agricultural Revolution

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. Map 2. Locations and dates of agricultural revolutions. The data is contentious, and the map is constantly being redrawn to incorporate the latest archaeological discoveries.1 That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.

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At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution. The archaeological record of island after island tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of humans.

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Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark. Part Two The Agricultural Revolution 11. A wall painting from an Egyptian grave, dated to about 3,500 years ago, depicting typical agricultural scenes. 5 History’s Biggest Fraud FOR 2.5 MILLION YEARS HUMANS FED themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

CHAPTER TWO A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL PHASE CHANGES Why This Time Things Are Different HUMAN PROGRESS is the product of a host of structural transformations that have culminated in a few big societal phase changes. Once set into motion, those societal phase changes are continual and overlapping. The Agricultural Revolution has been going on for twelve thousand years, the Industrial Revolution for more than two hundred. The Autonomous Revolution has only just begun. This chapter will take a closer look at the dynamics of societal phase change, focusing especially on the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, the Renaissance, and three different epochs of the Industrial Revolution. It is a mistake to assume that structural transformations are synonymous with technological change.

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PAST PATTERNS One is always tempted to declare the most recent wave of new technologies, from atomic power and genomic medicine to powered flight and artificial intelligence, as the most important ever experienced by humankind. But an objective observer would also stand in awe of the technologies that gave rise to and propelled the Agricultural Revolution. The structural transformations that led to the Agricultural Revolution began to accumulate in the Levant around 10,000 BCE, when people first began planting cereals and legumes, and spread throughout the Fertile Crescent over the next two thousand years. Agriculture was also discovered independently in other parts of the world—in China in 6000 BCE, in South America between 7000 and 8000 BCE, in sub-Saharan Africa around 5000 BCE, and so on.

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The heavy plow was invented as well, and improved versions of the harness made it possible for draft animals to pull them.12 The Second Agricultural Revolution coincided roughly with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around the 1700s. It was powered by new crops like corn and potatoes from the New World; new forms of organization, such as large single-owner holdings; mechanical equipment that replaced muscle power; and, later, railroads, which transported harvests.13 The so-called green revolution that began in the middle of the twentieth century (also called the Third Agricultural Revolution) used genetic science, pesticides, and new methods of cultivation to vastly increase yields.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

To be sure, the gamut of human food systems extends well beyond the “plants of civilizations,” to pastoralism, swidden agriculture, fisher communities, and nomadism. 9. Patel and McMichael 2009; Bruins and Bu 2006. 10. Maddison 2007, 43. 11. Excellent surveys of the English agricultural revolution include Thirsk 1987 and Overton 1996. 12. Calculated from G. Clark 2002. England wasn’t home to the first modern agricultural revolution—the Dutch were first, and the English learned capitalist agriculture from them. But England’s more expansive demography and size, coupled with sharply rising coal use, make its agricultural revolution a useful point of discussion. 13. Ormrod 2003, 213–18; calculations based on R. Davis 1954, 302. 14. Ormrod 2003, 214. 15.

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Index Aboriginal Australians, 99, 200 accumulation: as capitalism’s driving force, 38, 87–88; and cheap food, 144; financial engineering and, 88–89; and remaking of nature, 26; wars and, 69 Afonso de Albuquerque, 17 Africa: cultural interventions in, 231n97; Europe, Supported by Africa and America (Blake), 112 fig. 1; extinction in, 213n7; Green Revolution, 150, 157–58 Africans: in domain of Nature, 109; expulsions of, 39; New World production system and, 46; social death for, 30; transatlantic enslavement of women, 129–130. See also slaves/slavery Agricola, Georgius, 73 agricultural revolutions: climate change and, 159–160; in Europe, 232n12; Green Revolution, 149–152; inorganic fertilizer, 147, 172–74 agricultural sector: agricultural revolutions, 103; of Brazil, 143; of British empire, 141–43; communal ownership, 220n51; of Europe, 142–43; of France, 142–43; of Mexico, 142; of Poland, 142; and productivity, 48; swidden agriculture, 231n8; work and, 103.

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See also deforestation Cheap Work: overview, 91–95; global factories/global farms, 101–7; temporal ecology of wage labor, 95–101; worker control, 107–10 China, xiv–xv map 1; 15th century fleet, 215n41; agricultural revolutions, 151; animal food industry, 156; capitalism and, 220n50; charcoal industry in, 237n93; deforestation in, 164; food consumption, 33; food price changes, 154 fig. 5; forest management in, 162, 164; global power/production shifts and, 46; global silver trade and, 85; Great Chines Famine, 108; Little Ice Age, 71; nationalism, 238n20; opium trade, 146–47; silver shortage, 71; supremacism in, 41; worker control in, 108; workplaces in, 106 Clement VI, pope, 183–84 climate change: activists and, 42; agricultural revolutions and, 159–160; cheap energy and, 35, 177–78; cheap nature and, 62–63; China and, 71; feudalism and, 49; flooding, 221n58; flooding and, 221n58; green-house emissions, 174; labor effects of, 13; Little Ice Age, 48; Medieval Warm Period, 9, 11, 48; peat and, 167–68; renewable energy, 179; responsibility for, 24 colonialism: African slaves and, 92; anticolonial resistance, 197–98; early colonialism, 48–51; encomienda system, 36–37; mineral depletion and, 158; rise of, 81 colonization: control mechanisms, 61; by Europe, 6–7 map 2; gold standard and, 146; India’s taxation and, 146; by mapping and domination, 54; in Nigeria, 128–29; Valladolid controversy and, 92–94 Columbus, Christopher: birth of, 74; Centurione family and, 35, 65; cheap money strategy and, 65, 77; cheap nature strategy and, 49–50; finances of, 221n1, 228n3; food consumption, 138–39; Indigenous Peoples and, 111, 130, 180–81; New World sighting, 219n19; Rai on, 239n27; sexuality and, 113–14, 130; slave trade and, 91; Spanish empire and, 65; voyage of, 66; wife of, 111, 228n4, 228n4 commons/commoning, 59–60, 74, 143, 163, 164–65 communism: and capitalism, 227n63; McCarthyism and, 109; Rockefeller Foundation on, 149; worker control and, 108 Congo, 106–7, 110, 179 cotton industry, 103, 105–6 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 200, 208 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 133 crises: agroecological crisis, 167–68; Black Death, 11–13, 70, 183–85, 238n9; climate change as, 62–63; control mechanisms, 29; ecological crisis origin, 213n2; feudal, 49; fuel crisis, 178; global conquest and, 49; planetary crisis, 26; for profit strategies and, 18, 21–22; resistance and, 29; world-ecology perspective and, 38–39 Crusades, 8–9, 92, 183 Cuneo, Michele do, 130 Davis, Angela, 135 Davis, Mike, 95, 145 Day, John, 70 debt bondage/peonage, 93, 100, 168.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

It should be no surprise, then, that each revolution holds lessons for understanding the APM Revolution and why its advent will mark a divide in human history. As Winston Churchill once said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Here, we can begin with the Neolithic era. THE FIRST AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION The first agricultural revolution—the Agricultural Revolution—defines the dawn of the Neolithic era, more than ten thousand years in our past. The Agricultural Revolution gave human beings a new way to exploit the productive capabilities of the nanoscale machines found in living organisms, the molecular metabolic machinery that makes complex structures out of nothing more than water, soil, air, and sunlight.

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A great deal, as it turns out. Both parallels and contrasts offer insights. The biological machinery of the Agricultural Revolution, the digital nanoelectronics of the Information Revolution, and the innermost mechanisms of APM systems all show ways in which nanoscale devices can be harnessed within macroscale systems to deliver useful results. In other words, three of these four revolutions rely on nanoscale devices, the Industrial Revolution being the only exception. However, although the Agricultural Revolution employs atomically-precise nanoscale devices, these are products neither of human action nor human design.

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Chapter 18: Changing Our Conversation About the Future 283the first response . . . often sets the direction for the next: This is an example of a “social cascade,” discussed (together with a range of other successes and pathologies of group decision-making) in Cass Sunstein’s brief and readable book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). INDEX Actin, 69 Additive manufacturing, 76–77 Agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers vs., 41–42 Agricultural Revolution, 39, 40–42 APM Revolution and, 50, 54 Industrial Revolution and, 44 nature and human impacts of, 54 Agriculture, atomically precise manufacturing and, 231–232, 248, 250 American Chemical Society, 181 Angewandte Chemie (journal), 20n APM. See Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) APM Revolution, 39, 40, 50–53, 54 Agricultural Revolution and, 50, 54 consequences, potential, 240, 286 competitive, 243 Information Revolution compared, xii, 256 nanotechnology research and, 202 nature and human impacts of, 54 personal concerns and, 282 threshold of, 193 Apollo program, 18, 20, 111–112 Applications, atomically precise manufacturing, 166–167, 174, 223–239, 281 consumer products, 224–225, 253 security, 263–266 medical, 167, 236–238, 256 military, 35, 236, 259–263, 284 Approximations, exploiting, 123–124 Arms race, military applications of atomically precise manufacturing and, 259, 261–262, 268–269, 284 Armstrong, Neil, 112 Arrhenius equation, 292 Assemblers, 329 Assembly methods, molecular, 190–193 Asteroid mining, 15n Astronautics, 133 Atomically precise fabrication, 177–193 biological examples of, 80–82 biomolecular engineering as, 182–184 chemical synthesis as, 82–84, 179–181, 182 history of, 22–25, 46, 178 materials science and, 184–185 nanotechnology as, 28, 195–196 National Nanotechnology Initiative and, 32, 205, 207 pathway to atomically precise manufacturing, 9, 25–27, 32–33, 84–86, 144, 280–281 scanning probe methods, 185–186 Atomic precision, x, xiii, 7, 10, 22–24, 50 called the essence of nanotechnology, 205 definition of, 7 digital systems compared to, 7, 77–80 feedstock molecules and, 152–153 from small to large scale, 154–155 long history of, 22 nanolithography compared to, 76 nanotechnology and, x, xiii, 32 Richard Feynman and, 24 See also Atomically precise fabrication, Atomically precise manufacturing, Chemistry Atomically precise manufacturing (APM), x–xii agriculture and, 231–232, 248, 250 aligning national interests and, 266–269 applications (see Applications) assembly methods and, 190–192 automated manufacturing as template for, 73–77, 84 biomolecular engineering and, 187–188 biotechnology and, 73, 80–82, 85 carbon dioxide and, 234, 246, 250–252, 255 chemical synthesis and, 73, 82–84, 85 chemistry and, 179–181 civil society and, 262–263, 265–266 collaboration in, 271–272, 312 consumer products from, 224–225, 253 costs and, 52, 224, 227 digital information systems and, 73, 77–80, 84 digital media as cost model for, 172–173 digital revolution/digital technology and, 7–8, 50–51, 53, 277–278 domestic security applications, 263–266 economic implications of, 34–35, 256–257 energy and, 226, 229–230 environmental restoration and, 33–34, 233–234, 250–252, 255 exploratory engineering and, 143–144, 279–280 framework for thinking about, 274–287 fundamental principles of, 10, 24, 289–293 improvement in product performance and, 162–166 information technology and, 226–227 materials processing and, 184–185 medicine and, 236–238, 256 military applications, 35, 236, 259–263, 284 molecular biology and, 24–27 pace and direction of development, 241–245, 309–311 pathways to (see Pathways to atomically precise manufacturing) potential solutions/disruptions created by, 34–35, 240–241, 245–255 precursors, 279, 303–306 productivity of, 276–277 progress towards, 32–33, 177–179, 278 raw materials and, 230–231 relationship to nanotechnology, 32, 196–199, 205–207 reducing complexity of, 303–304 resource scarcity and, 33–34, 169, 230–231, 248 roadmapping for progress in, 216–220 scanning-probe methods and, 185–186 security technologies and, 235–236 supply chains and, 34–35, 51, 225–226, 244–245 surveillance networks and, 263, 264–266 transformation of infrastructure and, 228–229 uncertainties and, 258, 269–272 See also Atomically precise manufacturing systems, Pathways to atomically precise manufacturing Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) research carbon-based supermaterials and, 158 fostering collaborative strategies for, 271–272, 312 government funding and, 32, 194–195, 198–199, 204–207, 208, 243 repression of, 209–210 Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) systems energy requirements of, 155–156 as factories, 276 microblocks, 152–155 ordinariness of, 70–71 process of, 148–151 products of, 147–149, 159–174, 224–225, 253 (see also Applications) radical cost reduction and, 168–173 Automated manufacturing, APM and, 72–77, 84 Avco Everett Research Laboratory, 17–18 Battelle Memorial Institute, 211 Becquerel, Henri, 134 Bell Telephone/Bell Labs, 46–47 Biomolecular engineering, 9, 187–188 machine engineering, 24–25 systems, atomically precise manufacturing and, 73, 80–82, 85 Boltzmann factor, 292n Brownian motion, 23, 50 Bush, Vannevar, 5 CAD (computer-aided design) software, 189 CAMD (computer-aided molecular design) software, 189–190 Cancer, atomically precise manufacturing and attack on, 237–238 Carbon-based materials, 137, 153, 158, 162–163 Carbon dioxide emission reduction, 171, 250–252, 255 problem, 246, 250–252 removal from atmosphere, 234, 252, 255 See also Greenhouse gases Carbon nanotubes, 161, 164, 185, 188 Carroll, Sean, 96, 100 Carson, Rachel, 12 Casimir forces, 64 Catalysts (as products), 302 Cells, molecular machinery of, 25, 50, 61–62, 182 CERN, 95 Chemical synthesis atomically precise manufacturing and, 73, 82–84, 85 organic synthesis, 23–24, 32, 179–181, 187 Chemical reactions click chemistry/click reaction, 180n equilibria of, 292 free energy change, 291–292 in chemical synthesis, 23, 83, 84, 180, 293 kinetics of, 277, 292 machine-guided motion, 73, 292 methods for blocking, 84, 281, 290–292, 300 stereotactic, 290–293 thermal motion and, 68 thermal motion timescale, 68 thermodynamic control of, 277, 292 transition states of, 291, 292 yield, 84, 113, 292 See also Chemical synthesis, Chemistry Chemistry atomically precision and, 7, 22–23, 82–84 computational, 33, 56, 98–100, 179, 189–190, 218 discovery of atoms and, 23, 29 organic synthesis and, 179–181 as pathway technology, 32, 84–85, 179–181, 188, 242 as a production method, 92–84 research scope, 178–181 thermal motion and, 68–70 China conflict with United States, 268–269 economic rise of, 246 government funding of nanotechnology research, 194, 210, 243 Churchill, Winston, 40 Civil society, atomically precise manufacturing and, 262–263, 265–266 Clausewitz, Carl von, 262 Climate change, atomically precise manufacturing and, 234, 246, 250–252, 255.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Roots and Impacts of the Neolithic Revolution Jared Diamond has advanced a powerful thesis that links the uneven development across the globe to regional variation in the timing of the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. In particular, he provides an intriguing resolution to the question why historically the most powerful civilisations on Earth arose on the Eurasian land mass, rather than in sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas or Oceania.[2] Diamond has attributed the earlier emergence of the Neolithic Revolution in Eurasia to its biodiversity as well as the orientation of its continents. Specifically, he has argued that the earliest onset of the Agricultural Revolution nearly 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent was due to its abundance in a wide range of domesticable species of plants and animals.

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pid_prh_6.0_139577568_c0_r0 To Erica Contents Mysteries of the Human Journey I THE HUMAN ODYSSEY 1 First Steps Genesis Exodus from the Cradle of Humankind Early Settlement The Dawn of Civilisation 2 Lost in Stagnation The Malthusian Thesis The Inevitable Onset of Agriculture Population Swings The Economic Ice Age 3 The Storm Beneath the Surface Unified Growth Theory Wheels of Change 4 Full Steam Acceleration of Technological Development Education in the Pre-Industrial Era Industrialisation and Human Capital The Advent of Universal Public Education Child Labour No More 5 Metamorphosis Triggers of the Demographic Transition Family Tales Phase Transition 6 The Promised Land The Twilight of Industry The Age of Growth Growth and Environmental Degradation Coda: Resolving the Mystery of Growth II THE ORIGINS OF WEALTH AND INEQUALITY 7 Splendour and Misery Disparate Factors Rusty Tools Trade, Colonialism and Uneven Development Deep-Rooted Factors 8 The Fingerprints of Institutions Institutional Origins of the British Ascent Institutions and Long-Run Development The Legacy of Colonialism Origins of Institutions 9 The Cultural Factor The Power of Culture A Culture of Growth Cultural Inertia Culture and Prosperity 10 The Shadow of Geography Landscape Fragmentation and the Rise of Europe Origins of Extractive Institutions Geographical Roots of Cultural Traits Roots of Comparative Development 11 The Legacy of the Agricultural Revolution Roots and Impacts of the Neolithic Revolution The Grains of Civilisation Ceding the Head Start Geography’s Decree 12 Out of Africa Origins of Human Diversity Measuring Diversity Diversity and Prosperity The Grip of the Past Coda: Unravelling the Mystery of Inequality Afterword Acknowledgements References Endnotes Index Mysteries of the Human Journey A squirrel scurries along the windowsill of a Venetian Gothic structure at Brown University.

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But there is an additional factor lurking behind modern-day institutional and cultural characteristics that joins geography as a fundamental driver of economic development – the degree of diversity within each society, its beneficial effects on innovation and its adverse implications for social cohesiveness. Our exploration of the role of geographical characteristics will take us 12,000 years back in time to the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. The examination of the causes and consequences of diversity will lead us tens of thousands of years further back to the first strides of our species out of Africa. This is not the first attempt to describe the core thrust of human history. Great thinkers such as Plato, Hegel and Marx argued that history unfolds according to inescapable universal laws, often disregarding the role of societies in shaping their own destinies.[8] This book, by contrast, neither posits an inexorable march of humanity towards utopia or dystopia, nor purports to derive moral insights about the desirability of the direction of this journey and its consequences.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Yet the only time an animal initiates a conversation with a human is when the serpent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge (Bil’am’s donkey also speaks a few words, but she is merely conveying to Bil’am a message from God). In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lived as foragers. The expulsion from Eden bears a striking resemblance to the Agricultural Revolution. Instead of allowing Adam to keep gathering wild fruits, an angry God condemns him ‘to eat bread by the sweat of your brow’. It might be no coincidence, then, that biblical animals spoke with humans only in the pre-agricultural era of Eden. What lessons does the Bible draw from the episode?

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While animists saw humans as just another kind of animal, the Bible argues that humans are a unique creation, and any attempt to acknowledge the animal within us denies God’s power and authority. Indeed, when modern humans discovered that they actually evolved from reptiles, they rebelled against God and stopped listening to Him – or even believing in His existence. Ancestral Needs The Bible, along with its belief in human distinctiveness, was one of the by-products of the Agricultural Revolution, which initiated a new phase in human–animal relations. The advent of farming produced new waves of mass extinctions, but more importantly, it created a completely new life form on earth: domesticated animals. Initially this development was of minor importance, since humans managed to domesticate fewer than twenty species of mammals and birds, compared to the countless thousands of species that remained ‘wild’.

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Yet with the passing of the centuries, this novel life form became dominant. Today more than 90 per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering. Although the animal kingdom has known many types of pain and misery for millions of years, the Agricultural Revolution generated completely new kinds of suffering, that only became worse over time. To the casual observer domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild boars spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites and floods.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

We cross our fingers and assume that the major megapolitical variables in the next millennium will be technological rather than microbiological. If luck continues to side with humanity, technology will continue to grow in prominence as the leading megapolitical variable. It was not always such, however, as a review of the first great megapolitical transformation, the Agricultural Revolution, clearly shows. 43 CHAPTER 3 EAST OF EDEN The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence 'And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brothers' keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brothers' blood crieth unto me from the ground." GENESIS 4:9-10 Five hundred generations ago, the first phase change in the organization of human society began.1 Our ancestors in several regions reluctantly picked up crude implements, sharpened stakes and makeshift hoes, and went to work.

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Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history. The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change. Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution. its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime. What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe.

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L1FE WITHOUT FORESIGHT 32 If we fail to perceive the great transition going on around us, it is partly because we do not desire to see. Our foraging forebears may have been just as obdurate, but they had a better excuse. No one ten thousand years ago could have foreseen the consequences of the Agricultural Revolution. In-deed, no one could have foreseen much of anything beyond where to find the next meal. When farming began, there was no record of past events from which to draw perspective on the future. There was not even a Western sense of time divided into orderly units, like seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on, to measure out the years.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON It is a hard matter to save a city in which a fish sells for more than an ox. —Cato the Elder Contents 1 On the Eve of the Revolution 2 How American Food Got Bad 3 Revolutionizing the Supermarket Experience 4 The Rules for Finding a Good Place to Eat 5 Barbecue: The Greatest Slow Food of All 6 The Asian Elephant in the Room 7 Another Agricultural Revolution, Now 8 Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet 9 Why Does Mexican Food Taste Different in Mexico? 10 The Finding Great Food Anywhere Encyclopedia 11 The Stuff and Values of Cooking at Home Notes Acknowledgments Index 1 On the Eve of the Revolution American food is in crisis, and rarely has more disruption loomed before us.

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Rarely is it admitted, much less emphasized, that cheap, quick food—including its embodiment through our sometimes obnoxious agribusiness corporations—is the single most important advance in human history. It is the foundation of modern civilization and the reason why most of us are alive. Before there was an Industrial Revolution, which eventually brought the conveniences of modern life, there was an Agricultural Revolution, which created a large enough social surplus to make further economic development possible. It enabled us to pull people off the farm and employ them as scientists, engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Earlier food worlds were no paradise. If we go back to the middle of the nineteenth century, American consumers were suspicious of the concepts of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and milk, unless it came from their farm or a neighbor’s.

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And when my Ma Po Tofu came out, it was really quite good. It wasn’t “awesome” but it was better than the median Chinese meal in the far more cosmopolitan northern Virginia, or for that matter Manhattan. It was yummy. And so Bridgewater, Virginia, has—if you play your cards right—at least one good Chinese restaurant. 7 Another Agricultural Revolution, Now Juan Camilo Ayala, a Mexican farmer living in the village of San Agustin Oapan, has been a corn farmer for his entire life. He gets up in the morning, walks out to his cornfields, and works those fields with an ox and plow, sometimes a burro. He doesn’t own any other agricultural machines, and in his early sixties he still worries about the harvest and spending the day in the fields.

Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

We domesticate wolves into being companions, and soon we’re dressing up our dogs in Halloween costumes and buying Pet Rocks. The emergence of modern humans has generated some surprising twists and turns. Kahn and Ehrlich explore one of these unexpected consequences of human culture, sitting at the intersection of the expertise of this unlikely pairing of authors. Who would ever have predicted that the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Westernization of nursing patterns would have led to a distinctive orthodontic profile (in both the metaphorical and literal sense of “profile”)? And who would have predicted that this orthodontic profile winds up being relevant to an array of aspects of child development, health, and disease?

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Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had spacious jaws, with a continuous smoothly curved arch of teeth in each jaw, including third molars (“wisdom teeth”) at the back ends of the arches. Indeed, Stanford evolutionist Richard Klein, a top expert on our species’ fossil record, has told us that he personally had never seen an early human skull with crooked teeth. Further, the oral-facial epidemic of modern times, although rooted, we believe, in the agricultural revolution, was very slow in starting. Recently a cemetery of common people of the Amarna culture of ancient Egypt, dating to more than 3,000 years ago, was discovered. The skeletons had the tooth wear characteristic of farming peoples, the investigators noted, Except for the occasional slight incisor crowding and rotation, observation of the teeth indicated that they were well-aligned with very-good-to excellent occlusion, in general.

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Genetic evolution is slow, and the need for a tough “chewing environment” to properly express the genes for oral-facial development persisted even as cultural evolution reduced the need for prolonged chewing to obtain nourishment. Exact chronologies of the softness of diets as the West industrialized have eluded us, but we do have clues. For instance, human beings had long had a sweet tooth, but early after the agricultural revolution it could be satisfied mainly by raiding beehives—a limited resource that had to be acquired over the objections of the bees. The rich among the ancient Romans used honey extensively in their very varied diet. Poor Romans had much simpler diets, featuring especially bread and thick stews.11 In the Middle Ages honey was used, especially by the wealthy, in a great variety of cakes, custards, tarts, fritters, and the like—soft foods all.12 Sadly we have not found any accounts of rates of malocclusion among rich and poor in medieval or Roman times.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

For an explanation of just how important social learning was to our success see, for example, Henrich (2015). 8 It is, of course, somewhat arbitrary how many to include and how to individuate each one. If I were to count just two, I’d say the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (perhaps defining the latter more broadly to include the time of the Scientific Revolution). If I were to include four, I’d probably break the Agricultural Revolution into two parts: the beginning of farming and the rise of civilization (which I’d then date to the appearance of cities, about 5,000 years ago). For a rigorous exploration of the big picture of humanity’s development, I recommend Maps of Time by David Christian (2004). 9 In some ways the term “Revolution” is misleading: it was neither rapid nor universal.

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See note 97 to Chapter 4. 8 OUR POTENTIAL 1 Wells (1913), p. 60. 2 I use the term “civilization”—as I have done throughout this book—to refer to humanity since the Agricultural Revolution (which I round to 10,000 years, reflecting our imprecise knowledge of its beginning). This is a broader definition than the more commonly used 5,000 years since the time of the first city states. I use this longer time as I believe the Agricultural Revolution was the more important transition and that many of the things we associate with civilization will have been gradually accumulating during this time of villages and towns preceding the first cities. 3 Using the fossil record, estimates of median species lifetime for mammals range from 0.6 million years (Barnosky et al., 2011) to 1.7 million years (Foote & Raup, 1996).

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Little by little, our knowledge and our culture grew.7 At several points in the long history of humanity there has been a great transition: a change in human affairs that accelerated our accumulation of power and shaped everything that would follow. I will focus on three.8 The first was the Agricultural Revolution.9 Around 10,000 years ago the people of the Fertile Crescent, in the Middle East, began planting wild wheat, barley, lentils and peas to supplement their foraging. By preferentially replanting the seeds from the best plants, they harnessed the power of evolution, creating new domesticated varieties with larger seeds and better yields.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Tudge, C (2003), So Shall We Reap, Penguin Allen Lane. 7 Ernle (1912), op cit. 8 It has been argued that in some situations phosphorus was the limiting factor, a matter dealt with shortly, see Newman op cit. 13. 9 Allen, R (2008), ‘The Nitrogen Hypothesis and the English Agricultural Revolution: A Biological Analysis’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol 68, No 1, 2008. Allen says 1 to 3 per cent, but for convenience here I call it 2 per cent. 10 Allen (2008), ibid. See also Chorley, G P H (1981), ‘The Agricultural Revolution in Northern Europe, 1750-1880: Nitrogen, Legumes and Crop Productivity’, Economic History Review, Vol 34 pt 1 pp 71-93; and Clark, G, ‘The Economics of Exhaustion: The Postan Thesis and the Agricultural Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol 52 Pt 1, 1992. 11 Marx, K (1894), Das Kapital, Volume 3, ‘The Transformation of Profit into Ground Rent’. 12 Cited in Girardet, H (2000), Cities, People, Planet, Liverpool Schumacher lectures, April 2000.

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This is a point of view that lends considerable historical support to the case for stockfree agriculture. Allen is suggesting that the agricultural revolution, insofar as it was dependent upon nitrogen fixation, could have been carried out just as successfully, in the long run, by using legumes as a green manure rather than as animal feed. In the light of recent research into stockfree organic rotations entirely reliant upon green manures, it looks as though this could be correct. The Geography of Muck Unfortunately no sooner had one problem been solved by the so called agricultural revolution, than another was caused by the industrial revolution. As land was progressively enclosed for ‘improvement’ by capitalist farmers like Coke (even though many of the improvements just described took place some 200 years earlier on open fields) peasants were squeezed out of their communities and impelled into towns, in a process similar to one now taking place on a far larger scale in developing countries.

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Animal products were the main fertilizer used on arable land, so with more manure available soil fertility improved and yields per acre rose.6 This view, from J V Beckett in 1990, echoes that of the agricultural historian, Lord Ernle, 80 years previously : The field cultivation of roots, clover and artificial grasses … enabled farmers to carry more numerous, bigger and heavier stock; more stock gave more manure; more manure raised larger crops; larger crops supported still larger flocks and herds.7 This was the classic view which I once accepted, but now consider needs adjusting. Although animals were key to the advances of the agricultural revolution, manure played a smaller role than it occupies in the account propagated with such enthusiasm by Lord Ernle, John Seymour and others. The extra nitrogen came from the growing of legume crops for animals, but not necessarily via the digestive tracts of animals that ate them. This might seem a nice distinction but it is crucial to the debate between organic livestock farmers and organic stockless farmers that is the focus of much of this chapter.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

In Phase One, globalization meant a burgeoning human population traveling to exploit ever-more-distant production sites. Phase Two: Localizing the global economy (10,000 BCE to 1820 CE) In Phase Two, production and consumption were bundled as before, but with one absolutely critical difference. Thanks to the Agricultural Revolution, food production was brought to people rather than vice versa. The world economy was, in other words, “localized” in the sense that production and consumption occurred in fixed locations. Trade was still difficult and thus rare. This phase also saw the rise of cities and the ancient civilizations in today’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, China, India / Pakistan, and Greece Italy.

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Globalization’s Phase One (humanization of the globe) was triggered when modern humans left Africa around 83,000 BCE following a millennia-long spike in the planet’s average temperature. Phase Two was triggered when the climate warmed and stabilized 12,000 years ago. With the climate warm and relatively stable, humans were able to master food production. Local food production could be expanded to match local population expansions. This change, known as the Agricultural Revolution, enabled the rise of civilization. Modern “global warming” is the upward tick at the far right. SOURCE: J. Jouzel et al., “Orbital and Millennial Antarctic Climate Variability over the Past 800,000 Years,” Science 317, no. 5839 (2007): 793–797; based on Arctic Dome C ice cores. The DNA and archaeological data suggest that about forty millennia ago, humans were continuously present in Africa, Asia, and Australia (Figure 5).

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To put it differently, production and consumption were spatially bundled—thus there was little trade—but since moving people to food made more sense than moving food to people, the bundles of production and consumption were continuously shifting in a way that hindered the development of civilization. Essential Outcome Globalization in this epoch meant “humanizing” the globe. The rising world population drove humans to inhabit every inhabitable corner of the planet by about 15,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution ended Phase One and opened the door to Phase Two. Phase Two: Agriculture and the First Bundling For scientific reasons that are still unclear, the climate warmed twenty millennia ago and stabilized about 12,000 years ago (Figure 4). Prehistoric population density was limited by food, and food was limited by climate, so this “good” climate change triggered a transformation of human society.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

It is worth adding that neither does the record of the industrialized world in soil erosion, pollution or exhaustion of groundwater, and global warming represent an edifying example of foresight. 67. Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (London: Longman, 1983), quoted in Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, p. 40. There is a case to be made for Howard's claim that "agricultural revolutions" are always acts of autonomous farmers rather than states. From the agricultural revolution in Britain that laid the groundwork for industrialization to the broad adoption of such new crops as cocoa, tobacco, and maize in Africa, Howard's generalization rings true. It does not hold true, however, for large-scale irrigation projects or for the more recent, research-driven breeding of high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and maize.

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It goes without saying that the gardens Anderson is describing are so diverse in part because the villagers in question wish to grow many of the foods needed for subsistence rather than paying for them in the market. The point, however, is the plan behind the visual disorder. 38. Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, p. 63. 39. Ibid., p. 70. 40. Most traditional cropping systems, whether polyculture or crop rotation, combine a grain and a legume in this fashion. 41. Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, pp. 66-70. 42. H. C. Sampson and E. M. Crowther, "Crop Production and Soil Fertility Problems," West Africa Commission, 1938-1939: Technical Reports, part I (London: Leverhulme Trust, 1943), p. 34, cited in ibid., p. 30.

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But the research is more manageable when the variable of interest is less subjective and more easily quantifiable. 79. D. S. Ngambeki and G. F. Wilson, "Moving Research to Farmers' Fields," International Institute of Tropical Agriculture Research Briefs, 4:4, 1, 7-8, quoted in Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, p. 143. 80. Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, p. 143. 81. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, pp. 62-83. 82. In addition to the difficulties in finding the "active" cause among many possibilities, such a study of polycropping would have to find and justify a formula for comparing different combinations of yields.

Paleo Slow Cooker: 33 Quick Prep, Easy, Healthy and Delicious Smelling Paleo Slow Cooker Meals-Eat Well Even if You Are Tight on Time Through Paleo ... Slow Cooker Meals, Palo Diet) (Volume 6) by Tiffany Scott

agricultural Revolution

This eliminates grains, dairy products, processed foods, and a host of other food items that were introduced during or after the agricultural revolution from one’s diet. The idea is that the human body has not adapted to the newer grain-based diet we are used to. The large amount of processed foods people consume on a daily basis has also contributed to the health and weight problems plaguing a big number of the world’s population today. These foods contain a lot of chemical additives and sugar which, like grains, dairy, and other post-agricultural revolution food items, are not easily processed by the body. The Paleo Lifestyle Many traditional nutritionists dismiss the paleo diet as a fad diet that won’t last; however, as time passes, more and more people are going paleo.

