic trajectory change in human welfare around 1800-1870, 2 then my one-sentence summary of recorded human history is this:
Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.
Interestingly, this is not the impression of history I got from the world history books I read in school. Those books tended to go on at length about the transformative impact of the wheel or writing or money or cavalry, or the conquering of this society by that other society, or the rise of this or that religion, or the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, or the Black Death, or the Protestant Reformation, or the Scientific Revolution.
But they could have ended each of those chapters by saying “Despite these developments, global human well-being remained roughly the same as it had been for millennia, by every measure we have access to.” 3 And then when you got to the chapter on the industrial revolution, these books could’ve said: “Finally, for the first time in recorded history, the trajectory of human well-being changed completely, and this change dwarfed the magnitude of all previous fluctuations in human well-being.”
This is especially clear if we look at GDP per capita, for which we have especially detailed (but still quite uncertain!) estimates. Here’s GDP per capita (PPP) from 1-1800 CE:
If this is roughly accurate, then the drop in GDP per capita from 1000 to 1300 probably felt pretty awful to those living at the time, and the subsequent recovery probably felt pretty great. But these sorts of fluctuations are so small compared to what happened after the industrial revolution that they show up as a flat line when we include the post-industrial era:
That said, the long-run estimates I rely on are pretty uncertain, and my particular choice of measures to capture “well-being” is obviously questionable (and to some, no doubt objectionable), so I will still refer to the basic picture presented above as “speculative.” 4
Thus I’ll say my first speculation from my brief expedition in “quantiative macrohistory” is this:
Human well-being was pretty awful by modern standards until the industrial revolution, after which most things we care about got vastly better in the span of a century or two.
But that is probably not a surprising claim to most readers of this blog, especially those who have studied economic history.
Fortunately, my second speculation is probably even more speculative and controversial:
If we had all the data, and we did a factor analysis of “what mattered for human well-being in recorded history,” I suspect most of the variance in human well-being would be explained by a primary factor for productivity, and a secondary factor for political freedom.
The first factor probably isn’t surprising. Technological progress, energy capture, other aspects of productivity, and wealth all feed on each other and are in some cases hard to even distinguish, and they all generally improve physical health and many other things we care about.
But why do I suggest political freedom as a plausible second factor, given that “percent of people living in a democracy” tracks so closely with all the other measures of well-being covered above? Largely, it’s because I think “percent of people enslaved” is a more important measure of political freedom than democracy is, and while I wasn’t able to collect/guess enough data points to chart global slavery over time, I read enough of the history of slavery to get the impression that if I could chart it, it might not track that well with the other measures discussed above — at least, not until about 1900.
Instead of being well-represented by a simple hockey-stick, my rough guess is that “percent of people enslaved”…
- …was quite low near the dawn of recorded history, and gradually rose until about 500 CE,
- held steady or diminished somewhat from 500-1500, and then
- exploded upward during the international slave trade, and finally
- dropped precipitously as the anti-slavery movement made its way around the world.
Anyway, if we run with this wild speculation, then we might conclude that to improve human well-being going forward, there are basically two great battles to be fought: one for greater productivity, and the other for greater political freedom. Except, that hasn’t actually been the case since the invention of nuclear weapons, due to existential risk.
Perhaps the biggest reason to be skeptical of this 2nd speculation is that it’s based on measures for which I was able to find long-run data, and that means it can’t make use of data on various aspects of subjective well-being (e.g. moment-to-moment happiness, or sense of meaning) or aspects of social well-being (e.g. sense of community). Perhaps those would be clear major factors if we had long-run data for them. But perhaps not! 5
My third speculation is a happier thought:
Fortunately, it seems it would take a lot of deaths — maybe 15% of world population or even more — to knock civilization off its current positive trajectory (via deaths, anyway).
This speculation results from cataloguing the deadliest events in history, and finding that the worst of them (the Black Death and Genghis Khan) each killed about 10% of world population, and the deadliest event since our current positive trajectory began (with the industrial revolution) was the World War I + Spanish flu double whammy, which killed 4.1% of world population. At a glance, none of these events seem to have “come close” to prompting a downward spiral akin to a “negative industrial revolution” or (in the case of WWI+flu) knocking us off our current positive trajectory. Perhaps this is slightly reassuring about whether (say) a biosecurity disaster that killed 100 million people (<1% of world population) could be an existential threat to humanity (as opposed to being merely completely horrifying, worse than the Holocaust).
