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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 27)?
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I don't think there's any reason to think that selection has stopped in post industrial revolution times. Concerning that, I have another book to recommend: A Farewell to Alms. In it, a rather well supported argument is put forward that the industrial revolution was not industrial at all, but rather caused by a shift in the behavior of humans (less violent, more literate, more frugal, more industrious). The author further shows with meticulous analysis of family trees and census data and legal documents that this change of behavior patterns is co-incident with a replacement of the population of Britain between 1100 CE and 1800 CE. That is families with the new behavior patterns had more children that survived to have children of their own than those who didn't. The author is VERY careful to not speculate as to whether these altered behaviors were cultural or genetic in basis… but it still shows strong evidence for SELECTION in relatively modern times.
Of course the strongest factors altering selection in the last few centuries are likely birth control and antibiotics.
>Even if it's basically right, I want a book-length treatment of all the details that go into this happening.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is the closest thing that comes to mind.
>What would you recommend? What economics classes should one take before taking on those reads?
University level intermediate economics classes would be ideal, but you should be able to get by in that book with just the introductory classes.
I found this data after getting interested reading this book (which is great so far)
If your local library has a copy it might be worth checking out
Not really, that type of inbreeding only took place in the context of a misguided attempt to keep property in the family like they've been doing in the middle east for generations; the aristocracy would typically have 3-5 children, one of which would inherit the family's wealth and marry into another family, and the rest would marry down or join the clergy. Considering the Catholic church also banned marriage out to the 8th-12th cousin (depending on the region), these types of dysgenic relationships were strongly discouraged.
<em>A Farewell to Alms</em> by Gregory Clark. It's about economic growth throughout human history. I don't want to portray it as some seminal work in the field of economic history, because evidently it's debated intensely. It is however one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in recent memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
I originally learned about it from this book, but it's basically common knowledge and you can find historians and anthropologists talking about it all over the place (eg Yuval Harari's best seller Sapiens, or Jared Diamond).
>would love a citation that shows evidence we lived on average 70 years or longer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
I originally learned about it from this book, but it's basically common knowledge and you can find historians and anthropologists talking about it all over the place (eg Yuval Harari's best seller Sapiens, or Jared Diamond).
>cherry pick some point in time and say things like, "well, at least when we shit, it all gets carried away by a sewer system instead of into a chamber pot!" as if to handwave away sweeping inequality ...the fallacy of the "at least we all have iPhones" argument.
There are some who dismiss inequality by talking about iPhones -- but that's not really the point here. Just ignore those people who angrily say "but what about the iPhones!"
The point is that people's lives have improved dramatically in ways that aren't priced into our purchasing power because they've become so abundant and cheap.
Here's a neat treat you can do to think about this: If I said offered to pay you do manually wash your clothes for a whole entire year, how much would you ask for? And no cheating -- you have to hand wash everything every day, you can't just go to walmart and buy new clothes every day or not wash them or something like that. Whatever you wear you wash by hand each day x 365 days in a row. How much do I need to pay you up front for you to agree to do that????
Got a price in mind?
>!Now think about what it costs to buy a washing machine -- what's the difference in price? Eg, how much value does something as humble as a washing machine add to your life?!<
And the point is, hopefully you'll agree, that this added wealth in our lives just doesn't get added to nominal wealth. But it's an example of how you can be poor relative to Jeff Bezos and still much better off than a society which didn't have these things -- eg, our society 100 years ago -- and this is true even if that other society had less inequality.
In a Malthusian world of resource scarcity, then all good things are bad, and all bad things are good.
Gregory Clark has a book A Farewell to Alms (lecture version) about how in medieval times, Asians were clean whereas Europeans were and dirty disease-prone Europeans, and as a result Asians were poorer on average. He also describes how the bubonic plague killed a bunch of people and increased the standard of living of laborers. He lists other examples to show that when farmland was the scarce resource, then the higher the population, the lower the standard of living. This all changed during the industrial revolution.
As for housing, Tyler Cowen explained how the fixed supply of scarce housing makes any quality of life improvement a displacement dilemma in If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too (warning: bloomberg paywall): “Say air pollution or homelessness gets worse. You might think that would degrade the quality of life in a city. But don’t leap to that conclusion too quickly: To the extent land is truly scarce, the main effect would be a decline in rents and real estate prices.” When housing is scarce, then good things are bad for residents, and bad things are good.
