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- History of the Masses
- The Decline of Poverty: Where and When
- An Institutional Road-Map to Plenty
- The Decline of Poverty: Contemporary Trends
- Conclusions
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Douglass C. North for his advice and encouragement to write this paper. I am also grateful for very helpful discussions and commentary from Milton Friedman, Paul Romer, Lee Alston, Philip Coelho, Joel Mokyr, Dan Benjamin, David Dollar, Roger Ransom, Pat Fishe, Surrey Walton, Jerry Hume, Donald Raiff, Chris Wright, Smokey Murphy, Donna McCreadie, Gene McCreadie, Mike Copeland, Ken Leonard, Nicholas Koukopolos, Jim Klauder, and Kathy Ratté on the issues and topics herein. My gratitude also goes to Joyce Gordon, Yvonne Liebig, and Heather Carkuff for clerical assistance.
A Long-term Economic Perspective on Recent Human Progress
by Gary M. Walton
Professor Emeritus of Economics,
University
of California, Davis and
President, Foundation for Teaching Economics
History of the Masses
The year 1750 does not usually evoke images of great prosperity or of revolutionary progress, but in fact the mid-eighteenth century was an historical turning point of economic advance. Organizational and technological changes in that period allowed growing numbers of people to move from mere subsistence activities to thoughts and actions that furthered economic, political and social progress. This monumental turning point in human existence is often missed because of the way we perceive the past.
It is an interesting exercise to reflect on an historical episode, perhaps from the Bible, or from Shakespeare, or some Hollywood epic. For most of us, the stories we recall are about great people, or great episodes; tales of love, war, religion, and other dramas of the human experience. Kings, heroes, or religious leaders…in castles, battle fields, or cathedrals…engaging armies in battles, or discovering inventions, or new worlds --- readily come to mind. Glorifying the past is a natural instinct.1
There were so called golden ages, like Ancient Greece, the Roman Era, China’s Sung Dynasty, and other periods and places where small fractions of societies lived in splendor and reasonable comfort, and when small portions of the population sometimes rose above levels of meager subsistence (for select accounts see Murray, 2003). But such periods of improvement were never durably sustained.2 Taking a long, broad view, the lives of almost all of our distant ancestors were utterly wretched. Except for the fortunate few, humans everywhere lived in abysmal squalor. To capture the magnitude of this deprivation and sheer length of the road out of poverty, consider this time capsule summary of humanity from Douglass C. North’s 1993 Nobel address:
Let us represent the human experience to date as a 24-hour clock in which the beginning consists of the time (apparently in Africa between 4 and 5 million years ago) when humans became separate from other primates. Then the beginning of so-called civilization occurs with the development of agriculture and permanent settlement in about 8000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent – in the last three or four minutes of the clock (my emphasis). For the other 23 hours and 56 or 57 minutes, humans remained hunters and gatherers, and while population grew, it did so at a very slow pace.
Now if we make a new 24-hour clock for the time of civilization – the 10,000 years from development of agriculture to the present – the pace of change appears to be very slow for the first 12 hours.…Historical demographers speculate that the rate of population growth may have doubled as compared to the previous era but still was very slow. The pace of change accelerates in the past 5,000 years with the rise and then decline of economies and civilization. Population may have grown from about 300 million at the time of Christ to about 800 million by 1750 – a substantial acceleration as compared to earlier rates of growth. The last 250 years – just 35 minutes on our new 24-hour clock (my emphasis) – are the era of modern economic growth, accompanied by a population explosion that now puts world population in excess of 5 billion (1993).
If we focus on the last 250 years, we see that growth was largely restricted to Western Europe and the overseas extensions of Britain for 200 of those 250 years (North, 1993).3
Any brief explanation of the major forces and events lifting larger and larger portions of the world’s population to levels of good health and decent material comfort suggests a degree of presumption that even a Cheshire cat’s grin could not hide. While acknowledging many problematic issues of measurement and interpretation, we proceed without apology, directly and selectively to the historical evidence. Long-term measures of population size, length of life, infant mortality, body heights and weights, income per person, and many other such indicators of well being, whatever the quibbles over exactness, are perfectly clear. So are the geographic and national identities of the places inventions and improvements came from and where declines of poverty started and spread.