The inequality of progress (with Oded Galor)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

What can the history of human progress teach us about modern inequality? In his new book, ‘The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality,’ economist Oded Galor explores that question, as well as why human progress was stagnant for so much of history, if growth is still possible without ruining the planet, and what this all means for our future. Oded Galor is a Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founding thinker behind Unified Growth Theory. He’s also the author of The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality. Twitter: @GalorOded The Journey of Humanity https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/679024/the-journey-of-humanity-by-oded-galor/ Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the pleasures of hosting a podcast is that I get to talk to the authors of some of my
0:12.9	favorite books. And with Nick on vacation, I took the opportunity to invite Odette Galore onto
0:19.8	the podcast. He's a professor of economics at Brown University. And the author of the recently
0:25.9	published The Journey of Humanity, the origins of wealth and inequality. We've got a link to the
0:32.4	book in the show notes. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with Odette as much as I did.
0:45.4	My name is Odette Galore. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University. But in fact,
0:51.5	an interdisciplinary researcher, especially in the fields of economic growth, macro history,
0:59.4	cultural evolution, and discrete dynamical systems. In the past few decades, I was fortunate enough
1:06.6	to be engaged in a fascinating research about the roots of wealth and inequality. And this led to
1:14.0	the publication of my recent books, The Journey of Humanity, the origin of wealth and inequality.
1:22.0	I want to start with the title of the book. You call it The Journey of Humanity, the origins of
1:26.7	wealth and inequality. And that is an imposing title that covers a lot of ground. Why did you feel
1:34.0	it was so important to address all of human history going back to our evolution in order to get
1:40.5	at the origins of wealth and inequality? So over the past few decades, I was engaged in research
1:48.7	that established unambiguously that the significant portion of the inequality across the globe
1:55.7	today can be traced to forces that operated in the distant past, forces that operated
2:04.4	hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, and even tens of thousands of years ago.
2:10.7	And as a result of it, in order to address the issue of global inequality today,
2:17.2	in order to design perhaps policies that can mitigate this inequality, I felt compelled
2:24.6	to trace the evolution of humanities in the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa nearly 300,000
2:32.1	years ago, and to try to trace these roots of global inequality as we see today.
2:39.9	And to be clear, you go back, well, we'll define some terms here. You go back to the paleolithic
	...

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