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Human history, in one chart
Almost all the gains in human well-being in history happened
since the Industrial Revolution.
Luke Muehlhauser is a
researcher who studies risks to human civilization. Last year, he embarked on
an amateur
macrohistory project: collecting
all the data we have available for six different metrics of human well-being,
and graphing those metrics to get a picture of how the world has changed over
time.
The six metrics he
charted were life expectancy; GDP per capita; the percentage of the population living in
extreme poverty; “war-making capacity,” a measure of technological advancement for
which we have the most historical data; “energy capture,” which reflects access to
food, livestock, firewood, and, in the modern day, electricity; and the
percentage of people living in a democracy. Obviously, we don’t have a precise
measure of many of these things for most of history — but we have enough to get
a strong sense of some trends.
He plotted those measures
across the entire sweep of human history. The resulting graph is startling:
The graph starts in 1000
BC and goes to the present day. It’s flat for most of human history. The
Industrial Revolution is generally agreed to have begun in the late 1700s or
first half of the 1800s, and that’s also when most of these markers of human
well-being started to change.
Economic historian Joel
Mokyr has called the
19th and 20th centuries “the
most transformative centuries in all of human history.” From this chart, it’s
easy to see why. Over almost all of human history, each of these metrics of
well-being was completely flat. The same share of people lived in a democratic
society — approximately none. Life expectancy at birth is believed by
historians to have hovered in the range of 25 to 30 years (though this is
mostly due to
child deaths, not deaths in early
adulthood). Almost the entire world lived in extreme poverty.
The most significant
events of history had — when we zoom out and take a look at the big picture —
only a small impact on overall well-being. The Black Death killed 10 percent of
everyone alive and still barely moved these numbers. The fall of the Roman
Empire did affect
some measures of well-being, but on a scale that is barely visible on this graph.
In short, for most of
history, all human events — the rise and fall of empires, the spread of
plagues, the spread and schisms of religions, the invention of wheels and
aqueducts and the printing press — barely affected the typical person’s life
span, political freedom, economic productivity, or wealth.
And then, with the
Industrial Revolution, all those things changed at once. Within 200 years, the
human experience looked very different.
What made the Industrial
Revolution different?
The Industrial Revolution
refers to the transition, beginning in Britain and spreading around the world
in the 19th century, to new — often factory-based — manufacturing processes.
This transition affected almost every industry, from textiles and ironworking
to transportation and agriculture. People were profoundly affected as well.
“Until about 1800,”
Mokyr told the
Washington Post, “the vast bulk of
people on this planet were poor. And when I say poor, I mean they were on the
brink of physical starvation for most of their lives. Life expectancy in 1750
was around 38 at most, and much lower in some places. The notion that today we
would live for 80 years, and spend much of those in leisure, is totally
unexpected. The lower middle class in Western and Asian industrialized
societies today has a higher living standard than the pope and the emperors of
a few centuries back, in every dimension.”
That sudden, drastic rise
in standards of living is what the chart reflects.
Historians disagree on many
details of this story — for example, on when the Industrial Revolution can be
said to have begun, and on when it started producing
real gains in standards of living for the average person. But historians broadly
agree that extraordinary
gains were associated with the Industrial Revolution.
The most striking lessons
from this chart
I reached out to
Muehlhauser to ask him about the biggest takeaways from this chart and from
this view of human progress.
He emphasized how many
metrics are missing from this picture, because we don’t have
good data on them going back for centuries. He also emphasized that on its own, a chart
doesn’t demonstrate causation — we’d need to look at the timing of
industrialization by region, and the timing of changes in well-being, to draw
any conclusions there.
Nonetheless, there are
things we can learn just from this. We often think about history as a gradual
arc of progress, with setbacks such as wars and famines and gains such as new
ideas and technologies. Muehlhauser’s chart suggests a remarkable lack of
correlation between those forms of progress and gains in human well-being.
