A book. Why did the West get so rich and the others didn’t? This is the fundamental question that has obsessed economists since the emergence of their discipline. Adam Smith’s founding book, published in 1776, was aptly titled Inquiries into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Since then everyone has contributed their stone to the building, trying to go back as far as possible in the immense genealogy of Homo sapiens. “For three hundred thousand years, income barely exceeded the minimum necessary to survive,” explains Oded Galor in his book “Humanity’s Journey to the Origins of Wealth and Inequality” (Denoël, 320 pages, 23 euros). A quarter of the babies did not reach their first birthday; Women often died in childbirth and life expectancy rarely exceeded 40 years. Suddenly, “in the blink of an eye,” given the long history, global incomes have quadrupled and life expectancy has more than doubled.
It is this mystery of growth that the Israeli economist, professor at the American University of Brown (Rhode Island), is exploring. A prolific researcher, author of a “unified theory of growth”, he embarked on the adventure of popularization with a work reminiscent of the bestseller Sapiens (Albin Michel, 2015), whose author, the historian Yuval Harari, teaches as Oded Galor the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Also read articles for our subscribers Yuval Noah Harari, the historian of the future
The book will be read with avidity because it is teeming with anecdotes and answers to questions we all asked ourselves at one point or another. In contrast to Sapiens, the author focuses less on the first humans and more on this key moment in our history that took place in the 18th century. Because the history of wealth is the opposite of continuous progression. The living conditions of a 17th-century French peasant differed little from those of his distant ancestors. As in Babylon three thousand years ago, his day’s work was worth between 5 and 10 kilograms of wheat. Nothing has changed in his life expectancy either, between 30 and 40 years.
The English economist Thomas Malthus theorized this immobility in 1803, despite the many technical advances separating these two eras. According to him, all periods of prosperity have led to an exponential increase in births. More mouths to feed and therefore more levies on the agricultural resource that cannot progress at the same pace. Hence the fall in income, the return of poverty before the next cycle, aided by famines or epidemics that reduce the population. This Malthusian trap has locked populations in stagnation for millennia. But in the very century in which Malthus opens the debate, an event unique in human history occurs: the combination of a techno-industrial revolution and demographic change.
You still have 46.88% of this article to read. The following is for subscribers only.