My Brown University economics colleague Oded Galor does not lack for ambition. His new book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality seeks to explain how our species has progressed from a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out an existence in Africa to a flourishing, technologically and economically advanced civilization. That’s 300,000 years of economic history, all in one book. It sounds improbable, but Oded has been gathering the empirical and theoretical insights that underpin this work for decades. One of the true marvels of The Journey of Humanity is that Oded has managed to render his complex, erudite theory of human growth in jargon-free, compulsively readable prose (and he’s not too bad at talking about it either).
In our conversation, Oded explains how, throughout most of our existence on Earth, humanity remained locked in apparently stable cycles of growth and stagnation, where technological advances that increased productivity were counterbalanced by population growth. Oded tells the story of how the Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this cycle of stagnation and into modernity. It’s a complex but plausible account of the explosion of wealth and inequality that we’ve seen in the last 200 years, one that views geography, culture, political institutions, education, and diversity as factors that have enabled us to get where we are today and may point the way to solving some of our worst problems of inequality.
Oded is a deep thinker and a masterful economist. I hope you’ll find his work as mind-expanding as I do.
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0:00 Oded's new book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
7:58 How inequality and growth emerged over the course of human history
18:52 Breaking free of a 300,000-year-old stagnation cycle
27:24 Humanity's phase shift into modernity
33:39 Inequality and the formation of institutions
44:18 The deep links between geography and institutions
50:38 Africa, Asia, and the trials of diversity
Recorded January 21, 2023
Links and Readings
Oded’s new book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
Oded Galor – The Journey of Humanity