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Thanks again for downloading this book; I hope you definitely enjoy it! Chapter 1: Paleo or Paleolithic diet—a basic guide The Paleolithic diet is a way of eating from 10,000 years ago in the Paleolithic era, also known as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet & hunter gathered diet. The Paleo diet consists of foods that were eaten before the agricultural revolution and wheat based diet. These diets consist of meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables and nuts. All foods in their natural form, not processed and wheat free are included. Studies are showing that human bodies are better adapted to this way of eating. The term Paleo diet refers to the healthiest nutritional approach towards meal and eating food that keeps your genetics stay lean, potent and dynamic.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Nurit Bird-David, “The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters,” Current Anthropology 31, no. 2 (1990): 189–96. See also Calvin Luther Martin, cited in Barker, Agricultural Revolution, 409; and Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 69, for a description of the African Ituri pygmies’ perception that the forest “looks after” them. 12. Barker, Agricultural Revolution, 59. 13. Ibid. 14. Reported by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, quoted in David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House, 1996), 87. 15. Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology,” 34. 16.

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., “Review Feature: The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 11, no. 1 (2001): 105–21. See also Wilson, Domestication of the Human Species, 65. 20. See Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies”; Barker, Agricultural Revolution, 306; Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 135, 141–42; Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi, “Coevolution of Farming and Private Property during the Early Holocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 22 (2013): 8830–35. 21. Barker, Agricultural Revolution, 1–2. See Joyce Marcus and Kent V. Flannery, “The Coevolution of Ritual and Society: New 14C Dates from Ancient Mexico,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 52 (2004): 18257–61, for a fascinating account of an archaeological excavation in Mexico that traces the evolution, over 1,300 years, from the ad hoc rituals of egalitarian nomadic foragers to a full-time priesthood with state temples. 22.

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“Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers.” American Anthropologist 95, no. 4 (1993): 860–74. Woodburn, James. “Egalitarian Societies.” Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 431–51. Both recommended for their explanation of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer societies. Chapter 5. Agriculture and Anxiety Barker, Graeme. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. A detailed and extensive explanation of the transition from foraging to farming. Cauvin, Jacques. The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Translated by Trevor Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

The end of the Palaeolithic era also corresponded with the end of the Pleistocene, or ‘Ice Age’, and the beginning of the agricultural revolution. While it was first proposed by Dr Walter L. Voegtlin in his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet,1 the Paleo diet as it exists today entered the popular consciousness in 2002, thanks to Dr Loren Cordain’s bestselling book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat.2 The diet was so named because it was designed to mimic the diet of indigenous populations prior to the agricultural revolution. The basic premise for the whole Paleo movement was that for the vast majority of human existence, since Homo sapiens emerged 200,000–300,000 years ago, we subsisted as hunter-gatherers.

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I will deconstruct the concept of a calorie and take a closer look at our obsession with counting these small units of energy. I will examine the truths and fallacies in the claims made by the Palaeolithic and ‘clean’ movements, while charting the actual history of our diet as we transitioned from stone-age hunter gatherers to farmers during the agricultural revolution, to the industrialised food production of today. I will explore the science-fiction and non-fiction of current popular diet plans, ask if we can be meta-bolically healthy without being skinny, and also examine the latest experimental data extolling the benefits of certain traditional diets, such as, for example, the Mediterranean diet.

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The basic premise for the whole Paleo movement was that for the vast majority of human existence, since Homo sapiens emerged 200,000–300,000 years ago, we subsisted as hunter-gatherers. Then the dawn of the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago brought about huge changes to our diet. Since diet-related illnesses are responsible for much of the chronic and non-communicable disease burden today, and no evidence of such conditions can be seen in the Palaeolithic skeletal record, the blame for our contemporary woes must lie with the post-agricultural diet. Hence, according to Cordain, the solution to a skinnier and less-is-healthier human species must surely be to shift back to a pre-agricultural, so-called ‘ancestral’, subsistence.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

He wondered whether a better understanding of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived might offer some insights into the fundamental nature of our species ‘stripped of the accretions and complications brought about by agriculture, urbanisation, advanced technology, and national and class conflict’. ‘It is still an open question,’ wrote Lee, ‘whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself’ and whether ‘the efflorescence of technology’ that followed the agricultural revolution would lead us to Utopia or ‘to extinction’. While settling into the rhythms of Kalahari life, Lee impressed his hosts with how quickly he came to grips with their complex click language. They also appreciated his generosity and easy-going manner, even if their near-constant demands on him for gifts of food and tobacco began to exhaust him.

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If anything, he underestimated its significance. For while previous and later technologically driven transformations – from the mastering of fire to the development of the internal combustion engine – also dramatically increased the amount of energy humans were able to harness and put to work, the agricultural revolution not only enabled the rapid growth of the human population but also fundamentally transformed how people engaged with the world around them: how they reckoned their place in the cosmos and their relationships with the gods, with their land, with their environments and with each other. Gordon Childe was not especially interested in culture, at least not in the same way that his colleagues in the Social Anthropology Department were.

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Some later farming populations have the benefit of funerary inscriptions on gravestones and sometimes even partial census data, as in the case of Roman Egypt, but again this data is usually too incomplete to serve as anything more than a rough guide. Even if demographers are cautious when making pronouncements regarding life expectancy in early agricultural societies, there is broad consensus that before the Industrial Revolution kicked into gear and significant advances in medicine began to make an impact, the agricultural revolution did nothing at all to extend the lifespan of the average person, and indeed in many instances shortened it relative to the lifespans of remote foragers like the Ju/’hoansi. A comprehensive study of human remains from Imperial Rome, arguably the wealthiest agricultural society in history, for instance, shows that most men there were lucky to live much past the age of thirty,3 and analysis of the earliest well-documented mortality figures, which come from Sweden between 1751 and 1759, suggests that the Ju/’hoansi and the Hadzabe expected to live slightly longer lives than Europeans on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.4 Osteological studies of ancient bones and teeth also offer some insights into the quality of ancient people’s lives.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Today, the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

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Nor does it justify the invention of endless sub-categories like ‘complex’ or ‘affluent’ or ‘delayed-return’ hunter-gatherers, which is simply another way of ensuring such peoples are kept in what the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the ‘savage slot’, their histories defined and circumscribed by their mode of subsistence – as if they were people who really ought to be lazing around all day, but for some reason got ahead of themselves.44 Instead, it means that the initial assertion was, like that of the apocryphal Hamish McDonald, simply wrong. IN WHICH WE DISPOSE OF ONE PARTICULARLY SILLY ARGUMENT THAT FORAGERS WHO SETTLE IN TERRITORIES THAT LEND THEMSELVES WELL TO FORAGING ARE SOMEHOW UNUSUAL In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments. Usually, what’s meant by ‘atypical’ are wetlands of various sorts – coasts and river valleys – as opposed to the remoter corners of tropical forests or desert margins, which is assumed to be where hunter-gatherers really ought to be living, since that is where most of them live today.

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What’s deemed important is not what they were, but the fact that they could be on the brink of turning into something else: a ‘proper’ kingdom, presumably, whose subjects paid tribute in crops. This peculiar habit of thought requires us to treat whole populations of ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ either as deviants, who took some kind of diversion from the evolutionary highway, or as lingering on the cusp of an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that never quite took place. It’s bad enough when this is applied to a people like the Calusa, who were after all relatively small in number, living in complicated historical circumstances. Yet the same logic is regularly applied to the history of entire indigenous populations along the Pacific Coast of North America, in a territory running from present-day greater Los Angeles to the surroundings of Vancouver.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

Almost all the food of a town comes from owned and cultivated land -- in ancient times from fields round about the town, in modern times from anywhere in the world, transported and sold on through middlemen before being consumed. The Agricultural Revolution soon led to specialisation. Potters, weavers and smiths traded their skills for food which others grew. Before the Agricultural Revolution, food was not cultivated on owned land but captured or gathered on unowned commons. Pastoralism, the herding of animals on common land, may have been an intermediate stage. Whether it was a change for better or worse, the Agricultural Revolution was presumably not a sudden event. Husbandry was not the overnight brainwave of a genius, the neolithic equivalent of Turnip Townsend.

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But first, while our time machine is still in bottom gear, travelling on the timescale of human history rather than evolutionary history, a pair of tales about two major cultural advances. The Farmer's Tale is the story of the Agricultural Revolution, arguably the human innovation that has had the greatest repercussions for the rest of the world's organisms. And the Cro-Magnon's Tale is about the 'Great Leap Forward', that flowering of the human mind which, in a special sense, provided a new medium for the evolutionary process itself. The Farmer's Tale The Agricultural Revolution began at the wane of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, in the so-called Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

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Agriculture also arose, probably independently, in China and along the banks of the Nile, and completely independently in the New World. An interesting case can be made for yet another independent cradle of agricultural civilisation in the astonishingly isolated highland interior of New Guinea. The Agricultural Revolution dates the start of the new stone age, the Neolithic. The transition from wandering hunter-gatherers to a settled agricultural lifestyle may represent the first time people had a concept of a home. Contemporaries of the first farmers, in other parts of the world, were unreconstructed hunter-gatherers who wandered more or less continuously.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

I remember my school history curriculum bigging up Turnip Townshend and Coke of Norfolk, the great landowner reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who did such clever things, and raised yields, with crop rotation and clover and rationalising peasants off their bitty fragments of the commons. This narrative of the agricultural revolution has come under attack in recent years. The most frequent line of criticism is that the likes of Townshend and Coke weren’t innovators, but brilliant publicists and proselytisers who worked out how to systemise and promote much older ideas. A fiercer attack came from Robert Allen in 1992 in his book Enclosure and the Yeoman. Allen described two English agricultural revolutions, one by small yeoman farmers in the seventeenth century, another by landlords in the eighteenth. The yeomen’s revolution, he maintained, led to a big increase in crop yields, with the same amount of labour; the landlords’ revolution used less labour to grow the same amount of crops.

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He was foreign secretary when Britain had two of them, one for Protestant countries and another for Catholic and Muslim ones (Townshend’s was the northern department). Then he fell out with Walpole, retreated to his estate and devoted himself to farming so successfully (hence the nickname: he proselytised for turnips) that in popular history Raynham competes with Coke’s Holkham to be considered the birthplace of the British agricultural revolution. It was an awkward meeting. Lord Townshend agreed to see me after a personal introduction, and I thought I’d explained in advance who I was and what I was writing about, but it turned out he believed I was writing a historical piece about agriculture. He’d hoped he might be able to sell me some time in Raynham’s archive of 2.5 million documents, which he’s trying to catalogue and commercialise.

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This kind of mechanised, chemical-intensive, large-scale farming is widespread around the world, wherever farmers can afford fertiliser. Lord Townshend told me how he’d been assured by the Algerian minister of agriculture that ‘Turnip Townshend was where we started learning our agricultural procedures.’ The principles of the aristo-capitalist agricultural revolution – big farms replacing small ones, maximising food production through science – were followed by twentieth-century socialist progressives. David Laborde, of the International Food Policy Research Institute, pointed out to me that this kind of farming rendered absurd notions of food self-sufficiency for Britain, or even Europe.

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want. Capitalism has two answers to this criticism. First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again. In 8500 BC one could cry bitter tears over the Agricultural Revolution, but it was too late to give up agriculture.

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The band was economically independent; only a few rare items that could not be found locally – seashells, pigments, obsidian and the like – had to be obtained from strangers. This could usually be done by simple barter: ‘We’ll give you pretty seashells, and you’ll give us high-quality flint.’ Little of this changed with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Most people continued to live in small, intimate communities. Much like a hunter-gatherer band, each village was a self-sufficient economic unit, maintained by mutual favours and obligations plus a little barter with outsiders. One villager may have been particularly adept at making shoes, another at dispensing medical care, so villagers knew where to turn when barefoot or sick.

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

Even by 1750, there were just 800 million people. Famine was a constant worry, and the smart money said the planet couldn’t possibly support much more growth. The population in England had been decreasing—“essentially because,” as one historian wrote, “agriculture could not respond to the pressure of feeding extra people.” Enter the Agricultural Revolution. A variety of innovations, none particularly complex—they included higher-yielding crops, better tools, and a more efficient use of capital—changed farming and, subsequently, the face of the earth. In late eighteenth-century America, “it took 19 out of 20 workers to feed the country’s inhabitants and provide a surplus for export,” wrote the economist Milton Friedman.

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In late eighteenth-century America, “it took 19 out of 20 workers to feed the country’s inhabitants and provide a surplus for export,” wrote the economist Milton Friedman. Two hundred years later, only 1 of 20 American workers was needed to feed a far larger population while also making the United States “the largest single exporter of food in the world.” The Agricultural Revolution freed up millions of hands that went on to power the Industrial Revolution. By 1850, worldwide population had grown to 1.3 billion; by 1900, 1.7 billion; by 1950, 2.6 billion. And then things really took off. Over the next fifty years, the population more than doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer.

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Churchill, 1882); Atul Gawande, “The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial,” The New Yorker, October 2, 2006; and Stephen J. Dubner, “Medical Failures, and Successes Too: A Q&A with Atul Gawande,” Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, June 25, 2007. MORE FOOD, MORE PEOPLE: See “The World at Six Billion,” United Nations, 1999; Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harvest, 1990; originally published 1979). Information from Will Masters, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue, came from an author interview.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

These family plots of approximately one acre would be very important indeed in meat, egg, vegetable and fruit production, right up to the present day. The agricultural revolution in the long boom The phrase ‘green revolution’ is applied to the introduction of new varieties, irrigation and fertiliser to agriculture in the poor world in the 1960s. Partly because agriculture is associated with poverty and the past, and because of the focus on novelty, the even more significant agricultural revolution in the rich world was missed. In the rich world agriculture in the long boom saw much greater rates of labour productivity change than industry or services, and at much greater rates than before.39 In high land-productivity Britain, yields doubled in the post-war years from a very high base.

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Brazilian aircraft carrier Minas Gerais (Tom Pietrasik) Index Figures in italics refer to captions; those in bold to Tables. 2,4-D herbicide 162–3 17 of October (ship) 94, 124 A A-bomb see atomic bomb abattoirs 173 abortificients 23 abortion 23 Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq 156 academic science, and invention 185–7 acid rain 121 acupuncture 49 Acyclovir 163 advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) 21 AEG 193 aeronautical research 186 aeroplanes ix, xiv, 1, 3, 6, 28, 159, 191 appearance as a new technology 31 civil aircraft 117 and civilianised warfare 139 downplaying of military origins 142 hypersonic 38 killing by 146 and nationalism 116 powered aeroplane innovated in the USA 111 primarily a weapon of war 116, 158 R&D 197 supersonic 38 see also aviation; flight Afghanistan 145, 153 Africa death rate per car 27 guerrilla rebellions 152–3 malaria 27 sub-Saharan income per head 207 African National Congress 122 AGA range 57 Agency for International Development (AID) 157 agent orange 163 Agfa 130, 193 Agfacolor 130 agricultural revolution 64–6 agriculture family farms in the USA and USSR 62–4 horsepower xiii, 33–4 output 53 productivity 65, 74 shift to industry 52 Agrigento, Sicily 78 AIDS 25, 27, 49, 164, 207 Air France 21–2 air transport, cheap 115 air-conditioning 170 aircraft see aeroplanes aircraft industry 116, 158 airships 38, 50, 199 Al-Khahira (Cairo) jet trainer 125 Alang Beach, Gujarat, India 208 Albania 118, 131–2 Aliano, Basilicata, Italy 122–3 alkali 190 Allen & Hanbury 196 Almirante Latorre (battleship) 92 alternating current (AC) electrical systems 8–9, 176 alternatives assumption that there are no alternatives 6–7, 8 comparable alternatives 7–8 using a thing marginally better than alternatives 8 American Civil War 146 American Monarch (ship) 167 Amgen 202 AMO factory, Moscow 126 amodiaquine 26 analytical labs 192 animals husbandry 66 hybrids 190 killing 161, 164, 172, 173–6 anti-aircraft guns 14, 15 anti-malarials 164, 199 anti-missile systems 155–6 anti-virals 163 antibiotics 163, 190 antifungal treatments 164 apartheid 122 Apocalypse Now (film) 152 Arab oil embargo (1973) 122 Arab–Israeli wars 146–7 architecture ‘post-modern’ viii vernacular 41 Argentina builds a jet fighter 124–5 meat exports to Britain 172 national industrial development 118 the picana eléctrica 157 Argentina (liner) 124 Armament and History (Fuller) 141 Armenians 178–9 Armour meat packers 171, 172 Armstrong, Neil viii artillery fire 143, 144, 190 asbestos 42, 43, 211 asbestos-cement 42, 43 Asia: rice production 64–5 astronauts viii AT&T 193, 195 Atebrin (mepacrine) 25 atomic bomb xiv, 15–19, 21, 114–15, 117, 123, 138, 139, 158, 159, 185, 198, 199 atomic power 3, 6 Auschwitz–Birkenau extermination camp, Poland 121, 165, 180–81, 182 Australia maintenance and repair 80 meat trade 172 national industrial development 118 autarky 115, 116, 117–19 Autochrome process 193 autogiro 103 automation 2, 3, 85 Aventis 196 aviation 1, 19, 143 choices in aircraft construction 10 civil 6, 116 and empires 132 engine types 10 maintenance 87–91, 89 power of 141 supersonic stratospheric 3 see also aeroplanes; flight Axis Powers 18 AZT 164 B B-29 bombers 13, 15, 16, 123 B-52 bombers viii, ix, 95, 152, 155 ballistic missiles 154 Bangkok, Thailand long-tailed boats 47 Science Museum 28 Bangladesh motorised country-boats 48, 61 rice production 65 shipbreaking 208 barbed wire 146 Barham, HMS 93–4 BASF 119, 120, 121, 193 battleships x, xiv, 92–4, 93, 97, 141, 142, 143, 148–9, 154 Bayer 193, 194 Bayh–Dole Act (1980) 187 Beechams 196 Beef Trust 171 Belgrano (ARA General Belgrano) 94 Bell Labs 195, 196 Bell telephone 132 Belzec extermination camp, Poland 179 Bergius, Friedrich 120 Berlin–Baghdad railway xi bicycles x, 4, 45, 50–51, 58, 61 bidonvilles 41 Billingham plant, Stockton-on-Tees 119, 121 biological warfare 149 biotechnology 1, 185, 188, 192, 196, 202–3 Biro, Ladislao José 103 biro pen 103 birth control 23 Bishop, Billy 114 Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile ix Blue Star Line 172 boats fishing 49 long-tailed 47–8 motor torpedo 68 motorised country-boats 48–9, 61 bomber aircraft viii, ix, x, xiv, 9, 13, 13–16, 18, 95, 97, 123, 143, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155 Bomber Command 14 bombing atomic 15–19 conventional 12–15 ‘dumb’ bombs 155 ‘smart’ bombs 155 targets 12–13, 14, 15, 16 Borges, Jorge Luis 94 boundaries 117, 131, 132 branding 71 Braun, Werner von 18 Brazil (film) 75 Brezhnev, Leonid 102 Bristol Jupiter engine 88 Britain agricultural yields 64 autarchy 118 aviation 104, 111 car production 69 coal consumption ix cotton industry 36–7, 105, 190 economic growth 206 executions 176 horsepower in First World War 35 maintenance and repair 80 meat imports 172 output per head 109 privatisation of railways 87 R&D 109 railway workshops 98 steam power ix, 105 television 131 truck production 69 two-way movements between Britain/France and Britain/India 111–12 British Airways 21–2 British Electrical Development Association 56 British Empire 135 Brunnental, Soviet Union 62–3 Bumper V-2 rocket 2 Burmese army 145 Burney, Commander Sir Charles Dennistoun 167 buses ix, 96, 98, 191 C cable TV x, 49 Calcutta: rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws 45–6 Cambodia 182 Camden Market, London 33 camels 35 caravans 28, 30 cameras, replica 50 Canada: maintenance statistics 79 cap, the 24 Cape Canaveral, Florida 2 capitalism 76, 128 carbon monoxide 121, 179–80 Carrier, Dr Willis H. 170 Carrier Corporation 170 carrier pigeons 43 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 163 carving 28 CASA company 125 cavalry units 35 CDs 7 cement ix, 45 ceremonial occasions: use of reserve technologies 11 Césaire, Aimé 133 CFC gases 211 Chamoiseau, Patrick: Texaco 42–3 Cheliabinsk, Soviet Union 126 Chelmno extermination camp, Poland 179 chemical warfare 164 chemicals 1, 105, 188, 191, 192 chemistry 2, 130, 185, 186 organic 185 synthetic 4, 185 Chicago meatpackers 129–30, 171–5 chickens 66, 163, 164, 174–5 China agriculture 73 and Albania 131–2 atomic weapons as ‘paper tigers’ 19 autarchy 118 bicycle production 45 collective farming abolished 73 control of the internet 137 cotton textiles 65 Cultural Revolution 45, 72 economic growth 109, 112, 207 economy 73 executions 177 export of containers 74 foreign enterprise 137 ‘four big belongings’ 58–9 Great Leap Forward 44–5, 73 a hydraulic society 76 imitation of foreign technologies 112 industrialisation 73 links with Soviet Union (1949–60) 131 low-tech exports 137 Maoists 152 nationalism 137 old small scale technologies 72–3 pig production 66 produces Soviet technology 44 promotion of small-scale rural industries 72–3 rural industries 73 second Sino–Japanese War 140, 179 steel production 73 ‘technological dualism’ 44 Chinese Communist party 73 Chinese First Automotive Works 126 chlorinated organic compounds 161–2 chloroquine 26, 164 cholera 25 Ciba 196 Ciba-Geigy 26 Cierva, Juan de la 103 cinema ix, 203 cities of the poor world 39–40 clinical trials 11–12, 201 clothes: trade in old clothes 81 coal consumption ix hydrogenation of 120, 121–2, 186, 199 Cold War 123 ‘cold-chains’ 170 collectivisation 63, 64, 127 colonialism 39, 134 Common Market 119, 175 communications technologies xiv, 2 Communist movement 60 Companhia Energética de Sao Paulo 99 computer-numerically-controlled machine tool 158–9 computerisation 2 computers ix–x, 1, 158 analogue 7, 9 cheap PCs 71 digital 3, 6, 7, 9 initial cost as a percentage of lifetime cost 78 Concorde 21–2, 38, 96–7 condoms 1, 22–3, 24, 25, 49, 190 Congo War, second 146 contraception vii, x, 1, 22–5, 49, 190 cooking ranges 57 copper 73 corn, hybrid 64 corporate research laboratories 192 corrugated iron 41–3, 50–51, 78 cost-benefit analysis 11–12, 21, 142 cotton industry ix, 36–7, 65, 105, 136 Cotton Industry Act (1959) 38 credit agreements xv creole technologies xii, 39, 43–5, 46–7 creolisation of technology 85 Cuba 36, 207 Cudahy meat packers 171 cultural lag viii, 141, 212 Cultural Revolution 45, 72 cultural significance, measurement of 1 cycle-rickshaws 46–7, 48–9, 191 D Daktarin 164 Dalén, Nils Gustav 57 Datong Locomotive Works, China 50 DC-3 airliner 88, 197 DC-4 aircraft 197, 198 DC-6 aircraft 88 DC-8 jet 88, 197 DDT 26–7, 38, 162–3, 162 De Niro, Robert 75 de-globalisation 212 dependence 39 depression 37 Derwent jet engine 123 design 71 Detroit automation 86 Deutsches Museum, Munich 104 development labs 192 Dewoitine, Emile 125 diaphragm 24 diesel engine 3 differential analysers 7 diffusion vii Digital Signal Processing chip 195 direct current (DC) electrical systems 8, 9, 176 division of labour 72 Dnieper complex, Soviet Union 127 dockyards 91 domestic equipment 81 domestic production 56 ‘domestic science’ 56 domestic servants 56 domestic technologies xiv, 4, 56 domestic work, scientific organisation of 56 donkey carts 28, 30, 49 Dornier, Claude 125 douches 23 Dreadnought (battleship) 92 dreadnoughts 92, 148 Dufay process 130 Du Pont 20, 158, 193, 194–5 Durex 25 E East Germany: hydrogenation 121 Eastman Kodak 130, 193 economic growth 5, 52, 108, 109, 110, 206–7 economic history 3 economies of scale 71 ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) 38 Edison, Thomas 176 Edwards Air Force Base, California viii Egypt Ancient 76 aviation 126 Einsatzgruppen 179 ELAS resistance movement 60 electricity x, 1, 3, 6, 76–7, 185, 188, 190, 192 increased usage 5 electrification 2, 6, 32 electrocution/electric chair 165, 176, 177, 178 electronic communication: change in price 6–7 electronics 3, 99, 105, 191 Elizalde 31 Elliot, Gil: The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead 145–6 EMI 130, 131 empires 132, 134 employment in agriculture 53 in industry 53 service industries 53, 70 enclaves for European colonisers 134 engineering 19 masculinity of 101 mass production 67 engineers xiii, 100–102, 192–3 state 101 engines jet 10 petrol 10 Erikson, Gustaf 95 Europe car accidents 27 car production 69, 70 uptake of new technologies 32 European Union (EU) 200, 206 Eva Péron (liner) 124 F Fairchild Semiconductor 195, 203 Fairfree (factory stern trawler) 167 Falklands war 94 Far East growth rates 207 Faust, Mrs Mary 54 fertilisers 44, 45, 50, 64, 65, 67, 119–20 fertility control 23 feudalism 76 Fiat 69, 127 fibre-optic cables 7, 49 firing squads 176 First World War 31, 34, 34–5, 130 battleships x, 148, 149 casualty rates 146 chemical warfare 164 a chemist’s war 138 deaths 143 developments in artillery practice 143 H.

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199–203 the most important 4 new inventive institutions 192–8 stage models of invention 188–91 time of maximum use 4–5 inventors: seen as ahead of their time vii, viii investment expenditure 79 Iran 153, 154 Iran–Iraq wars (1980s) 149, 153–4 Iraq, US-led invasion of (2003) 153 IRI (Industrial Reconstruction Institute) 118 iron 2, 19, 44 corrugated 41–3, 50–51, 78 galvanised 41 ironer 38 irrigation 64, 65, 76 Italy aviation 104–5 car ownership 69 economic growth 112 imitation of foreign technologies 112 output per head 109 R&D 109, 110 under fascism 118, 122 IUD 25 J Japan agricultural productivity 65 bicycle industry 98 bombing of in Second World War 15, 16 car industry 136, 194 consumer electronics 105, 136 cotton industry 37, 136 economic growth 108, 109, 110, 112, 206 electrical firms 194 energy use levels 209 imitation of foreign technologies 112, 136 industrialisation 73 inventiveness 200 R&D 108, 110, 136 repair workshops 99 second Sino–Japanese War 140, 179 sewing machine production 58 war production 15 whaling 166 Japanese Navy 92–3, 136 jet engines 88–9, 103 jet fighters 123–5, 135 Jews, and the Holocaust 146, 179, 181 Jiefang (Liberation) trucks 126 Johnson and Johnson 196 Jones, Frederick 170 Jutland, battle of 148 K Kamprad, Ingvar xii KC-135 air-refuelling tanker 95 Kenya: road accidents 27 Kharkov tractor factory 126 Khrushchev, Nikita 128 killing 160–83, 212 executions and other killings 176–8 innovation in killing 160–65 killing animals in the long boom and after 173–6 slaughterhouses 168–73, 171 technologies of genocide 178–83 whaling and fishing 165–8 Kirov plant, Soviet Union 126 Kitty Hawk, North Carolina viii Klystron microwave generator 186 Kodachrome 130 Kokura Arsenal, Japan 16 Koolhaas, Rem 39 Korea 109, 123, 136, 200 Korean War 13, 151, 152 Korn, Arthur 193 Kuwait 155 Kyoto, Japan 16 L Lada car 127 lascars 135–6 lathe 4 Latin American dependency theorists 118–19 Latour, Bruno x Le Corbusier xii League of Nations 129 Leblanc process 190 leisure, technologies of 55 Lenin, Vladimir 128 Lenin Dam, Soviet Union 127 lethal injection 165, 176, 177, 178 Leuchter, Fred A. 181–2 Leuna, Germany 119, 120 Leverkusen, Germany 194 Libertad (liner) 124 Liebig, Justus von 171 Liebig Extract of Meat Company 171, 171, 172 Lindberg, Charles, Jr 104 lobotomy 38 London Red Routemaster buses 96 Science Museum 29, 104, 139 London Underground trains 96 long boom 52, 53, 74, 110, 163 agricultural revolution 64–6 cars 68–70 Eastern European economies 69 spectacular growth in 206 lorries 98 Los Alamos, New Mexico 16, 123 Lubitsch, Ernst 101 Lucent Technologies 195 Luftwaffe 122 Lumière brothers 193 lynchings 178 M MacArthur, General 26 Magnitogorsk steel works, Soviet Union 127, 208–9 Magnox reactors 21 mail order catalogue xiv maintenance 75–102 of ancient ruins 78 aviation 87–91, 89 the battleships and bombers 91–7, 93 downtime 86 engineers and the maintenance of society 100–102 from maintenance to manufacture and innovation 97–9 how important are maintenance and repair?

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

De Vries came to Santa Rosa to learn what Burbank had learned about heredity in order to push genetics out of its infancy. * * * — Pottery shards, ancient seeds, and the bones of livestock all indicate that the first breeders started their work in earnest around eleven thousand years ago. Plants and animals, once wild, came under the control of humans, grown for their benefit. The agricultural revolution let the population of our species explode, but it also made us precariously dependent on the heredity of what we raised. When farmers planted a new field of barley seeds, or goatherds delivered a new batch of kids, they needed each new generation of plants and animals to end up like the previous one.

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The same capacity for cumulative culture that had already spread humans to all the continents save Antarctica now allowed them to convert the wild lands around them into farm fields and grazing pastures. Children in these agricultural communities inherited traditions for farming, and they also inherited lands that had been converted from wilderness long before they were born. The Agricultural Revolution lofted our species to a far bigger population than before, leaving some farmers desperate for land. They moved into open territories still inhabited by hunter-gatherers, bringing with them the entire package of agriculture: not just the seeds for crops but also their livestock, their saddles, their hoes, and their inherited wisdom about how to use all of it to harvest food, brew beer, sew leather shoes, and all the rest of their cultural practices.

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As they learned how to work metals, they could make sickle blades or horseshoes. The environment in which much of humanity was now born had become a domesticated landscape, covered by farms as well as by houses, roads, villages, and cities. * * * — It was cultural heredity that led to an agricultural revolution, and it was that revolution that fostered the practice that gave heredity its name. Heirs began to inherit great wealth from their ancestors. There was nothing new about parents bequeathing valuable things to their offspring. You could argue that our reptilian ancestors were doing it 300 million years ago.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Islam preserved knowledge lost to the West with the fall of Rome, even as India discovered the zero, which made so much possible. The latest plague produced the latest antibodies to resist it. In Eurasia, at least, immunity became a powerful tool of progress. The planet’s population grew from those few thousands in the wake of the Toba eruption to between five and ten million during the first agricultural revolution. At 1 CE there were perhaps three hundred million. By 1300 CE, with China united, enlightened, and advanced under the Song Dynasty, Islam stretching from India to Spain, and Europe finally emerging from its post-Roman Dark Age, the global population had peaked at around four hundred million.12 And then the most terrible thing happened.

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Mechanized production accelerated productivity—the factory, the railway, the telegraph, electric light, the internal combustion engine. Those last three inventions were American; the United States was growing in wealth and power and confidence in the wake of its civil war. Thanks to the industrial and agricultural revolutions, people started living longer. Now that famine and pestilence were on the wane, couples married earlier and had more children. And those children were more likely to survive, thanks to improved sanitation and the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, another scientific leap. The Victorian era was the first in human history to witness rapid and sustained population growth, as Europe and the United States raced to catch up with Great Britain.

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And yet almost all of us today live longer, healthier, happier lives than the poor of England in the time of Malthus. This pioneer political economist, who lived much of his life among the green fields of Hertfordshire, literally stood in the middle of the explanation for why his theory was hopelessly flawed. By 1798, the British agricultural revolution was already a century old. It began with the enclosures, in which powerful men banished peasant farmers from communally owned fields. To this day, poets lament the theft, but farmers who controlled their fields could innovate so as to maximize yields and profits. New experiments in selective breeding took the average weight of a cow carcass from 370 pounds in 1710 to 550 pounds in 1795.58 People like Viscount Charles “Turnip” Townsend experimented with turnips, clover, and other crops to improve soil quality and reduce the need for fallow fields.59 And then there were the inventions: Jethro Tull’s seed drill, the threshing machine, the reaping machine, the all-iron plow.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

There was a century between Newcomen’s engine and the first commercially viable steamships. Revolutions are never just one thing. The steam impulse was matched by a very different but complementary impulse in the agricultural sector. It started with a land ownership shockwave called “enclosure.” British Agricultural Revolution The British agricultural revolution started with the enclosure movement in the 1600s. This involved the fencing (enclosing) of land that used to be open. Enclosing land ended the access that many rural families had to lands formerly held in common (in the sense that any community member could graze animals on the land).

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This drove people out of the agricultural sector since raising and sheering sheep commercially required far fewer workers than raising food for families. But it wasn’t just switches in ownership that put the revolution in the agricultural revolution. Enclosure firmed up property rights and thus encouraged adoption of more efficient farming techniques. One of the agricultural revolution’s red-letter innovations was a switch to the four-crop rotation system that heightened the productivity of land. Improved farm machinery also accelerated productivity. The classic examples include automatic threshing machines for grain; seed drills for planting; and improvements in farming tools, like the switch from wooden to iron ploughs.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Whatever happened, by 40,000 years ago H. sapiens sapiens is alone on the world stage. The rate of change accelerates. Europe is ablaze with the colour of cave art between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago, although most of the continent remains frozen under the last Ice Age. Rapid global warming returns around 10,000 years ago, and the agricultural revolution takes place. We still live in that ‘long summer’ that began ten millennia ago, in the scientifically termed ‘Holocene period’. It took humans four million years to evolve the hand axe, another two million years to somewhat improve it. And then, within a mere 20,000 years, a geological blink of an eye, they created art, agriculture, the wheel, computers and spaceships.