(Please remember that there are numerous caveats, clarifications, etc. in the full report; please consider reading them before lambasting my wild speculations or their underlying assumptions. Also, I think these speculations, especially the latter two, are pretty unstable: I don’t think it would take that much study and debate to make me heavily revise them, or abandon them altogether.)
Footnotes:- This sentence added Sep. 16, 2017. Log scale chart courtesy of reader Johannes Dahlström.[↩]
- Changed from “1820-1870” to “1800-1870” on Sep. 16.[↩]
- This is not to say there wasn’t important progress before the industrial revolution, of course. (This footnote added Sep. 16, 2017.) [↩]
- In particular, I’m not sure that subjective well-being improved as dramatically as other aspects of well-being seem to have improved following the industrial revolution, and subjective well-being is arguably the most important aspect of human well-being. See the report for more on this.[↩]
- This paragraph added Sep. 16, 2017.[↩]
Have you tried graphing the data on a log scale?
Just from eye-balling it, I don’t think I can distinguish between “The Industrial Revolution was uniquely important.” and “We’ve had steady exponential progress for millennia.”
I haven’t, but that’s pretty high on my list of things I’d want to play with if I had more time. Part of the difficulty, though, is that the data prior to the industrial revolution are often pretty sparse.
Added type: “logarithmic” to the HighChart y axis configs:
https://jsfiddle.net/zcghLjfy/2/embedded/result/
Is there a name for lines that still look exponential on a logarithmic scale? Meta-exponential? Exponent-exponential?
If it looks exponential when it is already graphed on a logarithmic scale, then the underlying function is tetrational. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration.
However, that doesn’t mean that the jsfiddle is showing tetrational growth. It looks like it’s growing too slowly for that. Double exponential growth may be a better fit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function)
The most common term used in everyday language is simply “increase in growth rates”
Did the same and expanded the chart. For me it looks like linear on the logarithmic scale since ~1800 and before that constant with some low-frequency changes.
Wow, thanks.
While this graph tells exactly the same story with regards to most of history. It also quite definitively cancels the “industrial revolution” theme. As in the logarithmic one it is quite clear that the real start is not the industrial revolution, but “The Enlightenment”.
Awesome post.
Losing 15% of world population would put a dent in the long-term economic trend, particularly if the casualties were concentrated among the most productive people, but would it be an existential threat? It only sets the population back 14 or 15 years.
What would make it existential is the threat of recurrence. For example, losing 15 or 20 percent of the world’s population in a one-off plague would be terrible, but it would be so much worse if it turns out to be easy to engineer smaller plagues and much harder to defend against them, in which case the threat of recurring and adaptive plagues might force humans to stop living and working in cities, dramatically cut down on travel and trade, make people suspicious of centralized food and water supplies, lead to global totalitarian efforts to suppress important technologies, or cause a lasting breakdown in institutions that support a sophisticated civilization.
Wow! It sure has been cranking since the revolution eh?
Oddly enough so may people in the Holiday Farm (that’s down under) spend so much time bitching and moaning about what they don’t have. Historically, give or take I just missed out on the dark ages and every revolution excluding the tech. How many wars, too many for sure but I still didn’t see the Boer, American Civil, WWI or WWII plus plus plus. No, the wars we fight where I live are on things like tooth decay, poker machines and smoking.
How lucky am I? Happy 60th Funky.
> If this is roughly accurate, then the drop in GDP per capita from 1000 to 1300 probably felt pretty awful to those living at the time, and the subsequent recovery probably felt pretty great.
At least in Europe, that recovery was directly caused by the Black Death. Wealth was primarily produced by agriculture, and almost all usable land was already being worked. Reducing population raised the productivity per capita because total productivity wasn’t proportionally affected. GDP per capita isn’t the right measure here.
The graph shows a rise from 90 to 140 points (dollars) in the 200 years 1300-1500, most of it during 1300-1400. That’s a 50% rise, which is inside the range of estimations of the proportion of European (and Chinese?) population killed.
I love your post. Thank you for this. I made a short animation about this topic a few years ago so I could explain to the company founders I back (I am a venture capitalist), how the plumbing of industrial capitalism fuels every good thing in our lives and pays the bills to eliminate the terrible inventions of humanity (slavery, political oppression, etc.). Here’s a link to the short animation: https://www.harrisonmetal.com/library/capitalism
Watched your well-crafted, well articulated video in praise of industrial capitalism (defn: an economic and social system in which trade, industry and capital are privately controlled and operated for a profit). While I am a true believer in capitalism, as I’m sure you know, there is a growing percentage of Americans, especially among our young, who believe that capitalism is good for the rich but bad for everyone else.
