Although the human race as a whole has experienced incessant change, individual peoples saw a much more intermittent flickering progress because the pace and place of that change was itself always changing. Innovation is like a bush fire that burns brightly for a short time, then dies down before flaring up somewhere else. At 50,000 … Read more
Today, the average person on the planet consumes power at the rate of about 2,500 watts, or to put it a different way, uses 600 calories per second. About 85 per cent o f that comes from burning coal, oil and gas, the rest from nuclear and hydro (wind, solar and biomass are mere asterisks … Read more
The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation. Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living. Until 1800 this was how every economic boom ended: with a partial return to self-sufficiency driven by predation by … Read more
Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs. But no – even in weightless industries like finance people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other inglass towers to do their exchanging and specializing, and they are prepared to pay absurdly high rents … Read more
Other trends too have made modern farming better for the planet. Now that weeds can be controlled by herbicides rather than ploughing (the main function of a plough is to bury weeds), more and more crops are sown directly into the ground without tilling. This reduces soil erosion, silt run-off and the massacre of innocent … Read more
Looking around the world, there are plainly societies which manage their citizens’ lives well with good rules and societies which manage their citizens’ lives badly with bad rules. Good rules reward exchange and specialization; bad rules reward confiscation and politicking. South and North Korea spring to mind. One is generally a fair and free place, … Read more
There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around 600,000 years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance o f a new species of hominid which replaces its ancestor throughout Eurasia and Africa. Called Homo heidelbergensis, this creature has a much bigger brain, possibly 25 … Read more
By the middle of this century the human race will have expanded in ten thousand years from less than ten million to nearly ten billion people. Some of the billions alive today still live in misery and dearth even worse than the worst experienced in the Stone Age. Some are worse off than they were … Read more
Clearly, big brains and language may be necessary for human beings to cope with a life of technological modernity. Clearly, human beings are very good at social learning, indeed compared with even chimpanzees humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation. But big brains and imitation and language are not themselves the explanation of prosperity … Read more
Why has median income stopped rising in the US? Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly? Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal? A popular explanation for these questions is technological stagnation (not enough inventions that bring progress). But the other explanation is that there is no … Read more