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The Journey of Humanity: And the Keys to Human Progress

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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

improvements since we walked out of Africa, yet not pet person until recently. Humanity was gripped in the Mathulsean poverty trap until recent centuries. Indeed Galor devotes little of his book to capitalism, the structure of states and the consequent dynamic interdependence between the public and private sectors, or the importance of Enlightenment values that unleashed notions of the public sphere and rule of law. These are gigantic omissions. His is a technocratic journey full of illuminating graphs, but strangely bloodless and neglectful of political economy in explaining humanity’s journey. En toch ... hoe kan het zijn dat we de laatste paar eeuwen een nooit eerder vertoonde economische groei hebben doorgemaakt? Dat is de vraag die Oded Galor in dit boek centraal stelt. Wat zijn de oorzaken, en hoe hebben die er voor gezorgd dat we uit deze Malthusian trap zijn ontsnapt? 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. 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.

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Finally, the fourth underlying story is the one that Galor’s own research has advanced and the idea that is the most intriguing but frankly also feels the most speculative to me. Specifically he points out that migratory distance from Africa is closely related to population diversity—which is very high in Ethiopia but very low in Bolivia because of the “serial founder effect”. He argues that diversity has a plus (lots of ideas from combining different perspectives) and a minus (clashing) and that this leads to an inverted U-shaped relationship between population diversity and various economic outcomes like per capita income. 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 From the Malthusian (hunter-gatherer) epoch to the Neolithic (agricultural) Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and concluding now in the Technological Era, the book looks closely at what drives lifestyle improvements. Has the Demographic Transition, where families have less children due to the cost of training them in advanced skills, promoted prosperity? Did allowing non-native citizens to share in the nation’s wealth increase or decrease growth?

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. Galor is unable to move away from his time and his world. When he talks about technology, he does not differentiate between types; when he talks about education he is only thinking of the current (and A very determined) pattern; and a long etcetera. Please, how can you reduce the increase in schooling and the disappearance of the gender gap only to decimononic industrialists? What about the political revolutionary process, what about the weakening of religious power, what about ideologies...? Please, Galor, Marxists advocated the kind of education you say was only defended by industrialists! Obviously you don't know that... And, do you really think that legislation and the New States didn't play a fundamental role? If you aren't lying consciously, you have been driven mad. I understand know why only economists clap their hands. You are saying, basically, that businessmen are the saviors of humanity. If you had said the same about proletarians, kings or peasants, i would have critized it too. Brilliantly weaves the threads of global economic history. A tour de force! ” —Dani Rodrik, author of Straight Talk on Trade 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 is quite often named as potential candidate for the Nobelprize. With this book he got a remarkable and unprecedented deal (for an economist) with his publisher: it was translated at the very same time into almost 30 languages.

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. Incredibly wide-ranging and detailed historical and even anthropological examination of the myriad factors that have brought success and failure to nations…. Lively and learned.”— Tim Hazledine A book of this nature relies on fortuitous reversals that might make sense ex post but how sure are we? For example, Europe’s geography led to many competition states and China’s to a single unified state, the later was better for the economy through 1500 but the former was better after. Yes, there’s a decent story. But am I sure? Of course not.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 Although some compare this work with Sapiens (Harari) or Jared Diamond's already classic, the differences are immense. While the first proposed a macrocosmic vision of history in an informative but fresh way, and while the second knew how to combine different branches of knowledge with an innovative result, in this book we find none of that. Maybe it might be said that the bests sections of the book are those in which he copy/pastes some interesting (but very well known) facts about geography and history (some of them previously divulged by other popularizers before him, like Peter Watson or Diamond...) 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. Moreover there is a lot that it does not explain, that probably depends on the more mundane issues covered by more proximate theories of growth and some of the standard economic policy issues like the importance of avoiding and resolving crises. For example, why is the United States so much richer than Argentina? Or why did China take off when it did but Brazil did not? Or even just variations in income within regions. The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision overturns a host of long-held assumptions to reveal the deeper causes that have shaped the journey of humanity:

Oded Galor’sattempt to unify economic theory is impressive and insightful. ” —Will Hutton, The Guardian 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. Astounding in scope and insight...provides the keys to the betterment of our species." -- Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics The second half of the book is about the rise of inequality between countries. He eschews any discussion of the growth theory of Solow, Lucas, Romer and the like and goes—which he briefly dismisses as “proximate”—and instead instead goes to the deeper, underlying theories: (1) institutions, (2) culture, (3) geography, and (4) population diversity. These and more questions are answered within The Journey of Humanity. However, the author does not provide a suggested solution beyond a rather simplistic “don’t force a developed world solution on a developing world’s entirely different culture”. In addition, the book is written like a college textbook with a large and technical vocabulary that may trouble some readers looking for a more popular science level of prose. 3 stars.In lucid, accessible prose, Galor ingeniously traces obscure influences over centuries…. This engrossing history reveals that subtle causes can have astounding effects.” — Publishers Weekly He ends his recapitulation of the same argument here by asserting that “geographical characteristics and population diversity” are “predominantly the deepest factors behind global inequalities”, which sounds rather like we can’t do anything about them. Happily, at least, he does suggest that a country such as Ethiopia, which in his view is too diverse, might be helped by “policies that enabled diverse societies to achieve greater social cohesion”. Meanwhile, Bolivia, which is allegedly too homogeneous, could achieve better economic growth by being more diverse and so benefiting from more “intellectual cross-pollination”. And so, though it has often seemed as if we can do little about his hidden “great cogs” and “fundamental triggers”, it appears cheeringly in the end that politics and ideas might at least sometimes trump their effects on the story of how we got here and where we might go next.

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