I’m making the case that enlightened self-interest on the part of you and your fellow pro-capitalism-ists will be greatly advanced if your side invests some of your intellectual capital investigating the merits of supporting both the creation of a new sub-field in political science: the study of competent self-governance, and a national education effort to introduce a new lexicon of “self-governance-based” terminology into our nation’s marketplace of new ideas. This new field of study, and new language, is absolutely necessary to bridge the passionate, heated, take-no-enemies divide between our society’s pro-capitalism (i.e., conservatism) supporters and anti-capitalism (i.e., Bernie Sanders-style liberalism/socialism) supporters.
Case in point: to “solve” our extreme income inequality problem, the Left wants to raise the federal minimum wage and raise taxes on the “rich,” while the Right wants to cut taxes and regulations. Yet, neither approach will meaningfully deal with the problem. More importantly, and to my point: Why is no one seriously considering a radically different (but much more logically coherent) legislative policy approach: namely, Congress aggressively pursuing a “100% cronyism-free free market system” policy, which would involve our legislators systematically removing every self-serving provision inserted into every piece of legislation (by every self-serving politician) passed in every Congress going back essentially to our nation’s founding.
No one is considering this and other unorthodox legislative approaches (for our myriad of major economic, financial, fiscal and societal (EFFS) problems) because it would be utterly impossible for a Congress controlled by self-serving, politically ambitious politicians (which is who has been in control of Congress essentially since our nation’s founding – but especially for the last 100+ years) to craft such legislation.
You can probably guess where I’m going. In order to actually “solve” our major EFFS problems, our voters must first know how to identify, successfully arm-twist into running, and elect liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans — in the Democratic and Republican congressional primaries – who are “PKQ-caliber” candidates (i.e., they possess the governing qualities, abilities AND selfless motives of a democracy’s version of philosopher kings and queens).
This is an impossibility in the absence of new, self-governance-based terminology (and knowledge) becoming a part of our society’s working vocabulary (and thought process).
You accurately describe the left and right approaches to the inequality problem, namely mandated minimum wealth on the one side and lower regulations and taxes on the other side.
You then propose a “100% cronyism-free free market system” as an alternative,immediately explaining why this can’t happen in the real world.
So we are left with real-world alternatives. Of the ones propounded by our sorry political parties, which one moves us closer to your vision of a 100% cronyism-free economy? I’d suggest that reducing taxes and regulations have the ultimate effect of enhancing the free market system, if nothing else by reducing the resources available to its enemies. They also reduce cronyism by shrinking the size of the pie cronies can share.
Which is why I must often pinch my nose and support anybody that, in any given race, is the least socialistic candidate, which includes going for Trump rather than Hillary.
Mr. Dearing – that was an excellent video. Many thanks.
I’d speculate political freedom has been more closely related to productivity than the second “wild speculation” in this post suggests. After all, it makes sense that the abolition of slavery (a.) closely followed the discovery/invention of powerful substitutes for muscle work and (b.) was promoted abroad by the civilizations—and within the United States by the faction—that had a competitive advantage in using those substitutes.
Another way productivity and technological progress encouraged political freedom is by leveling the playing field of violence.
When commoners can’t contribute much to a fight (e.g. when the table stakes for warfare are unaffordable to any one family, like heavy fortifications with long-lasting provisions, heavy armor and weapons, and warhorses), it may be foolish to give their voices much weight in the political process. After all, if the warrior elite are confident they could get their way by force, they have an alternative to taking orders from the weak.
But when the majority of landholding men own small arms that give them a decent chance of wounding and killing professional soldiers, including heavy cavalry, then raw numbers of such men become a much better predictor of who will win in a fight, so it suddenly makes sense to give all landholding men a similarly weighted voice; that way, political decision-makers don’t unwittingly find themselves in an outgunned camp. Instead of coming to blows over political disagreements, one can just count heads and estimate how a fight would turn out, which signals to the minority that they should back down for now. (If you’re heavily outnumbered, seizing power by force is unlikely to work, but if you’re barely outnumbered, it’s easier to persuade a small number of people than to pick a fair fight.) The flip side of that is that the majority can’t just run roughshod over the minority, because then the minority has no reason to accept the political order; they might as well fight for what they can get.
