The Largely-Fruitless Task of Trying to Make Sense of Human History: (LATE) TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL
Berkeley Economics Undergraduate Committee Chair Cecile Gaubert demands a syllabus for next spring. So let me throw it together. What is (are) my Grand Narrative(s) going to be, and will I be able at the end to look back and pull up the ladder?
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright…
In addition, the hope is that by January 15 I will have the full book ms. draft in hand, and can then tune it over the course of the semester.
DRAFT Syllabus · Econ 135 · Spring 2027
Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire
Econ 135: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective covers the whole sweep of human economic history, from how East African Plains Apes took the first steps toward becoming a coöperative “anthology intelligence” to today’s very rich but unstable global economy. We look at why humanity spent millennia stuck in a Malthusian trap under agrarian “societies of domination,” how the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions broke through after 1500, and how modern economic growth since 1870 has doubled our technological capabilities every generation. We then turn to the 20th century’s fights over economic systems, global divergence and convergence, the Global Value-Chain economy and the neoliberal order, and what comes after: climate change, populism, and the coming info-biotech economy. And I am going to try to make you do data science using python on <datahub.berkeley.edu>. Readings include Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich, and my own Slouching Towards Utopia. (Go read that last if you want to get a sense of what we will cover from the 30%-ile to the 80%-ile of the course.) Take this course if you want the big-picture context for every other economics class you take, and a serious way to think about how we might build institutions that share our wealth fairly and help us live wisely and well.
Course Frame: Two Throughlines
Francis Bacon gives the course its title, and “anthology intelligence” is the theme that runs through every week. The question each week: how did humanity’s collective store of knowledge enlarge “the bounds of human empire,” and what institutions decided who benefited?
Week 1 opens with Francis Bacon: Bensalem and Salomon’s House, and Week 15 returns to it.
Each notebook asks students to act as a “front-end interface” to that collective store of human knowledge that is the real ASI: not the artificial but the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the Collective Human Mind since the year -3000.
The closing question is your own: how do we build institutions that share our wealth fairly and help us live wisely and well?
Weekly rhythm
Readings and lecture early in the week.
A short Datahub notebook on that week’s data, due Sunday. As in Econ 196, buggy code is fine as long as the work shows engagement.
Perhaps a one-paragraph written reflection, also due Sunday, so you can adjust the next week’s class.
0. Introduction & Prehistory
Week 1. “To the Effecting of All Things Possible”
The five questions of the course, and the hockey stick. Why were we poor for so long, why did that change after 1870, and why so unevenly?
Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627), from the landing at Bensalem through Salomon’s House.
Koyama & Rubin, ch. 1, “Why, When, & How?”
DeLong, Slouching, Introduction.
Python Notebook: the long-run shape of the human economy, building the 75,000-year population series in pandas and plotting it on log scale. This reuses the Econ 196 Week 1 notebook.
Week 2. Anthology Intelligence: −300,000 to −3000
How East African Plains Apes became a cultural, collective-brain species. Covers prestige, reciprocity, redistribution, and dominance, and whether agriculture was progress at all.
Henrich (opt.), chs. 1, 4, 12, 15–17.
Clark (opt.), ch. 1, Introduction.
Diamond (1987), “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”
Python Notebook: income per capita and a “technology index” (growth of income per capita plus half of population growth) over the very long run.
I. Early Civilizations: −3000 to +500
Week 3. Ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus
Why productivity gains bought more people rather than better lives. The logic of the agrarian-age Malthusian equilibrium, and what living standards actually were.
Crone, Introduction & chs. 1–7.
Clark (opt.), chs. 2–3, “The Malthusian Economy” and “Living Standards.”
Clark (2005), “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.”
Python Notebook: simulate a Malthusian economy, then shock its technology and watch population, not wages, absorb the gain.
Week 4. Societies of Domination, Efflorescences & Dark Ages
Predatory elites, high cultures on a subsistence base, and booms that hit limits. Covers Bronze-, Iron-, and Classical-age empires, Rome’s fall, and the slow pace of pre-modern invention.
Allen, ch. 5, “Great Empires.”
Clark (opt.), ch. 7, “Technological Advance.”
Jongman (2007), “Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy.”
Python Notebook: two exercises from your 2027 list: “Societies of domination & the shape of human progress and exploitation,” and “Efflorescences & Dark Ages,” using Roman-era and Han-to-Tang population series.
II. The Mediæval Millennium & Its End: +500 to +1600
Week 5. Gunpowder Empires & On the Verge, ca. 1500
The Late-Antiquity Pause, the medieval recovery, and the world of ca. 1500. Covers the Inca, Mexica, Songhai, Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Ming, plus the Columbian Exchange and the forty years that shook Europe.
Wyman, chs. 0–2, 5 & 10.
Crone, ch. 8, “The Oddity of Europe.”
Morris (2010), Why the West Rules, For Now, ch. 3, “Taking the Measure of the Past.”
Python Notebook (new): rebuild a Morris-style social-development index for East and West Eurasia and test how much weighting choices change the story.
III. Imperial-Commercial to Steampower: 1600 to 1880
Week 6. Imperial-Commercial Society
Globalization, empire, the greatest slave trade, and the racialization of status. Covers Adam Smith’s commercial society and why the Dover Circle pulled ahead by 1770.
Koyama & Rubin, chs. 2–4, 6–7.
Berry (opt.), chs. 5–7, “Working,” “Trading,” “Legacy.”
Coatsworth (2008), “Inequality, Institutions & Economic Growth in Latin America.”
Python Notebook: “Commercial, industrial, & steampunk economies,” part 1: Allen-style real-wage comparisons across European and Asian cities.