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To understand the vital significance of totemic thinking for the survival of our forefathers and foremothers, let us revisit Ice Age Europe circa 17,000 years ago. The continent is at its coldest. Never before have humans lived in an environment harsher than the one that these ancient hunter-gatherers endure. This period is called ‘the Magdalenian’3 and lasts until around 10,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ends, and the agricultural revolution begins. Equipped with a general-purpose language and general intelligence, our species applies their evolved minds to surviving the long and ruthless winter of the Ice Age. They innovate. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a major shift in hunting techniques from that period. Elaborate tactics, weapons, logistics and strategies are developed and employed.

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Thinking through metaphor, feeling through narrative As we have seen, because of the way our storytelling brain has evolved it is impossible to think about anything without using metaphor and analogy. Both are linguistic tools for discovering, debating and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. They have served us very well since the Upper Palaeolithic. Thanks to them, we developed our technological civilisation. And we have considered how, as humankind progressed from the agricultural revolution to the Greco-Roman world, Renaissance, Enlightenment and the modern times, our metaphors for life and the mind have evolved and mutated. First came mud, then water or humours, then mechanics, the electric current or spark of life, followed by the telegraph and now the computer. For each of these metaphors, people have imagined automata, artificial artefacts set in motion by technologies that support the metaphors.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The Chinese had already developed a breast-collar harness, which was far superior to European versions but did not arrive in Europe until the eighth century CE. 31. Jerome Blum, “The rise of serfdom in Eastern Europe”, The American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. 4, July 1957 32. The folk rock group led by Ian Anderson was named after him. 33. See Professor Mark Overton, “Agricultural revolution in England 1500–1850” http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/agricultural_revolution_01.shtml 34. Ibid. 35. Michael Turner, “Agricultural productivity in England in the eighteenth century: evidence from crop yields”, The Economic History Review, vol. 35, no. 4, November 1982 36. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy 1000–1700, third edition 37.

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Another way in which crops were spread round the world was when they came under the same political, or religious, authority. The spread of Islam meant that sixteen food crops, like rice, bananas and spinach, as well as cotton fibre, were diffused from India all the way to Spain. Growing many water-hungry crops required the creation of extensive irrigation systems; what has been dubbed an “Arab agricultural revolution” brought more marginal land into cultivation.24 The Mongols were also keen diffusers of new crops and even had a “cotton promotion bureau” to encourage the use of the plant in their possessions.25 Much later, the British, whose empire spanned the globe, were eager to get their hands on sources of rubber.

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The political power of the nobility, and the relative lack of cities to which peasants could escape, seems to have contributed to this development. Serfdom would last for several centuries more.31 Perhaps this divide was crucial in economic history, paving the way for improvements in agricultural production and industrialisation in the west of the continent and leaving the east behind. The traditional explanation focused on an “agricultural revolution” in 18th-century Britain, which in turn paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. Tribute was paid to pioneers like “Turnip” Townsend, Jethro Tull and his seed drill,32 and Coke of Holkham Hall. Since then, however, the achievements of such people have been downgraded.33 However, it still seems clear that agricultural productivity in England did improve over the period, and this not only helped the population to grow but allowed workers to move off the farm and into the textile factories.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Subsequent widespread adoption of the practice had at least tripled nitrogen available to non-leguminous crops and began to raise long-stagnant staple grain yields (Campbell and Overton 1993). Chorley (1981, 92) concluded that this “generalization of leguminous crops and the consequent increase in the nitrogen supply . . . was of comparable significance to steam power in the economic development of Europe in the period of industrialization” and that it justifies the label of Agricultural Revolution. But this intensification of solar agriculture would not suffice to support growing populations—and hence a concurrent development saw the first applications of nitrogen fertilizers other than recycled organic wastes (manures and crop residues) and plowed-in green manures (leguminous cover crops).

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Foundations for its study were laid down in the late 1950s and the early 1960s (Abramovitz 1956; Solow 1957; Kendrick 1961) and it has become a critical concept in modern evaluations of economic growth (Pasinetti 1981; Arena and Porta 2016). In modern economies it has been often the single most important factor explaining their expansion (Shackleton 2013). As for the declining dependence on land, attentive readers remember Chorley’s (1981) quotation referring to the British agricultural revolution: labor surplus created by rising agricultural productivity released workers for urban and industrial employment as the nation’s share of population in agriculture fell to 37% by 1760 and to 24% by 1841. Compared to these two factors neither expanded coal extraction or trade had the same immediate impact.

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First, large numbers of city-bound migrants released from the countryside by gradual modernization of traditional farming made it possible to operate often highly labor-intensive tasks of material processing and only partially mechanized manufacturing. In the common (albeit misleading) terminology, no industrial revolution could have taken place without the preceding agricultural revolution. This labor push factor was potentiated by the effect of the already noted Engel’s law: reduced share of spending on food can be used to buy more manufactured products. Second, new opportunities in industrial production—enabled by technical advances and energized by the supply of inexpensive fuels and electricity—created a powerful labor pull factor.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

We might then unify and examine the societies of various species, or (more narrowly) the societies within our own species—such as the shipwrecks, communes, scientific settlements, online experiments, and many other communities, such as colonial outposts, monasteries, prisons, boarding schools, nuclear submarines, trapped miners, space-habitation experiments, and so on. We could include modern forager societies that resembled the kind of societies our species formed prior to the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago too. Such an exercise would shed light on just how similar human social organization really is across all these situations. To do this, we would have to define the key axes, just like Raup’s three parameters. One important axis might be the hypothetical size of the society, perhaps defined as the size at which people actually know the others in the group well, even if they are not close friends; this could range from, say, zero (meaning that no one knows anyone in our imagined society) to two thousand (each person knows two thousand other people intimately).

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The reasons for this shift are complex but are believed to stem from adaptations to different kinds of environmental pressures, such as changes in food resources, which we will discuss in more detail below. And these shifts in behavior were paralleled by physiological changes, including the lack of outward signs of ovulation, the further extension of childhood, and menopause. Then another shift happened, beginning most likely with the agricultural revolution roughly ten thousand years ago, and continuing through the rise of nation-states about five thousand years ago (along with the large-scale socioeconomic inequality that emerged with such states), such that polygyny once again became more common.11 This shift was due to the pressure of historical and cultural forces, not evolutionary ones.

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Mutual attachment solves an evolutionary conundrum. In essence, the Hadza research suggests that the evolutionary psychology of both men and women is to exchange love for support. Polygyny in Turkana Pastoralists How did things change for our ancestors after animals and plants were domesticated and the agricultural revolution laid the groundwork for wealth accumulation and economic inequality? Just five hundred miles to the north of the Hadza, in the Rift Valley of northwestern Kenya, the Turkana, who number about two hundred and fifty thousand, practice polygyny. Unlike the Hadza, the Turkana treat marriage more as a contract between families than a private arrangement undertaken by individuals.

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

The Depression had left farmers with huge surpluses of food which the unemployed urban workers could not afford to buy. By providing American farmers with a market for their food, and with a healthy income, the war pulled agriculture out of the Depression. A process of modernization, which had begun tentatively in the 1930s, was accelerated and a new agricultural revolution occurred which began to transform farming into the industry which it is today. Crucially, modernization allowed fewer farmers to feed significantly more people. The wartime boom in American agriculture meant that the United States was not only able to provide its enormous army and civilian population with plentiful quantities of food, it was also able to feed the soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union, China and Great Britain.

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This set post-war Kenya on a course towards internal conflict which came to a head seven years later with the Mau Mau conflict, when Kikuyu farmers rose in protest against repressive measures which deprived them of their land.78 A side-effect of this conflict was the consolidation of Kikuyu land-holdings which provided the basis for the 1950s ‘agricultural revolution’. Vegetable-planting schemes like the one associated with the long-closed military vegetable-drying plant were revived. African farmers were reorganized into high-productivity cash-crop farming and began growing European vegetables on a large scale. This is why Britain still imports fresh beans by air from Kenya.79 In the Rhodesias the political power of the settler communities had expanded to such a point that they were able to push through the creation of a Native Labour Supply Commission which recruited African labour to work on white farms right up until the 1970s, reinforcing the neglect of African farming.80 The bitter consequences of the resentments this caused are still being felt today in Zimbabwe (as Southern Rhodesia was renamed), where Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform programme’ has dispossessed white farmers, and raging inflation has left the African population destitute, ravaged by hunger and a cholera epidemic in 2008.

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He introduced new varieties of vegetables which were more amenable to mechanized harvesting such as ‘tomatoes with fruit that grew on accessible parts of the plant, [and] stringless beans’.163 Farmers were taught how to stagger the planting of peas so that as each successive field matured they could be fed through the canning factory.164 Seabrook introduced scientific methods for testing the starch content of the vegetables, to predict precisely when the crop should be picked for processing.165 Factories were sent pattern machines from America so that they could manufacture power-operated potato diggers, rotary weeders, and bean and pea harvesters.166 Using a pea harvester, a crop which used to take 1,500 pickers two weeks to harvest could be processed by fifteen men in days.167 Major Seabrook was praised by one contemporary historian for having ‘effected an agricultural revolution in this land’, without which ‘Australia could not have met the demands made upon her’.168 To complement the introduction of new vegetable-growing techniques, American experts overhauled the canning industry. Faulty end and side seams on the Australian cans had a tendency to let in bacteria.

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

In March 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys reflected the caution with which foreign fruit and veg were met in Britain, when presented with a glass of fresh orange juice. ‘I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt,’ he wrote. Vegetables won an improved status in the rural economy when it was realised that including legumes like beans and peas in crop rotation dramatically improved soil fertility and yields. During the British agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century, the Whig Parliamentarian Lord Charles Townshend became convinced of the central role for the turnip in this new agricultural system, earning both the inevitable nickname Turnip Townshend and a reputation for boring the pants off anyone who engaged with him on the subject.

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W. Lockley, Sleep: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) INDEX Acheson, Dean, ref1 acid (drug), ref1 Act of Consecration (UK), ref1 Act of Union (1707), ref1 adolescence, concept of, ref1 Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, ref1 Age of Reason, ref1 agricultural revolution, ref1 AIDS, ref1 Ajax, ref1 alcohol and drinking, ref1 and antisocial behaviour, misconception concerning, ref1 Britain’s ‘intoxication culture’ concerning, ref1 and cultural differences, ref1 and expected behaviour, ref1 and fighting, ref1 and journalism, ref1 and links to social problems, ref1 and liver disease, ref1 and murder, ref1 northern European attitude to, ref1 and outdated licensing laws, ref1 pseudo-science about, ref1 and sexual assaults, ref1 southern European attitude to, ref1 UCLA study concerning, ref1 and UK courts, ref1 Washington State University experiment concerning, ref1 ale, real, ref1 Alfred, King, ref1 Alternative Regional Strategy, ref1 Aliens Act (1905), ref1 allotments, ref1, ref2 American Psychological Association (APA), ref1 Amis, Martin, ref1 anachronism, and Britishness, ref1 Anatomy of Swearing (Montagu), ref1 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ref1 [roman in text: OK?]

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David, ref1 NVLA, ref1 obesity, ref1 obscenity, see bad language Observer, ref1 O’Donnell, Sir Gus, ref1, ref2 Ofcom, ref1 Oliver, Jamie, ref1, ref2, ref3 Olmstead, Frederick, ref1 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), ref1 One Tree Hill, ref1 open space, see public open space opium, ref1 in laudanum, ref1, ref2 Royal Commission on, ref1 Wars, ref1 see also drugs, recreational Orange Lodge, ref1 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 d’Ortous de Mairan, Jean-Jacques, ref1 Osbourne, Ozzie, ref1 Oswald, Ian, ref1 Oxford, murders in, ref1 Oz, ref1 Paddick, Brian, ref1 paedophobia, ref1 Paine, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3 Palmerston, Lord, ref1 Panorama, ref1 Pantazis, Christina, ref1, ref2 pantomime, ref1, ref2 Papago people, drinking culture among, ref1 parasol, see umbrella Parental Advisory Scheme, ref1 Parliament: Acts of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 and agricultural revolution, ref1 and coalition government, ref1 House of Commons, ref1, ref2 House of Lords, ref1, ref2 and Internet, ref1 kitsch fancy dress in, ref1 and obscenity, ref1 and public health, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and social capital, ref1 State Opening of, ref1 televised, ref1 see also monarchy Partridge, Eric, ref1 paruresis, ref1 Pauper Pedigree Project, ref1 Paxton, Joseph, ref1 Payne, Sarah, ref1 Pearl Harbor, ref1 pedagogy, ref1 Peel Park, ref1 Peel, Sir Robert, ref1, ref2 penal code, ref1 Pennsylvania Railroad, ref1 Pentagon, ref1 People’s Palace, ref1 Peplau, Letitia Anne, ref1 Pepys, Samuel, ref1, ref2, ref3 Peru, ref1 Peter Pan (Barrie), ref1 philanthropy, ref1, ref2 Philips Park, ref1 Phillips, Pearson, ref1 The Philosophy of Sleep (Macnish), ref1 Pickles, Eric, ref1 Pitlochry, ref1 Plato, ref1 Plough Green, ref1 Plumstead Common, ref1 Poitiers, Battle of, ref1 Poland, ref1, ref2 police: affection for, ref1 beat constable, ref1 passim characteristic helmets of, ref1 on demonisation of young people, ref1, ref2, ref3 in Kansas, ref1 and neighbourhood policing, ref1 patrol cars adopted by, ref1 targets for, ref1 see also crime; Dixon, George; knife crime; Morse, Ch.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

The ‘Paleo Diet’ is a popular fad that eschews processed foods and carbohydrates in favour of the only foods imagined to be available to the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic: no dairy or processed grains, no lentils, beans, peas or other human designed veg. Nuts are OK, but no peanuts, as they’re a farmed product. It is almost certainly built on bunkum foundations, as indeed most fad diets are. By the time of the agricultural revolution, we see multiplication and expansion of genes that encode salivary amylase, an enzyme in your spittle that initiates the digestion of complex molecules. Some people have eighteen copies of it, but chimpanzees only have two. Amylase digests starchy, carbohydrate rich foods, and helps generate glucose from them, which would provide much needed energy for the evolving and highly energetic brain.

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As with all fad diets it probably works a bit, but not because of the content of the diet itself, but because the act of dieting prompts people to eat less and think more about their food, and not to shovel huge portions of pasta or chips on their supper plates. So go ahead and diet, but don’t pretend that it’s based on some evolutionary precedent. And remember that whatever we did in the deep past, we live longer and better now than at any point in the history of humankind. Regardless, the agricultural revolution that occurred at the beginning of the current epoch, the Holocene, coincided with the first evidence for farming, even though the reasons for this revolution remain unclear. But it did irreversibly change everything. This transition to a domestic life fundamentally changed us in our bones and our genes, as we’ll see soon.

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I like to ponder how entirely unnatural they are, how they’ve been designed and built over thousands of years, how the hedgerows – so critical to the biodiversity of the land – were put there by people to separate crops and animals and predators and property. Even the coarse wild brush in the highlands of Scotland and much of northern England has been grazed and unnaturally tended and grazed again continually for millennia. Estimates are that the hunter-gatherers who were all but wiped out by the agricultural revolution numbered around 2 million 12,000 years ago. Agriculture spread like a virus over the continents from its birth somewhere in the Middle East (and dotted in other spots in Africa and China), and would be the dominant business of humans for most of the rest of history. Farming today is industrial, and dominated by monolithic corporations who control almost all the food we eat.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

What if the healthiest responses to the rise of nativism and the politics of hate and the environmental and social crises we now face were far more likely to come from the more conservative (but also more conservationist) land rather than from more liberal, techno-enthusiast urban bastions? Something profound happened to the human mind when the agricultural revolution turned us from an overwhelmingly nomadic species into an overwhelmingly sedentary one. The original meaning of ‘economy’ (οικονομός, oikonomós) was management of the household. The oxymoronic nature of the modern phrase ‘global economy’– calling ‘management of the home’ the act of burning said home to the ground – has been lost on us for far too long.

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Viewed like this, our development since becoming a sedentary species, five minutes or 10,000 years ago, might be seen as an open parenthesis. Covid-19 allows us to pause, and consider whether we should close it. Before you ask, I am not suggesting that we go back to living in trees or caves. I am no neo-Luddite, and I am grateful for the many gifts bequeathed to us by the agricultural revolution. But the time has come for our civilisation to break with the Othering phase of our development, just as children do, and to start treating ourselves, each other and the rest of nature as different parts of the same metabolism. We have spent the vast majority of our time on earth in small groups of less than one hundred nomads, on the move, certainly, but above all experts of the local.

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Aaron (ranch mechanic, Montana) 3, 4, 5, 7–8, 14, 166, 234 Abkhazia 175–7, 178 Achour, Mouloud 124, 125 Afghanistan 3, 9, 10, 84, 140 Africa 20–1, 44, 53, 83–4, 96–7, 220 African American immigrants in 63, 67–8, 114–15 China, African immigrants in 130–9 climate change and 90, 217 emigration to 83–5, 93–9, 100, 102, 107, 114–15, 119, 122, 229, 236 entrepreneurship in 75–90 Europe, African migrant journeys to 9, 122, 148–50, 152, 157, 160, 238 Europe, African refugees in 9, 148–57, 158, 161, 167, 229, 236, 238 France, African immigrants in 38, 52, 115, 124 gerontocracy in 126–7 ‘out of Africa’ migration of early humans 9, 18, 69 racism in 7, 115 US, African immigrants in 1–8, 12, 13–14, 21–2, 47, 59, 68, 133, 206, 218, 224, 232–4, 233, 234, 235, 238, 241 African American 44, 111–15 agricultural revolution 222, 227, 228 air travel 73, 198, 214, 216–18 Allt, Nicky 59–63, 68, 220, 229 Al Sarajj, Mustafa 179–82 American Civil War (1861–5) 1 American dream 20, 35, 72, 73, 81, 196, 211, 234 American Exceptionalism 28, 35 American Family Radio 3 Amore Gelato 143–4 Andreotti, Vanessa 238 Aneesa (entrepreneur) 75–6, 79, 80, 81, 82 anywheres (self-perceived as mobile, educated and progressive) and somewheres (more grounded and ‘real’, conservatives rooted in the place of their birth) divide 41, 223, 234, 236 Anzisha Prize 99 Apothéose (group of rappers) 45–6, 48 Arabo-centrism 24–5 Asquith, James 195 asylum seekers 152, 158, 161, 167 see also refugees Atsoko 84–5 Attali, Jacques 188, 195 Augustine of Hippo: The City of God 20–1 Australia 1, 47, 72, 73, 96, 161, 162, 178 emigration to London from 102–7 migration to 72–3, 102–4, 126, 140 Austria 24, 26, 36, 41, 42, 47, 62 banlieue, Paris 51, 55, 115 ‘Barrez-vous!’

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Finally, agriculture did not lead to working less—rather, humans now had to toil on the land and their quality of life became far worse. See S. Lev-Yadun et al. (2000), “The cradle of agriculture,” Science 288(5471), 1602–1603; C. Larsen (2006), “The Agricultural Revolution as environmental catastrophe: Implications for health and lifestyle in the Holocene,” Quaternary International 150(1), 12–20; and G. Barker (2006), The Agricultural Revolution of prehistory: Why did foragers become farmers? (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 39. A wheel is not just a circular object that can rotate, but also one that attaches to an axle bearing (a bearing being something that can support or bear something else).

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When we gaze at the world, we also see a myriad of natural systems: the changing weather as snowflakes fall, the movement of the wings of a dragonfly, the motion of tidal waves—all amenable to an if-and-then pattern analysis, and which we can use to make predictions: if there are cumulonimbus clouds in the sky, and there is thunder, then there will be severe weather.15 Such a prediction can be a very useful early-warning system. With other natural systems, once we have analyzed the if-and-then rule, we can control the system, as when humans invented agriculture. (For example, if a tomato seed is in the soil, and the soil is moist, then the seed will grow into a tomato.) The agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago transformed how humans lived, from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle that enabled us to feed our families, to the first farms that then enabled us to feed a whole village. Or consider another natural system. The invention of medicine, unique to humans, answered specific questions, such as “Why did my headache go away?”

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Each time, forests grew back rapidly over empty agricultural land and drew down carbon dioxide. If Ruddiman is right, climate has been a human artifact, a highly sensitive one, for a long time. “The end of nature,” to use Bill McKibben’s famous book title, didn’t begin two hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution but ten thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution. Farm and pasture land now takes up over a third of the world’s ice-free land surface. Ruddiman notes that “farming is not nature, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that humans have yet achieved.” Furthermore, “A good case can be made that people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person

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From 1998 to 2004, he was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and during that time he wrote an important book, The Doubly Green Revolution (1999). It noted the shortcomings of the original green revolution (excessive water use, excessive advantage to rich farmers, neglect of soil maintenance) and proposed how to remedy them. Conway expects the doubly green agricultural revolution to expand opportunities for the poorest farmers and to emphasize conserving natural resources and the environment while using GE to increase yield yet further. “Our capacity to build ecology into the seed,” he writes, “is largely a consequence of modern biotechnology.” The new “gene revolution” will be more adroit than the green revolution for two reasons but harder to implement for one reason, which he is trying to fix.

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“Greenpeace will fight to keep GE bananas, cassava, and sorghum from poor countries’ fields, just as it will keep opposing golden rice, says Janet Cotter of Greenpeace’s Science Unit in London.” That quote was in an April 2008 issue of Science. • A journalist I know, Gregg Zachary, wrote in 2008 about a little-noticed agricultural revolution going on in Africa:Exports of vegetables, fruits, and flowers, largely from eastern and southern Africa, now exceed $2 billion a year, up from virtually zero a quarter-century ago. . . . “The driver of agriculture is primarily urbanization,” observes Steve Wiggins, a farm expert at London’s Overseas Development Institute.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

., ‘Avoidable Mortality in Estonia: Exploring the Differences in Life Expectancy Between Estonians and Non-Estonians in 2005–2007’, Public Health, 125, 754–62. Brynjolfsson, E., and McAfee, A. (2012), Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating (Digital Frontier Press). Chambers, J. D., and Mingay, G. E. (1966), The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1850 (London: B. T. Batsford). Clark, G. (2002), The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, Working Paper, University of California, Davis. ———— (2005), ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004’, Journal of Political Economy, 113, 1307–40. Deane, P. (1969), The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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On the role the system plays in allowing personal control of private data, see Priisalu and Ottis (2017); on the use of the system by private sector companies, see Paide et al. (2018). Logistics and the labour market Data on transport and logistics in the labour market are from Statistics Estonia, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (US) and the Office for National Statistics (UK). The early agricultural revolution On the importance of crop innovations and how these ideas diffused across the UK, see Overton (1985); on improvements to livestock breeding by Robert Bakewell, see Wykes (2004). On the importance of mechanization in farming and of how individual farmers are promoters of change, see Fox and Butlin (eds.) (1979).

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OECD (2018), ‘Bridging the Rural Digital Divide’, OECD Digital Economy Papers, No. 265 (Paris: OECD). Overton, M. (1985), ‘The Diffusion of Agricultural Innovations in Early Modern England: Turnips and Clover in Norfolk and Suffolk, 1580–1740’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (2), 205–221. ———— (1996), Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Paide, K., Pappel, I., Vainsalu, H., and Draheim, D. (2018), ‘On the Systematic Exploitation of the Estonian Data Exchange Layer X-Road for Strengthening Public-Private Partnerships’, in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV’18, April.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In part for the reasons mentioned above, it is difficult to see why agriculture would stop after a collapse. If the world population shrank to eighty million, it is extremely likely that enough survivors would have knowledge of agriculture. The last time the world population was eighty million, in 2500 BC, we were already well into the agricultural revolution. Even if the global population fell to tens of thousands, it is still likely that some of the survivors would have knowledge of agriculture. Moreover, we would be in a much better position to maintain agriculture relative to people in 2500 BC. It took thousands of years for us to domesticate wild plants to make them better suited to farming, slowly (and mainly inadvertently) selecting those plants that bore the highest yields.

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Moreover, average human wellbeing has not increased inexorably upwards throughout all of human history. While living standards today are undoubtedly much higher than they were in preindustrial agricultural societies, our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, from the dawn of Homo sapiens up until the agricultural revolution around ten thousand years ago, probably had higher average wellbeing than early agriculturalists. As people relied more on agriculture, their height—a good indicator of nutrition and health—usually declined compared to that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.41 There is even some evidence that, in some ways, the lives of preagricultural hunter-gatherers were quite attractive compared to the life of the average person alive today.42 Although measurement is difficult, on average, the working hours of modern hunter-gatherers are not dramatically different from those in modern industrial societies, and for some hunter-gatherers they are much lower.43 Moreover, many hunter-gatherers enjoy their work—after all, hunting is a popular recreational activity for many people today.

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Slavery is absent today among what are (erroneously) known in the literature as socially “simple,” highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, who are probably most similar to preagricultural human societies (Kelly 2013, Chapter 9). Slavery likely only became widespread after the emergence of sedentary societies following the agricultural revolution. Any estimate of the fraction of the population enslaved since then necessarily involves some guesswork. But the evidence that exists suggests that in many agricultural societies, around 10 to 20 percent of the population was enslaved. For example, in the second millennium AD, as much as one-third of the population of Korea was enslaved.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

A powerful reason for maintaining the strict social order had unobtrusively disappeared, leaving behind a set of social prescriptions whose obsolescence would slowly be discovered. Nothing could have so dramatically distinguished England from the rest of Europe with its last general famine in 1819, not to mention the rest of the world, which still wrestles with failing food supplies. Despite the dislocations of the Agricultural Revolution, it improved everyone’s life chances. Inland trading in foods and other goods became denser. A single national market, the largest, free trading zone in Europe, took shape. This countrywide commercial network created another bulwark against famine because rarely did crop failures hit all regions at the same time.

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After a generation without famines, spenders and investors could shed the caution associated with fear and begin to take a few risks with their savings. There is no direct connection between more effective farming and the ingenious engineering of new machines that ushered in a new age in manufacturing. The Agricultural Revolution could not produce the inventions central to industrialization, but without its bounteous harvests, those inventions would have been confined to that small part of the economy not dedicated to growing food for the whole. Unlike the earlier quickening pace in commerce, the production of more food with less money and fewer workers released the vital resources of people and capital for a variety of other economic activities, some of them previously unimaginable.

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Millions of these men and women would cross the Atlantic to establish a European beachhead in North and South America while their sisters and brothers became part of an emerging proletariat. Present-day famines remind us of the complex challenge of feeding a society. They also make us aware of how an agricultural revolution made capitalism possible. COMMENTARY ON MARKETS AND HUMAN NATURE THE EAST INDIA COMPANY began importing colorful calicoes and ginghams at the end of the seventeenth century. After spending lifetimes wearing heavy wools and linens, ordinary Englishmen and women reacted with enthusiasm to this opportunity to wear light, bright fabrics.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 BC, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.1 Even the present rate of growth will produce impressive results if maintained for a moderately long time.

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If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the past fifty years, then the world will be some 4.8 times richer by 2050 and about 34 times richer by 2100 than it is today.2 Yet the prospect of continuing on a steady exponential growth path pales in comparison to what would happen if the world were to experience another step change in the rate of growth comparable in magnitude to those associated with the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The economist Robin Hanson estimates, based on historical economic and population data, a characteristic world economy doubling time for Pleistocene hunter–gatherer society of 224,000 years; for farming society, 909 years; and for industrial society, 6.3 years.3 (In Hanson’s model, the present epoch is a mixture of the farming and the industrial growth modes—the world economy as a whole is not yet growing at the 6.3-year doubling rate.)

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The craft was practiced in China during the Tang Dynasty around AD 600 (and might have been in use as early as AD 200), but was mastered by Europeans only in the eighteenth century.7 Wheeled vehicles appeared in several sites across Europe and Mesopotamia around 3500 BC but reached the Americas only in post-Columbian times.8 On a grander scale, the human species took tens of thousands of years to spread across most of the globe, the Agricultural Revolution thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution only hundreds of years, and an Information Revolution could be said to have spread globally over the course of decades—though, of course, these transitions are not necessarily of equal profundity. (The Dance Dance Revolution video game spread from Japan to Europe and North America in just one year!)

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

In the emerging next stage of economic thought, we might reframe the role of nature in terms of eco-system and commons, which we collectively cultivate and steward for the well-being of future generations and the whole (4.0). THE JOURNEY FROM 0.0 TO 3.0 The transition from 0.0 to 1.0 was marked by an agricultural revolution. As long as humans limited their economic activities to harvesting and hunting in order to feed and clothe themselves, their impact on nature was limited. But when people started to settle in one place and to cultivate the land, they began to interfere more deeply with the natural ecosystem.

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As indicated in table 3, earlier in this chapter, the concept of capital has changed significantly over the course of human and economic history.24 THE JOURNEY FROM 0.0 TO 3.0: NATURAL, HUMAN, INDUSTRIAL, AND FINANCIAL CAPITAL Capital was not in the vocabularies of 0.0 societies. From today’s view, 0.0 economies used capital in the form of physical tools and indigenous wisdom to relate to the natural cycles of Mother Nature. Nor was the word used during the Agricultural Revolution, in what we’re calling 1.0. Instead, advanced forms of physical equipment, craftsmanship, and knowledge of how to use tools were examples of capital. In the Middle Ages, capital meant financial assets that people invested in businesses. What we know as capital began in the British colonial empire as merchant capital and later morphed into industrial capital.

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THE JOURNEY FROM 0.0 TO 3.0: FROM CONSUMERISM TO CONSCIOUS CONSUMPTION Viewed from this angle, what does the journey of the economy look like? As we have already discussed, this journey has evolved through stages. In the 0.0 stage, economic activities were subsistence driven—that is, driven by the immediate needs of a local community. In 1.0, the production function began to differentiate through the Agricultural Revolution as production became more methodical and intentional. In the 2.0 economy, the differentiation of the production function continued, resulting in the first Industrial Revolution. Mass production led to mass consumption. Professional advertising, sales strategies, and product design slowly became part of the industrial management process.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Yields of cereal crops soared in England, a combined result of nitrogen-enriching clover and manure, tools for deeper plowing, more livestock for manure and labor, and new seeds that increased edible portions of the harvest along with other agricultural improvements. The impact was so colossal that the period is termed the agricultural revolution. The result of the revolution was a surplus of food. Whether the surplus spurred England’s industrial revolution of the eighteenth century or the other way around is impossible to say. Whether the times truly ushered in an abrupt revolution or a slower evolution is also a debatable point.

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Viola, D. Watts, R. Wittig, R. Wrangham, K. Zuberbühler, S. Pääbo, and L. Vigilant. 2012. Generation times in wild chimpanzees and gorillas suggest earlier divergence times in great ape and human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:15716–15721. Larsen, C. 2006. The agricultural revolution as environmental catastrophe: Implications for health and lifestyle in the Holocene. Quaternary International 150:12–20. ———. 2009. Emergence and evolution of agriculture: The impact in human health and lifestyle. Pages 3–13 in W. Pond, B. Nichols, and D. Brown, eds., Adequate Food for All: Culture, Science, and Technology of Food in the 21st Century.