As small arms get even cheaper and easier to use, even more men can potentially contribute to a fight, so they get a seat at the table too. “God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”
And as more people become useful in a fight in other ways, they too get representation; it doesn’t seem like a mere coincidence that women’s suffrage in Britain, Germany, the US, and other countries followed closely after women became visibly important to the new kind of war effort demanded by WWI.
In short, as wealth and technological advancement broadened the capacity for effective violence, more people naturally got seats at the table.
But if democracy reflects technologically enabled equality, then further technological advances could change the underlying logic.
If tiny minorities and individuals can disrupt the broader society without much chance of being deterred, then they have less reason to try to peacefully persuade a majority to agree with them. Such a disruption could be a high-impact attack (or set of attacks) that is hard to preclude, preempt, trace, or retaliate against. Possible examples include cyberattacks, cheaply engineered bioweapons, nanotechnology, or even some kinds of drones.
At the other extreme, if technology starts to make people wildly unequal in fighting capacity—say, technology requiring major concentrations of resources makes it much easier to put down dissenters—then there will be less reason to value the input of those commoners. Possible examples: an extremely effective surveillance state, or highly effective tools of coercion (robots?) that most families can’t buy or learn to use.
So the economic advances since the industrial revolution may have produced political freedom, but may not continue to do so.
Fossil fuels happened. The increase in available energy over human (slavery) and animal muscle made this improvement possible.
Very interesting.
However, in the case of Genghis Khan, my (rather poorly informed) understanding is that his hordes did do permanent or at least long-term damage to Middle Eastern civilizations.
Cool post. Couple comments:
(1) I wonder what you think Scheidel’s The Great Leveler argument, which I gather makes the point that violent shocks and mass death is good for societal inequality of the survivors. I know you haven’t listen inequality in your measures of well-being, but it seems like some of your well-being measures could be boosted, not dampened, by population loss as long as it was on the lower end of the distribution and only survivors were counted afterwards. What does your data say?
(2) Where did you get your data from?
(3) What is the explanation of the drop in PPP from 1000-1300 CE?
(4) How are you defining slavery? Any consideration of serfdom in your calculations? What about wage slavery?
Hi Seb!
(1) I haven’t read the book. I discuss inequality measures someone in the longer post (just Cmd+F for ‘inequality’). I think most historians agree that European wages rose after the Black Death (because labor demand), and plausibly this is true in the case of other major shocks I haven’t studied as much.
(2) Data and sources are in this spreadsheet.
(3) Don’t know, didn’t check.
(4) My guesses about the shifting proportion of world population enslaved were based on a definition that would include chattel slavery and the worst forms of serfdom and other forms of bondage, but not include most forms of wage slavery. But, it’s very hard to draw these lines, especially when considering all cultures across all of human history, and it’s also not clear where we should draw the lines for purposes of estimating “average global human well-being” over time. I say more about this in the longer post.
Luke, this reply is tangential, but you put a lot of emphasis on political freedom so I thought you might find this new thinking re pol. freedom thought provoking.
I think our society (and species) has an incomplete, even primitive, understanding of the concept of political freedom. The main reason for this is that our current lexicon only allows us to make crude, macro-level distinctions – e.g., dictatorial totalitarianism (e.g., North Korea, China) vs. democracy.
What’s lacking from our “self-governance” vocabulary is terminology which enables us to distinguish between a democracy whose national legislature in particular is controlled by legislators who are truly accountable, responsible and selfless (think of them as a democracy’s version of philosopher kings and queens (PKQs)) vs. a democracy whose national legislature is controlled by legislators who are, with exceedingly rare exception, unaccountable, fiscally irresponsible, self-serving legislators whose first and greatest concern is their political careers (what most of us would call a politically ambitious politician (PAP)).
In my view, our society will not achieve true political freedom – and enjoy all the economic, financial, fiscal and societal (EFFS) benefits that will accompany that freedom – until we recognize that our nation’s voters can use their two votes (in the national legislative election process (NLEP)) to achieve more than just one objective: decide which political party controls the U.S. House and Senate. They can also use their two votes to achieve a second objective: decide if they want a PAP-controlled or PKQ-controlled Congress.
The challenge will not be so much convincing our voters that they can and should abandon their “one objective” voting strategy in the NLEP in favor of a “two objective” strategy. It will be convincing our political scientists and civics teachers that they have a moral/academic obligation to start teaching our nation’s students (and voters) how to “practice” democracy/self-governance competently — which is to say, how to: 1) identify, 2) successfully arm-twist into running, then 3) elect PKQ-caliber candidates in the Democratic and Republican congressional primaries.
