A landmark, radically uplifting account of our species ’ progress, from one of the world's preeminent thinkers. A completely brilliant and utterly original account of humanity’s transit from crude beginnings to a deeply divided planet. A vastly readable insight into why our world is as it is. A book for our epoch.” —Jon Snow, former anchor of Channel 4 News (UK) Now, over most of human existence, as suggested by Hobbes, human life was largely “Nasty, Brutish and Short”. In fact, human life was remarkably similar to the life of any other species on planet Earth. Humans were preoccupied by survival and reproduction, living standards were very close to the subsistence levels and there were minor differences in living standards across time and across space. In fact, only about three or four centuries ago, ¼ of newborns did not reach their first birthday and nearly half of them did not reach their reproductive age, about ⅒ of women perished during childbirth, life expectancy fluctuated in a very narrow range of 𝟸𝟻 to 𝟺𝟶 and rarely exceeded 𝟺𝟶 and an economic crisis over this time period did not require belt tightening but led rather to mass starvation and ultimately extinction. An engaging and optimistic answer to anyone who thinks that poverty and inequality will always be with us Galor's project is breathtakingly ambitious 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

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'- Nouriel Roubini, author of Crisis Economics Rather than saying that genes equal destiny, Galor’s message appears to be that whatever the circumstances you have inherited, change is possible. It’s an analysis of the human condition that leads not to a counsel of despair, but a new set of tools he believes can help build a better future. But is that all wishful thinking? I ask whether his innately sunny disposition means we should distrust his intuitions. “I think that I do have a positive outlook in my personal life. Naturally that must be projected on to the way that I view the world.” ROSSA O'KEEFFE-O'DONOVAN: (00:02) Thanks very much for coming, everyone. As you all know, we're delighted to have Professor Oded Galor delivering a lecture on his new book, “The journey of Humanity”. Oded is the Herbert Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University and he's visiting GPI until the end of June, so if you're about in the building feel free to try and capture him in that time. And his research spans a number of subfields in economics including growth, long-run development, economic history and evolutionary economics and he's best known for developing and founding Unified Growth Theory. He has numerous affiliations and has won many awards and accolades. We only have an hour schedule, so I'm not going to go into them and I'm not going to list them here. And Oded will give a 45-minute lecture followed by 15 minutes of Q&A, so please save your questions to the end. For those following online, you can submit questions using the online form and I'll read them out at the end, but there's no option for you to kind of say the questions. I'll just have to read them out, so do please be specific with the questions. But without further ado, let me hand over to Oded and thanks very much.So this can illustrate for you the theory that I just proposed, that as I said, is based on quite a profound mathematical theory that is known as Unified Growth Theory that I advanced in the past 𝟸𝟶 years or so. What you can see here quite clearly is that we start in Africa with a certain size of population. As I said, these people are equipped with the human brain and they are able to advance the technology. Technological advancement permits more people to be supported, but in addition, it changes the composition of the population due to human adaptation. And the winds of change are rotating and reinforcing one another over a prolonged period of time, up to the point in which technological progress is rotating rapidly, very rapidly. The importance of human capital is growing and growing and growing. It doesn't have an effect until we reach a tipping point. At this tipping point, we really truly see a phase transition, a bifurcation point in which suddenly, individuals are investing in human capital, their fertility is starting to decline and the world is gravitated towards the Modern Growth Regime. Fascinating book…Highly exciting journey through the economic history of mankind from the Stone Age to the present day.”— Frankfurter Allgemeine A wildly ambitious attempt to do for economics what Newton, Darwin, or Einstein did for their fields: develop a theory that explains almost everything.An inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork, the boldest possible attempt to write the economic history of humanity.”— The New Statesman 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

Let me illustrate in a very simple fashion. Wouldn't the World Bank is preaching to less developed societies, suggesting policies that can mitigate poverty and inequality, they naturally emphasized fertility control and education, but when they emphasize education, it is basically use of education. Let's assure that population is more educated, in other words. And this is a wonderful policy, but it's deficient in the sense that what we learn is that. We need to go beyond it and to design a curriculum that will permit each society to deal with its historical hurdles. Let me give you an example. Suppose that we take a very diverse society in a diverse society. Part of the difficulty is the issue of social cohesiveness and tolerance. So naturally, we would like the education system from a very early stage to target these particular elements. Naturally, we have limited resources and we would like to target these particular elements in diverse societies. But if we focus, on the other hand, in a very homogeneous society, this will be a waste of resources. In fact, what we need in this society is to emphasize pluralism, to emphasize thinking outside of the box, to emphasize how to challenge the status quo. Well, if you think about cultural traits that we did, we discussed earlier, as we said, cultural traits largely emerge due to a deputation to the geographical surrounding. So suppose that we have some society that resided historically in a place that was not conducive for agricultural investment and did not induce people to plant and harvest. And as a result of it, those individuals historically did not learn how to delay gratification. After 4months of painting over 20hours a day, several injuries later, exhausted but still inspired, I realized that this painting could be made up of 70 parts and could potentially be as big as 5,000 Square Feet, and even more importantly it could benefit the children most in need of our help, this is when I had the idea to raise money for charities benefitting these children from the auctioning of my painting. I also decided to reach out to the children of our world asking them to send me artwork that they had created reflecting their feelings of isolation and connection during this difficult time, I then pasted the children’s artwork to strips of cloth laying on the Ballroom floor.

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Now the Mathusian Epoch originates with the emergence of an anatomically modern human in Africa nearly 𝟹𝟶𝟶,𝟶𝟶𝟶 years ago, and it lasts over 𝟿𝟿.𝟿% of human existence. What is interesting about this period is the dualism that it reflects. On the one hand stagnation in living standards, but on the other hand, certain dynamism in the context of technology, population and human adaptation. And it is this dynamism that, after a 𝟹𝟶𝟶,𝟶𝟶𝟶 year period, is leading into the beginning of economic growth in the course of the Post-Mathusian Regime. But when growth occurs initially, the Mathusian forces are still operating in the sense that much of the growth is counterbalanced by population growth and it is only in the post 𝟷𝟾𝟽𝟶 period, in the context of the most advanced societies in the world, it will see the onset of the demographic transition and emergence of modern economic growth.