The Israeli economist Oded Galor traces, in a large historic fresco, the upheavals which explain why, at the turn of the 18th century, humans’ income has grown continuously after centuries of stagnation.
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Book. Why did the West become so rich and why are others not? This is the fundamental question that has obsessed economists since the emergence of their discipline. The founding book of Adam Smith published in 1776 was aptly called research on the nature and the causes of the wealth of nations. Since then, everyone brings their stone to the building, trying to go up as far as possible in the immense genealogy of Homo Sapiens. “For three hundred thousand years, income hardly exceeded the minimum necessary for survival, explains Oded Galor in his book The journey of humanity, with the origins of wealth and inequalities (Denoël, 320 pages, 23 euros). A quarter of babies did not reach their first birthday; women would often die in layers and life expectancy rarely exceeded 40 years. “Suddenly,” the time of an air blinking “with regard to the long history , income has multiplied by fourteen worldwide and life expectancy has more than doubled.
It is this mystery of growth explored by the Israeli economist, professor at the American University of Brown (Rhode Island). Prolix researcher, author of a “unified theory of growth”, he embarks on the adventure of popularization with a work which recalls the bestseller sapiens (Albin Michel, 2015), whose author, the historian Yuval Harari, teaches, like Oded Galor, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The book can be read greedily as it is teeming with anecdotes and answers to questions that we all have been asked. Unlike Sapiens, the author does not dwell on the first men but rather on this key moment in our history, appeared in the 18th century e century. Because the history of wealth is the opposite of continuous progression. The living conditions of a French peasant from the 18th century e century were little different from that of his distant ancestors. As in Babylon, three thousand years ago, his working day was worth between 5 and 10 kilograms of wheat. His life expectancy, between 30 and 40 years old, had not changed either.
The English economist Thomas Malthus theorized in 1803 this immobility despite the numerous technical progress which separates these two eras. According to him, periods of prosperity have all resulted in an exponential increase in births. No more mouths to feed and therefore more sampling on the agricultural resource that cannot progress at the same rate. Hence the fall in income, the poverty that comes back, before the next cycle helped by famines or epidemics that reduce populations. This Malthusian trap has locked the populations in stagnation during millennia. But in the very century when Malthus launched the debate occurs a unique event in human history: the combination of a techno-industrial revolution and demographic transition.
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