A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark
The Fermi paradox is well known for its existential nature: Why—despite all the starts and all the seeming possibility for life—is it the case that we are the only civilization that we can detect?
Breaking this question down into parts gets us the Drake equation we get an estimate of the total number of communicable civilizations, N:
Where:
- R* is the rate of star formation per year
- ƒₚ is the fraction of stars with planets
- ⁿₑ s the number of Earth-like (or otherwise habitable) planets per system with planets
- ƒₗ is the fraction of such planets with life
- ƒᵢ is the fraction with life that develops intelligence
- ƒ꜀ is the fraction of intelligent civilizations that are detectable/contactable
- L is the average longevity of such detectable civilizations in years
Now the paradox comes in when we make reasonable assumptions with what we can guess. The first three parameters can be inferred with simple observation of what we think the range of an 'Earth-like' planet ought to be. Rocky planets in a habitable zone, one with a regular orbit and rotation, one that could support life are so numerous; So, "Where are they"?
Our models of planet formation and of our galaxy leave room for many, many of these planets to form. The sheer number of them makes the number of independent possibilities for life and the subsequent parameters to play out.
The last one, L, or the longevity of a contactable civilization also seems like it would be favorable for N, given the amount of energy that a civilization can extract from a mere planet not to mention an entire star and the space a solar system provides it's hard to imagine what problems an already entrenched contactable civilization, say, one with a presence in their solar system, would have in their persistence.
Now Earth is just barely detectable/contactable, we, in the past ~100 have only just become delectable and we're not quite contactable yet (Messages in space need a couple of orders of magnitude more time) but if we do, say survive 10,000 years it's hard to imagine not surviving a lot longer—to exist for a meaningful percentage of our galaxy's present lifetime. (as opposed to our current 0.000...001% existence )
So that leaves us with the three hardest parameters: life, intelligence, and civilization.
However, the probability of life seems like it would be fairly high, on our own plant life seems to have gotten a foothold about as soon as the conditions on the early earth seem to permit general chemical functioning. Similarly, it seems that given any plant with life, a non-astronomically small number would give rise to intelligence. Many different animals on earth have evolved intelligence and many others exist in environments plentiful enough to sustain the energy needed for intelligence. This doesn't have to occur very often but remember, we started off with ... number of habitable planets, to get an estimate in the range of ~1 for the Milky Way there needs to be some process that is a lot less likely than we are giving credit for. Perhaps this is the probability of industrial civilization.
An Economic History of the World
Gregory Clark, in his book *A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World* makes an attempt at "Big History one "...in the tradition of *The Wealth of Nations*, *Das Kapital*, *The Rise of the Western World*, and most recently *Guns, Germs, and Steel*. All these books, like this one, ask: How did we get here? Why did it take so long? Why are some rich and some poor? Where are we headed?” The primary goal is to explain the anomaly of the Industrial Revolution in light of the rather unknown workings of the past.
Clark does not understate his claims; this is a book of "Big History." This an attempt to explain our world and how it came to be. Namely, why did the industrial revolution happen? Why are some countries developed where others are not? Why were the living conditions of 1850s England worse than that of hunter gathers?
Clark challenges the prevailing theories of growth and development he finds that they do not explain the current world or the past. He examines the economies of the past, their simliatreis and vast differences and concludes that they cannot explain the differences of present of the development of the past.
The two core mechanisms that Clark has to eplain the world of the past and the present are the Malthusian era and when civilization broke tis pressures and how improvements in worker efficiency is the main driver of growth.
This is also a book of immense detail, Clark decorates his economic arguments with fascinating examples of the past, examples only someone who is truly well versed could come to know()
**Add an example of differences**
The Malthusian world
We've forgotten the past, modern society is so radically different than the world out ancestors lived in. In some way the past is not just unintuitive, but unimaginable. What life was really like what constrains existed and what caused the society we live in toady are things important today as many still have yet to enjoy the fruits of industrial civilization.
The past acted verry differently form the present: The Malthusian environment. Where principally, the birth and death of a population is in equilibrium with the resources in the environment. This principal is straight forward in animals but also holds for the vast majority of human lives ever lived. In the long run, human populations subject to the same Darwinic pressures of that of plants and animals will behave no differently from them.
The Malthusian equilibrium is simple, the amount of births must equal the amount of deaths in the long run and that deviation from this equilibrium with have subsequent changes in the standards of living. For any increase to the death rate there will be a higher income per person this will in turn increase income per capita. This will then cause more births and a decrease in the income per capita.
![[Pasted image 20240505152715.png]]
So, in the long run as long as the death schedules and birth schedules stay the same there there will be the same exact income per person. Or in other words the only way for a mathusial socity can change its standeard of lifing is to change either the bierth or death schedule.
Children
Even population during population growth does the overall reproduction rate stay nearly constant. The human population grew from about ~100,000 people in 130,000 BC to 770 million people by 1800, yet this growth only works out to 2.005 surviving children per woman!
Below is a chart of this figure of european coutries. Considering that these contires have, in that period, a greater birth rate we find that there is a low
![[Pasted image 20240504140925.png]]
The Equilibrium
Malthusian times were not strictly awful for the people living in them. The equilibrium of any societys given the Malthusian equlbrium dose not imply that people are barly holding on to life in want of food meerly that sociely is at a point were any addioal income will produce more births / less deaths and vice versa.