Bottom line, just as the myriad of revolutions (industrial, computer, information, etc.) were possible only because of new knowledge (i.e., new scientific, technical, etc. discoveries), true political freedom will require new self-governance-based knowledge and thinking — enough to require a new sub-field in political science.
Of course, this new knowledge will be rejected by our establishment’s well-entrenched political orthodoxy. That’s to be expected. The good news is that the history of new, knowledge-based ideas — e.g., Heliocentric Model, Germ Theory, etc. — is very clear in this regard: dragging the fields of political science and civics instruction out of the 18th century and into the 21st will not be an easy task. But it is inevitable.
Much of this new knowledge is introduced via a sci-fi narrative here: https://medium.com/@MontieRainey/two-outside-the-box-time-travel-fables-that-will-fundamentally-alter-our-understanding-of-self-79c8268eba84
>> the other for greater political freedom.
I think this is only a proxy.
The real factor is “the quality of decision making in society”. More political freedom means better decision making because the decisions are taken by people who are more competent and have access to more, better and diverse information.
The three volume “Bourgeois Era” books by economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey claim to explain the massive sudden increase in wealth after 1700.
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/books/index.php
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-west-and-the-rest-got-rich-1463754427
I would add, clearly the industrial revolution involved capitalism (many people having freedom to serve each other) and not Marx’s socialism (central planning, with one set of plans, invented only later by 1848). The industrial revolution needed the Enlightenment (with a belief that individuals can solve problems) and the scientific revolution (understanding of machines) to have occurred first. And it wasn’t just an industrial (machine) revolution, but also a flowering of free exchange (capitalism).
Could measurement error be part of the picture at all? I imagine the further you go back the worse the measurements go.
As I wrote here (http://www.zachgroff.com/2017/09/how-sharp-turn-did-humans-take-in.html) I’m quite curious about this, if in part because I do like at least one of the “big history” books that seems to be at least somewhat in tension with this (The Better Angels of Our Nature). I’m curious what this makes you think about books of that sort–if they just show the process of preparation for the Industrial Revolution + important events since then or if things before the Industrial Revolution actually are useful to study for their own sake.
TBC there was lots of “progress” before the industrial revolution, and much of it was very likely necessary for there to eventually be an industrial revolution, it’s just that most of that progress seems not to resulted in massively improved global average human well-being until the time of the industrial revolution.
the response to your 2nd speculation was answered here: https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-TheUnabombersManifesto/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-theUnabombersManifesto_djvu.txt
It looks like energy capture was a leading indicator. Probably due to the acute labor shortage after the Black Death.
do you have data for external energy consumed per capita?
Very interesting indeed but hardly surprising.
I would further speculate that the noticeable upward movement is kicking in around the Renaissance and further with Reformation.
Renaissance was the “rediscovery” of the underlying Roman culture and its original limited democratic process by a wider range of nouveau riches from Venice (maritime trade), Florence (banking) and Rome (enjoying the trickle down from Papal spending)
Reformation followed as a two-prong attack on Papal investiture and subsequently spiritual authority.
Together Renaissance and Reformation devoured what was the original (socialistic) Christianity paving the way to semi-pagan (individualistic) religious marketplace we enjoy now.
My speculative conclusions:
a) Increase in trade and slight global warming post the Little Ice Age generated enough initial capital to stimulate desire for financial prosperity that offered financial and further spiritual independence for those that could afford it.
b) That allowed the underlying and more market-friendly Roman civilization to change the authoritarian asian cult of Christianity towards a more European individualistic trend.
c) Gradual expansion of the wealth and consequent trickle-down led to the increase of percentage of the population that required legal independence following their financial independence.
d) This process led to accumulation of critical mass of wealth that spurred the Industrial Revolution.
e) Eventually generated, accumulated and trickled down wealth led to further expansion of the franchise, granting democratic rights to participate in popular governance to almost everybody.
AND FINALLY:
F) CAPITALISM RULES AND IT MADE IT POSSIBLE! 🙂
You can’t underestimate the impact of cheap, portable energy in the form of oil.
See also: Motionless History, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Social Science History Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1977), pp. 115-136
The correlation of productivity/wealth is to economic freedom, not political freedom. Consider the experience of postwar Taiwan and S. Korea.
Economic success, which inevitably follows economic freedom, yields political freedom. And environmental protection, and lots of what we call the good life.
