Notes

In the text, measures are American-style not metric, number names are American-style not European (a billion is a thousand million; a trillion is a million million), and complexities are often glossed. But I figure if you look in the back of the book you want the real thing. So here, measures, naming, and citations follow scientific convention.

Preface

[babysitting co-op]
To shorten the story I moved talk of the ‘truth squad’ to during the recession instead of during the inflation, where it actually happened. Incidentally, the co-op might not have gotten into as much trouble as it did had it let the price of babysitting float, rather than fixing it at exactly one voucher per session. Any government that thinks it can fix prices by fiat faces the same problem. “The Capitol Hill Babysitting Coop: Celebrating its 50th Year of Community Childcare,” M. Cavanaugh, HillRag, April 2008, pages 118-119. “The Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op: Anecdote or Evidence for the Optimum Quantity of Money?” T. Hens, K. R. Schenk-Hoppé, B. Vogt, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 39(6):1305-1333, 2007. The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, pages 8-11. “Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis,” J. Sweeney, R. J. Sweeney, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 9(1):86-89, 1977.
[traffic jams]
From the point of view of physics, a traffic clot is essentially a shockwave. “Self-sustained nonlinear waves in traffic flow,” M. R. Flynn, A. R. Kasimov, J.-C. Nave, R. R. Rosales, B. Seibold, Physical Review E, 79(5):056113, 2009. The Physics of Traffic: Empirical Freeway Pattern Features, Engineering Applications, and Theory, Boris S. Kerner, Springer, 2004. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, Mitchel Resnick, MIT press, 1994, pages 68-74.
[complex networks]
The study of complex networks is both very old and very new. It’s very old in that many early thinkers have pointed out that gestalts don’t always work the way we expect. It’s very new in that the field studying it formally, complex systems theory, is only about 30 years old. Today it goes by many names (for example: complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, complex network science, self-organizing systems, non-linear dynamical systems theory). It studies how relationships between parts of a system give rise to the system’s self-organizing behaviors. It is interdisciplinary, with applications in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, computer science, and mathematics, as well as more specialized fields like entomology, climatology, geology, neuroscience, molecular biology, immunology, control theory, artificial intelligence, and artificial life, plus economics and various other fields.

It’s growing now because our computers have finally grown strong enough for us to use them to see macroscale patterns that were too big for us to see before. It’s also growing now because we finally know enough to realize that understanding how the parts of a complex network interact is just as important as understanding the parts themselves. And it’s growing now that we realize that an entomologist studying termites may have something to say to a molecular biologist studying mitochondria, who may have something to say to a climatologist studying tornadoes, who may have something to say to a sociologist studying city planning.

It’s still a magpie of a science. It steals ideas from condensed matter physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, embryology, entomology, ecology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, mathematics, and economics. It feathers its nest with that hodge-podge of ideas, trying to find what’s common among them. It’s hoping to answer just one central question: how does order arise out of chaos? It assumes that there’s similarity of origin regardless of whether that order is in cities or crayfish or economies or railway companies. It’s still flailing around in the dark, but the vague outlines of a coherent theory may not be far off. And that theory, if proven true, may one day imply testable things about our future. However, today even the very definition of the word ‘complex’ is unresolved. We don’t yet have a widely accepted way to measure the ‘complexity’ of a system. So we still don’t have a uniform definition of a ‘complex system.’ So it’s still far from a real science.

Our knowledge base is now growing so fast that in recent decades every new scientific field goes through the same cycle. First a few explorers find something of interest. Then there’s a feeding frenzy as many prospectors join the gold rush. After a while, interest wanes as the same prospectors see that the pot of gold is still distant. That speed-up is a side-effect of our growing knowledge base, but the cycle itself is very old. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s in mining or science, finance or the stock market. We all behave exactly the same way, everywhere and everywhen. In the last century that cycle has played out in systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, game theory, catastrophe theory, fractal geometry, and chaos theory. It’s now playing out in complex systems. Each wave washes up some new and pretty shell on the shoreline of our knowledge, but it’s hard to build those shells into a coherent picture. Too much is still missing. “Quantifying Self-Organization with Optimal Predictors,” C. R. Shalizi, K. L. Shalizi, R. Haslinger, Physical Review Letters, 93(11):118701, 2004. Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, Perseus Books Group, 1999. Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics, Remo Badii and Antonio Politi, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John Holland, Addison-Wesley, 1996. Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, David Blitz, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.

[human society as an organism]
That’s hardly an original thought. For example, Herbert Spencer wrote the following in 1876:

“Thus we consistently regard a society as an entity, because, though formed of discrete units, a certain concreteness in the aggregate of them is implied by the general persistence of the arrangements among them throughout the area occupied. And it is this trait which yields our idea of a society. For, withholding the name from an ever-changing cluster such as primitive men form, we apply it only where some constancy in the distribution of parts has resulted from settled life.

But now, regarding a society as a thing, what kind of thing must we call it? It seems totally unlike every object with which our senses acquaint us. Any likeness it may possibly have to other objects, cannot be manifest to perception, but can be discerned only by reason. If the constant relations among its parts make it an entity; the question arises whether these constant relations among its parts are akin to the constant relations among the parts of other entities. Between a society and anything else, the only conceivable resemblance must be one due to parallelism of principle in the arrangement of components.”

The Principles of Sociology, Herbert Spencer, D. Appleton and Company, 1916, page 448. Then followed an entire chapter examining the question (Volume I, Part II, Chapter 2). Spencer primarily saw his ‘super-organism’ as an analogy, intended to point out that society is different from a set of random individuals, but also different from a single organic entity.

Covenant - Chapter 1, Food

[Brecht quote]
The Threepenny Opera. Act II, Scene VI.

Autocatalytic Runaway

[disease killed all the goats]
That’s just a guess, however perhaps not an entirely silly one. Hard evidence places goat domestication first at Ganj Dareh, in the Zagros mountains of modern Iran, only a millennium into the future from 11,600 years ago. “The Initial Domestication of Goats (Capra hircus) in the Zagros Mountains 10,000 years ago.” M. A. Zeder, B. Hesse, Science, 287(5461):2254-2257, 2000. “Age, Sex, and Old Goats,” C. W. Marean, Science, 287(5461):2174-2175, 2000. It’s not impossible that some goats were domesticated much earlier. Mitochrondrial evidence suggests that domestication events for goats were complex and geographically spread out. It seems likely that goats traveled great distances, presumbly by being herded, yet still intermixed with local populations. “Multiple Maternal Origins and Weak Phylogeographic Structure in Domestic Goats,” G. Luikart, L. Gielly, L. Excoffier, J.-D. Vigne, J. Bouvet, P. Taberlet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 98(10):5927-5932, 2001. “Livestock genetic origins: Goats buck the trend,” D. E. MacHugh, D. G. Bradley, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 98(10):5382-5384, 2001.
[hunting and gathering at least 1.8 million years old]
Evidence dates the combination back at least to Homo ergaster, via its use of various hand-axes and cleavers, and the presence of charred animal bones, strongly suggesting hunting, or at least butchery, followed by roasting, in Africa during the late Pliocene. “Human Evolution,” H. M. McHenry, in Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, Michael Ruse (editor), Harvard University Press, 2009, pages 256-280.
[what triggered our first settlements?]
We still don’t know why our first bands decided to settle. Likely it was a complex process taking a long time. Perhaps as the ice retreated the drying climate forced us to stay near rivers. Or perhaps the reverse happened—the melting ice raised sea level by 90 meters (about 300 feet), which would have drowned our lowlying camps and forced our tribes into the hills. Or maybe there was especially good wood or stone or game, and an excellent cave, thereabouts. Or perhaps the geography was especially good in relation to the roaming ranges of other nomad tribes. Or maybe a plague forced some of us to stop roaming. Or perhaps a severe drought drove most game away. It’s even possible that our slowly rising population led to overhunting until things got so bad that we started eating grass all the time. It’s tantalizing, for example, that by 11,000 years ago we’d already colonized most of the world that we could reach. So maybe our population had by then maximized, given the technology of the time, and food competition was thus growing. We don’t know. We’re also, likely, still missing a lot of data. For instance, our first cultivations may have happened millennia before the ones we’ve found so far, but they may have been in low-lying regions. If so, they would today be lost to us as the oceans rose with the melting ice. Perhaps, though, it was because the mutant grass seeds were so easy to harvest, and (at least in the Levant) so densely concentrated. “Yield stability: an agronomic perspective on the origin of Near Eastern agriculture,” S. Abbo, S. Lev-Yadun, A. Gopher, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 19(2):143-150, 2010. “From Foraging To Farming: Explaining The Neolithic Revolution,” J. L. Weisdorf, Journal of Economic Surveys, 19(4):561-586, 2005. First Farmers—The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Peter Bellwood, Blackwell Publishing, 2005. The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, David R. Harris (editor), Smithsonian Books, 1996. Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture, T. Douglas Price and Anne Birgitte Gebauer (editors), School of American Research, 1995.
[timing of early farming]
Debate continues about the exact timing and length of various stages of our neolithic revolution. Currently, the most divisive period is the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), a period of about a millennium where it’s not clear whether we continued our previous hunter-gatherer habits except with more reliance on wild grasses, or whether we settled down but only harvested wild grass varieties. Some recent papers propose a theory of, at least, Near East obligate farming as a result of a mixing of trade routes and early settlement, with subsequent spreading of both in a viable ‘neolithic package’ of technologies and lifestyles and trade arrangements. Origins and Spread of Agriculture in SW Asia and Europe: Archaeobotanical Investigations of Neolithic Plant Economies, W. S. Colledge, J. Conolly, and S. J. Shennnan (editors), University College London Press, 2005. It seems clear, though, that certainly by 10,400 years ago we had settled down in at least a few mountain villages in modern Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Syria, and Turkey, and had begun actively cultivating cereals.
[Dhra’]
Description of the early and later granaries is here: “Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley,” I. Kuijta, W. Finlayson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106(27):10966-10970, 2009. Population estimates are here: “Demography and Storage Systems During the Southern Levantine Neolithic Demographic Transition,” I. Kuijta, in The Neolithic Demographic Transition and Its Consequences, Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Ofer Bar-Yosef (editors), Springer, 2008, pages 287-313.
[Shanidar Cave]
The Proto-Neolithic Cemetery in Shanidar Cave, Ralph S. Solecki, Rose L. Solecki, and Anagnostis P. Agelarakis, Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
[ice-age settlement]
Our first known settlements predate the end of the ice age by about 3,000 years. At that time the earth briefly warmed out of its long cold spell and we started to settle, but we abandoned those settlements when the climate chilled again. In general, before farming, we had some relatively large settlements, but all occurred near coasts or along rivers with large and regular food supplies—oyster beds or salmon runs are typical. But sedentism (staying in one place in large numbers) is not the same as farming (long-term cultivation of the land or oceans). The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Graeme Barker, Oxford University Press, 2009. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Peter S. Bellwood, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. After the Ice: a Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC, Steven Mithen, Harvard University Press, 2004. Neanderthals, Bandits & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, Colin Tudge, Yale University Press, 1998.
[wheat mutants]
Our earliest known settlements were in the Fertile Crescent, a zone of grassland and woodland beginning at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and arching north and east to the Zagros Mountains in modern Iran. Sites primarily cluster in the Zagros, Taurus, and Pontic Mountains of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the Levant, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (primarily Israel and Jordan). From DNA analysis, einkorn wheat probably originated near the Karacadâg mountains in modern Turkey. The seven primary domesticates of the Fertile Crescent were: barley, emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. Of the 56 known species of large-seeded grasses, 32 grow wild in the Mediterranean region. “AFLP Analysis of a Collection of Tetraploid Wheats Indicates the Origin of Emmer and Hard Wheat Domestication in Southeast Turkey,” H. Özkan, A. Brandolini, R. Schâfer-Pregl, F. Salamini, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 19(10):1797-1801, 2002. “Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprinting,” M. Heun, R. Schäfer-Pregl, D. Klawan, R. Castagna, M. Accerbi, B. Borghi, F. Salamini, Science, 278(5341):1312-1314, 1997. The Emergence of Agriculture, Bruce D. Smith, Scientific American Library, 1995. Seed To Civilization: The Story of Food, Charles B. Heiser, Harvard University Press, New Edition, 1990. Forces of Change: An Unorthodox View of History, Henry Hobhouse, Arcade, 1989.
[squash in the Americas]
Until recently, archaeologists thought that Mesoamerica lagged behind Eurasia in its neolithic transition by about 5,000 years. That’s no longer so certain. It now appears that squash was domesticated in what is today southern Mexico around 7,920 (calibrated) years ago. Corn came much later, then beans. It’s possible that Mesoamerican populations domesticated plants long before settling, unlike Eurasian populations. “Reassessing Coxcatlan Cave and the early history of domesticated plants in Mesoamerica,” B. D. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 102(27):9438-9445, 2005. “Documenting Plant Domestication: The Consilience of Biological and Archaeological Approaches,” B. D. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 98(4):1324-1326, 2001. “The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago,” B. D. Smith, Science, 276(5314):932-934, 1997.
[domesticating maize]
Maize may have been domesticated as much as 9,000 years ago. “Directly dated starch residues document early formative maize (Zea mays L.) in tropical Ecuador,” S. Zarrillo, D. M. Pearsall, J. S. Raymond, M. A. Tisdale, D. J. Quon, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 105(13):5006-5011, 2008. “Microfossil evidence for pre-Columbian maize dispersals in the neotropics from San Andrés Tabasco, Mexico,” M. E. D. Pohl, D. R. Piperno, K. O. Pope, J. G. Jones, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 104(16):6870-6875, 2007. Prehistory of the Americas, Stuart J. Fiedel, Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 1992, page 175.
[spread of maize by 1492]
Today, Columbus’ original log is lost, but in 1514 Bartolome de Las Casas summarized it on his first visit to Cuba. On Tuesday, 6th November, 1492, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres returned from an exploration in Cuba noting that, “The land is very fertile and is cultivated with yams and several kinds of beans different from ours, as well as corn.” Quoted in: “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus,” The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985-1503, Original Narratives of Early American History, Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne (editors), Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906, page 142.

For Europeans in North America, maize came to be called ‘Indian corn,’ then simply ‘corn.’ In 1539, Garcilaso de la Vega, part of Hernan de Soto’s expedition in northern Florida and the Carolinas, wrote that, “[We] marched on through some great fields of corn, beans, and squash and other vegetables which had been sown on both sides of the road and were spread out as far as the eye could see across two leagues of plain.” The Florida of the Inca, John and Jeannette Varner (translators and editors), University of Texas Press, 1988.

[watermelon and cow ancestors]
“Diversity and origin of cultivated and citron type watermelon (Citrullus lanatus),” F. Dane, J. Liu, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, 54(6):1255-1265(11), 2007. Retracing the Aurochs: History, Morphology and Ecology of an Extinct Wild Ox, Cis van Vuure, Pensoft Publishers, 2005.
[domesticating animals]
Besides domesticating plants, we also domesticated our fellow animals. From genetic and paleontological evidence it seems that we domesticated them in the following order: dogs perhaps 15,000 years ago, sheep and goats 10,000 years ago, cats, pigs, and cows 8,000 years ago, horses, donkeys, llamas, and alpacas 6,000 years ago, camels 5,000 years ago, and rabbits, chickens, and turkeys between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. The Archaeology of Animals, Simon J. M. Davis, Yale University Press, 1987. (Note: That book came out before modern mitochrondrial dating and several of its dates are wrong, but I don’t know of any comprehensive successor text as yet.) Today all those species can still reproduce on their own, but none of them would exist in the numbers they do without our intervention. Our planet now supports ten thousand million chickens, 1,500 million cows, over a thousand million sheep, 700 million goats, and over 500 million pigs. All those populations are perhaps a thousand times as large as they would be without us. (Of course, they exist in such numbers at the expense of other species.) Today we control their reproduction with selective breeding, hormones, and spaying, and one day, to make them even more suitable as food or pets, we may genetically remove their reproductive ability entirely, just as we in some sense have already done with maize and wheat and seedless grapes.
[rise of slavery]
For an simple economic model of possible incentives for slavery, see “The Roads To and From Serfdom,” N.-P. Lagerlöf, Economics Working Paper, Concordia University, 2002. See also: “Slavery and Other Property Rights,” N.-P. Lagerlöf, Review of Economic Studies, 76(1):319-342, 2008. Capitalism, Socialism, and Serfdom, Evsey D. Domar, Cambridge University Press, 1989, especially chapter 12, which appeared earlier as: “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” E. D. Domar, Economic History Review, 30(1):18-32, 1970.

Slavery can arise even among foragers: if they’re sedentary and have access to a rich food source that rewards intensive labor. One such example is the coastal tribes in the northwest of North America. Their subsistence was based on hunting, gathering, and fishing. They all had a tradition of potlatch. Slavery among them was economically valuable not for primary activities (like fishing) but secondary activities—like drying the fish for storage. Aboriginal slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald, University of California Press, 1997.

These days it’s popular to believe that when we were foragers we likely didn’t take slaves because we were meek and thus didn’t have large wars. Not so. “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” I. J. N. Thorpe, World Archaeology, 35(1):145-165, 2003. Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past, Debra L. Martin and David W. Freyer (editors), Routledge, 1998. Killing or exploiting each other is ancient. It’s simply that it didn’t pay well when we were foragers.

[female fertility]
This anlysis assumes that our early hunter-gatherer lives were similar to modern hunter-gatherers. The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, Robert L. Kelly, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. The biology itself is now beginning to be fairly well understood, though. “Human Ovarian Function and Reproductive Ecology: New Hypotheses,” P. Ellison, American Anthropologist, 92(4):933-52, 1990. From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant and the End of the Ice Age, Donald Henry, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Nisa: The Life and Words of !Kung Woman, Marjorie Shostak, Vintage Books, 1981.
[population expansion]
Settling down also reduces our numbers a bit since crowding, living with livestock, and waste management problems increase disease. Further, more farming time means less foraging time, so farming can narrow our food choices—thus lowering food quality—even as it widens food volume. Shifting our diet from high-protein to high-carbohydrate also increases dental cavities and tooth wear, thus shortening life. Finally, the increased labor of farming stresses our body more, leading to ailments rare for foragers, like arthritis. On balance, though, settlement favors increased population.
[50,000-100,000 year genetic spread]
“The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation,” G. Coop, J. K. Pickrell, J. Novembre, S. Kudaravalli, J. Li, D. Absher, R. M. Myers, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, M. W. Feldman, J. K. Pritchard, Public Library of Science, Genetics, 5(6):e1000500, 2009. Of course, that’s only true for humans (based on the genes we’ve sequenced so far). Different species have different adaptation rates. For example, for guppies, significant adaptation can happen in as litle as 10 years (30 guppy generations), although it’s not yet clear how much of that is genetic rather than epigenetic (that is a non-genetic change in the protein compositions of the cells the genes express themselves in). “Adaptive changes in life history and survival following a new guppy introduction,” S. P. Gordon, D. N. Reznick, M. T. Kinnison, M. J. Bryant, D. J. Weese, K. Räsänen, N. P. Millar, A. P. Hendry, The American Naturalist, 174(1):34-45, 2009.

For recent human genetic change—where ‘recent’ means the last 80,000 years or so—the recent past—see: “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution,” J. Hawks, E. T. Wang, G. M. Cochran, H. C. Harpending, R. K. Moyzis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(52):20753-20758, 2007. “Genome-wide detection and characterization of positive selection in human populations,” P. C. Sabeti, P. Varilly, B. Fry, J. Lohmueller, E. Hostetter, C. Cotsapas, X. Xie, E. H. Byrne, S. A. McCarroll, R. Gaudet, S. F. Schaffner, E. S. Lander, The International HapMap Consortium, Nature, 449(7164):913-918, 2007.

Further, at least two genes that appear to be involved in determining our brain size have undergone strong positive selection recently, and (here’s the politically volatile bit) only among some of our populations. One haplotype of Microcephalin was strongly selected for starting about 37,000 years ago (confidence limit from 14,000 to 60,000 years ago), and a haplotype of ASPM about 5,800 years ago (confidence limit between 500 and 14,100 years). These are extremely recent haplotypes. Neither have spread very far in our African population yet. “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” P. D. Evans, S. L. Gilbert, N. Mekel-Bobrov, E. J. Vallender, J. R. Anderson, L. M. Vaez-Azizi, S. A. Tishkoff, R. R. Hudson, B. T. Lahn, Science, 309(5741):1717-1720, 2005. “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens,” N. Mekel-Bobrov, S. L. Gilbert, P. D. Evans, E. J. Vallender, J. R. Anderson, R. R. Hudson, S. A. Tishkoff, B. T. Lahn, Science, 309(5741):1720-1722, 2005. “Reconstructing the evolutionary history of microcephalin, a gene controlling human brain size,” P. D. Evans, J. R. Anderson, E. J. Vallender, S. S. Choi, B. T. Lahn, Human Molecular Genetics, 13(11):1139-45, 2004.

[farming is very recent]
Eleven millennia is a long time, but not geological terms. It’s been at least six million years since our hominid ancestors diverged from the ancestors of today’s chimpanzees. It’s been at least five million years since they first walked upright. It’s been two and a half million years since they started making stone tools. And perhaps a half million years since they diverged from our most recent cousins, the Neanderthals. But our species, the species of behaviorally modern humans, was born only about 50,000 years ago. We then started farming only about 11,000 years ago.

To get some idea of just how short a time 11,000 years is, most species of just one family of beetles (the leaf beetles) last an average of anywhere from one to 10 million years. (The family is called the Chrysomelidae, within the order Coleoptera). It’s the fourth largest family of beetles. The species life-range figure is from: In Search of Nature, Edward O. Wilson, Island Press, 1996, page 153.) Most vertebrate species, of which we’re one, last for an average of about four million years, so our species is still only a baby as species go. (An average species lifespan of four million years holds only for fossilizable species over the last 600 million years or so. Good enough for government work.) Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? David Raup, W. W. Norton, 1991, page 108.

Changing Phase

[termites have been farmers for 50 million years]
The particular family that the text indirectly refers to here is the fungus-farmers, Macrotermitidea. The Insect Societies, Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University Press, 1971. See also: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, J. Scott Turner, Harvard University Press, 2000, page 179. Turner reports an estimate of 75 to 150 million years, but that seems to be for the termite genera and not for Macrotermitidea, specifically. At least one termite species has been mutualist (that is, carrying and depending on stomach protozoa to digest cellulose) for at least 97 to 110 million years. “Description of an early Cretaceous termite (Isoptera: Kalotermitidae) and its associated intestinal protozoa, with comments on their co-evolution,” G. O. Poinar, Jr., Parasites & Vectors, 2(1):12, 2009.
[our dependence on farming today]
You’re mostly a grass-eater, even if you eat a lot of meat. Nearly 80 percent of all our nutrition comes directly from plants. Of the roughly 400,000 plant species on this planet, we mostly eat only about 30. They give us around 95 percent of all our plant nutrition. Of those 30, 20 grow on about three-quarters of all cultivated land worldwide. They give us roughly 90 percent of all our plant nutrition. Of those 20, eight are cereals. All of them belong to the same genetic family of grasses. Just one of those, rice, alone feeds almost half of all of us alive today. All flesh is indeed grass.

Note though that the figure of 400,000 is a guess. We still don’t know how many plant species there are. “Documenting plant diversity: unfinished business,” P. R. Crane, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London - Series B: Biological Sciences, 359(1444):735-737, 2004. For more recent work just on seed plants, see: “Mega-phylogeny approach for comparative biology: an alternative to supertree and supermatrix approaches,” S. A. Smith, J. Beaulieu, M. J. Donoghue, BMC Evolutionary Biology, 9:37, 2009. They quote a figure of 13,533 for seed plants.

Wheat, barley, rye, and oats belong to the subfamily Pooideae. Maize, sorghum, sugar cane, and most millets belong to the subfamily Panicoideae. Rice belongs to the subfamily Bambusoideae. All are members of the family Poaceae (that is, the true grasses).

[...we got about on foot]
We didn’t tame horses until about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Our picture is still blurry because horses haven’t speciated. There’s little difference between a wild horse, a tamed horse, and a feral horse. However an outer limit for taming of around 6,000 years ago seems safe. “Coat Color Variation at the Beginning of Horse Domestication,” A. Ludwig, M. Pruvost, M. Reissmann, N. Benecke, G. A. Brockmann, P. Castaños, M. Cieslak, S. Lippold, L. Llorente, A.-S. Malaspinas, M. Slatkin, M. Hofreiter, Science, 324(5926):485, 2009. “The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking,” A. K. Outram, N. A. Stear, R. Bendrey, S. Olsen, A. Kasparov, V. Zaibert, N. Thorpe, R. P. Evershed, Science, 323(5919):1332-1335, 2009. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony, Princeton University Press, 2007. Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse, Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle (editors), McDonald Institute, 2003, pages 69-82.
[hunter-gatherers were fit and healthy]
That is, if today’s hunter-gatherers, like the Khoisan in southern Africa, are anything to judge by. The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, Robert L. Kelly, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

At a conference in 1966, one eminent anthropologist called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society” because they (probably) had so much free time. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” M. Sahlins, Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development - Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore, Aldine Publishing Company, 1968, pages 85-89. Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins, Aldine Transaction, 1972. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society, Richard Borshay Lee, Cambridge University Press, 1979. But see also more recent analyses: “After the ‘Affluent Society’: Cost of Living in the Papua New Guinea Highlands According to Time and Energy Expenditure-Income,” P. Sillitoe, Journal of Biosocial Science, 34(4):433-461, 2002. “The darker side of the ‘original affluent society,’ ” D. Kaplan, Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(33):301-324, 2000.

[...dogs to help with the hunt]
That’s just a guess, but not an insane one. Dogs are our oldest tamed species. They descended from gray wolves somewhere between 43,000 and 135,000 years ago. However, for all that time they would have been physically indistinguishable from gray wolves. Their breeding into the physical types that we know today as domestic dogs began happening only around 15,000 years ago. “mtDNA Data Indicates a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, less than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves,” J.-F. Pang, C. Kluetsch, X.-J. Zou, A.-B. Zhang, L.-Y. Luo, H. Angleby, A. Ardalan, C. Ekstr&oulm;m, A. Sköllermo, J. Lundeberg, S. Matsumura, T. Leitner, Y.-P. Zhang, P. Savolainen, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 26(12):2849-2864, 2009. “The canine genome,” E. A. Ostrander, R. K. Wayne, Genome Research, 15(12):1706-1716, 2005. “Genome sequence, comparative analysis and haplotype structure of the domestic dog,” K. Lindblad-Toh, C. M. Wade, T. S. Mikkelsen, E. K. Karlsson, D. B. Jaffe, M. Kamal, M. Clamp, J. L. Chang, E. J. Kulbokas, III, M. C. Zody, E. Mauceli, X. Xie, M. Breen, R. K. Wayne, E. A. Ostrander, C. P. Ponting, F. Galibert, D. R. Smith, P. J. deJong, E. Kirkness, P. Alvarez, T. Biagi, W. Brockman, J. Butler, C.-W. Chin, A. Cook, J. Cuff, M. J. Daly, D. DeCaprio, S. Gnerre, M. Grabherr, M. Kellis, M. Kleber, C. Bardeleben, L. Goodstadt, A. Heger, C. Hitte, L. Kim, K.-P. Koepfli, H. G. Parker, J. P. Pollinger, S. M. J. Searle, N. B. Sutter, R. Thomas, C. Webbe, E. S. Lander, Nature, 438(7069):803-819, 2005. “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs,” P. Savolainen, Y. P. Zhang, J. Luo, J. Lundeberg, T. Leitner, Science, 298(5598):1610-1613, 2002.
[naked apes]
The backhanded reference is to The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, Desmond Morris, Jonathan Cape, 1967.
[...not naked apes...]
Woven clothing in the neolithic is a guess. However, that they had woven clothing (as opposed to the typical image we carry of paleolithic hunters dressed only in hides) is not unlikely since their remote ancestors had cordage and nets, and thus some kind of weaving. The Pavlovian variant of the Gravettian people—who lived scattered over a region stretching from Spain to southern Russia about 29,000 to 22,000 years ago—apparently at least had nets. “Ice Age Communities May Be Earliest Known Net Hunters,” H. Pringle, Science, 277(5330):1203-1204, 1997.

Actual twisted fibers dating to about 18,000 years ago have been found in caves in France. The earliest known evidence of woven fabrics might be Venus figurines carved about 26,000 years ago. Some of them have incised representations of what may be skimpy string skirts, presumably for some symbolic purpose. So twining and plaiting may go back 26 millennia. There’s argument about this particular extrapolation. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing, Mary C. Beaudry, Yale University Press, 2006, pages 45-46 and 90. “Archaeological Textiles: A Review of Current Research,” I. Good, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30:209-226, 2001. “Perishable Technologies and Invisible People: Nets, Baskets, and ‘Venus’ Wear ca. 26,000 B.P.,” O. Soffer, J. M. Adovasio, D. C. Hyland, Enduring Records: The Environmental and Cultural Heritage of Wetlands, Barbara Purdy (editor), pages 233-245, Oxbow Books, 2001. “Upper Palaeolithic fibre technology: interlaced woven finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 years ago,” J. M. Adovasio, O. Soffer, B. Klíma, Antiquity, 70(269):526-34, 1996. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with special reference to the Aegean, E. J. W. Barber, Princeton University Press, 1991.

[tattoos and ornaments]
When we think of hunter-gatherers today, we often imagine a few cold and small tribes. They’re dressed in roughcut hides and they’re wandering lost through desolate, virgin, landscapes. That’s the picture that even serious movies and books typically give us. But that picture may be completely wrong. We had a lot of time on our hands back then and we weren’t stupid. So perhaps we were actually wearing well-tailored clothes with lots of ornaments and tattoos and bodypaint—literally dressed to kill. All that would’ve vanished over the millennia. We may also have carved totems of our passing into every rock face, hillside, riverbank, and tree that we camped nearby, like dogs marking our territory. Over the millennia, such unsheltered signs would’ve weathered away, leaving only the few remains of cave art today. Adorning ourselves or adorning our territory, both may have helped us keep the peace.

Tattoos in the neolithic are a guess. However, a tattooed man existed in the Ötztal Alps 5,300 years ago. There seems to be no reason we couldn’t have tattooed, or at least scarred, ourselves 11,000 years ago, or even 50,000 years ago, or more. “Origin and Migration of the Alpine Iceman,” W. Müller, H. Fricke, A. N. Halliday, M. T. McCulloch, J.-A. Wartho, Science, 302(5646):862-866, 2003. The Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000-year-old Body Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age, Konrad Spindler, translated by Ewald Osers, Harmony Books, 1994.

Incidentally, this particular find has ramified into a murder mystery with new, and so far unpublished, DNA and forensic analysis of the body and its artifacts by Thomas Loy of the University of Queensland. For the same sort of forensics, see: “Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchí, the first ancient body of a man from a North American glacier: reconstructing his last days by intestinal and biomolecular analyses,” J. H. Dickson, M. P. Richards, R. J. Hebda, P. J. Mudie, O. Beattie, S. Ramsay, N. J. Turner, B. J. Leighton, J. M. Webster, N. R. Hobischak, G. S. Anderson, P. M. Troffe, R. J. Wigen, The Holocene, 14(4):481-486, 2004.

Our oldest known figurine is an ivory Venus dated to 35,000 years ago. “A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany,” N. J. Conard, Nature, 459(7244):248-252, 2009. Our earliest probable ornaments may go back at least 82,000 years (and perhaps 110,000 years in the latest unpublished research). “82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior,” A. Bouzouggar, N. Barton, M. Vanhaeren, F. d’Errico, S. Collcutt, T. Higham, E. Hodge, S. Parfitt, E. Rhodes, J.-L. Schwenninger, C. Stringer, E. Turner, S. Ward, A. Moutmir, A. Stambouli, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(24):9964-9969, 2007. “Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa,” C. Henshilwood, F. d’Errico, M. Vanhaeren, K. van Niekerk, Z. Jacobs, Science, 304(5669):404-404, 2004.

Our oldest known ornaments are perforated teeth or eggshell beads from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, and Lebanon, dated between 41,000 and 43,000-years-old, and 40,000-year-old ostrich-shell beads from Kenya. Beads found in Tanzania also appear to be very old, but are so far undated. “Ornaments of the earliest Upper Paleolithic: New insights from the Levant,” S. L. Kuhn, M. C. Stiner, D. S. Reese, E. Güleç, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(13):7641-7646, 2001. “Chronology of the Later Stone Age and Food Production in East Africa,” S. H. Ambrose, Journal of Archaeological Science, 25(4):377-392, 1998. Bead-making may go back at least 100,000 years: “Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Israel and Algeria,” M. Vanhaereny, F. d’Errico, C. Stringer, S. L. James, J. A. Todd, H. K. Mienis, Science, 312(5781):1785-1788, 2006.

The oldest known musical instruments, bone and ivory flutes, are also 35,000 years old. “New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany,” N. J. Conard, M. Malina, S. C. Münzel, Nature, 460(7256):737-740, 2009.

[chewing gum is prehistoric]
“Bulk stable light isotopic ratios in archaeological birch bark tars,” B. Stern, S.J. Clelland, C. C. Nordby, D. Urem-Kotsou, Applied Geochemistry, 21(10):1668-1673, 2006. “Chewing tar in the early Holocene: an archaeological and ethnographic evaluation,” E. M. Aveling, C. Heron, Antiquity, 73(281):579-584, 1999. “Chewing gum bezoars of the gastrointestinal tract,” D. E. Milov, J. M. Andres, N. A. Erhart, D. J. Bailey, Pediatrics, 102(2):e22, 1998.
[urban majority in 2007]
World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2006.
[“sweat of thy face”]
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The Bible, The King James Version, Genesis 3:19.
[Abu Hureyra lifestyle changes]
Abu Hureyra was inhabited in two stages: first during the warm interstadial about 14,000 years ago, and again during the time period mentioned in the text. For brevity, the text collapses the two occupation periods into one. Emmer wheat domestication at Abu Hureyra began around 10,400 years (calibrated) before the present, but the village was already inhabited by around 11,500 years (calibrated) ago. So they spent about a millennium simply gathering, not planting. “The plant food economy of Abu Hureyra 1 and 2: Abu Hureyra 1: the Epipaleolithic,” G. C. Hillman, in Village on the Euphrates: from foraging to farming at Abu Hureyra, A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hillman, and A. J. Legge (editors), Oxford University Press, 2000, pages 327-398.
[...hand-thrown pots]
The potter’s wheel was still 2,500 years into the future.
[...hours each day to grind]
Just as it still does today for the Kababish, one surviving nomadic desert tribe in the Sudan. “The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureyra,” T. Molleson, Scientific American, 271(2):70-75, 1994. A Desert Dies, Michael Asher, Viking, 1986.
[...weaving became a female specialty]
We can deduce that because their skeletons are clustered, and separated from others. Further, their front teeth are grooved, like today’s Paiute basket-weavers, who use their mouths as a third hand when weaving. The grooves come from the continual rubbing of the strands against the teeth. “Dietary change and the effects of food preparation on microwear patterns in the Late Neolithic of Abu Hureyra, northern Syria,” T. Molleson, K. Jones, S. Jones, Journal of Human Evolution, 24(6):455-468, 1993. Today the Paiute live on reservations in Nevada, Arizona, California, Utah, and Oregon, and a few still practice basket-weaving and other traditional skills. A few other native tribes also continue or have restarted basket-weaving, notably the Jicarilla and San Carlos Apaches, the Hualapais, the Hopis, and the Papagos.
[early weaving]
The earliest known direct evidence for weaving (impressions on fired clay of two different kinds of weaves) is from Jarmo, in northeastern Iraq, around 9,000 years ago. “The Textile and Basketry Impressions from Jarmo,” J. M. Adovasio, Paleorient, 3:223-230, 1975-77.
[pottery from weaving?]
This is just a guess, but it’s not impossible that pottery arose from weaving if we first used baskets to keep food, then one day coated a basket of food with mud to heat it in the fire. If we eventually coated the inside of the basket instead of its outside, the basket itself would burn away, leaving a pot. It’s even possible that we later painted pots with stylized patterns simply because our earliest pots, if made as above, would have come out of the fire with basket impressions. Of course, with no hard evidence this is complete guesswork, and by an amateur, too. The point, though, is that just because we today think of an artifact a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s how we thought of it millennia ago when we were first inventing it or its precursors.
[farmers shorter than rovers]
Farming boosted our numbers enormously, but otherwise it was a terrible calamity for our health. A comprehensive study of late paleolithic, mesolithic, and neolithic skeletons in Greece and Turkey found that we lost about 100 to 150 centimeters (about 4 to 6 inches) in height for at least about 5,000 years. More recent studies for northern European settlement show similar patterns. Only today is our species recovering the heights we grew to in the paleolithic: around 1.75 meters (five feet nine inches) for males and around 1.65 meters (five feet five inches) for females. “Health as a Crucial Factor in the Changes from Hunting to Developed Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean,” L. J. Angel, in Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Mark N. Cohen and George J. Armelagos (editors), Academic Press, 1984, pages 51-73. “Stature of early Europeans,” M. Hermanussen, Hormones, 2(3):175-178, 2003.
[acreage for 25 rovers supports 1,000 farmers]
The text chooses a (conservative) 40-fold density increase. The actual figure is unknown since it depends on the efficiency of their farming technology. Estimates are anything between 50 and 100 times as many farmers as rovers. A Concise History of World Population, Massimo Livi-Bacci, translated by Carl Ipsen, Third Revision, Blackwell, 1997, page 27. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Colin Renfrew, Penguin, 1989, page 125.
[first farmers in central Europe]
Those first farmers wiped out or swallowed the hunter-gatherers who lived there at the time. Male farmers fathered, and female hunter-gatherers mothered, most of today’s European population. “A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages,” P. Balaresque, G. R. Bowden, S. M. Adams, H.-Y. Leung, T. E. King, Z. Rosser, J. Goodwin, J.-P. Moisan, C. Richard, A. Millward, A. G. Demaine, G. Barbujani, C. Previderè, I. J. Wilson, C. Tyler-Smith, M. A. Jobling, Public Library of Science, Biology, 8(1):e1000285, 2010. “Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe’s First Farmers,” B. Bramanti, M. G. Thomas, W. Haak, M. Unterlaender, P. Jores, K. Tambets, I. Antanaitis-Jacobs, M. N. Haidle, R. Jankauskas, C.-J. Kind, F. Lueth, T. Terberger, J. Hiller, S. Matsumura, P. Forster, J. Burger, Science, 326(5949):137-140, 2009. “Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age,” W. Haak, G. Brandt, H. N. de Jong, C. Meyer, R. Ganslmeier, V. Heyd, C. Hawkesworth, A. W. G. Pike, H. Meller, K. W. Alt, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(47):18226-18231, 2008. “Isotopic Evidence for Mobility and Group Organization Among Neolithic Farmers At Talheim, Germany, 5000 BC,” T. D. Price, J. Wahl, R. A. Bentley, European Journal of Archaeology, 9(2-3):259-284, 2006. “Warfare in the European Neolithic,” J. Christensen, Acta Archaeologica, 75(2):129-156, 2004. “The Spread of Farming into Europe North of the Alps,” T. D. Price, A. B. Gebauer, L. H. Keeley, in Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture, T. Douglas Price and Anne Birgitte Gebauer (editors), School of American Research Press, 1995, pages 95-126. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Peter S. Bellwood, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, especially Chapter 4. Europe’s First Farmers, T. Douglas Price (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[Amorites in Sumeria]
Contrary to popular myth, thinking of nomads as ‘savages’ didn’t first appear in sixteenth century Europe. It’s far older. Here are the Sumerians writing about one nomad tribe (or confederation of tribes), the Martu (today called the Amorites), over 4,000 years ago: “The Martu who know no grain.... The Martu who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains.... The Martu who digs up truffles... who does not bend his knees [to cultivate the land (?)], who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death...” Who Were the Babylonians? Bill T. Arnold, Society of Biblical Literature, 2004, pages 36-37. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Karen Rhea Nemeth-Nejat, Greenwood Press, 1998, pages 113-116. Sumerian Epics and Myths, Edward Chiera, University of Chicago Press, 1934, Numbers 58 and 112. Incidentally, the bible refers to the (by then settled) Amorites living in Canaan as being tall. “Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath.” Of course, that may merely be a poetic way to say that they were hard to defeat. The Bible, The King James Version, Amos 2:9. See also Deuteronomy 3:11.
[Hyksos in Egypt]
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw (editor), Oxford University Press, 2000. The Rise and Fall of the Middle Kingdom in Thebes, Herbert E. Winlock, Macmillan, 1947.
[...rovers were swallowed]
That’s assuming, of course, that the rovers didn’t simply kill everyone there. That’s rare (at least, in recorded history), but it did happen. For example, in the thirteenth century the Mongols (who were horse-riding nomads) started to ride under Genghis Khan. (Note: ‘Genghis Khan’ is more properly transliterated as ‘Chinggis Khan’). They terrorized and razed to the ground many villages, towns, and cities, killing everyone there. Then they discovered the idea of taxation. Even then, they still did it occasionally to keep the terror level up and the taxes rolling in. For example, they sacked Baghdad in 1258, taking all the women and children and killing every adult male Muslim there—perhaps 800,000 to 1 million men. Basically, it was one giant protection racket. Probably not our first. And definitely not our last. Storm from the East: From Genghis Khan to Khubilai Khan, Robert Marshall, University of California Press, 1993. Genghis Khan, R. P. Lister, Dorset, 1969.
[consequences of population rise]
Any tool that ramps up our ability to gather food reliably can increase our birthrate. It needn’t be a sickle for grain plants. It could be woven traps for shellfish. Or fishing nets for salmon runs. Or using torches to stampede bison off a cliff. If it also forces us to settle, then the more our numbers rise, the more we must depend on our new food source. The more dependent we are, the more precarious our lives become. We can find only so many calories given our current toolbase. The advantages of settlement and intensive food production rise. Autocatalysis then drives our birthrate up so much that over time we cultivate even marginal foods. So when the next climate change, or plant blight, or other food catastrophe hits, we’re always caught with our populations rising. We only break out of that millennia-long feast-famine cycle when we discover some new knowledge about the cosmos, then use it to build new tools to make our food supply yet more reliable. That’s been our life for the last 11,000 years, all because we settled down.

Eat Your Heart Out

[Medieval peasant food]
The Medieval Village, G. G. Coulton, 1925, Dover reprint, 1989. For a more recent survey, but set only in England in the year 1000, see: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At the Turn of the First Millennium, Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, Little, Brown, 1999.
[English prices in 1300]
Wheat was 6s. a quarter; oats, 3s.; a cow, 12s. 6d.; a sheep, 1s. 2d.; a fat hog, 3s. 4d.; a fat goose, 2½d.; eggs 0½d a dozen; wine, 4d. a gallon; ale, 0½d. a gallon; a labourer’s wages 1½d. a day, in harvest time 2d.; a journeyman carpenter, 2d. a day; a horse for military service, 13s. 4d.; a pair of shoes, 4d.; an English slave and his family were sold for 13s. 4d.; a Bible was worth £33 6s. 8d. The History of Bradford and Its Parish: With Additions and Continuation to the Present Time, John James, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1841, page 60 and pages 74-75, footnote. For similar prices in near-contemporary Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Manchester, see also: History, Directory, and Gazetteer, of the County Palatine of Lancaster: With a Variety of Commercial & Statistical Information in Two Volumes, Illustrated by Maps and Plans, Edward Baines and W. Parson, Wm. Wales & Co., 1824, page 24. The Parochial History of Bremhill, in the County of Wilts: Containing a Particular Account, from Authentic and Unpublished Documents, of the Cistercian Abbey of Stanley in that Parish; with Observations and Reflections on the Origin and Establishment of Parochial Clergy, and other Circumstances of General Parochial Interest, Including Illustrations of the Origin and Designation of the Stupendous Monuments of Antiquity in the Neighbourhood, Avebury, Silbury, and Wansdike, W. L. Bowles, John Murray, 1828, page 17. Remains, Historical and Literary, Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester, Volume LVI, The Chetham Society, The Chetham Society, 1861, pages 399-400, footnote.
[bread for the rich and for the poor]
“Les labourers d’antiquité / Ne furont pas acoustummé / A manger le pain du frument, / Ainçois du feve et d’autre blé / Leur pain estoit, et abevré / De l’eaue furont ensement, / Et lors fuist leur festoiement / Formage et lait, mais rerement.” (“The laborers of olden days were not accustomed to eat wheaten bread. Their bread was of bean paste(?) and other grain; and likewise they quenched their thirst with water. And then their festive fare was cheese and milk, but that was rare.”) Mirour de l’Omme, lines 26449-26456, John Gower (a friend of Chaucer), writing around 1376 to 1379. Quoted in: “The Function of Food in Mediaeval German Literature,” G. F. Jones, Speculum, 35(1):78-86, 1960. See also: Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies, Harper & Row, 1990, pages 98 and 198. After the Black Death began decimating Medieval Europe starting in 1347, so many died that food became plentiful for a time, and surviving peasants began to eat better.
[salt as money]
The word ‘salary’ comes down to us from the Latin for ‘salt money.’ Pliny credits it as the source of the name for what Roman soldiers were paid: salarium. Natural History, Pliny the Elder, Book 31, part 41. Salt is still in use as money in some parts of the world today.
[Europe’s Great Famine]
In 1314, European weather, after four centuries of relative mildness, turned cold and wet. All that summer, crops, pelted by rain, rotted in the fields. Harvests were poor, and food prices rose. Spring brought months of storms and heavy rains. Dikes in England collapsed. Fields washed away in France. Rising rivers drowned villages in Germany. Crops failed from Ireland to Poland, from Scandinavia to Italy. In England the price of wheat rose eightfold. Both fodder and grain, covered in fungus, rotted in the damp haybarns and storage sheds. In heavy-clay regions, waterlogged fields rotted the standing crops even when the sun managed to shine. Continual rain leached nitrates from the soil, leaving it poor even when better weather returned. Disease then killed the cold, wet, and hungry livestock. Fewer oxen meant less plowed land, and less manure for the fields. Fewer oxen also meant less transport, so even if one village did well its grain couldn’t reach nearby villages.