One main way that human society have avoided this is by the restriction or at least non maximization of the birth rate. It is initially peculiar, in pretty much all human societies females reproduce less than their reproductive window allows A female wanting to maximize her reproductive schedule could theoretically produce XX offspring. If this were to happen in a Malthusian environment then we might expect human societies to mirror the ecology of animals more similarly; where much of the death is ultimacy caused by a lack of nutrients (see graphs of animal populations) What has sampling made humans different from other animals is that we don't fully maximize our reproduction; a hunter-gatherer society with a typical birth schedule and a fairly high death rate can live the high life, one of easy food procurement and long (after twenty ) life expectancy
“In the preindustrial world sporadic technological advance produced people, not wealth.” (Clark, 2007, p. 32) ![[Pasted image 20240504141338.png]]
(Clark, 2007, p. 68)
Counter intuitive
This past equilibrium profoundly foreign to us. While we can imagine that the Black Death would have made those that survive richer its difficult to intuit this to every scenario
![[Pasted image 20240505154119.png]]
Consider the question of the living standards of Neolithic farmers; Where they higher or lower than their hunter gather counterparts? A naive guess—one knowing that there was much greater inequality in farming societies—might lead to the conclusion that these societies were a much worse place to live than a hunter gather one. However, knowing that living standards are only determined by the birth and death rate we should be much more skeptical of such strong claims.
In reality Neolithic farming societies would not have lower living standards given large amounts of inequality, if anything this would have improved the standard of living! Consider two key differences between Neolithic farmes and huntergaters: the ability to store your harvest and greater population density. Common intuition would think that the ability to store food would be a positive for the standard of living and that the greater risk of disease would be a negative. Of course this persicely the opposite, food stores would reduce the death rate and thus decrease long run living standars. Conversely, greater disease would increae iving standards. So overall, it is hard to tell what the overall differnce between farmers and huntergateres was as all the systematic differnet in death and survival would have its own directional effect on living standards. Perhaps there was no overall difference, perhapse living standars different on the basis of the culture and envioremnt rathare than betwenn hunting and farming.
A paradox of Growth
The Industrial revolution mirrors the Fermi Paradox, why--despite the seeming ability of societies to grow--did they all fail to do so. The preconditions of growth existed long before the 1800s but as the record shows, all societies, in all their diverse nature, failed to grow.
Past Technological decline
The one constant of preindustrial growth is that there was no constant; societies commonly invented technologies only to forget them generations later.
#thread
There are many examples of this: consider the Chinese. China was arguably ahead of Europe a millennia ago.
When Marco Polo visited China in the 1290s he found that the Chinese were far ahead of the Europeans in technical prowess. Their oceangoing junks, for example, were larger and stronger than European ships. In them the Chinese sailed as far as Africa. The Portuguese, after a century of struggle, reached Calicut, India, in the person of Vasco da Gama in 1498 with four ships of 70–300 tons and perhaps 170 men. There they found they had been preceded years before by Zheng He, whose fleet may have had as many as three hundred ships and 28,000 men.16 Yet by the time the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese had lost the ability to build large oceangoing ships.
The Chinese declined in other areas as well Marco Polo observed deep and sophisticated coal mines. Around that period, the Chinese measured time accuralty using water clocks. By 1600 these were not to be found by European visitors whose mechincial clocka amazed the Chinese who at that point reverted to pre prmitive methods of time keeping.
![[Pasted image 20240505170313.png]]
Decline as happed even more fericly in the eample of the intuit and the Aboriginals. The Thule, the ancestors of the Inuit possesed a complex material culture. The hunted large sea mammals and lived in homes stocked with intricate artifiacts
Hunting of sea mammals in open water disappeared, or was restricted to smaller species. Winter was now spent in transient snow-houses, since the Inuit were unable to procure sufficient food supplies to winter in one location. Artifacts were simpler, and decorated or ornamental objects were produced in only a few areas. So marked was this difference that it took archaeologists a long time to accept that the Inuit were indeed the descendants of the Thule.
![[Pasted image 20240505165221.jpg]]
Similar was the decline for the Aboriginals, much of the material culture of their ancestors, thier tools and other complexities no longer exist in thier culture. The knowelge that theri ansestores cane the to content by boat is forgotten. This forgetting happens to many isolated peoples
Consider perhaps the longest example of this paradox: Madagascar. In the scope of the overall human time scale Madagascar was only settled recently, mere millennia ago. Anatomically modern humans existed as far back as 200,000 years ago, maybe even more. However, Madagascar was settles around 2000 years ago This is quite the puzzle, how does it come to pass that after 200,000 years does the world's fourth largest island right off the coast of our ancestral homeland somehow get settled close to or even during the Roman Empire?
It gets more perplexing, Africans, were if fact not the ones that first settled Madagascar, but the polypolnesianls. People who orginiated thouslans of miles away from the African coast. (add studies of Madagascar). Could it be the case that if humand never make it out of Africa by land we would have never made it out of Africa by sea?
Growth was possible
but statis was stronger
## Change in attitudes
Fighing murder etc
The crazy return on land
The un developed world
“History shows, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, that the West has no model of economic development to offer the still-poor countries of the world. There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth, and even complicated economic surgery offers no clear prospect of relief for societies afflicted with poverty.” (Clark, 2007, p. 373)
Unsorted
-Stature South korea and other part of korea advancemnt
-Compariosn ot hyenia
-The world used to be a lot more equal, inomces in the mathlusinal env were veryy simliare across
-Errom’s Law (https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1786439438668837000, https://www.economist.com/business/2024/04/30/can-biotech-startups-upstage-eli-lilly-and-novo-nordisk