It would be amazing to have GINI on this chart too…although I am not sure any real figures for it would be available…
To help bolster some of your ideas, comparing between peoples/countries on those metrics would be good…
I don’t disagree that life has improved dramatically, but using a measure like the GNP is cheating. There’s a direct connection between industrialization and economic productivity. It’s like finding a connection between multi-party elections and democracy. The two are different sides of the same coin.
William Bernstein’s book “The Birth of Plenty” parallels your observations. After centuries of fits and starts, in the first half of the 19th century everything started getting better.
Regarding the Holocaust, I wonder if any statistician has calculated the Nobel Prizes not won, the discoveries not made by the loss of European Jewry. It’s selfish I guess to worry about it. The murder of a person ends a world. To kill six million and their descendants, it’s to make the world cry out at the loss.
Recommend
https://www.amazon.com/Escape-Hunger-Premature-Death-1700-2100/dp/0521004888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506483812&sr=8-1&keywords=the+escape+from+hunger+and+premature+death
Flavor of it here. http://assets.cambridge.org/052180/8782/frontmatter/0521808782_frontmatter.htm
Good numbers
You’re missing another factor: the climate. Your six measures all take off at the same time that modern warming begins. That’s a very inconvenient fact for those that prefer to view benign temperatures in apocalyptic terms.
Machines are cheaper to operate than slaves, so that accounts for the human freedom rise. Material goods are also a kind of freedom (opening up dimensions of possible movement).
Unfortunately the end trajectory of that thought is to replace human beings entirely with AI.
In a way, the famous “paperclip maximizer” is already at work, and has been birthing itself. The market is a proto-AI that directs our activities in a certain way, a way that has led to the internet, which has led to social media and a new age of conformity, the noose of which is tightening.
Our interim future is the Borg, but eventually the AI won’t need to teleoperate meat puppets at all. It’s really six and a half dozen, a matter of semantics even, whether we BECOME this future species or it REPLACES us – within a few hundred years human beings as we know them, as they’ve been throughout our million-year history, won’t exist.
Really, we were lost as soon as primitive human beings started passing around the caveman equivalent of cat pictures on the internet. Memes, ideas, languages, which have been our great strength, are also the Trojan Horse of our downfall, the kernel, of the thing that replaces us, or rather, replaces the shaping of our being by DNA with the shaping of substance as such by AI. DNA is supserseded by languages, politics and markets, which are superseded by AI – all in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.
Interesting thoughts! However you are mistaken about the slave trade. Since the mid-600s, the spread of Islam developed a multi-continental slave trade greater than that of Rome. Islamic conquests developed the slave trade in Africans, Europeans, Persians, and Indians. The slave trade in the Americas pales in comparison. When European supremacy limited the spread of Islam by the 1600s, North African slavers continued to raid all over the Mediterranean, all along the Atlantic coast and raided both England and Ireland! Even today a slave trade continues to exist in Arabia, despite western-style “laws” to the contrary.
So, what is your thinking/speculation wrt the new (post-industrial revolution) economy, which is being driven by information and growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence?
I wonder if that 15% should be not 15% of the world population but 15% of the DEVELOPED world population, and perhaps even narrower than that, excluding the subpopulations who have been failed by our education systems or whose choices keep them in dependent poverty.
Also, not all slavery was chattel slavery. When you defeated a tribe or a nation that threatened to destroy you, you could kill them all or make the survivors slaves in the (Stockholm Syndrome) hope they would become members of your tribe.
There’s a big economic history on this subject. You might start here: http://amzn.to/2y9XPmS
There’s a big economic-history literature on the subject of the “takeoff” or what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment.” You might start with her book here: http://amzn.to/2y9XPmS
One of the subjects I read at the OU was “The industrial Revolution, revolution or evolution” I came down heavily after the course on ‘evolution’ as my answer after analysis of the presented information, it being a gradual influx of ideas.
I have a few speculative thoughts:
While the slave trade exploded in the early US, I don’t think it changed radically anywhere else. The presumed uptick in slavery in 18th century may amount to little or nothing, as a percentage.
We may in fact be entering a new age. Even thought there has been art and recreation throughout the ages, the main purpose of man’s existence was survival. Now, relatively few people have any more than a passing aquaintance with farming and material production. The quickest path to riches today requires the production of absolutely nothing; i.e. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.
I don’t know how, even on a speculative basis, to chart the future based on the past.
Great post.
Any reason for not including Europeans’ colonisation of the Americas from 1492 onwards? I have read that it killed 95% or so of native Americans, mostly through European diseases to which they weren’t resistant. I guess that might be 5-10% of world population.