Another bitter winter followed. The Baltic iced over and ships froze in place. That spring, torrential rains returned, turning roads to mires and waterways to rivers, further blocking food transport. In Hungary, the Danube, the principal transport corridor for continental Europe, flooded, washing away fields and villages. The sporadic war between France and Flanders, ongoing since 1297, worsened the crisis as armies stole draft animals and added banditry to their list of job skills. Europe began to fall apart. Peasants stumbled across the countryside, begging for food. The urban poor, unable to forage, suffered even more—or so say the chroniclers, but then most of them lived in towns. As among the cattle, disease then spread, killing rich and poor alike. Robbery and murder increased. So did food riots. In war-torn regions like Ireland and the Scottish border, graveyards were reportedly mined for fresh corpses. Corpses of the hanged were apparently cut down from their gibbets and eaten. Jailed convicts ceased to be fed and allegedly ate new prisoners alive. Families were said to eat their dead. Many chronicles even speak of parents killing their children for food.

Jordan estimates 30 million for the affected European population, with three million dead in the first three years. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, William Chester Jordan, Princeton University Press, 1996. Livi-Bacci, though, estimates that Europe as a whole contained that many as far back as the year 1000. However, although Livi-Bacci estimates 74 million for all Europe, it is for 1340 not 1314, and may include parts of Europe not visited by the 1314 famine. A Concise History of World Population, Massimo Livi-Bacci, translated by Carl Ipsen, Third Revision, Blackwell, 1997.

[Famine in England]
England alone had suffered famine in 1257, 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311. “In the eleventh and twelfth centuries famine [in England] is recorded every fourteen years, on an average, and the people suffered twenty years of famine in two hundred years. In the thirteenth century the list exhibits the same proportion of famine; the addition of high prices made the proportion greater. Upon the whole, scarcities decreased during the three following centuries; but the average from 1201 to 1600 is the same, namely, seven famines and ten years of famine in a century.” Quoted in: “The Influence of Scarcities and of the High Prices of Wheat on the Mortality of the People of England,” William Farr, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, IX, page 158, February 16, 1846.

If we take grain prices as a proxy for poor harvests, then regular famine appears to have been common all over the world and for all recorded time. Although, such price evidence may be good only for Western Europe in the recent past, with waves of inflation occurring in the thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 1999.

[medieval bones]
“Biocultural analysis of Sex Differences in Mortality Profiles and Stress Levels in the Late Medieval Population from Nova Raca, Croatia,” M. Slaus, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 111(2):193-209, 2000. “A Biomechanical Study of Activity Patterns in a Medieval Human Skeletal Assemblage,” S. Mays, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 9(1):68-73, 1999. “Dry Bones: a Paleopathological Study of Skeletal Remains from a Medieval Graveyard in Dundee,” R. N. Spalding, D. J. Sinclair, A. Cox, K. D. Morley, Scottish Medical Journal, 41(2):56-59, 1996.

Note however that paleopathology and paleodemography are still very young fields, with many of their research agendas, tools, and methods still in flux. In particular, any studies that claim anything about disease prevalence, or overall mortality statistics for any not-provably stationary populations, should be approached with caution. “The Osteological Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples,” J. W. Wood, G. R. Milner, H. C. Harpending, K. M Weiss, Current Anthropology, 33(4):343-370, 1992.

[possessions of a rich peasant]
From an inventory taken in 1329, upon the death of a villein named William Lene, who lived in Walsham manor, in Suffolk. An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press, 2005, page 26. Plantagenet England, 1225-1360, Michael Prestwich, Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 457-458.
[enough land to feed ourselves]
Dyer estimates that, at least in England between 1280 and 1480, given the technology available at the time, 12-15 acres was needed. In 1280, in the east midlands, at least 42 percent of households didn’t have that much. In 1480, about a third still didn’t. An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press, 2005, page 175. Prestwich details land holdings in Norfolk between 1220 and 1292. At Hinderclay in 1300 the average holding was seven acres. But some were as large as 30 acres while others were as small as two acres or less. Plantagenet England, 1225-1360, Michael Prestwich, Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 455-456.

Note: the practice of selling tenants along with land, or of selling families separate from land, wasn’t restricted to Europe in 1300. For example, the same thing was common China at about the same time. The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Mark Elvin, Stanford University Press, 1973, pages 71-73.

[Balzac quote]
“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.” (“The secret of a great fortune without obvious cause is a forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done properly.”) Le Père Goriot, Honoré de Balzac, Airmont, Reprint Edition, 1965, page 132.
[Congolese genocide]
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild, Mariner Books, 1999.

Seeds of the Future

[atmospheric carbon dioxide]
Its concentration is less than one 25th of one percent.
[kilocalorie]
Often miscalled a ‘calorie’ in the United States (but not Europe). Also often called a ‘large calorie.’ A kilocalorie, or kilogram calorie, or large calorie, is the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. It’s 1,000 ‘small’ calories, or gram calories.
[...burn a further 87 percent]
In 1977, Americans got from food roughly 13 percent of the energy used to grow, process, transport, sell, and prepare it. Energy and Food: Energy used in Production, Processing, Delivery, and Marketing of Selected Food Items, Anne Pierotti, A. Keeler, and A. Fritsch, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Energy Series Number 10, 1977. Extending the figure to today may seem problematic because that would assume that world farming is comparable to farming in the United States (which it isn’t, since Americans eat so much more processed foods), and that today’s figures are comparable with 1970s figures (which it may not be, since the price of oil had spiked after 1973 and the report gives no date for its data so it could easily have been taken at the peak of the OPEC oil embargoes). However, an expert on agronomy, Richard C. Fluck, believes that it’s probably not far wrong. (Personal communication.) Although technology has improved since the 1970s, largely thanks to precision farming, pressure for improvement has also been nearly flat since then as oil prices had remained relatively low for all that time. “Energy Use in the U.S. Food System: a summary of existing research and analysis,” J. Hendricksen, Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995. Energy in Farm Production, R. C. Fluck (editor), Elsevier, 1992.
[crop losses before harvest]
“Crop Losses to Animal Pests, Plant Pathogens, and Weeds,” E.-C. Oerke, in Encyclopedia of Pest Management, Volume II, David Pimentel (editor), CRC Press, 2007, pages 116-120.
[wasted edible food]
“Weekly food waste collections can benefit the environment and save money,” News Release, March 27th, 2008, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, United Kingdom Government, 2008. “Estimating household and institutional food wastage and losses in the context of measuring food deprivation and food excess in the total population,” R. Sibri´n, Komorowska, J. Mernies, Working Paper Number ESS/ESSA/001e, Statistics Division, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2006. “Household Refuse Food Loss,” T. Jones, S. Dahlen, K. Cisco, B. McKee, A. Bockhorst, Report to the United States Department of Agriculture, 2002. “Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System,” M. C. Heller, G. A. Keoleian, Report Number CSS00-04, Center for Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment, The University of Michigan, 2000, page 37. “Estimating and Addressing America’s Food Losses,” L. Scott Kantor, K. Lipton, A. Manchester, V. Oliveira, Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, 1997. “Household food wastage in Britain,” R. W. Wenlock, D. H. Buss, B. J. Derry, E. J. Dixon, British Journal of Nutrition, 43(1):53-70, 1980.
[expensive animal protein]
About 1,700,000 kilocalories of solar energy hit a square meter of earth per year. On land, just 20,810 kilocalories will be transferred to plants. Of that, 3,368 will be transferred to direct consumers, like cattle; and of that, 383 will be transferred to first level carnivores, like us. So for every 100 kilocalories of energy that hits a plant, 1.2 are available to cattle, and 0.12 are available to us. The conversion efficiencies are about 1.2 percent for converting energy to plants, 6 percent for converting plants to animals, and 10 percent for converting animals to other animals. So if you eat an animal you get 0.072 percent of the original solar energy, whereas eating a plant gives you 0.72 percent—ten times as much—of the original energy. Living in the Environment: Principles, Connections, and Solutions, G. Tyler Miller, Brooks Cole, Twelfth Edition, 2002, page 85.
[meat consumption in the United States]
“Food Consumption,” Briefing Room Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, 2007.
[grains of rice per pound]
There are many varieties of rice and their grains vary widely in weight—anywhere from 6 to 77 milligrams. However, average grain weights are in the 20-30 milligram range. So taking 25 milligrams as an average estimate, there are about 18,000 grains per pound. “A rice line with very large grain obtained by pyramiding genic effects,” T. Takita, N. Takahashi, Rice Genetics Newsletter, 5:109-110, 1988.
[energy cost of nitrogen fertilizer]
“Prairie Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development,” Program: Prairie Sard. Reports on Development of a Program for Research and Action Towards More Economically and Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development for Western Canada, The Canadian Agriculture New Uses Council, CANUC, Bulletin Number 6, 2001. This particular study was about including alfalfa in rotations at Winnipeg, Manitoba, to reduce nitrogen fertilizer costs. Incidentally, to make that 80 pounds of fertilizer per acre in the first place, we needed at least 1,428 cubic feet of natural gas. That, too, costs energy to find, make, process, and transport.
[applesauce is three times more expensive than apples]
“Energy Efficiency and Environmental News: Food to Energy,” July 1992. Florida Energy Extension Service newsletter, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida.
[plants don’t extract nitrogen from the air]
That’s strange because plants colonized the land at least 425 million years ago. That’s the latest lower estimate, based on genetic evidence. Previously, the best estimate (and the one in all the texts) was between 480 to 460 million years ago, based on the earliest land plant fossils found. That surely should have given them enough time to figure it out. Why they didn’t is a mystery. “Molecular Timescale of Evolution in the Proterozoic,” S. B. Hedges, F. U. Battistuzzi, J. E. Blair, in Neoproterozoic Geobiology and Paleobiology, Shuhai Xiao and Alan J. Kaufman (editors), Springer, 2006, pages 199-229. “The plant tree of life: an overview and some points of view,” J. D. Palmer, D. E. Soltis, M. W. Chase, American Journal of Botany, 91(10):1437-1445, 2004. “Molecular data from 27 proteins do not support a Precambrian origin of land plants,” M. J. Sanderson, American Journal of Botany, 90(6):954-956, 2003. “A methodological bias toward overestimation of molecular evolutionary time scales,” F. Rodríguez-Trelles, R. Tarrío, F. J. Ayala, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(12):8112-8115, 2002. “Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants,” D. S. Heckman, D. M. Geiser, B. R. Eidell, R. L. Stauffer, N. L. Kardos, S. B. Hedges, Science, 293(5532):1129-1133, 2001.
[plants and nitrogen fixation]
Legumes, like peas, beans, soybean, peanut, lentil, alfalfa, and clover, aren’t the only plants that form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing microbes, however at present they’re the most important ones for our food supply. We don’t know why most plants aren’t rhizobia symbionts. We don’t even know why plants don’t simply fix nitrogen themselves. Perhaps it’s simple competition. Nitrogen-fixation, or simply facilitating nitrogen-fixation as symbionts do, takes energy. Plants that don’t bother may grow faster or grow bigger. On the other hand, such symbionts have a huge advantage as they can grow anywhere, whereas most plants can only grow in nitrogen-rich soil. All we know for sure right now is that the situation is complicated. “Holy alliances?” B. Osborne, New Phytologist, 175(4):602-605, 2007. “Host sanctions and the legume-rhizobium mutualism,” E. T. Kiers, R. A. Rousseau, S. A. West, R. F. Denison, Nature, 425(6953):78-81, 2003. Rhizobia symbiosis may have arisen during a period where there was a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere (about 60 million years ago). But why it didn’t take over is unknown. “Evolving ideas of legume evolution and diversity: a taxonomic perspective on the occurrence of nodulation,” New Phytologist, J. I. Sprent, 174(1):11-25, 2007. We now know that legumes have a gene that trigger the formation of nodules, which then encourage nitrogen-fixing bacteria to come live there. That gene can be transplanted to another legume and it too will become nitrogen-fixing. “Nodulation independent of rhizobia induced by a calcium-activated kinase lacking autoinhibition,” C. Gleason, S. Chaudhuri, T. Yang, A. Muñoz, B. W. Poovaiah, G. E. D. Oldroyd, Nature, 441(7097):1149-1152, 2006.
[acerage covered by smart seeds]
Of that land area, about 87 percent is in the United States. Argentina, Canada, and China make up most of the rest. “Transgenic Crops,” J. Schahczenski, K. Adam, in Biotechnology: Perspectives & Prospects, C. P. Malik, Chitra Wadhwani, and Bhavneet Kaur (editors), MD Publications, 2008. See also: ATTRA Publication #IP189, National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, 2006. Agricultural Statistics Board National Agricultural Statistics Service Agricultural Statistics Board, United States Department of Agriculture, 2005.
[mining plants]
The multicellular photosynthetic autotrophs we call plants didn’t spend their last 425 million years on land just sunbathing. They adapted to varying soil and rainfall conditions. They’ve also adapted to variations in cloud cover, temperature, and humidity; to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air; and to many pests. Although our monoculture farming has weeded out most of that variation, it hasn’t gone away. It’s still there in our plants’ wild cousins. As we learn more about their genetic heritage, we may make hybrids with all those survival smarts built in. Such smart crops would then be hardy over wide variations in soil and climate. A future wheat grain, then, might adapt to widely varying conditions. We may not need to do much of anything to help it along. We could cover deserts with such wheat. One day we may just sow and reap. Then, as the economics of robots permit, we might replace ourselves even there.
[use of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides would drop]
Plants, not being fools, are already chemical warfare combat veterans. They’re already armed to the teeth with bioweapons in far larger amounts than the little we add. When we eat a chili pepper, for example, what burns our mouth is capsaicin. It’s a neurotoxin.

Since plants can’t run away, millions of years before we started meddling with them they protected themselves from being eaten by lacing their bodies with all sorts of poisons: antibiotics, fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides—from which we made nearly all of our earliest poisons, perfumes, medicines, and spices.

Today, our perception of risk from our food is severely distorted. Each day, the average American, for example, eats about 10,000 times more plant-generated pesticides than artificial ones. One gram of roasted coffee, for instance, contains about 59 milligrams of chlorogenic acid, neochlorogenic acid, caffeic acid, and caffeine—all toxins, and all put there by the coffee plant, not us. (However, artificial pesticides are still undesirable because being sprayed on, not built-in, they run off easily and collect in aquifers.) Cooking our food adds further toxicity by producing about two grams per person per day of burnt material that contains many rodent carcinogens: polycyclic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic amines, furfural, nitrosamines, and nitroaromatics, as well as many mutagens. Further, many plant toxins are cumulative. Potatoes, for example, contain fat-soluble neurotoxins detectable in the bloodstream of all potato eaters. Potatoes are relatively new to our species, so our genes haven’t yet had time to evolve ways to fully detoxify them.

We don’t drop dead (usually) when we drink coffee and eat some potato chips because all plant-eaters have evolved ways to detect harmful plants and avoid them, or have evolved ways to detoxify a few plant poisons. In our case, we’ve selectively amplified only those few plant cultivars and those ways of preparing food from them that haven’t immediately killed us in the past. For example, cassava (a starchy tuber like the potato and the chief component of tapioca) feeds over 400 million of us in the tropics, but it also contains cyanide. We’ve learned, presumably by long trial and error, how to boil it to reduce the poison to trace amounts. Rhubarb leaves, apple seeds, almonds, lima beans, potato skins, avocado skins, cherry pits—even too much nutmeg in your eggnog—all can kill. “What Do Animal Cancer Tests Tell Us About Human Cancer Risk?: Overview of Analyses of the Carcinogenic Potency Database,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. N. Ames, Drug Metabolism Reviews, 30(2):359-404, 1998. “Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. R. Stern, N. B. Manley, B. N. Ames, Science, 258(5080):261-265, 1992.

[kudzu]
In the southern United States, kudzu is sometimes called ‘the vine that ate the south.’ A legume, it will grown even on eroded soils, and was imported from Japan in 1876 then, with government help, it grew like a fungus. It can grow up to 300 centimeters (about a foot) a day, and will often smother even large trees simply by outgrowing them. “Kudzu: Where did it come from? And how can we stop it?” J. H. Miller, E. Boyd, Southern Journal of Applied Forestry, 7(3):165-169, 1982.
[a new superweed]
Despite conspiracy theories about mad scientists deep in military bunkers, we won’t be deliberately aiming to create a superweed, but nature is too wily for us to predict precisely what will happen to any plant, transgenic or not. Unintended pollen flow has already resulted in some unduly resistant weeds. “A Field Study of Pollen-Mediated Gene Flow from Mediterranean GM rice to Conventional Rice and the Red Rice Weed,” J. Messeguer, V. Marfa, M. M. Catala, E. Guiderdoni, E. Mele, Molecular Breeding, 13(1):103-112, 2004. “Gene Flow in Commercial Fields of Herbicide-Resistant Canola (Brassica napus),” H. J. Beckie, S. I. Warwick, H. Nair, G. Séguin-Swartz, Ecological Applications, 13(5):1276-1294, 2003. “Gene Flow Between Red Rice (Oryza. sativa) and Herbicide-Resistant Rice (O. sativa): Implications for Weed Management,” D. R. Gealy, D. H. Mitten, J. N. Rutger, Weed Technology, 17(3):627-645, 2003.

The Food Factory

[water content of various foods]
Bowes and Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used, Jean A. T. Pennington, J. B. Lippincott Co., Sixteenth Edition, 1994.
[farming’s water use]
“To produce 1 kilogram [2.2 pounds] of wheat, 1 cubic meter [264 gallons] of water is needed. It takes at least 1.2 cubic meters [317 gallons] of water to produce 1 kilogram of rice... Agriculture is by far the biggest water user, accounting for some 70 percent of all water withdrawals (industry: 20 percent, domestic: 10 percent). While the daily drinking water needs of humans are very small - four litres [about 1 gallon] per person - the water required to produce a person’s daily food is much higher: it varies between 2000 and 5000 litres [528 to 1321 gallons].” Unlocking the Water Potential of Agriculture, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2003. See also: “Review of measured crop water productivity values for irrigated wheat, rice, cotton and maize,” S. J. Zwart, G. M. Bastiaanssen, Agricultural Water Management, 69(2):115-133, 2004. For the figures on evaporation loss for farm irrigation, see: Challenges to International Waters; Regional Assessments in a Global Perspective, United Nations Environment Programme, 2006.
[raising a lamb is water-expensive]
The calculation is crude as it requires several approximations and conversions. In Ontario, average market-weight ranges for lambs are from 40 to 50 kilograms (88 to 110 pounds). Lambs are typically 5 to 8 months old at time of slaughter. “Market Lamb Nutrition: Factsheet,” C. Wand, and “Benchmarks for a Good Lamb Crop: Performance Targets for Replacement Ewe Lambs,” A. O’Brien, Food and Rural Affairs, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Government of Canada, 2003. In Britain, raising one gram of lamb needs about 15 liters of water. Future of Food, George Alagiah, BBC documentary, 2009.
[percentage consumption of irrigation in India and China]
See also: “Freshwater biodiversity: importance, threats, status and conservation challenges,” D. Dudgeon, A. H. Arthington, M. O. Gessner, Z. Kawabata, D. J. Knowler, C. Leveque, R. J. Naiman, A. H. Prieur-Richard, D. Soto, M. L. Stiassny, C. A. Sullivan, Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 81(2):163-82, 2006. “Global Water Crisis, the Major Issue of the 21st Century,” H. F. L. Saeijs, M. J. Van Berkel, European Water Pollution Control, 5(4):26-40, 1995.
[global water resource use]
Factsheet on Water and Sanitation, United Nations World Health Organization, 2008. See also: Water for Life, United Nations World Health Organization, 2005, page 40.
[global landuse]
Figures are as of 1990. Farming activities take about 18 million square kilometers (4.4 thousand million acres). Grazing land takes about 33 million square kilometers (8.1 thousand million acres). “Estimating global land use change over the past 300 years: The HYDE Database,” K. Klein Goldewijk, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 15(2):417-433, 2001. “Global Vegetation and Land Use: New High-Resolution Data Bases for Climate Studies,” E. Matthews, Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, 22(3):474-487, 1983.
[15 million acres a year]
That is, 6 million hectares annually. Global Diversity Outlook 2, Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Environment Programme, 2006
[topsoil loss]
One reliable estimate is 1,150 tons per kilometer square per year. That’s about 0.38 millimeters a year globally, with much of the loss concentrated in southeast Asia. About 60 percent of it is anthropogenic, and almost all of that is via farming. “Global potential soil erosion with reference to land use and climate changes,” D. Yang, S. Kanae, T. Oki, T. Koike, K. Musiake, Hydrological Processes, 17(14):2913-2928, 2002. “Global Soil Loss Estimate using RUSLE Model: The Use of Global Spatial Datasets on Estimating Erosive Parameters,” T. N. Pham, D. Yang, S. Kanae, T. Oki, K. Musiake, Annual Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, JSCE, 45:811-816, 2001.
[urban landuse]
Although the overall percentage of land being used by cities and industry is tiny compared to farm use, cities grow where people settle, which originally meant the most arable land. So although cities consume far less land than farms, they still cover a significant fraction of arable farmland. How much exactly is unknown. “Assessing the Impact of Urban Sprawl on Soil Resources in the United States Using Nighttime ‘City Lights’ Satellite Images and Digital Soils Maps,” M. L. Imhoff, W. T. Lawrence, D. Stutzer, C. Elvidge, Perspectives on the Land-Use History of North America: a Context for Understanding our Changing Environment, T. D. Sisk (editor), United States Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, Biological Science Report USGS/BRD/BSR 1998-0003, Revised 1999.
[today’s mass extinctions]
A common figure of about 100 species a day is common. It’s a total guess. The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and its Survival, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Doubleday, 1995. Leakey’s estimates have been challenged by, among others, the late Julian Simon. The Ultimate Resource 2, Julian Simon, Princeton University Press, 1998. The core problem is that we don’t even know how many species are on earth now, far less how many are being lost per day. At a talk given in Cape Town in 2001, Leakey upped his estimate to “between 50,000 and 100,000 plant, insect, and animal species a year” but gave no evidence to support his claim. By some environmentalist guesstimates, about 24 percent of mammal species, 11 percent of bird species, and 3 percent of fish species are thought to be threatened. World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life, World Resources Institute, 2000, pages 246-248. E. O. Wilson estimates that there are between 10 million and 100 million species on the planet. The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson, W. W. Norton, Reissue Edition, 1999.
[overfishing]
Estimates are that industrial fisheries typically reduce community biomass by 80 percent within 15 years. “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” B. Worm, R. Hilborn, J. K. Baum, T. A. Branch, J. S. Collie, C. Costello, M. J. Fogarty, E. A. Fulton, J. A. Hutchings, S. Jennings, O. P. Jensen, H. K. Lotze, P. M. Mace, T. R. McClanahan, C. Minto, S. R. Palumbi, A. M. Parma, D. Ricard, A. A. Rosenberg, R. Watson, D. Zeller, Science, 325(5940):578-585, 2009. “Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities,” R. A. Myers, B. Worm, Nature, 423(6937):280-283, 2003.
[slowing decay]
We already use vacuum desiccation and radiation. Some cyanobacteria can desiccate, be preserved for years at room temperature, then be rehydrated to life. Scientists have applied that genetic trick—basically, coating with glycan—to human kidney cells, which were dried then revived eight days later. Half of them survived. “Active Fe-Containing Superoxide Dismutase and Abundant sodF mRNA in Nostoc commune (Cyanobacteria) after Years of Desiccation,” B. Shirkey, D. P. Kovarcik, D. J. Wright, G. Wilmoth, T. F. Prickett, R. F. Helm, E. M. Gregory, M. Potts, Journal of Bacteriology, 182(1):189-197, 2000.
[seven or so elements]
In order, the big four are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Then the next five are: phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. Other elements occur only in trace amounts in most living things. Also: sulfur, calcium, and magnesium are usually abundant in soils, so they mostly aren’t needed in plant fertilizers.
[albumin]
Strictly speaking, ‘albumin’ is really a whole family of proteins, one of which is ovalbulmin, the principal protein in egg whites.
[genes and proteins]
Figuring out proteins (‘proteomics’) is far harder than figuring out genes (‘genomics’). We have roughly 25,000 genes, but an unknown number of proteins. There’s as yet no known mapping between our genes (the description of what does stuff in our bodies) and our proteins (the things that actually do stuff in our bodies). First, genes exist in separated blocks (called exons) on the genome. Those blocks can be put together in different ways to yield different proteins. (That’s called alternative splicing.) Second, on production, some proteins can alter themselves depending on their own structure. That’s called post-translational modification, or PTM.) Third, some genes can, in concert with others, produce multiple proteins. And all of those interactions can depend on which proteins have been expressed in our cells recently, and which are being expressed now. For some general background, see: Gene Regulation - A Eukaryotic Perspective, David S. latchman, Taylor & Francis, Fifth Revised Edition, 2005. We now know that even the same protein can have multiple different functions in different circumstances. For example, Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase has many different functions, perhaps as many as nine. These are so called ‘moonlighting’ proteins.
[protein is more than half our dry weight]
Estimates for a 70-kilogram elderly male (a Caucasian cadaver) are 42 kilograms of water, 12 kilograms of fat, 12 kilograms of protein, and decreasing amounts of glycogen, calcium, and phosphorus plus trace amounts of other elements, starting with potassium and sodium, then decreasing with chlorine, magnesium, iron, zinc, and copper. “Composition of the body,” J. S. Garrow, in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, J. S. Garrow, W. P. T. James, and A. Ralph (editors), Elsevier Health Sciences, 2000, pages 13-23.
[tweaking organisms]
We’re now in the early stages of synthetic biology. We’ve engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to use an artificial amino acid, to build artificial proteins that it can use to sniff out TNT, serotonin, and lactate, to build anti-malaria and anti-cancer drugs, to build itself a simple biological clock, to build itself a simple memory (a toggle switch), and to build itself simple digital circuits. We’ve also built viruses from scratch, and have created artificial DNA with six base pairs instead of four. And we’ve turned E. coli into a diesel producer (no papers yet; done at the startup, LS9 under the direction of Stephen del Cardayre). Here are some recent papers. “Development of Genetic Circuitry Exhibiting Toggle Switch or Oscillatory Behavior in Escherichia coli,” M. R. Atkinson, M. A. Savageau, J. T. Myers, A. J. Ninfa, Cell, 113(5):597-607, 2003. “Generating a synthetic genome by whole genome assembly: φX174 bacteriophage from synthetic oligonucleotides,” H. O. Smith, C. A. Hutchison, III, C. Pfannkoch, J. C. Venter, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(26):15440-15445, 2003. “Teaching bacteria a new language,” Y. Gerchman, R. Weiss, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(8):2221-2222, 2004. “Microbes Made to Order,” D. Ferber, Science, 303(5655):158-161, 2004. “Programmable cells: Interfacing natural and engineered gene networks,” H. Kobayashi, M. Kærn, M. Araki, K. Chung, T. S. Gardner, C. R. Cantor, J. J. Collins, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(22):8414-8419, 2004.
[Quorn]
Has been on sale since 1994, primarily to the vegetarian market. It’s made from the fungus Fusarium venenatum. As of 2006, it’s only sold in Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland.
[meat sheets]
“Long-term culture of muscle explants from Sparus aurata,” B. Funkenstein, V. Balas, T. Skopal, G. Radaelli, A. Rowlerson, Tissue and Cell, 38(6):399-415, 2006. “In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” P. D. Edelman, D. C. McFarland, V. A. Mironov, J. G. Matheny, Tissue Engineering, 11(5/6):659-662, 2005. “In vitro Edible Muscle Protein Production System (MPPS): Stage 1, Fish,” M. A. Benjaminson, J. A. Gilchriest, M. Lorenz, Acta Astronautica, 51(12):879-889, 2002. “Industrial Scale Production of Meat from in vitro Cell Cultures,” W. F. Van Eelen, W. J. Van Kooten, W. Westerhof, Patent Number WO9931222, European Patent Office, 1999.

Future Tense

[a child dies of hunger every five seconds]
One child every five seconds is 17,280 children a day. The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2004, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2004, page 4. Tietenberg estimates between 20,000 and 24,000 total hunger deaths a day. Environmental Economics and Policy, Tom Tietenberg, Addison Wesley, Fifth Edition, 2006, page 188.
[923 million malnourished]
The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2008, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2008, page 2.
[world kilocalorie averages]
World Agriculture: Towards 2010, An F.A.O. Study, Nikos Alexandratos (editor), United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1995.
[human meat?]
From an idea in the science-fiction novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books, 1984.
[cost of beef in rich countries]
The average price of beef in the United States in 2007, averaged over all cuts is $2.75 a pound. FreshLook Marketing data, for the 52 weeks ending in December, 2007.
[food cost as a percentage of income in the United States]
Is 9.9 percent. Agriculture Fact Book 2001-2002, Office of Communications, United States Department of Agriculture, 2003.
[...66 percent in Eritrea]
“The profile of most vulnerable households has remained similar to the previous year. Poverty is still rampant. A study undertaken in 2002/03 indicates that 66 percent of the population has incomes below the poverty line (and 37 percent below the extreme poverty line). On average 66 percent of household expenditure is spent on food in urban areas, and 71 percent in rural areas.” FAO/WFP Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission to Eritrea, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, 2005.
[10 percent rise in 2007 in Britain]
Future of Food, George Alagiah, BBC documentary, 2009.
[in the United States, two-thirds are too fat]
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2003-2004 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2007.
[overweight rates in rich countries]
Note that data for Britain and the United States are based on actual measurements. In other rich countries, data is self-reported, which tends to yield much lower figures. The figures are for both the overweight and the obese. OECD Health Data, 2007, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007.
[75 million more hungry]
The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2008, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2008, page 6.
[about 60 percent of us die of hunger]
“On average, 62 million people die each year, of whom probably 36 million (58 per cent) directly or indirectly as a result of nutritional deficiencies, infections, epidemics or diseases which attack the body when its resistance and immunity have been weakened by undernourishment and hunger.” From “The Right to Food,” Report E/CN.4/2001/53, The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, 2001, page 5.
[farm tariffs and subsidies]
As usual, the situation is more complicated than the simple version given in the text. Several poor nations, particularly in Africa, gain economically because several rich nations, particularly in the European Union, in effect suppress food prices on the world market by subsidizing their own domestic production. “Liberalizing Agriculture,” A. Panagariya, Foreign Affairs, 84(7):56-66, 2005.
[rich nations spend $372 billion U.S. a year on food subsidies]
The statistic was quoted by Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food and Agrculture Organization of the United Nations, in his opening speech of the Rome Summit on the Global Food Crisis, June 2008. For comparison, our richest countries (the OECD countries), gave $103.94 billion in ODA (Official Development Assistance, that is, foreign aid) in 2006. OECD in Figures, 2007 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2007.
[effect of food supports on West African farmers]
The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2004, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2004, page 24.

The estimate of $250 million lost by West African farmers each because of protected cotton alone is from an address by Mark Malloch Brown, who was then the head of the United Nations Development Programme, His address was given at the launch of the Human Development Report 2003, to the Second Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, in Maputo, Mozambique, July 10th, 2003. A year before, he noted that “Every cow in Europe today is subsidised two dollars a day. That is twice as much as the per capita income of a half of Africa. It is the extraordinary distortion of global trade, where the West spends $360 billion a year on protecting its agriculture with a network of subsidies and tariffs that costs developing countries about US$50 billion in potential lost agricultural exports.” From: “The Millennium Development Goals and Africa: A new framework for a new future,” Kampala, Uganda, November 12th, 2002.

Japan has a complex system in place to block as much foreign rice as possible. The markups mostly come from import duties, and can reach as high as 1,000 percent, depending on the rice variety. National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, 2005 The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), United States Government, 2005, page 314.

[...empty food before nutritious food]
For example, low-calorie sugar. The average American eats the equivalent of 20 teaspoons of sugar a day, and 144 million American adults regularly consume low-calorie, sugar-free products such as artificially sweetened sodas and desserts. “Sugar Substitutes: Americans Opt for Sweetness and Lite,” J. Henkel, FDA Consumer Magazine, November-December, United States Food and Drug Administration, 1999.
[the pull of city life]
In 1800, a thousand million of us were alive but only 2 percent of us were urban. In 1950, nearly three thousand million of us were alive and 29.8 percent of us were urban. Today, over six thousand million of us are alive and half of us are urban.

City life was always attractive, but it used to be that cities were very bad places to live, at least in terms of mortality rates. City disease killed us faster than we could reproduce and only continual replenishment from the countryside let them persist. Today, though, urban mortality rates are better than rural mortality rates. Urban dwellers also have different opportunities and different consumption patterns than rural dwellers. Regardless of income level, urban dwellers have fewer kids, eat more and better food, and consume more energy and durable goods. Of course, all that demand has environmental costs as well. “Consumption Patterns: The Driving Force of Environmental Stress,” J. K. Parikh, S. Gokam, J. P. Painuly, B. Saha, V. Shukla, The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1991. “Impact of Trends in Resources, Environment and Development on Demographic Prospects,” N. Keyfitz, in Population and Resources in a Changing World, Kingsley Davis, Mikhail S. Bernstam, and Helen M. Sellers (editors), Stanford University Press, 1989.

Given a choice today, we flee the countryside because urban prospects for income, education, medical care, and services (like entertainment) are higher. Urban mortality is lower, and urban fertility is much lower. Over 40 percent of our urban growth since 1960 has not been because of increasing urban birth rates but via flight from rural to urban areas. “People Who Move: New Reproductive Health Focus,” R. Gardner, R. Blackburn, Population Reports, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Population Information Program, 24(3):1-27, 1996. “Fertility and Family Planning in African Cities: The Impact of Female Migration,” M. Brockerhoff, Journal of Biosocial Science, 27(3):347-358, 1995.

[by 2015 another half a billion...]
By 2015, it’s estimated that 600 million more of us will be earning over $8 a day. The BRICs and Global Markets: Crude, Cars and Capital, Global Economics Paper Number 118, Goldman Sachs, 2004. Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050, Global Economics Paper Number 99, Goldman Sachs, 2003.
[world population in 2050 may be 9 billion]
That’s the median extrapolation as of 2004. World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2004.
[kilocalories per person in Eritrea and India]
In 1998 Eritrea had only 1,744 kilocalories per person. India in 1998 had 2,466 kilocalories per person. United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 2001.

The figures for France in 1705 and Britain in 1850 were 1,657 and 2,362, respectively. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 9. Eritrea has the highest percentage of population suffering from undernourishment in the world. The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2004, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2004.

The text’s description of the French diet circa 1705 is actually from 1777, but it had remained mostly constant for centuries. “Our Frenchmen eat soup with a little butter and vegetables. They scarcely ever eat meat. They sometimes drink a little cider but more commonly water. Your Englishmen eat meat, and a great deal of it, and they drink beer continually in such a fashion that an Englishman spends three times more than a Frenchman [on comestibles].” Delaunay Deslandes, 1777. Quoted in “Continental influences on the industrial revolution in Great Britain,” A. E. Musson, in Great Britain and Her World, 1750-1914: Essays in Honour of W. O. Henderson, Barrie M. Ratcliffe (editor), Manchester University Press, 1977, page 67, footnote 42.

[proportion starving in 1970 and today]
The chronic hunger figure for 1970, that is, 25 percent of us, meant 940 million people at the time. As of 2008, the number hit 963 million, compared to 923 million in 2007. The majority live in only seven countries: India, China, the Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2008, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2008.
[farming gains since 1970]
Figures derived from the speech, “Prospects for Food Security in the 21st Century,” given on April 17th, 1997, by Alex F. McCalla, the then Director of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Department of the World Bank. The Future of World Food series, Illinois World Food and Sustainable Agriculture Program, University of Illiois, Urbana-Champaign.
[political famine in China and elsewhere]
Most sources report mortality of about 20 million. The figure in the text of 30 million comes from the most comprehensive study so far: Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, Jasper Becker, Free Press, 1996.

Here are a few more examples. From 1769 to 1771, a famine in British-ruled Bengal killed one in three of us there; perhaps 10 millon people died. The usual cannibalism followed. The government response? They raised taxes. The Annals of Rural Bengal, Volume I, The Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, W. W. Hunter, Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868, pages 19-48. What should have been an equally bad famine occurred in roughly the place in 1866 (mainly in Orissa, but also Bengal), yet only one million died. The railroad and abandonment of a government ban on speculation in food made the difference. However, a much wider famine, affecting not only Bengal but much of the rest of India, occurred in 1896, once again killing millions. The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal: Availability or Entitlement Crisis?” Malabika Chakrabarti, Orient Longman, 2004.

From 1846 to 1852, a potato blight in Ireland helped kill over a million of us. (The figure of one million deaths is widely reported, although it’s only estimated since mortality records weren’t kept in Ireland until 1864.) We let whole villages be swept away by starvation, cholera, typhus, and politics. A Death Dealing Famine: the Great Hunger in Ireland, Christine Kinealy, Pluto Press, 1997. Major famine was nothing new to Ireland, though. For instance, about a century earlier, in 1741, about 300,000 had died, perhaps 13 percent of the population, or about one in seven or eight people.

From 1943 to 1945, heavy rains destroyed part of Bengal’s rice crop. Although its rice supply was still a million tons higher than it had been in 1941, between 3.5 and 3.8 million of us, mostly kids, died. We killed them with patchy infrastructure, profiteering, hoarding, denial, disease, disinterest, and politics. Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Amartya Sen, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Today, despite having more food globally than all of us alive need, we let famine continue in the horn of Africa—particularly Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti. We’re still trapped in a mirrored hall of political desire. Ignorance, disinterest, shortsightedness, power-hunger, and wishful thinking let us see only what we wish to see. It doesn’t matter how powerful our technology becomes if we choose not to use it.

[1928 drought in China worst in 200 years]
“Interdecadal Variability of Temperature and Precipitation in China since 1880,” S. Wang, J. Zhu, J. Cai, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, 21(3):307-313, 2004. “The extreme drought in the 1920s and its effect on tree growth deduced from tree ring analysis: a case study in North China.” E. Liang, S. Shao, Z. Kong, J. Lin, Annals of Forestry Science, 60(2):145-152, 2003.
[first steam engine]
The ironmonger referenced in the text is Thomas Newcomen, who built the world’s first steam engine in 1712.
[first cannery]
The cook’s name was Nicolas Appert (1750-1841). He invented his boiling process before 1809, over 53 years before Pasteur invented pasteurization. Connections, James Burke, Little, Brown, 1978, pages 234-235. L’art de conserver, pendant plusieurs années toutes les substances animales et végétales, Nicolas Appert, Patris, 1810.
[first refrigerators]
In May, 1844, John Gorrie in Apalachicola, Florida, built the first known working refrigerator as a way to combat ‘malarial dieases’ (he meant malaria and yellow fever). The Fever Man: A Biography of Dr. John Gorrie, V. M. Sherlock, private printing, 1982. Previously, in 1805, Oliver Evans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had designed the first known refrigerator, but never built it. Then, in 1834, Jacob Perkins in England had applied for a patent for a similar device. In 1846, after Gorrie, Ferdinand P. E. Carre in France produced another cooling device. In 1850, James Harrison in Scotland built one, then moved to England and built successive models in 1856 and 1857, which were used to make parrafin wax and ice. In 1856, Alexander C. Twinning in America tried another design. In 1874, Raoul Pictet in Geneva, Switzerland, produced one and it was used to make ice for a skating rink, but was otherwise not commercially successful. Finally, in 1876, Carl von Linde produced the first reliable and efficient refrigerator. It was used to let German brewers brew beer all year round. None of those inventors first had in mind food preservation. Further, all that development ignores all the earlier chemists, physicists, amateur scientists, and inventors, like Joseph Priestly, William Cullen, Michael Faraday, Louis Paul Cailletet, Jean Charles Athanase Peltier, Sadi Carnot, and Lord Kelvin, who first separated various gases, and made the earliest observations about evaporation and thermodynamics. It also ignores the century-long story of ice harvesting, which would require a book by itself. (And one has already been written, The Frozen Water Trade: How Ice from New England Lakes Kept the World Cool, Gavin Weightman, HarperCollins, 2001.) Few of our present-day artifacts came about simply. Most of their problems were solved piecemeal and over long periods by many hands, mostly working independently.
[cheap diamonds and cheap aluminum]
The French chemist was Henri Moissan. In 1893 he was trying to make artificial diamonds. The Canadian inventor was Thomas Leopold Willson, then living in the tiny town of Spray in North Carolina (the town is now merged into the town of Eden). In 1892 he was trying to make cheap aluminum, then switched to trying to make cheap calcium. Both developed the acetylene process using the new electric-arc furnace on coal and lime (calcium carbonate). Moissan received the 1906 Nobel prize for his work. Willson’s factory was eventually bought out by the company that became Union Carbide. Their use of the electric-arc furnace resulted in a lot of calcium carbide and acetylene, whose chief use at the time became oxy-acetylene welding since the use they had in mind, gaslighting, was preempted by another invention, but only after a lot of money went into acetylene. Gaslighting then became brighter and electricity became cheaper and lightbulbs were made more less fragile.

Various chemists, faced with mountains of now nearly worthless calcium carbine in both Europe and the United States, then tried various things. In 1903, two German dyers, Adolph Frank and Nikodem Caro, ran nitrogen over hot calcium carbide, accidentally producing calcium cyanamide, the world’s first artificial fertilizer. They did that not to produce fertilizer but to produce cyanides to help extract gold from its ores (which is sodium cyanide’s chief use today). They formed a company to do precisely that, the Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt, now called Degussa, AG. In 1905, two more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, developed a completely different, high-pressure way to make sodium nitrate, also a fertilizer. The Frank-Caro process initially nearly destroyed them commercially, though, since it was initially cheaper. Then, during World War I, Germany turned back to the Haber-Bosch process, but not to make fertilizers—to make explosives. The Chemical Industry: 1900-1930, International Growth and Technological Change, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1971. The Chemical Industry During the Nineteenth Century. A Study of the Economic Aspect of Applied Chemistry in Europe and North America, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1958.

The story is even longer, stranger, and more involved than this brief note suggests, containing many more blind alleys and unexpected twists and turns, and altering the politics of many nations, including Germany, France, Britain, Chile, and the United States. Not to mention the consequences of guano, gaslight, the electric light, welding, steel, explosives, poison gas, hydroelectrics, liquid oxygen, the dynamo, famine, the Nazis, and both world wars. Someone should write a book about this. It should be told to every schoolchild as their very first lesson that the world doesn’t work anything like they’ve been told.

[the importance of artificial fertilizers]
Before artificial fertilizers, food was a huge worry to the industrializing nations of the time. “My chief subject is of interest to the whole world—to every race—to every human being. It is of urgent importance to-day, and it is a life and death question for generations to come. I mean the question of food supply. Many of my statements you may think are of the alarmist order; certainly they are depressing, but they are founded on stubborn facts. They show that England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena. I am constrained to show that our wheat-producing soil is totally unequal to the strain put upon it. After wearying you with a survey of the universal dearth to be expected, I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty.” The Wheat Problem, William Crookes, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899.

Rebooting Reality - Chapter 2, Labor

[Faulkner quote]
Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III.

Network Reactions

[“still a shadow...”]
Quoted from a letter from Boulton to Watt. Lives of Boulton and Watt, Samuel Smiles, J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1865, page 199.
[James Watt’s fire-engine]
To his friends and family, Watt was known familiarly as ‘Jamie.’ Also, at the time, what we today call ‘steam engines’ were called ‘fire engines.’ Watt’s 1769 patent for “[A] new Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines,” was granted on January 5th, 1769, but Watt only enrolled its description at the High Court of Chancery on April 29th, 1769. It was patent number 913.
[an offer from Russia]
Watt had had several offers from Russia, starting in 1771. In 1774, the latest offer was for £1,000 (at a time when he was being paid £200 a year in Scotland as a surveyor). The Lunar Men: A Story of Science, Art, Invention and Passion, Jenny Uglow, Faber & Faber, 2002, page 251. By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-century Russia, Anthony Cross, Cambridge University Press, 1997, especially page 258. Both Russia and France also tried to bribe away Watt’s workers, once he was settled at Soho. They also tried to place apprentices there to learn what they could. In at least one case, they also bribed workers to sabotage the works.
[the parable of the sower]
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit.” The Bible, The King James Version, Matthew 13:3-8.
[Ivan Polzunov’s steam engine]
He built his machine for the Kolyvano-Voskresensky mine, in Barnaul, in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southwestern Siberia. The Sons of the Altai and Motherland: Part II: Mechanicus Ivan Polzunov: The Life and Creative Work of an Outstanding Thermal Power Engineering Specialist of the 18th Century, N. Ya. Savelyev, The Altai Publishing House, 1988. (Note: the above is a largely unexamined reference. I can’t read Russian and information on Polzunov is hard to come by in English. I have had to rely on one of my students’ partial translation of the above book and the few mentions of him in English references—see below. A real historian (who can read Russian) might be interested in finding out the full story.) The History of the Machine, Sigvard Strandh, translated by Ann Henning, Dorset Press, 1989, pages 118-120. See also the Polzunov entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, A. M. Prokhorov (editor), Macmillan, 1973-1983. In the 1740s, a generation before Watt and Polzunov, something similar happened to Joseph Karl Hell (Jozef Karol Hell, or Höll, 1713-1789) compared to John Smeaton. Hell, in Slovakia, was mostly alone and industrial infrastructure was lacking there, while Smeaton, in England, laid foundations that Watt was to exploit later in the century. The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, Arnold Pacey, MIT Press, Second Edition, 1992, pages 152-156.
[the Saint Petersburg fountains]
The steam engine powering the czar’s fountains were built in 1717-1718 by the French-born English engineer John Desaguliers. (Who, incidentally, had been Isaac Newton’s assistant in his secret alchemical researches.) It was the first steam engine Britain ever exported. The czar at the time, Peter I, had wanted something to compare with Louis XIV’s fountains at Versailles. He’d built his Summer Garden on the Dvortsovaya Embankment in Saint Petersburg (which he’d founded in May, 1703, in a marshy area he took from Sweden after a war).
[Russian feudalism]
Russian serfs were emancipated only in 1861.
[James Watt’s first commercial engine]
Was for Bloomfield Colliery near Tipton, which at the time was 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) away from Birmingham, in Staffordshire. An Early Experiment in Industrial Organisation: Being a History of the Firm of Boulton and Watt, 1775-1805, Eric Roll, Longmans, 1930, pages 27-29.
[Watt’s personal network]
Watt was also encouraged in his work by his personal circle. Nearly all of them were natural philosophers, inventors, merchants, or manufacturers: John Roebuck, William Murdock, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestly, William Small, James Keir, Samuel Galton, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin), and even Benjamin Franklin—who corresponded from British America. (The United States did not yet exist.) The Lunar Men: A Story of Science, Art, Invention and Passion, Jenny Uglow, Faber & Faber, 2002.
[networks of British industrialists]
Besides the names listed in the text, Britain also needed banking credit outside of London (Sampson Lloyd, James Barclay). It also needed ever-improving steam engines (Richard Trevithick, William Murdock, Joseph Bramah, Jonathan Hornblower, Arthur Woolf). Then it needed ever-improving machine tools (Henry Maudslay, Jesse Ramsden, Joseph Bramah, Joseph Whitworth, James Nasmyth). Plus it needed ever-growing canal transport (Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, William Small, Samuel Galton, Thomas Telford, John Rennies). It needed ever-expanding markets (Richard Trevithick, John Smeaton, Isambard Brunel). And it needed ever-expanding rail networks (Richard Trevithick, George Stephenson, John Wilkinson, Henry Cort).

