How Humanity Prospered
Factors that led to our dramatic transformation
Before we begin, check out my podcast with InsideIIM, where I talk about our journey of building The Minimalist, why we wrote ‘Think Like The Minimalist’, the impact of AI, and how to keep learning. Cheggit (and don’t blame me for the title and thumbnail text- I didn’t write them):
Hello reader,
Imagine a dude living in 1 AD.
Life’s a nasty affair- he has to work his butt off at the farm only to get a meal that sucks more than the food in an engineering hostel mess.
Arthritis and tuberculosis are common but he doesn’t have the luxury of applying for sick leave- because if he does that, instead of getting a panic attack-inducing email from a toxic boss, he’d simply starve to death.
There’s no sanitation, no protection from pests, nothing. Things can’t get more disgusting than this.
Now, if you put this dude in a time machine and transport him to 500, 1000, or 1500 AD, he’d find the world a bit better but he’d not be shocked. Across these eras, life continues to suck. Women are exploited, kids die, people are sold into slavery, and everyone’s still poor.
There are some new tools and technologies around, certainly. There has been progress, and some of the things he sees- like ships, the printing press, or canons- didn’t exist back in the day.
But when it comes to the standard of living that people have, things haven’t moved much. Life still sucks.
Now, take the same guy and allow him to witness the world in 1800, 1900, and 2023- and he would go nuts. The fall-off-your-chair-and-check-if-you-are-dreaming variety.
Every. Single. Time. Each time more than the previous time. The world he sees would be unfathomable- as if it was the product of some mad hallucinations. Like a dream world created using Midjourney.
We can appreciate that the world has changed dramatically in the last 200 years. But from the standpoint of human evolution, it’s merely an eyeblink.
For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity has been crawling on its feet. And suddenly, in a period that accounts for barely 0.05% of its existence, it has taken a giant leap forward.
It’s like a 30-year-old person going from being a sick, fragile, emaciated, sad lowlife into a sharp, smart, muscular, handsome trillionaire in the last 5 days of his life. All his life he has been sad, sick, and distraught and things got better at a snail-like pace, but the last week just changed everything.
That’s how drastic the change has been. Naturally, it begs the question- what the hell happened there? How did we get here? Or if you’re a cool startup guy, what was our “growth hack”?
The wheels of change were turning for a long time till we reached a point of explosion. To understand the processes that influenced this transition, we first have to understand the trap humankind was caught in for millennia.
The Malthusian Trap
For the longest time, humanity’s living standards were in a rut. The life of an average person was just as bad in 1000 AD as it was in 100 AD. The reason is that we were caught in a trap.
It’s not like there was absolutely no progress. In fact, tinkering humans kept developing new technologies over time. The Harappans were great at city planning. The Romans built superb aqueducts. The Chinese discovered gunpowder, printing, and glass. And all of these came in very different eras.
Technology kept progressing over time. But every time we gained an economic advantage with these new tools and technologies, we ended up giving birth to more kids. So all the gains that could have been achieved in per capita incomes & living standards were instead squandered away because there were now more mouths to feed.
As a result, the total human population of the world kept rising steadily over the centuries, but the living standards stayed in the same abysmal place! This was the Malthusian Trap that we were caught in.
However, the rising population turned out to be an important thing eventually, for it was giving rise to some second-order effects.
A Rising Population
A steadily rising population had a few important implications:
As regions grew more densely populated, there was a rising demand for goods & services, which fostered greater trade among kingdoms/empires, and more exchange of ideas among diverse people which created a sustained demand for new ideas and products.
A rising population also affected the population composition. When you have more people in a group, there’s a greater likelihood of having an inventor like Newton or Da Vinci in the crowd- whose ideas and inventions can radically transform the world and add tremendous value over the centuries.
The emergence of these new innovations also adapted the population to their new technological and ecological environment, and subsequent populations were better suited to take advantage and build further by standing on the shoulders of giants.A bigger population had a higher chance of escaping technological regression- cases where important technological know-how gets lost because of adverse events.
For instance, the Inuits lost their knowledge of building kayaks when all the elder people of the population perished, and since the knowledge hadn’t been passed on to the younger ones, they suffered severe setbacks. Tech regression can take society back by many decades. No wonder bosses lose their shit when people start absconding without doing a proper KT.
Thus, a rising population enabled the invention of newer technologies, and as people adapted to the new technological reality, they were further able to grow their numbers.
This virtuous cycle was slowly going on for many centuries until things reached an inflection point during the 1700s.
The Industrial Revolution
The phase transition moment for humanity came in the 17th Century with the advent of the European Industrial Revolution.
Now this is a pretty Euro-centric statement because this age also saw the horrible phase of colonization which ensured that the spoils of progress weren’t distributed equally. But if there was an inflection point that marked humanity’s break out from the Malthusian trap, it was this period.
In this age, the pace of technological change reached ever-faster rates.
As a result, human capital became much more valuable than at any other time in the past, and suddenly people realized that a person was much better off if they were educated so that they’d be able to work at the burgeoning factories and participate in this dramatic new transition.
Education suddenly went from being a cultural commodity- restricted to a bunch of elites- to something that was now democratized and passed on to the masses.
Consequently, a child was also much better off at school than toiling away at a factory.
This led to a drop in the levels of child labor in the West, coupled with reductions in the gender pay gap because, with the advent of machines, brains were suddenly more valuable than pure brawn.
The flywheel was turning at an unprecedented phase. Explosive new tech, greater education levels, higher incomes, lower child labor, reducing gender wage gaps.
What followed thereafter was a 300-period unlike any other in our history- with rising lifespans, education levels, prosperity, and well-being.
In summary, a rising population produced humans who came up with newer technologies that helped them adapt to their environment and increased the pool of individuals who could build atop existing tech to come up with newer innovations.
This positive feedback loop was churning for thousands of years, until we reached an inflection point in the 18th Century, after which there was no looking back.
But what led to some countries prospering from the Industrial Revolution which allowed them to conquer others?
We shall attempt to answer this question in a follow-up article soon. If you can’t contain your curiosity, you can check out The Journey Of Humanity by Oded Galor.