Also where do you get your figures for Genghis Khan and the An Lushan rebellion? I had no idea that were quite so catastrophic. Presume most of the deaths were economic disruption rather than being killed with weapons?
Your post has inspired many thoughtful comments.
What do you consider to be the greatest threat to the current trajectory? I say that around the Industrial Revolution, humanity discovered ways to be much harder on the earth, to drive plant and animal species into extinction, to test the carrying capacity of the earth, to possibly even alter the carrying capacity of the earth, for better or for worse.
Nations with individual freedom seem to do better at remediating environmental degradation than nations without individual freedom, for reasons Hayek described when he wrote about the “knowledge problem” and the power of “the man on the spot.”
May we use our freedom wisely.
You obviously misunderstand slavery, since you don’t include serfdom, including it’s versions where local war lords had life and death control over peasants.
If you can’t estimate serfdom/indentured peasants, perhaps something you could measure would be income inequity. Slavery, serfdom and similar social structures are the ultimate in inequity. At the endpoint you not only don’t own any fruits of your work, you don’t even own yourself.
In the longer report I discuss serfdom, e.g. see the section around “Arguably, many forms of serfdom ought to be counted as not very different than slavery from a ‘political freedom’ perspective…” I also have a paragraph explaining why I don’t include economic inequality: “Human happiness seems to respond not just to absolute income, wealth, and consumption, but also to…”
It seems that you are treating the world as one block, and trying to analyse it as such. But as far as I have seen, the estimates are that the Western European GDP per capita has doubled between 1000-1500 c.e., unlike the rest of the world which stayed about the same as WE in 1000 c.e.. So I think it is wrong to say that nothing happened, since the life of the average Englishman in 1500 c.e. was much better that in 1000 c.e..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/sbroadberry/wp/britishgdplongrun8a.pdf (check tables at the end)
Another point is that the black death seemed to cause a great growth of GDP per capita, since the rise began in the mid-14th century. This is known from many other sources as well, since the demand for labor grew.
I am definitely analyzing the world as one block, because this was a “quick & dirty” analysis. We could get a more detailed picture, and better causal identification, if we looked at data/estimates (where available) for particular regions over time. I’d like to see someone do that analysis.
I do discuss the Black Death GDP/cap boost briefly in the full report.
Quick question: I seem to recall (vaguely) that in early modern times (i.e. after 1500, but before the”dent”) life expectancy AFTER infancy was quite high, something like 60 years or so. Is it possible that a high and until the industrial revolution essentially unchanging infant mortality is obscuring sizeable increases of, say, a 5 y.o.’s life expectancy before the I.R. ? Arguments in favour could be p.e. the increased agricultural productivity in Europe in the middle ages due to the three-field system, improved plowing, etc. This is just a hunch and probably wrong, though.
I make a brief comment about this in the full report; Cmd+F for “falling rates of childhood mortality”. Mostly I think we just don’t know, though probably have some data on this for particular regions even if we don’t have any robust global estimates stretching many centuries back.
Population estimates to go along with the others would be useful. Declines in indigenous North American populations after European contact had profound effects on subsistence, for example.
Stupid question (and late into the conversation) but did you try a log-log plot, or try fitting to a different type of exponential growth? There are many non-equilibrium growth processes (in physics, biology, geology, etc.) where, when you get into a regime where what is called ‘scaling’ holds, that the function you measure, f, is roughly equal to b(t-t0)^a, where f is the measured quantity, t is time ‘t0’ is an initial time, b is a constant, and a is an exponent. If that is the case and if you the plot ln(f) against ln(t-to) then the “scaling regime” is a straight line segment of the plot, with a slope of ‘a’.
It’s a bit hard to do this plot if don’t know the value for ‘t0’ but you can try visually adjusting ‘t0’ see if you actually get a section of the data with a straight-ish line, or you could try fitting the function parameters (a, b, ‘t0’) to the data and then plotting the function ln(f) against ln(t-t0), using the fitted ‘t0.’ If you get a straight line segment then, bingo, you potentially have a scaling regime.
This might be interesting as the scaling regime implies interesting properties for correlations in the system: it’s a bit like there is a special synergy that leads to this type of growth law. A condensed matter physicist (if you know one) could help explain that part, and verify that the data lets you draw that conclusion.