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Nutrition Reviews 67 (Suppl. 1):S56–S61. Zimmerman, C. 1932. Ernst Engel’s law of expenditures for food. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 47:78–101. INDEX Africa failure of Green Revolution to reach, 182 introduced species, 150 locust plagues, 145 pest management, 152 wheat rust, 183 Age of Discovery, 94, 97 Agricultural revolution, 81 Agriculture birth of, 53, 56 Chinese, 75–78 corn, 60, 133–136, 148 four-course system, 80–81 genetically engineered crops, 168 greenhouse gases from, 196–197 pesticide use in, 154–155 rice, 176–178 slash-and-burn, 60, 65, 69–70 soybeans, 138–140 three-field system, 80 wheat, 136–138, 172–176 See also Farming and farmers Al-Haytham, Ibn, 72 Algal bloom, 118–120 Amaranth, 194 Amazon region, farming in, 59–60 Ambrosia beetles, farming by, 9 American crows, learning by, 40 Ammonia, 63–64, 108, 109 Animals domestication of, 52–53 transport to New World, 94–95, 97 use for power, 73, 74–75, 78–81, 97, 98, 123, 141 Antony Gibbs & Sons, 89, 90 Ants farming by, 9 fire, 155 insecticide use to control, 155 leaf-cutter, 149 Aping, 44 Arctic, 35–37 Arsenic, 151, 156, 169 Artificial breeding, 127–128 Asia, rice breeding in, 176–178 Asimov, Isaac, 65–66 Aswan dams, 72 Atmosphere greenhouse effect, 20–21 greenhouse gases in, 121–125, 196–197 of Mars, 21 nitrogen in, 62 solar wind as threat to, 21, 22 Aurora australis, 21 Aurora borealis, 21 Australia, locust plagues in, 146 Australopithecine, 48 Azotobacter, 63, 109 Aztec, 93 Bacillus thuringiensis, 168 Bacteria of early Earth, 30 nitrogen cycling and, 63–65 Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de, 94 Bangladesh, increase in overweight people in, 194 BASF, 109, 110 Beachell, Henry, 177 Beans in China, 75 New World origin of, 93 nitrogen and, 62–63, 75 soybeans, x, 138–140, 186, 193 Bennett, Merrill, 142–143, 144, 191, 192 Bergius, Friedrich, 109 Biofuels, 198 Biotechnology, criticisms of, 186–187 Birds guano from, 88–92 pesticide effects on, 160–162 protecting crops from, 151 Birth rates, 6 Black Death, 80 Blended inheritance, 129, 132 Blue-green algae, 63 Bolivia, 90, 91 Bone meal, 113 Bone Valley, Florida, 116 Bones, phosphorus from, 113–116 Borlaug, Norman on Africa, 182 on criticisms of Green Revolution, 182–183 in Mexico, 172–174 Nobel Peace Prize, 179, 181 on pest reappearance, 184 on pesticide use, 164, 169 on poverty, 181 view of biotechnology, 187 Bosch, Carl, 109 Boserup, Ester, 13–14 Bottlenose dolphin, 41, 42 Bowen, Samuel, 139 Boyd, Robert, 38, 45 Brain evolution of human, 42–43 intelligent, 40 Brandt, Hennig, 66 Brazil deforestation, ix–xi diet transformation in, 192 overweight people, 194 soybean production, x Breastfeeding, 57 Britain, guano trade, 90–91 Bt crops, 168, 186 Bubonic plague, 80 Buffalo bones, phosphorus from, 114 Calories burned to produce food, 122 Canals, 71 Capron, Horace, 138 Capuchin monkeys, 44 Carbon, cycling of, 23–24, 26–27, 125 Carbon dioxide global warming and, 27 as greenhouse gas, 121, 196, 202 nitrous oxide compared to, 121 in photosynthesis, 74 temperature effect on atmospheric, 27 from volcanoes, 24, 26, 27 weathering and, 26 Carnivore, 74 Carson, Rachel, 161–163, 169 Carter, Jimmy, 182 Cassava mealybug, 150, 167 Catton, William, Jr., 13 Chemical poisonings, 167–168 Children, number of, 6 Chile, 90, 91 Chimpanzee, 43–44, 45, 48 China agriculture in ancient, 75–78 diet transformation, 191–192 pest control in, 151 soybean domestication in, 139 Cholera, 77, 86 Chrysanthemum, 151, 152, 154, 158, 167, 169 Cities, growth of population in, 5 Civilization farming link to, 8 food as engine of, 7–10 overshoot and, 13–14 Clear Lake, California, 160–161 Climate agriculture’s impact on, 196–197 change from greenhouse gases, 125 fluctuations in, 43 shift from foraging to farming and, 55–56 Clover, 62–63, 75, 78, 80–82 Coal energy from, 81–82 industrial revolution and, 81–82 opening of energy bottleneck by, 123 steam engine tractors, 123 Coffee, as New World commodity, 96 Collar harnesses, 78 Colorado potato beetle, 158–159 Columbus, Christopher, 10, 93–94 Comets, 30 Communication by animals, 50 cumulative learning, 44–46 genetic inheritance, 39 language, 50–51 transition to cooked meals and, 49 Continents, 24–25 Continuously Habitable Zone, 20 Cooking, 49 Corals, phosphorus from, 116 Corn, 133–136 as biofuel, 198 Bt, 168, 186 farming in Amazon region, 60 fungal disease of, 148 high-fructose corn syrup, 193 origin of, 53–54, 93 Cortés, Hernando, 94 Cotton, Bt, 168, 186 Cows, greenhouse gases released in production of, 196 Crick, Francis, 186 Crookes, Sir William, 105–106, 107, 108, 136, 141 Crop rotation in China, 75–76 in Egypt, 78 in Europe, 80 Crops, genetically engineered, 168, 186 Crosby, Alfred, 94 Cross-fertilization, 130–131 Crows, tool use by, 48 Culsius, Carolus, 98 Culture cumulative learning and, 45–46 defined, 37, 45 evolution of, 38, 39 genes and, 46 role in human evolution, 37–38 Cumulative learning, 44–46, 49, 50 Dairy farming, 46 Dalrymple, Oliver, 123 Dams, 101, 124 Darwin, Charles hybrid vigor principle, 129 inbreeding, 128–129 natural selection and, 37–38, 127–128 On the Origin of Species, 128 Dawkins, Richard, 10 DDT.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF POWER ARE TIMELESS Consider two technological shifts that transformed how humans live and relate to one another. The first occurred about ten thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution—the farming of crops and the domestication of animals—turned our ancestors away from nomadic wandering to permanent settlements.3 No longer required to spend every waking hour searching for food, a few group members could now engage in activities other than hunting and gathering. The agricultural revolution changed the distribution of power on two levels: geographically, by favoring societies rich in farming resources, like domesticated animals, crops, and farming technology; and within those societies, by liberating a new social class to devote their time to intellectual, technical, commercial, and political pursuits that further consolidated their hold on power.4 Much later, in the mid-1400s, the course of human society was radically changed again by the invention of movable type.

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For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. 2008 financial crisis, 118, 126 48 Laws of Power, The (Greene), 19 Aakash’s story, 82–84 abuse of power, 21, 37, 43, 110–13 access to valued resources changing power balance, 8–13, 194 collective choices, 195 expanding networks for, 194 Ning’s story, 61, 63–64 personal data surveillance, 151–54 purposeful use of technology and, 148, 150 reclaiming democratic power, 197 Adbusters, 118 Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The (Zuboff), 152 agitation, 118–20, 137, 154, 195, 196, 238n7 agricultural revolution, 142 AI Now Institute, 160 Aladdin, x algorithms, 148–51, 153, 158–60 Alighieri, Dante, 41 Alinsky, Saul D., 20 Allegory of Good and Bad Government, The (Lorenzetti), 165 Allen, Danielle, 186 Alphabet Workers Union, 157–58 altruism, 26, 30–31, 36–38, 55, 196 Amazon, 112, 152, 153, 157, 159 Amnesty International, 156 Andersen, Lene Rachel, 187, 188, 258n83 Anderson, Cameron, 211n25, 212n10, 212n13, 230n12, 250n3 Anderson, Elizabeth, 177 antitrust legislation, 11, 159 apartheid, 117 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 218n18, 220n34 Apple, 113, 151, 153, 157, 158 Arab Spring, 109, 117, 118 Ardern, Jacinda, 53–54 Arendt, Hannah, 96 Argentina’s marriage equality story, 131–37, 242n34 Argentine LGBT Federation, 133–37, 242n34 Aristotle, 55, 57 artificial intelligence (AI), 148–49 Associação Saúde Criança (Instituto DARA), 28 attention economy, 152–53 attraction strategy, 8–11, 9, 12, 194 Austen, Jane, 46 authoritarianism, xvii, 36–38, 43, 122, 152, 185 authority-power relationship, 66–68, 69–70, 73 #BalanceTonPorc, 137 Banaji, Mahzarin R., 231n19, 231n20, 233n48 Banerjee, Abhijit V., 114 Barefoot College’s innovation, 144–46, 148, 161 Bastida, Xiye, 121–24 Beard, Mary, 101 Beauvoir, Simone de, 102 belonging, 2, 7, 58, 82, 105, 118, 133, 168, 187, 194, 221n40 See also valued resources: affiliation benefit corporations (B-Corps), 176 Bentham, Jeremy, 151, 245n30 Berners-Lee, Tim, 147, 148 betweenness, 79–81, 79, 153 Bhatia, Karan, 157 bias algorithmic, 150–51 fundamental attribution error, 16 negativity bias, 19 status quo bias, 74 confirmation bias, 88 See also stereotypes, racism, gender inequality BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), 88, 117, 151, 196 Björkman, Tomas, 187, 188, 258n83 Black Lives Matter movement, 117, 139, 141, 147–48 Black Voters Matter Fund, 190 Blau, Peter M., 261n4 Bloomberg, Michael, 130 Boards of Directors, 66, 86–89, 91–92, 128–130, 157, 169, 174–177, 188 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, 231n26, 232n34 Brass, Daniel J., 226n12 Brave New World (Huxley), 164 Brock, Timothy, 135 Brodsky, Greg, 162–63 Brown, LaTosha, 190–91 Browner, Carol, 80, 81, 84 Buddhism, 32–33 Buffett, Warren, 114 Buolamwini, Joy, 150 Burke, Tarana, 137 Burt, Ronald S., 227n25, 228n36, 236n66 Business Roundtable, 175–76 Caesar, Julius, 101 Cailliau, Robert, 147, 148 Capital (Marx), 110 Carnegie, Andrew, 110–11 Caro, Robert A., 14–15 Carus, Titus Lucretius, 41 caste system, 91–92 Castells, Manuel, 199, 231n26, 239n2, 261n9 Catholic Church, 131, 135 certified coaches, 5, 209n4 change-makers, 74, 78 Channapatna artisans, 47, 50 chattel slavery, 91–92 checks on power, 165–92 collective responsibility, 189–92 employee representation, 177–82 organizational power sharing, 167–73, 191–92 oversight and accountability, 173–77 societal power sharing, 182–84, 192, 256n63 structural limits, 165–66 See also civic education and engagement, civic vigilance Chenoweth, Erica, 124 Chomsky, Noam, 219n25, 257n77 Cialdini, Robert B., 210n15, 227n23 Citizens United, 118 civic education and engagement, 184–88 civic vigilance, 184–86, 192, 257n74, 257n79 Civil Rights Act, 14 Clegg, Stewart, 236n64, 262n22 Cleisthenes, 182, 256n63 climate science, 45–46 Clinton, Bill, 80 Coats, Michael, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171 Code of Hammurabi, 100–01 codetermination, 181 Cohen, Joshua, 257n75, 259n96 collective action consolidation strategy, 11–12, 111, 112 Google employees story, 154–58 keeping power in check, 192 power distribution responsibility, 195 shifting power balance and, 115, 178–79 collective movements, 117–39 agitation, 118–20, 137, 154, 195, 196, 239n6 digital technology and, xvii, 137–39, 154–58, 242n40 innovation, 119–20, 125–30, 147–49, 154, 195, 196 orchestration, 119–20, 131–37, 154, 195, 196 public agenda and, 120–25 shifting power balance, 115 collective orientation, 32, 36, 195 collective responsibility, 189–92 Community Interest Companies, 176 concentration of wealth, 162, 175–76, 189–90 confirmation bias, 88 Confucius, 55 consolidation strategy, 8, 9, 11–12, 111, 112, 142, 194 Contract with America (Gingrich), 80 Cook, Tim, 158 cooperatives, 162–63, 179–81 Cordeiro, Vera, 27–29, 33, 38–39, 166 Courpasson, David, 247n57, 262n22 COVID-19, 38, 49, 176 Creighton, Mandell, 24 CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), 162, 164, 249n79 Crozier, Michel, 225n6 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 42 Cuddy, Amy J.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

CHAPTER 8 Tools for the Transition to Sustainability We must be careful not to succumb to despair, for there is still the odd glimmer of hope. -EDOUARD SAOUMA, 1993 Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability? Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes: the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries. Those revolutions were gradual, spontaneous, and largely unconscious. This one will have to be a fully conscious operation, guided by the best foresight that science can provide.... If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity's stay on the Earth.

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Some people could live on excess food produced by others. They could become full-time toolmakers, musicians, scribes, priests, soldiers, athletes, or kings. Thus arose, for better or worse, guilds, orchestras, libraries, temples, armies, competitive games, dynasties, and cities. As its inheritors, we think of the agricultural revolution as a great step forward. At the time it was probably a mixed blessing. Many anthropologists think that agriculture was not a better way of life, but a necessary one to accommodate increasing populations. Settled farmers got more food from a hectare than hunter-gatherers did, but the food was of lower nutritional quality and less variety, and it required much more work to produce.

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As wants multiplied, as markets grew more and more far-flung, the bond between humans and the rest of nature was reduced to the barest instrumentalism.' That bare instrumentalism led to incredible productivity and a world that now supports, at varying levels of sufficiency, 6,000 million people more than 600 times the population existing before the agricultural revolution. Far-flung markets and swelling demands drive environmental exploitation from the poles to the tropics, from the mountaintops to the ocean depths. The success of the industrial revolution, like the previous successes of hunting-gathering and of agriculture, eventually created its own scarcity, not only of game, not only of land, not only of fuels and metals, but of the total carrying capacity of the global environment.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

As we’ve seen, without chemical fertilizers farmland would deteriorate in fertility, but animal manure allows you to return nutrients to the soil. Furthermore, there is a particular class of crops that will naturally boost soil nitrogen levels for you, the incorporation of which was a crucial step in the agricultural revolution in the seventeenth century. In the immediate post-apocalyptic world, the husbandry of plants and of animals will once again become inseparable, mutually supporting endeavors. Throughout the Middle Ages, European farmers followed an agricultural convention of routinely leaving plots fallow—a woefully inefficient practice, as at any one time up to half of your fields would be growing no crops at all.

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These are often very specific to the plant they can attack, and so annually shifting, and not growing the same crop on a plot for several years, means that you can exert natural control without pesticides. The Norfolk four-course rotation is the most successful of these historical systems and became widespread only in the eighteenth century, spearheading the British agricultural revolution. In the Norfolk system, succession of crops through each plot follows the order: legumes, wheat, root crops, barley. As we have seen, growing legumes is intended to build up the soil’s fertility for the rest of the cycle. Clover and alfalfa grow well in the British climate, but in other regions you might be better off with soy or peanuts.

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* Even within Britain, the Norfolk four-course rotation is less effective on the heavy clay soils of the north and west, and so historically these regions focused on livestock pasturing and on manufacturing (and using their profits to buy grain from the south). * Using many of the advances discussed in this chapter, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the British agricultural revolution achieved a substantially greater production of food while simultaneously becoming less labor-intensive, and the fact that a decreasing proportion of farmers and agricultural laborers was needed to feed everyone else enabled greater urbanization. By 1850, Britain had the lowest proportion of farmers of any country in the world, with only one person in five working the fields to feed the entire nation.

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

It was around this time that some of our Neolithic ancestors in what is now the Middle East gave up their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, over numerous generations, began instead to cultivate crops, domesticate animals and form permanent settlements. This is, of course, not particularly long ago by the standards of human history – Homo sapiens had emerged anything up to 300,000 years earlier – but what is now known as the First Agricultural Revolution, or Agrarian Revolution, was the beginning of a settled, more densely populated life, helping bring about the development of new tools, then the specialisation of labour. In other words, the building blocks for modern civilisation. Any 21st-century human suddenly catapulted to one of these first villages would find life there hugely gruelling and overwhelmingly physical.

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It has long been known that modern humans have considerably less dense bones than similar-sized primates, something often linked to our distinctive upright walking stance. But a fascinating 2014 study by US and British academics found that bones from humans who lived in hunter-gatherer communities in North America around 7,000 years ago (the agricultural revolutions did not happen everywhere simultaneously) were as strong and dense as those now seen in orangutans. In contrast, bones examined from farmers who lived 700 years ago were 20 per cent lighter. The researchers concluded that this ‘gracility’ of the more modern skeleton, a rather lovely technical term meaning ‘slenderness’, was not caused by a changing diet, or by different body sizes as humans evolved, but simply because of reduced physical exertion.1 Such change has very modern consequences.

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For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. actin (protein) 40 active applause 176–7, 180, 271 Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 adenosine triphosphate (ATP) 40, 41, 276 Aldred, Rachel 119–20, 139 Alzheimer’s disease 5, 49, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Agricultural Revolution/Agrarian Revolution 15–16 Amager Bakke/Copenhill waste-burning energy plant, Denmark 134–5 Amish people 17–18, 208 anaerobic respiration 40 Annual Travel Survey 3 anxiety 5, 50, 57, 112 Araujo, Claudio Gil 229–32 Aspern, Vienna 140 asthma 10–11, 160, 172, 209 Atlas, Charles (Angelo Siciliano) 31 Barnet Graph of Doom 100–1 basal metabolic rate (BMR) 51, 158, 191 Better (non-profit social enterprise) 224 BeUpstanding 195–6 bike couriers 11–13 Biobank public health project 114 biophilia 133 Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 132–5, 138–9 Blackburn, Elizabeth 41–2 Blair, Steven 19–20, 21, 46, 169–72, 275–6 blood pressure 5, 41, 46, 48, 57, 75, 90, 160, 225, 227, 265 Boardman, Chris 124–5, 127, 137, 264 BodPod 172–3, 174 body mass index (BMI) 146–7, 150–2, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 193, 243 bone density/health 16–17, 22, 23, 44, 46, 49, 67, 101, 209, 223, 227–8 Boyd, Andrew 105–6 breast cancer 48, 160 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 64, 65, 80 Buchan, William: Domestic Medicine 63 Buchanan, Colin: Traffic in Towns 120–1 Buchanan, Nigel 203–4, 206, 207–8 Buchner, David 228 Bull, Fiona 98–9 Burden of Disease, WHO 47, 90 Burfoot, Amby 78, 79 Burnham, Andy 124, 264, 266 bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 Bushy Park Time Trial 250 calories 13, 19–20, 19n, 27, 51, 54, 75, 113, 114, 146, 148, 153, 155, 156–7, 158, 165–6, 169, 190 Cambridge University 64, 65–6, 187 cancer 5, 41, 48–9, 62, 79, 90, 114, 160, 186, 187, 227, 231–2 car children and 216, 219, 258, 263–4, 265, 272 electric 137, 268 lobby 263 social engineering and 254, 258 town/city planning and 110, 111, 113, 121, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 walking supplanted by 2, 3, 5, 53 cardiovascular activity 168–9, 209, 271–2 cardiovascular health bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 children and 2, 213 coronavirus and 265 diabetes and 95 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 inactivity first linked to 47–8 life expectancy and 93 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL)/triglycerides and 41, 43, 46, 185 mitochondria and 40, 41 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 sitting and 5, 185, 186, 187, 199 Centers for Disease Control (US government) 95, 228 chair 178–9 Chan, Margaret 152–3 children 22–3, 203–20, 235 adult health, movement in childhood and 11, 209–10 BMI and 51 bone density and 16, 23, 49, 67, 209–10 childhood movement diminishing into adolescence and onwards 11, 210–11 cycling and 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 decline in activity/inactivity statistics 1–2, 10–11, 22–3, 24, 203–11, 252–3, 254, 256 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 life expectancy and 97 obesity and 84, 152, 153, 252–3, 256–7 schools and see schools social care and 100 social engineering and 244, 245, 246, 247–9, 252–3 town/city planning and 121, 122–3, 130, 138, 139–40, 142, 216–20 cholesterol 43, 185, 242–3 cigarettes 10, 29, 47, 62, 75, 76, 79, 92, 98, 105, 176, 177, 242–4 cognitive function 5, 46, 49, 57, 87, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Coldbath Fields Prison, London 63–4 colon cancer 48 co-morbidity 89, 91 commuting 58, 111, 114–18, 125, 127–9, 148, 183, 184, 199–200, 221, 270, 273, 274 Cooper, Ashley 129 Cooper, Ken: Aerobics 78, 79 Copenhagen, Denmark 109–12, 122–3, 125, 134, 135, 184, 240 Coronary Heart Disease and Physical Activity of Work 61–2, 71–3 coronavirus pandemic 8–10, 13, 33, 88, 90, 100, 115, 116, 130, 138, 154, 172, 173, 182, 183, 192, 198, 201–2, 214, 240, 247, 248, 257, 259–61, 263, 264–9 Cregan-Reid, Vybarr: Primate Change 178–9, 189 Criado-Perez, Caroline: Invisible Women 141 cycling body fat and 173 calories and 113 car travel supplants 2, 3, 127, 217–18 children/schools and 121, 130, 214, 217, 237–8, 246, 247 commuting/everyday cycling for transport 7, 9, 13, 27–8, 34, 58, 104–5, 113, 114, 115–20, 129, 137, 177, 182, 183, 184, 199, 213, 254, 261, 265, 270, 272–3 couriers 11–13 Denmark and 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 239, 240, 249, 268 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 Finland and 236–8, 246, 247 heart attacks and 74 lanes/routes 9, 28, 82, 111, 119, 120–1, 122, 124, 130, 133, 192, 237, 246, 253–4, 265, 267–8 leg strength and 224, 231, 276 METs and 51, 52, 58, 115, 129 mortality and 114–20, 121 Netherlands and 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 239, 240, 249, 268 Olympics and 34 overweight people and 166 Peloton 31 postmen and 73 safety/road danger 28, 118–19, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Slovenia and 253–4 social engineering and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 share schemes 106 short car trips and 136, 137, 143 town/city planning and 33, 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143, 191, 192, 236–9, 246–7, 249, 253–4, 256, 263–4, 267–8 cytokines 42, 161, 162 Dahl, Roald 217–18 Daily Mile 203–7, 212–13, 214, 249, 251, 261, 262 Davies, Adrian 5, 35 dementia 5, 49, 87, 88, 226, 227, 229, 232–4 Denmark cycling in 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 137–8, 184, 239, 240, 249, 268 town/city planning in 109–12, 114–15, 121, 122–3, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132–5, 268 Department for Transport, UK 3 depression 5, 50, 106, 250 diabetes 88, 90, 95, 102, 186, 187, 192–3, 227 pre-diabetes 37, 59, 188 type 1 37, 94 type 2 4, 5, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48–9, 57, 89, 93–4, 99, 106–8, 129, 145, 146, 151, 160, 162–3, 167, 185, 193, 215, 222, 265 Diabetes UK 108 Disneyland 135–6 Dober Tek campaign 254–5 Doll, Richard 79 Donaldson, Liam 79 driverless cars 136, 137 Dunstan, David 192–3, 200 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) 126 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 electric vehicles 128–30, 135, 136–7, 268 endocrine system 42 Equinox (US gym chain) 32 Erickson, Kirk 226, 233–4, 275 exercise see individual exercise and area of exercise ‘fat and fit’ 147, 169–75 fat, body 42–4, 145, 146–7, 151, 161, 162, 165–6, 167, 169–75, 185, 188, 193, 242, 255 financial costs of inactivity 87–143 mortality and morbidity and 90–3 NHS/universal medical systems and 87–108 non-medical long-term action against preventable conditions and 102–8 social care and 100–2 total additional costs imposed on health services due to inactivity 94–5 Finland 236–47, 258 cycling in 236–8, 246, 247 Finnish Schools on the Move 211–12, 246, 252 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels and 252–3, 255 Helsinki central library 252 Network of Finnish Cycling Municipalities 247 social engineering in 236–47, 249, 252, 262, 264 Sports Act (1980) 245–6 Sports Act (1999) 246 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 see also individual place name Fitbit 54, 181 fitness industry 3, 31, 33, 34 fitness watches 116, 181, 270–1 food corporation lobby 148 ‘four by four’ threat (four most damaging NCDs) 90 Frauen-Werk-Stadt (Women’s Work City), Vienna 140–1 Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Frome, Somerset 141–3 Garmin 116, 181, 270–1 Gehl, Jan 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135, 184, 268, 275 Life Between Buildings 110, 122–3, 131 Gill, Tim 138, 218–20 No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society 219–20 Glasgow University 66, 68, 134, 163 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels 24, 252–3 glucose intolerance 37, 38, 167, 185, 192–3, 194 Gobec, Mojca 254–5 Googleplex, Mountain View 133, 196 Greater Manchester 124–5, 127, 264–6 gyms 1, 4, 26, 30–5, 51, 106, 149, 166, 167, 220–1, 223–4, 256, 276 Hartley, Sir Percival Horton-Smith 64–5 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 Harvard University 46, 52, 74, 76, 77, 134, 171 Haskell, William 26, 274 Hatano, Yoshiro 54 Health Education Authority 210 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 Healy, Genevieve 194–6, 274 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 see also cardiovascular health heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 see also cardiovascular health heart rate 13, 27, 53, 116, 117, 129, 181, 197, 270 Hidalgo, Anne 192 high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) 43, 185 Hillman, Mayer: One False Move 217–18 Hillsdon, Mervyn 79–80, 83, 84, 85 Hippocrates 63 Hobro, Denmark 131 hunter-gatherers 5, 15, 16, 17 Hunt, Jeremy 261–4 Imbeah, Alistair 224 inactivity financial costs of 87–143 see also financial costs of inactivity obesity and see obesity sitting and see sitting see also individual area and consequence of inactivity incidental activity (activity which takes place as part of your regular day) 27, 114, 220 individual responsibility 2, 30, 58, 148, 263 industrialisation 2, 30 inequality (of income and opportunity) 103 Ineos 205 inflammation 42, 48, 68, 161, 162, 223 Institute of Hygiene and Occupational Health, Sofia 165 insulin 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 57, 146, 161, 162 International Olympic Committee 81 International Space Station 44 Johnson, Boris 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 267 Kail, Eva 139–43 Kelly, Mark 44 Kelly, Phil 88–9, 96–7, 103–5, 107 Kelly, Scott 44 Keston, John 225 keto diet 146 King’s College Hospital, London 87–9, 91 Kiuru, Krista 238–9, 245 Korhonen, Nina 246, 248–9, 252 Kraus, Hans: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 lactic acid 40–1 Lancet, The 23, 46, 47, 73, 95, 98, 128, 153, 199, 210 Lean, Mike 163–4 Lee, I-Min 46, 47, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 274 Levine, James 189–92, 193, 194, 196–7, 199, 201 Lewis, Thomas 68, 71–2 life expectancy 91–2, 99, 221–2 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 lipaemia 43 liver 161, 186, 187 Longevity of Oarsmen study, The 64–5 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL) 43, 185 Lucas, Tamara 73–4, 83, 85 lung cancer 48, 79 lung function 5, 95–6 Lykkegaard, Kasper 181–2 Mackenzie, Richard 36–8, 43, 59, 117, 274–5 Maguire, Jennifer Smith 31, 32, 33 Mancunian Way, Manchester 124–5 Marin, Sanna 238 Marmot, Michael 82–3 ‘Matthew effect’ 206 Mayer, Jean 154–6, 157, 175 Physiological Basis of Obesity and Leanness 155–6 McGovern, Artie 31 meals, movement and processing of fats and sugars after 43–4, 167, 183, 188, 194, 272 mental health 49–50, 74, 204, 211 MET (metabolic equivalent) 51–2, 58, 115, 129, 178 metabolic disorders 5, 43, 49, 74, 95 see also individual disorder name metabolic rate 39, 51, 158, 191 micro mobility 135 Miliband, Ed 266–7 minimum amount of moderate activity needed to maintain health, recommended 116–17 mitochondria 41, 48, 167 Mitrovic, Polona Demšar 254 modal filtering 126 morbidity 89, 91–3, 160, 168–9, 227, 256–7 Morris, Annie 66–7 Morris, Jerry 61–3, 64, 65, 66–74, 75, 77, 79, 80–6, 152, 154, 241 Morris, Nathan 66–7, 83 Moscow 111, 112, 123 Mosley, Michael 229 movement decline of everyday 15–35 rediscovery of benefits of 61–86 see also individual type of movement muscle leg 224, 231, 276 skeletal 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 smooth 40 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 wastage 22, 42, 223–4 Muscular Christianity 30 myosin (protein) 40 ‘nanny state’ 9, 243–4, 262–3, 264, 265 NASA 44 National Fitness Survey (1990) 84 National Health Service (NHS) 9, 70, 101, 164, 179, 223, 266 cost of inactivity to 9, 89–90, 93–7, 101, 104, 106–7, 153–4 social prescribing 105–6 National Lottery 33 Nebelong, Helle 219–20 Netherlands 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 166, 239–40, 249, 268 Nieman, David 265 Niemi, Joonas 246, 248–9, 252 non-communicable diseases (NCDs) 90, 98 non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) 190–1, 194–5 North Karelia, Finland 241–3, 244, 245, 257 obesity 5, 19, 89, 98, 144–75, 215, 241 activity required to lose significant amounts of weight 144–7, 164–9 age and 152 basal metabolic rate and 158, 191 BMI and 146, 150–1, 160, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173 body fat percentage and 146–7, 151, 165, 167, 170, 172–4, 193 childhood and 84, 152, 153, 212 costs of 95, 153–4 crisis 152–3, 154, 157 deaths and 47, 90, 160, 163, 170, 171 energy balance and 154–9 exercise benefits for 59, 144–7, 156, 158, 159, 165–6, 167–8 ‘fat and fit’ 169–75 health conditions associated with 160–1 obesogenic foodscape and 148–9 sex and 152 Slovenia and 256–7 stigma 147, 149–50 sugar and 146, 148, 156, 166 waist circumference and 161–4, 169, 172 weight loss/Watson and 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 worldwide spread of 152–3 Odense, Denmark 130 Ojajärvi, Sanna 247 older people/ageing staying active and 220–35 town/city planning and 138–9 Old Order Mennonites community 208 Olympics 33–4, 124, 224, 228, 255 (1964) 54 (1996) 33, 81 (2000) 33 (2012) 23 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation 21–2, 26, 38, 54, 201, 270 active travel and 112 children and 207 commuting and 127–8 definitions of moderate and intense exercise 22 MET and 58 moderate activities, WHO list of possible 52 mortality and 45 older people and 222 strength training and 271–2 weight loss and 164 osteoporosis 16–17, 209, 227 Paffenbarger, Ralph 62, 64, 74, 75–82, 84–5, 101, 134, 225, 274 Paris 191–2, 197, 268 Parkrun 106, 249–51 pavement 120, 122, 124, 130, 140, 141, 237, 265, 268 pedometers 53–4 Peloton 31 personal choice, myth of 25–30 personal trainers 31 Peska, Pukka 46, 240–5, 257, 262–3 Physical Activity and Health (eds Bouchard, Blair, Haskell) 39 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee (PACAG) 45, 48, 57 physical activity level (PAL) 51 Pichai, Sundar 133 Policy Studies Institute 217 polypharmacy 89 portal theory 161 poverty 67, 68, 69, 82, 152, 180 Poynton, Frederic 68 protein 37, 40 Public Health England (PHE) 3, 22, 33, 57, 94–5, 97, 169, 269 Raab, Wilhelm: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 Radcliffe, Paula 36 ramp test 117–18 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 risk-averse culture 207, 219 road danger 28, 119, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Roehampton University 36, 117, 172 Rook, Sir Alan 65 Ross, Robert 149–50, 157, 160, 161–2, 163, 164, 168–9, 171, 173, 174, 175 Rost, Leon 132–4, 135, 136, 139 Royal College of General Practitioners 105 running 1, 3, 9 ageing and 225, 227, 275 ATP and 40 bone density and 16 childhood and 203–7, 209, 210, 212–13, 214, 215, 246, 255 exercise industry and 31 home running treadmills 147 METs and 51, 58 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 52, 201 overweight people and 167 Paffenbarger and 76, 77, 78–9, 80, 225 Parkrun 106, 249–51 ultrarunning 32 schools 20, 27, 30, 121, 210–20, 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252–7, 261–2 cycling to 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 English curriculum, physical education and 212, 248, 261–2 Finland and 211–12, 246, 252–3, 257 free school meals at 245 girls low activity levels in 204, 209, 210–11 Global Matrix 3.0 Physical Activity Report Card and 24, 252–3 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 playing fields 103, 107 Scottish schools curriculum, physical education and 212 sitting in 211–16 Slovenian 212, 255–7 social engineering and 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246 sedentary behaviour 177–202 see also sitting Sens 181–4, 271 short-termism 107 Sidewalk Labs 136 Sim, David: Soft City 123–4, 126–7 Sinton-Hewitt, Paul 250 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 sitting 5, 13, 24, 26, 39, 49, 54, 62, 72, 176–202, 211–16 active applause and 176–7, 180, 271 average amounts of 179 breaking up prolonged 176–7, 180, 181, 182, 190–1, 193, 194–5, 197, 200, 271, 275 chair and 178–9 diabetes and 185, 186, 187, 188, 192–4 exercise and effects of 184, 199–201 fidgeting and 190–1, 194–5 health effects of 176–7, 185–8 low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL)/triglycerides and 185 ‘new smoking’ headlines 177 schools and 211–16 sedentary behaviour defined 177–8 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 tracking/measuring 179–84 TV viewing and 178, 186, 187–8, 189, 192 workplace and 189–92, 195–9, 201–2 skeletal muscles 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 skinfold body fat test 173–4, 255 Skinner, James 21 sleep 5, 42, 50, 57, 184 Sleep, Leisure, Occupation, Transportation, and Home-based Activities (SLOTH) 25 Slofit programme 255–6 Slovenia 24, 212, 253–8, 261 Smith, Edward 63–4 smooth muscle 40 social care 97, 99–101, 108 social engineering 236–58 cycling and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 Finland and 236–47, 249, 252–3, 255, 257, 258 see also individual area of Finland kindergartens and 252 mortality rates and 240–5 ‘nanny state’ objections to 243–4 obesity and 241, 252–7 Parkrun 249–51 political support, need for complete 244–5 schools and 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 252–3, 255, 256, 257 Slovenia and 253–7, 258 sports facilities funding 245–6 tax and 245–6, 252 Youth Sports Trust, UK 247–9, 251 social medicine 61, 68–71, 83 Social Medicine Unit 61, 69–70 socialism 66, 67–8 social prescribers 105–6 Spevak, Harvey 32, 35 Sport England 34 stairs 28–9, 131–4 Starc, Gregor 255–7 St Mary’s Hospital, London 93 St Ninian’s primary school, Stirling, Scotland 203–7, 213 Stockholm, Sweden 141 Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests, Netherlands (1970s) 121, 240 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 stroke 5, 46, 61, 81, 89, 160, 180, 186, 267 technology, monitoring of activity levels and Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 activity trackers 38, 57, 116, 180–4, 200–1, 214–15, 269, 270–1 Sens activity tracker 181–4, 200–1, 214–15, 271 television viewing 26, 82–3, 121, 186–9, 192 telomeres 41–2, 226 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 Titmuss, Richard 68–9 town/city planning (built environment) 5, 28–9, 108, 109–43, 210 active travel and 109–43 Amager Bakke and 134–5 Buchanan and 120–1 cars, hegemony of 110, 111, 113, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–31, 135–8, 140, 141, 142, 143, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 Copenhagen 111–12, 122, 123 coronavirus lockdown and 130–1 cycling and 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143 driverless cars and 136–7 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) concept 126 e-bikes and 127–30 Gehl’s philosophy 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135 Googleplex, Mountain View and 132–4 health dividends of active travel and 114–20 Manchester and 124–5, 127 Odense and 130 older people/those with disabilities and 138–9 stairs and 131–2 Toyota Woven City 135–6, 137, 138–9 Vauban, Freiburg 137–8 walking and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 women and girls, discrimination against 139–43 Toyota Woven City, Japan 135–6, 137, 138–9 tracking, electronic activity 13, 17, 21, 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 57, 113, 116, 180–4, 190, 200–1, 214–15, 269–71, 272 transport use see individual mode of transport travel, active 9, 24, 112–14, 118, 121, 126, 127, 131, 136, 143, 191, 216 see also individual mode of travel Travers, Andrew 100–1 treadmill desk 199 triglycerides 43, 185 True Finns 245 Tudor-Locke, Catrine 53–4, 56 Tulleken, Xand van 29–30, 44–5 Uber 137 ultrarunning 32 University of Massachusetts 53 Utrecht, Netherlands 125 Utzon, Jørn 111 Valabhji, Jonathan 93, 99, 104 Varney, Justin 97–8, 169, 198 Vartiainen, Juha-Pekka 237 Vauban, Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Vienna, Austria 140–3 VO2 max test 117–18, 173 walking Active Ten app and 57, 269–70 ageing and 102 assessing/tracking 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 181, 182, 183, 184, 200, 269–70, 272 bone density and 16 brisk/speed of 3, 9, 22, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 74, 79, 84, 86, 114, 167, 269 children and 11, 209, 214, 215, 216, 218, 246, 247 commuting and 114, 130 cycling and 114, 115 danger and 120 decline in 2, 3, 9, 16, 18, 19, 27–9, 33, 208, 216 fat processing/reduction and 43, 48, 185 150 minutes of moderate activity a week recommendation and 52–4 social prescribing and 106 stairs and 28–9, 131–4 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 town/city planning and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 weight loss and 144–5, 157, 165, 166, 167 workplace and 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 274, 275 WALL·E (film) 25–6 Watson, Tom 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 Downsizing 145 weekend warriors 58–9 Wellington, Chrissie 250, 251, 252, 257 Whyte, Martin 87–9, 91, 94, 95–6, 102–5, 106–8 Wicks, Joe 10 Wiggle 270 Wijndaele, Katrien 187–8 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 Wollaston, Sarah 263 Wolff’s Law (bones adapt to the repeated loads put on them) 209 women 6 BMI and 51 bone density 16, 18, 227 cancer and 48 diabetes 151 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 life expectancy 92, 222 modern decline in activity among 19, 22, 24 obesity and 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 164, 165, 171 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 207 public space and 139–43 sitting and 186 walking and 53–4, 55, 84, 121 World Health Organization (WHO) 22, 47, 52, 98, 151, 152–3, 210 World Obesity Forum 154 Wright, Chris 247–9, 252, 257 Wyllie, Elaine 203–4, 205, 206, 209, 212, 213, 262 Youth Sports Trust 247–9, 251 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021 Copyright © Peter Walker, 2021 The right of Peter Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Don’t name them, don’t show them, but report everything else: A pragmatic proposal for denying mass shooters the attention they seek and deterring future offenders. American Behavioral Scientist. Latzer, B. 2016. The rise and fall of violent crime in America. New York: Encounter Books. Laudan, R. 2016. Was the agricultural revolution a terrible mistake? Not if you take food processing into account. http://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/01/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-terrible-mistake.html. Law, S. 2011. Humanism: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Lawson, S. 2013. Beyond cyber-doom: Cyberattack scenarios and the evidence of history. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10, 86–103.

