By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Some time ago, we described that when a large comet struck the earth, this was bad news for dinosaurs but good news for us. Most believe that Homo sapiens could not have coexisted with such carnivorous beasts. We could be thankful our ancestors were small, ground-hugging, sub-snack-sized rodents, not worth pursuing. When humans first evolved, our intelligence was about the same as that of T. rex. During six million years of human evolution, our brain size has almost tripled, But T. rex would have had a 65-million-year head start on brain evolution. Even if Homo sapiens somehow could have found a way to coexist with T. rex, it is unclear which would have become the more intelligent and dominant species.

In his article, now we follow up with what happed because humans 'did 'survive whereby the development of humankind has been extraordinary – breathtaking in its path and radically different from the evolution of any other living species on Planet Earth. Early humans roamed the savannahs of East Africa using fire for light, warmth, and cooking and chiseling stones to make blades, axes, and other tools. Several million years later, one of their descendants writes this book on a portable device capable of performing complex, split-second mathematical calculations using nanotechnology-based processors with 100,000 times more processing power than the computers used only fifty years earlier to land a man on the moon.

The first spark that set humanity on its remarkable journey was the development of the human brain, whose growing capabilities were born from adaptation to evolutionary pressures unique to our species. Equipped with their powerful brains, humans developed progressively better technologies, improving their hunting and gathering efficiency. Such advances enabled the population to swell, while attributes that made humans better able to use those technologies bestowed a survival advantage. Thus emerged Homo technologies: human beings whose fingers adapted to sculpt raw materials into helpful hunting and cooking objects, whose arms developed to hurl spears, and whose brains evolved to store, analyze and transmit information, to reason and communicate using languages, and to facilitate cooperation and complex trade relations.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, these processes unceasingly enhanced humankind's adaptation to its ever-changing environment, allowing the species to thrive and grow and permeate new ecological niches as it ventured out of Africa. It learned to protect itself from precarious weather conditions and refine its hunting and gathering skills in a wide range of habitats until, about 12,000 years ago, it experienced its first significant transformation: some humans adopted sedentary lifestyles and began farming their food, generating evolutionary pressure on the species as a whole to follow suit.

The Neolithic Revolution had an enduring effect on humanity. In only a few thousand years, most humans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle. They began cultivating the land, raising cattle, sheep, and goats, and adapting to their new surroundings. Agricultural societies benefited from significant technological advantages, which persisted for thousands of years. Technological innovation in irrigation and cultivation methods generated higher farming yields. It led to greater population density, fostering specialization, and the emergence of a non-food-producing class dedicated to knowledge creation. They spurred further technological progress and advancements in art, science, and writing, leading to the onset of civilization. The human habitat had been gradually transformed: farms grew into villages, and villages expanded into towns and walled cities. These cities sprouted magnificent palaces, temples, and fortresses, the bastions of elites who created formidable armies and slaughtered their enemies in battles for land, prestige, and power.

For most of the history of our species, the interplay between technological progress and the human population was a continuous reinforcing cycle. Technological progress enabled the population to grow and encouraged the adaptation of societal traits to these innovations. In contrast, the growth and the transformation of the population widened the pool of inventors and expanded the demand for innovations, further stimulating the creation and adoption of new technologies. For eons, these great cogs of human history whirred beneath the surface, propelling humanity on its journey. Technologies improved, populations grew, and societal traits suited to new technologies spread – and these changes triggered further technological progress in every civilization, continent, and era.

Nevertheless, one central aspect of the human condition remained largely unaffected: living standards. Technological progress over most of human history failed to engender any meaningful long-term betterment in the material well-being of the population since – like all other species on Earth – humanity was caught in a poverty trap. Technological progress, and the associated expansion of resources it allowed, invariably contributed to population growth, dictating that the fruits of progress had to be divided among a growing number of mouths. Innovations led to a rise in economic prosperity for a few generations, but ultimately population growth brought it back down towards subsistence levels. When populations enjoyed fertile land and political stability, technology made significant strides. This occurred in ancient Egypt, Persia, and Greece, in the Mayan civilization and the Roman Empire, Islamic caliphates, and medieval China. Bursts of technological progress spread new tools and production methods across the globe and temporarily elevated living standards Yet these improvements were short-lived.

Eventually, however, the inevitable acceleration of technological advancement throughout human history reached a tipping point. The innovations of the Industrial Revolution that began in a small pocket of northern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sufficiently rapid to foster demand for a very particular resource: the skills and knowledge that would enable workers to navigate a technological environment that was not just new but continuously changing. To equip them for such a world, parents increased their investment in the upbringing and education of their children and thus were forced to bear fewer of them. The surge in life expectancy and the decline in child mortality augmented the duration of the return on education, further enhancing the incentive to invest in human capital and reduce fertility. Meanwhile, the decrease in the gender wage gap increased the cost of child-rearing and contributed further to the attraction of smaller families. These joint forces triggered the Demographic Transition, severing the persistent positive association between economic growth and birth rates.

