Page 262 - Encyclopedia Of World History

612 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

This photo, taken at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico shows the mix of the
modern economy with the indigenous way of life in a Native American
community in the 1990s.

resulting from more people expending labor on more of ever, that these did not lead to substantial increases in
the earth and its products. On the other hand, most per-capita income, because people who were often on the
growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has move had no incentive to accumulate possessions, unless
been intensive. Systematic science has increased the these possessions could walk, and the only animal that
speed with which new ways of doing things are discov- seems to have been widely domesticated well in advance
ered and disseminated, and supposedly more-efficient of the emergence of settled farming was dogs (used in
forms of economic organization have diffused around the hunting).Thus, whatever economic growth there was in
world under the increased competitive pressure wrought the long period from the first emergence of humans until
by improved transportation and increased trade. about 10,000 years ago was mostly reflected in popula-
As a very rough approximation, this is probably cor- tion growth, as people spread out of Africa and gradually
rect, but any full story would be much more complicated. covered all the habitable portions of the earth, probably
A fuller analysis shows that three critical eras account for by roughly 30,000 years ago.
most of the economic growth in human history, and that The efficiency gains from learning to do things better
the combination of intensive and extensive growth is dif- also enabled particular bands of humans to feed them-
ferent in each case. selves with fewer hours of labor—an important improve-
ment in human welfare, but one that does not show up
The Neolithic Revolution as economic growth. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers
Through the millennia during which people were hunter- suggest that they eat reasonably well with a work week
gatherers, there were many examples of unrecorded in- of fewer than thirty hours per adult.Thousands of years
tensive growth: gradual improvements in hunting tech- ago, before agricultural and industrial societies pushed
niques, expanding knowledge of what plants were edible them onto marginal lands, these people could probably
and how to find them, and so on. Studies indicate, how- feed themselves with less work.