CapitalistImperialistPig

I have written a lot about Prof Harari's lectures in his course A Brief History of Humankind , but having completed the course, I thought I would add a few thoughts on my takeaways. (1)There a lots of open questions about the relations between the various human variants that existed before H. sapiens replaced all the others, and about the biological basis of the developments that propelled our increasingly rapid technological progress. (2)Technological advance has not always been our friend. The central development of our history, the agriculture, allowed us to proliferate, but left us in many ways less healthy, more disease ridden, more subject to violence and oppression, and quite possibly, less happy. It also made us one of the most important players in the global ecology. Much of this was not new to me, but some was. (3)I had drastically underestimated the role of empires in creating the world of today. Almost everyone in the world today lives in a culture that was sh...

...that singular sensation... Prof Harari thinks it likely that the future belongs to creatures or things very unlike ourselves - quite possibly much more different from us than we are from Neandertals. Speculation, of course. Prediction remains difficult, especially of the future, as Bohr might have said. The potential for the creation of superhumans certainly has some plausibility - a socio-cultural singularity where all our familiar notions of human nature become ephemeral. Prof H. thinks that the most important question for our future is what we want to become. Suppose the so-called Gilgamesh project, the attempt to overcome disease, old age, and death - potentially eternal life - comes to fruition? Should that happen, who gets the privilege of transcending this human condition? Who will be the elect? Throughout our post agricultural history some have proclaimed themselves superior, usually by some essentially mythical right of history or descent, but it could become real. Wha...

It's at least possible that the amount of improvement biological techniques can make in humans is rather limited. Maybe we are too close to the biological optimum already. Suppose that genetic engineering will be limited to correcting some of nature's more obvious mistakes, like genetic diseases. That hardly exhausts our self-improvement options. Another staple of science fiction is the Cyborg. We have been adopting various artificial enhancements for some time - eyeglasses, hearing aids, even shoes and clothing might fit. Once again, though, modern electronics expands the potential enormously. Already Dick Cheney is kept alive by an artificial pump that aids his heart. More dramatically, bionic limbs operated by thought alone have been developed. Perhaps most radically, attempts to create brain-computer interfaces at the cellular level are underway. What would the world look like if you could interface directly with the internet and the other brains connected to it?...

More speculations by Yuval Noah Harari. He thinks H. sapiens has only a few decades left. Flowers for Algernon, written by Daniel Keyes in 1958, was one of the most successful Science Fiction short stories (later, a novel, play and film) of all time. It starts with the title mouse getting a dramatic IQ upgrade. Fifty-five years down the pike, it seems that science has caught up with the fiction. The genius mouse has been engineered. One might think that Harari's judgement on our limited future means he is a technological pessimist. This is hardly the case. He doesn't think we are likely to annihilate ourselves. Instead, he thinks it is likely that we will transform ourselves. The genomes of fish and potatoes are being merged to create frost resistant potatoes. Potential artificial organs for humans are being grafted onto mice. One of the most prescient science fiction writers of my childhood was Arthur C. Clark, who in addition to envisioning communications satell...

Harari takes a look at Daniel Kahneman's studies of happiness. His starting point is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where everybody is drugged to be happy all the time. What's wrong with that, he asks. Most readers do not like that world and find it dystopian. Kahneman took a virtual microscope to the lives of working women in Texas, and asked each to record what they were doing every few minutes and write down how they felt about it. One striking result was that the most unpleasant parts of their day were spent dealing with their children. On the other hand, when asked in the abstract what gave them the most joy in their lives, they named their children. There is more than one way to interpret this, but he pays attention mostly to the idea that what really gives us happiness is meaning in our lives. In that way, the much harder life of the medieval peasant might have given him more happiness if he could feel meaning in the pursuit of heaven and other meaningful goal...

And be miserable. That's one way to interpret what Prof Harari says is the principal result of psychological happiness research. He says that happiness depends more on expectations than on our current situation. If we are better off than we expect, we tend to be more happy. If we are worse off, we tend to be more unhappy. An eighteen year old ten thousand years ago might have considered himself pretty hot. All he had to compare himself to were the other fifty or so men he knew. In the modern world, he has to compare himself to Hollywood and super models. The modern world tend to make us less happy. Objectively, Egyptians under Hosni Mubarak were better off than their ancestors in any previous era. But they revolted, because they compared themselves not with their ancestors, but with the people in America or those on television. Biological research, he says, reaches somewhat similar conclusions from a different approach. Biologists see a biochemical reaction. Winning the lo...

Are we happier than our remote ancestors? Were the citizens of ancient Babylon happier than the hunter gatherers who lived there twenty thousand years ago? There is no doubt, says Professor Harari , that we live in an era of unprecedented material prosperity and collective power to control our environment. Historians rarely ask questions like these, but The Prof thinks them important. There are, of course, lots of theories, and people come down on all sorts of sides. A related question is whether our present prosperity is a transitory phase doomed by our relentless destruction of the natural environment. Have we produced a mechanistic world that makes us miserable in spite of relative material prosperity? He intends to discuss the various notions in more detail in the current segment of lectures, entitled: And they all lived happily ever after.

Professor Harari's latest is filled with those insights that I love and some of my critics disdain. Its subject is the remarkable decline in wars that we have seen in the last several decades and its causes and prospects. Wars of conquest have become remarkably rare, in fact so rare that in many places people cannot even imagine a major war between their country and one of its neighbors. This was essentially unknown in any other period of history. Why has this happened? Harari gives five major reasons. 1. Wars have become much more expensive, due to the vastly increased destructiveness of modern weapons. He especially singles out nuclear weapons, and adds that the physicists who invented it deserve another one of those ultimate Nobel Peace prizes like the one he awarded to Gorbachov. 2. Wars have become much less profitable. For most of history, wealth consisted mostly of material things like mines and control of other resources. I've been translating an article on ...

The theme of my latest Harari lecture was the remarkable decrease in violence the world has seen in the last several decades. People today are more likely to die by suicide or in car accidents than from interpersonal or state violence. Several hundred years ago, about 400 of every 100,000 people would die by violence at the hands of others every year. Even in Detroit, the US murder capital, the figure today is about 50/100,000 and in Western Europe, Japan, and Australia it is only 1/100,000. The global average is 9/100,000 but most of those deaths are concentrated in a few violent regions. The huge decline has occurred in two categories: interpersonal violence and interstate violence (wars). The decline in interpersonal violence has come about as a result of increased state power. Large and well-equipped police forces suppress both violence and many of its provocations. Harari attributes the decrease in interstate violence largely to the historically unusually peaceful fall of...

Another Harari summary From earliest times, it seems, people lived in family groups and communities were related by family ties. The agricultural revolution did not break those ties, they glued the smaller groups into clans and tribes. Families took care of you in sickness or in old age. In societies like these, neighbors and friends took care of each other and the communities supported each other by ties of mutual obligation. Relatively little was bought or sold in markets - usually less than 10% of people's needs. Kings, emperors and the like could do larger scale public works like road building, war fighting, and perhaps major irrigation works. There were insufficient surpluses in the economy to maintain schools, hospitals, or large police forces. Most justice was administered by clan and family. Governments had the quality of a Mafia style protection racket - if you pay up they won't kill you and will protect you from the king of the protection racket next door. Th...

MOOC The factory imposes a regime of clocks, timetables, and schedules. This replacement of the natural rhythms of day, season, and Sun has spread to every aspect of modern life. The first transportation time table seems to date from 1784. A half century later British railroads agreed on Greenwich time and another half century later it was imposed on the whole country by law. Now the planet is synchronized to the microsecond and below. Next: Collapse of the family and intimate community and their replacement by the market and the state.

MOOC Between sapiens and our domesticated animals, we constitute about 90% of the mass of large scale animals on the planet. Only tiny numbers of most really large animals still remain. A race between human caused destruction of the planet and our ability to manipulate the planet for our benefit. The equivalent of the Cretaceous extinction? Rats and cockroaches are doing fine.

One argument that Prof Harari likes to make is that while capitalism has produced enormous growth, it also requires economic growth, growth that can only be powered by technological advance.  Is that true?  Is steady state capitalism impossible?  What if it were? The basic logic goes like this: borrowing and lending are at the heart of capitalism, but borrowing and lending at interest only make sense when there is an expectation that the investment will lead to net profit.  In a zero sum economy, the average net profit is zero.  Thus, on average, investing becomes a losing strategy or at best, a pure gamble. By contrast, in a growing economy, investment buys a piece of the larger future pie.  Of course most growth inevitably hits limits imposed by resources.  Can our ingenuity continue finding more forever?  I have my doubts.