Week 7. The Last Efflorescence: The Dover Circle, 1770–1870
Science, markets, and coal, cotton, and sugar combine into the British Industrial Revolution. Students weigh Allen’s high-wage, cheap-energy story against Clark’s claim that this was the last efflorescence rather than the start of modern growth.
Allen, chs. 1–4.
Clark (opt.), chs. 11–14 (skim); or Koyama & Rubin, ch. 8.
Landes (2006), “Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?”
Python Notebook: “Commercial, industrial, & steampunk economies,” part 2: British output and real wages, 1770–1870. Midterm I is at the end of the week.
IV. Modern Economic Growth: 1870 to 1980
Week 8. 1870-1920: Applied-Science Society
The industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and globalization make technological capability double every generation. Each generation, about one-fifth of the economy is remade.
DeLong, Slouching, chs. 1–2, 4.
Koyama & Rubin, ch. 9, “The Modern Economy.”
Python Notebook: “Modern Economic Growth”: fit growth rates before and after 1870 and locate the break.
Week 9. Demographic Transition & the Development of Underdevelopment
First a population explosion, then the fall to sub-replacement fertility. Meanwhile, colonial extraction turns rich and poor people into rich and poor nations.
Koyama & Rubin, ch. 5, “Babies.”
Allen, chs. 6–8, “Americas,” “Africa,” “Standard Model.”
Lee (2003), “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.”
Python Notebook: “Demographic transitions & mass-production economies,” part 1: birth and death rates by country, aligned on the onset of the transition.
Week 10. The Fight Over Political-Economic Orders, 1910–1950
Rapid creative destruction outpaces institutional adaptation. Covers the semi-liberal order, socialism, fascism, world wars, and the Depression.
DeLong, Slouching, chs. 3, 5, 8–9.
Clark (opt.), chs. 16–17, “Divergence” and “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?”
Marx & Engels (1848), The Communist Manifesto, read as a lens: “less than half-right, but more than zero right.”
Python Notebook (new): interwar output and unemployment across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and the USSR.
Week 11. Mass-Production Society & the Thirty Glorious Years, 1940-1980
Assembly lines, the mixed economy, and social democracy’s peak. Also covers the Soviet experience and false and true starts to development.
DeLong, Slouching, chs. 6–7, 10, 14.
Allen, ch. 9, “Big Push Industrialization.”
Abramovitz (1986), “Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind.”
Python Notebook: “Demographic transitions & mass-production economies,” part 2: postwar catch-up regressions.
V. Globalized Value-Chain Society: 1980 to 2020
Week 12. Neoliberal Order, East Asian Miracles & Inclusion
The productivity slowdown, the neoliberal turn, and hyperglobalization. Also covers China standing up and Russia sitting down, status inclusion, and income divergence within rich nations.
DeLong, Slouching, chs. 11–13, 15–17.
Koyama & Rubin, chs. 10–11.
Pritchett (1997), “Divergence, Big Time.”
Python Notebook: “East-Asian miracles & global divergence,” replicating Pritchett’s divergence calculation with current data. Midterm II is at the end of the week.
VI. Info-Bio Tech-Attention Society: 2020 to ??
Week 13. Polycrisis: Warming, Populism & the Renewed Fight Over Orders
The weak reeds we have for fixing problems. Covers neofascist, state-surveillance-capitalist, and New Deal alternatives, and climate tail risk.
Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, chs. 7–8.
Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation, chs. 7–8, 13.
Weitzman, on the economics of catastrophic climate change. This is the “Weitzman” reading from Fall 2024; the exact piece needs confirming.
Python Notebook (new): a toy climate-damage model showing how fat tails change expected costs.
Week 14. The Attention Economy & Anthology Super-Intelligence
This generation’s turn in the bullseye of creative destruction: white-collar cognitive work. Do AI models replace the collective store of human knowledge, or just give us a new way to reach it?
DeLong, Slouching, Conclusion.
Clark (opt.), ch. 18, “Strange New World.”
Deming, “Using Generative AI to Learn Is Like Odysseus Untying Himself from the Mast.”
Python Notebook: “The economics of an Attention economy,” on time-use and digital-goods valuation.
Week 15. The Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox & Living Wisely and Well
Is the gunpowder-empire Malthusian society the natural end state for our species, and were we lucky to escape it? The course closes back at Salomon’s House.
Allen, Epilogue.
Keynes (1930), “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
Shalizi (2010), “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone,” as reposted on your Substack.
Python Notebook (new): a Monte Carlo Drake Equation, tracing which parameter values make the Fermi silence surprising.
RRR Week & Final
Review, plus the optional “Reading Week Project” from your draft, then the final. A possible capstone question is the anchoring line you said the course still lacked: “When asked thirty years from now what you learned in this course, I want you to say…”
Possible Book Readings:
Allen, Robert C. 2011. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Allen, Robert C. 2017. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berry, Christopher J. 2018. Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crone, Patricia. 1989. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Dasgupta, Partha. 2007. Economics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.
Gellner, Ernest. 1988. Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins Harvill.
Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Koyama, Mark, and Jared Rubin. 2022. How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. Cambridge: Polity.
Polanyi, Karl. 2018. Economy and Society: Selected Writings. Edited by Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger. Cambridge: Polity.
Rauchway, Eric. 2008. The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Peter. 2000. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skidelsky, Robert. 2003. John Maynard Keynes: 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Macmillan.
Temin, Peter. 2013. The Roman Market Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Winch, Donald. 2013. Malthus: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wyman, Patrick. 2021. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. New York: Twelve.
Decisions Still Open
General-purpose technologies. Your Fall 2024 post flagged a missing GPT track (grains, bronze, iron, printing, steam, electricity, and so on). It could run as a one-slide recurring segment each week.
Notebook scale. Econ 196 had about 15 students and 1:1 “hot seat” meetings. A lecture-size Econ 135 will need some other structures.
Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions?