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Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution.
Specialisation would therefore create and increase the opportunities for gains from trade. The more Oz goes fishing, the better he gets at it, so the less time it takes him to catch each fish. The more hooks Adam the reindeer hunter makes, the better he gets at it, so the less time he takes to make each one. So it pays Oz to spend his day fishing and buy his hooks off Adam by giving him some fish. And it pays Adam to spend his day making hooks and get his fish delivered by Oz.
So it was not that there was no innovation; it was that regress overwhelmed progress.
self-sufficiency – caused the shrivelling of their technology. Earlier I wrote that division of labour was made possible by technology.
Now, at last, it becomes clear why the erectus hominids saw such slow technological progress.
By the time Abel Tasman pitched up in 1642 it held probably about 4,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes, and they lived mainly off seals, seabirds and wallabies, which they killed with wooden clubs and spears.
Suppose, for example, that an abundance of seabirds led one group to eschew fishing for a number of years until the last maker of fishing tackle had died. Or that the best barbed-spear maker on the island fell off a cliff one day leaving no apprentice. His barbs went on being used for some years, but once they had all broken, suddenly there was nobody who could make them. Acquiring a skill costs a lot of time and effort; nobody could afford to learn barb-making from scratch. People concentrated on learning the skills that they could watch first-hand.
Adam Smith argued, the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. The Tasmanian market was too small to sustain many specialised skills.
The Torres islanders lost the art of canoe making, causing the anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers to puzzle over the ‘disappearance of the useful arts’.
whose members often make ‘hyper-fair’ offers and yet see them rejected: in such cultures, gifts can be a burden to the receiver because they carry an obligation to reciprocate.
The financing of Wellington’s armies in Spain in 1809–12 was made possible because the British government trusted a Jewish lender named Nathan Rothschild to trust his brothers on the continent to buy bullion with British paper.
In 2004, a series of volunteer undergraduates sat down at computer screens at George Mason University in Virginia to play games for money. In the game each person found himself in a virtual village with his own house and field in which he could produce and consume red and blue virtual ‘units’ during brief sessions of the game. In each case, he knew that the more he acquired and the closer he got to a certain ratio of blue and red units (e.g., 3:1) the more real money he went home with. But unknown to him, he was either an ‘odd’ player, who was programmed to be faster at making red units, or an
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Yet there were no clues that trading was even possible.
Smith brilliantly confused the distinction between altruism and selfishness:
As the philosopher Robert Solomon put it, ‘What I want for myself is your approval, and to get it I will most likely do what you think I should do.’
squirting oxytocin up the noses of students will cause them to trust strangers with their money more readily than those who receive a placebo squirted up their noses.
Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy.
The ‘long tail’ of the distribution
ask Osama bin Laden, the ultimate spoilt rich kid.
Tilda Swinton somewhat predictably tried to kill George Clooney for exposing her company’s poisoning of people with pesticides).
Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy;
The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die,
Efficient ordering, ruthless negotiating, hyper-punctual time keeping (suppliers must sometimes hit a thirty-second window for deliveries), merciless cost control and ingenious responses to customers’ preferences had given Wal-Mart a 40 per cent efficiency advantage over its competitors by the early 1990s.
opened an average of seven new three-acre supercentres a month for a decade.
Tesco probably had a similar effect in Britain.
‘cross-docking’ where goods go from suppliers’ trucks to distributor’s trucks without spending time in warehouses in between were indeed new.
(the smaller the scale, the better planning works).
The rule against revenge killing, for example, must have greatly helped society to settle down. It must have been quite a breakthrough to say that ‘do unto others’ applies only to charity, not to homicide, and that handing the matter of revenge over to the state to pursue on your behalf through due process would be of general benefit to all.
Oetzi, the mummified ‘iceman’ found high in the Alps in 1991, was carrying as much equipment on him as the hikers who found him. He had tools made of copper, flint, bone and six kinds of wood: ash, viburnum, lime, dogwood, yew and birch. He wore clothes made of woven grass, tree bark, sinew and four kinds of leather: bearskin, deer hide, goat hide and calf skin.
Few hunter-gatherers, for example, could ever afford the time off ‘work’ to build a furnace and slowly and laboriously smelt enough metal to make a copper axe: they would starve in the meantime
Squashes and then peanuts were cultivated in Peru by 9,200 years ago, millet and rice in China by 8,400 years ago, maize in Mexico by 7,300 years ago, taro and bananas in New Guinea by 6,900 years ago, sunflowers in North America by 6,000 years ago, and sorghum in Africa by around the same time.
between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago that a genetic mutation, substituting G for A in a control sequence upstream of a pigment gene called OCA2, gave adults blue eyes for the first time.
sunlight enables the body to synthesise vitamin D.
One of the reasons that farming spreads so rapidly once it starts is that the first few crops are both more productive and more easily grown than later crops, so farmers are always happy to move on to virgin land. If you burn down a forest, you are left with a soft, friable soil seasoned with fertilising ash. All you need do is poke a digging stick into the ground and plant a seed and sit back and wait for it to grow.
the invention of metal smelting was an almost inevitable consequence of the invention of agriculture (though some very early mining of pure copper-metal deposits around Lake Superior
Copper was produced throughout the Alps, where some of the best ores are to be found,
Almost by definition, the more wealthy somebody is, the more things he acquires from specialists. The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation. The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency. Go to a poor village in Malawi or Mozambique today and you will find few specialists and people consuming a high proportion of what they produce. They are ‘not in the market’, as an economist might say.
to placate malevolent deities.
wishful thinking.
Human beings comprise about 0.5 per cent by weight of the animals on the planet. Yet they beg, borrow and steal for themselves roughly 23 per cent of the entire primary production of land plants
That is to say, of the 650 billion tonnes of carbon potentially absorbed from the air by land plants each year, eighty are harvested, ten are burnt and sixty are prevented from growing by ploughs, streets and goats, leaving 500 to support all the other species. That may seem to leave some room for growth yet, but is it really practical to expect a planet to go on supporting such a dominant monoculture of one ape?
Even the confinement of chickens, pigs and cattle to indoor barns and batteries, though it troubles the consciences (mine included) of those who care for animal welfare, undoubtedly results in more meat produced from less feed with less pollution and less disease. When bird flu threatened, it was free-range flocks of chickens, not battery farms, that were at greatest risk.
the world could reasonably set a goal of feeding itself to a higher and higher standard throughout the twenty-first century without bringing any new land under the plough,
In the early 1960s the economist Colin Clark calculated that human beings could in theory sustain themselves on just twenty-seven square metres of land each. His reasoning went like this: an average person needs about 2,500 calories of food per day, equivalent to about 685 grams of grain. Double it for growing a bit of fuel, fibre and some animal protein: 1,370 grams. The maximum rate of photosynthesis on well-watered, rich soils is about 350 grams per square metre per day, but you can knock that down to about fifty for the best that farming is in practice able to achieve over a wide area. So
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In 2004, the world grew about two billion tonnes of rice, wheat and maize on about half a billion hectares of land:
both directly and via beef, chicken and pork – equivalent to feeding four billion people. So a hectare fed about eight people, or about 1,250 square metres each, down from about 4,000 square metres in the 1950s.
(pasture land is not part of this calculation) – that is about 5,000 square metres each.
70 per cent of all the world’s water usage is for crop irrigation. But he goes on to admit that the inefficiency of irrigation systems (i.e., the loss to evaporation) is falling fast, especially in China, and that there is already a well-used technique – drip irrigation – that could almost eliminate the problem. Countries like Cyprus, Israel and Jordan are already heavy users of drip irrigation. In other words, the wastefulness of irrigation is a product of the low price of water.
Organic farming is low-yield,
a pound of organic lettuce, grown without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides in California, and containing eighty calories, requires 4,600 fossil-fuel calories to get it to a customer’s plate in a city restaurant: planting, weeding, harvesting, refrigerating, washing, processing and transporting all use fossil fuel.