Eventually, however, the inevitable acceleration of technological advancement throughout human history reached a tipping point. The innovations of the Industrial Revolution that began in a small pocket of northern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sufficiently rapid to foster demand for a very particular resource: the skills and knowledge that would enable workers to navigate a technological environment that was not just new but continuously changing. To equip them for such a world, parents increased their investment in the upbringing and education of their children and thus were forced to bear fewer of them. The surge in life expectancy and the decline in child mortality augmented the duration of the return on education, further enhancing the incentive to invest in human capital and reduce fertility. Meanwhile, the decrease in the gender wage gap increased the cost of child-rearing and contributed further to the attraction of smaller families. These joint forces triggered the Demographic Transition, severing the persistent positive association between economic growth and birth rates.

This dramatic drop in fertility liberated the development process from the counterbalancing effects of population growth and allowed technological improvements to raise prosperity permanently instead of in fleeting spurts. Thanks to a better-quality workforce, and increased investment in human capital, technological progress accelerated further, boosting living conditions and catalyzing sustained growth in income per capita. Humanity was undergoing a phase transition. Just as the Neolithic Revolution spread from a few hubs such as the Fertile Crescent and Yangtze River to other regions, the Industrial Revolution and the Demographic Transition began in Western Europe. They rippled over the twentieth century out across most of the globe, raising prosperity levels wherever they reached.

Therefore, the past two hundred years have been revolutionary: living standards have taken an unprecedented leap forward by every conceivable measure. Average per capita incomes worldwide have risen by fourteen, and life expectancy has more than doubled. The cruel world in which child mortality was mounting gave way to a prosperous one, in which the death of a single child is an extraordinary tragedy. Yet improvements in living conditions have meant more than better health and higher incomes. Technological progress also led to a decline in the use of child labor, a shift to less hazardous and strenuous occupations, the ability to communicate and engage in commerce across vast distances, and the proliferation of mass entertainment and culture on a scale that our ancestors could never have imagined.

Although this spectacular technological advancement and the immense improvement in living standards have been shared unevenly across the planet, and sometimes grotesquely so within societies themselves, and though natural disasters, pandemics, wars, atrocities, and political and economic upheavals have occasionally rained destruction on countless individuals, these tragedies and injustices – dramatic and horrific as they have been – have not diverted the journey of humanity from its long-term path. Viewed via a broader prism, the living standards of society as a whole have recovered from each of these calamities with remarkable haste. They have kept hurtling forward – propelled by the great cogs of technological progress and demographic change.

Although this spectacular technological advancement and the immense improvement in living standards have been shared unevenly across the planet, and sometimes grotesquely so within societies themselves, and though natural disasters, pandemics, wars, atrocities, and political and economic upheavals have occasionally rained destruction on countless individuals, these tragedies and injustices – dramatic and horrific as they have been – have not diverted the journey of humanity from its long-term path. Viewed via a wider prism, the living standards of humanity as a whole have recovered from each of these calamities with remarkable haste and have kept hurtling forward – propelled by the great cogs of technological progress and demographic change.

The journey of humanity is abundant with captivating episodes. It is easy to become adrift on the ocean of detail, pounded by the waves and oblivious to the mighty currents underneath. The first part of this book has focused on these undercurrents: the interplay between technological progress and the size and the composition of the human population. It is virtually impossible to understand the history of humankind without grasping the contributions of these forces to the progression of the human species – the evolution of the human brain, the two monumental revolutions (the Neolithic and the Industrial), the growth of human capital investment and the Demographic Transition, the major trends that made us the dominant species on Planet Earth. These undercurrents provide a unifying conceptual framework, a clear axis from which to understand this journey. In their absence, the history of human development would be merely a chronological list of facts – an incomprehensible wilderness of rising and falling civilizations.

And yet the pace of progress in living standards has been neither universal nor inevitable. Indeed, modern humanity is exceptional in that the standard of living of humans across the planet largely depends on their place of birth. What are the root causes of this vast wealth disparity across nations and regions? Are human societies inevitably trapped by the history and geography of the places they sprouted? Was the emergence of these inequalities predominantly deterministic or random? What is the role of deeply-rooted institutional, cultural and societal characteristics in the divergence in the wealth of nations? Having followed the journey of humanity from the past to the present, our exploration of the Mystery of Inequality will involve gradually rewinding the clock in search of its deepest origins, reverting ultimately to the roots of our journey – the exodus of Homo sapiens from Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

 

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