Michael Magoon — From Poverty to Progress

This post is a commentary on a new book by Michael Magoon, From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement.

The topic is one that makes a lot of academics, and progressives in particular, nervous.  Is it really ok to suggest that history sometimes means progress?  That sounds like what they used to call Whig history, the optimistic account of continuous human improvement.  Here’s how he puts the problem:

In general, among people who are skeptical of or hostile to progress, those on the Left and young people compare the problems of today with an idea in their heads about how life should be, while those on the Right and older people compare the problems of today to nostalgic but distorted memories of how they think life used to be.

The author avoids this problem by narrowing the scope of what he’s calling progress.  He’s focusing here on material progress of a particular kind:

I believe that the most useful definition of progress is “the sustained improvement in the material standard of living of a large group of people over a long period of time.” In particular, I focus on changes to the standard of living that are rapid enough and sustained enough that one person could notice positive changes within their lifetime.

By this definition, it’s hard to argue against the simple fact that humanity has progressed enormously over the years, especially the last 300 years, during which economic development took off sharply in a series of hockey-stick graphs, e.g.:

Nothing happened for 1700 years and then, kabang.  Instant progress.  Everything went up — GDP per capita, life expectancy, public health, education — everything except death and poverty.  Now that’s progress.

As Magoon points out, humans are not programmed to focus on progress; watching out for danger has been key to our survival.

The fundamental problem is that the human brain did not evolve for happiness and appreciation for living in a world of abundance and progress. Nor did it evolve to solve problems in complex modern societies. The human brain evolved to enable our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors to survive and reproduce on the African Savannah. This world was full of daily threats to survival. Anyone who focused on appreciating their lives would soon get eaten by a predator, attacked by a stranger, or starve. Anyone who was relentlessly focused on threats to their survival was more likely to survive long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation.

Under these conditions, 

progress is a startling transformation compared to how humans have lived over the past hundred thousand years. For most of human history, there was little if any progress. Our ancestors were engaged in a constant struggle for survival. Most people lived on the edge of subsistence. The vast majority of our ancestors devoted the majority of their waking hours to acquiring enough food to eat. The quest for the next meal dominated their lives.

The core of the book is an exploration of how progress happened

So what are the Five Keys to Progress? To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire:

1. 1. A highly efficient food production and distribution system. This enables societies to overcome geographical constraints on food production so that large numbers of people can focus on solving problems other than getting enough food to eat.
   2. Trade-based cities packed with a large number of free citizens possessing a wide variety of skills. These people innovate new technologies, skills and social organizations and copy the innovations made by others.
   3. Decentralized political, economic, religious and ideological power. It is of particular importance that elites are forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based upon what they have to offer to each individual and society in general.
   4. At least one high-value-added industry that exports to the rest of the world. This injects wealth into the city or region, accelerates economic growth and creates markets for smaller local industries and services.
   5. Widespread use of fossil fuels. The incredible energy density of fossil fuels injects vast amounts of useful energy into society, enabling it to solve a wide variety of problems. Without this energy, life would return to the daily struggle for survival that dominated most of human history.

Each of the Five Keys to Progress is necessary for a society to experience progress, but none are sufficient by themselves.

In order for these five keys to progress to emerge, humans needs a series of historical breakthroughs:

There were six historical breakthroughs that enabled progress to accelerate and diffuse to new parts of the globe:

1. 1. The emergence of Commercial societies in Northern Italy about 800 years ago, which combined four of the Five Keys to Progress (productive agriculture, trade-based cities, decentralized power and export industries).
   2. The diffusion of Commercial societies from Northern Italy to Flanders (modern-day Belgium) and then to the Netherlands and finally to Southeast England.
   3. The migration of Europeans to much of the rest of the world. The migration of peoples from England to North America was particularly important.
   4. The Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 19th Century which added the fifth key to progress (widespread use of fossil fuels).
   5. The Allied victory in World War II, which ended the totalitarian threats of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy.
   6. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Perhaps the central form of socioeconomic breakthrough that promoted the sudden surge of development was the rise of societies organized around commerce.

The key development that made progress for the masses possible was the emergence of a new type of society sometime after 1200 in Northwestern Europe: Commercial societies. Commercial societies differed greatly from even the most complex Agrarian societies of Eurasia. These societies built on the relatively productive agricultural systems of Northwest Europe but channeled the food surplus towards autonomous trade-based cities full of free people with a wide variety of skills.

While Agrarian societies established government-sponsored monopolies designed to extract a food surplus to benefit political, economic and religious elites, Commercial societies promoted competition between a wide variety of institutions. The result was a dramatic increase in the rate of innovation of technologies, skills and organizations that triggered the first real progress in human history.

Western Europe was the first to develop because of its early organization around commerce, most particularly in the Low Countries and England.

I contend that what distinguished Western Europe from the rest of the world was a dense constellation of autonomous trade-based cities. These cities formed a society type like no other in the world: the Commercial society. While the earlier society types are difficult for a modern reader to imagine living in, Commercial societies are strikingly similar to our own. The only missing ingredient was the widespread usage of fossil fuels.

England had a special edge.

This lack of a clear military threat meant that England never needed the huge standing armies that the Continental powers found necessary to survive. While kings on the Continent had to fight to survive, the English monarchs could largely choose their wars, and if they lost, the entire kingdom was generally not in danger. This meant that the aristocracy and the monarchy gradually worked out a balance of power that maintained a centralized government that protected society from hostile external powers while respecting the economic rights of citizens. This balance of power was institutionalized in the House of Commons and English Common Law. While not as inclusive as governments in other Commercial societies, England’s political and economic institutions were far more inclusive than the Agrarian states on the Continent.

But in many ways, the Low Countries were the leaders in the commercial revolution.  They invented the modern system of finance, with the first public corporation, the first stock market, the first central bank, and the first bond market.  And they took off before England.

The best evidence of progress, however, was in the Netherlands, which grew from $761/year in 1500 to $1,381/year in 1600. This was probably the fastest sustained economic growth up to that time, and it firmly established the Netherlands as the richest society in the world. Dutch economic growth continued through most of the 17th Century, reaching a level of $2,130/year in 1700. That is the highest per capita GDP that any nation would reach before the Industrial Revolution.

Here is how Magoon characterizes the significance of this story of material progress:

Creating the first society with progress was humanity’s greatest achievement. It had taken at least 100,000 years of evolution to do so. Once one society made the jump from poverty to progress, other societies could copy the first one. The genie of progress had been let out of the bottle, and there was almost no way to put it back inside.

Progress is the most uplifting story in human history. It has transformed poverty into prosperity, disease into health, ignorance into education, isolation into connectedness, war and violence into peace and security, slums into housing, and servitude into freedom. Quite frankly, progress is the single most important force to impact the material existence of humanity. We must protect it in wealthy nations and expand it in developing countries.

So maybe we should be celebrating progress after all.