If anybody really wants a 500MB 608-slide deck on the history of economic growth; the review deck is only 12MB and only 29 slides: societies of domination, from stagnation to acceleration, & then our modern polycrisis: All of the lecture slides from yet another semester teaching my version of the course I “borrowed” form Melissa Dell: The History of Economic Growth.
We are an anthology-intelligence species of immense power and profound dysfunction. We escaped millennia of agrarian stagnation through modern economic growth, only to find ourselves floundering as we go through yet another chaotic technology-revolution transition, unable to build institutions and practices that enable us to take our growing prosperity and live wisely and well, feeling safe and secure and being healthy and happy. Can we build institutions to manage our prosperity before it all falls apart?
Looking back on this, after going through this one more time, my first thought is: this can never be one book. There are, somewhere in here, books on:
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The vicissitudes of the historical journey of humanity considered as a subject—as an immensely powerful anthology intelligence with a profoundly disordered soul…
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The workings of the Agrarian-Age societies—an updating of Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies, with a focus on the workings of societies-of-domination, on the coming-together of things to produce “efflorescences”, and the limitations imposed by Agrarian-Age societal structure on human progress…
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The book on the breakthrough from Agrarian-Age near stagnation to post-1870 Modern Economic Growth…
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The stage-theory look at Modern Economic Growth: Steampower, Applied-Science, Mass-Production, Globalized Value-Chain, and Attention Info-Bio Tech Societies…
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Our modern polycrisis—and how our situation now is profoundly different in a number of ways from the world from 1870 to 2010 and Modern Economic Growth…
The way I set it out at the start still seems to me to be an excellent thumbnail:
How a group of jumped-up monkeys more-or-less accidentally became first a band-wide, then a continent-wide, and then a global-wide anthology intelligence, and then hunted frantically for institutions to make that work…
Along the way, we fell into a Malthusian Trap of dire poverty, in which we turned aside from societies of cooperation to societies of domination…
Then we developed the institutions of modern economic growth, which made us rich at a dizzying rate…
Unfortunately, that rate of progress and transition was much too fast for any process of gradient-descent societal institutional evolution to cope well…
Plus we are still marked by our long history under the harrow of the societies of domination…
Now we face what turns out to be the truly big problem: that of building institutions for managing us as a prosperous species, given that we are a very imperfect anthology intelligence and desperately need a society that will actually enable us to live wisely and well…
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