The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

This is what I mean when I talk of cultural evolution: at some point before 100,000 years ago culture itself began to evolve in a way that it never did in any other species – that is, to replicate, mutate, compete, select and accumulate – somewhat as genes had been doing for billions of years.

Something else is necessary; something that human beings have and killer whales do not. The answer, I believe, is that at some point in human history, ideas began to meet and mate, to have sex with each other.

war kept the population density below the levels that brought on starvation.

From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers have proved to be in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and 87 per cent to experience annual war. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but because these happen so often, death rates are high – usually around 30 per cent of adult males dying from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5 per cent of the population per year that was typical of many hunter-gatherer societies would equate to two billion people dying during the twentieth century (instead of 100 million).

human beings evolved to strive to signal social status and sexual worth.

Evolutionary change happens largely by the replacement of species by daughter species, not by the changing of habits in species.

Only well after 80,000 years ago, so genetic evidence attests, does something big start to happen again. This time the evidence comes from genomes, not artefacts. According to DNA scripture, it was then that one quite small group of people began to populate the entire African continent, starting either in East or South Africa and spreading north and rather more slowly west.

My argument is that this habit of exchanging, this appetite for barter, had somehow appeared in our African ancestors some time before 100,000 years ago. Why did human beings acquire a taste for barter as other animals did not? Perhaps it has something to do with cooking. Richard Wrangham makes a persuasive case that control of fire had a far-reaching effect on human evolution. Beyond making it safe to live on the ground, beyond liberating human ancestors to grow big brains on high-energy diets, cooking also predisposed human beings to swapping different kinds of food. And that maybe got them bartering.

So cooking adds value: the great advantage of cooked food is that though it takes longer to prepare than raw food, it takes just minutes to eat, and this means that somebody else can eat as well as the person who prepares it. A mother can feed her children for many years.

In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one. It is an iron rule documented in virtually all foraging people that ‘men hunt, women and children gather’.

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds.

Yet even allowing for such conspicuous generosity or social parasitism – depends on how you view it – the economic benefits of food sharing and specialised sex roles are real. They are also unique to human beings. There are a few birds in which the sexes have slightly different feeding habits – in the extinct Huia of New Zealand male and female even had different beak shapes – but collecting different foods and sharing them is something no other species does.

Is the sexual division of labour a possible explanation of what made a small race of Africans so much better at surviving in a time of megadroughts and volatile climate change than all other hominids on the planet?

Having trained themselves to specialise and exchange between the sexes, having got into the habit of exchanging labour with others, the thoroughly modern Africans had then begun to extend the idea a little bit further and tentatively try a new and still more portentous trick, of specialising within the band and then between bands. This latter step was very hard to take, because of the homicidal relationships between tribes. Famously, no other species of ape can encounter strangers without trying to kill them, and the instinct still lurks in the human breast. But by 82,000 years ago, human beings had overcome this problem sufficiently to be able to pass Nassarius shells hand to hand 125 miles inland. Barter had begun.

The pattern of variation in the DNA of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomes in all people of non-African origin attests that some time around 65,000 years ago, or not much later, a group of people, numbering just a few hundred in all, left Africa.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

There is more invention between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago than there had been in the previous million.

There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference

Now, at last, it becomes clear why the erectus hominids saw such slow technological progress. They, and their descendants the Neanderthals, lived without trade

As the economist Herb Gintis puts it, ‘societies that use markets extensively develop a culture of co-operation, fairness and respect for the individual’.

Collaboration between unrelated strangers seems to be a uniquely human achievement.

And generally speaking the more cooperative a species is within groups, the more hostility there is between groups. As a highly ‘groupish’ species ourselves, still given to mutual aid within groups and mutual violence between groups, it is an extraordinary thing that people can overcome their instincts enough to have social commerce with strangers.

This ability to transact with strangers as if they were friends is made possible by an intrinsic, instinctive human capacity for trust.

The oxytocin investors are more than twice as likely to hand over the full twelve units as the controls. Yet oxytocin has no such effect on the back transfers offered by the trustees, who are just as generous without oxytocin as with. So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.

Thus, the entire edifice of human cooperation and exchange, upon which prosperity and progress are built, depends on a fortunate biological fact. Human beings are capable of empathy, and are discerning trusters.

