What is special about humans?

  • It’s not huge brains, complex languages, lots of technology — Neanderthals had three.
  • Appearance of new technologies and people is explained by
    • Climate: Volatility in climate placed a premium on adaptability — why did it produce other technologically advanced apes or other African species
    • Genetic mutation: triggered a change in human behavior by subtly altering the way human brains were built — recent studies suggest Neanderthals share the same mutations meaning the modern people and Neanderthals maybe using sophisticated language
  • The answer lies not in climate, nor genetics, nor in archaeology, nor even entirely in culture, but in economics.
  • They had started, for the first time, to exchange things between unrelated, unmarried individuals; to share, swap, barter, or trade. The effect of this was to cause specialization, which in turn caused technological progress, which in turn encouraged more specialization, which led to more exchange - and “progress” was born, that meant technology and habits changing faster than anatomy.
  • The big difference in every other species, the colonies of close relatives - even a city of million ants is really just a family.
  • Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.
  • Human history is driven by a co-evolution of rules and tools. The increasing specialization of the human species, and the enlarging habit of exchange are the root cause of innovation in both.
  • In no animals, does the individual become more specialized as population is rising nor less specialized as population is stalling or falling. In fact, the notion is specialization is rare, and where it does happen, in ants for example, it does not wax or wane in this manner.

Why did humans acquire a taste for barter as other animals did not?

  • Perhaps it has something to do with cooking. Beyond making it safe to live on ground, beyond liberating human ancestors to grow big brains on high-energy diets, cooking also predisposed humans to swapping different kinds of food.
  • Fire is hard to start, but easy to share; likewise cooking food is hard to make but easy to share. The time spend cooking is subtracted from time spent chewing.
  • An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects from the fire of thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the women brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may be the reason humans are the only great apes with long pair bonds.

Is organic food actually good?

  • Low yield — exhausts mineral resources of the soil — needs farmers to add crushed rock or squashed fish — have to be mined or netted
  • Can match the yields of non-organic — nitrogen fixing by growing legumes — using land elsewhere to grow legumes — doubling the land under the plough

Is population explosion a problem?

  • Bangladesh in 1955 had birth rate of 6.55, in 50 years, it was 2.7 children per women. India, went from 5.9 to 2.6. No country in the world had a higher birth rate than 1960.
  • Replacement rate — rate at which a women produces babies to replace her and her husband, with 0.1 added to cover childhood deaths and slightly male-based sex ratio.
  • Nearly half the world has a fertility below 2.1. Russia’s population is falling so fast it will be one-third in 2050 than what it was in 1990.
  • UN estimates population would increase till 2075 to 9.2 billion after which it would start falling.
  • Reasons for this trend of decreasing fertility rates:
    • Paradoxically, falling child mortality rates — only when a women think their children would survive do they plan and complete their families rather than just keep breeding.
    • Wealth: Having more money means you can afford more babies but also afford more luxuries to divert you from having babies.
    • Female emancipation: females want fewer children and give them high-quality upbringing, whereas males prefer lots of children and care less about upbringing.
    • Urbanization: urban population finds large families a drawback due to expensive housing and jobs outside homes.

Why we need non-renewable, non-green, non-clean power?

  • Non-renewable resources, like coal, are sufficiently abundant to allow expansion of both economic activity and population — generate sustainable wealth without hitting a ceiling — pass the baton to other forms of energy
  • The earth receives 174 million billion watts of sunlight, about 10,000 times as much as the fossil-fuel output that human beings use. A patch of ground roughly five yards by five yards, receives as much sunlight as you need to run your techno life.
  • Average person consumes 600 calories/second or 2500 watts — 85% of which comes from coal, oil, and gas and rest from hydro and nuclear. Reasonably fit person can cycle generating 50 watts. Next time you lament human dependence on fossil fuels, pause to imagine that for every family of four, there would 600 unpaid slaves back home, living in object poverty.
  • Oil, gas, and coal are finite — they will last decades perhaps centuries and people will find alternatives long before they run out.
  • To supply just 300 million inhabitants of USA to their current power demand which is 10,000 watts we need — solar panels the size of Spain, wind farms size of Kazakhstan, woodland size of India and Pakistan, hydroelectric dams with catchments one-third larger than all continents combined.
  • Biofuels — is it really green?
    • How much fuel does it take to grow fuel? About the same. Drilling or refining by contrast gets you 600% energy return or more on your energy used.
    • The most important problem — they need land — ruins habitats and landscapes, extinguishing a species to fuel a civilization.
  • Future? Nuclear + solar + geothermal, very little dependence on wind, tide, wave, or biomass.

The invention of invention

  • The more you prosper, the more you can prosper. The more you invent, the more inventions become possible. The engine that is driving human prosperity in the modern world is the accelerating generation of useful knowledge. Owning one cycle is useful, but there is not much extra gain in having two — diminishing returns. No matter how many times you tell someone how to make a cycle, the idea will not grow stale. The more people you tell about cycles, the more people will come back with useful features.
  • No country remains for long the leader in knowledge creation — Prosperity and success led to emergence of predators and parasites in various forms and guises who eventually slaughtered the geese that laid the golden eggs. Again and again, the flame of invention would splutter and die … only to flare up elsewhere. The good news is that there is always a new torch lite. So far.
  • People embrace technological change and hate it at the same time — handful are excited, rest depressed or annoyed by the changes. Inventor is the source of society’s enrichment and yet nobody likes what he does.
  • Science is much more like the daughter of technology rather than the mother. The inventors of steam engine were completely ignorant of the scientific theories. It was this invention that led to the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, not vice versa.
  • Technology has the upper hand compared to science in terms of raising the standard of living, even when there is remarkable ignorance on why they worked
    • The inventions of cotton gin and steam engine vs invention of gravity
    • Aspirin was curing headaches for more than a century before understanding how
    • Penicillin’s ability of killing bacteria, lime juice preventing scurvy, food preservation
  • Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. Coming together of technologies into wholes greater than sum of their parts.
    • Telephone + computer = internet
    • Bicycle + horse carriage = first cars
    • Photo-graphic chemistry → Plastics
  • Discovery is a fast breeder chain reaction; innovation is a feedback loop; invention is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Equilibrium and stagnation are not only avoidable in a free-exchanging world; they are avoidable.
  • Knowledge is limitless — no theoretical possibility of exhausting supply of ideas and knowledge
    • Number of software programs you can put in a 1 GB storage = 27 million * number of atoms in the universe.

Interesting Facts / Points:

  • Creative Destruction, as Schumpeter called it, meant that there is as much creation going as destruction — that the growth of digital photography would create as many jobs as analogue, or just that the saving pocketed by a Walmart customer are soon spent on other things, leading to the opening of new stores to service those demands. In America, roughly 15% jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15% created.
  • The size of the average American company is down from 25 to 10 in just 25 years. Tomorrow’s self-employed workers clocking on to work online in bursts for different clients when and where it suits them, will surely look back on the days of bosses and foremen, of meetings and appraisals, of time sheets and trade unions, with amusement. Firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way to help other do their consuming.
  • A countries economic freedom predicts the prosperity better than its mineral wealth, education system, or infrastructure do. In a sample of 127 countries, the 63 with higher economic freedom had more than 4 times the income per capita and nearly twice the growth rate of countries that did not.