Also, all the changes catalyzed yet another network of tools made by another network of early industrialists in Britain (Thomas Highs, John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton). They built the early machines of Britain’s textile industry. That then became one of the first killer apps of the new steam tech. Also, all those people needed yet another network of people (Jethro Tull, Robert Bakewell, Charles Colling, and others). Their farm innovations helped Britain raise its food supply until it could almost feed itself. And to top all that off, add 30 years of great growing weather in Britain from 1720 to 1750.

The productivity of land in England may have more than doubled between 1700 and 1850, with a large jump coming after 1750, although the largest part of the increase came after 1800. The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700-1870, Tom Williamson, Exeter University Press, 2002. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850, Mark Overton, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

It would be wrong to assume that Britain in 1776 was already well-off, just because a tiny percentage of its population now were. The Poor Laws were still in full force, and for good reason—most of the population were still starving, or near starvation. They were also strictly tied to the land—and not just in an farming sense, but also in a legal sense. To travel, the poor needed passes, which they rarely got. For example, on May 28th, 1795, a bill slightly ameliorated the travel problem: “Many industrious poor persons, chargeable to the parish, township, or place where they live, merely from want of work there, would in any other place where sufficient employment is to be had, maintain themselves and families without being burthensome to any parish, township, or place; and such poor persons are for the most part compelled to live in their own parishes, townships, or places, and are not permitted to inhabit elsewhere, under pretence that they are likely to become chargeable to the parish, township, or place into which they go for the purpose of getting employment, although the labour of such poor persons might, in many instances, be very beneficial to such parish, township, or place.” Poor Removal Bill, 35 George III, Chapter 101, (To Prevent the Removal of Poor Persons, Until They Shall Become Actually Chargeable). The bill explicitly excluded pregnant females, as the law had done for centuries already—they were the least able to work and the most expensive to support.

[“...aversion to monopolies...”]
“I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprising age. One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them. It looks as if Nature had taken an aversion to monopolies, and put the same thing into several people’s heads at once, to prevent them.” Letter to Boulton, February 14th, 1782. “From the many opponents we are like to have, I fear that the engine business cannot be a permanent one; and I am sure that it will not in any case prove so lucrative as you have flattered yourself.” Letter to Boulton, February 20th, 1782. From: The Life of James Watt: With Selections from His Correspondence, James Patrick Muirhead, D. Appleton and Co., 1859, pages 316-317. See also: Lives of Boulton and Watt, Samuel Smiles, J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1865, page 300. Watt didn’t even know about Polzunov. We remember Watt today not so much because of his genius, but because of the inherited wealth, and marketing and political savvy of his partner, Matthew Boulton.
[Savery’s 1698 patent]
“A new invention for raising water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for drayning mines, serveing houses with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills where they have not benefitt of water nor constant windes.” The Miners Friend; or an engine to raise water by fire, described, and the manner of fixing it in mines, with an account of the several uses it is applicable unto; and an answer to the objections made against it, by Thos. Savery, Gent, London, 1702.

Birth of a Notion

[slavery nurtured capitalism]
A point first argued by Williams. Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams, Andre Deutsch, Reprint Edition, 1964. The idea has been challenged as more quantitative and comparative data has come to light, but it’s hardly been disproved. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development, Joseph E. Inikori, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800, Kenneth Morgan, Cambridge University Press, 2001. “The Atlantic Economy of the Eighteenth Century: Some Speculations on Economic Development in Britain America, Africa, and Elsewhere,” S. L. Engerman, Journal of European Economic History, 24(1):145-175, 1995. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley Engerman (editors), Duke University Press, 1992.
[eighteenth-century Britain stripped of usable trees]
Transport technology at the time limited economically usable trees to those within 15 miles (24 kilometers) of any river or coast. A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, John Perlin, W. W. Norton, 1989, epecially pages 241-245.
[Henry VIII started the British Navy]
Well, not really. (As usual the text simplifies the real story.) But he was the first to spend vast sums on shipbuilding and dockyards and defences against naval attack. He also encouraged continental iron, glass, and ship builders to come settle in England. He was also invaded by a fleet even larger than the Spanish Armada that Elizabeth I was to face 43 years later. (In 1545, two years before he died, Francis I of France tried invading England with 30,000 soldiers in over 200 ships.) Henry had good reason to fear the continent.

Henry VIII had continued a major push to bring iron making to England, by importing foreign ironworkers. His father, Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had started the push in the 1490s, after he stole the throne. (For example, he started the first blast furnace in England in 1491.) But it was only by the 1540s, under his son, that industry in England really started to take off. The push continued under Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter, who continued the import of foreign experts. She increased the production of brass and glass in England. All three sovereigns lived in great fear of invasion. And iron-, brass-, glass-, and ship- production all needed massives numbers of trees. For example, a battleship might need more than 2,000 100-year-old oak trees. Wealdean Iron, Ernest Straker, G. Bell & Sons, 1931. The Iron Industry of the Weald, Henry Cleere and David Crossley, Jeremy Hodgkinson (editor), Second Edition, Merton Priory Press, 1995.

[...ever since the 1540s...]
The date is somewhat arbitary, chosen because 1543 was the year that the first one-piece cast-iron cannon was made in England. (It was made by a Frenchman, Peter Baude, at a foundry near Buxted, Sussex. He was employed by, or worked with, Ralph Hogge (aka Raffe Huggett), who was the servant of Rector and ironmaster William Levett, who had started the foundry, called Queenstock, with his brother John Levett.) Industrial Biography: Iron Workers And Tool Makers, Samuel Smiles, John Murray, 1863, Chapter II. Sussex Cavalcade, Arthur R. Ankers, Pond View Books, Revised Edition (with Michael Smith), 1997, pages 45-48. “The lordship of Canterbury, iron-founding at Buxted, and the continental antecdents of cannon-founding in the Weald,” B. Awty and C. Whittick, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 140:71-81, 2002.
[British patents from 1561 to 1642]
“[O]f the fifty-five patents granted for inventions granted during the reign of Elizabeth, 1561-99, one in seven is for the raising of water, and of the 127 patents granted between 1617 and 1642, the same proportion is observable.” A Short History of the Steam Engine, H. W. Dickinson, 1938, Frank Cass and Co., Reprint Edition, 1963, page 16.
[price of wood in Britain]
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz, Princeton University Press, 2000, page 220. A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, John Perlin, W. W. Norton, 1989.

The high price of grain during (and artifically propped up after) the Napoleonic wars, compounded the problem. “No doubt, a labourer, whose income was only £20 a year, would, in general, act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley bread, boiled milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts of this county, he is debarred not more by prejudice, than by local difficulties, from using a diet that requires cooking at home. The extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire, compels him to purchase his dinner at the baker’s; and, from his unavoidable consumption of bread, he has little left for cloaths, in a country where warm cloathing is most essentially wanted.” Quoted from: The State of the Poor: or a history of the labouring classes in England, from the Conquest to the present period; in which are particularly considered, their domestic economy, with respect to diet, dress, fuel, and habitation; and the various plans which, from time to time, have been proposed and adopted for the relief of the poor: together with parochial reports relative to the administration of work-houses, and houses of industry; the state of the Friendly Societies, and other public institutions; in several agricultural, commercial and manufacturing, districts. With a large appendix; containing a comparative and chronological table of the prices of labour, of provisions, and of other commodities; an account of the poor in Scotland; and many original documents on subjects of national importance, Frederick Morton Eden, Volume II, B. & J. White, G. & G. Robinson, T. Payne, R. Faulder, T. Egerton, J. Debrett, and D. Bremner, 1797, page 587.

None of this means that the industrial revolution was good for Britain’s trees. In fact, with the coming of the railroad, then the internal combustion engine able to reach anywhere, even more trees were cut until Britain’s forestation had dropped to an all-time low of 4 percent by 1918. Today it is 11 percent. A Reference for the Forestry Industry, The Forestry Industry Council of Great Britain, 1998.

British (then Continental) attitudes to the natural world started changing after the scientific revolution (also, the scientific revolution was itself partly an outgrowth of changes in attitudes toward the natural world). Deforestation, rather than a calamity, increasingly came to be seen as a symptom of increased industrial change, and therefore of ‘progress.’

[coal was cheap in Britain]
By 1650 Britain was already producing five times as much coal as the rest of world combined. Coal Mining in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Brian Lewis, Longman Group Ltd., 1971, page 10.
[labor was expensive in Britain]
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[Britain exported steam engines]
The first one was the one built in Saint Petersburg by John Desaguliers in 1717. It was the same one that fired the imagination of Ivan Polzunov in 1758. Britain exported steam engines to Russia, then Belgium, Hungary, France, Germany, Austria, and Sweden—but by 1753 Parliament banned their further export. By then it had realized how valuable the technology was.
[Voltaire on British commerce]
“As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the State. Trade raised by insensible degrees the naval power, which gives the English a superiority over the seas, and they now are masters of very near two hundred ships of war. Posterity will very probably be surprised to hear that an island whose only produce is a little lead, tin, fuller’s-earth, and coarse wool, should become so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send, in 1723, three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanced parts of the globe. One before Gibraltar, conquered and still possessed by the English; a second to Porto Bello, to dispossess the King of Spain of the treasures of the West Indies; and a third into the Baltic, to prevent the Northern Powers from coming to an engagement. [....] In France the title of marquis is given gratis to any one who will accept of it; and whosoever arrives at Paris from the midst of the most remote provinces with money in his purse, and a name terminating in ac or ille, may strut about, and cry, "Such a man as I! A man of my rank and figure!" and may look down upon a trader with sovereign contempt; whilst the trader on the other side, by thus often hearing his profession treated so disdainfully, is fool enough to blush at it. However, I need not say which is most useful to a nation; a lord, powdered in the tip of the mode, who knows exactly at what o’clock the king rises and goes to bed, and who gives himself airs of grandeur and state, at the same time that he is acting the slave in the ante-chamber of a prime minister; or a merchant, who enriches his country, despatches orders from his counting-house to Surat and Grand Cairo, and contributes to the felicity of the world.” “Letter X: On Trade,” French and English Philosophers: Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hobbes, Charles W. Eliot (editor), P. F. Collier & Son, 1910, pages 93-94.
[Dissenters and religious repression in Britain]
Most early industrialists in Britain were Dissenters, that is, those Protestants who refused to take Church of England vows—which included Quakers, Unitarians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. In Britain, non-Protestants, like Catholics and Jews, were a different matter. For example, England had kicked out its Jews entirely from 1290 to 1650. But Britain wasn’t unique in its religious repression. Russia was equally good at it. Russia, though, was much more of a peasant economy. It forced its religious minorities, primarily Jews, into finance, peddling, and shopkeeping instead of trade and industry—that is, when not running active pogroms against them. (A peasant uprising in 1768, during the partitioning of Poland, lead to massacres of both Jews and Catholics. Perhaps 20,000 were herded into their places of worship and killed. A century before, a Cossack idea of fun was to ride into a village and kill every male and take every female there.) Similarly, France had slaughtered or exiled most of its Protestants, the Huguenots. (Two important steam pioneers in Britain, Denis Papin and John Desaguliers, for example, had fled France for Britain. They were Huguenots). Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria—all have poor tolerance records as well. For long periods of recent European history, only the Netherlands was tolerant of variant religious belief systems. Britain in the 1770s was merely one of the less-intolerant nations.
[the history of the steam engine is long]
For example, Aristotle thought (to put it in today’s terms) that a body fell in a medium at a speed proportional to its weight, and inversely proportional to the amount that the medium resists its fall. So for him, if you dropped a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias from space, the whale would hit first. (His thinking was more complex than that, but you get the idea.) Perhaps he guessed that after seeing a pebble falling slowly through olive oil, faster through water, and fastest through air. He guessed that in a vacuum it would fall infinitely fast. And that, he declared, was impossible. So a vacuum couldn’t exist.

It was nonsense, of course. To see just how dumb his idea of motion was, drop three marbles of equal weight. They hit at the same time. Now glue two together, then drop all three again. They still hit at the same time. Yet, were Aristotle right, the two you glued together, being heavier, would hit first. But none of us back then did any such test. Otherwise, we would have laughed at him. So his guess became dogma for us—for over two millennia.

Before you snigger at Aristotle’s muddy thinking, remember when he lived. Back then, he was far from alone in avoiding tests. For example, Plato, his tutor, would never dirty his hands to check an idea. Aristotle was actually more practical than many other early thinkers, but he clearly didn’t test his ideas about motion either. Perhaps he thought them too obvious. Or perhaps, as the smartest kid on his block, he rarely had anyone to answer to but himself.

Aristotle’s completely wrong physics is still intuitive for most of us today, including first-year university physics students. (Don’t believe it? Ask your friends what would happen if they dropped a watermelon and a grape at the same time.) Newtonian physics is still counter-intuitive to most of us today. For example, most of us believe that a constant force applied to a body will produce constant velocity. That’s wrong. And Einsteinian relativity is still completely unknown, never mind counter-intuitive, to most of us today. “Intuitive Physics,” D. R. Proffitt, M. K. Kaiser, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Lynn Nadel (editor), Nature Publishing Group, 2003, pages 632-637. The Unnatural Nature of Science, Lewis Wolpert, Harvard University Press, 1993. Uncommon sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, Alan Cromer, Oxford University Press, 1993. “Common Sense Concepts about Motion,” I. Halloun, D. Hestenes, American Journal of Physics, 53(11):1056-1065, 1985.

Early steam engines created a partial vacuum in the piston chamber when an outside weight (the thing the steam engine is designed to move, for example, water in a mine) pulls up a piston. That vacuum then fills with steam from the boiler. Injecting a little water condenses the steam to water vapor, which creates a partial vacuum in the piston chamber, which draws down the piston again, and the cycle repeats.

Before we could even make a vacuum, and thus one day a steam engine, Galileo, Berti, Benedetti, and Torricelli in Italy; Stevin in Belgium; Pascal in France; and others, first had to expose Aristotle’s misstep. Before there could be a Watt in Scotland there was a Guericke in Germany; a Papin and de Caus in France; a della Porta and Branca in Italy; a Boyle and a Hooke in England. In turn, they built on William Gilbert in England—who, as far back as 1600, guessed that outer space was a vacuum. De Magnete magneticisique corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure; Physiologia nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis demonstrata, William Gilbert of Colchester, London, 1600.

[steam engine development]
Why did an efficient steam engine happen in the eighteenth century and not before? Again it’s easy to fashion a story about a century of heroes. However, contrasting it with past centuries suggests why an efficient steam engine arose then and not before. Take ancient Rome. The Romans didn’t invent an efficient steam engine but that needn’t have been because they were too callous to want one or too stupid to build one. They didn’t know enough metallurgy to make high-grade iron. They didn’t have crucible steel for precision cutters and precision bearings. They didn’t have steam-proof solders, sealants, and gaskets. Further, they couldn’t even imagine one. They didn’t understand the laws of physics well enough to even see that a steam engine was possible. And considering what was to happen to both Polzunov in Siberia and Watt in Scotland millennia later, they likely didn’t have the skilled machinists needed to maintain a high-precision steam engine, even if an alien spaceship had flown in and dropped one off in the forum.

It took millennia of accident for us to figure out all the knowledge we needed, and to develop all the tools and skills we needed, to build an efficient steam engine. All that came together only in the eighteenth century. Of course, none of that explains why one arose in the eighteenth century and not later. However it suggests that no industrial reaction network could have built one before the eighteenth century. It arose then and not before because of a long and unplanned chain of reactions going back millennia.

The Prime Mover

[banning of spinning wheel]
Use of the spinning wheel, sometimes called in Europe the ‘Hindustan Wheel,’ for woolen manufacture was either banned outright or forbidden for warp-spinning, beginning in Italy: in Venice (1224), Bologna (1256), Paris (1268), Speyer (1280), Abbeville (1288), Siena (1292), and Douai (1305), then grew from there as the spinning wheel spread. Bans remained in effect in some places until the sixteenth century. The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I, David Jenkins (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2003, page 201.
[reaction to calico]
“ ‘Callico Madams’: Servants, Consumption, and the Calico Crisis,” C. W. Smith, Eighteenth-Century Life, 31(2):29-55, 2007. A History of London, Stephen Inwood, Avalon Publishing Group, 1998, pages 395-396. The London Weavers’ Company, 1600-1970, Alfred Plummer, Routledge, 1972, chapter 14, pages 292-314. England and the English in the Eighteenth Century: Chapters in the Social History of the Times, Volume II, William Connor Sydney, Ward & Downey, Second Edition, 1891, pages 195-196.
[new sawmill]
The Industrial Windmill in Britain, Roy Gregory, Phillmore & Co., Ltd., 2005, page 105. Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations, 1717-1800, C. R. Dobson, Croom Helm Ltd., 1980, pages 115-116. London Memories: Social, Historical, and Topographical, Charles William Heckethorn, Chatto & Windus, 1900, pages 144-145. A History of Inventions and Discoveries, Volume I, Johann Beckmann, translated by William Johnston, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Third Edition, 1817, pages 375-376.
[new silk-weaving loom]
The inventor was Jacques de Vaucanson. As usual, he was building on top of other inventors work, primarily that of Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon, and his work would be built upon in its turn by Joseph-Marie Jacquard 55 years later. Also as usual the text compresses a much more involved and interesting story into a few words. In fact, the silk-wevers of Lyon first rioted because Vaucanson had been made inspector of silk weaving and it was his job to enforce unpopular reforms. Men were threatened with death, and several were killed. Vaucanson himself was stoned, and almost killed. He escaped by disguising himself as a monk and fleeing Lyon by night. The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815, Henry Heller, Berghahn Books, 2006, pages 37-38. Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime, Charles Coulston Gillispie, Princeton University Press, 2004, pages 414-418. Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, pages 40-43. Copying Machines: Taking notes for the Automaton, Catherine Liu, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pages 97-98.
[new fork-maker]
The innovator was Jacques Sauvade. The Path not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830, Jeff Horn, MIT Press, 2006, page 112. Engineering the Revolution, Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815, Ken Alder, Princeton University Press, 1997, page 215. Saint-Étienne et son district pendant la Révolution, Volume I, J.-B. Galley, Imprimerie de La Loire R&epublicaine, 1903, pages 74-77.
[anti-innovation attitude]
For millennia, ‘new’ was the same as ‘bad,’ and another word for ‘inventor’ was ‘lunatic.’ As late as 1803 in the United States, a pastor put the prevailing attitude thus: “Let us guard against the insidious encroachments of innovation, that evil and beguiling spirit which is now stalking to and for through the earth, seeking whom he may destroy.” That was Jedidiah Morse, a pastor in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the father of Samuel F. B. Morse, of the telegraph’s Morse Code. History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, Library of America, 1986, page 56.
[moving the obelisk]
Egyptians had been making and moving obelisks since at least Pharaoh Niuserre Izi, four and a half millennia ago. For millennia all we had were ramps, ropes, levers, cranes, rollers, capstans, block and tackle—and lots and lots of muscles. Our only other common tools were the tools to make those tools—axe, hammer, chisel, saw. The only things we had by Sixtus’ time that we didn’t already have in early Egypt were pulleys and iron. An Architectural Excursis into the Site of Becoming: Domenico Fontana’s “Della Trasportatione dell’Obelisco Vaticano,” Eric Solomon Toker, masters thesis, McGill University, 1998. The History of the Machine, Sigvard Strandh, translated by Ann Henning, Dorset Press, 1989, pages 89-90.

By the way, Sixtus also tried to kick out Rome’s 18,000 prostitutes. After all, they were supposedly useless in a city of celibates. But no amount of engineering could shift that particular stone. “Seen and known: prostitutes in the cityscape of late-sixteenth-century Rome,” E. S. Cohen, Renaissance Studies, 12(3):392-409, 1998, page 404.

[image of moving the obelisk]
Della Trasportatione dell’Obelisco Vaticano et delle Fabriche di Nostro Signore Papa Sisto V, Domenico Fontana, Domenico Basa, 1590, page 18.
[the sack of Rome]
Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome, Kenneth Gouwens, Brill Academic, 1998. The Sack of Rome, Luigi Guicciardini, translated by James H. McGregor, Italica Press, 1993.
[early waterwheels]
Millstone and Hammer: The Origins of Water Power, M. J. T. Lewis, University of Hull Press, 1997.
[Abraham Darby III works to keep ironmongers]
Dynasty of Iron Founders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale, Arthur Raistrick, Longmans, Green, & Co., 1953.
[...Watt had trouble]
“[Watt’s steam-engine] was so much in advance of the mechanical capability of the age that it was with the greatest difficulty it could be executed. When labouring upon his invention at Glasgow, Watt was baffled and thrown into despair by the clumsiness and incompetency of his workmen. Writing to Dr. Roebuck on one occasion, he said, “You ask what is the principal hindrance in erecting engines? It is always the smith-work.” His first cylinder was made by a whitesmith, of hammered iron soldered together, but having used quicksilver to keep the cylinder air-tight, it dropped through the inequalities into the interior, and “played the devil with the solder.” Yet, inefficient though the whitesmith was, Watt could ill spare him, and we find him writing to Dr. Roebuck almost in despair, saying, “My old white-iron man is dead!” feeling his loss to be almost irreparable. His next cylinder was cast and bored at Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless. The piston could not be kept steam tight, notwithstanding the various expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty, pasteboard, and old hat....

First-rate workmen in machinery did not as yet exist; they were only in process of education. Nearly everything had to be done by hand. The tools used were of a very imperfect kind. A few ill-constructed lathes, with some drills and boring-machines of a rude sort, constituted the principal furniture of the workshop....

Watt endeavoured to remedy the defect by keeping certain sets of workmen to special classes of work, allowing them to do nothing else. Fathers were induced to bring up their sons at the same bench with themselves, and initiate them in the dexterity which they had acquired by experience; and at Soho it was not unusual for the same precise line of work to be followed by members of the same family for three generations. In this way as great a degree of accuracy of a mechanical kind was arrived at was practicable under the circumstances. But notwithstanding all this care, accuracy of fitting could not be secured so long as the manufacture of steam-engines was conducted mainly by hand.” Industrial Biography: Iron Workers And Tool Makers, Samuel Smiles, John Murray, 1863, Chapter X.

[one English textile factory...]
“An extensive cotton-mill is a striking instance of the application of the greatest powers to perform a prodigious quantity of light and easy work. A steam-engine of 100 horse power, which has the strength of 880 men, gives a rapid motion to 50,000 spindles, for spinning fine cotton thread: each spindle forms a separate thread; and the whole number work together, in an immense building erected on purpose, and so adapted to receive the machines that no room is lost. Seven hundred and fifty people are sufficient to attend all the operations of such a cotton-mill; and, by the assistance of the steam engine, they will be enabled to spin as much thread as 200,000 persons could do without machinery.” Treatise on the Steam Engine: Historical, Practical, and Descriptive, John Farey, Jr., 1827. Quoted in: A Statistical Account of the British Empire: Exhibiting Its Extent, Physical Capacities, Population, Industry, and Civil and Religious Institutions, Volume I, J. R. McCulloch, Charles Knight and Co., Second Edition, 1839, page 648 (footnote).
[spread of steam in Britain in 1800]
Europe, 1783-1914, William Simpson and Martin Jones, Routledge, 2000, page 99. The Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain During the Nineteenth Century, L. C. A. Knowles, George Routledge and Sons, 1921, page 73.

The Synergetic Machine

[coke-smelting in China]
China: A New History, John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, Harvard University Press, Second Edition, 2006, page 89. Medieval China is a huge puzzle. (The medieval Islamic world is also puzzling.) It had so very much so very early, but the pieces either didn’t come together in industrial synergy, or when they did they didn’t stay together long enough to break our pattern of subsistence. Why? At least one big piece of swarm physics must still be missing. The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Mark Elvin, Stanford University Press, 1973.
[steam’s contribution to growth before 1830 was small]
“Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective,” N. Crafts, Economic Journal, 114(495):338-351, 2004.

Allen convincingly argues that in Britain, as opposed to France and China, labor was expensive and capital and energy were cheap. The substitution of capital and energy for labor was then economically forced. This is a great argument. However, it doesn’t explain why Britain was able to supply the machinery and know-how to accomplish that substitution, and why that particular substitution then went on to trigger such huge changes. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Although, see Elvin, and the even earlier Killough, for a sketch of an earlier version of this argument: The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Mark Elvin, Stanford University Press, 1973. International Trade, Hugh Baxter Killough, McGraw-Hill, 1938, pages 83-84.

[synergy]
The industrial dynamic sketched in the text went like this: mine coal to smelt iron to build machinery to build factories to build locomotives to power railroads to move coal to fuel factories to make machinery to mine coal to fuel machinery to mine iron to build machinery—to mine yet more coal, to smelt yet more iron, and so on. I’ve taken some liberties with the term a chemist might use for that kind of process. The word ‘synergy’ comes from the Greek synergos, which roughly means ‘working together’ or ‘combined action.’ The word is in common use but chemists don’t normally use the word (although they might sometimes use ‘synergistic’). For the same idea (of a self-stimulating reaction network) they might instead say ‘jointly catalytic’ or ‘collectively autocatalytic’ or ‘network catalytic’. But such phrases are too cumbersome for a book of popular science. For a survey of much more relaxed meanings of the word in physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and anthropology, see Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution, Peter A. Corning, University of Chicago Press, 2005. “The Synergism Hypothesis: On the Concept of Synergy and Its Role in the Evolution of Complex Systems,” P. A. Corning, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21(2):133-172, 1998.
[synergetic biochemical networks]
Many important biochemical networks are synergetic. A synergetic network inside our cells, for example, keeps us all alive. Biochemists call it the Krebs cycle. Our body takes in food, breaks it down, then feeds the parts to our mitochondria. They’re like little cells inside our cells—our cells’ power plants. They use the eight synergetic steps of the Krebs cycle to both produce themselves and to produce essentially all our body’s usable energy. The Krebs cycle—or a similar one, the Calvin cycle—runs inside nearly every living thing on earth. In the chloroplasts of plants, which are like the mitochondria of animals, the Calvin cycle produces parts useful for everything in our body. All our sugars, fats, and proteins start inside it. All our vitamins, and all our DNA start there. For millions of years, the core molecules of the Krebs and Calvin cycles have reproduced themselves so that they, and the synergetic networks that they form, can continue to persist, keeping us all alive.
[synergy in our species]
Our industrial revolution wasn’t the first time we fell into that kind of pulsing, self-propelling, synergetic cycle. In our recent past, for example, we autocatalytically cemented another: get slaves to harvest sugar to buy tobacco to buy ships to get slaves to work plantations to buy opium to buy tea to get slaves. That particular cycle changed the futures of Britain, the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Indonesia, and China. We made another cycle even further back in time: make war to get slaves to grow food to feed slaves to swell armies to support kings to make war to get slaves. The industrial revolution, however, may be our first synergetic cycle that didn’t directly depend on slaves.
[the railroad in the United States]
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon & Schuster, 2000. However, for a counterfactual economic analysis that the railroad in fact might have made little economic difference see: Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, Robert W. Fogel, Johns Hopkins Press, 1964.
[coal and iron production in Germany]
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, Liah Greenfeld, Harvard University Press, 2001, page 216-218. The Economic Consequence of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes, Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920, page 16.

Rebirth

[“people prefer lottery tickets”]
A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine, Ruth Brandon, Lippincott, 1977, page 45.
[first practical sewing machine]
Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine. As with Watt, he improved a bit of it until it became economically practical. Barthlélémy Thimonnier patented the first one in 1830. Benjamin Wilson, Walter Hunt, Elias Howe, Charles Morey and Joseph Johnson, and John Bachelder also worked on sewing machines. Charles Weisenthal, Thomas Saint, Henry Lye, and John Doge and John Knowles, also designed or developed bits and pieces of it.
[supine and silent]
A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine, Ruth Brandon, Lippincott, 1977, page 21.
[women were constrained]
Given any set of constraints, each of our groups builds itself into a stable synergetic network. Its parts lock together because all parts make catalysts for all the other parts. Each part constrains how every other part can change. It doesn’t matter whether we’re bushmen in the Kalahari, dairy farmers in Wisconsin, or goat herders in Greece. For instance, woman-as-baby-maker is the linchpin of all our farming synergetic networks. Whether we farmed corn and beans in America, millet and sorghum in Africa, soy and rice in China, or wheat and rye in Europe made no real difference. Thus, in Akkadian, a language we spoke at least 4,300 years ago, the word meaning ‘owner,’ ‘master,’ or ‘lord’ was bêlu. It denoted ‘husband.’ Hebrew today has the same word: ba’al. In Arabic, it’s ba’l. The Phoenician b’l, the Syrian ba’la, the Ugaritic b’l were more or less the same word. For millennia, men were owners; women were owned.

Note that the proper name for ‘husband’ in Akkadian was mutu; bêlu was its designation. Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro, translated by Antonia Nevill, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, page 115. All the listed languages are Semitic. (There are many more: Aramaic, Ethiopian, Gurage, and so on.) But Indo-European languages are similiar in some ways. The analogous root word seems to be póit, or poti-s. According to Pokorny’s proposed Proto-Indo-European derivation it means “owner, host, master, husband.” Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Julius Pokorny, 1959, page 842. That word has cognates in Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, and Hittite. But based purely on the words, Indo-European women may have been somewhat more equal than Semitic women since it also has feminine forms in Proto-Indo-European (but not in Proto-Semitic). Perhaps the difference is between farmers and herders.

Women were not always as constrained in agrarian societies. For example, in our very earliest literate one, in Sumeria four millennia ago, women could be brewers, bakers, tavern-keepers, and priestesses (but not soldiers). Women mostly couldn’t be scribes (although some celibate priestesses could write), but could hold property, including slaves. They could even sometimes divorce, sort of: if a woman’s husband committed adultery, she could sue for divorce; but if she committed adultery, she’d be drowned. In the main and across time, men had far more freedom than women in all agrarian societies everywhere and everywhen. But to look only at agrarian societies because they represent the bulk of our societies today is to overfocus. Pastoralists (herders, like say the very early Hebrews before they settled in Canaan) are different. And nomads (like the Eurasian horseclans) are different again. As are actual hunter-gatherers.

For millennia, however, men and women had well-defined roles. In China, for example, the saying is nan geng nü zhi (men plow women weave). For millennia, agrarian synergy had forced women all over the world into baby-making. When you’re a perpetual baby-machine, the three jobs that best fit you are child watching, home food production, and home clothing production. When some of us were speaking languages like Akkadian, those jobs were spinning thread and weaving, and milling flour and cooking. But in the nineteenth century such tasks began to matter far less than before. Our new factories and industrial farms were pumping out mass-produced food and clothes in vast peristaltic waves. Clothes got so cheap that many of us could afford more than one set. Food also got cheaper and cheaper. Child watching costs also declined as cities grew and schools ballooned. All three of the traditional female occupations grew less economically valuable. Women found other things to do, things that paid money.

But that’s not our most popular explanation for why the change happened. Instead we often prefer hero stories. To make our hero stories work, we must assume a lot. For example, to explain why women’s lives didn’t change for millennia we assume that our species had to wait all that time for the right woman to be born. She then showed us the error of our ways. But to make that work, we must assume yet more. We must assume that all our male ancestors were ruthless. And we must assume that all our female ancestors were cowed by that ruthlessness—until the birth of our brave hero. Such a story could work. But what about all our groups that still limit women’s choices today? Many do. Women in Afghanistan, for example, lead far different lives than women in Iceland. Why? To answer that we then assume that something must be wrong with them. Either that or they’re brainwashed monkeys.

Suppose all that were true. Why though did the birth of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1815 lead to change while the birth of an Anne Hutchinson in 1591 or a Mary Wollstonecraft in 1759 didn’t? Why didn’t the birth of Pharaoh Hatshepsut change Egyptian women’s lives 3,500 years ago? Why didn’t Empress Wu change women’s lives in China? Or Elizabeth I in England? Or Catherine I in Russia? And why do women today lead different lives in our industrial nations versus our non-industrial ones?

For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of the future Mary Shelley, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in England in 1792, during the French Revolution. At the time, it was considered inflammatory. Today, it’s considered seminal. A century later, though, in 1891, Henrietta Muller (whose penname was Helena B. Temple) wrote that, “One of the things which always humiliated me very much was the way in which women’s interests and opinions were systematically excluded from the World’s Press. I was mortified too, that our cause should be represented by a little monthly leaflet, not worthy of the name of a newspaper called the Women’s Suffrage Journal. I realised of what vital importance it was that women should have a newspaper of their own through which to voice their thoughts, and I formed the daring resolve that if no one else better fitted for the work would come forward, I would try and do it myself...” Women’s journals of the nineteenth century, part 1, The women’s penny paper and women’s herald, 1888-1893, microfilm collection, Adam Matthew, 1997. See also Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984; an Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International titles, David Doughan and Denise Sanchez (editors), Harvester, 1987. Despite all the agitation since at least 1792, it wasn’t until 1918 that 1918 that all adult men, and all women over 30, could vote in Britain. It wasn’t until 1920 that all adult women could vote in the United States. It wasn’t until 1928 that all adult women could vote in Britain.

[Baltimore to Philadelphia cost $11]
Adams gives the following figures: $6 for the coach, $2.25 for room and board each day, and a journey of three days. History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, Library of America, 1986, page 13.
[married women as property]
In English, the legal term for married women during most of European (and European colonial) history is ‘feme covert,’ and the whole institution is called ‘Coverture.’ When women married, they were covered by their husbands, in all senses of the word. In most of Europe that meant they couldn’t testify against their husbands, they couldn’t control money, or own property, or sign any legal document. Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, Margaret Schaus (editor), CRC Press, 2006, pages 282-283.
[...many married at 15]
That was especially so in the rural south. However, the average marital age for white women in the more industrial north was about 20.
[half-naked in mills]
Writing in 1831, Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony Trollope, the novelist, noted that “The greatest difficulty in organising a family establishment in Ohio is getting servants, or, as it is there called, “getting help,” for it is more than petty treason to the Republic to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it.... One of [my servants] was a pretty girl, whose natural disposition must have been gentle and kind; but her good feelings were soured, and her gentleness turned to mobid sensitiveness, by having heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women too, and that it was a sin and a shame for a free-born American to be treated like a servant.” Domestic Manners of the Americans, Mrs. Trollope, Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832, pages 61-62. Later on (page 74) she mentioned women and religion in the United States. “The influence which the ministers of all the innumerable religious sects throughout America, have on the females of their respective congregations, approaches very nearly to what we read of in Spain, or in other strictly Roman Catholic countries. There are many causes for this peculiar influence. Where equality of rank is affectedly acknowledged by the rich, and clamourously claimed by the poor, distinction and preeminence are allowed to the clergy only. This gives them high importance in the eyes of the ladies. I think, also, that it is from the clergy only that the women of America receive that sort of attention which is so dearly valued by every female heart throughout the world. With the priests of America, the women hold that degree of influential importance which, in the countries of Europe, is allowed them throughout all orders and ranks of society, except, perhaps, the very lowest; and in return for this they seem to give their hearts and souls into their keeping. I never saw, or read, of any country where religion had so strong a hold upon the women, or a slighter hold upon the men.” There is much more of this, including descriptions of ‘Revivals’ as a form of theater.
[no more guns from Europe]
In particular, Britain and Spain stopped supplying guns to the natives after losing the War of 1812. France was tied up in the tail end of the Napoleonic wars, and was soon to be defeated (in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo). Russia was unsure that it could project its military power that far away.
[expanding frontier]
The United States jumped from 17 states to 24 just from 1812 to 1821. It added Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, and Missouri.
[Russian expansion]
In the nineteenth century, the, then small, Russian state expanded east much as the, then small, United States expanded west. Russian expansion into the Balkans was partly checked by the British and French in the Crimean War in 1854, but it continued expanding from 1856 on into the steppes of Central Asia, eventually stretching all the way to the Pacific. Although it was more conquest than outright replacement, it still led to many genocides against nomadic, or even settled, peoples, just as western expansion did in the United States starting a little earlier. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe, Willard Sunderland, Cornell University Press, 2004.
[the Bantu expansion and the Khoisan]
History of Africa, Kevin Shillington, Palgrave Macmillan, Revised Edition, 2005, especially Chapters 3 and 4.
[women in nineteenth century America]
“In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or conduct a business or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If, on the one hand, an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, she is never forced, on the other, to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men.” Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II, Section II, Chapter XII, 1835, Henry Reeve Translation, revised and corrected, 1839.
[women in the United States in the 1830s]
By 1830 in the United States, women’s lives there were still much the same. At the time, only six percent of the new nation lived in cities—and calling them ‘cities’ stretches the current meaning of the term. In the few cities, older single women, mostly widows, kept shops or boarding houses. Spinsters took in washing; became seamstresses, cooks, or maids; lived with relatives; or rented their bodies. The more educated became governesses. Genteel urban females lived under the same rules. The only difference was that their menfolk could afford slaves or servants. They were also taught to read, draw, and sing—but only to make them more marriageable. Even with a severe labor shortage, the idea of paying most women to work was still too alien to imagine. And paying slaves, male or female, was unthinkable. Nor did women, slave or free, expect to be paid. Nor did they expect to have any control over their bodies or lives. If married, they were property of their husbands. If single, they were property of their fathers, uncles, brothers. If enslaved, they were property of their owners. If native, they were fleeing the invaders, or trying to find some way to survive with them. And many women, whether single or married, slave or free, white or native, still couldn’t read.

But that didn’t make the United States unusual. Britain, and the rest of Eurasia, wasn’t much different, except for being more urban. That pattern had held for millennia. For example, in seventeenth-century England, Shakespeare could read, but neither of his daughters could. The pattern wasn’t uniform though. Small newly rich places could be different. For instance, in fourteenth-century Florence, Dante pined for the good old days—back before rich Florentine women grew so uppity. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XV.) “Gender and Civic Authority: Sexual Control in a Medieval Italian Town,” C. Lansing, Journal of Social History, 31(1):33-59, 1997, page 42.

Mostly though, wherever the plow had touched down women had fallen over, supine and silent. Thus, nineteenth-century British women were, by law, inferior to men. Married women didn’t even exist, legally. They were home-bound, unable to vote, barely allowed to trade. They also had to be widows before they could control their own property. Outside of brothels and nunneries, half of us in 1830, in the United States, Britain, and everywhere else, were wards of the other half, not counting slaves and natives.

[steam engine production in 1830]
History of the Rise and Progress of the Iron Trade of the United States, from 1621 to 1857: With Numerous Statistical Tables, Relating to the Manufacture, Importation, Exportation, and Prices of Iron for More Than a Century, B. F. French, Wiley & Halsted, 1858, page 37. The number of steam engine factories in 1830 is listed in: Pittsburgh and Allegheny in the Centennial Year, George H. Thurston, A. A. Anderson & Son, 1876, page 172. See also: A History of Manufactures in the Ohio Valley to the Year 1860, Isaac Lippincott, Arno Press, Reprint Edition, 1973, page 102.
[immigration and steamships]
The first transatlantic service started in 1837.
[massacring the natives]
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown, Owl Books, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2001. The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813-1855, Gloria Jahoda, Wings, Reprint Edition, 1995.
[United States population overtakes Britain’s]
By 1860, it had 31.4 million census-counted people, surpassing Britain’s 29 million.
[“best boon to woman in the nineteenth century”]
“The Story of the Sewing-Machine,” New York Times, January 7th, 1860.
[it only took $5 to bring one home]
“The Disappearance of the Domestic Sewing Machine, 1890-1925,” M. Connolly, Winterthur Portfolio, 34(1):31-48, 1999, page 32.
[New York seamstresses employment options in 1858]
As reported by the New York Shirt Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union in 1858. A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine, Ruth Brandon, Lippincott, 1977, pages 69-70.
[female manufacturing options in Bridgeport in 1860]
A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860: Exhibiting the Origin and Growth of the Principal Mechanic Arts and Manufactures, from the earliest Colonial period to the adoption of the Constitution; and Comprising Annals of the Industry of the United States in Machinery, Manufactures and Useful Arts, with a Notice of the Important Inventions, Tariffs, and the Results of each Decennial Census. To which are added statistics of the principal manufacturing centers, and descriptions of remarkable manufactories at the present time. J. Leander Bishop, Volume II, Edward Young and Co., 1864, page 764.

In 1860, an estimated 12,106 people lived in Bridgeport. Population of the 100 largest cities and other urban places in the United States: 1790 TO 1990, Population Division Working Paper Number 27, United States Bureau of the Census, 1998.

Incidentally, Bishop also lists manufactory occupations, with a breakdown by male and female, for many towns, notably Hartford, where Samuel Colt had his gun manufactory. It had a much larger spread of female occupations (but then, it was a much larger town than Bridgeport), however, the top three female occupations were still clothing of one kind or another. The largest group was 595 women in clothing. Then 512 women in ‘silk, sewing.’ Then 409 in hosiery. Then 302 in paper. Philadelphia was much larger still, and so had an even wider spread of industries.

[half a million sewing machines a year by 1880]
Thus doubling the figure for 1870, when it sold 127,833 a year. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, David A. Hounshell, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, page 6.
[newspapers and common cause]
“The effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great number of persons, but to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may have singly conceived. The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. In democratic countries, on the contrary, it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it because as they are very insignificant and lost amid the crowd, they cannot see and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.” Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II, Section III, Chapter VI, 1835, Henry Reeve Translation, revised and corrected, 1839.
[reactions to the typewriter]
“The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” C. Keep, Victorian Studies, 40(3):401-426, 1997.
[women as nannies]
Women’s Work: The First 20,000 years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, W. W. Norton, 1994.
[United States mortality and height changes, 1890-1930]
“The Use of Model Life Tables to Estimate Mortality for the United States in the Late Nineteenth Century,” M. R. Haines, Demography, 16(2):289-312, 1979.
[total fertility rate decline for ever-married white women]
“Quantitative Aspects of Marriage, Fertility and Family Limitation in Nineteenth Century America: Another Application of the Coale Specifications,” W. C. Sanderson, Demography, 16(3):339-358, 1979.
[changes in reproductive control]
By 1860 in the United States, women’s labor options were changing fast, but their reproductive options, and thus constraints on their labor lives, were still much as they had been for millennia. Then in 1861 the New York Times carried the first ad for mass-produced rubber condoms. The nation went insane. By 1873 the government passed the Comstock Act, banning all birth-control ads, aids, and books. Even giving them away could mean six months hard labor, or a $100 fine. To the government, “suppressing vice” as all important. But it needn’t have bothered. At the time, three in four census-counted women were still rural. Further, there were vast tracts of land still to be stolen out west. The young nation was still killing natives. And machines were still costly. So farm labor was still valuable. So the cost of babies relative to their future labor value was still low. Plus child deaths were still high. So most women still made plenty of ’em.

The Comstock Act of 1873 (U. S. Statutes At Large, Vol. XVII, p. 598), reads, in part: “That whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States, or other place within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, shall sell, or lend, or give away, or in any manner exhibit, or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section hereinbefore mentioned, can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in anywise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof in any court of the United States having criminal jurisdiction in the District of Columbia, or in any Territory or place within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, where such misdemeanor shall have been committed; and on conviction thereof, he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six montns nor more than five years for each offence, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.” United States Duties on Imports, 1877, Lewis Heyl, W. H. & O. H. Morrison, 1877, page 144.

Even today, some sex differences remain. For example, since 1998, selling a dildo or vibrator in Alabama could result in a year of jail and a $10,000 fine. Sex toy sales are also illegal in Georgia and Texas, and are restricted in Louisiana and Tennessee. As of February, 2007, The Alabama ruling was once again under appeal (United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, D. C. Docket Number 98-01938-CV-5). Erection-enhancers, like Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, however, are legal in those states. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, Andrea Tone, Hill and Wang, 2002. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. American Sex Machines: The Hidden History of Sex at the U. S. Patent Office, Hoag Levins, Adams Media Corporation, 1996.

It’s not impossible that sex differences under the law won’t completely vanish until the consequences of sexual acts normalize between the sexes. If so, that’s going to take a long time, although there are signs of it ahead. There’s already been at least one ‘parentless baby.’ A heterosexual couple wanted a child but the husband was sterile and the wife doubly so: not only could she not produce fertile eggs, she also couldn’t carry a baby to term. The couple contracted with a married woman to do the job. Two anonymous people donated sperm and eggs. A fertility clinic brought the egg and sperm together, then implanted the resulting conceptus in the rented womb. The resulting child thus had at least three mothers: an intent-mother, an egg-mother, and a gestational-mother, and at least three fathers: an intent-father, a sperm-father, and the gestational-mother’s husband. While the fetus was gestating, the original couple divorced. The child was born a month later. Who gets custody? Buzzanca v. Buzzanca, 61 California Court of Appeal, 4th District, 1410, 1998. On appeal, the baby, christened Jaycee Buzzanca, was awarded to the original couple, even though they were now divorced and had no biological tie to the baby girl. “The Shadowlands—Secrets, Lies, and Assisted Reproduction,” G. J. Annas, The New England Journal of Medicine, 339(13):935-939, 1998. In 1999 a man in England who wanted to be the father of a motherless baby contracted with an American egg donor, fertility clinic, and surrogate mother. He now has triplets. “I’m the daddy,” Denise Winterman, BBC News, May 17th, 2006.

We’re also now working on artificial wombs. The possibility of men getting pregnant, or cows carrying human embryos, or full-term artificial wombs is pure science fiction—today. In 1997, Yoshinori Kuwabara, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Juntendo University School of Medicine, grew 17-week-old goat fetuses for two days in amniotic tanks with artificial umbilical cords to deliver nutrients and remove wastes. In 2002, Hung-Ching Liu, Cornell University’s Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, grew human blastulas for six days in an artificial womb. The womb lacked veins so the blastulas could not properly attach to get food and eliminate waste. Further, human embryos can now be brought to term outside the womb as early as 23 weeks after fertilization. (Rumaisa Rahman, a baby born in December, 2004, was 15 weeks premature.) It’s only a matter of time before those two curves cross. “Goat Fetuses Disconnected from the Placenta, but Reconnected to an Artificial Placenta, Display Intermittent Breathing Movements,” S. Kozumaa, H. Nishinaa, N. Unnoa, H. Kagawaa, A. Kikuchia, T. Fujiia, K. Babab, T. Okaic, Y. Kuwabarad, Y. Taketania, Biology of the Neonate, 75(6):388-397, 1999. “Artificial wombs: An out of body experience,” J. Knight, Nature, 419(6903):106-107, 2002.

[later female labor changes in the United States]
White women, cut out of the rural corset by a new synergetic machine, were now stuffed into a new urban corset. Aside from a handful of successful female writers, singers, and actors, like Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Louisa May Alcott with Little Women, most working white women were young, single, urban immigrants. Most saw their low-paying jobs only as ways to mark time until they could get married and stop getting paid. Since 1860, only about one woman in three was being paid for her labor. Nearly all were both single and non-white. From 1890 to 1980, many more married non-white women took paying jobs than married white ones did. For married white women in 1890, just 2.5 percent worked for money. That figure didn’t reach 20 percent until as late as 1950. Further, labor segregation remained strong. In 1900, 91 percent of all working women worked in only 12 percent of all jobs. That concentration has declined only very slowly since then. Women in 1900: Gateway to the Political Economy of the 20th Century, Christine E. Bose, Temple University Press, 2001, page 86.

Black and native women had, and still have, even fewer options. Even after genocide and legal slavery ended, many were at work outside the home, married or single, but only in service or on the farm. By 1890 genocide had reduced the native population from perhaps five million to about a quarter million. That is, 19 out of every 20 were dead. Native fertility rates before 1890 are unknown; however after that date they were high, yet native mortality rates were so high that the native population barely changed. From 1890 it took 70 years, until 1960, to double. Black rates before 1850 are also unknown. After 1850, they too were higher than white rates, but they also fell as white rates did. However, even today they’re still higher than white rates. Black infant mortality was also far higher. It too fell, but today it too is still higher than white rates. Black life expectancy is also still lower today. Today, urban-rural differences in the United States have vanished. Black-white and native-white differences still haven’t. “American Indian Mortality in the Late Nineteenth Century: the Impact of Federal Assimilation Policies on a Vulnerable Population,” J. D. Hacker, M. R. Haines, Working Paper 12572, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2006. “The Growing American Indian Population, 1960-1990: Beyond Demography,” J. S. Passel, in Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health, Gary D. Sandefur, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen (editors), National Academies Press, pages 79-102, 1996. “American Indian Fertility Patterns: 1910 and 1940 to 1980,” R. Thornton, G. D. Sandefur, C. M. Snipp, American Indian Quarterly, 15(3):359-367, 1991. A Population History of the United States, Herbert Klein, Cambridge University Press, 2004. A Population History of North America, Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (editors), Cambridge University Press, 2001. “A Statistical Reconstruction of the Black Population of the United States, 1880-1970: Estimates of True Numbers by Age and Sex, Birth Rates, and Total Fertility,” A J. Coale, N. W. Rives, Population Index, 39(1):3-36, 1973. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, Claudia Goldin, Oxford University Press, 1990, Table 2.1 and 2.2, pages 17-18. Statistical Abstract of the United States, United States Census Bureau, 1993.

[percentage of women in the United States working today]
“The participation rates of men and women have historically followed different trends. Until 1999, the men’s participation rate was continually decreasing, while the women’s rate was continually increasing. The men’s rate was higher not only in the aggregate, but also for every detailed age group, up until 2006. That year, the labor force participation rates of 16- to 19-year-old men and women were the same: 43.7. The labor force participation of 16- to 19-year-old women is projected to surpass that of men of the same age by 2016.” From “Labor force projections to 2016: more workers in their golden years,” M. Toossi, Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2007, page 41. See also Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2005.
[lower pay for women]
The Economics of Gender, Joyce P. Jacobsen, Wiley-Blackwell, Third Edition, 2007, page 4.
[White House senior aides]
As of July 1st, 2005, and not counting the president or vice president, or household staff and military staff. ‘Senior aide’ means anyone titled ‘Assistant to the President.’ They earn the top salary, $161,000 a year. The second tier, anyone titled ‘Deputy Assistant to the President,’ earn from $133,000 to $144,000. The third tier is anyone titled ‘Special Assistant to the President.’ 5 of the top 19 aides are female (about 26 percent). 7 of the top 25 aides are female (about 28 percent). 34 of the top 81 aides are female (about 42 percent). Data from: “2005 White House Office Staff List,” Dan Fromkin, Washington Post, July 1, 2005. By July 1st, 2009, in the next White House, of the 147 aides earning over $100,000 (to a maximum of $172,200, with one exception at $192,934) 65 (44 percent) were female. Of the 23 top aides, 8 are female (about 35 percent).
[female Nobelists]
Twelve in Peace, ten in Literature, seven in Physiology of Medicine, three in Chemistry, two in Physics, zero in Economics. (Marie Curie got two of them, one in Physics, one in Chemistry. Her daughter, Irène, also won one in Chemistry.)
[female billionaires]
“The World’s Billionaires,” database of The World’s Richest People. Forbes Magazine March 9th, 2006.
[female CEOs]
As of 2006, the companies are: Sara Lee, Daiei, SNCF, AREVA, Xerox, Rite Aid, and Archer Daniels Midland. Fortune Magazine, July 24th, 2006.

In the Grip of a Metal Hand

[settlement changes in the United States]
The rural-urban proportion data doesn’t cover 1800 to 2000 precisely. It’s from 1790 to 1990. Table 4, ‘Population 1790 to 1990,’ United States Census Bureau, 1995.
[job changes in the United States]
The job-market data doesn’t cover 1900 to 2000 precisely. It’s from 1910 to 2000. “Occupational changes during the 20th century,” I. D. Wyatt, D. E. Hecker, Monthly Labor Review, 129(3):35-57, 2006.
[United States farmers and beauticians]
Back in 1900 38.8 percent of the population, 29.5 million people, were farmers. In 2006, there were 859,000 agricultural workers. versus 825,000 personal appearance workers. (That includes barbers, cosmetologists, makeup artists, manicurists, and cosmetologists.) There were 435,000 computer programmers. Also, there were 1,860,000 heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers, and 1,051,000 light truck or delivery services drivers. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008-09 Edition, Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2009.
[farm income]
Data from the USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey, 2008. Farm Household Economics and Well-Being, United States Department of Agriculture, 2009.
[changes in food costs in the United States]
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 90.
[changes in leisure and retirement in the rich world]
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 67.
[talk of a global brain]
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom, John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Research toward what might eventually become such a thing is proceeding along several lines (although no responsible researcher says that the ultimate result might be a ‘global brain,’ or at least, no one says so publicly). The problem is how to coordinate action by massive numbers of mobile, computational agents, each with limited knowledge, as they interact to solve various problems in a massive, distributed, global computer network. The chief areas of research are: ubiquitous computing (also called ubicomp), pervasive computing (sometimes called ambient intelligence), mobile agents, massively parallel computation, and grid computing. Security for Ubiquitous Computing, Frank Stajano, John Wiley & Sons, 2002. Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, E. Bonabeau, M. Dorigo, G. Theraulaz, F. Kluegl, Oxford University Press, 1999. The Ecology of Computation, B. A. Hubermann (editor), North-Holland, 1988. The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman (editors), Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. Software Agents, James E. White (editor), AAAI Press/MIT Press, 1997.
[‘digital factories’]
Another possibility is that our computers themselves will power our new idea fountain. But likely, the main barrier to that will be software. Mental labor today is no more mechanized than physical labor was in 1776. We thus still hand-make nearly every computer program. So despite the glamour that we today attach to anything to do with computers, today’s programmers are much like yesterday’s blacksmiths and handicrafters. But instead of asking them to shoe horses or make wagon wheels, we’re asking them to build missile defence shields and deep space probes—by hand. The tasks we ask of them far exceed their tools and skills. Thus, we’re still the main prime movers of our still infant mental phase change. We’re still our own carthorses; we don’t yet have a mental engine. There’s no time for anything better yet because there’s too much money to be made even if you only know a little. Getting ten years of training, or spending ten years building a new tool, can’t easily happen when just six months of it makes you, or your partly built tool, worth good money. The chance of a phase change in software production soon seems remote.
[metaconcert]
The term is Julian May’s, as used in her science-fiction novel, The Saga of the Pliocene Exile, in four Volumes, Julian May, Del Rey Books, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984.

Dynamo - Chapter 3, Resources

[Adams quote]
“‘[T]echnology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them.” Quoted in “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet,” Douglas Adams, Sunday Times, August 29th, 1999. The thought is also credited to Danny Hillis. Since Alan Kay expressed a related thought earlier (‘technology is stuff invented after you were born’) and Hillis worked under Kay, and Hillis and Ferren worked together at Disney, then later cofounded the company Applied Minds, Hillis might be the likelier author. He’s cited as saying: “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” Quoted in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, Stewart Brand, Basic Books, 2000, page 17.

The King’s Last Argument

[British slavery around 1851]
Its overseas slavery ended (legally, at least) in 1834. Its penal slavery ended (legally, at least) in 1868.
[the Crystal Palace]
For simplicity the text gives the impression that all Britain supported the idea of the fair, but actually the initial impetus came from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. However, to actually get it built he needed to rouse interest among the mercantile population to show off their wares, and so get the funding for the building. The Great Exhibition of 1851: a Nation on Display, Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Yale University Press, 1999.
[“which will kill eight times as quick...”]
“The most popular and famous invention of American industry, is a pistol which will kill eight times as quick as the weapon formerly in use. It has been reported upon by committees, and sanctioned by Congress, and so keen is the national appreciation of this great discovery, that the Republican Government of Washington does not hesitate to pay about three times as much for cavalry pistols as England pays for infantry muskets.” The Times went on to sardonically call Samuel Colt ‘the American Jenner.’ “Here you may make yourself acquainted with the new method of vaccination, as performed by the practitioners of the Far West, upon the rude tribes who yet incumber the wilderness with their presence. This, in a word, is the stand of Samuel Colt, the inventor of the six barrelled revolving pistol, an arm which in all probability will supersede the fire-arms at present carried by the cavalry of every military power, and which, by the extension of the invention, might be made equally applicable to the efficiency of the foot service. The weapon is of the simplest kind, although it is clear enough that a vast amount of pains must have been bestowed upon the attainment of what seems to be a very simple result.” The Times, June 9th, 1851. See also: American superiority at the World’s Fair; designed to accompany a chromo-lithographic picture illustrative of prizes awarded to American citizens at the Great Exhibition: a compilation of public and private sources, Charles T. Rodgers, J. J. Hawkins, 1852, page 65.
[France had lost a big war with Britain]
That was the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763. Sometimes called the ‘first world war,’ it was the first to involve actions all over the globe. It was fought by France, Austria, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden against Britain, Prussia, and Hanover. Spain and Portugal were later drawn in. It’s part of an even larger conflict sometimes called the ‘Second Hundred Years’ War.’ That was the fight for supremacy between Britain and France from the accession of William III (in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (in 1815).
[France’s newest artillery engineers and science]
They were trained in the then young scientific method. “Five artillery schools, all located in garrison towns, had been started in 1720. Enrollment was expanded after 1763 and the curriculum enlarged and made more rigorous. In addition to normal military training, cadets studied geometry, mechanics, drafting, and elementary physics and chemistry. Before graduation they took an examination in mathematics set by Bézout and after his death by none other than Laplace. Over a thousand officers were thus trained in the last quarter-century of the old regime.” Quoted from: “Engineering the Revolution,” C. C. Gillispie, Technology and Culture, 39(4):733-742, 1998, page 735.
[Blanc was the first to make precision parts]
As usual, the text compresses a complex story into a simpler one in the interest of brevity. Christopher Polhem (1661-1751), a Swedish inventor, was actually the first, but his machines, which made cogwheels for clocks, didn’t trigger further change partly thanks to its rejection by the best clockmakers and partly by the difficulty of distribution in sparsely populated and largely rural Sweden. The History of the Machine, Sigvard Strandh, translated by Ann Henning, Dorset Press, 1989, pages 54-55. Nor was Polhem alone. Guillaume Deschamps, a French armorer, also made interchangeable parts in the 1720s. Plus, they were gunlocks too. “Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacturing in France,” K. Alder, Technology and Culture, 38(2):273-311, 1997, page 298. For the development of mass production outside government control in the United States, see: Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector, Donald Robert Hoke, Columbia University Press, 1990.
[the development of interchangeable parts]
Jefferson probably met with Blanc in Paris on July 8th, 1785. He was then in Paris as the new ambassador to the court of Louis XVI. Engineering the Revolution, Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815, Ken Alder, Princeton University Press, 1997. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, David A. Hounshell, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
[Blanc’s second demo]
It was held five years after his first, on November 20th, 1790. By then, Jefferson was back in Washington.
[Brunel’s Portsmouth block manufactory]
Brunel sailed for England on January 20th, 1799. The United States and France never declared war, but fighting at sea had begun by then. Brunel got as far as he did, despite many failures, largely because his wife’s brother was senior in the British Navy. He provided introductions. Brunel worked with Samuel Bentham, who was himself very inventive. Brother of Jeremy Bentham (the political radical and philosopher), Samuel was inspector general of the British Navy. They then hired Henry Maudslay to build the machines they’d need. Maudslay was one of Britain’s rising stars in precision tools. His machines for the Portsmouth yards were so well made that they were still in use in 1944, 141 years later. Blocks for the landing boats at Normandy on D-Day were made there. At the same Portsmouth yards, Bentham had a steam engine in use to drain the docks as early as 1799, and, by 1802, another to run mechanical saws. The block factory suffered after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 and demand dried up. By 1821 Brunel was in jail for debt. The government let him, and his family, languish there until he started corresponding with the Tsar of Russia, who was interested in hiring him away. Then it paid off his debts with the understanding that he’d remain in Britain. He then went on to invent several more machines and initiate many more building projects. The Greater Genius? Harold Bagust, Ian Allan Publishing, 2006. Brunel: The Man Who Made the World, Steven Brindle, Sterling Publishing Company, 2005, page 37. The Portsmouth Block Mills: Bentham, Brunel and the start of the Royal Navy’s Industrial Revolution, Jonathan Coad, English Heritage, 2005. “The Portsmouth System of Manufacture,” C. C. cooper, Technology and Culture, 25(2):182-225, 1984. English and American Tool Builders, Joseph Wickham Roe, Yale University Press, 1916. For the reaction of the Southampton block manufactory to his idea, see: Memoir of the life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel: Civil Engineer, Vice-President of the Royal Society, corresponding member of the Institute of France, etc., Richard Beamish, Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, Second Edition, 1862, page 50.
[slave revolts in the United States]
In the United States, revolts were feared more than anything else and many laws governing slaves were designed to prevent them. Despite that, slaves still sometimes rebelled anyway, most recently in New York 1741, and soon after in Virginia in 1800. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, Junius P. Rodriguez (editor), in two volumes, Greenwood, 2006. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, Douglas R. Egerton, University of North Carolina Press, 1993. A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York, Thomas J. Davis, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Some revolts outside the United States did succeed, in Haiti for example.
[“slit the throats of their sons and wives”]
The reference is to La Marseillaise. “Entendez-vous dans les campagnes / Mugir ces féroces soldats? / Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras / Éorger vos fils, vos compagnes!”
[war with Barbary pirates]
That was the First Barbary war. It started in 1801, when Jefferson became president. It was only the second time that United States troops were used abroad, and was also undeclared (by the United States, although it was declared by Tripoli).
[undeclared war with France]
The (primarily naval) actions persisted from 1798 to 1800. It was the first time that United States troops were used abroad, and was undeclared by Congress (which hardly existed at the time anyway).
[why did mass production take off in the United States?]
Those new guns had grown out of fear, but fear alone was hardly enough for us to change. We had been plenty afraid before 1801, yet we didn’t then enter a production phase change. In particular, fear didn’t force the same production phase change in Europe—at least, not at first. Its clotted layers of artisans wouldn’t stand for it. Fear was only able to break the back of the age-old piecework tradition in the United States because—unlike Europe—the little ex-colony didn’t have much of a tradition to begin with. It was a backwater full of hicks. There, land was cheap and skilled labor was scarce. Even unskilled labor was unreliable. So it welcomed machines.

The idea that labor shortage encouraged machines in the United States is hardly new. It seems to have first been enunciated in: American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour Saving Inventions, H. J. Habakkuk, Cambridge University Press, 1962. See, for example, The Emergence of Industrial America: Strategic Factors in American Economic Growth Since 1870, Peter George, State University of New York Press, 1982, pages 37-47. But that pressure wasn’t enough. The United States also needed the new precision machines that were only then becoming available because of decades of steam engine developments in Britain, and of course the import of French ideas about parts interchangeability following decades of effort in France. Telling the story from the point of view of any one nation alone, as is still common today, falsifies it.

Being land-rich and labor-poor wasn’t enough by itself either. If it were, then Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, or Uruguay might have developed mass production first. Various historical accidents (examined earlier) made the United States peculiarly suited to adopting new machines quickly. But the main reason it could adopt those new machines at all was that there were new machines to adopt. In Britain, machines and machine tools were only then becoming reliable and powerful enough to begin to replace our labor. In turn, that was thanks to the autocatalytic effects of steam engine. Without the precision tools that British machinists were then busily creating—and which the United States was just as busily buying, copying, smuggling, or outright stealing—mass production in the United States would’ve been impossible. So the United States did what Britain and France couldn’t, but were it not for France and Britain it would’ve been just as trapped as they were.

[Europe reimports mass production]
Even after 1851 it still took more decades of muddle. For instance, in 1852 Samuel Colt opened a revolver factory in London. But the British arms workers he hired repeatedly sabotaged it. So he fired them and imported trained staff from his hometown in Hartford, Connecticut. By 1854 his London factory was open for business. As with Blanc’s, and Brunel’s, it was wildly successful—for a while. Britain and France had just declared war on Russia in the Crimea. So, as usual, those of us in Europe went gun-mad. By December 1856, though, Colt closed his London factory. The war had ended. British gunsmiths were still making nearly everything by hand in their cottages. And after the shooting war against Russia ended, they won the propaganda war against Colt with ‘buy British.’

“The Americans carry out the factory system, the well-planned division of labour, to a greater extent than we do. They have not more hands than are requisite to do the work which is to be done; and they have not before their minds that fear of strikes, and grumblings and discontent, which frequently deter inventors from introducing new machines in England. Among us, guns and pistols are handwork, made in pieces by artisans who use the hammer and file, and other hand-tools; but in the United States the art is regarded as a kind of engineering, in which steam-power and beautiful machines are employed.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, “What Is A Revolver?” Anonymous, Number 519, December 10th, 1853. (Robert Chambers is the likely author of this piece; he often wrote anonymously to fill his journal.)

[New York Times on the future of the United States]
“Everywhere, beyond our borders, on this Western Hemisphere, do we see the need of the ballasting traits of Anglo-Saxonism. It will never do to argue the practicability of our system beyond the confines of the race, until the experiment has been abundantly tried. The lights now before us seem to justify the idea that such institutions as those our Fathers devised, must be sustained by the continued exercise of traits peculiar to the national character. Believing this, and both branches of the Predestinarians accepting the fact that the national influence and national force must operate together, we see nothing irrational in the hope of a more dazzling future for the race than imagination has yet ventured to outline. Not a continent, a half-globe, but the world—shall be ours. Through what vista into the future shall we look to see a more splendid destiny?” “The Science of Manifest Destiny,” New York Times, September 9th, 1852. The New York Times was then one year old.

Amalthea’s Recursive Horn

[cotton price drops]
The man-hour estimates for 100 pounds of cotton are from: The Lever of Riches: Technology, Creativity, and Economic Progress, Joel Mokyr, Oxford University Press, 1990, page 99. The transport prices for 100 pounds of cotton are from: The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History; Part I: The Cotton Culture and the Cotton Trade, M. B. Hammond, Macmillan, 1897, page 171.
[four ideas behind mass production]
These days we often muddle together four separate ideas when we speak of mass production. The idea of a ‘factory,’ meaning someplace when several of us would go to work together, is an old one. In China, we had such factories at least a thousand years ago. The idea of making something in volume is also old. For instance, that’s how we made pots, coins, buttons, and cannon balls centuries ago. The idea of division of labor is old, too. It probably dates back at least as far as our first cities, perhaps seven millennia ago. But those three ideas didn’t come together until recently.

As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “[Normally a pinmaker] could scarce... make one pin in a day.... [But now] the whole work... is divided into a number of branches.... One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top....” In other words, pinmakers specialized and together they formed a reaction network. Before that, a pinmaker could only make about one pin a day. Now, the same pinmaker could average around 5,000 pins a day. The price of pins dropped like a rock. By dividing labor we could thus make an assembly line. By adding a steam engine we could also power all the tools on that line. That alone was a huge change, but mass production also involves yet another idea—precision parts. While we could divide our labor in factories to make pins in volume, those pins needn’t be precision-made. Conversely, we could make precision pins in low volume in factories without dividing our labor—painstakingly and by hand. Our production explosion happened only when all four ideas came together.

Mass production is thus a form of volume production in which we divide both the making of and the putting together of standard parts into a series of steps so simple that we can make tools do them. We can then divide the labor of making and putting together the parts for those tools, thus closing the recursive loop.

Factories in China 1,000 years ago: “Organization and Management in the Midst of Societal Transformation: The People’s Republic of China,” A. S. Tsui, C. B. Schoonhoven, M. W. Meyer, L. Chung-Ming, G. T. Milkovich, Organization Science, 15(2):133-144, 2004.

Division of labor is old: Finley cites Xenophon 2,400 years ago explaining why artisans specialize in cities. The Ancient Economy, M. I. Finley, University of California Press, 1973, page 135. However, any large mass of us will specialize—for example, in armies. Probably the idea is so old that it’s impossible to date.

Adam Smith’s pin-making example: “[A pinmaker] could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some factories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.... Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan Edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, Book I, Chapter I, page 3.

Mass production isn’t just volume: For example, Abraham Darby’s brass castings for cast iron, or Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery molds for kiln pottery, or Christopher Polhem’s cogwheels milling machine, or any number of other such items (bootlaces, buttons, coins, cannon balls, and so on). All were in volume, yet none were ‘mass produced.’ In 1452, Gutenberg had made the lead type for his printing press in bulk, but that wasn’t ‘mass production’ either.

[recursion]
Recursion is a tricky idea, and even math and computer science students have a lot of trouble with it. The essence of their problem is this: if a process depends on itself, how can it ever stop? For example, when you stand between two mirrors facing each other what you see is a recursive image: it contains a reflection of you, a smaller reflection of that reflection of you, a yet smaller reflection of that, and so on. The recursion doesn’t go to infinity because after some number of reflections, the next reflection is either too small or too dim for your eyes to see. Every recursion eventually ‘bottoms out’ sometime, so if we were to start at its bottom and work our way out we’d have a more easily understood operation, (example: imagine that the mirror starts with a just barely discernible image of your reflection, then the second mirror magnifies that, and so on, until the reflected image occupies the whole mirror’s surface). However expressing the operation recursively (going the other way) is more compact and, almost always, more powerfully expressive.
[...guns germinate steel foundries]
An homage to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton, 1997.
[‘childhood’ in nineteenth century Britain]
Today’s notion of ‘childhood’ is something we had to invent. And recently. Before then children were mostly just small adults. In Britain at least, kids under ten had been barred from mining only in 1841. Kids under eight would be barred from working the fields only in 1868—the same year public hangings would be outlawed. Working children had little legal protection. But then even adult male trade unions remained illegal until 1871—and hanging or penal slavery was the penalty for trying to start one. Kids under ten would be barred from manufactory work only in 1874. Child chimney sweeps would be banned only in 1875.

In Britain until the 1840s over 400 crimes carried the death penalty. Cutting down a sapling, damaging Westminster Bridge, being a very malicious child, stealing a letter—all were hanging offenses. Children weren’t excepted. From the age of seven, kids convicted of stealing toys, or a spoon, or a pork pie, could be jailed or hung. Or they could be transported—sent to a colony for hard labor—in effect, enslaved. Of the transported, some of those “little depraved felons” went for life. Others went for seven or fourteen years. One boy stole 21 umbrellas and was transported to today’s Tasmania for seven years. He was 11. Another boy also got seven years in Tasmania. He stole three boxes of toys. He was nine. In 1851, perhaps 100,000 children roamed the streets of London alone. Child labor, starvation, disease, near-slavery, harlotry, illiteracy, crime, and bastardy were normal. Kids as young as five were bought and sold, brutalized and exploited, and put to work up chimneys, down coal mines, or in the factories and fields. ‘Baby farming,’ the paid murder of unwanted infants, was an industry. Such ‘farmers’ might accept dozens of babies at once—supposedly to raise, but mostly to kill ‘accidentally.’ They even advertised in the newspapers. Dickens didn’t have to make up anything in Oliver Twist. What he had to do was tone it down.

At the time, many crimes in Britain had only one punishment—hanging. Spending a month in the company of gypsies, stealing goods worth 5 shillings, impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, blacking up at night, being a runaway sailor—all were hanging offenses. But the penalty was so harsh that in practice few were actually hanged, so transportation (essentially penal slavery) was a popular alternative. Also, pregnant women, young children, clergymen, anyone who could read (or pretend to) well enough to pass muster, and—of course—anyone who was rich, often received pardons or reduced penalties, like whipping or branding or pillorying. The laws were beginning to be softened by the 1830s—after huge postwar political unrest from 1816 on, largely having to do with the way the rich treated the poor—but many such laws were still in force by 1851. Crime and Punishment in England: A Sourcebook, Andrew Barrett and Christopher Harrison (editors), Routledge, 2001. “London Crime and the Making of the ‘Bloody Code,’ 1689-1718,” J. M. Beattie, Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750, Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker (editors), St. Martin’s Press, 1992. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, Peter Linebaugh, Penguin, 1991. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England, Frank McLynn, Routledge, 1989.

Children transported: Two children in Birmingham were sentenced to be transported to Australia on January 5th, 1844. John Locksmith (also known as William Joach), aged 14, got 14 years, and George Wort, aged 15, got seven years. Home Office 11/15: Convict Transportation Registers, 1846-1848, pages 190 and 225. The National Archives, Kew, England.

An 11 year-old named James Gavagan arrived at Point Puer in 1835. A nine year-old named James Lynch was a London laborer and he could read a little. Previously he’d stolen stockings, for which he got 10 days in jail, and two bonnets, for which he got six months in jail. For stealing the toys he got transportation and seven years at the Surrey Quarter Sessions, Newington, on September 11th, 1843. He sailed with 289 other convicts on board the Equestrian and arrived in Hobart May 2nd, 1844. Pack of Thieves? 52 Port Arthur Lives, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Susan Hood, Port Arthur, Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, 2001. The Village Labourer 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill, J. L. and Barbara Hammond, 1911, Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, Reprint of the 1913 Edition, 1967. Remember, though, that at the time, marriageable age was 14 for boys and 12 for girls, and many would be dead by 20, so ‘children’ is a somewhat misleading term.

The phrase “little depraved felons” is that of Governor Arthur, of Port Arthur, in Australia. The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, Knopf, 1986, page 408.

100,000 child vagrants in London: The Seven Curses of London, James Greenwood, Stanley River, 1869. See also Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth Century London, Heather Shore, Boydell Press, 1999. “Histories of Crime and Modernity,” Andrew Davies and Geoffrey Pearson (editors), special issue of the British Journal of Criminology, 39(1), 1999.

A typical baby-farmer ad read: “NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT -- The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.” The Seven Curses of London, James Greenwood, Stanley River, 1869, page 23.

In Britain, after passage of the new Poor Law in 1834, an unwed mother bore the sole financial responsibility until her child turned 16. Many poor unwed mothers couldn’t support their offspring, especially if she was young and had been impregnated by the master of the house or shop or factory in which she worked. Then too there was the stigma of having an illegitimate child. So what many mothers wanted was to make the child disappear. But it was illegal to kill your children (or at least, to be caught at it). Baby farmers existed for those (many) mothers who couldn’t bring themselves to kill their own children, or who didn’t want to risk it, or who chose to believe that their children would be raised properly, albeit very cheaply. Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870-1908, George K. Behlmer, Stanford University Press, 1982. Baby farming also existed in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in the United States until at least 1917. One Chicago ‘farmer’s slogan was: “It’s cheaper and easier to buy a baby for $100.00 than to have one of your own.” Baby Farms in Chicago: An Investigation Made for the Juvenile Protective Association, Arthur Alden Guild Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1917.

[children sent to school]
That was no small change. Reformers like Carpenter and Turner and Davenport Hill campaigned for better schools—or even for just less useless, destructive, and harsh schools—but against stiff opposition. The idea was that they, and their parents, and essentially all paupers, were lost to sin, so there was no point trying to educate them. Mandeville’s 1723 satiric comment below suggests something of England’s more usual attitude to the children of its laboring classes, prior to mass production: “Few Children make any Progress at School, but at the same time they are capable of being employ’d in some Business or other, so that every Hour those of poor People spend at their Book is so much time lost to the Society. Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they’ll be when grown up for downright Labour, both as to Strength and Inclination. Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, Tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after. Hard Labour and the coarsest Diet are a proper Punishment to several kinds of Malefactors, but to impose either on those that have not been used and brought up to both is the greatest Cruelty, when there is no Crime you can charge them with.” The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, “An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools,” Bernard de Mandeville, edited by Phillip Harth, Pelican, 1970. Similar attitudes prevailed in the United States. The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, John Taylor Gatto, Oxford Village Press, 2001.
[the poor must be kept poor]
That idea extended to slavery itself. The notion that many of us just have to be enslaved so that the few can have decent lives is very old. For example, Aristotle, 2,300 years ago, wrote: “But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.... Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.... It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.” Politics, Aristotle, Book I, Chapters iii-vii, Benjamin Jowett Translation, Dover, Reprint Edition, 2000, pages 32-34.

Slavery is today no longer legal, but it still exists. Today it’s common to say that we abolished legal slavery in the nineteenth century ‘because it was bad.’ But that can’t possibly be all that matters. If it were, why didn’t we abandon slavery millennia before? If the explanation for that then amounts to ‘because our ancestors were bad,’ then why are there an estimated 200,000 slaves today just in the United States alone? Why are 27 million of us still slaves today? Why must 250 million of our children between the ages of 5 and 14 still labor today? Why are we forcing perhaps 60 million of those children to become prostitutes or soldiers? Aren’t those things bad too? We’ve been slavers and slaves ever since we phase changed into farming and herding, millennia ago. The Hebrews kept slaves. The Maya kept slaves. The Bantu kept slaves. The Persians, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Sumerians—anyone and everyone kept slaves. Even when we tried to abandon slavery we rarely succeeded. For instance, the first effort in Europe to ban slavery came in 655. Europe still kept slaves 1,300 years later. We had to do much more than talk before we could do without slavery—and we still haven’t fully done so.

Nor did we change our division of labor simply because of the steam engine alone. The United States had steam engines early on but still kept legal slaves up to the late nineteenth century. Japan, Germany, China, and Russia all had steam engines by the late nineteenth century, but they still kept penal slaves in the twentieth century. In short, througout our farming history, we all wanted slaves for our fields, our armies, our beds. It didn’t much matter whether we had a king, a constitutional monarchy, a federal republic, a collective. It didn’t much matter whether we were Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Polytheists. It didn’t matter where we lived, nor what languages we spoke, nor what we looked like. Land and bodies were wealth. Legal slavery began to end worldwide only with our phase change into industry. That helped alter whether slavery was legal or not, whether our children had to work or not, whether women got paid for their labor or not, and what jobs men did.

“The United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America’s largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department’s director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: “That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.” Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time.” Quoted from “The Girls Next Door,” P. Landesman, New York Times, January 25th, 2004. Batstone estimates that there are 200,000 slaves in the United States today. Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It, David Batstone, HarperOne, 2007.

The United Nations International Labor Organization estimates a minimum of 12.3 million slaves worldwide today. Bales estimates 27 million, a widely accepted guess. A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, E. Benjamin Skinner, Free Press, 2008. A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour, International Labour Office, United Nations, 2005. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Kevin Bales, University of California Press, 2000.

“Year after year, NGOs presented more and more examples of the same inquitous practices, as well as new ones. Members [of the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery] listened to governments’ claims that they were eliminating them, only to hear a year later from NGOs that nothing had changed. The only certainty was that if there were any results they would be long delayed. While the UN talked and governments made excuses, more people fell into debt-bondage, more women were forced into marriage, more children were sold and ill-treated, and more workers were exploited.” Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem, Suzanne Miers, Rowman Altamira, 2003, page 404.

For a sampling of the wider history, see: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery In The Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, And Italy, 1500-1800, Robert Davis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy, Steven A. Epstein, Cornell University Press, 2001. Slavery in the Arab World, Murray Gordon, New Amsterdam Books, 1989. Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, two volumes, John Ralph Willis (editor), Routledge, 1986. Slavery and Human Progress, David Brion Davis, Oxford University Press, 1984. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Orlando Patterson, Harvard University Press, 1982.

[child labor]
Beyond Child Labor: Affirming Rights, United Nations Children’s Fund, 2001, page 1.
[European slavery was common]
It’s often said, especially by European or American writers, that Europeans sometimes tried to stop all slavery (or even succeeded). Really, though, all Europe tried to stop, and that ineffectively, was the lucrative sale of its Christian slaves to non-Christian foreigners. Slavery in medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it—or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171. Sales continued. For example, in 1475 Pope Martin V threatened all Christian slave traders with excommunication. He also ordered all Jewish slave traders to wear a special badge of infamy. But then, in various European nations, Christian export slavery, had been occasionally prohibited since at least 655, by the Church or by various rulers. Not that it mattered. For example, the same year, 655, that Bathild, regent of France, who had herself been a slave (some say, kidnapped from England), tried to ban Christian enslavement in France, the Church, which wanted to maintain full control of ecclesiastical appointments, decreed enslavement for any children produced by clerics. No longer would the bastard child of a priest succeed him to his post.

William the Conqueror, too, is often alleged to have banned slavery in Britain after the conquest in 1066, but what he actually did was the same that any other European ruler did—he banned export slavery of English slaves (maybe because he didn’t get a cut on those sales?). It’s also often reported that various religious leaders, Saint Wulfstan or Anslem or Archbishop Lanfranc or Saint Patrick, for example, ended slavery in England—or even Europe as a whole. Not so. There were occasional admonitions, for example, after the (first) invasion of Ireland by English barons in the 1160s, but at most they lead to a reduction in Christian export slavery. In short: in Europe, it was ok to have slaves, it was ok for them to be Christian, it was ok to export slaves, too. The European abolition effort in medieval times was primarily about the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands.

Finally, it’s often stated that even if Christianity itself accepted slavery that after the Protestant Reformation it died out in Europe because of the new Protestant zeal. It’s true that it mostly did die out after the Reformation, and it’s true that Puritans, in particular, who were themselves badly treated, were more against slavery than normal, but it’s also true that many still kept slaves. William Penn, for example, a Quaker, who also owned Pennsylvania, was both a slave holder and a slave trader. England didn’t make slavery on English soil illegal until 1796 (not 1772 as is often reported; the James Somerset case in 1772 prevented slave recapture in England, but the idea of slaves as property was only overturned in 1796). Nor was English slavery particularly special within Europe. For example, thanks to their longships, the Vikings earlier took Norse, Saxon, Irish, Gallic, Italian, and Slav slaves from all over Europe and sold them to other Europeans, to the Muslims, and to each other. Also, from the eighth century on, North Africans—from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, known at the time as the Barbary coast—took slaves in England and Ireland for centuries, as well as slaves all over the North Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, from Iceland to Palestine—including Miguel de Cervantes, who was enslaved off the Catalan coast on September 26th, 1575, 30 years before he wrote Don Quixote.

[penal slavery in Europe]
“It is truly extraordinary that European scholars have either neglected this whole aspect of the subject or defined it as something other than slavery when they recognized it.” Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Orlando Patterson, Harvard University Press, 1982, pages 44-45.
[the normal view of the poor]
“[E]very one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious; I do not mean, that the poor of England are to be kept like the poor of France, but, the state of the country considered, they must (like all mankind) be in poverty or they will not work.” The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England; Being The Register of a Journey through Various Counties of this Kingdom, to Enquire into the State of Agriculture, &c., Arthur Young, Volume IV, page 361, W. Strahan; W. Nicoll; B. Collins; and J. Balfour, 1771. Here’s another, of many pronouncements of the same stripe: “It seems to be a law of nature, that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery, and freed from those occasional employments which would make them miserable, but are left at liberty, without interruption, to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions, and most useful to the state. As for the lowest of the poor, by custom they are reconciled to the meanest occupations, to the most laborious works, and to the most hazardous pursuits; whilst the hope of their reward makes them chearful in the midst of all their dangers and their toils. The fleets and armies of a state would soon be in want of soldiers and of sailors, if sobriety and diligence universally prevailed: for what is it but distress and poverty which can prevail upon the lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them on the tempestuous ocean, or in the field of battle? Men who are easy in their circumstances are not among the foremost to engage in a seafaring or military life. There must be a degree of pressure, and that which is attended with the least violence will be the best. When hunger is either felt or feared, the desire of obtaining bread will quietly dispose the mind to undergo the greatest hardships, and will sweeten the severest labours. The peasant with a sickle in his hand is happier than the prince upon his throne.” A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-Wisher to Mankind, Joseph Townsend, Section VII, page 35, 1786, University of California Press, 1971. Nor was that attitude rare earlier in England (or, probably, anywhere else). Compare the same thought from about 1388, four centuries prior: “And gif laboreris weren not, bothe prestis and knygtis mosten bicome acremen and heerdis, and ellis they sholde for defaute of bodily sustenaunce deie.” (If laborers didn’t exist, both priests and knights must become farmers and herders, or else they would, for lack of bodily sustenance, die.) “Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: ‘Redde racionem villicacionis tue,’ ” N. H. Owen, Mediaeval Studies, 28:176-197, 1966.

Trigger Effect

[spread of inventions from 1860 to 1910]
Many of the inventions listed in the text predated the period 1860-1910, but that’s when they really started to spread across several countries. For example, China had toilet paper 1,500 years ago but its use didn’t spread out of China until the nineteenth century. Science and Civilization in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing, Joseph Needham, Caves Books, Ltd., 1986.
[petroleum in history]
In Hassuna and Mattarah in northern and eastern Iraq, we used bitumen to water-proof our grain bins at least 7,500 years ago. Encyclopedia of Prehistory: Volume 8: South and Southwest Asia, Peter N. Peregrine and Melvin Ember (editors), Springer, 2002, pages 50-52. Myth has it that Noah apparently used it to caulk his ark. Ditto for Gilgamesh some time before. “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.” The Bible, The King James Version, Genesis 6:14. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Volume I, A. R. George Oxford University Press, 2006, page 513. See also: The Chemistry and Technology of Petroleum, James G. Speight, CRC Press, Fourth Edition, 2006, pages 3-10. But our hydrocarbon use started exploding only in the late nineteenth century. That’s when, through our usual bumbling, we developed practical versions of both the internal combustion engine and the dynamo.
[heroin]
Opium use goes back at least 5,400 years. But heroin, made by what is today the Bayer pharmaceutical company, was originally used to treat tuberculosis in the 1890s. It was also used for coughs.
[United States corn productivity rose nearly 800 percent]
The increase is for corn yields per hectare. “Biomass as Feedstock for Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry: the Technical Feasibility of a Billion-Ton Annual Supply,” R. D. Perlack, L. L. Wright, A. Turhollow, R. L. Graham, B. Stokes, D. C. Urbach, 2005, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL/TM-2005/66, 2005.
[increasing nitrogen-fixation]
That was the Green Revolution. The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger, Leon Hesser, Durban House, 2006. The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century, Gordon Conway, Cornell University Press, 1998, especially chapter 4. Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth, L. T. Evans, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
[rice yields almost tripled since 1967]
“Rice-based production systems for food security and poverty alleviation in Latin America and the Caribbean,” L. R. Sanint, Proceedings of the FAO Rice Conference, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2004, pages 97-101.
[oil consumption, 1900-2000]
Energy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide to Conventional and Alternative Sources, Roy L. Nersesian, M. E. Sharpe, 2006, pages 146-147.
[oil and food]
“Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System,” M. C. Heller, G. A. Keoleian, Report Number CSS00-04, Center for Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment, The University of Michigan, 2000, page 44.
[Japan and Bangladesh]
As of 2007, Japan supports around 127 million and Bangladesh around 150 million. World Factbook, United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2007. Japan’s per capita GDP (PPP) is about $34,100. Bangladesh’s is about $1,400. World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund, 2009.
[Japan and Saudi Arabia, 1970-2000]
Energy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide to Conventional and Alternative Sources, Roy L. Nersesian, M. E. Sharpe, 2006, page 157. Saudi Arabia’s per capita GDP (PPP) is around $23,800. World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund, 2009.
[Singapore and New Zealand]
Singapore’s per capita GDP (PPP) is around $51,00. New Zealand’s is around $27,000. World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund, 2009.
[oil from coal in World War II]
Wartime Germany made 56 percent of its oil that way by 1943. But by 1944 its enemies began bombing the new plants, thus starving its war machine. The Second World War, 1939-45: A Strategical and Tactical History, J. F. C. Fuller, Da Capo Press, 1993, pages 314-316. “Technology Transfer as War Booty: The U.S. Technical Oil Mission to Europe, 1945,” A. Krammer, Technology and Culture, 22(1):68-103, 1981. “The Role of Synthetic Fuel in World War II Germany,” P. W. Becker, Air University Review, 32(5):45-53, 1981. “Synthetic Fuels in Germany: 1. Introduction,” B. Orchard Lisle, Petroleum, 9(4):74-93, 1946.
[oil from coal today]
More recent synthetic oil processes are far better than the early synthetic oil processes. They can also work with biomass instead of coal as feedstock. “Producing Transportation Fuels with Less Work,” D. Hildebrandt, D. Glasser, B. Hausberger, B. Patel, B. J. Glasser, Science, 323(5922):1680-1681, 2009. “Sustainable fuel for the transportation sector,” R. Agrawal, N. R. Singh, F. H. Ribeiro, W. N. Delgass, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(12):4828-4833, 2007. “Catalytic Alkane Metathesis by Tandem Alkane-Dehydrogenation-Olefin-Metathesis,” A. S. Goldman, A. H. Roy, Z. Huang, R. Ahuja, W. Schinski, M. Brookhart, Science, 312(5771):257-261, 2006. Synthetic Fuels, Ronald F. Probstien and R. Edwin Hicks, McGraw-Hill, 1982.
[oil is running out... soon?]
Clearly crude oil is running out. The question is when will the real crunch hit. That’s hard to say right now. Some argue that oil has already peaked, or will soon. Others argue that oil hasn’t peaked and won’t anytime soon. The second side would be easy to dismiss, except that the figures come from the United States Geological Survey. The differences between the two positions are huge. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, Kennet S. Deffeyes, Hill and Wang, 2005. The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers, 2003. Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Princeton University Press, 2001. “World Energy Assessment 2000,” United States Geological Survey. Are We Running Out of Oil? Edward D. Porter, American Petroleum Institute, Policy Analysis and Strategic Planning Department, Discussion Paper Number 81, 1995.

Recently, consensus seems to be forming that no matter when the peak is, economic and political decisions taken within two decades of it will make a huge difference on its mitigation. One new study predicts the peak as early as 2014. “Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model,” I. S. Nashawi, A. Malallah, M. Al-Bisharah, Energy Fuels, DOI:10.1021/ef901240p, to appear, 2010. “Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production,” United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-07-283, 2007. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Recent forecasts,” R. L. Hirsch, World Oil, 228(4), 2007. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management,” R. L. Hirsch, R. Bezdek, R. Wendling, United States Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, 2005. “Long Term World Oil Supply Scenarios - the future is neither as bleak or as rosy as some assert,” J. H. Wood, G. R. Long, D. F. Morehouse, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, 2004.

Both sides of today’s debate about oil depletion and alternative energy have clear political agendas. They each see the same amount of future oil in the ground in two completely different ways. Huge amounts of power and money—not to mention strong feelings of guilt and shame—depend on what policies each of our countries adopt, so the urge to sway those policy choices one way or the other is strong. However, the data on which such policies might be based is poor—and may even be deliberately distorted in some cases. When giants clash, amateurs can only watch and try to come to as reasonable a conclusion as possible. Those who say that oil production has peaked, or will soon, seem right. Physics favors them. But that still means that we have as much oil left as we’ve used until now. So those who say that we’ll likely invent our way out of disaster also seem right. Economics favors them. That seems to be roughly what those who are most informed seem to be saying on our oil futures markets. That’s where we place long-term public bets about future oil supplies and consumption patterns. There at least, hard data is in constant demand and continuous evaluation. Also, politics matters less there. Futures traders are betting thousands of millions of dollars on being right. Maybe they’re wrong, but so far it doesn’t seem so.

[a quarter-billion cars, trucks, and buses]
National Transportation Statistics, Table 1-11: Number of U.S. Aircraft, Vehicles, Vessels, and Other Conveyances, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Research and Innovative Technology Administration, United States Department of Transportation, 2008.
[plastic waste]
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman, St. Martin’s Press, 2007, page 126.