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It was only at the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that people figured out how to bend the curve upward.15 In Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, the moral imperative was explained to Gulliver by the King of Brobdingnag: “Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” Soon after that, as figure 7-1 shows, more ears of corn were indeed made to grow, in what has been called the British Agricultural Revolution.16 Crop rotation and improvements to plows and seed drills were followed by mechanization, with fossil fuels replacing human and animal muscle. In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17 Machines also solve an inherent problem with food.

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* * * What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls “the enlightened economy.”8 The machines and factories of the Industrial Revolution, the productive farms of the Agricultural Revolution, and the water pipes of the Public Health Revolution could deliver more clothes, tools, vehicles, books, furniture, calories, clean water, and other things that people want than the craftsmen and farmers of a century before. Many early innovations, such as in steam engines, looms, spinning frames, foundries, and mills, came out of the workshops and backyards of atheoretical tinkerers.9 But trial and error is a profusely branching tree of possibilities, most of which lead nowhere, and the tree can be pruned by the application of science, accelerating the rate of discovery.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

For one thing, it became increasingly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that the supposed revolutions in human history were largely historiographical fictions, or at least that they did not happen as we imagine them to have happened. The “human revolution” of the Paleolithic (when significant art and artifacts of material culture began to appear), the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic, the scientific revolution that inaugurates modernity, and the industrial revolution that announces modernity’s maturity: for the most part, these successive revolutions were not experienced by those who lived them as sudden moments of illumination, as when an apple falls on the head or a cartoon lightbulb appears, and the benighted past, the old way of doing things, is instantly swept away.

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Steven Shapin wrote a book about the Scientific Revolution whose first sentence reads: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution.”24 He nonetheless manages to describe at least some seventeenth-century natural philosophers who sincerely believed that they were making a radical break with the past, that they were “revolutionaries.” By contrast, as James C. Scott has shown,25 it is nothing short of preposterous to suppose that anyone who lived through the moment we now call the “agricultural revolution” saw the cultivation of plant crops as anything like a leap forward from an inferior level of social development characterized by foraging. What is more, in recent years scholars have become attuned to the fact that human groups considered for a long time to be living in a “state of nature,” to not have realized the essential human activity of transforming nature to any significant degree, in fact, from their own internal point of view, often envision the natural environment in which they live as a product of their own efforts, stewardship, and care.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

., agriculture) to result in much increased productivity for the economy overall, the labor released in the rapidly improving sector has to be capable of being employed productively in other parts of the economy. But as the First Agricultural Revolution took hold, there were effectively no other forms of productive employment. Hence the proliferation of temple attendants, pyramid builders, and domestic servants. The anthropologist James Scott has suggested that after the First Agricultural Revolution average living standards for the mass of the population actually declined.10 Nor was there anything in the new agrarian economy, with its lopsided income and wealth distribution, that favored further technological developments.

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In any case, the truth may well be a mixture of all four. What’s more, each of these possible explanations has resonance for the subject of this enquiry, namely the economic impact of robots and AI. The first seems prosaic, but it is nonetheless important. Momentous developments such as the First Agricultural Revolution, involving the domestication of animals and the plantation of crops, which can be said to have begun about 10,000 BCE, were stretched out over a very long time. Accordingly, even if the cumulative effect once the process was complete was indeed momentous, the changes to average output and living standards did not amount to much on a year-by-year basis.9 The second possible explanation is structural and distributional.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Australians had the most limited resources of all. Recent excavations show that they experimented with eel farming, and given another few thousand years may well have created domesticated lifestyles. Instead, European colonists overwhelmed them in the eighteenth century CE, importing wheat and sheep, descendants of the original agricultural revolution in the Hilly Flanks. So far as we can tell, people were indeed much the same everywhere. Global warming gave everyone new choices, among working less, working the same amount and eating more, or having more babies, even if that meant working harder. The new climate regime also gave them the option of living in larger groups and moving around less.

…

Back in Chapter 1 I described the historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s complaints about how comparative historians often skew analysis of why the West rules by sloppily comparing tiny England with enormous China and concluding that the West already led the East by 1750 CE. We must, he insisted, compare like-sized units. I spent Chapters 1 and 2 responding to this by defining West and East explicitly as the societies that have descended from the original Western and Eastern agricultural revolutions in the Hilly Flanks and the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys; now it is time to admit that that resolved only part of Pomeranz’s problem. In Chapter 2, I described the spectacular expansion of the Western and Eastern zones in the five thousand or so years after cultivation began and the differences in social development that often existed between core areas such as the Hilly Flanks or Yangzi Valley and peripheries such as northern Europe or Korea; so which parts of the East and West should we focus on when working out scores for the index of social development?

…

Perhaps the industrial revolution came first to the West not because of some extraordinary fluke, as Pomeranz concluded, but because East and West were both on track for such a revolution; and then something about the way the West reacted to the events of the fourteenth century gave it a slight but decisive lead in reaching the takeoff point in the eighteenth. It seems to me that Figures 3.3, 3.7, and 3.8 illuminate a real weakness in both long-term lock-in and short-term accident theories. A few of the theorists focus on the story’s beginning in the agricultural revolution, while the great majority look only at its very end, in the last five hundred years. Because they largely ignore the thousands of years in between, they rarely even try to account for all the spurts of growth, slowdowns, collapses, convergences, changes in leadership, or horizontal ceilings and vertical links that jump out at us when we can see the whole shape of history.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Unfettered and unregulated by the backwards thinking of nation-states, aquapreneurs will be free to reimagine civilization as an ultra-libertarian experiment. They will rapidly prototype new forms of government, and determine what—if any—nods to civics or collectivism are even necessary. As the Seasteading Institute website explains, “We’ve had the agricultural revolution , the commercial and industrial revolutions, but why not a governance revolution? Enter the sea.” The ocean will be the means to an end—a way of redefining one’s sovereignty from the bottom up, being always absolutely in charge of one’s own personal allegiance, expression of values, and obligation to the law.

…

sh =675141ef6ad6.   19   real estate agents specializing in private islands : Heather Murphy, “The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed,” New York Times , October 9, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /10 /09 /realestate /private -islands -coronavirus .html.   19   Cancer-causing microplastics : Jamie Wheal, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).   19   World Wide Fund for Nature study : Wijnand de Wit and Nathan Bigaud, “No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People,” World Wide Fund for Nature, 2019, https:// d2ouvy59p0dg6k .cloudfront .net /downloads /plastic _ingestion _web _spreads .pdf.   21   “aquapreneurs” : Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians (New York: Free Press, 2017).   21   humanity’s return to the sea : “Busan UN Habitat and OCEANIX Set to Build the World’s First Sustainable Floating City Prototype as Sea Levels Rise,” UNHabitat.org, November 18, 2021, https:// unhabitat .org /busan -un -habitat -and -oceanix -set -to -build -the -worlds -first -sustainable -floating -city -prototype -as.   21   “To establish permanent” : https:// www .seasteading .org.   21   “We’ve had the agricultural revolution” : https:// www .seasteading .org. Chapter 2: Mergers and Acquisitions   25   Tech companies actively sought : Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: HarperOne, 1994).   25   “new communalists” : Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).   26   Operation Sundevil : Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992).   26   “Governments of the Industrial World” : John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https:// www .eff .org /cyberspace -independence.   26   fungus and bacteria : Qi Hui Sam, Matthew Wook Chang, and Louis Yi Ann Chai, “The Fungal Mycobiome and Its Interaction with Gut Bacteria in the Host,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences , February 4, 2017, https:// www .ncbi .nlm .nih .gov /pmc /articles /PMC5343866 /.   28   extolled the virtues of the deal : Saul Hansell, “America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times , January 11, 2000, https:// www .nytimes .com /2000 /01 /11 /business /media -megadeal -overview -america -online -agrees -buy -time -warner -for -165 -billion .html.   28   the piece I wrote placed in the Guardian : Douglas Rushkoff, “Why Time Is Up for Warner,” Guardian , January 20, 2000, https:// www .theguardian .com /technology /2000 /jan /20 /onlinesupplement10.   29   People blamed : Seth Stevenson, “The Believer,” New York Magazine , July 6, 2007, https:// nymag .com /news /features /34454 /.   30   hired investment bank Salomon Smith Barney : Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times , January 10, 2010, https:// www .nytimes .com /2010 /01 /11 /business /media /11merger .html.   31   probably borrowed : Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).   32   stocks quadruple : Lisa Pham, “This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%,” Bloomberg , October 27, 2017, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2017 -10 -27 /what -s -in -a -name -u -k -stock -surges -394 -on -blockchain -rebrand.   33   “independent, host-led local organizations” : Dave Lee, “Airbnb Using ‘Independent’ Host Groups to Lobby Policymakers,” Financial Times , March 21, 2021, https:// www .ft .com /content /1afb3173 -444a -47fa -99ec -554779dde236.   33   Google was outspending : Shaban Hamza, “Google for the First Time Outspent Every Other Company to Influence Washington in 2017,” Washington Post , January 23, 2018, https:// www .washingtonpost .com /news /the -switch /wp /2018 /01 /23 /google -outspent -every -other -company -on -federal -lobbying -in -2017 /.   33   outspent by Facebook : Lauren Feiner, “Facebook Spent More on Lobbying than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020,” CNBC , January 22, 2021, https:// www .cnbc .com /2021 /01 /22 /facebook -spent -more -on -lobbying -than -any -other -big -tech -company -in -2020 .html.   33   Numerous studies : Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The earliest hominids were not disease-free. Some organisms, like lice, pinworms, and salmonella, seem to have been with us since before we were human. Diseases like sleeping sickness and trichinosis may have traveled from animals to people even when we hunted in small packs without domesticated animals. The agricultural revolution that led to sedentary settlements about twelve thousand years ago created higher human density levels and more opportunities for infection from domesticated livestock. Close proximity to pigs has long had its hazards. A distinguished anthropologist of early disease, George Armelagos, emphasizes that the “products of domesticated animals such as milk, hair and skin . . . could transmit anthrax, Q fever, brucellosis, and tuberculosis.”

…

Instead of “breeding a new race of nomads,” as Toffler wrote, the geographic mobility of Americans is far lower today than it was in 1970. The 1970s were a catastrophic decade for much of urban America. When Toffler followed Future Shock with The Third Wave in 1980, he expressed far less confidence that cities would survive. The main thesis of that later book was that humanity had experienced a first “wave” during the agricultural revolution ten millennia ago and a second wave during the Industrial Revolution. The third wave was “the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization” that could be only imperfectly labeled with the phrases “information age, electronic era, or global village.” Toffler was writing just as the easier shipment of goods was killing off urban manufacturing.

…

Polgar, “The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases.” Cockburn, Infectious Diseases; Their Evolution and Eradication. Diseases like sleeping: Steverding, “The History of African Trypanosomiasis”; Neghina et al., “The Roots of Evil: The Amazing History of Trichinellosis and Trichinella Parasites.” The agricultural revolution: “Neolithic Revolution,” History.com. “products of domesticated animals”: Armelagos et al., “Disease in Human Evolution: The Re-Emergence of Infectious Diseases in the Third Epidemiological Transition,” 3. Records of pre-Athenian plagues: Ehrenkranz and Sampson, “Origin of the Old Testament Plagues: Explications and Implications.”

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

You see, what makes us different from the animals, why we were able to develop afterwards, intelligently, was we learned how to cook. That is something that is completely underestimated.” And while Brabeck-Letmathe conceded that vegetables and grown foods play an important role, he told me that he knew it “wasn’t enough” for him. For him and Singer, the agricultural revolution is an evolving narrative. The work of figuring out new ways to efficiently feed people is not work for the weary, though it doesn’t make him popular with slow food advocates such as former New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman. I asked him about Brabeck-Letmathe’s perspective and couldn’t help but chuckle at his scornful reaction.

…

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. ag-gag laws, 200–201 agrarian model, 197–98 agribusiness. See industrial farming Agricultural Revolution, 195–98 Agriculture Department, U.S. (USDA) cell-cultured meat and, 130–31 cell-cultured meat and beef industry, 154–55, 168–78 conflict with FDA, 173–76, 177 egg industry and Just Mayo, 91–92 farm consolidation, 7–8 political lobbying of, 168–74, 176–77 Albright, Curt, 146–47 Aleph Farms, xv, 114, 116–18, 155 Almy, Jessica, 170 Alternative Protein Show, 230 American Civil War, 232 American Egg Board, 90–93 American Meat Science Association, 130–31 American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), 34–35 Amsterdam, 57–58 animal farming.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

This book is structured chronologically and thematically and addresses common themes that recur, to a greater or lesser extent, in each period, of which I distinguish six. The first is by far the longest, from the emergence of Homo sapiens (who, based on genetic calculations, split off from Neanderthals 700,000 years ago) to the Neolithic or agricultural revolution. Initially, and this must be our starting point, there was essentially no distinction between human and animal attempts to survive, but through the development of human speech and thus new forms of communication, new forms of collaboration grew. The individual lived within a household, households formed bands, and bands exchanged individuals.

…

Nevertheless, it offered increased opportunities for obtaining and hoarding food, and thus for the division of labour, which may have led to greater enrichment of some households and, ultimately, to disparities between households. Here, the seed was sown for inequality; alongside cooperation, subordination was now being created too. The differences, however, were still small in the second period distinguished in this book, and Africa demonstrates that there is no causal link between the agricultural revolution and social inequality. Following the emergence of cities, first in Mesopotamia some 7,000 years ago – extremely late in the evolution of Homo sapiens – and a little later in China and India, the division of labour between urban and rural areas and among urban residents was possible. The emergence of city leagues and states from 3000 BCE strengthened this trend.

…

For women, the Neolithic revolution meant a steady increase in labour, in both the work and the child-bearing senses’.62 That farming was primarily women’s work is substantiated by similar research in North America. The starting point is the observation that highly mobile humans develop a long ridge down the length of the femur.63 Conversely, this ridge disappears once we become sedentary under the influence of the agricultural revolution. Interestingly, this process does not always occur simultaneously among men and among women. And that is precisely the case among the people of the Cochise culture in what is now south-eastern Arizona. They switched to farming 3,500 years ago, but apparently farming was typically women’s work, because only the men kept their pronounced ridges.

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

For the most part, advances in farm implements during this period were regionally exclusive, and farmers benefited little from their development. With the onset of the Civil War and the ensuing political and social upheaval, farming in America underwent significant changes. The Civil War prompted the first agricultural revolution, transitioning from hand labor to horse labor.6 With the surging demand for agricultural products and shortage of labor due to the draft, farmers were called upon to adopt practices that would foster productivity. Deere’s steel plow and McCormick’s reaper facilitated greater animal use and enabled farmers to produce more in a shorter period of time.

…

Douglas Hurt, American Farm Tools: From Hand-Power to Steam-Power (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1982), 133. 5. Wayne D. Rasmussen, “The Impact of Technological Change on American Agriculture, 1862–1962,” Journal of Economic History 22, no. 4. (1962): 574. 6. Rasmussen, “Impact of Technological Change,” 578; Wayne D. Rasmussen and Paul S. Stone, “Toward a Third Agricultural Revolution,” Proceedings from the Academy of Political Science 34, no. 3 (1982): 174–185. 7. Robert C. Williams, Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin’ Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact on America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 11. 8. Williams, Fordson, 90. 9. Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 97. 10.

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See also Farm mechanization; Transgenic crops agricultural biotechnology, differing perceptions of, 4–5 agricultural research, lack of, 253 agricultural research stations, 133, 134 agricultural technology, 256, 298 agro-ecological farming, 3, 233, 251–252 changing farm sizes, 121 chaos in, 126 chemicals, opposition to use of, 24 in China, reduced pesticide exposure, 246 farmers’ organizations, 143 farm subsidies, 229 first agricultural revolution, 123 impact of Civil War on, 123–124 institutionalization of mechanization of, 137–140 lack of government intervention in, 98 researchers, tensions with, 134–135 sustainable, 224, 248–249 traditional farming economy, impact of technology on, 23 transgenic crops, 226–227 as way of life, 141 Agriculture Department (USDA) cold storage, public education on, 195–196 Economic Research Service, 140 frozen pack laboratory, 195 genetic engineering regulation and, 237 HAA on, 130 inspection service, 197 ISAAA, support for, 244 market-news network, 196–197 role of, 138–139, 142, 197, 201 shipping conditions, tests on, 193 transgenic plant regulation, 265–266 on warehouse cold storage, 187 warehouse reporting system, 188 Agrochemicals, 227, 250.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

When a buccaneer raiding party boarded a Spanish ship the first thing they would look for and demand was the maps. Charts – a form of information which improve navigation – were actually more valuable than silver and gold.[ix] An example of one revolution re-igniting another is that the industrial revolution enabled the mechanisation of agriculture, causing a second agricultural revolution, making the profession of farming more effective and more efficient. The information revolution does the same, providing farmers with crops that are more resilient in the face of weather, pests and weeds, and allowing them to sow, cultivate and harvest their crops far more accurately with satellite navigation.

…

Unemployed people often struggle with depression, but they are experiencing it in the context of a society where it seems that everyone else has a job. They are also on a lower income than the employed people around them. How bad would it be if everyone else was also unemployed, and receiving a decent income? Fortunately, there are a couple of places we can look for an answer to that question. The rich and the old The agricultural revolution, around 12,000 years ago, created sustainable surpluses of food and other basic resources. This enabled a class of people to stop doing the work that pretty much all humans had done since our arrival on the planet, which was foraging and hunting for food. They became tribal leaders, kings, warriors, priests, traders and so on.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, recently spoke at a poverty summit cohosted by Stanford, the White House, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Facebook billionaire’s charitable institution. “There have been these moments where we have had these major technology revolutions—the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, for example—that have really changed the world in a big way,” he said. “I think we’re in the middle or at least on the cusp of another one.” As it turns out, the idea of a UBI has tended to surface during such epochal economic moments. It first arrived, it seems, at the very birth of capitalism, as medieval feudalism was giving way to Renaissance mercantilism during the reign of Henry VIII.

…

“VC for the people”: Steve Randy Waldman, “VC for the People,” Interfluidity (blog), Apr. 16, 2014, http://www.interfluidity.com/​v2/​5066.html. “evolving as we speak”: Chris Hughes, telephone interview by author, Oct. 21, 2016. “we can see the future”: Misha Chellam, telephone interview by author, Feb. 10, 2017. “There have been these moments”: Lowrey, “Future of Not Working.” the open-field system: Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ebook. “Who will maintain husbandry”: Quoted in John F. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 5. meek animals: Thomas More, Utopia, ed.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

Our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well.’ The most powerful constraint on the growth of the collective brain in our species’ early history was social isolation. Nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers were often geographically dispersed and had few means of communication. When groups started living closer together following the agricultural revolution, sociality was constrained by the many barriers that can exist between human groups, both physical and psychological. We noted that Tasmania went backwards when it was separated from the broader Australian ecology. Today, however, we live in a radically different era. People are connected not just socially but digitally.

…

For one thing, the two groups think drastically different things.’FN1 Other studies led by Seth Flaxman of Oxford and the Pew Institute offer a different lens on the digital world. These find that when you look at overall Internet use, digital users have higher average exposure to the views of their own side, but nevertheless get to see the views of opponents, too. Perhaps that is not surprising. Even in the clan systems that emerged after the agricultural revolution, the various in-groups were not completely shut off from each other. But what is fascinating – and broadly acknowledged by almost all scholars – is what happens when exposure does take place. Now, you might have thought that by hearing the views of opponents, and seeing the evidence from the other side, opinions would become less extreme.

A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, NP-complete, phenotype, placebo effect, wikimedia commons

Indeed, it would seem more accurate to say that today’s craze for extreme beers represents a return to the beverage’s origins. One difference between beer in earlier times and beer today is that nowadays we have the option of slaking our thirsts with water. Today most citizens of developed economies take pure and refreshing water for granted; but it was not always so. The Agricultural Revolution brought with it pollution on a grand scale, as one of the major byproducts of progress with which human society is still coming to terms. On the marshy Mesopotamian plain, crowded with people and their even more numerous domestic animals, there would have been few sources of reliably potable water in Sumerian times.

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In 1989 Fritz Maytag, a wealthy young entrepreneur who had not long before bought and rejuvenated San Francisco’s venerable Anchor Brewing Company, ran across a 1987 article by the Philadelphia anthropologist Sol Katz. In this piece Katz argued that gathering cereal grains for brewing had been a major impetus for the agricultural revolution; and in support of this contention he cited the translation of the Hymn to Ninkasi that the University of Chicago Assyriologist Miguel Civil had made a couple of decades earlier. Working closely with Katz and Civil, Maytag then figured out a practical recipe for Ninkasi’s beer that was compatible with her activities as described in the Hymn.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, Donner party, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, mass immigration, Nash equilibrium, nuclear winter, out of africa, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, trolley problem, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile

It enabled us to produce a great deal more off each acre of land than our medieval forebears could even have dreamed about, and it finally did away with the Highland ‘ferm touns’ and the old rig systems of medieval agriculture. But there is a worrying difference between then and now. The agricultural revolution relied on old technology, the kind that every farmer worth his salt knew by instinct. New developments in science today depend on much more sophisticated kinds of knowledge. And the worrying point here is that the number of new discoveries per decade has been declining steadily for most of the last century.

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[Page 292] Index academic: communities, 27; performance, 208–12 acquaintanceship, 32–4 Adoyo, Bishop Boniface, 117 advertising: for a mate, 228–32, 236–41; men’s conversations, 75–6 Africa: forests, 144–5; fossils, 132–3; great apes, 4, 122, 127, 134–5, 145, 275; Horn of, 89, 147, 148; human ancestry, 3, 122, 127, 134–5, 138–9, 161; migration from, 85, 127, 129–30, 139–41, 151; Pygmy peoples, 131, 267; San Bushmen, 33, 90, 182, 287; sickle cell anaemia, 101; skin colours, 90–1; Swahili language, 52 age at death, 204–5 aggression, 259, 260, 261–2, 264 agricultural revolution, 157–8 Alexander the Great, 55 algebra, 118 alligators, 121 Altamira cave paintings, 135–7 Amboseli National Park, 16, 195 Amish, 27–8 amygdala, 170 androstadienone, 247–8 androstenone, 247 Anglo-Saxons, 57–8 apes: brain size, 22–4, 272–3; capacity for theory of mind, 176–7, 197, 200, 277; classification, 274–5; culture, 194; grooming, 61–2, 73–4, 243, 286; group size, 24; habitat, 134, 135; language, 195, 275; mating strategies, 29; moral beings, 275; pelvis, 93; quadrupedal, 134; relationship with humans, 4, 116–17, 127, 277; sleeping, 83; social cognitive abilities, 31, 178–9, 181, 272, 277; social interactions, 31, 35, 179, 285; story-telling, 200; tools, 193; see also chimpanzees, gorillas, orang utans Arden, Ros, 208 Aristotle, 7, 118 armies: conquests, 54–5; units, 17 Asimov, Isaac, 217 Atran, Scott, 280 Attila, 52, 139, 153–4 attractiveness, 233–7 Audubon Society, 5 Austen, Jane, 228, 236 [Page 293] Australian Aboriginals, 33, 82, 123 autistic people, 277 babies: care of, 95, 107–8; human prematurity, 85, 92–5; motherese language, 76–7; paternity, 95–6, 257; skin colour, 91 baboons: habitat, 24; language, 196; mating strategies, 262; neocortex size, 24; religion, 279–80; social skills, 16; tactical deception, 29–30 back, lower, 93–4 bacterial infection, 104–6 Baker, Robin, 257 Bantu peoples, 91, 101 Barton, Rob, 15 Basques, 51–4 Bates, Tim, 206 Bayes, Thomas, 184 Bebo, 21 Becher, Tony, 27 bees, 98, 195 Behe, Michael, 114 Bellis, Mark, 257 Bentham, Jeremy, 268 Bering Strait, 123 biodiversity, 103 bipedalism (walking upright), 93–4, 133–4 birds: brain size, 12; chromosomes, 97; dinosaur relationship, 120, 121; divorce, 260–1; monogamous relationships, 12, 13–14, 221, 255–6, 259–60 birth: human childbirth, 92–6; place, 44–5; premature, 85, 94–5; sex ratio at, 110; weight, 104, 206 Blair, Tony, 166 blue tits, 193 blushing, 19–20 bonellia worm, 98 bonobos, 275–6 Borodin, Alexander, 216 Boswellia trees, 147–9 Boyer, Pascal, 280 brain: complexity, 11; emotional responses, 16, 170; energy consumption, 11–12; evolution, 161, 181; frontal lobe, 181, 269–70, 273, 290; judgements about morality, 269–70; limbic system, 15–17; neocortex, 15–17, 23–4, 29, 181, 272–3; size, 12–13, 22–4, 81, 92–3, 130–1, 261, 272; striate cortex, 272–3; visual processing, 181, 272–3 Buffon, Comte de, 7 burials, 137, 288–9 Burns, Robert, 213, 218–22 Bush, George, 167 business organisations, 26 Buss, David, 232 Byrne, Dick, 29, 176, 179 Carnegie Medal, 249 Cartmill, Erica, 176, 179 cave paintings, 53–4, 135–8 Celts, 53, 57–9 chain letters, 186–9 Changizi, Mark, 19 Chaplin, George, 89–90 Chatters, Jim, 123 Chauvet cave art, 137 Cheney, Dorothy, 195–6 Cheyenne Indians, 250–1 childbirth, 77, 85, 92–5 childcare, 107–8 chimpanzees: babies, 77; classification, 274–5; culture, 194; DNA, 121; eaten, 131, 145; extinction threat, 145; habitat, 24, 134; language, 196; laughter, 68–9; [Page 294] mind-reading capacities, 179; moral beings, 275; neocortex size, 24; pygmy (bonobo), 275–6; relationship with humans, 122, 133, 134; religion, 279–80; skull size, 134; social cognitive abilities, 181, 272; tools, 192–3; typewriting, 200 China: migration from, 91; sex ratio, 109–10, 112 Christ Church, Spitalfields, 125 Christianity, views on evolution, 116–17 chromosomes: genetic analysis, 120–1; maternal and paternal, 15; X, 18–19; XX, 96–7; XY, 96–7; Y, 47, 48, 49, 55, 56, 57–8 chuckwalla lizards, 261–2 cities, 4, 24–5, 159 Clark, Arthur C., 217 climate warming, 150–2, 156–9 Clinton, Hillary, 167–8 colour vision, 9, 17–20, 183–4 community: kinship, 35, 38–9; membership, 39, 82; role, 35; small-scale, 35, 38–9, 291–2 conscious thinking, 23, 63, 72, 170, 181 conversations, 74–5, 79–80, 286 Copernicus, Nicolas, 119 Corti, organ of, 184 creationism, 113 crocodiles, 98, 121–2 cuckoldry, 255–8 culture, human, 4, 137–8, 175, 191–4, 196–8 Cunningham, Michael, 235 Cuvier, Baron, 7, 182 Dalí, Salvador, 163 Daly, Martin, 95, 259 dance, 72, 284, 287 Darwin, Charles: Descent of Man, 70, 72, 85; evolutionary theory, 6–10, 100, 111, 115–16, 126, 164, 227, 279, 292; influences on, 157, 183; letter-writing, 21; marriage plans, 243; Origin of Species, 5, 7–8, 113, 157 Darwin, Erasmus, 7 Davies, Nick, 256 Dawkins, Richard, 5 DDT, 99, 116 Dearie, Ian, 204, 205 death, age at, 204–5 Declaration of Arbroath, 50–1 Dene-Caucasian languages, 53 Dennett, Daniel, 177 Descartes, René, 191, 195, 209, 210 Dhondt, André, 260 dialects, 44–5 Diamond, Jared, 91 diamond market, 64 dichotomies, 182–5 dinosaurs, 120–2, 143–4 diseases, new, 100–3 divorce, 108, 110, 254, 260–1 DNA, 47, 120–1, 124–5, 140, 255 dogs, 180, 195, 277 Dohnányi, Christoph von, 218 Domesday Book, 27 dominance, male, 29 Dominica, island of, 41 Donner Party, 39–40 Douglas, Stephen, 168–9 Duck, Steve, 238 Dunbar’s Number, 4, 24, 28, 285 dunnocks (hedge sparrows), 256–7 Durkheim, Émile, 284, 291 Edinburgh Enlightenment, 213 education: effect on political views, 170–1; exercise and, [Page 295] 208–12; science, 214; Scots, 212–14; study of Latin, 223–6 Einstein, Albert, 172, 212, 216, 218 elections, 164–9 emotional response mechanism, 16 emotional responses, 169–71 endorphins: levels, 210–11; release triggered by grooming, 62, 69, 286; release triggered by laughter, 68, 69; release triggered by music, 72, 76, 78; release triggered by religious rituals, 284–5, 287, 291–2; release triggered by spices, 106; role, 62, 209 Enquist, Magnus, 259 Eskimo peoples, 91–2, 246 evolution, 5–10, 113–15, 279, 292 evolutionary psychologists, 42–3, 71, 161, 185, 281 extinctions, 143–6; frankincense trees, 146–9; languages, 152–3; mammoths, 149–52 eyes, 17, 114–15 Facebook, 21 faces, 164–8 factory size, 26 Falk, Dean, 76 Farisai, Kamal al-Din al-, 119 Farrant, Patti, 106 Farthing, William, 248–9 fertility, 207–8, 234 Feynman, Richard, 217 fighting, 16–17 Flores, island of, 128 food production, 157–8 forests, 144–5 fossil record, 119–20, 128–35 frankincense, 9, 146–9 Freud, Sigmund, 244, 258, 283 friends, number of, 21–2, 32 ‘Frisch Effect’, 234 frontal lobe of brain, 181, 269–70, 273, 290 Fulani, 88 Furness, Bob, 260–1 Gaelic, 9, 41–2, 152–3, 154–5 Gardner, Lucinda, 163 genes: haplotypes, 48–50; mutation, 49–50, 85, 115; parental, 14–15; see also chromosomes genetic drift, 49 Genghis Khan, 47–50 genomic imprinting, 15–16 geology, 182–3 Gilday, Jamie, 45 Glass, Philip, 218 godparents, 42, 108 GoreTex, 26 gorillas: classification, 274; eaten, 131; extinction threat, 145; language, 196, 275; relationship with humans, 122, 275; zoo exhibit, 267 gossip, 79–81, 286 great apes, see chimpanzees, gorillas, orang utans Great Chain of Being, 7 Greenland, 125 grooming: baboon tactical deception, 30; language as, 73–4; nuzzling, 243; relationship involved, 61–2, 73–4, 80, 286–7; release of endorphins, 62, 69, 286–7 group size, 23–8, 33–4, 81, 290–1 Haidt, Jonathan, 268 Hamilton’s Rule, 43–4 haplotypes, 48–50 Harcourt, Sandy, 253 Hauser, Marc, 270 health, link with IQ, 204–6 [Page 296] hearing, 184 height, 162–4, 166–9, 207 Helmholtz, Herman von, 183 Hering, Ewald, 183 heroism, 249–50 Hill, Elizabeth, 163 Hill, Russell, 26 Hitler, Adolf, 170 ‘Hobbit, The’, 128–32 home-wreckers, 260–1 Homo: erectus, 69, 93, 127, 128, 129–30, 290; floresiensis, 129; genus, 134; sapiens, 81 Hume, David, 213, 268, 270 hunter-gatherers, 158–9 Hurst, Jane, 246 Hutterites, 27–8 Huxley, Thomas, 117 ibn al-Haytham, Hasan, 118–19 ibn Musa, Abu Jafar Muhammed, 118 Ice Age, 149–50, 156 Iceland, 58–9 immune system, 106, 244–6, 285 income, IQ and, 207 Indo-European: language, 51–3; migrations, 51–4, 139 Intelligent Design (ID), 113–16 intentional stance, 177–8 intentionality: ape capacity, 181, 200, 272, 273; brain evaluation of, 270; definition, 180; fifth-order, 180, 181, 199–201, 272, 289, 290; first-order, 180, 181, 272; fourth-order, 200, 289, 290; frontal lobe involvement, 181, 269–70, 273, 290; human capacity, 181, 199–200, 272, 273, 289–90; monkey capacity, 181, 272, 273; religious belief and, 271–2, 278, 289–90; secondorder, 180, 181, 200, 271, 272, 273, 289; sixth-order, 201; third-order, 200, 289, 290 Inuit, 38, 125 IQ, 185, 203–6, 207, 210, 212 Islam: law, 260; science, 118–19; views on evolution, 117 IVF pregnancies, 106 Jablonski, Nina, 89–90 jealousy, 259–60 Jobling, Mark, 57 Johnson, Dominic, 264 Johnson, Douglas, 169 jury system, 171–4 Kanpur (Cawnpore), 35–6 Kant, Immanuel, 268 Kanzi, 275–6 Kaskatis, Kostas, 71 Keefe, Richard, 230 Kelly, Sue, 248, 249 Kennewick Man, 123–4 Kenrick, Douglas, 229–30 Kenya: Amboseli National Park, 16, 195; fossils, 132; religion, 116–17 Kerry, John, 167 Keverne, Barry, 15 killdeer, 260 kinship: circles of acquaintanceship, 34; communities, 35, 38–9; evolutionary significance, 43–4; social framework, 35 kissing, 243–6 klipspringer, 259 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 192 Kroeber, Alfred, 192 Krummhörn, parish registers, 42, 227, 237 Kummer, Hans, 30 [Page 297] lactase gene, 86, 88 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 7 language(s): animals, 195–6; apes, 275–6; Basque, 51–4; dialect and, 44–5; evolution, 79–81, 153–5; extinction, 152–3, 155; geographical distribution, 102; Indo-European, 51–3; motherese, 76–8 Lascaux cave art, 137 Latin, 153, 154, 219, 223, 225 laughter, 9, 66–9 Lavoisier, Antoine, 186 law, 58, 171–4, 260, 268, 271 Lawrence, T.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

Along with Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat and new varieties of corn and rice, synthetic fertilizer was a key factor in the agricultural revolution that changed the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s been estimated that if we couldn’t make synthetic fertilizer, the world’s population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is. Touring the Yara fertilizer distribution facility in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2018. I’m having even more fun than it looks. The world uses a lot of fertilizer already, and poor countries should be using more. The agricultural revolution I mentioned—often called the Green Revolution—largely bypassed Africa, where the typical farmer gets just one-fifth as much food per acre of land as an American farmer gets.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Everything that human beings might need or want, Hilton foresaw, would very soon be produced by machines—“solely by machines without any human intervention or labor.”53 The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century wasn’t big enough as a comparison, Hilton argued. The agricultural revolution was the better analogy. The ability to cultivate crops and livestock turned food gatherers and primitive hunters into food growers and organized communities. Cultivating plants and domesticating animals freed “some” of their energy to create civilization. Automating production would have a similar effect yet again: now “all of human energy” could be freed from the task of providing for survival. Instead of an agricultural revolution, humankind would now face a cybercultural revolution. Hilton, an exceptionally eloquent mathematician, was certainly the most potent cheerleader of that revolution.

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., 109 Abene, Mark, 237 abstraction, 68, 69 “Achieving Electronic Privacy” (Chaum), 281–82 action, brain and, 63 adaptation, 55 Adelman, Leonard, 251–52, 254 Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 104–7, 110 Adobe Acrobat, exploitation of, 327–28 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 147 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), 111, 148, 186 Advanced Technology Institute, 319 Aeronautical Research Committee (Britain), 19 aeronautics, 12 African Americans, 107 “After the Take-Over,” 101 Age of Cyberculture, The (book series), 103 Agile Eye, 204 agricultural revolution, 102–3 Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program, 128–29 air defense, xi–xii, 40, 56, 78–81; See also Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Air Defense Command, 40, 79, 81 Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee (Valley Committee), 76 Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 143 Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, 76, 144 AirLand Battle, 300–301 airpower, 4, 10, 300–301 Albe Archer exercise, 208 Aliens (film), 136 “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (Brautigan), v, 165–66, 170 Amazon.com, 244 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 71–72 American Civil Liberties Union, 244 American Mathematical Society, 29 Ames Research Center, 220 amputees, 141–42 Analyzer, The (hacker), 315 anarchy, 246–93 Andrews Air Force Base, 314–15 AN/FSQ-7 computer, 96 Anguilla, 287, 288 anonymity, 272 antiaircraft batteries, 22 Anti-Aircraft Command (Britain), 39 antiaircraft gunnery, 56 antiaircraft missiles, 78 “antiaircraft problem,” 12, 16–17 Apache helicopter, 305 Apple Computer, 184, 186–88, 215 Apple II computer, 211–12, 295 Applied Cryptography (Schneier), 276 Arbeit am Mythos (Blumenberg), xvi “Are Human Beings Necessary?”

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (according to this view) no respite from the time-consuming struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was launched only after the end of the last Ice Age, when people began independently in different parts of the world to domesticate plants and animals (see Chapter Fourteen). The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it is nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, the question 'Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work.

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Similarly, early stages of plant domestication included people harvesting wild plants and discarding seeds, which were thereby accidentally 'planted'. The inevitable result was unconscious selection of those plant and animal species and individuals most useful to humans. Eventually, conscious selection and care followed. Now let's return to the progressivist view of this agricultural revolution of ours. As I explained at the outset of this chapter, we are accustomed to assuming that the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture brought us health, longevity, security, leisure, and great art. While the case for this view seems overwhelming, it is hard to prove. How do you actually show that lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting for farming?

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Thus, the lives of at least the surviving modern hunter-gatherers are not 'nasty, brutish, and short', even though farmers have pushed them into the world's worst real-estate. Hunters of the past, who still occupied fertile lands, could hardly have been worse off than modern hunters. However, all those modern hunter societies have been affected by farming societies for thousands of years and do not tell us about the condition of hunters before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of people in each part of the world got better when they switched from hunting to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from remains of domestic ones in prehistoric rubbish dumps.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

By the end of the Pleistocene, almost 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were hunting and gathering with sophisticated tools. Some populations were already occupying settled villages, living with dogs, decorating cave walls with multicolored paints, using pottery, and grinding grain. Shortly afterward, about 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution began.3 Too few fossils have been found for us to be sure when and where an archaic form first started differentiating into Homo sapiens. To be unambiguously Homo sapiens, skulls must be markedly round (globular) in profile with a clearly flexed base, and have such a small face that it is tucked mostly under the cranium.

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One school of thought has held that battles and “real war” were trivially rare before agriculture. Supporters of this view argue that nomadic hunter-gatherers had low rates of intergroup violence from time immemorial until they encountered farmers, at which time they had to start defending themselves. Until the agricultural revolution, these scholars tend to suggest, there was no need to fight: if a dispute arose between forager groups, one group could always move elsewhere. The motivation for taking this perspective was sometimes explicitly political. For instance, the anthropologist Douglas Fry wrote, “One important, general, contribution that anthropology holds for ending ‘the scourge of war’ lies in demonstrating that warfare is not a natural, inevitable part of human nature.”44 On an opposite side of the debate, it can be noted that other primates invariably populate their habitats fully, which leaves groups with few options when conflict occurs.

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For instance, the anthropologist Douglas Fry wrote, “One important, general, contribution that anthropology holds for ending ‘the scourge of war’ lies in demonstrating that warfare is not a natural, inevitable part of human nature.”44 On an opposite side of the debate, it can be noted that other primates invariably populate their habitats fully, which leaves groups with few options when conflict occurs. When competing groups cannot find vacant land, they fight. It would be surprising if human groups could regularly find empty, well-resourced space to occupy, or if humans could relate to their neighbors without aggression. Thus the claim that groups of hunter-gatherers before the agricultural revolution had generally peaceful relations and could move to unoccupied resource-rich land is implausible. Furthermore, many scholars point to archaeological evidence of frequent warfare prior to agriculture in the form of fortified settlements, armor, and high levels of violent trauma exhibited in skeletons and skulls.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

HOW WE REFASHION THE WORLD Humans are continually creative: whether the raw material is words or sounds or sights, we are food-processors into which the world is fed, and out of which something new emerges. Our innate cognitive software, multiplied by the massive population of Homo sapiens, has produced a society with increasingly faster innovation, one that feeds upon its latest ideas. Eleven millennia transpired between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Then it only took a hundred and twenty years to get from the Industrial Revolution to the light bulb. Then merely ninety years until the moon landing. From there it was only twenty-two years until the World Wide Web, and a mere nine years later the human genome was fully sequenced.12 Historical innovation paints a clear picture: the time between major innovations is shrinking rapidly.

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., “The tiger genome and comparative analysis with lion and snow leopard genomes,” Nature Communications 4 (2013), <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3433> Index Abakanowicz, Magdalena ref1 Achelis, Elisabeth ref1 acronyms ref1 Acura TLX ref1 adaptation ref1 advertisements ref1, ref2 Aerial Restaurant ref1 African masks ref1 Agricultural Revolution ref1 ailerons (hinged flaps) ref1 airport towers/fences ref1 aldehydes ref1 Alessi, Alberto ref1, ref2 Alessi (company) ref1 Alexander McQueen ref1 Alhambra Palace ref1 Alice in tumblr-land (Manley) ref1 Allocamelus ref1 Alpha Centauri ref1 The Alteration (Amis) ref1 altruism ref1 Amazon ref1 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) ref1 Amis, Kingsley ref1 Andrews, Arlan ref1 Ant-roach robot ref1, ref2 Apocalyptic Vision (El Greco) ref1 Apollo 13 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Apple ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mining history ref1, ref2, ref3 Apple Watch ref1 Arcangel, Cory ref1, ref2 Aristotle ref1, ref2 Army (US) ref1 Army–Navy football game (1963) ref1 art bending ref1, ref2, ref3 blending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 good ref1, ref2 education ref1 mining history ref1 proliferating options ref1 public reception ref1, ref2 arts, influence of ref1, ref2 Asimov, Isaac ref1 Asplund, Antii ref1 Atlantic (magazine) ref1 Atlassian ref1 ATMs ref1 Audi ref1 audiences ref1 automated behavior ref1, ref2, ref3 Available Forms I (Brown) ref1 Bach, Johann Sebastian ref1 Back to the Future (film) ref1 Bacon, Francis ref1, ref2 Barbèy, Thomas ref1 The Beatles ref1 The Beatles (album) ref1 Beaumarchais, Pierre ref1 beauty, universal ref1 Beaux, Ernest ref1 Beekman Tower (Gehry building) ref1 bees ref1, ref2, ref3 Beethoven, Ludwig van ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Bel Geddes, Norman ref1 Bell, Graham ref1 Bell, James ref1 Bell Labs (New Jersey) ref1, ref2 bending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 art ref1, ref2, ref3 design ref1 “end of time” illusion ref1 language ref1 time ref1 “Beowulf” (poem) ref1 bestselling books ref1 Betrayal (Pinter) ref1 Better Place (auto company) ref1 bicycles ref1 Biome car ref1 bionics ref1 The Birth and Triumph of Venus (Boucher) ref1 “Black Tractor” (Ferguson) ref1 Blackberry ref1 blending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 art ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 design ref1, ref2 language ref1 mathematical techniques ref1 mythical creatures ref1 science ref1, ref2, ref3 Blockbuster ref1, ref2 Bloom, Benjamin ref1 Blur Building (Diller/Scofidio) ref1 Bonaparte, Napoleon ref1 bone furniture (Laarman) ref1 Bonnie and Clyde (film) ref1 Bose, Amar ref1 Botanical Society of America ref1 Boucher, François ref1 Boulton, Mathew Piers Watt ref1 Boyle, Robert ref1 Bradbury, Ray ref1 brain breaking ref1 cognitive flexibility ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cognitive workings ref1, ref2 overt/covert creativity ref1 refashioning the world ref1 seeking/decision making ref1 Brand, Stewart ref1 Brandenburg, Karlheinz ref1 Branson, Richard ref1 Braque, Georges ref1 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 art ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 design ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 good ref1, ref2, ref3 music ref1, ref2 science ref1, ref2 Breakthrough Starshot ref1 Broken Obelisk (Newman) ref1 Bromberg, Irv ref1 Bronze Age ref1 Brown, Capability ref1 Brown, Earle ref1 Brown, James ref1 Buffalo News (newspaper) ref1 Building 20 (magical incubator) ref1 Bull series (Lichtenstein) ref1 Bull series (Picasso) ref1 bullet train ref1 Burton, Sarah ref1 buses ref1 Buxton, Bill ref1, ref2 Byron, Lord ref1 Café Carlyle (New York) ref1 calcite ref1 calendars ref1 California State Curriculum Committee ref1 cameras ref1 canal locks ref1 car industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 testing possibilities ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 carbon copies ref1 Cardin, Pierre ref1 Carnegie Mellon ref1 Carver, George Washington ref1, ref2, ref3 Casio AT-550-7 wristwatch ref1 Castro, Fidel ref1 Catalano, Bruno ref1 Cave, Sophie ref1 Cézanne, Paul ref1 Chanel N°5 ref1 change, responding to ref1 Cheney, Vice President Dick ref1 Chicago World’s Fair (1893) ref1 The Children’s Hour (Hellman) ref1 chimeras ref1 Chomsky, Noam ref1 Chopin, Frédéric ref1 Chung, Kwanghun ref1 Church, George ref1 Cichon, Steve ref1 Cicoria, Anthony ref1 cigarette factories ref1 Cimarosa, Domenico ref1 Citizen Kane (film) ref1, ref2 CitySmoother ref1 CLARITY method ref1 Clark, Barney ref1 Clark, Steve ref1 Cummings, e.e. ref1, ref2 “The Clock” (Marclay) (video) ref1 “closed-world assumption” ref1 CoBot ref1 Coca-Cola company ref1 cognitive flexibility ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cohn, Billy ref1, ref2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ref1 Colescott, Robert ref1 companies ref1 challenges ref1 flexibility ref1 proliferating options ref1 testing possibilities ref1 workplace changes ref1 Composition VII (Kandinsky) ref1 Conan Doyle, Arthur ref1 concrete ref1 Conference Bike ref1 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain) ref1 consonance ref1 Contac decongestant ref1 continental drift ref1 continuous flow heart ref1, ref2 Continuum Innovation ref1 Cook, Captain ref1 Cooper, James Fenimore ref1 Cotsworth, Moses ref1 Cotsworth calendar ref1 creativity economy ref1 explosion ref1 overt/covert ref1 practice ref1 creoles ref1 Crick, Francis ref1 The Crossword Puzzle (Hockney) ref1 Cubism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cultural conditioning ref1 public approval ref1 da Vinci, Leonardo ref1, ref2 dance ref1, ref2 Dancing House (Gehry/Milunić) ref1 “Dare to Try” Award ref1 Darwin, Charles ref1, ref2, ref3 Data Rover 840 ref1 Davis, Miles ref1 Davy, Humphry ref1 Dawkins, Richard ref1 de Kooning, Willem ref1 decision making ref1 Defragmentados (Portal) ref1 Deisseroth, Karl ref1 Delacroix, Eugène ref1 “The Descent of Edward Wilson” (review) ref1 design ref1, ref2, ref3 bending ref1 blending ref1, ref2 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 fashion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 meaningful ref1 proliferating options ref1, ref2, ref3 risk ref1, ref2, ref3 testing possibilities ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also technology DeVries, William ref1 Diabelli, Anton ref1 Dick, Philip K. ref1 Dickinson, Emily ref1 dictionary definitions ref1 DiCycle ref1 digital pixilation ref1 Diller, Elizabeth ref1 diminutive artwork ref1 dissonance ref1 drama ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 cultural conditioning ref1, ref2 timelessness ref1 Dre, Dr ref1 Duchamp, Marcel ref1 DuPont ref1 Dweck, Carol ref1 Dynamic Architecture (Fisher) ref1 Dyson, James ref1 Eagleman, David ref1 Eastman, George ref1, ref2 Eastman Kodak Company ref1, ref2 E-car ref1 Edgerton, Harold ref1 Edison, Thomas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 education see schools efficiency ref1 egg drop experiment ref1 Einstein, Albert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 El Greco ref1 electroencephalography (EEG) ref1 elevators ref1, ref2 Eleven Madison Park (restaurant) ref1 Elias, Anastassia ref1, ref2 Eliot, T.S. ref1 “end of time” illusion ref1 equivalence principle ref1 Ercon frangible mast ref1 Esnault-Pelterie, Robert ref1 Esola, Lindsay ref1 ESP computer game ref1 Esperanto ref1, ref2 Eureka Innovation Lab ref1 eureka moments ref1 exploration/exploitation trade-off point ref1, ref2, ref3 Facebook ref1, ref2 failure ref1, ref2 cultural tastes ref1 fearlessness ref1 public reception ref1 schools, failing ref1 Solyndra ref1 Falconer, William ref1 familiarity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) ref1 fashion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Federal Aviation Administration ref1 Feldman, Morton ref1 Ferguson, Harry ref1 Fermat, Pierre de ref1 Fermat’s Last Theorem ref1 Feynman, Richard ref1 film, breaking ref1 Fire Phone, Amazon ref1 Fisher, David ref1 Fisher-Price ref1 FitDog ref1 Fitzgerald, F.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

What was also special about primitive affluence was that it suggested that Keynes’s “economic problem” was not a “permanent condition” of the human species but instead that it was a relatively recent phenomenon when viewed against the broader scope of human history. One that emerged only when some of our ancestors abandoned a life of foraging and became farmers and food producers. The story of southern Africa’s Bushmen encapsulates the history of modern Homo sapiens from our species’ first emergence in sub-Saharan Africa through to the agricultural revolution and beyond. It is an incomplete story, one pieced together from fragments of archaeology, anthropology, and most recently genomics. Taken together, these fragments offer a sense of how hunter-gatherers came to exemplify elements of Keynes’s Utopia and how, since the invention of agriculture, our destiny has been shaped by our preoccupation with solving the “economic problem.”

…

The story of this conquest helps us to make sense of how and why the Neolithic Revolution expanded far beyond the places it began, eventually converging on the Kalahari some ten millennia later. It also reveals the extent to which so many of our contemporary social, cultural, and economic institutions were shaped by the legacy of the agricultural revolution. Early Neolithic farmers had one massive advantage over hunter-gatherers. When the stars were in alignment, the weather favorable, the pests subdued, and the soils still packed with nutrients, farming was very much more productive than hunting and gathering. This enabled farming populations to grow much more rapidly than hunter-gatherers and sustain these growing populations with less land.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The more pecans you took, the larger and more numerous they grew. Implausible, I admit. Yet that is precisely the character of the human experience since 100,000 years ago. Inexorably, the global nut bowl has yielded ever more pecans, however many get used. The pace of acceleration of returns lurched upwards around 10,000 years ago in the agricultural revolution. It then lurched upwards again in AD 1800 and the acceleration continued in the twentieth century. The most fundamental feature of the modern world since 1800 – more profound than flight, radio, nuclear weapons or websites, more momentous than science, health, or material well-being – has been the continuing discovery of ‘increasing returns’ so rapid that they outpaced even the population explosion.

…

This position explains the accomplishment of so enormous a social change – the creation of an industrial proletariat in the face of tenacious resistance – by postulating an act of forcible expropriation: the enclosures uprooted the cottager and small peasant and drove them into the mills. Recent empirical research has invalidated this hypothesis; the data indicate that the agricultural revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labour, and that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest increase in resident population. From 1750 to 1830 Britain’s agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants. Whether objective evidence of this kind will suffice, however, to do away with what has become an article of faith is doubtful.’

…

Lord Kelvin’s contributions to the physics of resistance and induction were driven more by practical problemsolving in the telegraph industry than esoteric rumination. And though it is true that the physics of James Clerk Maxwell produced an electrical revolution, the chemistry of Fritz Haber spawned an agricultural revolution, Leo Szilard’s idea of a chain reaction of neutrons led to nuclear weapons and the biology of Francis Crick fathered biotechnology, it is none the less also true that these sages needed legions of engineers to turn their insights into things that could change living standards. Tinkering Thomas Edison, with his team of forty engineers, was more important to electrification than thinking Maxwell; practical Carl Bosch mattered more than esoteric Haber; administrative Leslie Groves than dreamy Szilard; practical Fred Sanger than theoretical Crick.

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

Highland farming continued to present many difficulties, but the numerous improvements made in Lowland farming in the first half of the century were followed in its second half by a transition to more intensive farming, encouraged by increased commercialization and higher levels of investment. The result was an agricultural revolution. 86 Initially, the advent of Union proved more problematic for industrial than agricultural development, leaving a real possibility that Scottish manufactures would wither, and that post-Union Scotland would be relegated to the status of a mere supplier of food and raw materials to the English market.

…

Both, too, had experienced a significant population increase and growing urbanization in the eighteenth century, and achieved major agricultural improvements in response to the demands of expanding market opportunities. While eighteenth-century Catalonia saw an impressive development of viticulture in particular, Lowland and Highland Scotland underwent an agricultural revolution over the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 63 As connections between town and country multiplied, industrial and agricultural transformation went hand in hand, although Scotland and Catalonia both remained predominantly rural societies, at least until the middle of the nineteenth century.

…

., abbot of Montserrat, (i) España, Carlos, Count of, (i) Espartero, General Baldomero, (i) , (ii) Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Estates: Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalonia, (i) , (ii) Estatut, (i) ; see also Autonomy, Statutes of ETA (Basque movement), (i) European Commission: bars unilateral secession, (i) European Union ( formerly Community): promotes liberal democracy, (i) ; Spain joins, (i) ; Scottish policy on, (i) ; attitude to breakaway states, (i) ; and British referendum, (i) ; Britain votes to leave, (i) ; danger of independent Catalonia losing membership, (i) ; member states fear internal separatist movements, (i) ; Puigdemont supporters denounce, (i) Ewing, Winifred, (i) Exclusion Crisis (England, 1679–81), (i) ‘exempt provinces’, (i) , (ii) , (iii) exhibitions: Barcelona, (i) , (ii) ; Glasgow, (i) ; Paris (1937), (i) Faculty of Advocates (Scottish), (i) , (ii) fadristerns , (i) , (ii) ; see also mas (farmstead) fascism, (i) , (ii) federalism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) felipistas , (i) , (ii) Feliu de la Peña, Narciso, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Fénix de Cataluña , (i) Ferdinand of Antequera, (i) Ferdinand (the Catholic), King of Aragon and of Spain: marriage and rule, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; death, (i) , (ii) ; as king of Aragon after Isabella’s death, (i) ; and Sentence of Guadalupe, (i) ; captures Granada, (i) Ferdinand VII, King of Spain ( earlier Prince of Asturias), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Ferguson, Adam, (i) Feria, Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba, 2nd Duke of, (i) Ferrer i Guárdia, Francesc, (i) Ferro, Víctor, (i) feudalism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) First World War see Great War (1914–18) fiscal-military state, (i) , (ii) flags: Scottish, (i) ; British (union flag), (i) , (ii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) Flanders, (i) Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, (i) Flodden Field, battle of (1513), (i) foral law (Catalonia), (i) , (ii) Forcadell, Carme, (i) France: ‘auld alliance’ with Scotland, (i) ; rescues and supports Mary Queen of Scots, (i) ; wars with England, (i) ; Catalonia becomes protectorate of, (i) , (ii) ; war with Spain (1635–59), (i) , (ii) ; Franco-Spanish frontier redrawn (1659), (i) ; French immigrants in Catalonia, (i) ; French invasion (1695–7), (i) ; Catalan hostility to, (i) , (ii) ; supports Stuart pretender to English throne, (i) ; war with Spain (1793–5), (i) ; French invasion and Spanish resistance (1808), (i) , (ii) ; occupies Catalonia in Napoleonic Wars, (i) Francis II, King of France, (i) Franco, General Francisco, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Franks, (i) , (ii) Free Church of Scotland, (i) , (ii) French Revolution (1789), (i) , (ii) fueros (Aragonese and Valencian): Aragon’s revolt over defence of, (i) ; abolished by Philip V, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; ‘exempt provinces’, (i) , (ii) ; desire for recovery, (i) ; see also Constitutions, Catalan Gaelic see language Galicia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Galileo Galilei, (i) Ganivet, Ángel: Idearium español , (i) Garbett, Samuel, (i) Gaudí, Antoni, (i) Gaythelos (Greek prince), (i) Generalitat: role and function, (i) ; revived (1931), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; re-established (1977), (i) , (ii) ; Pujol’s presidency, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Constitutional Tribunal discusses, (i) ; educational and cultural programmes, (i) ; anger at Supreme Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, (i) ; policy on independence, (i) , (ii) ; overspending, (i) ; economic management, (i) ; see also Diputació; Govern Genoa, Treaty of (1705), (i) Geoffrey of Monmouth: History of the Kings of England , (i) , (ii) George I, King of Great Britain, (i) , (ii) George II, King of Great Britain, (i) George III, King of Great Britain, (i) George IV, King of Great Britain, (i) Gibbs, James, (i) Gibraltar: captured by Allies (1704), (i) Gil, Pere, (i) Gil Robles, José María, (i) Gilmour, Sir John, (i) Girona: established as province, (i) ; under French occupation, (i) ; sieges of (1684), (i) ; (1808), (i) Gladstone, William Ewart, (i) , (ii) n.4 Glasgow: riots over proposed union (1706), (i) ; Malt Tax riots (1725), (i) ; population increase, (i) ; and Atlantic trade, (i) ; Literary Society, (i) ; compared with Barcelona, (i) ; mercantile elite, (i) ; university, (i) , (ii) n. 130; unrest and riots (1819), (i) ; (1848), (i) ; industrial growth and dominance, (i) , (ii) ; Kelvingrove Park exhibitions (1880 and 1901), (i) ; contribution to Great War, (i) ; rent strike, (i) ; see also Clydeside Glasgow General Assembly (1638), (i) Glencairn, William Cunningham, 9th Earl of, (i) Glencoe, Massacre of (1692), (i) Glendower, Owen, (i) , (ii) Glenfinnan, (i) globalization, (i) Glorious Revolution (1688–9), (i) , (ii) Gloucester, William, Duke of: death (1700), (i) ‘God Save the King’: as British national anthem, (i) , (ii) Goded, General Manuel, (i) Godoy, Manuel, (i) Good Friday Agreement (Ireland, 1998), (i) Goschen, George, 1st Viscount, (i) Goths, (i) Govern, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Goya, Francisco, (i) Granada: as Moorish kingdom, (i) ; captured by Ferdinand and Isabella, (i) Grant, Alexander, (i) Great Britain: and Scottish independence movement, (i) ; formed by James VI/I’s joint monarchy, (i) ; mythical origins, (i) ; and dynastic union (1603), (i) ; as term, (i) , (ii) ; and nationality, (i) ; formally created (1707), (i) , (ii) ; reordered after Union, (i) ; victories in Seven Years War, (i) ; as fiscal-military state, (i) ; impact of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, (i) , (ii) ; Spain sees as enemy, (i) ; wars with Spain (1796–1802, 1804–8), (i) ; growing power, (i) ; patriotism, (i) ; as united nation-state, (i) ; union by association and imitation, (i) ; 19th-century stability and prosperity, (i) ; proposed federalism, (i) ; regional aspirations, (i) ; patriotism in Great War, (i) ; sense of unity in Second World War, (i) ; welfare state established, (i) , (ii) ; post-war GDP, (i) ; votes to leave EU, (i) ; see also England Great Depression (1929–1930s), (i) Great Reform Bill (and Act, 1832), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Great War (1914–18): and collapse of Austro-Hungarian Empire, (i) ; suspends British home rule movements, (i) , (ii) ; and social-political change, (i) ; Spain’s neutrality in, (i) , (ii) ; effect on British sense of community, (i) Guadalupe, Sentence of, (i) Guardia Civil: created (1844), (i) Güell family, (i) Guipúzcoa, (i) Habsburg dynasty: and Spanish royal succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Haig, Douglas, 1st Earl, (i) Hamilton, James, 3rd Marquis ( later 1st Duke) of, (i) Hamilton, James Douglas, 4th Duke of (and Duke of Brandon), (i) , (ii) Hamilton, James, 7th Duke of, (i) Hamilton by-election (1967), (i) Hampden, John, (i) Hanover, House of: and succession to British throne, (i) , (ii) harvest: failures in Scotland (1695–9), (i) ; in Spain (1790s), (i) Hastings, Warren, (i) Heath, Ted, (i) Hebrides, (i) Henry II, King of England, (i) Henry VII, King of England, (i) , (ii) Henry VIII, King of England, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Henry II, King of France, (i) heraldry: Catalan, (i) Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1747), (i) , (ii) Hesse-Darmstadt, George, Prince of, (i) Highlands (Scottish): character, (i) ; lawlessness and banditry in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Glencairn’s rising (1653), (i) ; Monck subdues, (i) ; as recruiting ground for Jacobites, (i) ; Anglicization, (i) , (ii) ; land tenure, (i) ; Wade’s road-building programme, (i) ; and Jacobite rebellion (1745), (i) ; farming difficulties, (i) ; provides troops for British Army, (i) ; migration to America, (i) ; and national identity, (i) ; in romanticized history, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; clearances, (i) , (ii) Hispania: as myth, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; as term, (i) historiography, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also myths Holland, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron, (i) Holyroodhouse, Palace of, (i) home rule: Catalan, (i) , (ii) ; Spain and, (i) ; Irish, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; devolution accepted by major British political parties, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; critics of, (i) , (ii) ; see also independence Horne, Sir Robert, (i) Huguenots: persecuted in France, (i) Hume, David, (i) Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis, (i) Hutcheson, Francis, (i) ‘Hymn of the Grenadiers’ (Spanish national anthem), (i) Iberian Peninsula: union of regions, (i) , (ii) ; localism, (i) ; see also federalism; Hispania; Spain Ilay, Archibald Campbell, Earl of ( later 3rd Duke of Argyll), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ‘improvement’: English origins, (i) , (ii) ; in Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) independence movements: Catalan, (i) , (ii) ; independent republic (1641) (i) ; (1713), (i) ; criticized by Balmes, (i) ; (1934) (i) ; (since 2010), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; overseas imperial territories, (i) , (ii) ; Cuba, (i) , (ii) ; see also home rule; secession and separatism India: Scots in, (i) Indies see empires, Spanish industrialization: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; European, (i) , (ii) ; see also ‘improvement’; textiles Innes, Thomas, (i) Inquisition, Spanish, (i) Institute of San Isidro, (i) intermarriage: Scots-English, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Spanish Monarchy, (i) Ireland: treaty with Britain (1921) and creation of Irish Free State (1922), (i) , (ii) ; conquered by English, (i) , (ii) ; Henry VIII proclaimed King of (1541) and English rule, (i) , (ii) ; relations with western Scotland and Scottish settlers in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Ulster plantation, (i) ; rebellion (1641), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; support for James II and reconquered by William III, (i) ; keeps parliament, (i) ; manpower resources, (i) ; 1798 rebellion, (i) , (ii) ; incorporating union (1801) and inclusion in British parliament, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Church disestablished (1869), (i) ; nationalism and Home Rule movement, (i) , (ii) ; Easter Rising (1916), (i) , (ii) ; Irish immigrants in Scotland, (i) ; see also Northern Ireland; Ulster Isabel II, Queen of Spain, (i) Isabella I of Castile, Queen of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Italy: fascism in, (i) ; see also Mazzini Jacobites and Jacobitism: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; rebellions (1715), (i) , (ii) ; (1745), (i) , (ii) ; Jacobitism and Scottish history, (i) ; see also Charles Edward Stuart; James Francis Edward Stuart Jamància (pastry-cooks’ revolt, 1842), (i) James II, King of Great Britain ( earlier Duke of York): proposed as viceroy in Scotland, (i) ; Edinburgh court (1679–82), (i) ; accession (1685) and religious policy, (i) ; flight to France and exile, (i) ; death (1701), (i) James III, King of Scotland, (i) James IV, King of Scotland, (i) , (ii) James V, King of Scotland, (i) James VI, King of Scotland (James I of England): succeeds to English throne (1603), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; as ruler of composite monarchy, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; crowned king of Scotland, (i) ; adopts style ‘Great Britain’, (i) ; compatriots follow to English court, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; advocates perfect union, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) ; and nationality question, (i) ; on intermarriage of nobility, (i) ; attempts to pacify Borders, (i) ; death (1625), (i) James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince (‘the Old Pretender’; ‘James III/VIII’): and succession, (i) ; rising (1715), (i) , (ii) ; exile and plotting, (i) ; see also Jacobites Jaume I, Count-King (‘the Conqueror’), (i) Jefferson, Thomas, (i) Jeffreys, George, 1st Baron, (i) Jenkins’s Ear, War of (1739–48), (i) Jesuits, (i) , (ii) Jocs Florals , (i) , (ii) John of Fordun, (i) John II, King of Aragon, (i) John II, King of Catalonia, (i) John IV, King of Portugal ( formerly Duke of Braganza), (i) Johnson, Samuel, (i) Johnston, Tom, (i) Johnstone family, (i) Johnstone, George, (i) Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, (i) Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Juan Carlos, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Juan José de Austria, Don, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Junqueras, Oriol, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Junta de Comercio (Barcelona), (i) Junta Superior (Catalonia, 1808), (i) , (ii) Junts per Catalunya (JpC), (i) , (ii) Justices of the Peace: in Scotland, (i) Kames, Henry Home, Lord, (i) Killiecrankie, battle of (1689), (i) Kirk: General Assembly, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; unease at James VI/I’s religious policies, (i) ; gifts of property revoked, (i) ; Charles I’s liturgical reforms resisted, (i) ; fails to extend church government to England, (i) ; vulnerability after 1707 settlement, (i) ; welcomes Hanoverian succession, (i) ; opposes Gaelic language, (i) ; Moderates acquire control, (i) ; and national sentiment, (i) ; diminishing influence, (i) ; see also Church of Scotland; Disruptionists; Presbyterianism Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, (i) Knox, John, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also Covenant Labour Party (British), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Labour Party (Scottish), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) labour (workers): in Scotland and Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; and industrial unrest, (i) ; organized, (i) , (ii) ; indifference to Catalan autonomy, (i) ; see also anarchism; trade unions lairds, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) language: Castilian, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; nineteenth-century revival, (i) , (ii) ; prohibitions under Franco, (i) ; official status in 1978 Constitution, (i) ; Generalitat’s promotion of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; English, (i) ; Gaelic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, (i) Lauderdale, John Maitland, 1st Duke of, (i) , (ii) law: English–Scottish differences, (i) ; English Common, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) León: united with Castile, (i) ; foundation myth, (i) Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, (i) Leovigild, Visigothic king, (i) Lérida see Lleida Lerroux, Alejandro, (i) , (ii) Leslie, General Alexander, 1st Earl of Leven, (i) Liberal Democrats (Britain): coalition with Conservatives (2010), (i) ; decline in Scotland, (i) Liberal Party (British), (i) , (ii) Liberal Party (Spanish), (i) ; factional divisions, (i) Liberal Unionists (Scottish), (i) , (ii) liberalism: ideology, (i) , (ii) ; in Cortes of Cadiz, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; liberal triennium (1820–3) (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; in Scotland, (i) Lithuania: union with Poland, (i) Lleida (Lérida), (i) , (ii) Lliga Regionalista ( later Catalana), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Llivia, (i) Llorens i Barba, Xavier, (i) Lloyd George, David, (i) London Corresponding Society, (i) Lord Advocate (Scotland), (i) , (ii) Lords of the Articles (Scotland), (i) , (ii) Lords, House of: Scottish peers in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; as ultimate court of appeal, (i) ; Irish peers in, (i) Lothian, William Kerr, 3rd Earl of, (i) Louis I (the Pious), Carolingian Emperor, (i) Louis XIII, King of France, (i) , (ii) Louis XIV, King of France, (i) , (ii) ; and Spanish succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Louis XVI, King of France, (i) Lublin, Union of (1569), (i) McCormick, John, (i) McCrone, David: Understanding Scotland , (i) MacDiarmid, Hugh, (i) MacDonald, Ramsay, (i) Macià, Colonel Francesc, (i) , (ii) Macmillan, Harold, (i) Macpherson, James, (i) Madrid: Archduke Charles captures, (i) , (ii) ; population increase, (i) ; uprising against French invaders ( dos de mayo , 1808), (i) ; urban elite, (i) ; lacks manufacturing, (i) ; political and administrative power, (i) , (ii) ; as national capital, (i) , (ii) ; University, (i) ; see also Castile; Spain Magna Carta (1215), (i) Mair, John: Historia Maioris Britanniae , (i) Major, John, (i) , (ii) Malcolm III, King of Scotland, (i) Malcontents , (i) Mallorca: Jaume I captures from Moors, (i) ; and Indies, (i) ; language, (i) , (ii) ; and Nueva Planta, (i) Malt Tax, (i) ; riots (Glasgow, 1725), (i) Man, Isle of, (i) Mancomunitat, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Manresa, (i) , (ii) Mar, John Erskine, 22nd or 6th Earl of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Maragall, Pasqual, (i) , (ii) Margaret (‘Maid of Norway’): death, (i) , (ii) Margaret, Queen of Alexander III of Scotland, (i) Margaret, St, Queen of Malcolm III of Scotland, (i) Margaret Tudor, Queen of James IV of Scotland, (i) Margarit i Pau, Joan, Cardinal, (i) María Cristina de Borbón, Queen of Ferdinand VII, (i) María Cristina de Austria, Queen of Alfonso XII, (i) Martin the Humane, Count of Barcelona, (i) Martínez Marina, Francisco, (i) ; Theory of the Cortes , (i) Mary of Guise, Queen of James V of Scotland, (i) , (ii) Mary I (Tudor), Queen of England, (i) Mary II (Stuart), Queen of Great Britain, (i) Mary Queen of Scots, (i) , (ii) Mas, Artur, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) mas (farmstead), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also fadristerns Mataró, (i) Maura, Antonio, (i) , (ii) May, Theresa, (i) Mazzini, Giuseppe, (i) ‘Memorandum of Grievances’ ( Memorial de Greuges ), (i) Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, (i) Menorca, (i) Millar, John, (i) miquelets , (i) , (ii) Miralles, Enric, (i) Miró, Joan: Segador (mural), (i) modernista movement, (i) Mon, Alejandro, (i) monarchy: as unifying force, (i) ; ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’, (i) , (ii) ; restored in Spain (1874), (i) ; ceremonial activities in Europe, (i) ; as centre of stability in Spain, (i) ; styling in Britain, (i) monarquia española (Spanish Monarchy), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also empires, Spanish Monck, General George (1st Duke of Albemarle), (i) , (ii) Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of: rebellion (1685), (i) Montjuïc, battle of (1641), (i) ; World Fair site (1929), (i) Montrose, James Graham, 5th Earl and 1st Marquis of, (i) , (ii) Montserrat: Santa Maria abbey, (i) , (ii) Moors (Muslims): invade and settle southern Spain, (i) ; conflict with Christians, (i) ; Barcelona recaptured from, (i) Morocco: Spain’s wars in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Mossos d’Esquadra, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Muir, Edwin, (i) Muirhead, Roland, (i) Muntañola, Pere, (i) Murat, General Joachim, (i) Mussolini, Benito, (i) myths: and national identity, (i) , (ii) ; and foundation of Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and foundation of Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; see also historiography; Romantic movement Nairn, Tom, (i) Naples: Alfonso V conquers, (i) ; and composite monarchy, (i) Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor of the French, (i) , (ii) Napoleonic Wars: impact on Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) Narváez, General Ramón Maria, 1st Duke of Valencia, (i) Naseby, battle of (1645), (i) nation: concept and meaning, (i) , (ii) ‘nation-state’: as political formation, (i) ; (i) ; (i) ; Pi i Margall on, (i) ; Prat de la Riba on, (i) national anthems, (i) , (ii) National Assembly of Catalonia (ANC), (i) National Party of Scotland, (i) nationalism: rise of, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; linguistic, (i) ; English, (i) , (ii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) ; British, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; in post–Great War Europe, (i) ; resurgence, (i) , (ii) ; changes with circumstances, (i) ; see also patria , patriotism; unionist nationalism nationality, (i) ; difficulties over definition, (i) nationalization, (i) NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), (i) Navarre, kingdom of: status in Spain, (i) ; Castilian conquest and incorporation (1515), (i) ; under Bourbon administration, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also ‘exempt provinces’ Navigation Acts (English), (i) , (ii) Negrín, Juan, (i) Netherlands see Dutch Republic, Flanders New Lanark, (i) New Model Army (English), (i) Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of, (i) newspapers, (i) , (ii) Newton, Sir Isaac: Principia Mathematica , (i) Nifo, Francisco Mariano, (i) Nine Years War (1688–97), (i) , (ii) nobility: Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; intermarriage in Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also Lords, House of Normans: expansion in Britain, (i) North America Act (Britain, 1867), (i) North Sea oil, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Northern Ireland: Good Friday Agreement (1998), (i) ; see also Ulster Norway: contends for dominion over Scotland, (i) Nottingham, Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of, (i) Nueva Planta: as incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; and system of government and administration, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Numancia, (i) , (ii) Núria Statute, (i) ‘October Revolution’ (1934), (i) O’Donnell, General Leopoldo, (i) Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of: administration and reforms, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and war with France (1635), (i) ; and Catalans, (i) , (ii) ; opposition and downfall, (i) ; see also Union of Arms Oliver, Frederick Scott, (i) , (ii) Omnium Cultural (organization), (i) Organic Laws (1978 Constitution), (i) , (ii) n. 41 Orkney, (i) Ortega y Gasset, José, (i) Orwell, George, (i) Ossian, (i) Oswald, Richard, (i) Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of, (i) , (ii) Paisley: riots (1819), (i) Paris International Exhibition (1937), (i) Parliament British: composition, (i) ; and peripheral countries’ representation, (i) ; sovereignty, (i) ; see also Great Reform Bill (1832); Lords, House of Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) English: and union with Scotland, (i) ; Short (1640), (i) ; Long (1640–60), (i) ; Rump (1648), (i) ; as counterpart to Scottish parliament, (i) ; Convention (1689), (i) ; historical legacy, (i) Irish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Scottish: devolved, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; defers to monarch, (i) ; ratifies National Covenant, (i) ; and Triennial Act, (i) , (ii) ; and rebellion (1640s), (i) ; Covenanter, (i) ; dissolved, (i) ; post-Restoration status, (i) ; relations with English parliament, (i) ; activities, (i) ; passes Succession Act favouring James II, (i) ; revival under William III, (i) ; history of, (i) Spanish see Cortes; Corts parliamentary democracy: European disillusionment with, (i) Partido Popular (PP), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) Paterson, William, (i) Patiño, José, (i) , (ii) patria , patriotism: Catalan image of, (i) ; and Scottish and Catalan rebellions, (i) ; dual patriotism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; in Cortes of Cadiz, (i) ; and struggle for liberty, (i) ; and a federal Spain, (i) ; and state, (i) ; Primo de Rivera and Spanish, (i) Patronage Act (British, 1712), (i) peasantry, Catalan: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) peers (Scottish): in House of Lords, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; apply for English titles, (i) Pelayo, Don (legendary figure), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Penedès region, (i) Peninsular War, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Perpinyà (Perpignan), (i) Perth, Five Articles of (1618–21), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Peterborough, Admiral Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of, (i) Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, 1819), (i) Petronilla, wife of Ramon Berenguer, (i) Philip II, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) Philip III, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Philip IV, King of Spain: accession (1621), (i) ; early encounters with Catalans, (i) ; and Olivares’s administration, (i) , see also Olivares; and Catalan rebellion (1640–52), (i) , (ii) ; rule without minister-favourite, (i) Philip V, King of Spain ( earlier Duke of Anjou): contends for succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; and Catalan Corts (1702), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Nueva Planta, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; aims to recover lost Italian territories, (i) ; war with Charles VI ends, (i) Philip VI, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Philippines, (i) , (ii) Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, (i) Pi i Margall, Francesc, (i) , (ii) ; Las nacionalidades , (i) Picasso, Pablo: Guernica (painting), (i) Picts, (i) Pitt, William the Younger, (i) PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, Basque Nationalist Party), (i) Poland: union with Lithuania, (i) political culture: English, (i) , (ii) ; Catalan, (i) ; Spanish, (i) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) population: Castile, (i) ; Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Crown of Aragon, (i) ; Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; England and Wales, (i) , (ii) Popular Front, (i) Porteous Riots (Edinburgh, 1736), (i) Portugal, kingdom of: (i) ; dynastic marriages, (i) ; and Ferdinand and Isabella’s title, (i) ; union with Spain (1580), (i) ; citizens declared foreigners in Castile, (i) ; customs barriers with Castile, (i) ; recovers independence (1640), (i) , (ii) ; in War of Spanish Succession, (i) ; French invade (1807), (i) ; and proposed federation with Spain, (i) , (ii) POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), (i) Prat de la Riba, Enric, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Compendium of Catalanist Doctrines (with Muntañola), (i) ; La nacionalitat catalana , (i) prayer book: in Scotland, (i) Presbyterianism: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; restored (1690), (i) , (ii) ; and Scottish national identity, (i) ; internal dissent, (i) ; relations with state, (i) ; see also Church of Scotland; Covenant; Kirk; Knox, John Preston, battle of (1648), (i) Prim, General Joan, (i) prime ministers (British): Scottish origins of, (i) , (ii) n. 4 Primo de Rivera, General Miguel, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Privy Council, British (post-Union), (i) , (ii) Privy Council, English, (i) , (ii) Privy Council, Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) pronunciamientos , (i) , (ii) proportional representation: in Scotland, (i) , (ii) protectionism, (i) Protestantism: adopted in England and Scotland, (i) ; and Scottish working-class culture, (i) ‘province’: differing interpretations, (i) PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; Socialist Party), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Puerto Rico, (i) , (ii) Puig, Tomàs, (i) Puigdemont, Carles, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Pujol, Jordi, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Pyrenees, Peace of the (1659), (i) Quadruple Alliance (Britain–France–Austria–Netherlands), (i) Quebec, (i) rabassaires , (i) , (ii) ; see also viticulture Radical Republican Party, (i) radicalism, (i) Rajoy, Mariano, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Ramon Berenguer IV, Count, (i) rauxa , (i) rebellions: Aragon (1590–1), (i) , (ii) barretines (1687), (i) Carlist, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Catalonia: (1640), (i) , (ii) ; (1705), (i) ; (1719), (i) ; (1822), (i) Ireland: (1641), (i) , (ii) ; (1798), (i) , (ii) Jacobite: (1715), (i) , (ii) ; (1745), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Madrid (1808), (i) Monmouth’s (1685), (i) Riego’s (1820), (i) , (ii) Scotland: (1638), (i) ; (1640s), (i) see also wars, civil Recaredo, Visigothic king, (i) , (ii) referendums Canada (1980, 1995), (i) Catalan (2017), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Scotland: (1979), (i) ; (1997), (i) ; (2014), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Spain (1978), (i) Wales (1979), (i) Reformation (Protestant): effect on Anglo-Scottish relations, (i) , (ii) ; exacerbates religious differences, (i) regidores , (i) , (ii) regionalism: in Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) , (x) , (xi) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also Home Rule; Lliga regionalista religion: resurgence, (i) ; see also Church of England; Church of Rome; Church of Scotland Renaixença , (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) resistance, right of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Revocation, Act of (1625), (i) revolutions of 1848, (i) , (ii) Richard III, King of England, (i) Richelieu, Cardinal Armand du Plessis, Duc de, (i) , (ii) Riego, Colonel Rafael de, (i) , (ii) rights (civil): and independence movements, (i) Ripon, Treaty of (1640), (i) Rius i Taulet, Francesc, (i) Rivera, Albert, (i) Robertson, William, (i) ; The History of America , (i) Robres, Agustín López de Mendoza y Pons, Count of, (i) Roebuck, John, (i) Romanones, Alvaro de Figueroa, Count of, (i) Romantic movement: influence, (i) , (ii) ; and historiography, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and revival of Catalan language, (i) Rome: Fascist march on (1922), (i) Ross, Willie, (i) Rosselló ( comtat ), (i) ‘rough wooing’ (Henry VIII’s), (i) Royal Academy of History, Madrid, (i) Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969), (i) Royal Company of Barcelona, (i) Rubió i Ors, Joaquim, (i) Ryswick, Treaty of (1697), (i) Sabadell, (i) Sagasta, Práxades, (i) Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Salmond, Alex, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) San Sebastián, Pact of (1930), (i) Sànchez, Jordi, (i) Sanjurjo, General José, (i) Sanpere i Miquel, Salvador, (i) Santa Coloma, Dalmau de Queralt, Count of, (i) , (ii) Sardana (dance form), (i) Scone, Scotland: as site of royal enthronement, (i) , (ii) ; stone of, (i) , (ii) Scota (mythical Scottish queen), (i) Scotia: as term, (i) Scotland: recent independence movement, (i) ; as nation without state, (i) ; devolved parliament (Assembly), (i) , (ii) ; dynastic union with England (1603), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Edward I invades and subdues, (i) ; geographical character, (i) ; colonised and settled, (i) ; influence of sea on, (i) ; Scots dominate, (i) ; early claims to sovereignty, (i) , (ii) ; land ownership and transfers, (i) ; close relations with Ireland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; local powers and chieftains, (i) ; territorial consolidation and expansion, (i) , (ii) ; slow state-building, (i) ; Wars of Independence, (i) , (ii) ; ‘auld alliance’ with France (1295), (i) ; population changes, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; foundation myth, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Protestantism, (i) , (ii) ; union settlement debated, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; administrative system after union, (i) ; intermarriage with English, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and nationality question, (i) ; customs barriers with England, (i) ; transatlantic trade and colonization (i) , (ii) ; incorporating union with England, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; innovation and reform under Charles I, (i) ; revenue raising under Charles I, (i) ; Estates, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; rebellion against England (1640s), (i) ; defeated by Cromwell (1650), (i) ; army threat to England, (i) ; army strength, (i) ; seeks confederal union with England, (i) ; role and fortunes in English Civil War, (i) , (ii) ; rift with England over execution of Charles I, (i) ; improvement in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) ; post–Civil War settlement and government reforms, (i) ; Episcopacy reimposed (1661), (i) ; rejects office of viceroy, (i) ; clan conflict, (i) ; church government (Presbyterian) in, (i) , (ii) ; and succession question (to Charles II), (i) ; divisions in, (i) ; cross-border trade, (i) , (ii) ; economic hardship and population loss, (i) , (ii) ; migration to America, (i) , (ii) ; William III’s indifference to, (i) ; and succession to William III and Anne, (i) ; opposes Catholic monarch, (i) ; as prospective province of Dutch Republic, (i) ; government and constitution under Union, (i) ; fear of anglicization after Treaty of Union, (i) ; constituencies reduced, (i) ; post-Union administrative and political part-autonomy, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; coinage, (i) ; sacrifices sovereignty, (i) ; shares economy with England, (i) ; delayed economic development, (i) ; Secretary of State for Scotland office revived under Oxford, (i) ; unable to participate in overseas trade, (i) ; administrative reforms under Walpole, (i) ; riots against English government, (i) ; resents English governance, (i) ; feudal jurisdictions abolished (1748), (i) ; social and economic changes (18th century), (i) , (ii) ; commercial networks disrupted by wars, (i) ; surplus food production and exports, (i) ; access to British market and overseas trade, (i) ; industrialization, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; textile and weaving industry, (i) , (ii) ; gains access to overseas trade, (i) , (ii) ; military service abroad, (i) ; shipbuilding, (i) ; manpower resources, (i) ; taxation levels, (i) ; administrators in India and colonies, (i) ; rise of English hostility to (1760s), (i) ; national identity and culture, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Enlightenment, (i) ; dual patriotism in, (i) ; and romanticized history, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; dissent and riots in, (i) ; Lords Lieutenant introduced, (i) ; national militia question, (i) ; representation in British parliament, (i) ; national debt, (i) ; ‘radical war’ (1820), (i) ; contribution to British Empire, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; agricultural revolution, (i) ; employment and labour, (i) ; landed aristocracy, (i) ; cotton spinners’ strike (1837), (i) ; parliamentary reform, (i) ; laissez-faire government in mid-19th century, (i) ; peripheral role in British economic development, (i) ; semi-independence, (i) ; feudalism survives, (i) ; historiography, (i) ; nineteenth-century renaissance, (i) ; grievances, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; provides British prime ministers, (i) , (ii) n. 4; education, (i) ; demands separate Department of State, (i) ; home rule movement, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; close ties with England, (i) ; in Great War, (i) ; effect of Irish developments in, (i) ; Labour party ascendancy in, (i) ; political parties established in British system, (i) ; Unionism, (i) , (ii) ; devolution proposals, (i) ; in Great Depression, (i) ; ‘Renaissance’ (1930s), (i) ; contribution to Second World War, (i) ; state intervention in, (i) ; heavy industries decline, (i) , (ii) ; post–Second World War nationalism, (i) ; referendum on devolution (1979), (i) ; Poll Tax (Community Charge) proposed, (i) ; recession (1980s), (i) ; campaign for legislative assembly, (i) ; parliament opened (July 1999), (i) ; proportional representation in 1999 poll, (i) ; referendum (September 1997), (i) ; economic resources and revival, (i) , (ii) ; renaissance of history as academic subject, (i) ; referendum campaign and vote on independence (2014), (i) , (ii) ; plans second referendum on independence, (i) ; and end of empire, (i) ; sense of Britishness, (i) ; and inadequate dialogue with London government, (i) ; see also Treaty of Union Scotland Act (1998), (i) Scots (people): arrival in Scotland, (i) ; unpopularity in England after union, (i) ; settle in Ulster, (i) Scott, Sir Walter: on Darien scheme, (i) , (ii) ; on development of Scotland, (i) ; popularity in Europe, (i) ; romanticizes Scottish past, (i) ; on Scottish emotionalism, (i) ; The Antiquary , (i) ; Waverley , (i) Scottish Assembly: proposed, (i) Scottish Council: established in London, (i) ; disbanded, (i) Scottish Education Act (1872), (i) Scottish Executive, (i) , (ii) ; title changed to Scottish Government, (i) Scottish Home Rule Association, (i) , (ii) Scottish Militia Act (1796), (i) Scottish National Party (SNP): founded, (i) ; weakness, (i) ; Hamilton by-election victory (1967), (i) ; growing strength, (i) , (ii) ; aims for independence, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; claims North Sea oil, (i) ; European policy, (i) , (ii) ; and new economy, (i) ; in government, (i) ; success in 2011 election, (i) , (ii) ; gains seats in 2015 general election, (i) ; membership increases after referendum, (i) ; members move to Barcelona to support independence, (i) ; popular appeal, (i) ; efficient rule, (i) Scottish Office: transferred to Edinburgh, (i) Scottish Reform Act (1832), (i) Scottish Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, (i) secession and separatism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Catalonia and Portugal (1640), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalonia (2010–17), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Scotland (2014), (i) ; see also Cuba; independence movements Second World War (1939–45): and nationalism, (i) ; outbreak, (i) ; effect on British unity, (i) Security, Act of (1703), (i) seny , (i) , (ii) separatism see secession Serrano Suñer, Ramón, (i) Sert, Josep María, (i) Settlement, Act of (1701), (i) Seven Years War (1756–63), (i) , (ii) Sharp, James, Archbishop of St Andrews, (i) Shetland, (i) shipbuilding, (i) , (ii) Sidney, Algernon, (i) Silvela, Francisco, (i) Sinn Fein (Irish party), (i) slave trade, (i) Smith, Adam, (i) , (ii) ; Wealth of Nations , (i) Smith, John, (i) Socialist Party (Catalonia) see PSOE socialists: in Barcelona, (i) , (ii) Societies of Friends of the Country (Amigos del País), (i) Societies of the Friends of the People (Scotland), (i) Society of Barcelona Weavers, (i) Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture (Scotland), (i) Solemn League and Covenant (1643), (i) , (ii) Solidaritat Catalana, (i) Sophia, Electress of Hanover, (i) sovereignty: national, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Edward I claims over Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Bodin on indivisibility, (i) , (ii) ; embodied in English/British parliament, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalan claims, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Basque claims, (i) Soviet Union: collapse (1989), (i) Spain: and Catalan independence movement, (i) ; dynastic union (Ferdinand and Isabella), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; mythological origins, (i) ; union with Portugal (1580), (i) ; in Low Countries, (i) ; internal customs, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; war with France (1635–40), (i) ; post-Olivares government, (i) ; frontier with France defined, (i) ; and the Austrian connection, (i) ; Bourbon administrative intentions, (i) ; sends invasion fleet against Britain (1719), (i) ; population, (i) ; as fiscal-military state, (i) ; migration to Americas, (i) ; taxation, (i) , (ii) ; national identity, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; resistance to Enlightenment ideas, (i) ; Britain perceived as enemy and rival, (i) ; impact of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars on, (i) ; allies with France against Britain (1796–1802), (i) ; uprisings against French in Napoleonic wars, (i) , (ii) ; Cortes of Cadiz and constitutional monarchy, (i) , (ii) ; liberal reform, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; new regional divisions (1833), (i) ; economic development (19th century), (i) ; political instability in 19th century, (i) , (ii) ; tensions with Catalonia over government, (i) ; developed and undeveloped regions, (i) ; civil code, (i) ; Moderates and Progressives, (i) ; centralization, (i) ; Revolutionary Sexennium (1868–74), (i) ; First Republic (1873), (i) , (ii) ; monarchy restored (1874), (i) ; considers home rule for regions and overseas territories, (i) ; varied historic regions and communities, (i) ; proposed federalism, (i) , (ii) ; defeat in war with USA (1898), (i) ; anarchist attacks in, (i) ; war in Morocco, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; loss of Empire and decline, (i) , (ii) ; regionalism, (i) , (ii) ; neutrality in Great War, (i) , (ii) ; provoked by increasing Catalan nationalism, (i) ; and Primo de Rivera’s nationalism, (i) , (ii) ; Second Republic (1931), (i) , (ii) ; under Franco’s dictatorship, (i) , (ii) ; monarchy restored (1975), (i) ; decentralization under 1978 Constitution, (i) ; membership of European Community and NATO, (i) ; failure to counter Catalan independence propaganda, (i) ; illegality of unilateral secession under Constitution, (i) ; reaction to Catalan referendum and declaration on independence, (i) ; and consequences of Catalan independence decision, (i) ; see also Castile Spanish Civil War see wars, civil Spanish Succession, War of (1700–14), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Spanish-American War (1898), (i) , (ii) ‘Squadrone Volante’ (Scotland), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Stair, Sir James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount, (i) ; Institutions of the Laws of Scotland , (i) state, the: and surrender of overseas empires, (i) ; changing meaning, (i) ; fiscal-military, (i) ; and sense of nationality, (i) ; and bureaucracy, (i) ; and pàtria , (i) ; Catalonia as a ‘complete’ state, (i) ; see also ‘nation-state’; nationalism Stevenson, Robert Louis, (i) Stewart see Stuart Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of, (i) ‘Strategy for Catalanization’ (document), (i) Stuart dynasty, (i) , (ii) Sturgeon, Nicola, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Suárez, Adolfo, (i) , (ii) Supreme Constitutional Tribunal (Spain), (i) , (ii) , (iii) syndicalists, (i) , (ii) ; see also anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism; trade unions tacks (Highland land leases), (i) Tarradellas, Josep, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Tarragona, (i) taxation: in Catalonia (1716), (i) , (ii) ; (2015) (i) ; in Scotland (18th century), (i) ; (since 1888), (i) ; in Spain, (i) , (ii) Terrassa, (i) textiles: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) Thatcher, Margaret, (i) , (ii) Thirty Years War (1618–48), (i) Three Commons, the see Conferència dels Tres Comuns Times, The , (i) , (ii) tobacco: trade, (i) , (ii) Toleration Acts (England, 1689), (i) , (ii) ; (British, 1712), (i) , (ii) Tories: election victory (1710), (i) , (ii) ; see also Conservative Party Townsend, Joseph, (i) , (ii) Townshend, Charles, (i) trade: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; see also Darien project Spanish Atlantic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) trade unions: Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism trading companies, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also individual companies Trastámaras, (i) , (ii) Treaty of Union (Anglo-Scottish, 1707): and Scottish parliament, (i) ; negotiated and ratified, (i) ; as incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; and Scottish and English law, (i) ; and Scottish religious fears, (i) ; and Scottish representation in British parliament, (i) ; on relations between state and Presbyterian Church, (i) ; see also Anglo-Scottish Union Trevor-Roper, Hugh, (i) Triennial Act (Scotland, 1641), (i) , (ii) Tubal, son of Japhet, (i) , (ii) Tweeddale, John Hay, 4th Marquis of, (i) Tyrconnel, Rory O’Donnell, 1st Earl of, (i) Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of, (i) UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), (i) , (ii) Ulster: plantation established, (i) ; see also Northern Ireland Ulster Unionists, (i) Union, Anglo-Scottish see Treaty of Union (Anglo-Scottish, 1707) Union Commissioners (English and Scottish), (i) union (forms of): dynastic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) ; aeque principaliter , (i) , (ii) ; incorporating, (i) , (ii) ; see also Nueva Planta Union of Rabassaires , (i) , (ii) ; see also viticulture Union of Arms, (i) , (ii) unionist nationalism (‘banal’ nationalism), (i) , (ii) n. 93 Unionist Party (Scotland), (i) , (ii) ; see also Conservative Party United Irishmen, (i) United Kingdom see Great Britain United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), (i) United Scotsmen, (i) United States of America: war with Spain (1898), (i) , (ii) Universal Male Suffrage Law (Spain, 1890), (i) , (ii) universities: Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Spain, (i) urbanization: Catalonia, (i) ; Scotland, (i) Utrecht, Treaty of (1713), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Vairement, Richard (Veremundus): Gesta Annalia (attrib.), (i) Valencia, kingdom of: Jaume I reconquers, (i) ; economic strength, (i) ; and internal relationships of Crown of Aragon, (i) ; in War of Spanish Succession, (i) ; imposition of Nueva Planta (i) , (ii) , (iii) Vatican Council, Second (1962–5), (i) Velasco, Don Francisco Antonio Fernández de, (i) Versailles: peace settlement and treaties (1919), (i) Vicens Vives, Jaume, (i) ; Noticia de Cataluña , (i) viceroys: title rejected by Scots, (i) , (ii) ; of Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; of Peru, (i) Villahermosa, Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea de Borja, 9th Duke of, (i) , (ii) Visigoths, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) viticulture, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also rabassaires Vizcaya, (i) ; see also Basque provinces Wade, General George, (i) Wales: English conquest, (i) ; incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; referendum on devolved assembly, (i) Wallace, William, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Walpole, Sir Robert, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) War of Spanish Succession see Spanish Succession, War of wars, civil: English (1642–50), (i) ; Spanish (1936–9), (i) ; see also rebellions Wars of the Congregation (Scotland, 1550s), (i) Waterloo, battle of (1815), (i) Watt, James, (i) West Indies (Caribbean): trade with Spain, (i) ; immigration and settlement, (i) West Lothian question, (i) Western Isles: purchased by Alexander III from Norway, (i) Weyler, Valeriano, (i) Whigs: Junto falls (1710), (i) ; return to power under George I, (i) ; and Jacobite rebellion (1715), (i) ; supported by 2nd Duke of Argyll, (i) Whitelaw, Archibald, (i) Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona, (i) Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, (i) William III (of Orange), King of Great Britain, (i) , (ii) Wilson, Harold, (i) Wilson, Woodrow, (i) wine production (Catalonia) see viticulture woollen industry (Scotland), (i) ; see also textiles workers see labour Young Scots Society, (i) Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, (i) , (ii) Zapatero, General Juan, (i) Zaragoza: rising (1591–2), (i) ; resists French invasion, (i)

Protein Power: The High-Protein/Low-Carbohydrate Way to Lose Weight, Feel Fit, and Boost Your Health--In Just Weeks! by Michael R. Eades, Mary Dan Eades

agricultural Revolution, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA

It has always intrigued us because it completely flies in the face of today’s low-fat paradigm. At about the same time we ran across Banting we began attending paleopathology conferences and studying anthropology, where we learned what paleopathologists and anthropologists have known for years: the agricultural revolution and the increased consumption of carbohydrates it brought along with it played havoc with the health of early man. Mary Dan’s extensive study of eating disorders and metabolic hormonal derangements combined with Mike’s interest in biochemistry rounded out the “preparation” of our minds. We looked at Banting’s success with carbohydrate restriction along with the paleopathological/anthropological data showing a decline in health accompanying an increase in carbohydrate intake and concluded that maybe the intake of large amounts of carbohydrates wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

…

Many scientific papers have been written on this subject, and they present even the most passionate believer in the superiority of the high-carbohydrate diet with some food for thought. As Dr. Kathleen Gordon, like Dr. Cassidy an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, writes in one such paper: “Not only was the agricultural ‘revolution’ not really so revolutionary at its inception, it has also come to represent something of a nutritional ‘devolution’ for much of mankind.” The Thrifty Gene: Store That Fat! The anthropological record provides plenty of evidence that the change to a high-carbohydrate diet caused a general decline in health of people designed to eat a high-protein, carbohydrate-restricted diet.

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labeling. Journal of Rural Studies 19:127–138. Barker, G. 1981. Landscape and Society: Prehistoric Central Italy. Academic Press, London. —. 1985. Prehistoric Farming in Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. —. 2006. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Barker, G., and T. Rasmussen. 1998. The Etruscans. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK. Barker, G., A. Grant, P. Beavitt, N. Christie, J. Giorgi, P. Hoare, T. Leggio, and M. Migliavacca. 1991. Ancient and Modern Pastoralism in Central Italy: An Interdisciplinary Study in the Cicolano Mountains.