Or asking people, in their native tongue, ‘generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?’ By these measures, Norway is heaving with trust (65 per cent trust each other) and wealthy, while Peru is wallowing in mistrust (5 per cent trust each other) and poor. ‘A 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy,’ says Paul Zak, ‘raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.’

You may think you are living in a suspicious and dishonest world, but you are actually the beneficiary of immense draughts of trust.

Perhaps Adam Smith was right, that in turning strangers into honorary friends, exchange can transmute base self-interest into general benevolence.

Politically, as Brink Lindsey has diagnosed, the coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come. ‘One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’

In that sense ‘capitalism’ is dying, and fast. The size of the average American company is down from twenty-five employees to ten in just twenty-five years.

But note here that a country’s economic freedom predicts its prosperity better than its mineral wealth, education system or infrastructure do.

‘Rich countries,’ concluded the Bank, ‘are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity.’

So perhaps I am wrong to seek the flywheel of human progress in the gradual development of exchange and specialisation. Perhaps they are symptoms, not causes, and it was the invention of institutions and rules that then made exchange possible.

all can agree that the rule of law is better than the rule of reciprocal revenge, though it makes less good theatre, but not all can overcome their instincts and customs to achieve it. True

I see these rules and institutions as evolutionary phenomena, too, emerging bottom-up in society rather than being imposed top-down by fortuitously Solomonic rulers. They come through the filter of cultural selection just as surely as do technologies. And if you look at the history of, for instance, merchant law, you find exactly this: merchants make it up as they go along, turning their innovations into customs, ostracising those who break the informal rules and only later do monarchs subsume the rules within the laws of the land. That is the story of the lex mercatoria of the medieval period: the great law-giving kings of England, such as Henry II and John, were mostly codifying what their trading subjects had already agreed among themselves when trading with strangers in Bruges, Brabant and Visby.

In the conventional account it was agriculture that made capital possible by generating stored surpluses and stored surpluses could be used in trade. Before farming, nobody could hoard a surplus. There is some truth in this, but to some degree it gets the story the wrong way round. Agriculture was possible because of trade. Trade provided the incentive to specialise in farmed goods and to generate surplus food.

Agriculture started to appear independently in the Near East, the Andes, Mexico, China, the highlands of New Guinea, the Brazilian rainforest and the African Sahel – all within a few thousand years. Something made it inevitable, almost compulsory around this time: however much it eventually resulted in misery, disease and despotism in the long run, it clearly gave its first practitioners competitive advantage. Yet farming was not an overnight transition. It was the culmination of a long, slow intensification of human diet that took tens of thousands of years. In search of extra calories people gradually ‘moved down the trophic pyramid’ – i.e., became more vegetarian. By 23,000 years ago the people of what is now Israel and Syria had become dependent on acorns, pulses and even grass seeds, as well as fish and birds, garnished with the occasional gazelle – perhaps supplied by other hunting tribes through trade.

They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. Extant hunter-gatherers are remarkably egalitarian, a state of affairs dictated by their dependence on sharing each other’s hunting and gathering luck. (They sometimes need to enforce this equality with savage reprisals against people who get ideas above their stations.) A successful farmer, however, can soon afford to store some provisions with which to buy the labour of other less successful neighbours, and that makes him more successful still, until eventually – especially in an irrigated river valley, where he controls the water – he can become an emperor using servants and soldiers to impose his despotic whim upon subjects.

Worse still, as Friedrich Engels was the first to argue, agriculture may have worsened sexual inequality. It is certainly painfully obvious that in many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. In hunter-gathering, men have many tiresome sexist habits, but they do at least contribute. When the plough was invented around 6,000 years ago, men took over the work of driving the oxen that cultivated fields, because it required greater strength, but this only exacerbated inequality. Now women were treated increasingly as the chattels of men, loaded with bracelets and ankle rings to indicate their husband’s wealth. Now art became dominated by the symbols of male power and competition – arrows, axes and daggers. Now polygamy probably increased and the wealthiest men acquired harems and patriarchal status: at Branc in Slovakia, more women than men were buried with elaborate grave goods, indicating not that they were wealthy, so much as that their polygamous husbands were wealthy while other men languished in celibate poverty. In this way, polygamy enables poor women to share in prosperity more than poor men. It was an age of patriarchy.

