The Journey of Humanity: And the Keys to Human Progress

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In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, world-renowned economist and thinker Oded Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity's great mysteries. I am in awe of Oded Galor’s attempts to explain inequality today as a consequence of such profound forces. A remarkable contribution to our understanding of this mammoth dilemma.” —Jim O’Neill, author of The Growth Map Astounding in scope and insight...provides the keys to the betterment of our species." -- Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics Oded Galor staat aan de basis van de Unified Growth Theory die unieke factoren beschrijft die ervoor gezorgd hebben dat sommige landen een ongekende economische groei hebben doorgemaakt en andere landen juist niet. Centraal in deze theorie staat het uitgangspunt dat de economische groei, startende met de Industriële Revolutie, leidde tot een val in geboortecijfers omdat ouders - dankzij het groeiende belang van onderwijs - hun schaarse tijd en mogelijkheden aan enkele kinderen moesten verdelen, die tegelijkertijd met de groei in welvaart, steeds een grotere kans hadden om hun volwassen leeftijd te bereiken. An optimist’s guide to the future … Oded Galor’s ‘Sapiens’-like history of civilisation predicts a happy ending for humanity.” ―TheGuardian

Why did humanity get prosperous after hundreds of thousands of years of stagnation? And why do we observe such high levels of inequality between regions and countries today? These are the two main questions that Galor aims to answer in his Journey of Humanity. In many ways the evidence the book presents, drawing on a lot of peer-reviewed research, is much better than what we had even twenty years ago in thinking about economic growth. In other ways, however, a lot of the relationships between ancient variables and present ones (e.g., when was maize first introduced in Chinese areas and what was there economic status much later) could easily have alternative explanations or miss big points. Had high expectations, and the book showed a lot of promise with a unified theory of growth. And some chapters were pretty interesting, particularly on how fertility and genetic diversity has evolved with relation to growth. For most of human history, we were caught in a stagnation trap. Improvements in technology and productivity led to population increases, and all those new people gobbled up the surplus, so that overall living standards always reverted to the historical average, barely above subsistence. Thomas Malthus, the unfairly maligned English clergyman, assumed this would always be the case. And yet, at least in the fortunate global north, things have been very different for the last century or so. How come?In lucid, accessible prose, Galor ingeniously traces obscure influences over centuries…. This engrossing history reveals that subtle causes can have astounding effects.” — Publishers Weekly The Journey of Humanity takes on the huge task of explaining how humanity got to this point, which the author calls the Mystery of Growth. The second half explains why this growth has not been universal across nations, which the author calls the Mystery of Inequality.

Brilliantly weaves the threads of global economic history. A tour de force! ” —Dani Rodrik, author of Straight Talk on TradeCompletely brilliant and utterly original … a book for our epoch. ”—Jon Snow, former presenter, Channel 4 News (UK) A very good but perhaps not great book. Does a good job staying focused on the biggest of human stories, evolution, survival, growth, inequality and the future while remaining interesting throughout. It is tempting for a “unified theory” of the “journey of humanity” to try to provide the key to all mythologies, and the book becomes more speculative and dubious, suggesting that the economic performance of entire modern societies can be explained by a kind of cultural memory of their ancestors’ interactions with one kind of crop or animal versus another. Galor also proposes that languages with politeness distinctions ( tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German) have thereby enshrined more rigid hierarchies, and so harmed individual business enterprise. This reminded me pleasantly of the remark attributed to George W Bush: “The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.” The book’s desire to uncover the “great cogs” of history devolves into a kind of impersonal conspiracy thinking.

Furthermore, too many examples were a bit cliché - institutions seen in North and South Korea, trust seen in North and South Italy. I'm missing a bit more strange examples to give some new flavor to these classic topics.Astounding in scope and insight…provides the keys to the betterment of our species. ”—Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics

An inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork. ” — The New Statesman In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, world-renowned economist and thinker Oded Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity’s great mysteries. The explanation of the takeoff into sustained growth is a little bit less satisfying, but that’s partly what happens when you only have one first sustained takeoff—and it happens at a time when the world is globally connected so you don’t have the (somewhat) independent data points you have for studying other issues. Galor argues was a situation where small changes can lead to a large change—which he analogizes to “bifurcation theory” in mathematics. Because it was now rational to invest in children’s education rather than get them working, child labour fell awayAstounding in scope and insight, The Journey of Humanity provides a captivating and revelatory account of the deepest currents that have shaped human history and the keys to the betterment of our species.”— NourielRoubini, Professor Emeritus, NYU, and authorof Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance A wildly ambitious attempt to do for economics what Newton, Darwin, or Einstein did for their fields: develop a theory that explains almost everything.An inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork, the boldest possible attempt to write the economic history of humanity.”— The New Statesman