Tag Archives: Chapter 1: A Summary

Chapter 1 of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007) is called “The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World,” which briefly summaries the broad, long-run economic history of humanity.Gregory Clark contends that the most important long-run, historical reality of world history can be summed up in two ideas: (1) from the earliest times of hunter-gatherers until roughly 1800 humanity was stuck in a long-run Malthusian trap: per capita wealth may have...

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is a truly extraordinary book that every person on the Left should read. Critical reviews of the book can be found in Wills (2009), Arden (2009) and Gorelik and Shackelford (2010).In essence, Cochran and Harpending challenge the notion that human evolution stopped around 50,000 years ago. In Chapter 1 of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending (2009: 1) argue...