Gregory Clark http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf makes a case that there was enough Darwinian selection over the generations from the middle ages to 1800 to possibly account for the industrial revolution by a significant change in human psychological traits. Worth reading.
hkeithhenson(at) gmail.com
I believe that you re headed in the right direction. May I suggest that you continue a couple ideas to their logical conclusion. The slavery concept and democracy concept are indeed powerful, but I would recommend expansion and rewording. If you define slavery as any time one group of people holding superior weapons/power force another group of people to give up the fruits of their labor under threat of coercion/force then you will see that slavery didn’t actually expand much during the African slave trade. It just took on a new form, to be added to the myriad of ways humans enslaved each other through much of human history. Whether it was Pharaohs, Ceasars, Kings, or Factory towns with indebted workers, the result was the same. One group of people with power and weapons forced another group to hand over the products of their labor. Today that happens primarily through confiscatory taxation in many countries allowing a group of oligarchical elites to enslave the workers of their countries.
I would also note that your use of the word “Democracy” moved you beyond the oligarchical swamp that has plagued much of human history, however you may not have moved far enough to accurately pinpoint the change in fortune that you see. Democracy is rule by the people, which is certainly superior to rule by the elites. However, far superior to majority or mob rule is the rule of law. Societies prosper when laws are not made at the whims of men, but instead reflect a set of logical and rational human rights that most agree on based on conscience and when governments are restrained to their proper role of protecting those human rights and punishing those who violate them. Even a “democratic government” will suffer and collapse into oligarchy again if the vote of the majority establishes laws that violate human rights of life, freedom from coercion and property.
So you have pretty graphs going up and to the right. Therefore things are better. I couldn’t disagree more. What makes for a “better” life? The question is philosophical, not mathematical. You seem to take it axiomatically that “political freedom” and “GDP per capita” and “technological empowerment” are measures of a “better” life. I say these measures are largely irrelevant. Even life expectancy as a measure of quality of life is dubious. Would you say a few extra years spent in a crappy retirement home is a “better life”? Most older people before the 1700’s spent their golden years with their kids and grandkids, not abandoned in a retirement home. I say their life was better before the breakdown of family ties caused by the Industrial Revolution.
This post is a great example of the dogma of Western society – it functions like a religion, except the preachers lack the self-awareness to realize they are pushing a dogma. Only the Russians and the Muslims have the ability to call out the Western Religion of Statistics. “Come to the paradise of Western civilization – our way of life is better because the statistics we chose to define it are improving!” Meanwhile they continue to destroy the meaning of history, downplaying events like the Reformation or the Renaissance, choosing “GDP per capita” as the defining measure of human worth. Hence, The Meaning Crisis.
I really like the spirit of the article but there are a few things I am disappointed that a rationalist did not catch. First, the increase in average life expectancy is entirely due to more infants surviving. This is a good accomplishment but using average life expectancy does not give an accurate picture. In fact, the lifespan of humans has not gotten any longer since ancient times. See this article. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
There is also research coming out showing that ancient humans were actually healthier than modern humans. https://dnascience.plos.org/2017/08/31/were-ancient-humans-healthier-than-us/
Also, the idea that before the industrial revolution people did not have pleasant and enjoyable lives is a myth. Pre-industrial revolution we had Shakespeare, all of the renaissance artists, beautiful cathedrals like Notre Dame and wonderful castles all over Europe. I would dare say that many people find these buildings far more beautiful than most of the modern architectural styles in use in the late 20th Century.
After the black plague a building boom happened and even the average person’s house was comfortable even if it was smaller than the McMansions we have today. See here https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/peasant-houses-in-midland-england.htm
Yes you can point to some areas of poverty in the Middle Ages but that is true for every era including our own where over 1 billion people live in extreme poverty.
Going back even further you have the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome which by all accounts had all of the creature comforts and a vibrant intellectual and artistic life.
The idea that people who live in democracies today have political freedom is completely false to anyone on the right of the political spectrum. Any professor expressing a right leaning opinion would be driven out of the university and conservatives are being canceled and deplatformed left and right. Some are barred from using Uber and having their bank accounts closed. Most troubling of all nobody is pointing out that the erosion of free speech in the name of political correctness severely curtails people’s freedom of thought and expression.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t appreciate how important free speech is, even for their political opponents, because the average IQ is in a free fall. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576
Alas, the only conclusion that a rationalist can draw is that we are headed to the place described in the movie Idiocracy where 200 years from now people will not be very smart at all. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
I won’t take the time to reply to everything, but: I disagree with much of what you say here. E.g. on life expectancy see here: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy