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They could do so by eating more fish, fruit and vegetables. But not only would this be a land-hungry option, it would suit the wealthy more than the poor, so it would exacerbate health inequalities.
Tax and even slavery soon began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the next 6,000 years – merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalise it.
The settlements on the coast harvested fish in huge quantities, mainly anchovies and sardines, but also clams and mussels.
They fashioned the cotton into nets, which they bartered for fish.
a cotton grower need only grow some more cotton rather than spend time fishing. Specialisation raised the standard of living for both.
They bought gold, silver and copper in exchange for tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes shipped in on caravans of up to 300 donkeys.
monopoly rewards caution and discourages experiment, the income is gradually captured by the interests of the producers at the expense of the interests of the consumers, and so on. The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.
Eventually they were able to build ships so large that they needed two banks of oars to propel them. Oars, though, were used only for manoeuvring close to shore. These were sailing ships and the larger they were, the more they could amplify the work of their human operators. Using the power of the wind, a comparatively small crew could transport a heavy cargo hundreds of miles further, and much more cheaply, than a caravan of donkeys could ever hope to manage. Suddenly, for the first time, a large-scale seaborne division of labour became a possibility: wheat from Egypt could feed the Hittites
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money lending at interest stopped and coins ceased to circulate so freely.
government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers;
Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.
The miller wants all you can grow, so you encourage both your sons to marry early and rent a few acres off you. The carter, the miller, the baker, the merchant and the shepherds are all doing the same: setting their children up in business.
Black Death arrived in the 1340s and caused a crash in human numbers.
By 1450, the population of England had been reduced to roughly where it had been in 1200.
Black Death was not caused by overpopulation, but by a bacterium.
That capital was used to get work out of animals, rivers and breezes, rather than people. Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies’.
This was a time of rapid population expansion, made possible by the high productivity of paddy rice, naturally fertilised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in the water and therefore needing little manure
With abundant food and a fastidious approach to hygiene, the Japanese population boomed to the point where land was scarce, labour was cheap and it was literally more economic to use human labour to hoe the land than to set aside precious acres for pasture to support oxen or horses to draw a plough.
All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed:
The pattern is always the same: mortality falls first, causing a population boom, then a few decades later, fecundity falls quite suddenly and quite rapidly. It usually takes about fifteen years for birth rate to fall by 40 per cent. Even Yemen, the country with the highest birth rate in the world for most of the 1970s with an average of nearly nine babies per woman, has halved the number.
In Niger or Afghanistan today, where more than fifteen of every 100 babies die before their first birthdays, the average woman will give birth seven times in her lifetime; in Nepal and Namibia, where less than five babies out of every 100 die, the average woman gives birth three times.
Another factor is wealth. Having more income means you can afford more babies, but it also means you can afford more luxuries to divert you from constant breeding. Children are consumer goods, but rather time-consuming and demanding ones compared with, say, cars.
the correlation between widespread female education and low birth rate is pretty tight,
females want to have relatively few children and give them high-quality upbringing, whereas males like to have lots of children and care less about the quality of their upbringing.
‘Capitalism exterminated slavery.’ The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to water to wind to fossil fuel. In each case, the amount of work one man could do for another was amplified by the animal or the machine.
to illustrate the notion that factory jobs are often preferable to farm ones. A farm worker named William Turnbull, born in 1870, told my grandmother that he started work at thirteen, for sixpence a day, working six days a week, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., usually outdoors whatever the weather, with just Good Friday, Christmas Day and half of New Year’s day as his only holidays.
Carolina in the 1920s explained to a different historian why the mill was so much better than the farm: ‘Once we went to work in the mill after we moved here from the farm, we had more clothes and more kinds of food than we did when we was a-farmin’. And we had a better house. So yes when we came to the mill life was easier.’
More patents were issued in Birmingham than in any other city than London in the eighteenth century, though few would count as major ‘inventions’:
The cost of transporting coal overland was prohibitive until the railway came along.
There was never going to be enough wind, water or wood in England to power the factories, let alone in the right place. This was the position in which China found itself. In 1700 it had a vibrant textile industry, perhaps equally ripe for mechanisation, but it was a long way from coalfields, and its domestic iron industry was dependent entirely on charcoal, whose price was rising as forests retreated.
Because none of the coal reserves were close to navigable water, China’s iron industry gave up its early experiment with fossil fuel. The price of iron rose in China, discouraging inventors from using it for machinery. So industrial activity in China experienced diminishing returns and as the population grew, people had less and less incentive both to consume and to invent.
Today most coal is used for generating electricity.
Two billion people alive today have never turned on a light switch.
alternating current from George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla and Sebastian de Ferranti, turbine generators from Charles Parsons. The electrification of the world began,
television replaces procreation as an evening activity.
The earth receives 174 million billion watts of sunlight, about 10,000 times as much as the fossil-fuel output that human beings use. Or, to put it another way, a patch of ground roughly five yards by five yards receives as much sunlight as you need to run your techno life.
Since a reasonably fit person on an exercise bicycle can generate about fifty watts, this means that it would take 150 slaves, working eight-hour shifts each, to peddle you to your current lifestyle. (Americans would need 660 slaves, French 360 and Nigerians 16.)
You can take this reductio ad absurdum two ways. You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional reaction, or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99 per cent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires. This is not to try to make you love coal and oil, but to drive home how much your Louis Quatorze standard of living is made possible by the invention of energy-substitutes for slaves.
Coal has huge drawbacks – it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity and mercury; but my point here is to note how it contributes to human prosperity as well.
Just one wind farm at Altamont in California kills twenty-four golden eagles every year: if an oil firm did that it would be in court.
Using tractors to grow crops also releases nitrous oxide from soil, which is a stronger greenhouse gas with nearly 300 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
as the aeons passed,
The Newcomen steam engine worked at 1 per cent efficiency – that is to say it converted 1 per cent of the heat from burning coal into useful work. Watt’s engine was 10 per cent efficient and rotated much faster. Otto’s internal combustion engine was about 20 per cent efficient and faster still. A modern combined-cycle turbine is about 60 per cent efficient at making electricity from natural gas and runs at 1,000 rpm. Modern civilisation therefore gets more and more work out of each tonne of fossil fuel.
Thomas Edison deserves the last word: ‘I am ashamed at the number of things around my house and shops that are done by animals – human beings, I mean – and ought to be done by a motor without any sense of fatigue or pain. Hereafter a motor must do all the chores.’
‘diminishing returns’
The pioneers of political economy expected eventual stagnation. Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Robert Malthus all foresaw that diminishing returns would eventually set in, that the improvement in living standards they were seeing would peter out.
A greater and greater amount of effort is needed to squeeze the next few miles per gallon out of vehicles of any kind, whereas each tranche of extra megabits comes more cheaply for now. Very roughly, the best industry to be in as an innovator was: 1800 – textiles; 1830 – railways; 1860 – chemicals; 1890 – electricity; 1920 – cars; 1950 – aeroplanes; 1980 – computers; 2010 – the web.
It is what happens today in the garages and cafés of Silicon Valley, but not in the labs of Stanford University.
Perhaps money is the answer to the question of what drives the innovation engine. The way to incentivise innovation, as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will tell you, is to bring capital and talent together.
The pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot said that the most dangerous moment in the life of a company was when it had succeeded, for then it stopped innovating.
