The Journey of Humanity: And the Keys to Human Progress

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In The Journey Of Humanity, Oded Galor argues that climate policy should not be restricted to cutting carbon but should also involve ‘pushing hard for gender equality, access to education and the availability of contraceptives, to drive forward the decline in fertility.’ India will do well to heed that advice.” —The New Indian Express Sweeping overview of cultural, technological, and educational forces that let countries break out of the poverty trap and become wealthy.Its breadth and ambition are reminiscent of Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steeland Harari’s Sapiens.”— Financial Times

Brilliantly weaves the threads of global economic history. A tour de force! ” —Dani Rodrik, author of Straight Talk on Trade In lucid, accessible prose, Galor ingeniously traces obscure influences over centuries…. This engrossing history reveals that subtle causes can have astounding effects.” — Publishers Weekly 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? Completely brilliant and utterly original … a book for our epoch. ”—Jon Snow, former presenter, Channel 4 News (UK)La historia y la sociología sean quizá dos de las disciplinas que más se ajusten al zeitgeist reinante, y este ensayo se ajusta con absoluta precisión a la ortodoxia de nuestros días. No encontraréis ninguna reflexión incómoda que pueda aparecer por la interpretación de unos datos objetivos, como por ejemplo hacía Noah Harari -con el cual, por cierto, discrepo en casi todo, en especial cuando trata el tema que me toca. Galor es superficial y predecible, bastante aburrido por su convencional aproximación al tema. Aunque, eso sí, cumple con lo que se propone, a saber, explicar el crecimiento de la humanidad y la consecuente desigualdad económica. What I also missed was a clear taxonomy on what factors matter the most. Again, I get that the scope is huge and the world is complex, but I'm missing a bit that Galor explains what matters most (which I see in Fukuyama 2011, Jared Diamond "Guns Germs and Steel" and Sowell "Wealth, Poverty and Politics"). I'm not going away from the book with a clear argument on what drives growth - which is OK, but disappointed when the book itself promises a unified theory, but ends a bit scattered.

Just like the theories that promise to tie together all of physics or any other science, Galor’s work aims to make the world’s economic trajectory seem logical, even inevitable.”— American Banker

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Astounding in scope and insight...provides the keys to the betterment of our species." -- Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics 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. Astounding 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

Galor tells this big story while drawing on a range of recent academic research, much of it is his own but also Daron Acemoglu, Melissa Dell, and many other economists who are using modern empirical methods to exploit quasi natural experiments to study how (possibly) random differences in the past cast a shadow centuries or even millennia later. This thorough grounding in research sets it apart from some other more speculative big think books—although some of the research ends up confirming, or at least corroborating, various speculations. There is so much Oded Galor forgets or ignores... it all comes down to weak correlations! But, anyway, they look so PERFECT that people could believe this is the truth. 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.

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Galor concludes with a short and relatively superficial discussion of the public policy implications of these ideas. From my perspective the fact that the book does not explain issues like the United States vs. Argentina also is related to its overly facile dismissal of the “Washington consensus”. Of course it ignored culture, institutions, population diversity and geography—but by the way most of those are not changeable and there is enormous variation within regions that are similar in those regards. Nothing about the deep roots of incomes is a reason why a country, for example, should run large budget deficits financed with short-term foreign borrowing or have a budget devoted to subsidies while neglecting primary education or have weak property rights. Galor’s project is breathtakingly ambitious. He proposes a fairly simple, intensely human-capital-oriented model that will accommodate the millennia of Malthusian near-stagnation, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath of rapid growth, the accompanying demographic transition, and the emergence of modern human-capital-based growth. And the model is supposed to generate endogenously the transitions from one era to the next. The resulting book is a powerful mixture of fact, theory, and interpretation.”— Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics improvements since we walked out of Africa, yet not pet person until recently. Humanity was gripped in the Mathulsean poverty trap until recent centuries.