Money Matters

[United States retail electricity price]
In 2006 it was 10.6 cents averaged over all residences, but 8.64 cents averaged over all users and all states. “Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State,” Electric Power Monthly with data for May 2006, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, 2006.
[United States energy use]
Annual Energy Review 2005, Report No. DOE/EIA-0384(2005) Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, July 2006. Power Plant Report, 2004, Form EIA-906, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, November 2005. Annual Energy Review 2004, Report DOE/EIA-0384(2004), Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, August 2005. Annual Energy Outlook 2003 with Projections to 2025, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, 2003.
[economy of the United States and the world]
The estimates provided are rough averages of GDP (PPP) for the year 2006. When measured with nominal GDP instead of PPP GDP, the United States is about a quarter of the world’s economy instead of a fifth. World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund, 2007. World Development Indicators Database, The World Bank, 2006. The World Factbook, United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2007.
[California fuel usage]
California’s roadways use about 20 billion gallons of gas and diesel fuel a year. State Alternative Fuels Plan, AB 1007 Report, California Energy Commission, 2007, page 14.
[United States transport fuel use by sector]
Table 2.6: Transportation Energy Use by Mode, 2004-2005, Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 26, Engineering Science & Technology Division, Center for Transportation Analysis, United States Department of Energy, 2007.
[10 largest companies worldwide]
According to Fortune magazine, as of 2006, they are, in order: Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, General Motors, Chevron, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota Motor, Ford Motor, and ConocoPhillips. Only Wal-Mart isn’t a transport company.
[“...too cheap to meter”]
“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, in a speech before the National Association of Science Writers, September 16th, 1954. New York Times, September 17th, 1954. However, when committing his thoughts to paper four years later, Strauss was more pragmatic: “It is a hard economic fact that before nuclear power can begin to be commercially competitive in the United States, its cost must be brought down to levels well below those acceptable in Western Europe and other areas where conventional fuels are in short supply.... There is confidence that these targets can be reached, but it is clear that a highly developed technology will be required.” Quoted from the Preface to Atoms for Peace: U.S.A. 1958, United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1958.
[price of uranium versus coal]
In the United States as of May 2008, spot prices for uranium oxide (U3O8) were around $60 a pound and Central Appalachian coal, a benchmark grade, were around $90 a short ton (2,000 pounds). Most of coal’s cost isn’t mining it, it’s transporting it. “Coal News and Markets,” May 12, 2008, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy. “Ux Weekly,” May 12, 2008, The Ux Consulting Company, LLC.

Incidentally, radioactivity is a source of great fear and also of great fearmongering. Most of the radiation you receive over your lifetime (about 82 percent, in the United States) comes from natural sources, including food, no matter how ‘organic.’ About 55 percent comes from radon in your own home (and other structures). Nuclear power plants release far less radiation than coal-fired plants do. Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, Gwyneth Cravens, Knopf, 2007. “Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance,” Fact Sheet FS-163-97, United States Geological Survey, 1997. Environmental Aspects of Trace Elements in Coal, D. J. Swaine and F. Goodarzi (editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. “Ionizing radiation exposure of the population of the United States,” National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Report 93, 1987.

[bizarre subsurface fire]
That’s not completely insane. Oil fires are common only at the surface but it’s not uncommon for coal mines to burn for decades. One has been on fire since 1916. Parts of subsurface India today, for example, are on fire. “Detection of coal mine fires in the Jharia coal field using NOAA/AVHRR data,” R. Agarwal, D. Singh, D. S. Chauhan, K. P. Singh, Journal of Geophysics and Engineering, 3(3):212-218, 2006. So is part of Pennsylvania. Unseen Danger: a Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire, David DeKok, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
[price sensitivity]
In 2007-2008 in the United States, the price of gasoline at the pump suddenly jumped by about a third. Road travel then fell by 3.3 percent. (67.2 billion fewer vehicle-miles a year.) August 2008 Traffic Volume Trends, Federal Highway Administration, United States Department of Transportation. Since 2003, drivers have had to pay £5 (£8 since 2005) to enter Central London and now parts of West London. The number of entering cars has dropped by 14 to 21 percent. (Although note that congestion is back to where it was before.) Central London Congestion Charging: Impacts monitoring, Sixth Annual Report, July 2008, Transport for London, 2008. “Pain at the Pump: The Differential Effect of Gasoline Prices on New and Used Automobile Markets,” M. R. Busse, C. R. Knittel, F. Zettelmeyer, Working Paper 15590, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2009. A global economic slump in 2008 halved the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and from making cement rose 1.7 percent in 2008, as against 3.3 percent in 2007. “Global CO2 emissions: annual increase halves in 2008,” Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), 2009. On the other hand, the rising price of oil in 2007-2008 helped increase food cost. That then led to riots and other unrest in 22 countries—all of them poor. Poor countries feel even more of a pinch than rich countries do.
[solar power in Germany]
Renewables: Global Status Report, 2009 Update, Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, 2009.
[renewables are a small part of world energy today]
Estimates vary between 7 percent and 13 percent. The EIA estimates it’s about 7 percent as of 2003 (the latest data available), so I’ve chosen that estimate. See Tables A2 and A8 in the Reference Case Projections Tables (1990-2030) of the International Energy Outlook 2006, Report DOE/EIA-0484(2006), Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, June 2006. However, the IAE’s estimate for 2003 is about twice as large (13.3 percent). Renewables in Global Energy Supply — An IEA Fact Sheet, International Energy Agency, 2006. Why the difference? For the IAE, about 80 percent of the 13.3 percent estimate comes from biomass (which it calls “combustible renewables and renewable waste”). Hydro accounts for a further 16 percent or so of the same 13.3 percent. The principal difference in estimates may be that the EIA only counts commercial sources of energy, whereas the IAE includes sources like gathered firewood.

Some Assembly Required

[14 terawatts]
Overall energy consumption in 2004 was around 448 exajoules, thus giving a burn rate per second of about 14.2 terawatts. Report of the Energy Research Council, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006, page 6.
[solar satellites]
Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Robert Zubrin, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999, pages 70-84. Solar Power Satellites, Peter E. Glaser, Frank P. Davidson, and Katinka Csigi, John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
[gold and platinum prices]
As of March 26th, 2007, platinum costs $39,674 U.S. a kilogram ($19,744 a pound). Gold cost $21,344 a kilogram—$10,608 a pound.
[space shuttle’s costs]
“A Reappraisal of the Space Shuttle Program,” R. A. Pielke, Jr., Space Policy, May, 1993, pages 133-157. “The Space Shuttle Program: Performance versus Promise,” R. A. Pielke, Jr., R. Byerly, Jr., pages 223-245 in Space Policy Alternatives, Radford Byerly, Jr., (editor), Westview Press, 1992. Pielke later updated his figures after the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report was published in 2003.
[Atlanta flights]
As of 2006, Atlanta International Airport is the world’s busiest, counting by number of landings and takeoffs of a single aircraft per year. In 2006, it handled 976,447 such landings and takeoffs. That averages to 115 turnarounds per hour. Airports Council International, March 16th, 2007.
[worldwide launches per year]
The Space Launch Industry Recent Trends and Near-Term Outlook, Futron Corporation, 2004. “Space Launch Vehicle Reliability,” I-S. Chang, Crosslink, 2(1), 2001.
[solar panel efficiencies]
Today, energy from solar panels costs at least 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s about three times as much as retail electricity, even in a sunny region. Solar panel efficiency is measured as a percentage of the energy hitting it. Today’s commodity solar panels have energy efficiencies around 10 to 15 percent. Expensive research versions are now up to about 40 percent, but they’re expensive; they need exotic materials and delicate production processes. Cheap versions are around 8 percent, or less. It takes about 20 years for a solar installation to pay for itself.

The following abstract summarizes where experts think the technology is going over the next four decades: “Subjective probabilistic judgments about future module prices of 26 current and emerging photovoltaic (PV) technologies were obtained from 18 PV technology experts. Fourteen experts provided detailed assessments, including likely future efficiencies and prices under four policy scenarios. While there is considerable dispersion among the judgments, the results suggest a high likelihood that some PV technology will achieve a price of $1.20/Wp by 2030. Only 7 of 18 experts assess a better-than-even chance that any PV technology will achieve $0.30/Wp by 2030; 10 of 18 experts give this assessment by 2050. Given these odds, and the wide dispersion in results, we conclude that PV may have difficulty becoming economically competitive with other options for large-scale, low-carbon bulk electricity in the next 40 years. If $0.30/Wp is not reached, then PV will likely continue to expand in markets other than bulk power. In assessing different policy mechanisms, a majority of experts judged that R&D would most increase efficiency, while deployment incentives would most decrease price. This implies a possible disconnect between research and policy goals. Governments should be cautious about large subsidies for deployment of present PV technology while continuing to invest in R&D to lower cost and reduce uncertainty.” From: “Expert Assessments of Future Photovoltaic Technologies,” A. E. Curtright, M. G. Morgan, D. W. Keith, Environmental Science and Technology, 42(24):9031-9038, 2008. (Note: ‘Wp’ means ’peak Watts,’ that is the wattage that a panel can produce on a bright sunny day. So a price of ‘$1.20/Wp’ means that the panel costs $1.20 for ever watt pumped out on the panel’s best day. Also note that over the past decade, good ratings for panels are in the $4.50/Wp to $5.50/Wp range.)

[energy to reach orbit is low]
If energy could be converted directly into propulsion, it would only take at most a few hundred kilowatt-hours for a human being weighing around 200 pounds to achieve escape velocity and thus get into orbit, not counting the costs of overhead for the transport system. At present energy prices, that would only cost a few hundred dollars. The Exploration of Space, Arthur C. Clarke, Harper, 1951. “[T]he energy cost of going to the Moon is less than a hundred dollars in terms of kilowatt hours of electricity [per human passenger]. The fact that the Apollo round tickets cost about two billion dollars per passenger is a measure of the chemically-fueled rocket’s inefficiency.” “2001: The Coming Age of Hydrogen Power,” A. C. Clarke, Infinite Energy Magazine, Issue 22, 1998.
[cost of a one-gigawatt power plant on earth]
On earth, new coal plants might cost around $1 billion per gigawatt. Natural gas, $1.2 billion. Hydroelectric, $1.3 billion. Nuclear, $2 billion. Solar $5.1 billion—except that none yet exist in the gigawatt range. Those figures are very approximate. In reality, they should vary depending on the plant’s scale, on what technology it uses, on the country it’s sited in, and on overall energy demand. The figures also don’t count various government subsidies (for example, Germany heavily subsidizes solar power plants), nor does it count maintenance costs, various lawsuit costs, taxes, and so on. China is presently building four of the latest Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors, which produce 1.117 gigawatts, for $8 thousand million U.S. for operation starting in 2013 to 2015. India is presently building a 4-gigawatt coal plant for $4 thousand million. It expects to build at least 5 over the five years. Both projects are using the same steam generator technology, supplied by Doosan Heavy Industries and Toshiba. China is also building the Three Gorges Dam, expected to go onstream in 2011. It will produce 22.5 gigawatts at a cost of $30 thousand million. It’s using turbines made by a consortium that includes General Electric. The natural gas estimate comes from the proposed Eastshore Energy Center, in Hayward, California. Expected to go onstream in 2009, it will produce 115.5 megawatts and cost $140 million. The photovoltaic power plant estimate comes from the € 130 million ($204 million U.S.) cost of the 40-megawatt Waldpolenz project in Germany. As of 2007 it’s the world’s biggest photovoltaic power plant.
[satellite losses]
“Insurance for Space Systems,” S. Fordyce, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 3(1):211-214, 1985.
[possible future orbital transport]
The space shuttle was originally designed to be cost-effective when it flew hundreds of times a year. Instead, no year has ever seen more than nine launches. The human cost of failure is just too high. We have various proposals to reduce launch costs today. One startup, the Space Island Group, has a clever way to reduce costs even if we use today’s launch technology: namely, instead of jettisoning the main fuel tanks once in orbit, outfit those tanks as space habitats. They also propose launching to low-earth orbit, then boosting to high-earth orbit (geostationary orbit) using specialized ion-drive tugs that would remain in orbit. PowerSat Corporation has similar plans. They also plan to split up their powersat into hundreds of micropowersats then gang them together in a phased array. Other companies in this area include Space Energy, Inc., and Solaren, Inc. NASA is presently studying a plan by Masten Space Systems that argues for smaller but more robust rockets to put fuel stations in orbit and thus reduce costs and risks of later flights. “Depot-Centric Human Spaceflight: Strengthening American Industry, Creating a Robust Beyond-LEO Exploration Program, and Enabling the Commercial Development of Space,” J. Goff, S. Traugott, A. Oesterle, unpublished manuscript, 2009.

There are other, more far-out, ideas: Perhaps we could build cheap and reliable suborbital hypersonic scramjets or rocketplanes. We might also use nukes in orbit-changing spacecraft. Or, one day, we might replace rockets with superconducting mass drivers and free-electron launch lasers. We might even figure out how to build a space elevator. Costs would also lower if we already had moon colonists and got them build satellite parts. Or if we already had an orbital power satellite. (Its power could reduce the cost of lunar mining and manufacture.)

For a survey of powersat technology, see: Laying the Foundation for Space Solar Power: An Assessment of NASA’s Space Solar Power Investment Strategy, Committee for the Assessment of NASA’s Space Solar Power Investment Strategy, United States National Research Council, National Academies Press, 2001. Much of scramjet research is classified. Here’s a report giving a good overview of what little is known publically: “A Comparison of Propulsion Concepts for SSTO Reuseable Launchers,” R. Varvill, A. Bond, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 56:108-117, 2003. Mass drivers and launch lasers are even more speculative: “Preliminary Feasibility Assessment for Earth-To-Space Electromagnetic (Railgun) Launchers,” E. E. Rice, L. A. Miller, R. W. Earhart, NASA Report Number CR-167886, United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1982. For something a lot more speculative, but even bigger-picture, see: The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, Marshall T. Savage, Little Brown, 1994, pages 103-123. The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System, Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling, BC Edwards, 2003.

In the more immediate future though, the private company, SpaceX, became suborbital on March 21st, 2007. Its rocket then achieved orbit on September 28th, 2008. However, its rocket is not the first privately owned orbital rocket; it’s the first private liquid-fueled rocket to achieve orbit. Orbital Sciences Corporation was the first company to orbit its own (sold-fuel) rocket (in 1990).

In the long run, though, orbital power may still be in our future even if we never lower launch costs. Space flight today is like catapulting an egg into a tree. To survive, the egg has to carry its nest with it. That means huge catapults and careful launches. Instead, one day we may first build a nest for the egg in the tree, and only then launch the egg. How might we do that? Getting out of a deep gravity well is like giving birth. Babies with big brains are useful, but they also mean long pregnancies and risky births. Kangaroos, though, bear tiny joeys. They’re about the size of a jelly bean. Pregnancies are short. Births are easy. The joey then crawls into its mother’s pouch and lives on her milk until it matures. One day we might do the same. What we want is brains and hands in orbit. Today we get them by sending big, finicky, costly, one-shot rockets. We do so because we’re sending humans. Never send a human to do a machine’s job. Sending robots into space is already far cheaper than sending humans. Spacebots need neither food nor water, nor a ride home. And if one blows up, so what? Staging missions would then become easier. Instead of everything having to happen in the small window of time before astronauts start to die, mission buildup could go on for years. Lots of small launches could send up fuel and parts, plus more spacebots. Further, our spacebots are getting better all the time, because our computers are getting better all the time.

Of course, none of that is likely to happen soon. One reason we toss eggs into trees is that it’s more exciting that tossing nests into trees. There’s always the chance that the egg will break. So funding for egg-tosses far exceeds funding for nest-tosses. Another thing that may change the picture is if another space race develops. Horse races are exciting and thus attract funding. That will likely continue to be true until nest-launch grows so cheap that we do it anyway. By then we won’t just be using bots to explore space, we’ll also use them to build in space. We might first operate them in orbit, like remote hands, then we might build ones that can build copies of themselves out of rocks and sunlight. If so, they could then build orbital power plants for us out of more rocks and sunlight. Mostly what we’d then be launching is knowledge, and what we’d get back is power.

No one really knows what the cost of humans versus robots in space is, but a possible figure might be between a 10- to 100-fold difference, but that’s just a guess. Estimates of the cost differential vary widely since the missions that each get sent on are so very different. Robots are far less flexible, but humans are vastly inferior in terms of endurance, weight, consumables, cost, and risk.

Space robotics is still in the covered-wagon stage, but there have already been a few in-space experiments (Germany’s ROTEX in 1993, Japan’s ETS-VII in 1997, and Germany’s ROKVISS in 2005). “Ground verification of the feasibility of telepresent on-orbit servicing,” E. Stoll, U. Walter, J. Artigas, C. Preusche, P. Kremer, G. Hirzinger, J. Letschnik, H. Pongrac, Journal of Field Robotics, 26(3):287-307, 2009. Advances in Telerobotics, Manuel Ferre, Martin Buss, Rafael Aracil, Claudio Melchiorri, Carlos Balaguer (editors), Springer, 2007. The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement, David Schrunk, Burton Sharpe, Bonnie L. Cooper, Madhu Thangavelu, Springer Praxis, Second Edition, 2007. “Robotics Component Verification on ISS ROKVISS - Preliminary Results for Telepresence,” C. Preusche, D. Reintsema, K. Landzettel, G. Hirzinger, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 9-15 October, 2006, pages 4595-4601. “Space Robotics—DLR’s Telerobotic Concepts, Lightweight Arms and Articulated Hands,” G. Hirzinger, B. Brunner, K. Landzettel, N. Sporer, J. Butterfaß, M. Schedl, Autonomous Robots, 14(2-3):127-145, 2003.

[British Petroleum and Exxon Mobil investments]
“BP to Invest $500 Million on Biofuels at a Research Center,” J. Mouawad, New York Times, June 14th, 2006. In 2002, Exxon Mobil partnered with General Electric, Schlumberger, and Toyota to fund a research effort at Stanford University, the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project. It’s contributing $100 million out of $225 million in total. However, such figures are a tiny fraction of oil company profits. Oil companies may be presenting one public face but by their (less public) exploration and investment decisions are presenting another face.
[Hubble superseded]
The particular instrument referenced in the text is the new Large Binocular Telescope atop Mount Graham in Arizona. However, as adaptive optics and lucky-imaging techniques spread, all large earth-based telescopes are being upgraded. About ten in all are, so far, about twice as good as Hubble in many wavelengths. Hubble is still useful, however, particularly for deep-field and ultraviolet (and higher) observations. In general, our best telescopes have doubled in size every 30 years over the last century. Science with the VLT in the ELT Era, Alan Moorwood (editor), Springer, 2009. The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It, Robert Zimmerman, Princeton University Press, 2008. “Is the broken Hubble Telescope worth saving?” C. Moskowitz, USA Today, October 10th, 2008.
[satellite phone companies]
The companies died, but the satellites they’d put up didn’t. After bankruptcy, those satellites changed hands. The effect is that the first wave of companies all lost money, but companies based on the same satellites still exist today, like Inmarsat, Iridium, GlobalStar, and Orbcomm.
[future energy alternatives]
There are many experiments today. For example, the oceans are huge batteries. They hold about three terawatts of recoverable power. The sun warms the ocean’s upper layers more than its lower layers and we can use that temperature difference to extract energy. One way is to sink a deep pipe and place another in the surface layer. Then we pump warm surface water into a low-pressure chamber, where it boils. The steam drives a turbine. Then we pump up cold water and use it to condense the steam for the next cycle, just as if we were running a giant refrigerator in reverse. As a byproduct, we can use the nutrients in the deep ocean water to make, literally tons, of high-protein food from algae. Or we can use that to grow tons of seafood. And we can use the same power plant to also make hundreds of gallons of distilled water. Just its use as a desalination plant alone is valuable. But seawater is also highly corrosive. And it contains living things that grow fast and thus quickly foul equipment. Although small-scale experimental plants already exist, we don’t yet know how to cheaply scale them from kilowatts to gigawatts. We also don’t yet know how to put them anywhere cheaply. And we don’t know what their effect might be on deep-ocean ecology. “An Order-of-Magnitude Estimate of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Resources,” G. C. Nihous, Journal of Energy Resources Technology, 127(4):328-333, 2005. Renewable Energy from the Ocean: A Guide to OTEC, William H. Avery and Chih Wu, Oxford University Press, 1994. Ocean Energies: Environmental, Economic and Technological Aspects of Alternative Power Sources, R. H. Charlier and J. R. Justus, Elsevier, 1993.

We have many other energy options, too. In the nearer term, we might find more efficient ways to mine oil from shale or oil sands, or from methane clathrates on the ocean floor. Then there’s bioreactors that extract energy from waste. We can also tailor lifeforms for use in such bioreactors using artificial evolution. We’ve already evolved bacteria to extract heavy metals and sulfur and nitrogen compounds from coal or oil. For example: You can grow hydrothermal bacteria in their normal nutrient bath mixed with small amounts of oil. Then, in stages, grow the survivors with ever higher proportions of oil, until they eat only oil. By that time, all remaining survivors eat only oil. Then add coal in the same staged way. You end with bacteria that can eat coal at high temperatures and pressures. “Biochemical technology for the detoxification of geothermal brines and the recovery of trace metals,” E. T. Premuzic, M. S. Lin, H. Lian, Heavy Metals in the Environment, 2:321-324, 1995.

A similar scheme might make bacteria that could leech oil from shalesands. That would lower the mining price for oil sands and shale oil enough to compete with liquid oil. Or it might even be used to convert our planet’s vast coal reserves into oil. Other research efforts to make genetically modified bacteria, or wholly synthetic cells, that make fuels (like ethanol) are already underway. We can also make oil—it just costs more than digging it out of the ground. We can thermally depolymerize biomass into light crudes, water, and minerals. We can even grow plants to get fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. We can burn waste to make syngas (which is mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen), then make diesel fuel from that. A new company, Synthetic Genomics, has gotten funding from Exxon Mobile on the hundred-million dollar scale to investigate making biofuels directly from genetically engineered algae. We can also simply burn biomass to make electricity. Plasma processing can convert municipal solid waste (or farm wastes like corn stover or rice straw) into syngas. Then we can steam-reform the syngas to make nearly pure hydrogen.

Hydrogen would be a good byproduct because we could use it to fuel cars and trucks. It’s also clean-burning and can be handled safely. But making it via electrolysis is three times more expensive than gasoline, and ten times more expensive than natural gas. Also, converting all our gas stations and cars and trucks and motorbikes to use hydrogen would be costly. Rich countries have a huge investment in cars and trucks powered by petroleum (whether gasoline or diesel). If they do it slowly enough to avoid severe economic disruption, and if they only have today’s science and technology to do it with, it’ll take decades for them to move from gasoline to hydrogen. On the other hand, hydrogen might be an easier choice for industrializing countries like China and India and Brazil. They don’t yet have as many cars per person. Also, new and relatively cheap pebble-bed nuclear reactors make both hydrogen and electricity. So such countries may convert to hydrogen sooner than rich ones.

Making cheap hydrogen might also be useful if we ever decide to do something about climate change. We’ve just recently learned that, unlike animals, a plant’s metabolism is almost solely governed by its nitrogen supply. Change that, and you change everything. “Universal scaling of respiratory metabolism, size and nitrogen in plants,” P. B. Reich, M. G. Tjoelker, J.-L. Machado, J. Oleksyn, Nature, 439(7075):457-461, 2006. “Dark respiration rate increases with plant size in saplings of three temperate tree species despite decreasing tissue nitrogen and nonstructural carbohydrates,” J. L. Machado, P. B. Reich, Tree Physiology, 26(7):915-923, 2006.

Spirits from the Vasty Deep

[“spirits from the vasty deep”]
“Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. / Hotspur: Why, so can I; or so can any man: / But will they come, when you do call for them?” Henry IV, Part I, Act III, Scene I, William Shakespeare.
[Washington Monument aluminum]
“The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument,” G. J. Binczewski, JOM, (formely the Journal of Metals), 47(11):20-25, 1995.

Aluminum makes up 8.2 percent of the earth’s crust. It’s the third most abundant element on earth, after oxygen and silicon. Worldwide, from 1884 to today, our yearly aluminum supply rose from around 200 metric tons to around 22 million. About five million of that is recycled. So our species as a whole now has at least 100,000 times as much aluminum as we did before. And we have it at about 1,000th the price. We now make more aluminum than any other metal, save iron. It’s now so plentiful and cheap that we make throw-away cans and tin-foil with it. That price drop comes through better infrastructure and knowledge. We now know more about the universe than we did in 1884. We also now have more tools than in 1884. We have more trained people, and they’re more highly trained. We also have more and bigger and faster and cheaper mines, railroads, ships, smelters, and the like. Education, exploration, mining, shipping, and processing costs, all have fallen for a good chunk of our species. Lastly, though, the price of aluminum has fallen because of our new energy supplies.

[...a laborer might get 10 cents an hour]
In 1884 in the United States, a laborer got about $1 for a day’s work of ten or more hours. A highly skilled artisan might get $2. A well-paid clerk might get $3.
[price of aluminum]
Over the 15 years from 1995 to 2008, a pound of aluminum has mostly bounced between 50 cents and $1. From 2006 to 2007 it was a bit over $1 but never more than $1.50. As of January, 2007, it cost about $1.16 a pound. As of November, 2008, it cost about $1 a pound.
[labor-price collapses]
It’s the same for copper, zinc, tin, lead, iron, tungsten, titanium, chromium, sodium, sulfur, chlorine, and so on. Even some relatively price-stable commodities, like diamonds, sometimes retain their pricepoints partly by being artificially limited, both on supply and for resale. But the price of diamonds, both for industrial use and for jewelry, is soon about to collapse, as industrial diamond production ramps up.
[biodiesel’s water footprint]
Today, biodiesel, on average, takes 14,000 liters of water to produce one liter of biodiesel from rapeseed or soya. To produce 1 liter of biodiesel from jatropha takes 20,000 liters of water. “The water footprint of bioenergy,” W. Gerbens-Leenes, A. Y. Hoekstra, T. H. van der Meer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(25):10219-10223, 2009.
[coal tar]
Today we know that coal tar contains over 10,000 different hydrocarbons. So far we’ve found uses for less than half of them. Coal tar’s value might well double as we learn more about it. Chemistry, Society and Environment: a New History of the British Chemical Industry, Colin A. Russell (editor), Royal Society of Chemistry, 2000, pages 217-270.
[nylons]
DuPont developed the first nylon in 1935, and showed it off at two World’s Fairs in San Francisco and New York in 1939. When it first went on sale in 1940, millions of pairs sold out in days. World War II shifted production away from stockings to make parachutes and such but by 1945 they were back on sale. There were riots until production could ramp up enough to satisfy demand. Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century, Susan Smulyan, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, pages 41-71. American Plastic: A Cultural History, Jeffrey L. Meikle. Rutgers University Press, 1995, pages 142-152.
[molecular manufacturing]
John von Neumann first sketched the idea of machine self-replication in the 1940s. Richard Feynman first presented the idea of building on the atomic scale in 1959. Eric Drexler carried those ideas forward in his 1991 doctoral thesis at MIT (Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation,), publishing a paper in 1981 and books in 1987 and 1992. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, John von Neumann and Arthur W. Burks, University of Illinois Press, 1966. “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” R. P. Feynman, Engineering and Science, 23:22-36, 1960. “Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation,” K. E. Drexler, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 78(9):5275-5278, 1981. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986. Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation, K. Eric Drexler, John Wiley & Sons, 1992. Springer Handbook of Nanotechnology, Bharat Bhushan (editor), Springer, Second Edition, 2006.
[climate change]
We now accept anthropogenic explanations of global warming (at least over the last 50 years). But we still haven’t decided what we might do about it that’s also politically and economically acceptable. So far, natural forcing—mainly volcanic aerosols and solar irradiance—don’t account for a temperature rise for the latter half of the twentieth century of about 0.25 degrees Celsius, so that portion of the rise is almost surely due to our actions. On the other hand, there’s still something wrong with models, since what they predict isn’t exactly what’s happening. “Why Hasn’t Earth Warmed as Much as Expected?” S. E. Schwartz, R. J. Charlson, R. A. Kahn, J. A. Ogren, H. Rodhe, Journal of Climate, doi:10.1175/2009JCLI3461.1, to appear, 2010. “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?” W. Knorr, Geophysical Research Letters, 36(21):L21710, 2009. “Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum warming,” R. E. Zeebe, J. C. Zachos, G. R. Dickens, Nature Geoscience, 2(8):576-580, 2009. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Academies Press, 2006.
[artificial plants]
We’re still in the basic science phase of artificial plants. We have much to learn about biophysics, biochemistry, synthetic chemistry, and physical chemistry, before we can build our own cheap and efficient plant-substitutes. We’ve also only just recently learned exactly how photosynthesis works. And today we’re beginning to duplicate it. One day we might have huge bioreactors that function as plants do. They might take in water and carbon dioxide (the single largest greenhouse gas), and make fuels, or oxygen plus edible starches. We might also have versions that split water to make cheap hydrogen. We could then use that hydrogen as fuel. That might then solve two problems at once—reducing greenhouse gases and making fuel. Right now, though, such artificial photosynthesis might far in the future for us, perhaps as much as three decades. We have little idea of the best chemistry to make such devices, and we have little idea of their various costs. “Direct photosynthetic recycling of carbon dioxide to isobutyraldehyde,” S. Atsumi, W. Higashide, J. C. Liao, Nature biotechnology, 27(12):1177-1180, 2009. “In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co2+,” M. W. Kanan, D. G. Nocera, Science, 321(5892):1072-1075, 2008. “Light harvesting in photosystem I supercomplexes,” A. N. Melkozernov, J. Barber, R. E. Blankenship, Biochemistry, 45(2):331-345, 2006. Artificial Photosynthesis: From Basic Biology to Industrial Application, Anthony F. Collings and Christa Critchley (editors), Wiley-VCH, 2005. “Towards complete cofactor arrangement in the 3.0 Å resolution structure of photosystem II,” B. Loll, J. Kern, W. Saenger, A. Zouni, J. Biesiadka, Nature, 438(7070):1040-1044, 2005. “Architecture of the photosynthetic oxygen-evolving center,” K. N. Ferreira, T. M. Iverson, K. Maghlaoui, J. Barber, S. Iwata, Science, 303(5665):1831-1838, 2004. “Water Photolysis in Biology,” A. W. Rutherford, A. Boussac, Science, 303(5665):1782-1784, 2004. “Reduction of CO2 with H2O Using Highly Efficient Titanium Oxide-based Photocatalysts,” M. Anpo, in Carbon Dioxide Utilization for Global Sustainability, Sang-Eon Park, Jong-San Chang, and Kyu-Wan Lee (editors), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Utilization, Seoul, Korea, October 12-16, 2003, Elsevier, 2004.
[impact of biofuels]
Suppose some biochemists walk out of the lab tomorrow morning with a new way to make fuel from corn. We stuff Nobel prizes in their pockets then snatch their idea and turn it into a way to make money. Suppose it needs only a small tool change. Suppose it doesn’t need huge start-up costs or heavy government subsidies. Suppose it’s easy to add to our fuel supply chain (tankers, gasoline stations, cars). Also suppose that our oil companies lose their minds and don’t interfere. Wonderful. But now farmers switch from corn to the new biofuel. With less corn, its price rises. Soybean farmers then switch to corn. Ranchers then lose both fodder and pasture for their cattle. So they cut down more forest and spread to more grassland. Result: the price of corn, soybean, and meat goes up; the amount of wildland goes down. For that not to happen, next suppose that the new fuel’s process is so magical that it doesn’t effect land use. But it will still affect water use. Suppose we somehow finesse that as well. What will happen? Within a decade the new fuel might displace perhaps five percent of our gasoline usage worldwide. Great. But gasoline prices would then fall, so we’d use more of it, so overall energy use would rise. The result: the ratio of our use of gasoline to all other fuels would drop. But we’d still be burning about as much gasoline as before. Of course, there’s no reason we couldn’t find such a miracle fuel, but given all the constraints it would have to satisfy, the chance of us finding it soon seems small. The chance that it would displace gasoline soon seems even smaller. “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” J. Fargione, J. Hill, D. Tilman, S. Polasky, P. Hawthorne, Science, 319(5867):1235-1238, 2008. “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change,” T. Searchinger, R. Heimlich, R. A. Houghton, F. Dong, A. Elobeid, J. Fabiosa, S. Tokgoz, D. Hayes, T.-H. Yu, Science, 319(5867):1238-1240, 2008.
[oil company aggregate investment]
The figure of a trillion dollars a decade is given, without citation, in “A Space Roadmap: Mine the Sky, Defend the Earth, Settle the Universe,” L. Valentine, Aerospace Technology Working Group, Space Infrastructure Development: Near Earth meeting in Phoeniz, Arizona, May 2002.
[spread of economic acceleration]
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 50.
[Prospero]
The reference is, of course, to The Tempest.

Sweat of the Sun God - Chapter 4, Wealth

[Heller quote]
“The economists here, including the theorists, seemed well aware that their profession has much to be humble about these days. Self-mockery abounded, perhaps best summed up by Walter W. Heller, a top economic adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. ”An economist,” he averred while moderating a panel discussion, ”is a person who, when he finds something that works in practice, wonders if it will work in theory.” “A Fed Camp in the Rockies,” R. D. Hershey Jr., New York Times, August 26th, 1985.

Wolf in the Fold

[Viking pillage of Saxons]
The text takes a little artistic license with the scene-setting, but everything in the text is based on what we know about what happened that night. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on January 6th, 793, (not June 8th, as is often reported), they raided Saint Cuthbert’s monastery in Lindisfarne, off England’s northeast coast. The History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church; Containing an Account of its Origin, Government, Doctrines, Worship, Revenues, and Clerical and Monastic Institutions, John Lingard, Volume II, C. Dolman, 1845, pages 220-223. “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.” Alcuin, Letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria. Quoted in A History of the Vikings, Gwyn Jones, Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 1984.
[Saxons bribed the Vikings]
The Saxon king of England, Aethelred II, paid the Danes 10,000 pounds of silver to go away in 991, after the Saxon armies were defeated at Maldon. Then he paid 16,000 in 994 and 24,000 in 1002, in which year he tried to massacre all Danes living in England. Then he paid 30,000 in 1007, 3,000 for East Kent alone in 1009, and 48,000 in 1012. A year later, Swegn Forkbeard attacked in force and soon his son, Cnut, a Dane, was on the English throne. In 1018, Cnut took a danegeld of 82,500 pounds of silver (11,000 paid by London alone). And so on. In all, from 991 to 1018 they extorted 186,500 pounds of silver. Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England, F. W. Maitland, 1897, New Edition, 1907.
[“...so strong through the consent of God”]
“Although it happens that a slave escape from a lord and, leaving Christendom becomes a Viking, and after that it happens again that a hostile encounter takes place between thane and slave, if the slave kills the thane, he lies without wergild paid to any of his kinsmen; but if the thane kills the slave that he had previously owned, he must pay the price of a thane.... And pirates are so strong through the consent of God, that often in battle one drives away ten, and two often drive away twenty, sometimes fewer and sometimes more, entirely on account of our sins. And often ten or twelve, each after the other, insult the thane’s woman disgracefully, and sometimes his daughter or close kinswomen, while he looks on, he that considered himself brave and strong and good enough before that happened.” The sermon of the Wolf to the English, when the Danes were greatly persecuting them, which was in the year 1014 after the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Worcester, around 1014. After: Sermo Lupi ad Anglos: An Electronic Hypertext Edition, Melissa J. Bernstein, honors thesis, Florida State University, 1996.
[Norse loan words in English]
“Norse-derived Terms and Structures in The Battle of Maldon,” S. M. Pons-Sanz, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 107(4):421-444, 2008.
[predation and rent-seeking]
For a view from economics, see: Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, Mancur Olson, Basic Books, 2000. For a view from political science, see: Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development, Robert H. Bates, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. For a view from anthroplogy, see: “The emergence of status inequality in intermediate scale societies: A demographic and socio-economic history of the Keatley Creek site, British Columbia,” A. M. Prentiss, N. Lyons, L. E. Harris, M. R. P. Burns, T. M. Godin, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 26(2):299-327, 2007.
[ecogenesis]
I chose this word because it seemed the most euphonious of the semantically obvious choices. The possibilities involving Greek roots for ‘self-changing’ or ‘self-evolving’ sounded bad. (For example, one possibility for ‘self-evolutionary’ might be ‘autoexelixic.’ However, ‘autoallagic,’ to mean ‘self-changing,’ is a reasonable possibility.) Another problem was how to keep the distinction between ‘self-assembling’ and ‘self-evolving’ (and later concepts like ‘self-maintaining’) clear in the reader’s mind. An ecogenetic network is a self-assembling one, not necessarily a self-evolving one. It relies on a fixed set of spare parts that have already evolved and it’s merely ‘choosing’ among various random assortments of them to see which ones ‘fit together.’ (In short, it self-evolves as a network, but its parts aren’t themselves evolving.)

Botanists and ecologists mostly don’t use the word ‘ecogenesis.’ They do however have several related concepts, principally ‘seral succession,’ ‘community assembly,’ ‘pedogenesis,’ and ‘demutation.’ There are also various biome-specific cases, like xerosere, lithosere, and so on. I thought these were either too specific, too technical, or too colorless for a popular science book. A Theory of Forest Dynamics: The Ecological Implications of Forest Succession Models, Herman H. Shugart, The Blackburn Press, 2003. Plant Succession: Theory and Prediction, David C. Glenn-Lewin, Robert K. Peet, and Thomas T. Veblen (editors), Springer, 1992. Ecological Assembly Rules: Perspectives, Advances, Retreats, Evan Weiher and Paul Keddy (editors), Cambridge University Press, 2001. Assembly Rules and Restoration Ecology: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Vicky M. Temperton, Richard J. Hobbs, Tim Nuttle, and Stefan Halle (editors), Island Press, 2004.

The idea of succession is old in some ways, young in others. Early forms of it trace back to Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. “Ecology today: Beyonds the Bounds of Science,” Nature and Resources, 35(2):38-50, 1999. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Clarence J. Glacken, University of California Press, 1976, pages 129-130.

[leaf litter alters soil chemistry]
“Leaf litter fall and soil acidity during half a century of secondary succession in a temperate deciduous forest,” S. Persson, N. Malmer, B. Wallén, Plant Ecology, 73(1):31-45, 1987.

See. Want. Take

[Ur-kanara]
I owe this story to Doctor Robert K. Englund (personal communication). The tablet in question is MVN 10, 155. It dates Ur-Kanara’s death to the 32nd year of Šulgi, which was a little over 4,000 years ago. On his death he owed 140 liters of clarified butter and 180 liters of cheese, assuming the usual Uruk measures (1 sìla = 1 liter, 1 bán = 10 liters, 1 barig = 60 liters). See page 268 of “Hard Work-Where Will It Get You? Labor Management in Ur III Mesopotamia,” R. K. Englund, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 50(4):255-280, 1991. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East, Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund, translated by Paul Jansen, University of Chicago Press, 1993, page 82. The Beginnings of Accounting and Accounting Thought: Accounting Practice in the Middle East (8000 B.C to 2000 B.C.) and Accounting Thought in India (300 B.C. and the Middle Ages), Richard Mattessich, Taylor & Francis, 2000, page 112, footnote.
[Nin-dada]
History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History, Samuel Noah Kramer, University of Pennsylvania Press, Third Edition, 1981, pages 56-59. The Ancient Mesopotamian City, Marc Van de Mieroop, Oxford University Press, 1999, page 122. In the text I choose the later translation (that is, that Nin-dada was killed) rather than the earlier one (she was acquited).
[the idea of law]
Law is very old. The idea of restitution, of graduated punishment, of a difference between intentional versus accidental causation, and so on, all go back to our oldest written laws. The Code of Ur-Nammu (in Mesopotamia) is the oldest known, and is not yet fully deciphered, but it goes back 4,000 years (or more). It deals with divorce, adultery by a married woman, the defloration of someone else’s female slave, the escape of slaves, bodily injury, and false accusation, among others.
[Norse prices]
The wergild, or man’s price murdered, was common among Germanic peoples, not just the Norse. The Saxons in England had a similar scheme: a noble was worth 1,200 shillings; a thane, 300; a churl, 200; a serf, nothing. Technically, Norse thralls had no wergild, but it was still often customary in Iceland to pay something for killing them. (Unless you owned them, in which case you could do what you liked—unless you killed them during a festival, or during Lent—and that last only applied as Christianity began to spread among the Norse.) Also, prices fluctuated. The figures given in the text are from Friedman. Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, David D. Friedman, Princeton University Press, 2000.
[the Thing]
A History of the Vikings, Gwyn Jones, Oxford University Press, Revised Edition, 1984. Viking Age Iceland, Jesse Byock, Penguin, 2001.
[...worth 1,000 cows]
A thousand cows back then would be worth about $6 million U.S. today. “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law—A Historical Case,” D. D. Friedman, Journal of Legal Studies, 8:399-415, 1979.
[Icelanders had no jails]
Saxons had no jails either, and for the same reason—they couldn’t afford them. Feeding a man was too costly if he couldn’t work for his keep. Thus, England at least wouldn’t have its first jail until 1166. Even then, most jails were temporary holding places until punishment could be decided and meted out. The idea of using mere imprisoment as a punishment in itself spread only when we grew rich enough to afford it—in the nineteenth century in Britain, and then elsewhere later on.
[violence in history]
When we were hunter-gatherers we may have had little war as we understand the term today, but that doesn’t mean that we were meek. The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory, Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit, translated by Melanie Hersey, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Constant Battles: Why We Fight, Steven Le Blanc and Katherine E. Register, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley, Oxford University Press, 1996. Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts, H. H. Turney-High, Second Edition, University of South Carolina Press, 1971.
[long-term decline in violence]
“Explaining the Long-Term Trend in Violent Crime: A Heuristic Scheme and Some Methodological Considerations,” H. Thome, International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 1(2):185-202, 2007. “The Long-Term Development of Violence: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Approaches to Interpretation,” M. Eisner, International Handbook of Violence Research, in 2 volumes, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, pages 41-59. “Long-term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” M. Eisner, in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, M. Tonry (editor), volume 30, pages 84-142, University of Chicago Press, 2003. “Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective,” M. Eisner, The British Journal of Criminology, 41:618-638, 2001.
[murder and suicide in the United States in 2004]
National Vital Statistics Reports, United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 54(1), 2006, Table 2, page 19. See also “Democracy and Crime: A Multilevel Analysis of Homicide Trends in Forty-Four Countries, 1950-2000,” G. Lafree, A. Tseloni, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 605(1):25-49, 2006.

Weaving the Web

[Dumuzi-gamil]
“The Invention of Interest: Sumerian Loans,” M. Van De Mieroop, in The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets, William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (editor), Oxford University Press, 2005, page 26. The Babylonians: An Introduction, Gwendolyn Leick, Routledge, 2003, page 88.
[Godric]
The text narrative is partly made-up (especially his early trading activity) since we don’t know much about his early life, but the details and the settings are real. Words for occupations present special problems as I’m not a philologist, however I have tried to be accurate. However, I chose ‘earthling’ (yrðlicg) over the usual gebúr as the more colorful word. (In any case, a gebúr was likely richer than Godric’s parents were, but we really don’t know.)

Here is Reginald of Durham on Godric: “[I]n his beginnings, he was wont to wander with small wares around the villages and farmsteads of his own neighborhood; but, in process of time, he gradually associated himself by compact with city merchants. Hence, within a brief space of time, the youth who had trudged for many weary hours from village to village, from farm to farm, did so profit by his increase of age and wisdom as to travel with associates of his own age through towns and boroughs, fortresses and cities, to fairs and to all the various booths of the market-place, in pursuit of his public chaffer.... [T]hen he travelled abroad, first to St. Andrews in Scotland and then for the first time to Rome. On his return, having formed a familiar friendship with certain other young men who were eager for merchandise, he began to launch upon bolder courses, and to coast frequently by sea to the foreign lands that lay around him. Thus, sailing often to and for between Scotland and Britain, he traded in many divers wares and, amid these occupations, learned much worldly wisdom.... [A]t length his great labours and cares bore much fruit of worldly gain. For he laboured not only as a merchant but also as a shipman... to Denmark and Flanders and Scotland; in all which lands he found certain rare, and therefore more precious, wares, which he carried to other parts wherein he knew them to be least familiar, and coveted by the inhabitants beyond the price of gold itself; wherefore he exchanged these wares for others coveted by men of other lands; and thus he chaffered [haggled] most freely and assiduously. Hence he made great profit in all his bargains, and gathered much wealth in the sweat of his brow; for he sold dear in one place the wares which he had bought elsewhere at a small price.” From: Life of Saint Godric of Finchale, Reginald of Durham, in Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, G. G. Coulton (editor), Cambridge University Press, 1918, pages 415-420. See also: “The Benedictines, the Cistercians and the acquisition of a hermitage in twelfth-century Durham,” T. Licence, Journal of Medieval History, 29(4):315-329, 2003. “Durham Priory and its Hermits in the Twelfth Century,” V. Tudor, in Anglo-Norman Durham, David Rollason, Margaret Harvey, and Michael Prestwich (editors), Boydell & Brewer, 1998, pages 67-79. St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071-1153, William M. Aird, Boydell & Brewer, 1998. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, M. T. Clanchy, Wiley-Blackwell, Second Edition, 1993, pages 237-240. The Hermits, Charles Kingsley, Macmillan, 1913, pages 309-328. Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Heremitæ de Finchale, Reginaldo Monacho Dunelmensi (Reginald of Durham), Joseph Stevenson (editor), J. B. Nichols and Son, 1847.

