The Great Divergence
Yet Another Answer
On reddit recently someone asked roughly: ‘Why are cold countries so rich and well governed compared to hot ones?’. There were various answers, including the evergreen ‘Because white people are better’, and ‘The question itself is racist’, but I don’t believe the first, and the second is only true if you do believe the first, but there were also various other answers which I didn’t buy either.
This is my answer to that question:
Until about 1800, absolutely everybody in the world was unimaginably poor.
The great achievements of earlier civilizations like Babylon, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, India, the Islamic World and then early modern Europe were all things done by educated elites who could live on agricultural surpluses extracted from peasants who were usually living uncomfortably close to starvation, and often actually starving.
Most people anywhere in the world today would have trouble imagining what life was like for ordinary people before the Industrial Revolution, and I’m including early 19th century England, which at that time was the wealthiest and most powerful society there had ever been.
The question that needs to be asked is “Why did some parts of the world become rich earlier than the others?”, not “Why are some places still poor and backwards?”. Poor and backwards is the natural state of man.
Most of the stability and good government you see in the world is coming on the back of that immense new wealth, which takes a lot of the pressure off people. Before then everywhere was a shithole full of starvelings, ruled by dictators and kings and oligarchs and other thieves at the heads of gangs of thugs.
The ancient Greeks did try democracy in such conditions in some of their cities (and even then only some of the people got to vote), but it was violently unstable, and the experiment didn’t last.
So your question is really: “Why did the all the good stuff seem to start in Europe and spread from there to everywhere else?”.
Which is a difficult question, called “The Great Divergence”, to which I’m not sure anyone has a good answer.
My answer is that we’ve been accumulating knowledge and power and technique as a species for millennia, with the torch of learning being passed around from civilization to civilization by a series of mischances, collapses, invasions, empires and travelling scholars.
Knowledge was increasing throughout this period, and we got better and better at agriculture and warfare and mathematics and chemistry and mining and shipbuilding and all the other things as the years went on, and the new knowledge spread amongst the people, but always the population rose to absorb the new surpluses, and so although there were more people, doing cleverer and better and more sophisticated things, they weren’t any better off. But amongst the elites, the flame kept getting passed, and in various places it got brighter, and in various places it guttered out.
And Europe, in particular Britain and France, just happened to be the place which was holding the torch at the point where we started getting better at growing food faster than the population could rise. After that more and more people start becoming free to do things other than farming and war, and the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing and everything speeds up, and within a few generations you’ve got unimaginable wealth.
It’s like watching a forest catch fire. The whole thing heats up and dries out really slowly, and then one day there’s a tree on fire and soon it’s all alight.
There are probably reasons why the first tree catches, but they’re contingent rather than inevitable, maybe lightning struck, or maybe someone dropped a cigarette, but they’re not really the interesting bit of the process, and they don’t really matter.
Sooner or later something, somewhere would have set it all off.