Book. Why has the West become so rich and why the others are not? This is the fundamental question that has obsessed economists since the emergence of their discipline. Adam Smith’s founding book published in 1776 was aptly titled Researches on the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Since then, everyone has contributed their stone to the building, trying to go back as far as possible in the immense genealogy ofHomo sapiens. “For three hundred thousand years, income hardly exceeded the minimum necessary for survival, explains Oded Galor in his book The Journey of Humanity, to the Origins of Wealth and Inequality (Denoel, 320 pages, 23 euros). A quarter of the babies did not reach their first birthday; women often died in childbirth and life expectancy rarely exceeded 40 years. » Suddenly, “time for the blink of an eye” over the long history, incomes have increased fourteen times worldwide and life expectancy has more than doubled.
It is this mystery of growth that the Israeli economist, professor at the American University of Brown (Rhode Island), explores. A prolific researcher, author of a “unified theory of growth”, he embarked on the adventure of popularization with a work reminiscent of the best-selling Sapiens (Albin Michel, 2015), whose author, historian Yuval Harari, teaches, like Oded Galor, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The book is read with greed as it teems with anecdotes and answers to questions that we have all asked ourselves one day. Unlike in Sapiensthe author dwells little on the first men but rather on this key moment in our history, which appeared in the 18e century. Because the history of wealth is the opposite of a continuous progression. The living conditions of a 17th century French peasante century differed little from that of its distant ancestors. As in Babylon, three thousand years before, his working day was worth between 5 and 10 kilograms of wheat. His life expectancy, between 30 and 40 years, had not changed either.
The English economist Thomas Malthus theorized in 1803 this immobility despite the many technical advances that separate these two eras. According to him, periods of prosperity have all resulted in an exponential increase in births. More mouths to feed and therefore more levy on the agricultural resource which cannot progress at the same rate. Hence the fall in income, the return of poverty, before the next cycle aided by famines or epidemics which reduce populations. This Malthusian trap has locked populations in stagnation for millennia. But in the very century in which Malthus launches the debate, an event unique in human history occurs: the combination of a techno-industrial revolution and demographic transition.
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