[eleventh-century England had hares (but not rabbits)]
Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century, C. Anne Wilson, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991.
[shod horse worth twice an unshod one]
Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, Heinrich Fichtenau, translated by Patrick J. Geary, University of Chicago Press, 1991, page 337.
[marriage at 13]
Minimum legal ages for marriage in Europe until recent times were 12 for girls and 14 for boys. “Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century: Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753,” D. Lemmings, The Historical Journal, 39(2):339-60, 1996. In 1457, for example, Lady Margaret Beaufort was 13 when she gave birth to the future Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king.
[trade creates wealth]
A trade shares economic benefit among two parties, but not necessarily equally. For example, economists are fond of the following scenario: Alice has an apple, which she values at one dollar, and Bob wants an apple, which he values at two dollars. Alice and Bob bargain for a mutually acceptable price for the apple, then the apple and money change hands and both parties benefit. This must be so as long as neither Alice nor Bob has a gun, because Bob will have paid less than two dollars and Alice will have received more than one dollar. The agreed upon price might be $1.50, sharing the benefit equally, but it could just as easily be closer to Bob’s ceiling of $2.00 than Alice’s floor of $1.00 because Alice as the seller likely has many more things to sell. She also has more experience with bargaining, and she likely has more disposable income than Bob does. To a millionaire, a dollar is worth less than a penny is worth to a pauper. Further, the more experience Alice has, the better she is at gauging a potential buyer’s commitment to acquiring the apple in question. And the larger a supplier she is, the more likely it will be for her to have other people competing to buy her apple, so demand for Alice might be more uniform than supply is for Bob. On the other hand, buyers can sometimes have the upper hand as well. For example, when a multinational goes looking for a city to build a shopping center in, many cities want the increased development so the corporation cherry-picks to find the best deal. Publishers versus authors, commodity brokers versus farmers, insurance companies versus homeowners, multinationals versus cities, rich nations versus poor ones, often the usual simplifying neoclassical assumptions that there is perfect symmetry, perfect competition, and perfect knowledge on all sides is false. Of course, economists know that, but lacking more detailed yet still mathematically tractable models, neoclassical economics seems to be the best we can do at present.
[division of labor is old]
The idea is surely far, far older than Plato. However, in the Republic we see him making Socrates say that a city comes about because no one is self-sufficient. We all need things that we can’t supply by ourselves, and we each are good at some things and bad at others. “...[A]ll things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.... Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him, —is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place? Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who desire to buy.” The Dialogues of Plato, Volume III, The Republic, Plato, Book II, 371, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Clarendon Press, 1875, pages 241-242.
[no more than seven miles from home]
For a picture of the time, see The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke, Little, Brown, 1986, pages 91-96. A more comprehensive, but less likely, figure than seven miles a day might be 12 miles (about 20 kilometers), since 25 miles (about 40 kilometers) is about as far as a fit person can walk in a day, but that assumes no stopover at the destination and no heavy luggage. High speed used to be about 90 miles (about 140 kilometers) a day—and that was only for the few and expensive couriers—the king’s, or those of a rich banking family like the Fuggers or the Medicis—traveling fairly short distances on safe and well-maintained roads in good weather with fit horses and changing horses on each leg of their journey. Pony Express riders in the United States in 1860-1861 averaged about 75 miles (120 kilometers) a day. Although in the thirteenth century, with numerous horses and riders, Genghis Khan’s messages often covered 180 miles (290 kilometers) a day across the steppes of Central Asia, and by the time of his grandson, Khubilai Khan, messages could cover 300 miles (480 kilometers) per day in emergencies. The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by William Marsden, Thomas Wright (editor), The Orion Press, 1958.
[“Norman spoon in English dish”]
Ivanhoe, Walter Scott, American Book Company, Reprint Edition, 1904, page 276.
[Norman slaughter of rebels]
The Normans fought for nearly 30 years to bring rebellions to an end. They only truly conquered England by 1093. “[T]he English were groaning under the Norman yoke and suffering oppressions from the proud lords who ignored the king’s injunctions. The petty lords who were guarding the castles oppressed all the native inhabitants of high and low degree, and heaped shameful burdens on them. For Bishop Odo and William fitz Osbern, the king’s viceregents, were so swollen with pride that they would not deign to hear the reasonable plea of the English or give them impartial judgement. When their men-at-arms were guilty of plunder and rape they protected them by force, and wreaked their wrath all the more violently upon those who complained of the cruel wrongs they suffered.” Historia Ecclesiastica, Orderic (Ordericus Vitalis), Book IV, written around 1125, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, Volume II, Marjorie Chibnall (translator and editor), Oxford University Press, 1969, page 203. Orderic, born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, was of the first generation of Normans to follow William the Bastard’s invasion of 1066, although he spent nearly all his life (after age 10) in a French monastery, so much of his work is second- or third-hand.
[‘just price’ theory is old]
As with many statements in the text, this is a simplification. From Aristotle on to medieval times, several European philosophers and clerics, including Aquinas, recognized that there is a subjective aspect to prices, that both supply and demand mattered. “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” R. de Roover, Journal of Economic History, 18(4):418-434, 1958. Medieval Economic Thought, Diana Wood, Cambridge University Press, 2002, Chapter 6. However, it wasn’t until the sixteenth century and the enormous inflation and price differentials brought about by Europe’s conquest of the Americas that Europe began to develop a more sophisticated price theory. Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva, soon to be Archbishop of Santo Domingo, put it into words in 1554: “The value of an article does not depend on its essential nature but on the estimation of men, even if that estimation be foolish. Thus in the Indies, wheat is dearer than in Spain because men esteem it more highly, though the nature of the wheat is the same in both places.” The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory 1544-1605, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Clarendon Press, 1952, page 48.
[European warming]
By Godric’s time, Europe’s weather had been warming for over two centuries in a climate phase we now call the Medieval Warm Period. It lasted from about 800 to about 1200, giving way to the Little Ice Age. “Climate over past millennia,” P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, Reviews of Geophysics, 42(RG2002):404-405, 2004.

The time period coincides with the Viking incursions into Europe. The Vikings were marauding then because of northern Europe’s warming climate. That warming kept the north seas ice-free all year round, but it also changed north European farming. New tools—the wheeled iron plow, the nailed horseshoe, the horsecollar—had started opening virgin land. The forests fell and the villages spread. As produce grew, so did trade. England, with the climate of today’s southern France, grew grapes and exported wine. (And wool and slaves.) It was then rich—well, for northern Europe, anyway. Then in 1066 a bunch of French-speaking ex-Vikings invaded. They called themselves ‘Normans’ rather than Norsemen because they’d invaded France so long before that by then they’d turned French. Meanwhile, their cousins invaded Sicily and Italy. Poverty, ignorance, slavery, and war—a thousand years ago that was Europe, especially northern Europe. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, about all it was good for was furs and slaves.

The horsecollar and nailed horseshoe alone increased crop yields by 50 percent. Since Roman times, horsecollars choked horses when pulling heavy loads. The new horsecollar took the weight off the horse’s neck and put it on the horses’s shoulders, thus relieving it of the threat of strangulation. Since a horse can work for about 3 hours more per day than an ox, animal power no longer was the limiting factor in food production. Land was. The word ‘acre’ originates from that time; it’s the amount of land a horse can plow in one day. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, Jean Gimpel, Penguin, 1976.

[the ‘just price’ idea in New England]
The Boston shopkeeper was named Robert Keayne. “Why is There a Conflict Between Business and Religion? A Historical Perspective,” K. E. Schmiesing, in Business And Religion: A Clash of Civilizations? Nicholas Capaldi (editor), M & M Scrivener Press, 2005, pages 90-99, especially pages 91-94. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, John Winthrop, Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (editors), Harvard University Press, 1996, pages 305-309.

The Non-Elephant in the Living Room

[trying to save downtown]
A German city once decided to do something about the problem of noise and air pollution in its downtown shopping area. The mayor and city councillors reduced speed limits and added speedbumps to ensure compliance. Citizens applauded. But drivers spent more time negotiating downtown, so noise and air pollution increase. Aggravated by the new problems, shoppers started going to suburban malls. Downtown businesses went bankrupt. City taxes plummeted. And, thanks to the new speedbumps, noise and air pollution remained downtown. The original problem had grown worse. The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do To Make Them Right, Dietrich Dörner, English Translation, Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

When we think about the world around us, we often assume ceteris paribus, Latin for ‘all else being the same.’ In reality, though, it’s cetera desunt, ‘all else is missing.’ In non-linear networks, ceteris is never paribus. Ecologists have long had to face this chasm separating what we think will happen and what actually happens.

[linearity]
We often prefer quick, cheap, popular—and wrong—solutions. They look good to us at first because it’s hard for us to see the network we’re embedded in. Thus, we often assume the following: We can change one thing and nothing else will change. If we change something and get one result, and if we change something else and get another result, then if we change both at once we’ll get both results. A small change will have a small result. Conversely, a large result must have come from a large change. Finally, if we do something and get a result, then if we do the same thing again later we’ll get the same result. Mathematicians might bunch all such assumptions under one word: ‘linearity.’ If effort X yields result Y, then effort 2X will yield result 2Y.
[use of the word ‘non-elephant’]
We inherited the term ‘non-linear’ from math and physics because until last century, they mostly only studied linearly separable systems. Everything else was too hard. Today though our computers are helping us simulate and analyze more complex reaction networks. Almost all of them are non-linear. The term originates with a mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam, circa 1950. He’s reported to have said that using the term ‘non-linear science’ was like calling the bulk of zoology ‘the study of non-elephants.’ “Experimental Mathematics: The Role of Computation in Nonlinear Science,” D. Campbell, D. Farmer, J. Crutchfield, E. Jen, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 28(4):374-384, 1985.
[susceptibility to scams and bubbles]
This reasoning style (‘I’ll do it because others are doing it’) normally is an excellent computational shortcut. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini, Quill, Revised Edition, 1993. It works well for a lot of things—foraging, for example, or choosing a restaurant, doctor, or dentist—but it doesn’t serve us well in non-linear situations. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1841, Harmony Book, Reprint Edition, 1980. How Con Games Work, M. Allen Henderson, Citadel Press, 1985. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions, James Randi, Prometheus Books, 1982.

Many of us don’t like uncertainty and will do nearly anything to remove it as a possibility. Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak, MIT Press, 1986. Reasoning and Decision Making, P. N. Johnson-Laird and Eldat Shafir (editors), Blackwell, 1994. Decision-Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment, Irving L. Janis and Leon Mann, Free Press, 1977.

In the stock market it’s called ‘The Greater Fool Theory,’ and it goes something like this: ‘I may be a fool, but since I’m induced to buy this stock now, there should be greater fools out there I can sell it to later.’ For the ridiculous extremes this style of reasoning can drive us to see, for example, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Roger Lowenstein, Random House, 2001. Inventing Money: The story of Long-Term Capital Management and the legends behind it, Nicholas Dunbar, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.

Scientists fall for such mental shortcuts, too. “Assessing uncertainty in physical constants,” M. Henrion, B. Fischoff, American Journal of Physics, 54(9):791-797, 1986. Uncertainty: A Guide to Dealing with Uncertainty in Quantitative Risk and Policy Analysis, M. Granger Morgan and Max Henrion, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Should We Risk It? Exploring Environmental, Health and Technology Problem Solving, Kammen and Hassenzahl, Princeton University Press, 1999.

[large bailouts can encourage capital flight]
In July 1998 the International Monetary Fund began a bailout of Russia with a first tranche bond sale valued at $4.8 billion U.S. Within days, the money appeared in offshore banks in Cyprus and Switzerland. Russia’s currency collapsed, and a banking crisis followed. Globalization and its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, page 150.
[layers of meaning of a bailout]
The last layer is called ‘moral hazard’ in insurance (and now economics). “Moral Hazard: A Question of Morality?” A. E. Dembe, L. I. Boden, New Solutions, 10(3):257-279, 2000. Essentially, if something is insured against failure, we sometimes act so as to increase the chance of failure, thereby either negating the extra protection or passing on extra risk to someone else. An example might be antilock brakes. Drivers of cars with them alter their driving behavior in such a way that overall they don’t significantly increase safety.
[forest fires]
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Edward Tenner, Knopf, 1996, pages 79-82. “Smokey’s Revenge,” C. E. Little, American Forests, 99(5-6):24-25,58-60, 1993.
[paper money in China in 1111]
“The Origins of Paper Money in China,” R. Von Glah, In The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets, William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (editor), Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 71-75.
[human inability to understand complex systems]
Hardly an original thought. For example: “It is my basic theme that the human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Our social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary for man to understand these systems until very recent historical times. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental skill needed to properly interpret the dynamic behavior of the systems of which we have now become a part.” “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems,” J. W. Forrester, Technology Review, 73(3):53-68, 1971. Forrester reports on a model of urban housing that showed several counter-intuitive results, all of them completely sensible when the real variables and feedback loops are understood. But most of us don’t see them or understand them. Some politicians and planners do, but it’s not politically wise for them to try to explain them to the people they govern. So urban problems not only remain, they expand to the limit of available money.

Bright Lights, Big Cities

[growth dynamics of firm locations]
This study belongs to a new branch of economics sometimes dubbed ‘geographic economics’ or sometimes ‘economic geography.’ It deals with the spatial effects of economic activity and the effects of location on economic activity. “Rethinking human capital, creativity and urban growth,” M. Storper, A. J. Scott, Journal of Economic Geography, 9(2):147-167, 2009. “Why So Many Local Entrepreneurs?” C. Michelacci, O. Silva, Review of Economics & Statistics, 89(4):615-633, 2007. “Homegrown Solutions: Fostering Cluster Formation,” M. P. Feldman, J. L. Francis, Economic Development Quarterly, 18(2):127-137, 2004. “Scale Economies and the Geographic Concentration of Industry,” G. H. Hanson, Journal of Economic Geography, 1(3):255-276, 2001. “Space: The Final Frontier,” P. Krugman, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12(2):161-174, 1998. “How the Economy Organizes Itself in Space: A Survey of the New Economic Geography,” P. Krugman, in The Economy As an Evolving Complex System II, Proceedings Volume XXVII, W. Brian Arthur, Steven R. Durlauf, and David A. Lane (editors), Addison-Wesley, 1997, pages 239-262. “Complex Landscapes in Economic Geography,” P. Krugman, American Economic Review, 84(2):412-16, 1994.
[city highway growth]
The number of highways in a city rises slower than does the city’s surface area (it scales roughly as the 3/4th power of the surface area). However, the number of highway exits rises faster than does the city’s surface area (it scales roughly as the 9/8th power of the surface area). That data is empirical and was taken from a study of cities in the United States varying in size from about 10 thousand to about 10 million. “Common scaling laws for city highway systems and the mammalian neocortex,” M. A. Changizi, M. Destefano, Complexity, 15(3):11-18, 2009.
[city wealth grows superlinearly]
“The Self Similarity of Human Social Organization and Dynamics in Cities,” L. M. A. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, G. B. West, and “Innovation Cycles and Urban Dynamics,” D. Pumain, F. Paulus, C. Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, in Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change, David Lane, Sander Ernst Van Der Leeuw, Denise Pumain, and Geoffrey West (editors), Springer, 2009, pages 221-236 and 237-262. “The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities,” M. Batty, Science, 319(5864):769-771, 2008. “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities,” L. M. A. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, G. B. West, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(17):7301-7306, 2007. “Urban Land Area and Population Growth: A New Scaling Relationship for Metropolitan Expansion,” J. D. Marshall, Urban Studies, 44(10):1889-1904, 2007.
[urban proportion of GDP]
“Flows of capital, labour, technology and information have supported the growth of world trade from US$579 billion in 1980 to US$6.272 trillion in 2004, an increase of 11 times. Trade in goods has become an increasing share of the GDPs of national economies, rising from 32.5 per cent in 1990 to 40 per cent in 2001.... the location of infrastructure investment is an important determinant in the quality of housing, education and other services. A study of infrastructure investment in Buenos Aires from 1991 to 1997 concluded that 11.5 per cent of the population received 68 per cent of investment, leading to the observation that the city is, in fact, five cities, each with different levels and quality of infrastructure and public services.” State of the World’s Cities 2004/5, Globalization and Urban Culture, UN-Habitat (The United Nations Human Settlement Programme), 2004.
[infant mortality in Brazil]
World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, The World Bank, 2005, page 55.
[size of big cities]
Size of eighth-century Xi’an (Chang’an): Encyclopedia of Asian History, Volume I, Ainslee T. Embree, Robin J. Lewis, Richard W. Bulliet, Edward L. Farmer, Marius B. Jansen, David S. Lelyveld, and David K. Wyatt (editors), Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988, page 320. Size of eleventh-century Baghdad: World Cities: -3000 to 2000, George Modelski, Faros, 2003. Size of seventeenth-century Tokyo (Edo): The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War, Christopher Howe, Hurst, 1996, page 55.
[Roman life expectancy]
Structure & Scale in the Roman Economy, Richard Duncan-Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2002, Chapter 6, especially page 103. “Roman Demography,” B. W. Frier, in Life, death, and entertainment in the Roman Empire, D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly (editors), University of Michigan Press, 1999, pages 85-109. The Ancient Roman City, John E. Stambaugh Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, page 337, footnote 3.
[population of Ulan Bator and Mongolia]
“Ulan Bator Statistic Bulletin,” December, 2008. Table A.1. of World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2008.
[over a billion squatters]
Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Robert Newuwirth, Routledge, 2005.
[the city as an organism]
Hardly an original idea. Aristotle, among others (including Plato, his tutor), saw the city as an organism. Near the beginning of his Politics he observes that: “He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them.” Politics, Aristotle, Book I, Part II, Benjamin Jowett Translation, Dover, Reprint Edition, 2000, page 26.
[London as an organism]
These statistics are surprisingly hard to come by. Only recently has anyone even thought to compile them in one central place and that effort is not yet complete. There’s lots of data on a per-person or per-country basis, but very little on a per-city basis (and even less on a per-region basis). Plus, while there is still a lot of data, getting current data, and getting it all together in one place is hard. Also, whole sectors are unmeasured (or under-reported) by city government, although the Greater London Authority is one of the first to make a stab at this. The figures in the text are thus intended to give a rough idea only. They are accurate to within an order of magnitude though. No other city in the world has yet undertaken this effort. City Limits: A Resource Flow and Ecological Footprint Analysis of Greater London, Best Foot Forward Limited, 2002. For explanations about why so many figures are missing or proxied and for warnings about using the above booklet as a basis for policy, see: London’s Ecological Footprint: A review, Greater London Authority, June 2003. I also used data from other reports without special citation. Monthly Digest of Statistics, Office of National Statistics, July 2009. A BBC documentary that aired in August, 2008. Britain from Above, Ian Harrison and Andrew Marr, Pavilion, 2008. Focus on London 2007, Office of National Statistics, 2007. The Urban Environment, Twenty-sixth Report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, The Stationery Office, 2007. Drought in London, July 2006, Health and Public Services Committee, London Assembly, 2006. The London Plan: Spatial Development Strategy for Greater London, Greater London Authority, 2004. Access to Primary Care, A joint London Assembly and Mayor of London Scrutiny Report, The Access to Primary Care Advisory Committee, 2003. Planning for London’s Growth, Greater London Authority, 2002. 1992-2002 Annual Abstract of Statistics, Bank of England, 2002. For lack of London-specific data in some areas, I have been forced to proxy it based on total British figures (for example, for the number of British Telecom phone calls per hour, or the cash flow per day, or the Bank of England’s M0) then divide by the ratio of London’s population to total British population. That is almost surely an underestimate of the actual figures since London is richer and denser and more business-oriented than most of the rest of Britain. Finally, the figures, such as they are, are for a spread of dates roughly from 1997 to 2008 and are not current.
[urban technology]
“Growth, innovation, and the pace of life in cities,” L. M. A. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, G. B. West, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(17):7301-7306, 2007. “Gig@city: The Rise of Technological Networks in Daily Life,” D. Lorrain, in Sustaining Urban Networks: The Social Diffusion of Large Technical Systems, Olivier Coutard, Richard E. Hanley, and Rae Zimmerman (editors), Routledge, 2005, pages 15-31. Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future, Jesse H. Ausubel and Robert Herman (editors), National Academies Press, 1988. Lawyers and judges also matter. So does road congestion and external trade. Smog, schools, jobs, all matter too. Many other factors—rivers, available land area, the cost and tensile strength of steel and concrete, and so on—all matter. And they all interact. Plus, we can always argue about definitions and the various purely political ways that a city can grow (for instance, by annexation). But despite all our urban planning, our mayors, our city councils, our earnest debates, our cities grow more like unruly ecosystems than like anything planned. The same is true of our other corporate bodies—our neighborhoods, universities, countries, regions, firms, institutions, governments, markets. They all grow or shrink ecogenetically. As new tools or new lives enter them, they act like ecosystems with new species invading.
[urban versus rural]
For example, in the 1980s China’s urban households compared to rural households were twice as likely to have a TV; they were eight times more likely to have a washing machine; and 25 times more likely to have a fridge. Consumer Demand in China: A Statistical Factbook, Jeffrey R. Taylor and Karen A. Hardee, Westview Press, 1986. For a more recent view for the world as a whole, see Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and its Implications in the Developing World, National Research Council, National Academies Press, 2003.
[South Korea versus Ghana]
South Korea is today a big exporter of cars and computers. Its per-person income is about that of Israel’s. It also has military and geopolitical significance, and thus investment, that Ghana lacks. For an analysis from the firm-level of the economy see Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan, Robert C. Feenstra and Gary G. Hamilton, Cambridge University Press, 2006. The introduction of the shipping container also mattered. See: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson, Princeton University Press, 2006. Other data on growth (for example, life expectancy), came from The Transformation of South Korea: Reform and Reconstitution in the Sixth Republic under Roh Tae Woo, 1987-1992, Robert E. Bedeski, Routledge, 1994, especially pages 79-81.

The 1963 per capita income figures are from the United States Department of State and the article “Third World Economic Development,” C. Crook, in The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, David Henderson (editor), Warner Books, 1993. See also “Ghana and South Korea: Explaining Development Disparities,” An Essay in Honor of Carl Rosberg H. H. Werlin, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 29(3-4):205-225, 1994.

Urbanization data is from: “Urban Growth in Korea, 1970-1980: An Application of the Human Ecological Perspective,” S. H. Ko, Korea Journal of Population and Development, 23(1):1-18, 1994.

As of 2007, the International Monetary Fund estimates that GDP (PPP) in Canada is $1,265,838, while in South Korea it’s $1,200,879, making them 13th and 14th in the world. The United States Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook estimates Canada at $1,266,000 and South Korea at $1,201,000, again making them 13th and 14th in world ranking. The World Bank reverses their order, but its estimates are about the same: South Korea at $1,199,270 and Canada at $1,178,205.

Another interesting comparative case is South Korea versus the Philippines. Lectures on Economic Growth, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Harvard University Press, 2002, especially Chapter 3. And of course, South Korea versus North Korea.

[population of North and South Korea]
Table A.1. of World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2008.
[differences in heights and weights between North and South Korea]
“Height and weight differences between North and South Korea,” D. Schwekendiek, Journal of Biosocial Science, 41(1):51-55, 2009. “Recent growth of children in the two Koreas: a meta-analysis,” D. Schwekendiek, S. Pak, Economics and Human Biology, 7(1):109-112, 2009. “Doors closing for North Korean defectors,” T. Johnson, The Seattle Times, September 30th, 2007. Unable to read Korean, I’ve so far failed to track down the original study mentioned here, but it seems to be real. By comparing 1,075 North Korean defectors to the South Korean population, in 2005 the Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that North Korean males between 20 and 39 are 165.6 centimeters tall (5’ 4.5”), while South Korean males are 172.5 centimeters (5’ 8.5”). For females, the values were 154.9 centimeters (5’ 1.0”) and 159.1 centimeters (5’ 3.5”).
[on cities and their growth patterns]
For further background on the connections between cities and infrastructural support see American Cities and Technology: Wilderness to Wired City, Gerrylynn K. Roberts and Philip Steadman, Routledge, 1999.
[half of us are urban]
World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2006. The data is imprecise because the definition of ‘urban’ varies from place to place. However, in North and South America, about 80 percent of us are urban. In Oceania and Europe, about 70 percent of us are urban. In Asia and Africa, about 40 percent of us are urban.
[effect of demographic change]
“We estimate half of East Asia’s growth in income per capita over the last 40 years, that is all of its ‘miracle’ has been due to the consequences of demographic change.” From: “Economic Development and the Demographic Transition: The Role of Cumulative Causality,” D. E. Bloom, D. Canning, the United States Agency for International Development under CAER II, (Consulting Assistance on Economic Reform), Harvard Institute for International Development, September, 1999. “The Health and Wealth of Nations,” D. E. Bloom, D. Canning, Science, 287(5456):1207-1209, 2000.
[phase change into wealth as a demographic transition]
Economists call that phase change a demographic transition. We can stigmergically react to tool changes around us to then change our attitudes and that internal change alone can itself lead to further changes. But that phase change isn’t guaranteed because it depends on our initial state. For instance, over the past 40 years, changes in medical tech touched off baby booms in both East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. However it had different effects in each place. In East-Asia, as the boom matured, it reversed the ratio of dependents to workers. That alone may have caused half of East Asia’s per-person income growth over the past 40 years. If we can sustain such growth for long enough, we have time to build the tools and attitudes that then keep the stigmergic cycle going. The cost of kids relative to their labor value rises. We come to expect tomorrow to be better than today. Over the same 40 years, however, sub-Saharan Africa started with low life expectancy and many kids per worker. So its first baby boom was followed by another. Then another. So when the first boom reached maturity, the ratio of workers to dependents remained unchanged. Further, AIDS slashed the working-age population, which further reduced that ratio. Economic growth slowed even more. The cost of kids remained the same. We come to expect tomorrow to be just like today—except perhaps worse. Demographic Transition Theory, John C. Caldwell (editor), Springer, 2006.
[skyscraper technology]
American Cities & Technology: Wilderness to Wired City, Gerrylynn K. Roberts and Philip Steadman (editors), Routledge, 1999, pages 104-124.
[our swarm as a slime mold]
That’s a metaphor, but not an idle one. It can be literally true in at least for cities and transportation networks (roads and railroads). “Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle,” A. Adamatzky, J. Jones, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, to appear, 2010. “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,” A. Tero, S. Takagi, T. Saigusa, K. Ito, D. P. Bebber, M. D. Fricker, K. Yumiki, R. Kobayashi, T. Nakagaki, Science 327(5964):439-442, 2010. The Social Amoebae: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds, John Tyler Bonner, Princeton University Press, 2009.

The Price of Life

[dependence on history]
Economists normally call this ‘path dependence.’ “Increasing returns and economic progress,” A. A. Young, Economic Journal, 38(152):527-542, 1928. Mathematically speaking, though, it’s more strictly any non-ergodic stochastic process. That is, any process whose asymptotic distribution is at least partly a consequence of its history. Increasing Returns and Path Dependency in the Economy, W. Brian Arthur, University of Michigan Press, 1994. Arthur’s models have been challenged, particularly for VHS versus Betamax and for the Dvorak versus the QWERTY keyboards. That challenge in turn led to further argument. “Path dependence, Its Critics and the Quest for ‘Historical Economics,’ P. A. David, in Evolution and Path Dependence in Economic Ideas: Past and Present, P. Garrouste and S. Ioannidis (editors), Edward Elgar Publishing, 2001, pages 15-40. “Path Dependence, Lock-in, and History,” S. J. Liebowitz, S. E. Margolis, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 11(1):205-226, 1995. “Defending the Concept of Network Externalities: A Discussion of Liebowitz and Margolis,” P. Regibeau, Research in Law and Economics, 17:33-39, 1995. That economic argument revolves around whether path dependence (stigmergy, in the text) can force fixable free market errors. That is, whether the history of an innovation can lock a free market into choices that are economically inefficient even when more efficient choices exist. In general, that seems unlikely (in a free market). However, that’s not the point being made in the text. It argues that whether or not our choices are economically efficient, history (stigmergy) does affect which options we choose, can choose, or are forced to choose.
[foreign direct investment in Turkey to 2005]
“Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries? An Empirical Investigation,” L. Alfaro, S. Kalemli-Ozcan, V. Volosovych, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(2):347-368, 2008.
[other trade networks]
The United States, Canada, and Mexico entered free trade agreements in 1994 that have so far been more economically mixed than experience in the European Union. The agreements in question are the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) signed in 1989 and the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1994. Briefly, the combined North American economy has doubled in a decade, however it’s still not clear how much of that is a result of NAFTA and how much simply better technology. Also, there are many points of friction in all three countries, even a decade after the signing. It does seem to have benefited Mexico though. NAFTA’s Impact On North America: The First Decade, Sidney Weintraub (editor), Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2004. NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, Paul L. E. Grieco, and Yee Wong, Institute for International Economics, 2005.
[effect of distance on trade]
“Distance, Trade, and Income: The 1967 to 1975 Closing of the Suez Canal as a Natural Experiment,” J. Feyrer, Working Paper 15557, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2009.
[Australia’s trading partners]
Year Book Australia, 2007, Australian Bureau of Statistics.
[population of London from 1500 to 1800]
Immigrants and the industries of London, 1500-1700, Liên Luu, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005, page 34.
[land and energy footprints of Hong Kong and London]
Green Light to Clean Power: Highlights of the Mayor’s Energy Strategy, Greater London Auhority, 2004, page 5. “Ecosystem appropriation by Hong Kong and its implications for sustainable development,” K. Warren-Rhodes, A. Koenig, Ecological Economics, 39(3):347-359, 2001.

Economic War - Chapter 5, Poverty

[Clausewitz quote]
On War, Carl von Clausewitz, translated by J. J. Graham, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1908, Volume III, page 121.

Insolubles

[the dead donkey...]
This is a composite story based on an eyewitness report in July, 1985, plus several Egyptian government white papers, and conversations with Egyptian friends. Adoption of Community Water Systems: An Area Study in Three Villages in Muhafzat Kofr-Shaykh, Egypt, David Berton Belasco, doctoral thesis, University of Denver, 1989. For more recent ethnographic background on Delta problems, see also: Agrarian Transformation in Egypt: Conflict Dynamics and the Politics of Power from a Micro Perspective, Caroline Laetitia Tingay, doctoral thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2005.
[child deaths in Egypt]
During the 1980s in Egypt, two-thirds of all deaths of infants and children under five were from diarrhea and associated dehydration. The proportion of water-related child deaths is highest in the Delta. Egypt: A Country Study, Helen Chapin Metz (editor), Fifth Edition, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1991.
[the largest single cause of human disease and death]
“Even though the percentage of the world’s population with access to improved water supply rose from 78 to 82 per cent between 1990 and 2000, and the percentage with access to improved sanitation rose from 51 to 61 per cent during this same period, contaminated water remains the greatest single cause of human sickness and death on a global scale.” Global Environment Outlook, GEO-4, United Nations Environment Programme, 2007, page 151.

“Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea—4,900 deaths each day or an under-five population equivalent in size to that for London and New York combined. Together, unclean water and poor sanitation are the world’s second biggest killer of children. Deaths from diarrhoea in 2004 were some six times greater than the average annual deaths in armed conflict for the 1990s.” Human Development Report, 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2007, page 6.

“Poor water and sanitation produce nonfatal chronic conditions at all stages of the lifecycle. At any given time close to half the people in the developing world are suffering from one or more of the main diseases associated with inadequate provision of water and sanitation such as diarrhoea, guinea worm, trachoma and schistosomiasis. These diseases fill half the hospital beds in developing countries.” Human Development Report, 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2007, page 45.

“...10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday...” Human Development Report, 2005, United Nations Development Programme, 2006, page 3.

In 1990, the United Nations World Health Organization reported that 1,015 million of us, almost one sixth of everyone alive, were forced to drink contaminated surface water, and 1,764 million, almost a quarter of us, were without adequate sanitation. Despite immense gains over the past 20 years, an additional 800 million people made the situation much the same ten years later: “The percentage of people served with some form of improved water supply rose from 79 percent (4.1 billion) in 1990 to 82 percent (4.9 billion) in 2000. Over the same period the proportion of the world’s population with access to excreta disposal facilities increased from 55 percent (2.9 billion people served) to 60 percent (3.6 billion). At the beginning of 2000 one-sixth (1.1 billion people) of the world’s population was without access to improved water supply and two-fifths (2.4 billion people) lacked access to improved sanitation. The majority of these people live in Asia and Africa, where fewer than one-half of all Asians have access to improved sanitation and two out of five Africans lack improved water supply. Moreover, rural services still lag far behind urban services. Sanitation coverage in rural areas, for example, is less than half that in urban settings, even though 80 percent of those lacking adequate sanitation (2 billion people) live in rural areas - some 1.3 billion in China and India alone.” Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report, WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, 2000.

[ancient belief that Nile water was fecund]
The belief goes back at least two millennia, long before Islam. Natural History, Pliny the Elder, Book 7, part 3. See also: Water in the cultic worship of Isis and Sarapis, Robert A. Wild, Brill Academic, 1981.
[Egyptian water problems]
Here’s a sample of recent papers on the water problem: “The Egyptian State Under Threat of Hydraulic Crisis and Peasant Poverty: The Risks of a Free-market Management of Water,” H. Ayeb, Fourth Pan-African Programme on Land and Resource Rights Workshop, Cape Town, South Africa, 5-7 May 2003. “Some Technical and Economic Considerations on Irrigation Water Pricing,” M. A. Abu-Zeid, Water Science Magazine, Number 7, 1990. “Water Supply and Demand in Egypt,” Sami El Fillali, Ministry of Agriculture Report, Egypt.
[the Aswan High Dam]
“The Artificial Nile: The Aswan High Dam destroyed a fishery, but human activities may have revived it,” S. Nixon, American Scientist, 92(part 2):158-165, 2004. “The Imperiled Nile Delta,” P. Theroux, National Geographic, 191(1):2-35, 1997. “Nile delta: extreme case of sediment entrapment on a delta plain and consequent coastal land loss,” D. J. Stanley, Marine Geology, 129(3):189-195, 1996. “The southeastern Mediterranean ecosystem revisited: Thirty years after the construction of the Aswan High Dam,” S. El-Sayed, G. L. van Dijken, Quarterdeck, 3(1):4-7, 1995.
[Egypt went socialist]
A group of Egyptian officers seized power in the 1950s and Gamal Abdel-Nasser took power. He instituted land reform that led to the breakup of the old big estates, thus redistributing land to the peasants.
[new water technology]
“Towards sustainable seawater desalting in the Gulf area,” M. A. Darwish, N. M. Al-Najem, N. Lior, Desalination, 235(1-3):58-87, 2009. “Optimized design of a reverse osmosis system with a recycle P. Sarkar, D. Goswami, S. Prabhakar, P. K. Tewari, Desalination, 230(1-3):128-139, 2008. “Design of single-effect mechanical vapor compression,” H. Ettouney, Desalination, 190(1-3):1-15, 2006.
[analysis of Egypt’s containerized port facilities]
“Logistics chain analysis of Alexandria container handling company in Egypt: a basis for assessing services,” K. Abbas, Freight and Logistics Seminars, The European Transport Conference, 2003. Egyptian ports used to be havens of high cost, weak investment, and poor service. However since 2003, the situation has changed. There have been major upgrades at Alexandria but also Port Said and elsewhere. As of 2006, Port Said East and Port Said West together handle around 75 percent of transit containers. (Damietta handles much of the rest.). Ports, Cities, and Global Supply Chains, James Wang, Daniel Olivier, Theo Notteboom, Brian Slack (editors), Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007.
[Egyptian illiteracy]
Data is for 1998. In 1970, illiteracy was even higher, at 68.6 percent. “Sources of Economic Growth and Technical Progress in Egypt: An Aggregate Perspective,” H. Kheir-El-Din, T. A. Moursi, Economic Policy Initiative Consortium (EPIC), Egypt, and the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Social Science, Cairo University, Egypt 2001. Paper presented to the Economic Research Forum of the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey, 2002. The authors note that figures may be inflated even today thanks to corruption, since a literacy certificate is so valuable for jobs. For literacy in the Arabic world in general, see Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society, United Nations Development Programme, 2003.
[Egypt’s statistics]
Growth rates of population and the economy, as measured via GDP (gross domestic product), are from World Factbook, United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2005.
[causes of Egypt’s changing prospects]
In Egypt, rising oil income, policy changes, cheaper technology, spreading literacy, and more money sent home from expats, have now made for a change. Egypt is now phase changing from rural to urban, from peasant to industrialist, from unlettered to educated.

Farming as a share of national Egyptian income fell from more than 38 percent in 1975 to 16 percent in 1995. As of 2006, its population is still growing, but only by 1.75 percent a year—far below its peak of 2.7 percent in the 1980s. Its economy is rising at 4.5 percent a year. Its middle class is growing too. About 43 percent of its population is now urban. Female literacy and paid employment are also rising. Thus, from 1990 to 2005 Egypt’s birthrate fell from 4.3 to 3.1 births per woman. Its child death rate also plunged 68 percent—the biggest drop in the world. Both literacy and new tools are spreading. Many villages now have both clean water and electricity. Roads are being paved. Clinics are spreading. So are schools. The stigmergic effect of all that new infrastructure is rising. But the quality of such services isn’t yet high. There still isn’t enough money, nor enough skilled people. In Egypt, two in every five of us still are below or just above the world poverty line—$2 U.S. a day. In the Arabic world as a whole, life for us is changing fast as well. Since 1970, female literacy has tripled. But our problems are still vast. Today, 43 percent of all Arabic women still can’t read. And 35 percent of men can’t either.

But that won’t last forever. In Egypt, our new tools are adding up and starting to work synergetically with each other. Nor is that process special to Egypt. Today, our material welfare is changing everywhere. Since 2000, over 82 percent of us around the world now have safe water. Over 61 percent of us now have adequate toilets. In 1990, those figures were 78 percent and 51 percent, respectively. Our resources do change, but it takes time for our tools to cheapen and spread, then to link up synergetically.

For a summary look at the relevant policy changes in 1991 and 1993, see The State of Food and Agriculture 1997, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1998. Egypt’s child death rate plummeted 68 percent: It dropped from 104 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 33 in 2005. State of the World’s Mothers: Saving the Lives of Children Under 5, Save the Children, 2007, pages 22 and 27. State of the World’s Children, UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund), 2007, Table 10. Egyptian life expectancy in 2005: World Health Statistics, 2007, United Nations World Health Organization, 2007.

[the economics of development]
This is wide field, with a number of competing theories. However, speaking very generally, in recent times (post World War II) the basic idea has evolved from the Big Push strategy (epitomized by the Marshall Plan’s success in Europe and Japan) to the micro-investment strategy (epitomized by successful microfinancing efforts, first in Pakistan then elsewhere). The other main variant is the ‘linked investment’ strategy, which effectively means: choose a small set of functionally linked industries to invest in heavily, then spread out from there. There are also the usual political tugs-of-war. For example, on the left: the market won’t change unless government taxes the rich to then invest heavily, to the right: the government is the main drag on the economy and the market is the only thing that works reliably. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Penguin Books, 2005. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, William Easterly, MIT Press, 2002. The Strategy of Economic Development, Albert Hirschman, Yale University Press, 1958. Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions, Gunnar Myrdal, Duckworth, 1957.
[closure]
Note that closure as defined in the text, is relative to the desired state. Egypt, say, is in a sense always operationally closed in the sense that it provides for all its most basic wants—it continues to exist and hence in that sense it must be getting everything it needs to survive. However, Egypt desires to grow richer, and that means that it’s trying to move from one state to another. It’s from the perspective of the second state, the desired state, that it is not operationally closed.

Operational closure isn’t ‘catalytic closure’ (that is, that a reaction network makes all its own catalysts). That’s already guaranteed with the assumed collective autocatalysis (which is called ‘synergy’ in the text) of the given reaction network. Instead, operational closure here means something stronger. It means that the reaction network is closed not just with respect to its catalysts but also their substrates—the ‘resources’—that the collectively autocatalytic (‘synergetic’ in the text) reactions need.

Of course, closure alone can’t explain everything. For example, Germany became half-urban 50 years after Britain did, yet still it caught up fairly quickly. It invested in research more rapidly and more heavily and moved that research more rapidly into development. Plus, it could start with the best factories and machines available at the time whereas Britain was slow to change even when it invented new things. For instance, aniline dyes—then drugs based on them—grew into a huge industry in Germany, not Britain, even though Britain discovered the first one. The first aniline dye was commercialized as mauveine. It was discovered accidentally by William Perkin in 1856. But leadership in organic chemistry soon passed from Britain to Germany. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World, Simon Garfield, W. W. Norton, 2000.

A head start of two generations—50 years—didn’t make much difference (between England and Germany) while a head start of four generations—100 years—did (between Germany and Egypt). Why? Perhaps such questions can be answered by recent work on growth theory in economics. For example, see “First Mover Advantages, Blockaded entry, and the Economics of Uneven Development,” J. R. Markusen, in International Trade and Trade Policy, Elhanan Helpman and Assaf Razin (editors), MIT Press, 1991, pages 245-269.

Note that the way the text defines operational closure differs from the definition given by Varela, which is more concerned with a system’s autonomy. Although both definitions are motivated by the same underlying idea of closure in mathematics (and especially in topology). See the Preface to: Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine (editors), MIT Press, 1992.

The Properties of Property

[buying land in Egypt]
It’s much the same in many other poor countries. To get the legal permits to build a house on state-owned land in Peru takes almost seven years. It takes 207 steps spread over 52 government offices. To get legal title to that land then takes a further 728 steps. Buying a house in the Philippines can take 168 steps spread over 53 public and private associations and agencies. It can take 13 to 25 years. Leasing state-owned land in Haiti takes 65 steps. It takes about two years to lease a plot for five years. To then buy that land takes a further 111 steps. And 12 more years. Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina are similar. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando de Soto, Basic Books, 2000.
[days to get a business license]
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, Dambisa Moyo, Macmillan, 2009, page 100.
[legal cases in Argentina can take over 20 years]
“The Formation of Beliefs: Evidence from the Allocation of Land Titles to Squatters,” R. Di Tella, S. Giliana, E. Schargrodsky, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(1):209-241, 2007. The above paper is of independent interest as it describes a natural experiment on the consequences of titling for belief in the free market versus family support and local community over 20 years in Buenos Aires.
[corruption in Afghanistan]
Corruption in Afghanistan: Bribery as Reported by Victims, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2010.
[bribery in India’s driver’s licensing bureaus]
“Corruption in Driving Licensing Process in Delhi,” M. Bertrand, S. Djankov, R. Hanna, S. Mullainathan, Economic & Political Weekly, 43(5):71-76, 2008.
[corruption is common]
Global Corruption Report 2009: Corruption and the Private Sector, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Global Corruption Report 2007: Corruption in Judicial Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Global Corruption Report 2006: Special Focus: Corruption and Health, Pluto Press, 2006. Global Corruption Report 2005: Special Focus: Corruption in Construction and Post, Pluto Press, 2005.
[international corruption]
Bribery of foreign officials to thus gain contracts is common among rich nations, especially for contracts involving weapons, construction, public works, and oil. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) made it illegal only in 1999, and as of 2009 is still only very sparsely enforced. Just four nations take active measures (the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Norway). Before that, only the United States had passed such a law (the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in 1977). OECD Anti-bribery Convention Progress Report: Enforcement of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, Fritz Heimann and Gillian Dell, Transparency International, 2009.
[construction corruption in Manhattan]
“Why Gotham’s Developers Don’t Develop,” W. J. Stern, City Journal, Autumn 2000. More generally, see: “Construction, Corruption, and Developing Countries,” C. Kenny, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4271, The World Bank, 2007. Five families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Families, Selwyn Raab, Macmillan, 2005. Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated From the Grip of Organized Crime, James B. Jacobs, Coleen Friel, and Robert Raddick, NYU Press, 2001, especially Chapter 7. Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry: The Final Report of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, Ronald Goldstock, Martin Marcus, Thomas D. Thacher II, James B. Jacobs, NYU Press, 1991.
[female restrictions in Uttar Pradesh]
“The Determinants of Gender Equity in India: Examining Dyson and Moore’s Thesis with New Data,” L. Rahman, V. Rao, Population and Development Review, 30(2):239-268, 2004.
[female property ownership in Cameroon]
“The Development Impact of Gender Equality in Land Rights,” K. O. Mason, H. M. Carlsson, in Human Rights and Development: Towards Mutual Reinforcement, Philip Alston and Mary Robinson (editors), Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 114-132.
[more girls than boys out of school]
Beyond Child Labor: Affirming Rights, United Nations Children’s Fund, 2001, page 2.
[more women than men can’t read]
As of 2009, 774 million adults can’t read. Of those, 64 percent are female. UNESCO Institute of Statistics, 2009. United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture.
[problems of poor borrowers]
Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, Muhammad Yunus (with Alan Jolis), PublicAffairs Books, 1999. Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, Muhammad Yunus, PublicAffairs Books, 2008.
[African stock markets]
The African Stock Exchanges Association (ASEA) lists the following 17 nations: Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
[...smirking foxes]
The situation is much the same for the poor in a rich country. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Harvard University Press, 2006. Poverty Traps, Samuel Bowles, Steven N. Durlauf, and Karla Hoff (editors), Princeton University Press, 2006. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Swimming with Barracuda

[adult literacy rates in Egypt and Germany]
Table I of the Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world, United Nations Development Programme, 2007.
[brain drain]
“Report of the WPA Task Force on Brain Drain,” O. Gureje, S. Hollins, M. Botbol, A. Javed, M. Jorge, V. Okech, M. Riba, J. Trivedi, N. Sartorius, R. Jenkins, World Psychiatry, 8(2):115-118, 2009. “Why Did They Come to the United States? A Profile of Immigrant Scientists and Engineers,” N. Kannankutty, J. Burrelli, Info Brief, National Science Foundation: Directorate for Social Behavioural and Economic Sciences. 2007. “Brain Drain in Developing Countries,” F. Docquier, O. Lohest, A. Marfouk, The World Bank Economic Review, 21(2):193-218, 2007. “Arab Societies as Knowledge Societies,” A. B. Zahlan, Minerva, 44(1):103-112, 2006. “Engineering and Engineering Education in Egypt,” O. L. El-Sayed, J. Lucena, G. Downey, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 25(2):18-25, 2006. “How Extensive Is the Brain Drain?” W. J. Carrington, E. Detragiache, Finance and Development, International Monetary Fund, 36(2):46-49, 1999. “The Egyptian "Brain Drain": A Multidimensional Problem,” N. Ayubi, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15(4):431-450, 1983. “Motives for the Emigration of Egyptian Scientists,” S. Saleh, Social Problems, 25(1):40-51, 1977.
[Philippine doctors emigrating to become nurses]
Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, Volume I, Richard T. Schaefer (editor), SAGE, 2008, page 199.
[capital flows to rich versus poor countries]
“What drives international financial flows? Politics, institutions and other determinants,” E. Papaioannou, Journal of Development Economics, 88(2):269-281, 2009. “International Investment Patterns,” P. R. Lane, G. M. Milesi-Ferretti, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3):538-549, 2008. “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries? An Empirical Investigation,” L. Alfaro, S. Kalemli-Ozcan, V. Volosovych, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(2):347-368, 2008. “Banking on Democracy: The Political Economy of International Private Bank Lending in Emerging Markets,” J. Rodríguez, J. Santiso, International Political Science Review, 29(2):215-246, 2008. (Also: Working Paper Number 259, OECD Development Centre, 2007.) “Channels from Globalization to Inequality: Productivity World versus Factor World,” W. Easterly, in Brookings Trade Forum 2004: Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality Susan M. Collins and Carol Graham (editors) Brookings Institutions, 2004, pages 39-71. “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?” R. E. Lucas, Jr., American Economic Review, 80(2):92-96, 1990.
[30-year textile trade agreement]
That’s the Agreement on Textile and Clothing (also known as the Multi-Fibre Arrangement). TNCs and the removal of textiles and clothing quotas, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2005. “Market Access for Developing Countries,” H. P. Lankes, Finance and Development, International Monetary Fund, 39(3):8-13, 2002.
[higher trade barriers in poor countries]
A briefly stated yet comprehensive comparison is hard since there are many ways for a country to protect itself—including subsidies, quotas, tariffs, duties, and so on—and there are many ways to define who is rich and who is poor. However, at least in terms of tariffs, Lankes notes that: “Developing countries themselves have high tariffs that limit trade among them. The average tariff in developing countries is 14 percent, and in the least developed countries, 17.9 percent, compared with 5.2 percent in the industrial countries.” “Market Access for Developing Countries,” H. P. Lankes, Finance and Development, International Monetary Fund, 39(3):8-13, 2002. Similarly, the World Bank states that “Developing countries themselves are part of the problem. Although South-South trade is a much smaller share of total trade, average tariffs in manufactures are three times higher for trade among developing countries than for exports to high-income countries. Taken together and because of high protection for labor-intensive products around the globe, the world’s poor face tariffs that are, on average, roughly twice as high as those imposed on the nonpoor.” Global Economic Prospects 2002: Making Trade Work for the World’s Poor, The World Bank, 2002, page 37.
[India and China]
Up to about five centuries ago, India and China led the world in just about every respect. One day, they will again do so. In the long run, most of our productivity must move to our biggest population centers. That’s where most of our brains are. But those brains will also need sophisticated tools to perform at their best. Thus, India and China will become our biggest barracuda of all—one day. But for the next few decades at least, if you want a picture of which countries will do well, take the derivative of the length of immigration lines at embassies around the world. When a country’s derivative turns negative, it means the lines are shrinking. Fewer people are trying to get in. Invest elsewhere.

