4. ECONOMIC GROWTH pt1 - ΠΩΣ ΟΙ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΙΝΕΣ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΕΣ ΑΥΞΑΝΟΥΝ ΤΗΝ ΠΑΡΑΓΩΓΗ ΑΓΑΘΩΝ
Λοιπόν, κοντεύω στο σημείο που θα αρχίσω να ποστάρω πιό ενδιαφέροντα πράγματα (δηλαδή οικονομική ιστορία, ανταμ σμιθ, μαρξ, λένιν, κράχ, κέυνς, φρίντμαν, κρούγκμαν και πιστωτική κρίση), πρώτα όμως θα ποστάρω κάποια πράγματα για το πως οι ανθρώπινες οικονομίες κατάφεραν να φτάσουν απο την ανταλαγή δερμάτων με ψάρια στο κατέβασμα apps στο iPhone. Μια πρώτη σκέψη που σας έρχεται στο μυαλό μπορεί ναι είναι "είσαι βλάκας, η απάντηση στο ερώτημά σου είναι η τεχνολογία και οι εφευρέσεις και δεν χρειαζόμαστε να διαβάζουμε εναν χοντρό καλιφορνέζο μαστούρη καθηγητη για να το μάθουμε". Φυσικά, η τεχνολογία παίζει μεγάλο ρόλο στην οικονομία, όμως:
- Σημαντικές διαφορές στην τεχνολογία δεν υπήρχαν στην αρχαιότητα. Υπάρχουν άπειρα παραδείγματα όπως της Αθήνας και τις Σπάρτης, οπου δύο κράτη με ακριβώς ίδια τεχνολογία αναπτύσσονταν με εντελώς διαφορετικούς ρυθμούς. Τέτοια παραδείγματα υπάρχουν και στο σύγχρονο κόσμο, πχ η Ιαπωνία είναι πιό ανεπτυγμένη τεχνολογικά απο την Κίνα, όμως δεν αναπτύσεται οσο αυτή. Άρα, υπάρχουν κι άλλοι παράγοντες που επηρεάζουν το αν η Ελλάδα σε 5 χρονια θα παράγει περισσοτερα αγαθά (άρα εσύ θα έχεις καλύτερο μισθό) ή οχι.
- Ακόμα και αν η τεχνολογία είναι η μοναδική παράμετρος, το πρόβλημα για κάθε οικονομία παραμένει: Δεν μπορούμε να δώσουμε όλα τα λευτά στους επιστήμονες και να πεινάσουμε όλοι περιμένοντας το επόμενο τεχνολογικό θαύμα, όμως αν τους απολύσουμε όλους το θαύμα δεν θα έρθει ποτέ. Είτε είσαι η Κίνα, είτε η Αμερική, είτε η Σοβιετική 'Ενωση, χρειάζεσαι να ξέρεις πως αναπτύσεται η οικονομία ωστε να επιτύχεις μία ισορροπία.
Παράλληλα, η ανάπτυξη μιας οικονομίας καθορίζει το αν ο μέσος εργαζόμενος θα πάρει αύξηση. Οπότε, το να γνορίζουμε 5 πράγματα για το θέμα, βοηθάει στο να κατανοήσουμε αν μια πολιτική που διαφημίζεται ως "αναπτυξιακή" είναι πράγματι τέτοια, όπως και άλλα τέτοια ερωτήματα. Οπότε, ξεκινάω να ποστάρω με αποσπάσματα απο εδώ.
When did we collectively invent agriculture? When was the Neolithic Revolution? When did we stop being very smart East African Plains Apes with stone tools and actually become civilized people--with fields and firms and domesticated animals and civilizations? Figure that it happened soon after 10,000 BC. Dating the invention of agriculture is important, because the invention in agriculture was one of the perhaps four major changes in human life worldwide, at least from an economic point of view. I claim that the first big change was when we learned how to make fire and stone tools. I claim the second was when we developed language: language allows for plannin,g and for collective action of scale much larger than otherwise possible. Otto von Bismarck said: "Fools learn from their own experience. I prefer to learn from other people's experience." Without language it is really difficult to learn from the experience of very many other people: you actually have to see Ogged poke a hornet's nest with a stick. With language it is easy: the cautionary tale of not to do what Ogged did to the hornet's nest can spread rapidly around the entire globe.
I claim that the third big change was the invention of agriculture.
What was human life like in the perhaps 50,000 years--perhaps more, but it is unlikely to be less--between the invention of language on the one hand and the discovery of agriculture? Those were the years when some of us decided to leave our original East African home and venture out across the Red Sea into Arabia, and then from there to pretty much everywhere else in the world (except for Antarctica) over the next 20,000 or 30,000 years? For one thing, back before 10,000 BC we were pretty buff. Adult males were perhaps 5'8" on average. We were pretty strong too. We had high-exercise lifestyles. We were, however, short lived: life expectancy fracked. Infant mortality was high--babies are fragile things to drag around. And life was pretty dangerous: break a leg and your odds were not good at all; get an infected tusk gore and your odds were very bad.
Nevertheless, we rose in population numbers from perhaps 100,000 humans in 48,000 BC to perhaps 5,000,000 worldwide by 8000 BC. That is impressive: a population multiplication by a factor of 50,000 in what is on the evolutionary time scale a remarkably short time. Tell the biologists that a population multiplies 50-fold in 1600 generations and they will be impressed. On the other hand, we can calculate growth rates. Take the natural log of 50--that is four. Divide that by 1600 generations--that is a population growth rate of 0.25% per generation. That is a population growth rate of 0.01% per year. Look across the average century between 48,000 BC and 8,000 BC: in the average century, for every 100 humans who were alive at the century's beginning there were 101 alive at the century's end. Contrast that growth rate of 0.01% per year with the current human population growth rate of about 1% per year today, or the growth rate of 3% per year from natural increase alone seen during much of the nineteenth-century temperate-settlement pioneer experience.
That slow population growth rate tells us something pretty important about material standards of living. Think of the British colonist landing on the coast of North America after the plagues, the epidemics, and the wars had decimated the Amerindian population. The rule of thumb is that a healthy settled human population with low female literacy, no effective means of artificial birth control, and ample food doubles every generation. Figure ten pregnancies per potential mother eight of which survive to term six of which survive infancy four of whom reach adulthood. Between 48000 BC and 8000 BC, it wasn't 4 children surviving to adulthood per potential mother but rather 2.005. 1.995 adult children per potential mother that we would expect to see in a settled population with ample food simply do not survive. That much excess mortality tells us that life was not just short--life expectancy at birth of 25 or so--but brutish. You lived the healthy life. You got lots of exercise hunting and gathering. But you watched perhaps three-quarters of your children die. But you did have pretty much all your teeth--hunters and gatherers had a low-carbohydrate zero refined sugar diet. That is what life was like between 48,000 BC and 8000 BC. You were physically relatively fit. But populations grew at only the most glacial pace--which means that the odds were good that the jaguar got ya.
The Agrarian Age: Now let us move on to the world of agriculture that starts in 8000 BC or so: the agrarian society where people figure out:
-there are these grasses that have really big seeds
-if we plant all these grasses right next to each other in a place that has a lot of water, then
-if then we stick around for a while and drive off the birds before they eat the seeds
-we will be able to get a lot of our nutrition from these really huge grass seeds--they are quite nourishing and we won't have to rumble around our hundred square-mile foraging territory: we can just sit at home and each day gather some more grass seeds--especially if we figure out how to dry them so they will keep.
Ιnventing agriculture seems like a no-brainer, right? You can build and live in a permanent house so you don’t get as wet. You can weave and stitch better clothes to wear so you don’t get as cold. But when we dig up skeletons from 100 BC or so, we find that the adult males are not averaging 5'8" any more: they are averaging 5'2". he lesson is that the upper classes were different--and with the coming of agriculture there are for the first time real upper classes. Most people after the invention of agriculture, look to have been quite short. Most people look to have been pretty much toothless and eating corn mash by the time they were 40--if they were alive. Everybody looks to have become a wonderful environment for human diseases: think of a bunch of people living together in a village, talking to each other, coughing at each other, drinking each other’s water--the bacteria love it and disease becomes a much bigger deal. If your adult height is 5'2" for males or 4'11" for females, something has gone very wrong with respect to protein and calcium deprivation. If you were to feed your future children a diet that would make make the boys 5'2" at their adult height, California Child Protective Services would take your children away. But that appears to have been the kind of diet that most human beings seem to have had in the years between 8200 BC and, say, 1800 A.D.
Still, human populations grow. Maybe five million people in 8000 BC become 750 million people by 1800. A fifteen-fold multiplication in 10,000 years or 400 generations. That is a population growth rate of 1.25% per generation, or 0.05% per year--fully five times as fast as in the previous hunter-gatherer era. This is still a human population that is in toto close to the margin of "subsistence"--but not quite as close as in the hunter-gatherer age. On the other hand, life appears to have been a lot less healthy in the biomedical sense. That calcium and protein deprivation hit your bones is obvious from the height of skeletons--and I shudder to think of what it did to your brains. These are all things that lead UCLA professor Jared Diamond to say that the invention of agriculture was probably a mistake.