Professor Yuval N. Harari's Coursera history course is exactly the kind of MOOC that Historian Jonathan Rees likes to hold up to scorn. Just lectures, mostly from a guy sitting in an armchair. No required outside reading. No writing assignments. No in class discussion. And the tests are easy multiple choice. Well, I still like it a lot. Well prepared lectures have a lot to offer. Sure, I could read the words faster, but the human voice has a compelling quality of its own. Listening to some guy talking is not going to work for all courses. I don't think you can learn much physics that way, especially if you don't do any problem sets. Some professors, maybe most, give boring or badly structured lectures, don't present the material at the appropriate level, or just happen to be annoying to listen to. But I really like this little Israeli guy, with his funky accent and original (to me) take on the big picture of global history.

Harari's answer to a student question: to free us from the grip of the past. To help us understand how we got to where we are now and give us more choices about the future.

Pretty clearly Professor Harari is offended by some of the consequences of capitalism and humanism. One focus is the mechanization of peoples and animals. Capitalism created the Atlantic slave trade, for example. Slavery was not created by malice, but by desire for profit, and subordinating human consideration to profit. Modern factory farming is the principal target of the second lecture on the industrial revolution. It is ironic that just as evolutionary psychology was revealing that animals have emotions, mental lives, and social needs, mechanization of agriculture destroyed what remanents of natural and social lives domestic animals had. On the other hand, it has produced an enormous increase in agricultural productivity. What the evolutionary psychology studies of animals did do was to have some beneficial results for people, though. Above all, such studies drastically changed the prevailing theories of child rearing. In the forties and fifties, the popular theories gave alm...

So much for capitalism's good deed. Now Prof Harari looks at the downsides of completely free markets. Another segment hard to summarize, but some examples may help. By the end of the middle ages, slavery had nearly disappeared in Europe. The mines and plantations of the Americas and elsewhere needed labor, and the Atlantic Slave trade was created to supply that. Slave trading companies were traded on the European stock exchanges and were highly profitable. The Atlantic slave trade was a capitalist creation. Another crime of equal scale was the Great Bengal famine of 1770. This famine killed ten million Bengalis and was largely the creation of the British East India company and its disastrously greedy policies. These events illustrate a key problem with unregulated free markets: money has no conscience or morality. The more powerful actors in markets have great power to oppress the less powerful. Capitalists, says Harari, have two answers to that: First, mistakes were mad...

If capitalism was such a profitable idea, why didn't the Indians, Chinese, and Ottomans think of it? The answer, of course, is that they did. Individual entrepreneurs in all the great empires of the East were busy practitioners of capitalist ideas, but in those empires the imperial, kingly, and noble authorities were careful to keep the commercial classes in check. The empires they built were based on taxation and plunder. In Western Europe, it might have been the very weakness of the states that made things turn out differently. In Holland, Britain, and France exploration and conquest were financed by stock markets and run as commercial companies. Companies set up intially for trade found it useful to protect themselves against pirates, defend themselves against local rulers, and eventually to conquer their Eastern trading partners. At its apex the British East India Company had a much bigger army than Britain. In the Nineteenth Century, when the big Dutch and British imper...

Trying to distill Prof Harari's insights into capitalism and its intimate link to science is a challenge that I will doubtless flunk, but let me mention a few ideas I found striking: Capitalism depends on growth. It makes little sense in a zero sum world. Capitalism depends on credit and credit depends on faith in a more prosperous future. Growth comes ultimately from scientific progress, which explains the intimate link between capitalism and science. Industry and governments fund science to promote growth. The sacred law of capitalism is that profits of production must be reinvested in more production. Capital and wealth are not the same thing. Capital must be invested in production. Wealth can be frittered away in conspicuous consumption. If growth stops, the edifice collapses. This last is hardly obvious to me, and I think at least arguable. I suspect that future arguments may hinge on this.

Since 1500, the world's total economic production has increased by a factor of about 240. Per capita production has increased by a factor of roughly 16. Capitalism, says Prof Harari, was the key ingredient in this growth, and in particular credit. Availability of credit made possible the vast economic expansion in the past six centuries. Loaning money is not a new invention, though - it goes back at least to Sumer, 5000 years ago. Such credit, he argues, was short term and high interest. So what was the special ingredient that made longer term, lower interest credit available? Faith in the future. Faith that the future would be more prosperous than today. Traditional societies, he said, tended to believe either in a static world or a golden age in the past. If one thinks that the world is a zero sum game, loaning money is just a gamble. On the other hand, if you believe that that money can produce new additional prosperity it makes excellent sense to invest.