Today though, many foreheads in rich countries crease over talk of a ‘loss of competitiveness’ or even of a ‘flat world.’ It’s hard to know why. India and China, in particular, are indeed growing fast now. From 1978 and 2007, for instance, rural poverty in China fell from 30.7 percent to 1.6 percent. But India and China also started from far behind. From 1990 to 2003, per person income in China leapt 196 percent. In rich nations it went up only 24 percent. Yet today, income in rich lands is still over five times larger than income in China. China today is about where Japan was in the 1970s. Similarly, India’s economy is now surging at 9.4 percent a year—yet even were its torrid growth to persist, it would still take many decades to catch up with our rich countries. It has huge problems. Its adult literacy rate is lower than Rwanda’s. Its percentage of children in school is smaller than Vietnam’s. Its per person income is lower than Nicaragua’s. More than a fourth of the very poorest of us live in India.

India in 2005 had a life expectancy of 63.7 years, an adult literacy rate of 61.0 percent, a combined gross enrollment ratio for primary, secondary, and tertiary education of 63.8 percent, and a per-person GDP (PPP, that is, purchasing power parity) of $3,452. Table I (page 231) of Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world, United Nations Development Programme, 2007.

Education: “Getting the Numbers Right: International Engineering Education in the United States, China, and India,” G. Gereffi, V. Wadhwa, B. Rissing, R. Ong, Journal of Engineering Education, 97(1):13-25, 2008. Rural poverty: Access for All: Basic public services for 1.3 billion people, China Human Development Report 2007/2008, United Nations Development Programme, page 10. Growth curves: Human Development Report, 2005: International cooperation at a crossroads: aid, trade and security in an unequal world, United Nations Development Programme, 2006, page 37.

Of course, no edge lasts forever. Five thousand years ago, Egypt, not Britain, had bronze tools, big cities, large buildings, writing, math, and advanced medicine. As the decades pass, many of our presently poor countries—not just India and China—will shift fully into industry. Their populations will phase change into cities, literacy, and more female control of reproduction. But by then some vital resource, like cheap oil, may have run out. By then, our current barracuda may well have converted that resource into other advantages that they’ll mostly keep. So although many of our nations will rise, and a few will change position, don’t look for major change anytime soon. South Korea might soon be a barracuda, but Egypt surely won’t.

[barracuda and minnows]
The text’s analogy of barracuda and minnows is similar to a well-known anthropological theory of groups divided by energy use. It was first proposed by Leslie White, then developed more or less as follows: The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, Leslie A. White, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, Leslie A. White, McGraw-Hill, 1959. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, Marvin Harris Random House, 1979. Cannibals and Kings, Origins of Cultures, Marvin Harris, Vintage, 1991. Social Transformations: A Critical History, Stephen K. Sanderson, Blackwell, 1995. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan, Paradigm Pub, Ninth Edition, 2004. The Lenski book, much as the text does, focuses on information acquisition. Within this stream of thought, often called ‘anthropological materialism,’ or ‘evolutionary sociology,’ there’s a kind of line of descent, based mostly on who was who’s student. (Roughly speaking, Gordon Childe influenced Leslie White who influenced Marvin Harris who influenced Stephen Sanderson.) As an amateur, my emphasis differs from those of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, in that its focus is on possible internal forces working among our whole species and not on any particular group as it stands with respect to any other group, although of course there’s no way to study the species in the abstract with no reference to particular societies.
[rich world birth rates]
Table A.15 of World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2007.
[immigration to the United States today]
Is about 1.8 million a year. About 1.3 million are legal. Immigration And America’s Future: A New Chapter, Doris Meissner, Deborah W. Meyers, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, and Michael Fix, Brookings Institute Press, 2006.
[almost no retirees before 1890]
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 66.
[in 2007, U.S. personal income was $10 thousand million]
Table 2.1. “Personal Income and Its Disposition,” National Income and Product Accounts Tables, Bureau of Economic Analysis, United States Department of Commerce, 2008.
[U.S. debt in 2007]
The GAO estimates that the government owes a total of $53 trillion U.S. “Long-Term Fiscal Outlook: Action Is Needed to Avoid the Possibility of a Serious Economic Disruption in the Future,” United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-08-411T, 2008, page 6.
[demographic change in China]
“China faces growing gender imbalance,” BBC News, January 11th, 2010. World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2007. “The Contribution of Population Health and Demographic Change to Economic Growth in China and India,” D. E. Bloom, D. Canning, L. Hu, Y. Liu, A. Mahal, W. Yip, PGDA Working Paper Number 2807, Program on the Global Demography of Aging, 2007. “China’s Growth to 2030: The Roles of Demographic Change and Investment Premia,” R. Tyers, J. Golley, PGDA Working Paper Number 1206, Program on the Global Demography of Aging, 2006. “China’s Growth to 2030: Demographic Change and the Labour Supply Constraint,” J. Golley, R. Tyers, PGDA Working Paper Number 1106, Program on the Global Demography of Aging, 2006.
[barracuda and minnows by 2050]
On the barracuda-minnow divide: The game itself is changing as our newest computer tech cheapens and spreads. It’s growing a little easier for some minnows to compete just a bit more evenly with barracuda. Some unprepared barracuda may thus lose some of their current resource closures since many newly rich players will be competing for the same resources. Resource prices will then rise and competition will intensify. That’ll then drive yet more new tech. Further, although our species is aging, our global working-age population—those aged between 15 and 59—is rising. It’ll keep rising until around 2045. So if our tech cheapens and spreads fast enough, our minnows might add production faster than our barracuda lose it. Also, as time goes by, our reproductive rates might well change again. Once our tech makes it possible for many of us to work from home, many women in rich countries might well go back to being homebodies. In the United States today, 15 percent of the non-farm workforce—about 21 million people—already work from home at least part of the time. So our birthrates in rich countries might well spike again in the future. However, the number of such babies likely won’t be as high as before, since our death rates are now so much lower and industrial children cost so much more to rear.

The extrapolation of working-age population is from World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2007. The data on working-at-home in the United States is of 2004. Only about half that population was actually paid to work at home. whether part-time or not. Work At Home In 2004, Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2005.

Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night

[“ignorant armies”]
“Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold.
[2002 steel tariff]
Of course, policy makers did their best to present appropriate fig leaves—first for the desperate need for the tariff, and then for the desperate need for its absence. As of 2009, the United States imports tires from China cheaper than the United States can make them. But it doesn’t get out of the tire business. Why? Its jobless tire-makers say that they feel humiliated, that their children will starve, that without domestic tires the country is doomed, and that they’ll protest in the streets until something is done. So the United States imposes a tariff on Chinese tires. Meanwhile, China imports car parts from the United States cheaper than China can make them. But it doesn’t get out of the car parts business. Why? It’s upset that the United States has just slapped a tariff on its tires. So it slaps a quota on car parts from the United States. The United States then slaps import duties on Chinese steel pipes. If that were to go on for long enough, the countries might one day stop trading tires and car parts and start trading bullets and bombs.
[comparative advantage]
Even if one person, group, or country were to make everything more efficiently than some other person, group, or country, it would still gain economically by specializing in whatever it was best at making then trading with other nations for everything else. The absolute cost of production doesn’t matter. By choosing to make one thing, you’re also choosing not to make another thing. In other words, everything has an opportunity cost, so it’s best to specialize then trade for everything else. The idea goes back to the English economist, David Ricardo, in 1817. It was first published in his book: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, David Ricardo, John Murray, 1817.
[laws are products]
The particular example in the text is an example of a relatively recent branch of economics called public choice theory. It’s an attempt to explain politics in terms of the economic choices of rational agents—whether they are voters, politicians, bureaucrats, or lobbyists. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, University of Michigan Press, 1962. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Mancur Olson, Harvard University Press, Revised Edition, 1971. A good recent textbook is: Public Choice III, Dennis C. Mueller, Cambridge University Press, Third Edition, 2003. For a reexamination of some of the basic tenets, see: Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky (editors), Cambridge University Press, 1993. For a questioning of the foundational assumptions of (pure) actor self-interest, see: “Skating on Thin Ice: Cracks in the Public Choice Foundation,” N. Frohlich, I Oppenheimer, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 18(3):235-266, 2006.
[almost $2 billion a year for cotton farmers]
“High Cotton: Why the USA Should Not Provide Subsidies to Cotton Farmers",” M. Helling, S. A. Beaulier, J. Hall, Economic Affairs, 28(2):65-66, 2008. For more specific numbers, see the cotton entry in Table 9 of “Farm Commodity Programs: Direct Payments, Counter-Cyclical Payments, and Marketing Loans,” J. Monke, CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress, 2006.

For general analysis of the economic costs of farm subsidies in the United States, see the following United States Congressional Budget Office Reports: “The Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Review of Modeling Studies,” June 2006. “The Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Survey,” December 2005. “Policies That Distort World Agricultural Trade: Prevalence and Magnitude,” August 2005

[subsidized cotton purchases]
“U.S. Subsidizes Companies to Buy Subsidized Cotton,” E. Becker, New York Times, November 4th, 2003. The support was repealed on August 1st, 2006.
[over $5 billion a year for corn]
From 1995 to 2006, total corn subsidies amounted to $56.17 billion. In that time the number of beneficiary farms amounted to 1,568,095. About 10 percent collected 75 percent of the subsidies. Farm Subsidy Database, 2007, Environmental Working Group. 1436 U St. N.W., Suite 100, Washington, DC 20009, U.S.A.
[New Zealand and subsidy reduction in 1984]
“Miracle Down Under: How New Zealand Farmers Prosper without Subsidies or Protection,” T. Lambie, Cato Free Trade Bulletin, 16:1-3, 2005. “Efficiency in New Zealand sheep and beef farming: The impacts of regulatory reform,” C. J. M. Paul, W. E. Johnston, G. A. G. Frengley, Review of Economics and Statistics, 82(2):325-337, 2000. “Economic Reform in New Zealand 1984-95: The Pursuit of Efficiency,” L. Evans, A. Grimes, B. Wilkinson, Journal of Economic Literature, 34(4):1856-1902, 1996. For a view that argues against the direness of New Zealand’s economic situation in 1984, see: “The Polish Shipyard: Myth, Economic History and Economic Policy Reform in New Zealand,” S. Goldfinch, D. Malpass, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 53(1):118-137, 2007.
[sectoral share of New Zealand’s GDP]
“The process of economic growth in New Zealand,” P. Conway, A. Orr, Bulletin of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, 63(1):4-20, 2000.
[cost of New Zealand lamb in Britain versus British lamb]
Future of Food, George Alagiah, BBC documentary, 2009.
[New Zealand sheep fell 14 percent]
The Contribution of the Primary Sector to New Zealand’s Economic Growth, Alex Harrington, New Zealand Treasury Policy Perspectives Paper 05/04, 2005, page 21.
[two ways to make cars...]
The example in the text on what international trade restrictions really mean is adapted from Hidden order: The Economics of Everyday Life, David Friedman, HarperBusiness, 1996, page 70. For the same example in a very gentle introduction to economics see The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, Steven E. Landsburg, First Press, 1993, pages 197-199.
[growth in world trade]
Chart I.1, World Merchandise Exports and GDP 1960-2008, International Trade Statistics 2009, World Trade Organization, 2009.

The Skew

[life expectancies in Sierra Leone and the United States]
World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, The World Bank, 2005, page 55.
[wasted water]
“Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people.” Human Development Report, 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2007, page 6.
[disproportion between rich and poor countries]
For instance, the richest half-billion of us produce about half of all our carbon dioxide emissions while the poorest three billion of us emit at most ten percent. “Equitable Solutions to Greenhouse Warming: On the Distribution of Wealth, Emissions, and Responsibility Within and Between Nations,” S. W. Pacala, Presentation at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) conference, November 2007.
[cheap water filtration]
Since about 1950 our rich countries have clean water everywhere, but most of our poorest countries today still don’t. Millions of us die each year because of that. Our institutional tools are often non-physical—the most important part of a bank isn’t the building it’s housed in or the ledgers it uses—why then are they so hard to spread? Our problem isn’t merely ignorance. Nor is it as easy to solve as just buying a water filter for $5 U.S. If you’re living on $1 U.S. a day, you couldn’t afford that. Forty percent of us in sub-Saharan Africa live on less than that. Next best might be to boil your water. But you need about a gallon a day just to drink. Boiling it might take 1.4 pounds of wood, and wood costs money—which you don’t have. Even if you had free wood, it can take women 2.5 hours a day to gather. Okay, then get your government to build a water-filter factory. But what if you have no effective government? Even if you have one, where would it get the money? Even if it could borrow the money, why would that money go to the plant and not into someone’s pocket? Even if you can ensure low corruption, what about the skill to build the factory? Even if the factory got built, why wouldn’t its products get smuggled out for private gain? Even if you manage to build many such factories, if you’re landlocked and have hostile neighbors, as, for instance, the Congo does, why wouldn’t they simply invade and steal your stuff? (Which they’ve done—repeatedly.)

What you need is a cheap, easy-to-build, maintenance-free water filter. You must be able to make it out of cheap and common things too. And with unskilled labor. The filter must also need only a little energy to run. And that fuel source must also be easy to get anywhere. Plus, it must be cheap. It can’t need steel milling plants, nor electricity grids. Nor must it need effective governance, well-behaved officials, and guarded borders. The poorest of us don’t yet have such luxuries. However, such low-demand, low-energy filters do exist. To make one, mix equal parts clay and coffee grounds—or rice hulls, or tea leaves—and form it into a cup. Then fire it for one hour with cow dung. That simple clay cup will filter out almost all microbes. It’s dirt cheap. It’s easy to make anywhere. It could save millions of our lives. But today, almost none of us, rich or poor, knows about it.

Solar Disinfection of Drinking Water and Oral Rehydration Solutions: Guidelines for Household Application in Developing Countries, Aftim Acra, Zeina Raffoul, and Yester Karahagopian, UNICEF Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa, P. O. Box 811721, Amman, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 1984. “Household Water Treatment in Developing Countries: Comparing Different Intervention Types Using Meta-Regression,” P. R. Hunter, Environmental Science & Technology, 43(23):8991-8997, 2009. “Use of ceramic water filtration in the prevention of diarrheal disease: A randomized controlled trial in rural South Africa and Zimbabwe,” M. Du Preez, R. M. Conroy, J. A. Wright, S. Moyo, N. Potgieter, S. W. Gundry, The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 79(5):696-701, 2008. “Local drinking water filters reduce diarrheal disease in Cambodia: A randomized, controlled trial of the ceramic water purifier,” J. Brown, M. D. Sobsey, D. Loomis, The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 79(3):394-400, 2008. “New filter promises clean water for millions,” A. Flynn, Department of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Australian National University, 2005. “How To Estimate Recoverable Heat Energy in Wood or Bark Fuels,” United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, General Technical Report FPL 29, 1979. Wood is an inefficient fuel. A pound of dry wood (454 grams) yields about 2.5 kilowatt-hours of energy. Straw and dung are even more inefficient. Rural Energy and Development: Improving Energy Supplies for 2 Billion People, A World Bank Best Practice Paper, Report Number 15912 GLB, Industry and Energy Department, The World Bank, 1996.
[income differentials]
The income figures are PPP (purchasing power parity). “Poverty Traps,” C. Azariadis, J. Stachurski, Chapter 5 of Handbook of Economic Growth, Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf (editors), Volume I, Part A, Elsevier, 2005.
[worldwide income distribution]
As of 1993, and for 91 percent of us spread over 91 countries, to be in the top one percent of all incomes worldwide one of us needed to earn about $47,500 U.S. a year. Ignoring taxes and averaging over 365 days, that’s $130 a day. In the United States, the average income is $24,700 a year. That’s $68 a day. The poverty line there is $18,000 a year. That’s $50 a day. If our world income distribution today is still about the same as in 1993 (although average world income levels rose 5.7 percent from 1988 to 1993, they also became more skewed), then 99 percent of all of us alive today earn less than that—far less. Eighty-five percent of us earn under about $6 a day. Three-quarters of us earn under about $4 a day. Half of us earn under about $2.33 a day, and 40 pecent of us live on under $2 a day—the world poverty line. In sub-Saharan Africa, 46 percent of us live on less than $1 a day.

The dollar figures given assume that the average worldwide annual income is $5,000 U.S. (1999 estimate by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute). The best-fit statistical distribution itself is from: “True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculations, Based on Household Surveys Alone,” B. Milanovic, Policy Research Working Paper, page 30, Poverty and Human Resources Research Group, The World Bank, 1999. Published in: The Economic Journal, 112(476):51-92, 2002.

Both the World Bank and the United Nations roughly agree on the above trends. However such measures, and their interpretations, are contested within econometric circles. See, for example, “The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and... Convergence, Period,” X. Sala-i-Martin, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2):351-398, 2006. “The World Distribution of Income and Income Inequality: A Review of the Economics Literature,” A. Heshmati, Journal of World-Systems Research, 12(1):1-24, 2006. “World Income Distribution: Which Way?” P. Svedberg, Journal of Development Studies, 40(5):1-32, 2004.

However, the following paper shows that while inequity is large today, it used to be larger, but within countries, less so between countries. The industrial revolution led to a large spike in inequity for its first 90 years or so, then the within-country inequities leveled off and the between-countries inequities grew. “Inequality among World Citizens: 1820-1992,” F. Bourguignon, C. Morrisson, American Economic Review, 92(4):727-744, 2002.

[poverty in the United States]
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, Owl Books, New Edition, 2002. Framework for Understanding Poverty, Ruby Payne, Aha Process, Inc., Revised Edition, 2001.
[top 10 percent earns 103 times bottom 10 percent]
Human Development Report, 2005, United Nations Development Programme, 2006, page 38.
[rich and poor in ancient Athens]
Ignoring slaves, the poorest Pentakosiomedimnoi (‘500-bushel men;’ the rich Athenians) was only about three times as rich as the richest Thete (manual laborers; the poor Athenians). Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Volume I, Life of Solon, Plutarch, translated by Aubrey Stewart and George Long, Reprint Edition, George Bell & Sons, 1900-03.
[income-segregation in the United States versus the Philippines]
Distribution of family income - Gini index, World Factbook, United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2007.
[20 to 1]
The World Economy: A Millennia Perspective, Angus Maddison, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001.
[inheritance inequality]
In herding and farming populations, children of the top tenth of the wealth distribution are 20 times more likely to stay in the top tenth than are children of the poorest tenth likely to reach the top tenth. “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies,” M. Borgerhoff Mulder, S. Bowles, T. Hertz, A. Bell, J. Beise, G. Clark, I. Fazzio, M. Gurven, K. Hill, P. L. Hooper, W. Irons, H. Kaplan, D. Leonetti, B. Low, F. Marlowe, R. McElreath, S. Naidu, D. Nolin, P. Piraino, R. Quinlan, E. Schniter, R. Sear, M. Shenk, E. A. Smith, C. von Rueden, P. Wiessner, Science, 326(5953):682-688, 2009.
[increasing income disparity]
Poverty Reduction and Growth: Virtuous and Vicious Circles, The World Bank, 2006, page 6.
[income polarization in the United States]
Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1979-1997, Appendix G: “Distributional Estimates Using Adjusted Comprehensive Household Income, by Quintile, 1979-1997,” United States Congressional Budget Office, 2001. See also: “Income Inequality In The United States, 1913-1998,” T. Piketty, E. Saez, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1):1-39, 2003.
[skewed income rise at the top]
“Where Did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income,” I. Dew-Becker, R. J. Gordon, in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, 2005, William C. Brainard and George L. Perry (editors), Brookings Institution Press, 2006.
[world GDP skewing]
Here ‘middle-income’ means countries with GDP between the 30th and the 85th percentiles. That is, all countries but the very richest (which mostly means North America, Japan, and Europe) and very poorest (which mostly means African countries). “Power Law Scaling in the World Income Distribution,” C. Di Guilmi, E. Gaffeo, M. Gallegati, Economics Bulletin, 15(6):1-7, 2003. Distributions that obey a power law are highly skewed. The most frequent elements are far more frequent than the next most frequent elements, and so on down to the least frequent. Technically: element frequency is determined by some power of a variable.
[firm size skewing]
More specificially, the firm-size distribution follows Zipf’s law, which is a power law. “Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm Sizes,” Science, 293(5536):1818-1820, 2001.
[distribution of city sizes]
More accurately, the city-size distribution follows Zipf’s law, which is a power law. “Zipf’s law for cities: An explanation,” X. Gabaix, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(3):739-767, 1999. When it comes to living organism, a related scaling result is called Kleiber’s law, but it was recently shown, after 80 years, to be wrong. It predicted a power law with an exponent of about 3/4 for homeotherms (like mammals and birds) when in fact the exponent is closer to 2/3rds. It’s still a power law though. “Optimal Form of Branching Supply and Collection Networks,” P. S. Dodds, Physical Review Letters, 104(4):048702, 2010. For the more general result (applicable to anything with a metabolism, which can be said to include nations, cities, firms, and such), see “Sizing Up Allometric Scaling Theory,” V. M. Savage, E. J. Deeds, W. Fontana, Public Library of Science, Computational Biology, 4(9):e1000171, 2008. “Growth, innovation, and the pace of life in cities,” L. M. A. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, G. B. West, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(17):7301-7306, 2007. “Allometric scaling laws of metabolism,” J. K. Leal da Silva, G. J. M. Garcia, L. A. Barbosa, Physics of Life Reviews, 3(4):229-261, 2006. “Ecology’s Big, Hot Idea,” J. Whitfield, Public Library of Science, Biology, 2(12):e440, 2004. “A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology,” G. B. West, J. H. Brown, B. J. Enquist, Science, 276(5309):122-126, 1997.
[British private schools]
Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions June 2009, The Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, Admiralty Arch, The Mall, London SW1A 2WH.
[education chances for Britain’s rich and poor]
In Britain, only 10 percent of kids from the poorest fifth of households will get a university degree. But 44 percent from the richest fifth of households will do so. See Table 6, Inequality in Intermediate Outcomes by Parental Income in More Recent Cohorts, in “Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain,” J. Blanden, S. Machin, Sutton Trust Report, 2007.
[school segregation in the United States]
In the data reported in the text, ‘nearly all’ means ‘85 percent or more.’ Data is from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. See Table 5 of: “How Might School Choice Affect Racial Integration in Schools? New Evidence from the ECLS-K,” G. W. Ritter, A. Rush, J. Rush, Georgetown Public Policy Review, 7(2):125-136, 2002. The data on Chicago and New York public schools in 2004 is from: Segregated schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America, Paul Street, Routledge, 2005, pages 13-14. See also: “Racial Residential Segregation in Urban America,” R. M. Adelman, J. Clarke Gocker, Sociology Compass, 1(1):404-423, 2007. “Racial Segregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap,” D. Card, J. Rothstein, Journal of Public Economics, 91(11-12):2158-2184, 2007. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol, Crown, 2005. “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” J. Kozol, Harper’s Magazine, 311(1864):41-54, 2005. “Court-Ordered Desegregation Successes and Failures Integrating American Schools since Brown versus Board of Education,” S. J. Reber, Journal of Human Resources, 40(3):559-590, 2005. “Integrating neighborhoods, segregating schools: The retreat from school desegregation in the South, 1990-2000,” S. F. Reardon, J. T. Yun, in School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? Jack Boger and Gary Orfield (editors), University of North Carolina Press, 2005. “New Faces, Old Patterns? Segregation in the Multiracial South,” G. Orfield, C. Lee, Working Paper, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2005. “Resegregation in American Public Schools? Not in the 1990s,” J. Logan, Working Paper, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, University at Albany, 2004. “Is Resegregation Real?” C. Lee, Working Paper, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2004. No excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, Simon & Schuster, 2003. “Level and Rate of Desegregation and White Enrollment Decline in a Big City School District,” D. U. Levine, J. Keeny Meyer, Social Problems, 24(4):451-462, 1977.
[black-white net worths in the United States]
In 2007 dollars, the median family net worth of non-Hispanic whites in 1998 was $121,900. The median for non-whites or Hispanics was $21,200. In 2007, those net worths had grown to $170,400 and $27,800, respectively. “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2004 to 2007: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” B. K. Bucks, A. B. Kennickell, T. L. Mach, K. B. Moore, Federal Reserve Bulletin, volume 95, United States Federal Reserve Board, 2009, page A11.
[hedge fund managers versus public school teachers]
In 2006, New York City’s top 25 highest paid hedge fund managers earned $14 billion U.S. That was more than all 6.6 million Laotians earned that year. It was also enough to pay all 80,000 or so of New York City’s public school teachers—for three years. “Top Hedge Fund Managers Earn Over $240 Million,” J. Anderson, J. Creswell, New York Times, April 24th, 2007. See also: “Performance Pay and Wage Inequality,” T. Lemieux, W. Bentley MacLeod, D. Parent, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(1):1-49, 2009. “Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?” X. Gabaix, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1):49-100, 2008. In the United States from 1998 to 2008, the pay of employees who receive more than $106,800 rose by 78 percent, or nearly $1 trillion. That doesn’t even include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock units, and various benefits. On the other hand, the pay of lower-paid employees rose by 61 percent over the same period. Over a third of all pay in the United States now goes to its top earners. “Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security,” E. E. Schultz, The Wall Street Journal, June 21st, 2009.
[segregation in Brazil]
Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, Evelyn Nakano Glenn (editor), Stanford University Press, 2009. Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, Volume 1, Richard T. Schaefer (editor), SAGE, 2008, page 202. Race in another America: The Significance of Skin color in Brazil, Edward E. Telles, Princeton University Press, 2006. Race and multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging paths? G. Reginald Daniel, Pennsylvania State University, 2006. Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives, Martin N. Marger, Wadsworth Publishing, Seventh edition, 2005, especially Chapter 14. Racism and discourse in Spain and Latin America, Teun A. van Dijk, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005, pages 133-146. Race in Contemporary Brazil: From Indifference to Inequality, Rebecca Reichmann, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
[...a son born into the richest tenth]
In the United States the classic economic argument that used to be made against the biasing effect of parentage was the belief that, in the United States, three generations was enough to wipe out all correlation between the incomes of parents and their descendants. That assumed sign of economic mobility in the United States, has now come under serious attack. Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles, and Steven Durlauf (editors), Princeton University Press, 2000. The text’s observation about the persistence of the poorest and richest tenths comes from: “The Inheritance of Inequality,” S. Bowles, H. Gintis, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3):3-30, 2002. Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (editors), Princeton University Press, 2005. However, other data suggests that intergenerational transfer probabilities are fragile. They are dependent on cohort age, and on the sex, work experience, and martial status of their offspring: “Has the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status Changed?” S. E. Mayer, L. M. Lopoo, The Journal of Human Resources, 40(1):169-185, 2005. “What do trends in the intergenerational economic mobility of sons and daughters in the United States mean?” S. E. Mayer, L. M. Lopoo, in Generational income mobility in North America and Europe, Miles Corak (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2004, pages 90-121. For a global perspective on the same issue, see: World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, The World Bank, 2005, especially Chapter 2, and especially pages 46-48. See also childhood poverty’s effects on health: “Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory,” G. W. Evans, M. A. Schamberg, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(16):6545-6549, 2009. “Low early-life social class leaves a biological residue manifested by decreased glucocorticoid and increased proinflammatory signaling,” G. E. Miller, E. Chen, A. K. Fok, H. Walker, A. Lim, E. F. Nicholls, S. Cole, M. S. Kobor, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(34):14716-14721, 2009.
[intergenerational income mobility in Germany versus Ecuador]
Poverty Reduction and Growth: Virtuous and Vicious Circles, The World Bank, 2006, page 38.
[family income and child attainment in rich countries]
Parent-child attainment, education, and income strongly correlate. Over the world as a whole the correlation coefficient is about 0.4 and it has stayed mostly steady for at least the last 50 years. “The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends,” T. Hertz, T. Jayasundera, P. Piraino, S. Selcuk, N. Smith, A. Verashchagina, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 7(2):article 10, 2007. The correlation is stronger in both the United States and Britain than it is in Finland, Denmark, and Norway, over at least the past 30 to 40 years. “Accounting for Intergenerational Persistence,” J. Blanden, P. Gregg, L. Macmillan, Economic Journal, 117(519):C43-C60, 2007. See also: “Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States, 1940 to 2000,” D. Aaronson, B. Mazumder, Journal of Human Resources, XLIII(1):139-172, 2008. “The Path to Convergence: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Britain and the US in Three Eras,” J. Long, J. Ferrie, Economic Journal, 117(519):C61-C71, 2007. “Nonlinearities in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility: Consequences for Cross-Country Comparisons,” B. Bratsberg, K. Røed, O. Raaum, R. Naylor, M. Jäntti, T. Eriksson, E. Österbacka, Economic Journal, 117(519):C72-C92, 2007. “The Apple Falls Even closer to the Tree than We Thought: New and Revised Estimates of the Intergenerational Inheritance of Earnings,” B. Mazumder, in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (editors), Princeton University Press, 2005. What’s the Good of Education?: The Economics of Education in the UK, Stephen Machin and Anna Vignoles (editors), Princeton University Press, 2005. Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe, Miles Corak (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2004.
[black-white income disparity in the United States]
“Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” J. B. Isaacs, Economic Mobility Project, Pew Charitable Trust, 2007. Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, Devah Pager, University Of Chicago Press, 2007. “Rags, Riches, and Race: The Intergenerational Economic Mobility of Black and White Families in the United States,” T. Hertz, in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (editors), Princeton University Press, 2005. The Hidden Cost of Being African-American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, Thomas M. Shapiro, Oxford University Press, 2004. “Segregation and Stratification: A Biosocial Perspective,” D. S. Massey, Du Bois Review, 1:7-25, 2004. “Inequality and Segregation,” R. Sethi, R. Somanathan, Journal of Political Economy, 112:1296-1321, 2004.
[black-white jobless rate in 2006 in the United States]
In the United states in May, 2006, the black joblessness rate was 8.9 percent. It was 4.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites. Current Population Survey, May 2006, Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2006.
[health care tiering in the United States]
In the United States, blacks and whites receive different levels of, and different kinds of, health care, even after controlling for income, education, medical insurance, and neighborhood. “Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients,” A. R. Green, D. R. Carney, D. J. Pallin, L. H. Ngo, K. L. Raymond, L. I. Iezzoni, M. R. Banaji, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 22(9):1231-1238, 2007. “Differences in Mortality and Use of Revascularization in Black and White Patients With Acute MI Admitted to Hospitals With and Without Revascularization Services,” I. Popescu, M. S. Vaughan-Sarrazin, G. E. Rosenthal, The Journal of the American Medical Association, 297(22):2489-2495, 2007. “Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States,” C. J. L. Murray, S. C. Kulkarni, C. Michaud, N. Tomijima, M. T. Bulzacchelli, T. J. Iandiorio, M. Ezzati, Public Library of Science, Medicine, 3(9):e260, 2006. For one of the few studies finding that blacks get superior care in any medical setting, see: “Who Is at Greatest Risk for Receiving Poor-Quality Health Care?” S. M. Asch, E. A. Kerr, J. Keesey, J. L. Adams, C. M. Setodji, S. Malik, E. A. McGlynn New England Journal of Medicine, 354(11):1147-1156, 2006.
[HIV 20 times more prevalent in blacks]
“Ending the Epidemic of Heterosexual HIV Transmission Among African Americans,” A. A. Adimora, V. J. Schoenbach, M. A. Floris-Moore, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 37(5):468-471, 2009.
[longitudinal studies in Canada, Britain, and the United States]
“Early experiences matter: Lasting effect of concentrated disadvantage on children’s language and cognitive outcomes,” J. E. V. Lloyd, L. Li, C. Hertzman, Health & Place, 16(2):371-380, 2010. “The Declining Relative Importance of Ability in Predicting Educational Attainment,” F. Galindo-Rueda, A. Vignoles, The Journal of Human Resources, 40(2):335-353, 2005. Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40, Lawrence J. Schweinhart, Jeanne Montie, Zongping Xiang, W. Steven Barnett, Clive R. Belfield, and Milagros Nores, High/Scope Press, 2005.
[income, education, location, or occupation segregation]
In the United States: “Racial Residential Segregation in Urban America,” R. M. Adelman, J. Clarke Gocker, Sociology Compass, 1(1):404-423, 2007. In Britain: “Accounting for Intergenerational Persistence,” J. Blanden, P. Gregg, L. Macmillan, Economic Journal, 117(519):C43-C60, 2007. In Australia: “Intergenerational Mobility in Australia,” A. Leigh, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 7(2):article 6, 2007. For a comparison of various inequality measures over four rich coutnries, see: “Permanent Income Inequality: Australia, Britain, Germany, and the United States Compared,” A. Leigh, CEPR Discussion Paper Number 628, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, 2009.
[inequality rise during the industrial revolution in Britain]
From about 1770 to 1910, inequality in Britain changed twice. For the first 70 or so years, the rate of profit for those of us who owned capital roughly doubled. With capital, you could buy tools and resources. You could also encourage and support skilled labor. And you could concentrate labor pools. With new tools, like the steam engine, and new ways to organize labor to take advantage of them, profits surged. The share of national income from capital rose, while the shares from land and labor fell. Further, profit was so great that capital owners reinvested much of it—in search of yet more profit—rather than consuming it. Capital thus began to build on itself. Further, with the new tools and resources and labor arrangements that capital bought, output per worker rose. Real wages of those workers also grew, but far more slowly. Thus, inequality rose sharply. During this period, capital owners in Britain made out like bandits. However, the picture changed over the next 70 or so years. Output kept rising, but this time, real wages rose with it. Given the state of technical know-how at the time, capital had already done about a much as it could with tools and energy and labor organization. The only thing left to invest in was the workers themselves. In this period, railroads, which helped concentrate workers, and also divide their labor, were spreading. Mass production, which needs educated labor, was also spreading. As real wages rose, workers now had enough to start saving a little of it. The rest they reinvested in themselves. Unions spread. Schools spread. Voting rights spread. Laws changed. Sewerage and other infrastructure spread. Child mortality then fell. Then family size dropped. The British economy shifted away from hand-to-mouth farm and factory labor. The returns to capital, while still high, then stabilized. Inequality then fell—but not as sharply as it had earlier risen. “Engel’s Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British British Industrial Revolution,” R. C. Allen, Explorations in Economic History, 46(4):418-435, 2009.
[Disraeli quote]
In 1845, three years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, Disraeli wrote that “[The Queen reigns over] [t]wo nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” He wasn’t speaking of Britain and Ireland, both of which Queen Victoria ruled. He meant the rich and the poor. Sybil; Or the Two Nations, Volume I, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Colburn, 1845, page 149. He wrote Sybil decades before he became Prime Minster for the first time. Disraeli was echoing a thought that goes back at least as far as Plato. In the Republic, he noted that each city contains two warring cities, one of the rich and the other of the poor.
[storm of tool change]
Tool change needn’t always benefit our richest. For example, the steamship benefited our rich at first, but it also harmed them because at the time land was power and the steamship made it less relevant. The British aristocracy, for example, lost a lot of power partly because their farming land became less valuable as Australian wool and American corn and Argentinian beef grew cheaper in London than the same products from East Anglia. They also lost power because as new industrial tools spread, skilled hands became more important, so the suffrage extended out of just the landed gentry. From the 1880s to the 1950s, land lost value relative to factories.
[Congolese genocide]
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild, Mariner Books, 1999. The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration and Exploitation of the World’s Most Dramatic River, Peter Forbath, Harper & Row, 1977.
[rubber and napalm]
Latex from the rubber tree was used in World War II as a jelling agent with gasoline to make the first napalm. Today’s napalm is made with benzene and polystyrene.
[Congolese deaths since 1998]
The IRC estimates that 5.4 million have died since 1998. Children under five make up 19 percent of the population, but they make up nearly half of the deaths. Starvation and disease killed the most people. Fever (mostly from malaria), diarrhea, malnutrition, and respiratory problems were the biggest killers. “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: a nationwide survey,” B. Coghlan, R. J. Brennan, P. Ngoy, D. Dofara, B. Otto, M. Clements, T. Stewart, The Lancet, 367(9504):44-51, 2006. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis, International Rescue Committee, 2008.
[Congolese rape]
“More Vicious Than Rape,” Rod Nordland, Newsweek, June 1st, 2007.
[Congolese resource exploitation today]
Parts of the final report of the United Nations panel in October 2003 has not been made public. The United Nations cites ‘diplomatic reasons’ for the secrecy. The interim reports conclude that the main forces responsible for the illegal exploitation are the armies of Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda, and various elites in the Congo. The country’s mineral assets are transported to other countries, then sold. The profits then fuel further conflict. Exports from countries fighting the government have increased exponentially since 1998. As of 2003, the main resources fueling the conflict are: coltan (a tantalum-niobium ore), diamonds, copper, cobalt, and gold. Moreover, 29 international companies are involved; the report names companies and persons from Belgium, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the United States, Germany and many others. In the October 2002 report, the panel accused 85 international corporations of breaching the standards of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) through their business activities. But the United Nations refused to publish that list. Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2001/357 and S/2002/1146, United Nations Security Council, 2001.
[tantalum]
We use tantalum to make electrolytic capacitors, which are useful in a wide range of digital devices, especially portable ones, like mobile phones. While tantalum is implicated in fueling the conflict in Congo, most of the world’s tantalum comes from Australia. Canada, Brazil, and China also are suppliers. However, Congo has the largest deposits known so far. (It’s being exploited by hand labor in poor conditions, so output is much smaller than industrial mines in places like Australia.)
[mobile phone and internet usage up 100-fold]
“Worldwide, mobile phone subscribers increased from 2 people per 1 000 in 1990 to 220 per 1 000 in 2003. Internet use increased from 1 person per 1 000 in 1990 to 114 per 1 000 in 2003.” Global Environment Outlook, GEO-4, United Nations Environment Programme, 2007, page 4.
[one billion internet devices]
Forrest Research estimates that in 2008, 1.46 billion of us were active users of the internet (‘active’ meaning online at least once a month). They predict 2.17 billion by 2014. “The Gap Widens in Online Population,” A. LaVallee, The Wall Street Journal, July 21st, 2009. “Computers in use pass 1 billion mark: Gartner,” Reuters, June 23rd, 2008. “Shift Happens,” (aka “Did You Know?”), Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, Jeff Brenman, remixed by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, video presentation, May 4th, 2008.

Utopia Dead Ahead

[dates of first urbanization]
Our species is phase changing out of poverty. Factories are spreading like acne across the face of the planet. Both trade and industry are growing like fungus in a dark closet. Today our entire species is half-urban. That’s where Britain was in 1850. It’s where Germany was in 1900. It’s where the United States and Japan were in 1920. France in 1930, Spain in 1950, South Korea in 1977, all walked the same path. It’s happening too in Egypt—and India and China and Brazil and elsewhere. Thus, in 1950, India was 17 percent urban. Today it’s 29 percent—which is about where Egypt was in 1950 (32 percent). Today, Egypt is 43 percent urban—which is about where Germany was in 1890. By 2023 Egypt will be half-urban. By then, around half a billion more of us around the world will have scaled the middle-class wall—that is, we’ll be earning over $8 U.S. a day, which is a middle-class income for our species today. The Encyclopedia of World History, Peter N. Stearns and William L. Langer (editors), Houghton Mifflin Books, 2001, page 420.
[Egypt will be half-urban by 2023]
United Nations Population Division estimates, United Nations Common Database, 2007.
[600 million more earning over $8 a day by 2015]
The BRICs and Global Markets: Crude, Cars and Capital, Global Economics Paper Number 118, Goldman Sachs, 2004. Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050, Global Economics Paper Number 99, Goldman Sachs, 2003.
[global per-person GDP rose from 1960 to 2000]
Lectures on Economic Growth, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Harvard University Press, 2002, especially Chapter 5. From 1987 to 2004 alone, our numbers rose by over 1.7 billion. Yet our average per-person income still rose by a third. “Worldwide, GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) has increased from US$5 927 in 1987 to US$8 162 in 2004.” Global Environment Outlook, GEO-4, United Nations Environment Programme, 2007, page 4.
[half a billion in last 25 years]
The statistic was quoted by Paul Wolfowitz, then president of the World Bank, at World Economic Forum Sessions on Global Health: Scaling Innovation in Foreign Aid, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007, page 7.
[Spanish inflation]
“Institutions and the Resource Curse in Early Modern Spain,” M. Drelichman, H.-J. Voth, in Institutions and Economic Performance, Elhanan Helpman (editor), Harvard University Press, 2008. The Mediterranean Tradition in Economic Thought, Louis Baeck, Routledge, 1994, Chapter 7. American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650, Earl J. Hamilton, Harvard University Press, 1934. Spain went broke three more times, too. It didn’t fully shift into industry until the 1960s. It was more or less a basket case until 1979, when it negotiated to join the European Union (which, back then, was the European Economic Community).
[falling shares of farming and manufacturing in the United States]
2002 Census of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Economic Analysis, United States Department of Commerce.
[United States shift from manufacturing to paperwork]
The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money, Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, Basic Books, 2010.
[manfacturing output in the United States in 2005]
USA Economy In Brief, United States Department of State, 2007, page 11.
[rise and fall of manufacturing’s share in rich countries]
In 2002, Britain’s share of industry as a percentage of national output was 26 percent; in 1801, it was 23 percent. In France in 2002, it was 25 percent; in 1841 it was 25 percent. In Germany, it was 23 percent; it was 24 percent in 1841. In Italy, it was 29 percent; in 1901 it was 22 percent. “Emerging Structure of Indian Economy: Implications of Growing Inter-sectoral Imbalances,” T. S. Papola, Presidental Address, 88th Conference of the Indian Economic Association, Andhra University, December, 2005.
[population flows and rising manufacturing in China]
“Peer Migration in China,” Y. Chen, G. Z. Jin, Y. Yue, Working Paper 15671, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2010. “Measuring Interprovincial Flows of Human Capital in China: 1995-2000,” L. Fan, Population and Development Review, 28(3):367-387, 2009. “China’s Floating Population: New Evidence from the 2000 Census,” Z. Liang, Z. Ma, Population and Development Review, 30(3):467-488, 2004. “Gold into Base Metals: Productivity Growth in the People’s Republic of China during the Reform Period,” A. Young, Journal of Political Economy, 111(6):1220-1261, 2003.
[job insecurity]
In general, as our toolbase changes, the efficiency of various of our economic sectors change. But they don’t all change at the same rate. As efficiency in any one sector rises we have more money to invest in improving those same tools. Thus, our tools improve but mostly just in those sectors where they can make the largest economic difference at that time. Plus, the more they improve, the more capital we can amass and direct at our next most reachable sector. Further, as they cheapen, the cost of the things we make with them falls, so we consume more of them. Instead of eating meat once a week, we eat it every day. Instead of one mobile phone per village, every villager has several. But that only means that the relative cost of any technologically untouched sectors rises. Since even our newest tools haven’t yet reduced the cost of nurturing, governance, entertainment, and creativity, those are the jobs remaining for us to do. Anything portable or mechanical, whether physical or mental, is falling in value, but that won’t mean the end of work.

