There’s a growing genre of books, the long sweep of human history from a social science perspective. The ur-text must be Jacob Bronowski’s [amazon_link id=”1849901155″ target=”_blank” ]The Ascent of Man[/amazon_link] (the DVD of the series is still available and, I think, still fascinating despite being so old-fashioned.) I suppose the recent wave started with Jared Diamond’s [amazon_link id=”0099302780″ target=”_blank” ]Guns, Germs and Steel[/amazon_link] (1997), and more conventional economic histories such as David Landes in the [amazon_link id=”0349111669″ target=”_blank” ]Wealth and Poverty of Nations[/amazon_link] (1998). More recent contributions have come from Ian Morris, with [amazon_link id=”1846682088″ target=”_blank” ]Why the West Rules – For Now[/amazon_link] (2011) and [amazon_link id=”0691155682″ target=”_blank” ]The Measure of Civilization[/amazon_link] (2013), and Diamond again with [amazon_link id=”0241958687″ target=”_blank” ]Collapse[/amazon_link] (2005).
[amazon_image id=”0563104988″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Ascent of Man[/amazon_image]
The latest is Yuval Noah Harari’s [amazon_link id=”1846558239″ target=”_blank” ]Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[/amazon_link], just published in the UK with a lot of publicity razzmatazz. I’ve not read it, just this extract in The Guardian. It touches on how we measure progress, and is happiness a better aim than GDP. It isn’t entirely clear to me what the conclusion is – that we were happier in the Stone Age? To which the answer is surely the economist’s sceptical revealed preference argument: see how many voters want to revert to a hunter-gatherer society. Or is Harari instead arguing for giving evolution a bit of a boost?
“Humans are not adapted by evolution to experience constant pleasure, so ice‑cream and smartphone games will not do. If that is what humankind nevertheless wants, it will be necessary to re-engineer our bodies and minds. We are working on it.”
[amazon_image id=”1846558239″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[/amazon_image]