While there was
absolutely important technological and political progress occurring over
centuries — new forms of government, new forms of warfare, new understandings
of the world — global average well-being barely budged. The fluctuations
associated with nearly all historical events are dwarfed by the changes
associated with just one event: the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most striking
things about the chart is how little most historical events affected it. The
1918 flu epidemic killed an estimated 20 million
to 50 million people.
It shows up on the chart, but as a brief blip in a general upward trajectory.
World War II surpassed that death toll, killing more than 60 million people; it’s not even visible on the graph. Even
though our capacity to slaughter each other has been growing — and the 20th
century was rife with such atrocities — the overall trajectory has been that
things keep getting better.
If you took a look at
these numbers in 1800, you might have concluded that it’s impossible to really
change anything about the human experience. Every change up to that point had
not affected life span, not really affected political freedom, and not affected
wealth or personal capacity to affect the world. It’d be easy to just conclude
that the human condition was immutable.
That would have been a
mistake, though. In ways that were hard to predict, things were about to
change.
Yours in Freedom,
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
PARTING THOUGHT
There are few coincidences in national politics so when
establishment propagandists from "both sides" of the political
spectrum agree on something then you can expect that something nefarious is
afoot.
It happened in November when Republican establishment Neocon
writer Jonah Goldberg wrote a piece calling for an
end to political primaries. This was followed with the December edition of The Atlantic
publishing a column advocating for
the same.
Their condescending arguments were mirrors of each other: The
political primary system has become too unpredictable to continue because
giving the people a choice means we end up with candidates who are aren't our
approved people.
They don't want to go back to having candidates chosen in
smoke-filled rooms, they say. But on the other hand, they do.
Not everything in politics has to be democratic, Goldberg writes.
Never mind that America is not a democracy.
More Free Resources:
.
The Supplies You Need To Stockpile For TEOTWAWKI
There are a lot of
things you could stash away but what are the items that will be most in demand
in a TEOTWAWKI situation? The answer to that is pretty obvious in some ways but
there are definitely some … Continued
Recent Observations...
Had 3
customers in my office this afternoon; A retiree, a teacher & a UAW
worker-all of them said they’d never vote Democrat again; they’re destroying
our country w/ their socialist-communist crap.
Do folks
feel that skin color denotes the qualifications of that person? Most have now
realized that the progressive’s push for identity politics is driving people
apart & creating division.
Today I find
progressive have created promoted cultural insanity which has been done to alienate
people.
I did note
an observation Trump made in New Orleans…if he had been opposed to the building
a border wall, Dems would have been all over him w/ demands that a wall be
built.
When I was
teaching college courses in marketing/economics, there were few conservatives
in the faculty; roughly 60% of the sociology professors were socialists and
viewed conservatives as deviants despite the majority of folks in this nation
are conservative.
Our nation’s
two biggest threats are Communist China and our own internal Communists [aka:
the socialist-democratic party & their co-conspirators in the media,
universities, Hollywood, etc.].
Imagine a scenario
where cash has become worthless. It could be hyperinflation, where it takes a
wheelbarrow of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Or it could a devastating act of
terrorism such as a bioweapon or an EMP that sets the country back 100 years.
Whatever the cause, there could come a day when our money becomes useless.
And it won't necessarily be a
nationwide disaster that causes this to happen. In a local disaster such as a
powerful hurricane or earthquake, the power will be out which means the banks
will be closed. And if they don't reopen, there won't be enough cash to go
around.
In any of the above scenarios, people will be forced to
barter with one another until power is restored or a suitable currency emerges.
In case that ever happens, it's a good idea to have a wide assortment of barter
items. That way if someone has something you need, you're more likely to
already have something they need...
Poll: Majority expect Trump to win in 2020
A Final Note…
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3 comments:
Bit of an odd topic but thought provoking [I can see why you were a professor]. It's always been obvious, however, at least to me, that capitalism improved the lives of people while socialism has always ruined lives in the end...why else would communist China & Russia have adopted & benefited from so many tools of capitalism?
I enjoy your postings & liked your observations today!
a good read-enjoyed your observations...you're very politically astute & tied into current events.
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