Astounding in scope and insight, The Journey of Humanity provides a captivating and revelatory account of the deepest currents that have shaped human history and the keys to the betterment of our species.”— NourielRoubini, Professor Emeritus, NYU, and authorof Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance A landmark, radically uplifting account of our species ’progress, from one of the world’s preeminent thinkers. Why did humanity get prosperous after hundreds of thousands of years of stagnation? And why do we observe such high levels of inequality between regions and countries today? These are the two main questions that Galor aims to answer in his Journey of Humanity. Incredibly wide-ranging and detailed historical and even anthropological examination of the myriad factors that have brought success and failure to nations…. Lively and learned.”— Tim Hazledine

Fascinating book…Highly exciting journey through the economic history of mankind from the Stone Age to the present day.”— Frankfurter Allgemeine Don't get us wrong. It is not that something in his approach to economic development is not true (although there are things that a historian would never accept), it is that the perspective is scientific, ahistorical, anti-philosophical, uncritical... It looks like political propaganda, politically correct...aiming at understanding the whole with broken toys. In many ways the evidence the book presents, drawing on a lot of peer-reviewed research, is much better than what we had even twenty years ago in thinking about economic growth. In other ways, however, a lot of the relationships between ancient variables and present ones (e.g., when was maize first introduced in Chinese areas and what was there economic status much later) could easily have alternative explanations or miss big points. Finally, the fourth underlying story is the one that Galor’s own research has advanced and the idea that is the most intriguing but frankly also feels the most speculative to me. Specifically he points out that migratory distance from Africa is closely related to population diversity—which is very high in Ethiopia but very low in Bolivia because of the “serial founder effect”. He argues that diversity has a plus (lots of ideas from combining different perspectives) and a minus (clashing) and that this leads to an inverted U-shaped relationship between population diversity and various economic outcomes like per capita income.

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It seems that, for him, human life is mere Darwinism of competition and struggle where we have (almost all) reached total perfection. For him, life is just economics and technology (and a strange scientific delusion about biological variety related to progress). All is about reproduction, money and commodities. That's all, People in the past were miserable and bitter ("indistinguishable from a squirrel", in his words...but since the INdustrial Revolution, happiness and completennes has arrived. And he is going to tell us how it is possible and why some territories haven't (still) reach this utopy. A masterful sweep through the human odyssey…. If you liked Sapiens, you’ll love this. ”—Lewis Dartnell, author of Origins An optimist’s guide to the future … Oded Galor’s ‘Sapiens’-like history of civilisation predicts a happy ending for humanity.” ―TheGuardian Yet his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth. It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic. Sad to say they would also have made it less optimistic. Humanity, as Kant said, is made of crooked timber from which nothing entirely straight can be made. Galor’s book would have been the stronger had he leavened his sunshine with some shadows. Moreover there is a lot that it does not explain, that probably depends on the more mundane issues covered by more proximate theories of growth and some of the standard economic policy issues like the importance of avoiding and resolving crises. For example, why is the United States so much richer than Argentina? Or why did China take off when it did but Brazil did not? Or even just variations in income within regions.

Completely brilliant and utterly original … a book for our epoch. ”—Jon Snow, former presenter, Channel 4 News (UK) Indeed Galor devotes little of his book to capitalism, the structure of states and the consequent dynamic interdependence between the public and private sectors, or the importance of Enlightenment values that unleashed notions of the public sphere and rule of law. These are gigantic omissions. His is a technocratic journey full of illuminating graphs, but strangely bloodless and neglectful of political economy in explaining humanity’s journey. Just like the theories that promise to tie together all of physics or any other science, Galor’s work aims to make the world’s economic trajectory seem logical, even inevitable.”— American Banker La historia y la sociología sean quizá dos de las disciplinas que más se ajusten al zeitgeist reinante, y este ensayo se ajusta con absoluta precisión a la ortodoxia de nuestros días. No encontraréis ninguna reflexión incómoda que pueda aparecer por la interpretación de unos datos objetivos, como por ejemplo hacía Noah Harari -con el cual, por cierto, discrepo en casi todo, en especial cuando trata el tema que me toca. Galor es superficial y predecible, bastante aburrido por su convencional aproximación al tema. Aunque, eso sí, cumple con lo que se propone, a saber, explicar el crecimiento de la humanidad y la consecuente desigualdad económica.Although some compare this work with Sapiens (Harari) or Jared Diamond's already classic, the differences are immense. While the first proposed a macrocosmic vision of history in an informative but fresh way, and while the second knew how to combine different branches of knowledge with an innovative result, in this book we find none of that. Maybe it might be said that the bests sections of the book are those in which he copy/pastes some interesting (but very well known) facts about geography and history (some of them previously divulged by other popularizers before him, like Peter Watson or Diamond...) In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, world-renowned economist and thinker Oded Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity’s great mysteries. Galor concludes with a short and relatively superficial discussion of the public policy implications of these ideas. From my perspective the fact that the book does not explain issues like the United States vs. Argentina also is related to its overly facile dismissal of the “Washington consensus”. Of course it ignored culture, institutions, population diversity and geography—but by the way most of those are not changeable and there is enormous variation within regions that are similar in those regards. Nothing about the deep roots of incomes is a reason why a country, for example, should run large budget deficits financed with short-term foreign borrowing or have a budget devoted to subsidies while neglecting primary education or have weak property rights.

Astounding in scope and insight…provides the keys to the betterment of our species. ”—Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics Unparalleled in its scope and ambition…All readers will learn something, and many will find the book fascinating. ’— The Washington Post The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision overturns a host of long-held assumptions to reveal the deeper causes that have shaped the journey of humanity: The explanation of the takeoff into sustained growth is a little bit less satisfying, but that’s partly what happens when you only have one first sustained takeoff—and it happens at a time when the world is globally connected so you don’t have the (somewhat) independent data points you have for studying other issues. Galor argues was a situation where small changes can lead to a large change—which he analogizes to “bifurcation theory” in mathematics. I found the section on Climate change a bit short, pretty much just says will be fine if we get rich as the rich societies in Europe went green per person once wealthy... hmmm I'll need a lot more than that.

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No creo que este libro vaya a satisfacer del todo a nadie, ni a profanos en la materia ni a entendidos y especialistas. Los primeros encontraran el libro lleno de lugares comunes, y lo poco que no conocían solo les servirá para unir las fronteras de los conocimientos que ya poseían a poco que fueran aplicados en el instituto u observadores de la realidad cotidiana; a los segundos, porque no hay nada nuevo ni original. Quizá esto último sea lo más decepcionante, la constante sensación de repetición y pereza intelectual.