America’s horse population peaked at twenty-one million animals in 1915; at the time about one-third of all agricultural land was devoted to feeding them.

Caral in the desert of the Supe Valley in Peru was a large town with monuments, warehouses, temples and plazas. Discovered in the 1990s by Ruth Shady, it lies in a desert crossed by a river valley and was only the biggest of many towns in the area, some of which date from more than 5,000 years ago – the so-called Norte Chico civilisation. For archaeologists there are three baffling features of the ancient Peruvian towns. First, their people had no cereals in their diet. Maize was yet to be invented, and although there were several domesticated squashes and other foods, there was nothing so easily accumulated and stored as the grain which was the staple of Mesopotamia. The idea that cities are made possible by largescale hoarding of grain thus takes a blow. Second, the Norte Chico towns have yielded no pottery of any kind: they were ‘preceramic’. This surely made both the storage and the cooking of food more difficult, again undermining one of the favourite tenets of archaeologists trying to explain how cities began. And third, there is no evidence of warfare or defensive works. So the conventional wisdom that cereal stores made cities possible, that ceramic containers made them practical and that warfare made them necessary takes quite a knock from Norte Chico.

In these Bronze Age empires, commerce was the cause, not the symptom of prosperity. None the less, a free trade area lends itself easily to imperial domination. Soon, through tax, regulation and monopoly, the wealth generated by trade was being diverted into the luxury of the few and the oppression of the many. By 1500 BC you could argue that the richest parts of the world had sunk into the stagnation of palace socialism as the activities of merchants were progressively nationalised.

Monarchs love monopolies because where they cannot keep them to themselves, they can sell them, grant them to favourites and tax them. They also fall for the perpetual fallacy that they can make business work more efficiently if they plan it rather than allow and encourage it to evolve. The scientist and historian Terence Kealey points out that entrepreneurs are rational and if they find that wealth can more easily be stolen than created, then they will steal it: ‘Humanity’s great battle over the last 10,000 years has been the battle against monopoly.’

the west, money lending at interest stopped and coins ceased to circulate so freely. In the Dark Ages that followed, because free trade became impossible, cities shrank, markets atrophied, merchants disappeared, literacy declined and – crudely speaking – once Goth, Hun and Vandal plundering had run its course, everybody had to go back to being self-sufficient again. Europe de-urbanised. Even Rome and Constantinople fell to a fraction of their former populations.

subsistence replaced specialisation.

Arabia was discovering gains from trade. The sudden emergence of an all-conquering prophet in the middle of a desert in the seventh century is rather baffling as the tale is usually told – one of religious inspiration and military leadership. What is missing from the story is the economic reason that Arabs were suddenly in a position to carry all before them. Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel, the people of the Arabian Peninsula found themselves well placed to profit from trade between East and West. The camel caravans of Arabia were the source of the wealth that carried Muhammad and his followers to power.

Like all the best entrepreneurs, they thrived despite, rather than because of their government.

China, meanwhile, was heading the other way, into stagnation and poverty. China went from a state of economic and technological exuberance in around AD 1000 to one of dense population, agrarian backwardness and desperate poverty in 1950. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, it was the only region in the world with a lower GDP per capita in 1950 than in 1000. The blame for this lies squarely with China’s governments.

Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialisation; thus, even Genghis Khan’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the Silk Road, thus lowering the cost of oriental goods in European parlours. But then, as Peter Turchin argues following the lead of the medieval geographer Ibn Khaldun, governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, 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; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. 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.

Part of the problem was that a Chinese artisan could not flee to work under a more tolerant ruler or in a more congenial republic, as Europeans did routinely. Because of its peninsulas and mountain ranges, Europe is much harder to unify than China: ask Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon or Hitler. For a while the Romans achieved a sort of European unity, and the result was just like the Ming: stagnation and bureaucracy. Under the emperor Diocletian (just as under the emperor Yong-Le) ‘tax collectors began to outnumber taxpayers’, said Lactantius, and ‘a multitude of governors and hordes of directors oppressed every region – almost every city; and to these were added countless collectors and secretaries and assistants to the directors.’