Some activists (who ironically call themselves “Progressives”) deny that housing is in short supply and believe that population is the problem. They respond to the shortage of housing by attacking amenities that middle-class people like, such as buses, bicycles, scooters, retail, and most destructively even housing, in the hope that worse amenities will encourage certain people to leave.
Other activists (YIMBYs) respond to the shortage of housing by reducing barriers to housing supply so that we do not have to live in a zero-sum economy.
Yep. Educated Anti-Intellectualism, as out lined above, and the principle of Nearly Immutable Human Nature, as outlined below, are two of the core principles of my politics...
Nearly Immutable Human Nature:
Too much of modern policy is designed behind an intention, either stated or unstated, of changing human individuals or whole human societies for the better. The thinking seems to go: 'If we could just make people less brutish, ignorant, short-sighted, and more caring and compassionate.... we wouldn't have to deal with all these problems!' The problem with this thinking is that we CAN NOT change human nature. Methods to change human nature that have been tried include: War, Peace, Religion, Science, Agriculture, Industry, Meditation, Drugs, Abstinence, Technology, Techno-Regression, Education, Ignorance, Policing, Freedom, Wealth, Poverty, Benevolence, Oppression, Libertine Sexuality, Repressive Sexuality, Art, Social Engineering, Taxes, Services, Emotional Appeals, Alterations in Family Structures, Prison, Charity, Awareness Campaigns... and this is not even a comprehensive list... ALL of these methods have FAILED. Human Nature remains completely unaltered from all of them.
Humans nature has only ever changed about five times that I am aware of (the development of Language, Writing, Agriculture, the Wheel, and the Industrial Revolution). (You might think that the last two on the list aren't actual changes to human nature, I recommend the books The Horse, The Wheel, and Language and A Farewell to Alms to defend their placement on the list. Also, the Digital Revolution is still too early to know if it will amount to an actual change in our over-all behavior patterns instead of a change to how the old patterns manifest... check back in a hundred years or so). There are three important things to note about the above historical list of changes to human nature:
All of these have been technological changes to the capabilities of man and have only ever had behavioral changes as secondary consequences (with the possible exception of the industrial revolution if we accept the conclusions of 'A Farewell to Alms' on face value). This is important because it tells us something important about our nature that we too easily forget... Other species are predators, or sunlight-gatherers, or herbivores, whatever; Humans are TOOL USERS... in a very real way our relationship to our tools is a defining part of us, and our use of new and different tools touches upon us in profound ways. When that first Australopithecus picked up a piece of flint and broke off a flake to leave a sharp cutting edge... it wasn't just a stone that became a tool, the animal became a man.
None of these human nature revolutions have been instituted as changes to human nature intentionally. This comes back to Educated Anti-Intellectualism again. Human society is complicated. It is exactly the sort of complex system with multiple interlocked feedback loops that humans consistently and profoundly fail at understanding, anticipating, or manipulating. The reason for this is that large parts of human society are invested in other aspects of human society and thus will dynamically alter their behavior to protect that investment in response to whatever anyone does to alter the system. Since they are each also responding to one another, and to one another's responses, this becomes incalculably hard to predict almost immediately. If a person can't predict or understand the effects of their actions, it's hard to have intentional effects upon such a system at all. It should be pointed out that any improvement in our capacity to understand human society will equally empower people responding to efforts to change society as it will empower those trying to make the change... so no amount of getting smarter will let us think our way out of this... a thousand years from now when we all have computers implanted in our brains from birth and IQs of a million we'll STILL not be able to manipulate human nature intentionally. The reason technology changes evade this barrier to change is that they touch upon our nature as tool users, and since they are intrinsically useful, get retained systematically without any intention needed to drive their uptake in a coordinated manner.
Not only have these changes not been brought about by moral/ethical/spiritual changes to human nature but they have not caused moral/ethical/spiritual alterations in the underlying nature of humans either. (Changes in the behavior of humans that lead to moral/ethical/spiritual results have been a dividend... in much the same way that capitalism massively reduces systemic poverty even though that is not the goal of the system nor any individual in it). All of the classical approaches to understanding and interacting with human nature: the arts, the humanities, philosophy, social experiments, spiritualism, moralism, government, etc, kind of miss the point... they fail FOR A REASON. That reason is that they don't cut to the core of what we are. We are tool users. For example, the classicists say we are capable of morality and conclude that makes us moral beings. But what they should conclude is that morality makes us more effective tool users... and indeed it does: people use other people as tools to their own ends all the time. The problem with that is that one of the things that makes tools especially useful is that they are not part of us... they are ultimately disposable. (To clarify, the tool itself is disposable, our relationship with the tool... the fact that we are a tool user is not). Morality is, at its core, the pragmatic recognition that, over a long enough timeline, the use of other people as disposable tools is counter productive. Similarly, the philosophers note that we are "rational animals", but then get trapped in all sorts of idiocy about the nature of reason itself. But if we come back to our tool using nature, it immediately grounds the discussion: We have rationality because it lets us select and apply tools more effectively. And what is a tool for? To achieve an Objective. It is amazing how many thousands of pages have been written by philosophers about the human mind that somehow fail to do more than pay lip-service to the core fact that thinking is has a PURPOSE outside itself! (Or perhaps it's not amazing at all... Intellectuals who hide in universities that let them devote their lives thinking without purpose believe that the purpose of thinking is itself).
Recast in these terms, it's easy to see why so much policy musings out there predicated upon changing human nature for the better fail miserably when put into practice.
Get yourself an alt-right starter kit.
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/
http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/
http://www.amazon.com/Uniqueness-Civilization-Critical-Sciences-Academic/dp/9004232761/
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Accomplishment-Pursuit-Excellence-Sciences/dp/0060929642/
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Critique-Evolutionary-Twentieth-Century-Intellectual/dp/0759672229/
http://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/0679730826/
Only insults? Try reading this: http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393728698&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=a+farewell+to+alsm Its an attempt to figure out why the industrial revolution happened in Britain. Scary eugenics is involved. You just insult and call names because you have beliefs that are backed up by nothing.
Check out Greg Clark's work on this question. His hypothesis is that a change in primogeniture law in England led to a higher evolutionary advantage to high self control.
> Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.
> Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education.
> The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations.
> A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.
>So what? People are also pissed of at the pricing of HBO and still people pay for it.
People would like all prices to be lower, but they still pay them. That isn't evidence that consumers don't have power in the industry, as they clearly do, even in cases where people still wished that costs were lower. If the cost was high enough, they'd stop watching HBO.
>Until you realize you have to pay more, but don't get more in the end. And when you don't have net neutrality it also questionable if they even want to improve the infrastructure.
This might be true if we were only talking about poor customers who aren't able to move. However, many are able to move, and BUSINESSES can move even more easily. A company that offers fast speeds and lots of infrastructure will get the richest customers. As they continually upgrade the infrastructure, faster speeds are eventually passed onto lower paying customers as well. Net Neutrality actually takes money away from the suppliers of infrastructure and transfers the benefits to content creators, which consists of powerful companies such as google and facebook. I'm not seeing how that rewards more decentralized markets.
>At least they will make a wage they can live of in the end and aren't exploited by some corporations making billions in profit.
If you take the job voluntarily, and the government isn't preventing you from getting a better job, then you can't say that you were "exploited" in any malicious sense. Yes, it is important for people to have money to live, but this is not manna from heaven, and the economic process if very important for producing enough wealth to take care of all of these people.
>I rather pay some taxes to provide for people who can't get a job instead of subsidizing big companies who cut wages and then giving out foodstamps to the people working there so they can make it rough the month.
Okay, this has little to do with what we're talking about here.
>And who pays the bill in the end when they end up in a hospital without insurance?
Nobody should be forced to pay for a bill for something they never asked for. That was the chance the worker took. It isn't our job to now take care of people who didn't have foresight to find a less dangerous job, even if it meant making less money.
>When a parent might even become unable to care for their children trough an accident?
Personally, I don't think that anybody should be having kids unless they are already very comfortable in life, but for these freak scenarios, charity often used to step in, before the government crowded them out. Their are also family members to turn to, as well as your local community.
>Yeah well tell that to the person who works in unsafe conditions not getting minimum wage. Or look to China, I bet some people would rather have their old farm live back instead of living in a small room near some factory.
For many, no, that isn't true. Statistically, and according to the evidence of the migration patterns within CHina, that's simply all false. For some, maybe so, and if they were forced off of their land, the government probably had something to do with it, which is usually the case when 3rd worlders are forced off of their land.
>Not if you would have passed it along with foodstamps.
Okay, I seriously suggest that you read some history from the time period. This is a good start:
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282
People starved back then because there wasn't enough food. Even if the upper classes donated all of their money to charity, millions would still have starved.
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