Harvesting Sunlight
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap. Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers got a boost from farming. Instead of eating
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
the advent of agriculture entailed more than a change in diet; it also launched a great revolution in the organization of economic life and culture as well as a transformation of the logic of violence. Farming created large-scale capital assets in land and sometimes in irrigation systems. The crops and domesticated animals farmers raised were
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