The easier a job becomes, the more insecure it becomes. That will have consequences for our settlement patterns and work lives. We’re competing for jobs, but our cities are competing for us—as tax payers. Our cities are also competing for firms—for tax income. Our firms are also competing for cities and us. We’re all looking for the lowest costs and highest returns. Thus, over time, as our transport and communication tools grow and spread, our jobs everywhere—not just in our rich countries—will grow more creative, more transient, and more part-time. They’ll also grow more personal, and more dependent on networking with others around the globe. And to do them we’ll need higher-intensity training in ever shorter bursts.

But what becomes of job security when anyone anywhere can do the same job? What becomes of a city’s toolbase when much of the income to pay for it comes from firms that can move in an instant? What becomes of careers when neither you nor your city nor even your country can guarantee decades-long employment in any specific job? What becomes of mating and reproduction and schooling and health care and pensions when income security is unheard of? What happens to countries when their tax rate is set not by them but by global demand and supply? We don’t know the answers to any of those questions yet. But we’re going to find out.

[attention economics]
To put it a bit more technically: as our future options’ marginal creation costs fall, it would only mean that new options would arise faster. The faster they do, the more quickly would rewards for any particular option drop. The more options there are, the harder the option-choice problem would become. So even if we one day have total freedom of choice among infinitely many options, each of which have a zero marginal cost of creation and adoption, we still won’t have a zero marginal cost of attention to pay to each of those choices equally. So rewards for each one would vary. Variation of reward is inevitable.

This idea was inspired by work on scale-free networks. A network becomes scale-free if its number of nodes is growing and if the chance that a new node will link to an existing node is proportional to how highly linked the existing node already is. “Statistical mechanics of complex networks,” A.-L. Barabási, R. Albert, Reviews of Modern Physics, 74(1):47-97, 2002.

For an early example of the ideas behind what is now called scale-free networks (and their associated power laws, as well as an explanation for their random generation), see “A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes,” D. J. de Solla Price, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27:292-306, 1976. For further background on scale-freeness, see “Towards a Theory of Scale-Free Graphs: Definition, Properties, and Implications,” (Extended Version), L. Li, D. Alderson, R. Tanaka, J. C. Doyle, W. Willinger, Internet Mathematics, 2(4):431-523, 2005. “Scale-Free Networks,” A.-L. Barabási, E. Bonabeau, Scientific American, 288:60-69, 2003. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, Duncan J. Watts, Princeton University Press, 1999. For an application to business, see: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, Hyperion, 2006.

[England’s birthrate peaked in 1876]
England’s birthrate in 1876 was 36.3 per 1,000. By 1909, it was 25.6 per 1,000. France’s birthrate started declining earlier. By 1881 it was already 24.7 per 1,000. Birthrates over all of western Europe fell dramatically between 1881 and 1907. A Short History of War and Peace, G. H. Perris, H. Holt and company, 1911, pages 244-245.
[poverty is relative]
A series of studies done over a 50-year period in York, England, illustrates the point. In 1901, poverty in York was defined with respect to the ability to afford a basket of basic goods. By 1951, that kind of poverty had disappeared. So poverty’s definition was changed. It was now pegged to a percentage of the national average income. A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree 1871-1954, Asa Briggs, Longmans, 1961. Poverty and the Welfare State, B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Longmans, 1951. Poverty, A Study of Town Life, B. Seebohm Rowntree, Macmillan and Co., 1901.
[cars and servants over a century]
Looking back from 1977 at her early life in Torquay (in Devon) just after the turn of the century, Agatha Christie wrote that “One of the things I think I should miss most, if I were a child nowadays, would be the presence of servants. To a child they were the most colourful part of daily life. Nurses supplied platitudes; servants supplied drama, entertainment and all kinds of unspecified but interesting knowledge. Far from being slaves they were frequently tyrants. They “knew their place,” as was said, but knowing their place meant not subservience but pride, the pride of the professional. [...] In describing my life i am struck by the way it sounds as though I and everybody else were extremely rich. Nowadays you certainly would have to be rich to do the same things, but in point of fact nearly all my friends came from homes of moderate income. Most of their parents did not have a carriage or horses, they certainly had not yet acquired the new automobile or motor car. For that you did have to be rich.” An Autobiography Agatha Christie, Dodd, Mead, 1977, pages 17 and 165.
[persistence of inequality]
Inequality persists not merely because of stereotypes, but also because it has consequences that aid those stereotypes. For example, status has strong effects on health regardless of how rich the country is. The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity, Michael Marmot, Times Books, 2004.

Shoulders of Giants - Chapter 6, Thought

[Kesey quote]
“An Afternoon with Ken Kesey,” David Loftus. Versions of this interview appeared in the Roseburg, Oregon News-Review, entitled “Trippin’ Again,” on October 28th, 1990; and in Portland, Oregon’s Willamette Week, “Thus Spake Kesey: an Aging Prankster’s Guide to the Galaxy,” on November 22nd, 1990.

The Very Pulse of the Machine

[Gutenberg in Mainz in 1448]
His full name was Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. He had moved back to Mainz from Strassburg by October 17th, 1448, because on that day he borrowed 150 Rhenish guilders from his brother-in-law, Arnold Gelthus, probably to start building his printing press.
[ink containing tannic acid]
They got the acid from oak galls (swellings on an oak tree from wasp stings) and used it to etch their skins. Writing at the time was more like carving, except with acid on skin instead of chisel on stone.
[foul tanners]
Tanning was a big source of horrid smells in medieval towns. The process involved marinating rotting flesh and using excrement for curing. Life in a Medieval City, Frances and Joseph Gies, HarperPerennial, 1969.
[paper-mill in Strassburg]
One started there around 1430, just about the time that Gutenberg first fled there (presumably to avoid creditors in Mainz). The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, Douglas C. McMurtrie, Dorset, 1943, page 127. Strassburg, now Strasbourg, in France, was then a big city by European standards. However, it only had 25,000 inhabitants at most.
[alloys for lead type]
The best is 62 percent lead, 24 percent antimony, and 14 percent tin.
[Christian and Muslim attitudes to cleanliness]
The saying about stink is attributed to Saint Bernard (with no further disambiguation) in The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, Katherine Ashenburg, North Point Press, 2007, page 2. The Muslims said that “cleanliness is half of the faith.” The connection between cleanliness and faith was reported by Abu Malik al-Harith ibn Asim al-Ash’ari as a saying (hadith) of Muhammed. The Book of Purification (Kitab Al-Taharah), Sahih Muslim, Translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqui, Book II, Chapter I, Hadith Number 432.
[making oil]
Oilmakers made oil from flaxseed. They moistened and heated flaxseed then stuffed it in woolen bags and crushed them in a wooden press.
[making soap]
Chandlers made it from woodash plus the tallow of slaughtered cattle that they bartered from the butchers.
[fire prevention]
In a crowded town of wood and thatch, fire is a constant fear. Stealing a public leather waterbucket would get you hanged.
[printing trials]
Gutenberg wasn’t the only one making experiments with print at this time. Laurens Janszoon Coster (also, Koster) in Haarlem, now the Netherlands, and Procopius or Prokop or Procope Waldvogel (also Waldfogel or Waldfoghel) in Avignon, France also did. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, translated by David Gerard, Verso, 1976, pages 52-54. Some writers also mention the much less credible Jan or Jean or Johannes Brito (also, Brulelou) in Bruges, now Belgium, Johannes Mentelius in Strassburg, now France, and Panfilo or Pamphilo Castaldi in Feltre, now Italy. Not much is known about their work, and all of it may be apocryphal, as various writers have argued.
[partner steals your business]
This whole section is an imagination of what it might have been like for Gutenberg to build a printing press in 1448-57. All the technology is more or less as it must have been at the time, and the life experiences are based on the general conditions in Mainz at that time and what little we know of Gutenberg’s life. But we only know of him through his appearances in court. One lawsuit was for breach of promise, several were for financial matters, and one was for allegedly not paying back Johann Fust, his backer, whose daughter married Peter Shoeffer, an ex-student from Paris University, and Gutenberg’s chief typographer. Fust and Schoeffer then produced the first piece of signed and dated print in 1457. Gutenberg’s name never appears on any printed matter.
[...cost a fifth as much]
That’s a decidedly low estimate of the eventual cost reduction, but I chose it to be a safe estimate given the presumably high cost of the very first press. The following gives an idea of the magnitude of the cost savings. (In what follows, ‘The Ripoli Press’ was run by the nuns of the Convent of San Jacopi di Ripoli and was one of the earliest presses in Florence; it may also have been the first press run by women). “In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins per quinterno for setting up and printing Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues. A scribe might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one.” From: “Vespasiano da Bisticci Historian and Bookseller,” Albinia De la Mare, doctoral thesis, London University, 1965, page 207. Quoted in: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Volumes I and II, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Cambridge University Press, 1979, page 46. The Ripolo Press operation itself is given more depth in The ’Diario’ of the Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli 1476-1484. Commentary and Transcription, Melissa Conway, (Storia delle tipografia e del commercio librario, 4), Firenze, Olschki, 1999.

A century before, in 1311, in Yorkshire, England, a bible was worth 33 pounds, 6 shillings, and 8 pence—a fabulous sum; enough to buy 60 cows or 50 slave families. The History of Bradford and Its Parish: With Additions and Continuation to the Present Time, John James, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1841, page 60 and pages 74-75, footnote.

Even by 1500 a book might cost a ducat in Venice, where a servant earned about seven ducats a year. For a teacher or skilled artisan, a book might cost about a week’s wages. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine, Longitude Books, 1998, page 160.

[indulgences]
Indulgences, written by hand, were first sold at least by 1190. Various popes had expanded their use for fundraising. By the sixteenth century, and the printing press, they were essentially a license to print money. Pope Sixtus IV even authorized sale of indulgences for the dead, to reduce their time of torment. He also licensed brothels, gaining an estimated 30,000 ducats a year. Pope Leo X again increased indulgence sale by offering indulgence even for future sin.

“Incest, if not detected, was to cost five groats; and six, if it was known. There was a stated price for murder, infanticide, adultery, perjury, burglary, etc.” The History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Volume I, J. H. Merle d’Aubigne, 1835, translated by H. White, Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875, page 56.

[fighting archbishops]
The small war over Mainz in 1461-1462 was between Dieter (or Diether or Theoderic) von Isenburg (or von Ysenburg-Büdinger), who was Archbishop of Mainz from 1459 until 1461, and Adolf II. von Nassau-Wisebaden-Idstein (or Adolph II, Graf von Nassau), who won the war and became Archbishop of Mainz from 1461 until he died in 1475, at which time Dieter became Archbishop again. The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking, Douglas C. McMurtrie, Dorset, 1943, page 183. “Johann Neumeister: An Assistant of Johann Gutenberg?” R. A. Ketring, The Library Quarterly, 1(4):465-475, 1931. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Erzstift Mainz unter Diether von Isenburg und Adolf II. von Nassau, Julius Jaeger, in Programm des Königlichen Gymnasium Carolinum zu Osnabrück Ostern, 1894. English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History of English Literature, Henry Morley Cassell & Company, limited, 1890, Volume VI, pages 290-291. The Book: Its Printers, Illustrators, and Binders, from Gutenberg to the Present Time, Henri Bouchot, translated by E. C. Bigmore, edited by H. Grevel, H. Grevel & Co., 1890, pages 36-37.
[...archbishop steals your house]
Apparently this happened to Gutenberg, although we’re not sure. We do know that Archbishop Nassau did steal a lot of property when he sacked Mainz, and that he did eventually become Gutenberg’s patron on January 18th, 1465, just before Gutenberg died sometime before February 3rd, 1468. We know little about the real Gutenberg, but he probably got a printing press going by 1452. The first known dated piece of print in Europe, a psalter, was made in Mainz on the eve of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, August 14th, 1457. And five years later, Archbishop Nassau did indeed take Mainz, and he did exile the printers. Then the new book plague spread.
[20 million books in print]
The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, translated by David Gerard, Verso, 1976, page 248.
[linen, paper, and printing started in Asia]
The European all-metal movable-type printing press, invented around 1452, was not the first printing press in the world. Presses were invented sometime between 1041 and 1048 in China with moveable clay type, and with fixed metal type in Korea in 1377. Wood block printing was in use in Japan somewhere between 764 and 770. The European printing press, however, was the first one that slipped out of state control. One reason may be the much lower cost of type because European languages were alphabetic and only 30 or so characters were needed. Although, in Korea in 1446, King Sejong tried to institute an alphabet of twenty-five letters. But Korean printers and scholars stuck with traditional 40,000 or so Chinese characters.

China invented paper even earlier, perhaps in 105, if not before. It had toilet paper and paper money and a large literate class long before anyone else. The Muslim world discovered the secret after capturing some Chinese paper makers in a battle near Samarkand in 751. By 794 there was a paper factory in Baghdad. The technology then spread within the Muslim world from Baghdad to Syria and further west to Morocco until it reached Muslim Spain about a century later, by 1150 if not before. (Muslims had toilet paper when Christians had moss and straw and hockey-shaped sticks in buckets of water. Don’t ask how those sticks were used. I’ll only note that the expression ‘the wrong end of the stick’ had a concrete meaning once upon a time.) From Spain, printing took another couple centuries to reach the rest of Europe, first to Italy in 1275 then to France and Germany over the next century.

The Muslim world never invented its own printing press. With Arabic’s cursive writing it was hard to imagine it being separated into letter types. There were also religious beliefs to contend with. In the Ottoman empire in 1483, Sultan Bayezid II decreed the death penalty for anyone printing Arabic or Turkish script. The ban held until 1727.

“Paper, Printing and the Printing Press: A Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory Analysis,” S. A. Gunaratne, International Communication Gazette, 63(6):459-479, 2001. “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print,” F. Robinson, Modern Asian Studies, 27(1):229-251, 1993. “Innovation and Diffusion of Technology: an Example of the Printing Press,” M. Macioti, Impact of Science on Society, 154:143-150, 1989. Annals of Printing: A Chronological Encyclopaedia from the Earliest Times to 1950, W. Turner Berry and H. Edmund Poole, University of Toronto Press, 1966.

Spinning wheels apparently existed in Persia in 1257 and may have come there from India. By the late twelfth century, Chinese spindle wheels were in use in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Italy and Switzerland. Spinning Wheels, Spinners and Spinning, Patricia Baines, B. T. Batsford, 1977.

[aftermath of the printing press]
Called into being by economic forces resulting from the stresses of the time, and made possible by a slow, centuries-long increase in technical knowledge spread over many guilds, plus high tech lifted from the Arabs, print helped many European urban commoners, particularly merchants and lawyers, slowly rise into a middle class. It helped them gouge out more of a place for themselves in feudal Europe. Europe (and most everywhere else) at the time was much like a diplodocus—a tiny head on a gigantic, slow-moving body. Nearly everyone was still on the land practicing inefficient farming. So nothing changed for the peasantry—still 90 percent of the population—as books were still far too expensive, and few could read anyway. So except for the village priest’s catechisms, books remained urban. With the peasants cut off from the idea flow, except second-hand, little else could change.

Once print’s cost fell sufficiently, however, printers became itinerate, driving their horse-drawn presses from town to town. Broadsheets began to appear everywhere, and then even the powerful lost control. Everything started to change. As some of the age-old verities came under question, even by unlettered peasants, anyone with anything to lose was petrified. Heresies had come before, revolts had come before, but print spread thought wider and faster, like napalm airstrikes on a dry forest. The resulting turmoil, like most major changes our species stumbles into, was not bloodless, nor was it without the usual ironies. In 1525, for example, Martin Luther, the instigator of Protestantism back in 1517, sided with the nobility and clergy against a peasant revolt that he helped encourage and in which perhaps 100,000 were massacred. By 1543 he also wrote a book inciting pogroms against Jews—and exactly four centuries later, another German leader was to take him seriously.

Nor was Germany unusual. All Europe would, by 1562, be bathing in blood over religious differences, and many European countries would expel their Jewish populations after centuries of persecution, demonization, and massacre. Sectarian violence raged on in firecracker chain-reactions until the end of the century, then flared up repeatedly over the next 250 years over the entire face of Europe, then the rest of the world. Nor was conflict solely due to religious difference. In a pinch, any difference between us will do, as two short, global, non-religious, high-intensity bursts in the twentieth century show. Eventually, though, the gains in applicable knowledge about the universe forced Europe’s eyes to begin to turn, grudgingly, oh so slowly, from the past to the future. That love of novelty, fueled by an uncontrolled printing press, and at the time largely unknown elsewhere in the world, would have major consequences for that same unsuspecting world.

Organon

[nearly constant war]
About then, England went to war roughly every three and a half years. Just within the 50-year span bracketing 1665, England warred: with itself (1642), Scotland (1648), Ireland (1650), Scotland (1651), Holland (1652), Spain (1656), with France against Spain (1658), Holland again (1664), with Portugal against Spain (1665), Denmark and France (1666), with Holland and Sweden against France (1668), with France against Holland (1672), itself (1688), then against Ireland and France (1690).
[many sects in Europe]
Here’a a list for England alone: Anglicans (who were the official Church of England), Catholics (who were despised in England at this time), the three main non-Anglican Protestants (Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists), plus Quakers, Shakers, Ranters, Seekers, Levellers, Diggers, Independents, Arians, Arminians, Lutherans, Socinians, Anabaptists, Muggletonians and Gindletonians, and other sects and sub-sects, all lumped under generic terms like ‘Puritans,’ ‘Dissenters,’ or ‘Noncomformists.’ History of the English-Speaking People: The New World, Winston Churchill, Dorset, 1956. Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1980. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, 1972, Penguin, Reprint Edition, 1991.
[...then they ran away]
In England, immigration started as early as 1607, when famine, plague, cold, and persecution drove a few Puritans as far as Plymouth Rock. After the Restoration in 1660, persecution was intense from 1662 to 1664. Dissenter families were fined, imprisoned, molested at worship, and their children were pilloried and publicly scourged, with children as young as twelve sent to Bridewell prison at hard labor. “[S]uch Fines levied upon them, so many ruined, so many imprison’d, and so many murthered.” Wise as Serpents, Daniel Defoe, quoted in Daniel Defoe, His Life, Paula Backscheider, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pages 10-11.
[Protestantism and science]
A story is being told these days that Protestantism led to science (rather than both being outgrowths of the printing press). It’s true that today’s worship of the freedom to choose came from the greatest of all heresies, the Protestant Reformation, which the Roman Church opposed—virulently—and millions died because of it. But not even Protestantism alone can be the full explanation of the philosophical change of what we today would call scientific thought because many Protestant cities were even more opposed to the new philosophy than the Catholic Church was. Martin Luther, for example, the paragon of Protestantism, was hardly the saint of tolerance. A vicious anti-Semite (Hitler took lessons from his writings), he was also vehemently against any teaching of Copernician natural philosophy. He, though, was an equal-opportunity hater. He despised Aristotle, too.
[Aristotle and women’s teeth]
History of Animals, Aristotle, Book II, Part 3.
[Aristotle predates algebra]
Credit for naming and expanding, if not actually inventing, algebra, goes to several people, not least of whom is Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician and astronomer who lived and taught in Baghdad from around 800 to some time after 847. His book Al-jabr wa’l muqabalah gave algebra its name. History of Mathematics, Carl B. Boyer, John Wiley & Sons, Second Edition, pages 228-230. Incidentally, his name, al-Khwarizmi, is also the source of our modern word ‘algorithm,’ without which computer science wouldn’t now exist.
[Aristotle and ‘purpose’]
Aristotle believed that form was an objective part of the universe (that is, not just an observed or accidental part of a thing), and that everything was actively striving to reach its ultimate form. So, for him, the ‘final cause’ of an acorn was its final form, an oak tree. His notion of form was much stronger than the modern notion of ‘information.’ For him, everything, whether made by human hands or not, had four ‘causes.’ But we must be careful how we interpret that word, ‘cause.’ The Greek word αιτια (aitia) roughly means ‘cause’ or ‘reason,’ but it can also mean ‘makes’ or ‘signifies’ or ‘produces’ or even ‘explains.’ For Aristotle, when asked: ‘Why this end?’ an aitia is anything that we can give as a means to that end.

“ ‘Cause’ means (1) [Material Cause:] that from which, as immanent material, a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze is the cause of the statue and the silver of the saucer.... (2) [Formal Cause:] The form or pattern, i.e. the definition of the essence... (e.g. the ratio 2:1 and number in general are causes of the octave).... (3) [Efficient Cause:] That from which the change or the resting from change first begins; e.g. the adviser is a cause of the action, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made.... (4) [Final Cause:] The end, that for the sake of which a thing is; e.g. health is the cause of walking. For ‘Why does one walk?’ we say: ‘that one may be healthy’; and in speaking thus we think we have given the cause.” The Works of Aristotle, Volume VIII: Metaphysics, Book V, Part II, W. D. Ross (translator and editor), Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 1928. A History of Natural Philosophy From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Edward Grant, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pages 27-51.

[Aristotle built on many others]
Starting with Thales, two centuries before him. The tradition is that Thales taught Anaximander, who taught Pythagoras. Then a second wave started with Anaxagoras and Empedocles, then Democritus, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato, then Aristotle. Thales, and many others, also based his work on earlier Persian, and before them, Egyptian, Sumerian, and Indian, thought. For example, the result that everyone today knows as “the Theorem of Pythagoras” predates Pythagoras. Pythagoras was still important to the theorem in its complete form, even though the idea was known before him. History of Mathematics, Carl B. Boyer, John Wiley & Sons, Second Edition, 1989, pages 34-37.
[Aristotle’s physics]
What we take to be ’Aristotelian physics’ today is a sort of reinterpretation in mathematical terms of what Aristotle might have believed had he had any mathematical talent at all. For example, around 1328 Thomas of Bradwardine, an English philosopher and theologian, wrote a book on motion based on what he understood to be Aristotle’s beliefs about motion. Bradwardine showed that Aristotle’s theory of motion was inconsistent. First, Aristotle claimed that a body could be in motion only when the force acting on it exceeded the resistance to its motion through the medium. Second, Aristotle claimed that a body’s velocity was proportional to the force acting on it divided by the resistance of the medium it moved through. Bradwardine showed inconsistency between these two Aristotelian tenets by assuming an initial force and resistance, then asked what would happen if the resistance were continually increased while keeping the force constant. At some point the resistance will exceed the force so the body cannot move. But its velocity, which supposedly was its acting force divided by the resistance, could not then also be zero. Thomas of Bradwardine, his Tractus de Proportionibus: its significance for the development of Mathematical Physics, H. Lamar Crosby, Jr. (editor and translator), University of Wisconsin Press, 1955.
[math and experiment]
As usual, the forced brevity of the text might give a false impression. It isn’t the case that Newton and his contemporaries invented the idea of using math and experiment to develop and verify laws of the natural world. For example, both Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus were strong proponents of both—four centuries earlier. That’s not even to mention all the Arabic-speaking proto-scientists before and after them. What is true though is that by Newton’s time all the centuries of effort were bearing fruit in insights that a later age would look back and see as pivotal. History is a raging river out of which we can take only a few sips at a time or risk drowning. The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon, Brian Clegg, Constable & Robinson, 2003. Albertus Magnus and The Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1980, James A. Weisheipl (editor), Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980.
[what is science?]
In my view, the process of doing science is much less amenable to philosophizing than is commonly supposed. Science depends on a certain kind of personality type and a certain skepticism of thought. Not everyone has both. Above all, good scientists (not all scientists are good) are anti-authoritarian. They don’t take a result as true just because someone says so. They’re all about “show me.” Everything else—publication, peer review, replication, degree-granting institutions, funding, credit, priority, reputation—is method. To the extent that science is honest, what keeps it so is partly all that, but mostly that once interesting results appear in good journals they get talked about, argued about, worried over, tested, and used. Uninteresting results in good journals, and many results in most other journals are mostly ignored. “There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.” D. Rennie, “Guarding the guardians,” Journal of the American medical Association, 256(17):2391-2392, 1986. “Editorial,” D. Rennie, Fourth International Congress on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication, Journal of the American medical Association, 287(21):2759-2760, 2002. It’s possible that nearly everything produced in second-tier and lower journals is rubbish, yet even were that true, it so far doesn’t seem to matter much at all. Of course, things may change as we approach data-overload. But by then we’ll have made up penalities for scientific fraud simply because we’ll have so much data coming out of science and so much of it will be vitally important in medicine, engineering, and other fields.

Philosophical ideas on what science is have been raging for at least the last two centuries. Every formal definition that philosophers have come up with has been shot down in one way or the other. Scientists, though, still know what constitutes science and what does not. For two recent contrasting overviews of scientific methods, see: “Reflection on rules in science: an invisible-hand perspective,” T. C. Leonard, Journal of Economic Methodology, 9(2):141-168, 2002. and “The Invisible Hand and Science,” P. Ylikoski, Science Studies, 8(2):32-43, 1995.

Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, then Francis Bacon and later David Hume, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill, and others started the philosophical argument from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, arguing about the various roles of induction versus deduction. The three dominant philosophical threads these days are: Pragmatism, Realism, and (the one that’s ignored by most scientists), Social Relativism. Here are a few of the main modern references in the area: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, 1970. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Pierre Duhem, Atheneum, 1962. “Natural Kinds,” W. V. O. Quine, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, 1969. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper, Hutchinson, Sixth Edition, 1974. Progress and Its Problems, Lawrence Laudan, University of California Press, 1977. “Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes,” I. Lakatos, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (editors), Cambridge University Press, 1970. Against Method, Paul K. Feyerabend, Verso, 1975. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, David Hull, University of Chicago Press, 1988. The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism, Frederick Suppe, University of Illinois Press, 1989. As usual, there’s a lot of wind out there, but as the philosophical and sociological arguments rage, most scientists ignore them as they go on reinventing our universe.

[waves of the scientific revolution]
As in all things we do, 1666 was no sudden flowering in barren earth. Long before even the sixteenth century, many philosophers, Arabic and European, had challenged Aristotle on numerous details, but rarely on the foundations of his whole philosophy. It seemed obvious to all that Aristotle was right, that the universe was animate and purposeful.

The long philosophic change we now call the scientific revolution started mainly in the middle and late sixteenth century (after the printing press in 1452), with Nicolaus Copernicus, Niccolò Tartaglia, Lodovico Ferrari, Girolamo Cardano, Andreas Vesalius, Giovanni Benedetti, Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, Simon Stevin, Galileo Galilei, and others. Then, building on that work, the first big mechanist wave followed in the early seventeenth century with William Gilbert, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Jan van Helmont, William Harvey, René Descartes, Evangelista Torricelli, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Fermat, Otto Guericke, John Napier, and others. Then, as young natural philosophers grew up with the insights of the first two waves, the mechanist tide started to crest with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Jeremiah Horrocks, Edmond Halley, Giovanni Cassini, John Wallis, John Flamsteed, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Marcello Malphigi, Jacob Bernoulli, Ole Rømer, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Newton, born the year the English Civil War started, and a year after Galileo died (blind, and under house arrest in Florence) was also lucky enough to concern himself with physics, the most sharp-edged part of the new natural philosophy as it is the most universal, the most easily mathematized, and the most easily tested. Newton was an inheritor as a well as a creator. (Note: Many books state that Newton was born the same year that Galileo died. However, it was actually a full year later. Galileo died January 8th, 1642. Newton’s birth date is usually given as Christmas Day, December 25th, 1642, but England was still using the old (Julian) calendar at the time instead of the new (Gregorian) calendar so on the continent it was actually 10 days later, January 4th, 1643.)

It’s odd that similar waves of scientific thought had earlier happened around the eastern Mediterranean over 26 centuries ago. Thales of Miletus, building on earlier Egyptian and Chaldean mathematics and astronomy, started the ball rolling, just as Copernicus was to do much later. Thirty years later came Anaximander, then twenty years after that, Anaximenes (all from Miletus in today’s Turkey). About fifteen years after Thales, Pythagoras was born on Samos, 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) from Miletus. He then moved to Croton, in today’s southern Italy, and his school also flourished. The tradition is that Thales taught Anaximander, who taught Pythagoras. Then a second wave started with Anaxagoras and Empedocles, then Democritus, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato, then Aristotle. Then yet another wave with Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, and Erastothenes. Then it petered out. So perhaps Europe’s new natural philosophy would have petered out as well, had not an industrial revolution followed it. For an interesting theory about this, see The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn, Lucio Russo, Birkhäuser, 2004.

[Newton’s physics]
Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Richard S. Westfall, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The more mathematically interested might try Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke: Pioneers in Mathematical Analysis and Catastrophe Theory from Evolvements to Quasicrystals, Vladimir I. Arnol’d, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990. The less mathematically interested might try: Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, Michael White, Fourth Estate, 1997, or Isaac Newton, James Gleick, Vintage, 2004.
[mathematics and science]
An argument can be made that science can exist without mathematics; certainly natural philosophy did so. See A History of Natural Philosophy From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Edward Grant, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pages 303-322. However, it’s difficult to truly understand modern science without mathematics.

Start with Erastothenes 2,600 years ago putting sticks into the earth at different places and from their heights and shadow lengths, and the geometry of similar triangles, working out the circumference of the earth. Then take one of the sticks and sketch some crude geometric diagrams in the dirt with Euclid and discover the proof found by Pythagoras and many others that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides, a result known to the Mesopotamians nearly two millennia before Pythagoras, and to the Indians over 2 millennia ago—and probably the Egyptians and Chinese, too.

From there jump with Descartes to map a circle centered on two right-angled axes, x and y. Observe that because of Pythagoras’ theorem, each point, (x, y), on a circle of radius r must obey the equation:

x2 + y2 = r2
Now redraw the circle and axes but on a sheet of rubber, and pull on the rubber horizontally or vertically and you’ll see the circle turn into an ellipse. A ellipse is like a circle except with two focal points instead of one. All points on that ellipse will obey the more general equation:
(x/a)2 + (y/b)2 = 1
The constants a and b reflect the amount of horizontal (x) and vertical (y) distortion that your pulling caused.

Now recall with Kepler, based on Brahe’s observations, that the planets move in ellipses with the sun at one of the ellipse’s focal points, then contemplate that fact with the genius of a Newton or Hooke or Huygens and deduce that elliptical orbits imply that the force binding a planet to the sun must vary in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Combine that insight with various estimates we produced over the millennia for the mass of the earth and you can estimate the mass of the sun.

Now that you have all that, you can predict when the sun will come up next Tuesday. Once you have good telescopes, you can then relate the tides on earth to the orbit of Jupiter. You can then derive distances, and then deduce, with Rømer, that light has a speed—it isn’t instantaneous. You can also predict, with Newton, that the earth’s poles must be flattened compared to the earth’s equator. More than that, though, as you stare at your little diagram sketched in the sand you realize that the planets wish to move off in a straight line from their direction of orbit. Perfect the calculus with Newton or Leibniz and you can calculate just how much they want to do so. From that you can tell the orbit of comets, and predict which will hit the earth and which will not. More prosaically, you can also tell a cannoneer how to aim his cannon to best destroy his enemy.

You can model many things now that you can integrate as well as differentiate. You can use your new powers to find the minimum curve of a hanging chain, or tell the amount of iron you need to make a bell of a given volume, or derive the speed of a coach from measurements at its axle, or how to shape a ship’s sail or keel or prow for maximum effect and minimum cost, or what shape to make a reflector to best collect light and so make better telescopes or lighthouses.

Link that power to mechanics and you can derive the strength of various materials even before you create them, or the mass of a planet you’ve never set foot on. Go far enough down in size and you can predict how strong or weak a material will be, how much you need of it to build a bridge over a certain span that must take a certain weight, how to build a rocket fast enough to reach orbit. From there you can see, unhindered by an atmosphere, far enough to imagine and begin to calculate how far back in time the universe goes.

From scratching simple diagrams in dirt to understanding the beginning of the universe, in mathematics everything connects to everything else. There is a passion here, a wondrous excitement at the relatedness of things, and a reveling in the ability to play at this level. Few of us ever gain the mathematical prowess to see all this immense beauty, but it is there, nonetheless. And no one knows why.

[...no one liked it much]
The problems of natural philosophy had to do with acceptance, and they were many—and many are still with us today. If we’re just a kind of complex machine, where does God fit? What’s the point of life? What about sin and free will? If we’re simply acted upon by unwilled forces, how do we assign praise and blame for our actions? What supports our legal system? And what do we tell our kids about moral choice? For the few Europeans who had any idea what the new philosophers were talking about, the new belief network was just too much. It wasn’t merely that its results were hard to swallow. (The earth rotated about the sun, you say? And it spins? And it spins so fast that it bulges? What?) The method itself meant rejecting everything that everyone was sure of. For one, it meant ignoring dogma, authority, and spirits, all the things that nearly all of us had believed for millennia. It further meant replacing them with instruments, math, and tests—none of which we’re good at. We’re good at biology’s four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and, er, reproduction. And it’s good that we’re good at them. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to whine about not being good at anything else.

For example, not even Newton liked his own theory. It’s tempting, and easy, and common, to make Newton into some sort of scientific saint. Certainly nearly all the science writings about him make him out to be such, but that’s far more to do with what modern scientists and technologists wish to believe about themselves than anything to do with the real Newton. Like all of us, Newton was a child of his time. He was a stupendous thinker, but he still carried a huge and unavoidable set of assumptions about how the world works, which he inherited from the deep past. For example, Newton produced many more writings on what we would today call occult matters than scientific matters. But only the science gets published. On his death, the Royal Society refused to accept most of his writings and returned them to his family. Decades later, his first serious editor, Samuel Horsely, saw the papers and he “slammed shut the lid of the trunk that held them.” His papers lived in that trunk until the middle of the twentieth century, where they were auctioned, and spread piecemeal among many institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, the British Museum, and Jerusalem University, most of which wanted nothing to do with the rest of the collection. John Maynard Keyes then scavenged some of the manuscripts and concluded that instead of being the first real scientist Newton was “the last of the magicians.”

Only toward the end of the twentieth century did most of Newton’s science-related writings finally see the light of day, and even today, nearly three centuries after he died, most of his other writings still have not. For Newton, those writings were at least as important as those we accept today as ‘scientific.’ All were parts of his carefully thought-out, and slavishly worked-on, grand unified theory of the universe. The Birth of Modern Science, Paolo Rossi, translated by Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen, Blackwell, 2000, page 215.

What is true of Newton is also true for all Europe’s early natural philosophers, including Spinoza, perhaps the most relentlessly rationalist of them all—at least until Laplace in the late eighteenth century. Kepler, for example, devised his system of planetary orbits but named the thing that moved them the ‘Holy Spirit Force.’ Physics students rarely hear that he lived in an era that imprisoned his 73-year-old mother for witchcraft, and would have burnt her too, were it not for his years-long efforts. Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother, James A. Connor, HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. All that is elided from physics books as scientists continue to pretend that there is some deep division between what we can prove about the universe and what we wish to believe about it. On the other hand, it is easy to claim that there is no distinction at all between science and other ways of understanding the universe, as if science is just some random collection of made-up stories. A hilarious recent book of some examples of the extremes of that particular trend is: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Picador, 1998. More generally, though, the following neuroscience book points out the folly of trying to rigidly separate reason and emotion: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio, Grosset/Putnam, 1994. This desperate need of ours to separate, to make an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ in all things, is foolishness. But then lacking so very much knowledge of reality, foolishness must always be the one thing we’re most expert about.

If Newton, or Leibniz, in indeed most natural philosophers of the time, were alive in today’s secular times, they’d pray for us. Like Leibniz, and many other proto-scientists, Newton couldn’t imagine a universe without God. They only argued about how God manifested. All of their contemporaries, except perhaps Hooke and maybe Huygens, were theists or, at most, deists.

[Europe in 1665]
In 1665, the series of stupidities and atrocities that historians now politely call ‘The Thirty Years War’ was just over, but all Europe still felt its effects. Germania had just lost more than half its population to war, famine, and disease—perhaps eight million dead. Poland was a smoking ruin, with millions dead. Ireland, raped by England, was starving and destitute, with half its population dead, forced to emigrate, or enslaved in England’s colonies. Mercenary bands, which were what then passed for armies, roamed Europe, burning and pillaging, raping and killing. The Inquisition was still tromping around—happily torturing or burning heretics, Jews, crypto-Jews, Muslims, gypsies, vagrants—all over Iberia, the small Iberian colonies in Africa and southeast Asia, and the future Latin America. In the Americas, women were being burned alive for witchcraft, Africans were beginning to be enslaved and transported by the million, and genocide against natives in the Americas was just about to begin in earnest as the new European colonies began to expand—in the north, the south, in the Caribbean—in Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and British Americas.

France, with its enormous wheat fields and army, was the power in Europe at the time, with land power partly shared by Sweden and Poland-Lithuania, and sea power going mostly to the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Portuguese, though, were just in the process of slitting their own economic throats, just as the Spanish had earlier done, by having the Inquisition largely destroy their educated commercial class—mostly Jews and Protestants—and now were rapidly losing trade routes to the Dutch, who later lost out to the English (hence the series of wars between them around this time). France, too, had tried to commit economic suicide in nearly the same way, and had almost succeeded. Its Protestants, the Huguenots, had been persecuted then massacred, or had fled to Holland, England, Protestant parts of Germania, South Asia, or various colonies. See, for example, “The Inquisition and the Portuguese Economy,” L. M. E. Shaw, Journal of European Economic History, 18(2):415-431, 1989. “The First Global War: The Dutch versus Iberia in Asia, Africa and the New World, 1590-1609,” P. C. Emmer, e-Journal of Portuguese History, 1(1), 2003.

[estimates of European readers in 1727]
Voltaire, writing after Newton’s funeral, which he attended in 1727—after fleeing France to escape jealous husbands, several creditors, and deadly political foes—said that perhaps five percent of Europeans could read, and perhaps five percent of that five percent would read philosophy. (“Divisez le genre humain en vingt parts: il y en a dix-neuf composées de ceux qui travaillent de leurs mains, et qui ne sauront jamais s’il y a un Locke au monde; dans la vingtième partie qui reste, combien trouve-t-on peu d’hommes qui lisent! Et parmi ceux qui lisent, il y en a vingt qui lisent des romans, un qui étudie la philosophie.”) Lettres Philosophiques, Voltaire, Letter 13, circa 1734. His estimate for all Europe may be reasonable but, acerbic as usual, he may also have been exaggerating a bit for humorous effect. England’s literacy rate, at least, was likely higher. Based on school creation rates and percentages of people who could sign their names on official documents, Cressy estimates that about 25 percent of the English population were literate by 1665. And that was a big step up, because in Henry VII’s time (around 1520), 90 percent of men and 99 percent of women were illiterate. By 1642, over 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women were still illiterate. Of course, Voltaire may still have been correct, since ‘literacy’ can mean many things. Just because someone can, with effort, pick our printed words, doesn’t mean that they regularly read books—or even can read handwriting, for that matter. Further, literacy was (and is) strongly related to urban versus rural divisions and to class (and income) divisions. In Norwich at the time, for example, 98 percent of the gentry could sign their names, compared to 65 percent of yeomen, 56 percent of tradesmen, 21 percent of husbandsmen, 18 percent of servants, and 15 percent of laborers. Literacy and the Social Order—Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, David Cressy, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
[Surrey woman gives birth to rabbits]
The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True medical Mystery, Clifford A. Pickover, Prometheus Books, 2000.
[communication was difficult in Newton’s time]
That summer, the summer of 1666, one of those natural philosophers, Isaac Newton, was just 23. Long-distance data exchange was hard in his time compared to today, but the cheap books produced by two centuries of the printing press had eased it. Also thanks to the press, and the spread of Arabic and Greek ideas it had encouraged, he’d inherited over two millennia of Eurasian thought about nature. Also thanks to the press, and the literacy it spread, he was part of a network of dozens of new thinkers, powered by the new books and the growing postal service. Their musings about the force that kept the heavens together had shaped his thought. Also thanks to the press, he’d been taught the best math available at the time, including an early version of calculus. Armed with all that, plus his own immense genius, he began to think about gravity as a force, a force extending at least as far as the moon. He began to grasp the entirety of the cosmos—falling apples, circling moons, orbiting planets, shooting stars, spinning suns, spiraling galaxies, everything. Even with the printing press, paper was still expensive in England. Newton, from a fairly well-to-do farming family (they owned several sheep and had tenant farmers) rejoiced that when his stepfather died he inherited a large notebook. Newton wrote small and made it last for many years. Translations, too, were uncommon, so even though Galileo, for example, had written several books in the early seventeenth century, he wrote most of them in Italian, which few in England could read. Even when Latin translations existed, foreign books in England were expensive and closely guarded. Even when books were easily available, you still had to travel to cities to get them. And in those days, a good rider on a fresh horse traveling a safe road on a fair day would be lucky to do 65 kilometers (about 40 miles) that day. Further, while travel by sea was faster, at sea you also had to worry about pirates—for example, Isaac Barrow, Newton’s tutor at Cambridge, fought pirates after being boarded in the Mediterranean sea. What made Europe’s new natural philosophy go was a few cheap printed pamphlets, plus the new clubs and coffehouses, and a postal service supporting letters between savants, with good translators in each country. That, plus the printing press, the lens, the clock, and the growing importance of trade, started the philosophic fire.
[“shoulders of giants”]
“But in ye meane time you defer too much to my ability for searching into this subject [optics]. What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.” Newton to Hooke, February 15th, 1676. The Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke 1635-1703, Stephen Inwood, MacAdam Cage, 2003, page 216. Originally published as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Macmillan, 2002. (Note: The letter itself was dated as ‘5 February 1675.’ The (old) Julian Calendar was still in use in England at that time.)

The quote’s originator, Bernard of Chartres, was a Breton monk who ran the Chartres cathedral school in France from 1114 to 1124. Merton traces the quote’s history forward from the twelfth century, and backward to Priscian, a sixth-century Constantinople grammarian, whose grammar Bernard had followed assiduously. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, The Post-Italianate Edition, Robert K. Merton, Chicago University Press, 1993.

[Greek myth of Orion]
In one (of many) versions of the Orion myth, Poseidon’s giant son, Orion, who gives his name today to the constellation of the hunter, tried to rape Merope and her father blinded him, after which Hephaestus, gave him one of his men, Kedalion, to carry on his shoulders to see for him. Bulfinch’s Mythology, The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes, Thomas Bulfinch, 1855. But of course the story of this ancient idea may not originate there. Or it may have, but may go even further back in time. Who knows.
[myth speaks of us]
Or, as Aristotle says, “... it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen,—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Poetics, 1451a, Section I, Part IX, S. H. Butcher Translation, Macmillan, 1898, page 35.
[Newton built on others]
One example should suffice. Isaac Barrow, Newton’s tutor, gave a series of 13 lectures, which Newton attended, just before 1665, the year Newton, driven off by the plague left Cambridge for Woolsthorpe and invented the calculus. In Barrow’s lectures, later published as Lectiones Mathematicae in 1683, he showed how to crudely derive tangents to curves, find the length of curves, and find the areas below them (three typical applications of what we today call the calculus). Here is a simplified example in modern terms: Barrow, wishing to show how to calculate the slope of the tangent to the curve:
x2 + y2 = r2
(that is, a circle) considered the point (x, y) on the curve and a nearby point (x + Dx, y + Dy) where Dx and Dy are extremely small. Since the second point is also on the circle, then:
(x + Dx)2 + (y + Dy)2 = r2
So
x2 + 2xDx + Dx2 + y2 + 2yDy + Dy2 = r2
But since (x, y) is a point on the circle, we can subtract the first equation to get:
2xDx + Dx2 + 2yDy + Dy2 = 0
Now he discards all terms involving higher powers or products of Dx or Dy on the grounds that since they are each small, powers of them are negligible. Thus giving:
2xDx + 2yDy = 0
So
Dy/Dx = -x/y
which is the slope of the tangent of the circle at the point (x, y). The History of Mathematics: An Introduction, David M. Burton, Allyn and Bacon, 1985, pages 364-365. This argument is not rigorous to modern mathematical eyes, but its shape is clear and it is substantially what we do today. Of course, Barrow didn’t see that this idea can be generalized quite considerably to do more powerful things, while Newton did. But then, so did Leibniz. Barrow himself was hoeing a furrow well traveled by many long before him—Archimedes, for example, who, two millennia before, estimated the area of a circle (and other areas, surfaces, and volumes) with a very early form of integration (he approximated the circle with triangulation and dissection). But the seventeenth century was when the true explosion began with Johannes Kepler, Pierre Fermat, Gilles Roberval, and Bonaventura Cavalieri. A case could even be made that Fermat, not Newton and Leibniz, invented the calculus first. The Historical Development of the Calculus, Charles Henry Edwards, Jr., Springer-Verlag, 1979. “Precalculus, 1635-1665,” K. Andersen, in Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, I. Grattan-Guinness (editor), Routledge, 1994, pages 292-307.
[science grew for political reasons]
Besides the practical side of new tools and weapons, newly rich merchants, made fat with Europe’s growing trade, slave income, finance, and industry, were some of the earliest adopters of the new mechanical idea. Not that they much cared if it was true or not; adopting it was just one more way to distinguish themselves. They were out shopping for family heirlooms to fake a landed ancestry. This was just more of the same. The new belief network also fit with their aspirations better than did the old worldview that their lords spiritual and temporal still clung to. So as they gained power, the new ideas spread.
[even politicians and poets...]
For example, Newton died in 1727. In 1730 Alexander Pope composed the following epitaph for his monument at Westminster Abbey: “Quem Immortalem / Testantur Tempus, Natura, Cœlum: / Mortalem / Hoc Marmor fatetur. / Nature, and Nature’s Laws, lay hid in Night. / God said, Let Newton be!, and All was Light.” The Poems of Alexander Pope, John Butt (editor), Routledge, 1966, page 808.
[Adam Smith inspired by Isaac Newton]
“Essay on the History of Astronomy,” Adam Smith, in The Early Writings of Adam Smith, J. R. Lindgren (editor), Kelley, 1967.
[Newtonianism not accepted at first]
Newton’s contemporaries were not wrong to be squeamish about some of his ideas. For example, he postulated that gravity acted instantaneously across any distance. That’s wrong. Since Einstein, we now know that the force of gravity is transmitted at the speed of light. Further, even today we still haven’t found the graviton, the particle we believe should carry the force of gravity, and our current theories of quantum gravity are still more wish than reality. The best candidate so far is string theory, and it is, so far, completely untestable. It’s not physics; it’s poetry. Finally, physics today now has to contend with true instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Alain Aspect’s experiment showed spacelike