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The Biblical Archeologist 60(1):2–51. Berlin, I. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bezeczky, Dr. 1996. Amphora Inscriptions—Legionary Supply? Britannia 27:329–336. Bidwell, P. W. 1921. The Agricultural Revolution in New England. The American Historical Review 26(4):683–702. Bidwell, P. W., and J. I. Falconer. 1941. History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 358. Peter Smith, New York. Bieber, M. 1957. A Bronze Statuette in Cincinnati and Its Place in the History of the Asklepios Types.

Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life by Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus

agricultural Revolution, price anchoring, Skype, young professional

We also consume some dairy products, albeit significantly less than we used to. Paleo or Primal. Although neither of us subscribe to this diet (because we don’t eat meat), we have some friends who have had tremendous results from some form of a paleo or primal diet. The Paleo Diet mimics the types of foods most people on earth ate prior to the Agricultural Revolution (a mere 500 generations ago). These foods (fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood) are high in the beneficial nutrients that promote good health. The Paleo Diet is low in the foods and nutrients (refined sugars and grains, dairy, trans fats, salt, high-glycemic carbohydrates, and processed foods) that frequently cause weight gain, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and numerous other health problems.

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

, 325–6; acreage from Ho, Studies, 102 (but note the caveat on page 730 n. 4 to ch. 5 above). Other information from Huang, Peasant economy, 85–6; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 84; and Will, ‘Développement quantitatif’. 19. Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib his legacie. Kerridge, The agricultural revolution, first published in 1967, produced a barrage of examples of agrarian ‘improvement’ in England during the later seventeenth century. Mark Overton, An agricultural revolution, later dismissed this evidence and argued that little changed before 1750. The rival claims may be reconciled by noting that Kerridge drew most of his examples from East Anglia, where lighter soils facilitated innovation, whereas Overton concentrated on the Midlands, with heavier soils.

…

Thanks to these measures, the total cultivated land in the empire, which had fallen to 67 million acres in 1645, climbed back to 90 million acres in 1661 and to 100 million acres in 1685 – although since over 191 million acres of Chinese soil had been under cultivation in 1600, the heavy footprint of the Global Crisis remained perceptible well into the eighteenth century.18 A Second Agricultural Revolution A baby boom normally stimulates the agricultural sector, since every new mouth needs to be fed, encouraging farmers to invest in irrigation and drainage works, to improve the yield of traditional crops and to introduce new ones. In Mughal India the versatile peasants of the Ganges valley, who already cultivated almost 50 different crops in the early seventeenth century, added maize (as well as tobacco, the other New World ‘miracle crop’) to their repertory; while the farmers of west central Africa began to plant not only maize but also manioc (originally a Brazilian crop) as a safeguard against the failure of the millet and sorghum harvests during drought.

…

In 1650 Samuel Hartlib, a refugee from the Thirty Years War who settled in England, published A discours of husbandrie used in Brabant and Flaunders, later expanded to include information from New England and Ireland, showing how new methods of tillage and rotation made otherwise unproductive soils profitable; how to identify and to sow the strains best suited to each locality; and how to use chemical fertilizers to optimal effect. Hartlib also carried out experiments concerning the relative yields of different methods of farming. Some English historians have hailed these practical and theoretical efforts, which gathered momentum in the 1640s and 1650s, as an ‘agricultural revolution’.19 Chinese farmers also innovated at this time, notably by cultivating maize, peanuts and sweet potatoes: three crops recently imported from the Americas, which thrived in marginal soils, resisted both droughts and locusts, did not require transplanting like rice, and produced twice as much as other dry-land crops with far less labour input.

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

agricultural Revolution, CRISPR, Donner party, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, RFID, side project

I couldn’t help but imagine him on the porch with a book that he probably didn’t pay for, sipping an iced tea, while the brother of someone he was both having sex with and legally owned was pausing in his toil to wipe his brow and gaze up at the man who would one day get credit for all his hard work. Sure, it probably didn’t happen like that. But it certainly didn’t happen like the tour guides suggest. The men and women who built the railroads, started our agricultural revolution, our industrial revolution, had to go through a period of abuse, ownership, and neglect. Will our machines suffer the same? I think they already are. My sailboat is a robot—a collection of robots, really. My floating home runs on solar power, but there’s a machine that talks to my batteries, and if they get below 35 percent, it cranks the generator for me.

…

The word “farm,” of course, was a holdover from the clusters of computers, the server farms, used at places like Pixar, where virtual worlds were created for entertainment. It took a while before the productive uses of such worlds were understood. Once they were, the result was often referred to as the third great agricultural revolution. Sim farms, in just the last decade, had sprouted all over the place. Government-owned, university-owned, even a few private ones. The flood of research from these farms drowned out all the work done in the real world. A theory would be published in the morning and overturned by mid-afternoon.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Drayton is the founder of Ashoka, an organization that supports and trains social entrepreneurs around the world. They are called Ashoka Fellows, and there are now more than two thousand of them—many involved in women’s rights campaigns. Drayton’s brief history of the rise of social entrepreneurs goes like this: The agricultural revolution produced only a small surplus, so only a small elite could move into the towns to create culture and conscious history. This pattern persisted ever since: Only a few have held the monopoly on initiative because they alone have had the social tools. That is one reason that per capita income in the West remained flat from the fall of the Roman Empire until about 1700.

…

Likewise Scotland examined the Dutch and Swedish approaches, along with that of New South Wales in Australia, and preferred Sweden’s strategy: Scottish Parliament, Local Government and Transport Committee, “Evidence Received for Prostitution Tolerance Zones (Scotland) Bill Stage One,” February 4, 2004. CHAPTER THREE Learning to Speak Up 52 A retired high court judge, Bhau Vahane: Raekha Prasad, “Arrest Us All,” The Guardian, September 16, 2005. The New Abolitionists 55 “The agricultural revolution”: Bill Drayton, “Everyone a Changemaker: Social Entrepreneurship’s Ultimate Goal,” Innovations 1, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 80–96. CHAPTER FOUR Rule by Rape 61Women aged fifteen through forty-four: The calculation that more women die or are maimed from male violence than from the other causes comes from Marie Vlachova and Lea Biason, eds., Women in an Insecure World: Violence Against Women, Facts, Figures and Analysis (Geneva: Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2005), p. vii.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

If all people had to grow or gather all of their own food and fuel, the effort might require most of their working hours. By leaving food production to skilled farmers, we enable others to spend their days weaving cloth, playing the oboe, or screening hand-carried luggage at airports.47 Prior to the agricultural revolution several millennia ago, division of labor was mostly along gender lines, and was otherwise part-time and informal; with farming and the settling of the first towns and cities, full-time division of labor appeared, along with social classes. Since the Industrial Revolution, the number of full-time occupations has soared.

…

Fire enabled us to stay warm in forbidding environments, cook our food (leading to profound changes not only in human culture but human physiology as well), and alter landscapes in our favor.24 The second was the development of language — likely a gradual process that began many tens of millennia ago, but an equally fateful one: it enabled humans to coordinate their actions over time and space, and it slowly altered the internal architecture of our brains. With language we told stories, and with those stories we wove religions, philosophies, and eventually scientific theories and computer programs. The third turning point was the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Seasonal surpluses of storable food enabled full-time division of labor (society became segmented into peasants, soldiers, accountants, merchants, and kings) as well as the emergence of cities and empires — which brought with them writing, mathematics, and money. The industrial revolution, only about two centuries old, liberated the energies of fossil fuels, which replaced muscle power in production and transportation, thereby dramatically increasing the speed and scale of those processes.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

See, for instance, Daron Acemoglu, “Advanced Economic Growth: Lecture 19: Structural Change,” delivered at MIT, 12 November 2017. 41.  Jesus Felipe, Connie Bayudan-Dacuycuy, and Matteo Lanzafame, “The Declining Share of Agricultural Employment in China: How Fast?” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 37 (2016): 127–37. 42.  Estimate of “males in agriculture” in 1900–1909 is 810,000 in Gregory Clark, “The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1500–1912,” unpublished ms. (University of California, Davis, 2002). The National Health Service of England and Wales employed about 1.2 million people in 2017; see https://digital.nhs.uk/. 43.  David Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth” in “Re-evaluating Labor Market Dynamics: A Symposium Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

…

Chui, Michael, Katy George, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi. “Human + Machine: A New Era of Automation in Manufacturing.” McKinsey & Co., September 2017. Cingano, Federico, “Trends in Income Inequality and Its Impact on Economic Growth.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 163 (2014). Clark, Gregory, “The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1500–1912.” Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Davis, 2002. ________. A Farewell to Alms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cobb, Charles, and Paul Douglas. “A Theory of Production.” American Economic Review 18, no. 1 (1928): 139–65.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This book shows with great clarity why we are heading for planetary disaster and suggests ways in which new kinds of more stable social and economic practices might evolve around support for sustainable agriculture. A timely and compelling vision of a New Agrarianism. Highly recommended.’ —PAUL RICHARDS, author of Indigenous Agricultural Revolution and Ebola; emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development, Wageningen University ‘Time to tune in – these are powerful arguments for collective action in agriculture. We know that small farms offer solutions to the crises of our time. Stewardship, guardianship and rebuilding biodiversity is real, meaningful work.

…

London: ONS. Orrell, David. 2010. Economyths: How the Science of Complex Systems Is Transforming Economic Thought. London: Icon. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overton, Mark. 1996. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parenti, Christian. 2011. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books. Patel, Raj. 2013. ‘The Long Green Revolution,’ Journal of Peasant Studies 40(1): 1–63.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

Eventually this process of selection produced early versions of familiar modern crops, plants productive enough to sustain and reward sedentary populations who could put in the work to clear land, sow and maintain the fields, and then hang around to reap the rewards. Voilà, agriculture. Somewhat later, similar processes independently led to agricultural revolutions in other regions of the world, such as the domestication of wheat, millet, and rice in the Yellow River and Yangzi River valleys in China and of maize (corn) in the Americas. Once early farmers were systematically producing crops, they’d often end up with surpluses. These could be stored for the off-season, or as insurance against a future bad harvest.

…

Its discovery a couple decades ago was therefore an important piece of evidence against the traditional view that certain key trappings of civilization—monumental architecture, elaborate ritual-based religion, and the brewing of alcohol—only could have developed once humans had attained the stability and access to resources brought about by the agricultural revolution. Beer before bread advocates see this site, with its stone basins that could hold up to forty gallons of liquid, scattered remnants of drinking vessels, and evidence of extensive feasting on wild animals, as an illustration of how ancient humans were first motivated to come together in large groups by the draw of intoxication and ritual, with agriculture coming after.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Farming led to a stable supply of food and even a regular surplus for the first time,36 and a non-nomadic way of life allowed people to stock food and domesticate animals, providing further sources of nutrition, including meat and milk products. Aided by further technological breakthroughs, such as the development of the plough, the wheel, pottery, and iron tools, this era consisted of a true agricultural revolution. It had major political, economic, and societal consequences. Socially, the new sedentary lifestyle allowed for the development of villages, cities, societies, and even early empires. Politically, these societies started to see hierarchies for the first time, as the food surplus allowed certain classes of people to live off the foods produced by others.

…

Kahn, The Yale Law Journal, January 2017 34 “Big Tech Has Too Much Monopoly Power—It's Right to Take It On,” Kenneth Rogoff, The Guardian, April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/big-tech-monopoly-power-elizabeth-warren-technology; Quote: “Here are titles of some recent articles: Paul Krugman's “Monopoly Capitalism Is Killing US Economy,” Joseph Stiglitz's “America Has a Monopoly Problem—and It's Huge,” and Kenneth Rogoff's “Big Tech Is a Big Problem”; “The Rise of Corporate Monopoly Power,” Zia Qureshi, Brookings, May 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/05/21/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 35 “Steve Wozniak Says Apple Should've Split Up a Long Time Ago, Big Tech Is Too Big,” Bloomberg, August 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-08-27/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-ve-split-up-a-long-time-ago-big-tech-is-too-big-video. 36 Some scholars do dispute this notion. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, is much less upbeat about the impact of the agricultural revolution on the quality and quantity of food supply on people. 37 A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, Chapman & Hall, 1859. 38 “The Emma Goldman Papers,” Henry Clay Frick et al., University of California Press, 2003, https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/PublicationsoftheEmmaGoldmanPapers/samplebiographiesfromthedirectoryofindividuals.html. 39 “Historical Background and Development Of Social Security,” Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html. 40 “Standard Ogre,” The Economist, December 1999, https://www.economist.com/business/1999/12/23/standard-ogre. 41 “The Presidents of the United States of America”: Lyndon B.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Farming led to a stable supply of food and even a regular surplus for the first time,36 and a non-nomadic way of life allowed people to stock food and domesticate animals, providing further sources of nutrition, including meat and milk products. Aided by further technological breakthroughs, such as the development of the plough, the wheel, pottery, and iron tools, this era consisted of a true agricultural revolution. It had major political, economic, and societal consequences. Socially, the new sedentary lifestyle allowed for the development of villages, cities, societies, and even early empires. Politically, these societies started to see hierarchies for the first time, as the food surplus allowed certain classes of people to live off the foods produced by others.

…

Kahn, The Yale Law Journal, January 2017 34 “Big Tech Has Too Much Monopoly Power—It's Right to Take It On,” Kenneth Rogoff, The Guardian, April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/big-tech-monopoly-power-elizabeth-warren-technology; Quote: “Here are titles of some recent articles: Paul Krugman's “Monopoly Capitalism Is Killing US Economy,” Joseph Stiglitz's “America Has a Monopoly Problem—and It's Huge,” and Kenneth Rogoff's “Big Tech Is a Big Problem”; “The Rise of Corporate Monopoly Power,” Zia Qureshi, Brookings, May 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/05/21/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 35 “Steve Wozniak Says Apple Should've Split Up a Long Time Ago, Big Tech Is Too Big,” Bloomberg, August 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-08-27/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-ve-split-up-a-long-time-ago-big-tech-is-too-big-video. 36 Some scholars do dispute this notion. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, is much less upbeat about the impact of the agricultural revolution on the quality and quantity of food supply on people. 37 A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, Chapman & Hall, 1859. 38 “The Emma Goldman Papers,” Henry Clay Frick et al., University of California Press, 2003, https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/PublicationsoftheEmmaGoldmanPapers/samplebiographiesfromthedirectoryofindividuals.html. 39 “Historical Background and Development Of Social Security,” Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html. 40 “Standard Ogre,” The Economist, December 1999, https://www.economist.com/business/1999/12/23/standard-ogre. 41 “The Presidents of the United States of America”: Lyndon B.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Domesticated species were not adequate, the environment was not propitious, and societies failed to stick together long enough to make it work. Yet as the Holocene progressed more and more experiments were successful, and around the world cultivated fields and plots and gardens were carved out of the wilderness. It used to be common to write about the agricultural revolution, as if a world of foragers changed suddenly into a world of farmers. In reality it was more complicated. Different groups of foragers approached farming by various routes. All they had in common were those social and cognitive capacities that had evolved for other purposes. Mostly these changes happened sooner in those warmer regions where plant resources had always been a bigger part of foragers’ diets: in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, Egypt and northern China.

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Some early accounts of urbanization—focused on the experience of the Near East—seem to assume that once a society had committed to farming then population growth, metallurgy, and trade would all follow automatically, with cities and states the inevitable end point of the historical trajectory. Childe’s Urban Revolution was seen as a natural sequel to his Agricultural Revolution. The European sequence is one of those that shows things were not so simple. Humans might have an urban aptitude, but did not have an urban destiny. Other kinds of social worlds could be built out of farming, multispecies societies, and metal-working. The Mediterranean, as one might expect, was somewhere between the two.

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Current Anthropology 52 (5): 619–660. Bannon, Cynthia. 2009. Gardens and Neighbours: Private Water Rights in Roman Italy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bar-Kochva, Bezalel. 1979. The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barker, Graeme. 2006. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barker, Graeme, and Tom Rasmussen. 1998. The Etruscans. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bass, George, ed. 1972. History of Seafaring. London: Thames and Hudson. Beard, Mary. 2007. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

According to recent estimates, life on Earth will last for another billion years, until it will be destroyed by the increase in solar temperature. So imagine an historian writing in the near future, say in a million years. She may consider it normal, and perhaps even elegantly symmetrical, that it took roughly six millennia for the agricultural revolution to produce its full effect, from its beginning in the Neolithic (10th millennium BC), until the Bronze Age, and then another six millennia for the information revolution to bear its main fruit, from the Bronze Age until the end of the 2nd millennium AD. During this span of time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) evolved from being mainly recording systems - writing and manuscript production - to being also communication systems, especially after Gutenberg and the invention of printing - to being also processing and producing systems, especially after Turing and the diffusion of computers.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Land was made available—but it was land that had been unproductive before. After the middle of the nineteenth century land-grant colleges were established, and they disseminated information and technology through governmentally financed extension services. Unquestionably, however, the main source of the agricultural revolution was private initiative operating in a free market open to all—the shame of slavery only excepted. And the most rapid growth came after slavery was abolished. The millions of immigrants from all over the world were free to work for themselves, as independent farmers or businessmen, or to work for others, at terms mutually agreed.

…

It acted primarily to restrict output in order to keep prices artificially high. The growth of agricultural productivity depended on the accompanying industrial revolution that freedom stimulated. Thence came the new machines that revolutionized agriculture. Conversely, the industrial revolution depended on the availability of the manpower released by the agricultural revolution. Industry and agriculture marched hand in hand. Smith and Jefferson alike had seen concentrated government power as a great danger to the ordinary man; they saw the protection of the citizen against the tyranny of government as the perpetual need. That was the aim of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) and the United States Bill of Rights (1791); the purpose of the separation of powers in the U.S.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

A six-foot-tall worker weighing 200 pounds would have survived about as well in the eighteenth century as a man on the moon without a spacesuit; on average there simply was not enough food to support a population of people of today’s physical dimensions. The small workers of the eighteenth century were effectively locked into a nutritional trap; they could not earn much because they were so physically weak, and they could not eat because, without work, they did not have the money to buy food. With the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, the trap began to fall apart. Per capita incomes began to grow and, perhaps for the first time in history, there was the possibility of steadily improving nutrition. Better nutrition enabled people to grow bigger and stronger, which further enabled productivity to increase, setting up a positive synergy between improvements in incomes and improvements in health, each feeding off the other.

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Riley, 2001, Rising life expectancy: A global history, Cambridge University Press; and Mark Harrison, 2004, Disease and the modern world, Polity Press. 2. The data are taken from the Human Mortality Database, http://www.mortality.org/. 3. The following account relies on Graeme Barker, 2006, The agricultural revolution in prehistory: Why did foragers become farmers? Oxford University Press, and Mark Nathan Cohen, 1991, Health and the rise of civilization, Yale University Press. See also Morris, Why the West rules. 4. David Erdal and Andrew Whiten, 1996, “Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human evolution,” in Paul Mellars and Kathleen Gibson, eds., Modelling the early human mind, McDonald Institute Monographs, 139–50. 5.

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Their relative incomes are therefore determined by their relative productivities in growing food; and the relative prices of steel and cocoa are determined by these relative incomes and by productivities in steel and cocoa.”13 The cocoa farmer and the steelworker the w elfa r e wor ld of the new economic or der [ 147 ] had to be paid wages that attracted them away from food production and toward these forms of employment. Because an agricultural revolution had already occurred in the temperate regions, wages would be higher.14 The absence of an agricultural revolution was thus one of the distinguishing features of underdeveloped countries. This meant that relatively low wages could attract workers away from food production and toward the production of cash crops like coffee and cocoa. Moreover, without a revolution in agricultural production, the economies of underdeveloped countries did not have the necessary surplus food and raw materials that could be consumed in an industrial sector.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

From the earliest civilizations, like Uruk in Mesopotamia, the birthplace of cuneiform, the first known writing system, to today’s megalopolises, cities have driven technological development. And more technology meant more—and bigger—cities. At the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution the worldwide human population numbered just 2.4 million. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, it approached 1 billion, a four-hundred-fold increase that was predicated on the waves of the intervening period. The Agricultural Revolution (9000 –7500 BCE), one of history’s most significant waves, marked the arrival of two massive general-purpose technologies that gradually replaced the nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life: the domestication of plants and animals.

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

ACCIDENTS OF URBAN CREATION Beginning in about 1840, a concatenation of four events and two nonevents began to emerge in the United States; they would constitute what I’ll call accidents of urban creation. All of these outcomes are wrapped within the evolution of American capitalism, with its sharply increasing capacity to create and to destroy, and to influence the course of government policy. These developments were: the rising dominance of steam-driven manufacturing, already noted; an agricultural revolution allowing the nation to support more and larger urban centers; the emergence, largely as a result of integrated railroad systems, of national markets accessible from central-city manufacturing plants; a critical timing gap between the maturation of that rail system (which centralized cities) and the coming automotive and truck transportation (which decentralized them); a sustained period of relatively open immigration allowing accelerated growth in the supply of urban labor; and a delayed and uneven spreading out and implementation of distance-compressing technologies such as alternating current (AC) electricity.

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During this time, two of these forces were important by their absence: motor vehicles with the highway system on which they relied, and a well-developed electrical grid spanning urban regions. The other forces were made important by their presence: the (temporary) dominance of steam-powered manufacturing, the agricultural revolution needed to sustain more and larger urban centers, the maturation of a well-integrated railroad system, and, finally, the willingness of government to permit a great wave of immigration during the same decades. There was nothing inevitable or even predictable about this temporary historical alignment: if God, or nature, should elect to run the same history a thousand times, there is no particularly good reason to expect that the same alignment would recur very often, or at all.

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See brutalism; modernism; New Urbanism assembly-line production, 21–22, 224 athletic organizations, 144–45 Atlas Club, 154 automobiles assembly-line production of, 21–22, 221 growth in numbers, 437 impact of on city governance, 23–24 manufacture of, 223 –24 in New Haven, 223, 224–28, 296 and urban life, 14–15, 223 –30, 369 – 70 A&P stores, 236–43 Adler, Max, 81, 172, 187 African-Americans. See blacks agglomeration economies, 435 agricultural revolution, 11–13, 17 agriculture in the New Haven area, 48 – 50, 63 Albertus Magnus College, 248 Alexander, Bruce, 431 Alfano, Jenny, 250–51 Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 250–51 Ambler Realty, 261 American Automobile Association, 223, 458 American Federation of Teachers, 252 American Steel & Wire Company, 110, 111 Amorotti, Ben, 384 Andrew B.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Figure 3.6 Components of a typical late nineteenth-century collar harness (based on Telleen 1977 and Villiers 1976)—and a variety of mid-eighteenth-century horseshoes (Diderot and d’Alembert 1769–1772). The shapes (starting on the left) are, respectively, typical English, Spanish, German, Turkish, and French horseshoes. An efficient harness was not the only precondition of a horse’s superior performance, and hence its introduction did not launch an agricultural revolution (Gans 2004). Hard-working horses were fed grain, which required a planting cycle, and needed relatively expensive harnessing and shoeing, while weaker and slower-working oxen could be fed with just straw and chaff and harnessed cheaply. Horseshoes are narrow U-shaped metal plates fitting the hoof’s rim and fastened with nails driven into the insensitive hoof wall (fig. 3.6).

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Not surprisingly, it formed the core of all intensive agricultural systems relying on complex crop rotations, but it was only between 1750 and 1880 when standard rotations, including legume cover crops (exemplified by Norfolk’s four-year succession of wheat, turnips, barley, and clover), were widely adopted in Europe and at least tripled the rate of symbiotic nitrogen fixation and secure rising yields of nonleguminous crops (Campbell and Overton 1993). Chorley (1981, 92) recognized that this change was truly epochal, justifying his label of Agricultural Revolution: Although advance was broad-fronted, the outcome of many small changes, there was one big change of overriding importance: the generalization of leguminous crops and the consequent increase in the nitrogen supply. Is it not fanciful to suggest that this neglected innovation was of comparable significance to steam power in the economic development of Europe in the period of industrialization?

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Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Chincold. 2015. Three Gorges Project. http://www.chincold.org.cn/dams/rootfiles/2010/07/20/1279253974143251-1279253974145520.pdf. Ching, F. D. K., M. Jarzombek, and V. Prakash. 2011. A Global History of Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Chorley, G. P. H. 1981. The agricultural revolution in Northern Europe, 1750–1880: Nitrogen, legumes, and crop productivity. Economic History Review 34 (1):71–93. Choudhury, P. C. 1976. Hastividyarnava. Gauhati: Publication Board of Assam. Christ, K. 1984. The Romans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Church, R., Hall, A. and J.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Whether we like it or not, economic growth and technological progress do not always come in steady doses. World history offers various precedents for the idea of a "great transformation," leading to enormous increases in the quality and quantity of human lives. Our ancestors did not foresee the evolution of humans, the agricultural revolution, the "urban revolution" (Sumeria and Mesopotamia, circa 4000 B.C.), or the Industrial Revolution. For that matter the East Asian 14 See for instance Venkatraman (2009) and Tsai (2006). 25 revolution in economic growth was not widely anticipated. Each development, over time, dramatically changed the human condition, and eventually very much for the better.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Whether we like it or not, economic growth and technological progress do not always arrive at a steady pace. World history offers various precedents for the idea of a “great transformation” leading to enormous increases in the quality and quantity of human lives. Our ancestors did not foresee the evolution of humans, the agricultural revolution, the “urban revolution” (Sumeria and Mesopotamia, circa 4000 B.C.), or the Industrial Revolution. For that matter, the East Asian revolution in economic growth was not widely anticipated. Each development dramatically changed the human condition over time, and eventually very much for the better.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Environment may not determine the capacities of humans, but environmental events can decisively influence the course of history. CRISIS IN EUROPE It is no exaggeration to say that the vicissitudes of Western Europe's Little Ice Age climate brought about what cultural geographers refer to as the second Agricultural Revolution. Farm implements were improved; field methods (planting, sowing, watering, weeding, harvesting) got better, transportation and storage of produce involved less waste and loss. New crops were tried (not always with good results); marketing in the growing urban areas became more efficient. All this was, literally, a matter of survival, because toward the end of the sixteenth century there were signs that the Little Ice Age had even worse in store.

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See also specific countries, organizations and events and Afghanistan, 156-59, 176, 177 (see also primary entry for Afghanistan) bin Laden, 155-56, 157, 160, 161-62, 163, 177 of Chechens, 247-48 color-coded terror alerts, 174 INDEX terrorism (continued) defining terrorism, 151 and demarcation, 120 expansion of, 159-61 favorable environments for, 176-77 (see also states, failed or malfunctioning) funding of, 187-88 and globalization, 164 incidence of, ix (see also specific attacks) infiltration, 180 and insurgency, 188 and Iraq, 189-96 (see also primary entry for Iraq) and Islam, 48-50, 123, 124, 147, 148, 151-56, 161-73, 181-87 potential targets, 174-75, 176-81 religious extremism, 48-49, 50, 151-56, 161-67 responding to attacks, 175-76 suicide attacks, 152, 160, 170, 175-76, 189,248 and territorial imperative, 161-62 Triple Frontier, 179-81, 180 Thailand, 147, 177 Thatcher, Margaret, 151-52 Thira eruption, 76 Tiananmen Square, 131 Tianjin, China, 127, 139 Tiber Valley, 201 Tibet (Xizang, China) borders and boundaries, 119-20, 135 China's claims to, 108, 130, 135, 144 name, 37 Tibetan revolt (1959), 137 Tigris-Euphrates rivers, 98, 190, 193 time in geologic terms, 53, 58, 59 Toba eruption, 71-72, 82, 83, 279 Togo, 185 toilets, 93 topography, 28, 29, 30 Toure, Sekou, 267 trade Africa, 182, 258, 267, 271 China, 124, 136, 146-47, 149 Europe, 202 Japan, 146-47 South Korea, 146-47 United States, 14| Transcaucasia, 234, 236, 238, 243-48 transculturation, 144, 173 Transdniestria, Moldova, 3, 206 Trans-Siberian Railroad, 238, 239 Transylvania, Romania, 206 TreatyofNice (2000), 211 TreatyofRome (1957), 210 tree ring research (dendochronology), 78 Tribal Areas (Waziristan), Pakistan, 177 Trinidad and Tobago, 180 Triple Frontier, 179-81, 180 Truman, Harry, 209 tsunami of December 26, 2004, 12, 55, 279 Tunisia, 94 Turkestan, 133 Turkey borders and boundaries, 193 Dardanelles Strait, 116 ethnic groups, 228 and European Union, 225, 228-29, 253 immigration, 95, 168 and Iraq, 190 Islam in, 162, 164 and oil, 234 terrorists, 188 and U.S. invasion of Iraq, 189 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 37 Turkmenistan, 109, 176 Tuscany (region), 218 Tutsi population, 264, 269 Uganda, 185. 265-66, 268 Ukraine climate change, 72 and European Union, 218, 225-26, 228, 230 industrialization, 203 language, 199, 201 name changes, 37, 40 and Russia, 205, 231, 234, 237, 253, 254 terrorists, 188 unitary states, 110-11 United Arab Emirates, 277 United Flight 93, 174 United Kingdom borders and boundaries, 115, 119-20, 223 colonialism, 112, 125, 129, 136, 138, 142-43, 183,262,263,264,265 currency, 213 and European Community, 210 and European Free Trade Association, 210 and European Union, 217, 218 geographic education in, 13 and Gibraltar, 222, 224 government of, 110-11 and immigration, 168, 212 and Iraq, 189, 194 Islam in, 168, 169 and language, 201 Navy, 128 physical separation from Europe, 74 population, 95, 223 remote-sensing technology, 48 and separatist movements, 220-21 strength of, 128 terrorism, 177 United Nations and China, 125 Conferenceon Environment and Development inRiodeIaneiro(1992), 100 Convention on Law of the Sea, 115, 148, 252, 281 307 creation of Israel, 162 definition of terrorism, 151 on environmental issues, 100 on genocide, 183 on Iraq, 113, 114, 189,229 Israel's origins, 162 Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, 175 and Soviet Union, 113 and United States, 280 United States and Afghanistan, 3, 148, 159-60 and Africa, 255-56, 266, 274 African American population, 274 bases in Asia, 129 borders and boundaries, 108, 115, 120, 181, 280-81 challenges to supremacy, 123-24 and China, 47, 125-26, 129-30, 132-33, 133, 282 climate, 87 and continental drift, 57 and Cuba, 114 democracy, 148, 195, 276, 281 economy, ix education, 13, 14-15 elections, ix and Europe, 122, 214, 229, 280, 281 and European Union, 214, 229, 280 and Heartland Theory, 129 immigration, 106, 167-68, 181, 281 intelligence operations, 130 international relations, 45 and Iraq, 3, 21-22, 42, 167, 189-90, 193-94, 195 (see (j/so Gulf Wars) and Islam, 167 migration to Sunbelt, 85 military, 229-30 and NAFTA, 3, 109, 209, 280 national security, 277 oil imports, 271-72 and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 210 population, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101 race relations, 148 at Rio summit (1992), 100-101 as superpower, ix-x, 129, 229-30, 274-75, 280, 281-82 support of the mujahideen, 153-54 and Taiwan, 129, 130-31, 146, 279-80 and terrorism, 3, 150, 152, 156, 159, 160-61, 174, 178, 180, 1T5 unilateralism, 147, 194, 195, 229-30, 281 and United Nations, 280 United States Geological Survey (USGS), 28 United States Naval War College, 8 University of Baghdad, 44 University of California at Berkeley, 9 University of Miami, 17, 18 Upper Silesia, Poland, 206 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), 112, 183, 185 Uralic languages, 201 Ural Mountains, 204, 238, 240 urban areas and urbanization. See also specific cities Afghanistan, 158-59 Africa, 265, 267 and Agricultural Revolution, 79 Chechnya, 246 China, 129, 134, 141 distance between, 10 and environmental issues, 100, 106 Europe, 202-3 and field of geography, 7, 10 growth rates, 96 interaction between cities, 10 and Little Ice Age, 78 and Muslim community, 171 and population, 96, 97-99 and terrorism, 26-27, 164, 176-77 Uruguay, 180 USS Cole, 156 U.S.S.R.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

Chemical fertilizers and weedkillers have eradicated common plants like fumitory and scarlet pimpernel, on whose tiny, energy-rich seeds the turtle doves feed; while the wholesale clearance of wasteland and scrub, the ploughing of wildflower meadows, and the draining and pollution of natural water courses and standing ponds has wiped out their habitat. The same agricultural revolution has taken place on the Continent, but in Europe, it seems, there is enough wild land left – and in large enough areas – to slow the decline in turtle-dove numbers. But in lowland England what tiny fragments of nature remain, whether left by accident or by design, are like oases in a desert, disconnected from natural processes – the interactions and dynamism that drive the natural world.

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Evidence of shifting baselines was apparent on our first tractor-and-trailer tours of Knepp in the early 2000s, when we began to take mixed generational groups from NGOs like the National Farmers’ Union and the Country Landowners’ Association around the project. We were familiar with the usual reaction from our own generation, the forty-to-sixty-somethings. Children of the agricultural revolution were aghast at what we were doing. The twenty-somethings were often more responsive. For them the idea of national food security, of digging for victory, was an anxiety from a bygone age. They had grown up in a time of plenty – an era of globalization, cheap clothes and cheap food, their supermarket shelves stocked with Spanish tomatoes in winter, asparagus from Peru, lamb from New Zealand, tiger prawns from Thailand and beef from Argentina.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

The societies that have been most successful – because they have survived – are nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies like the Aborigines. The reason for their success is no secret: they have survived because they ‘have lived with nature and within nature and haven’t tried to change it, haven’t tried to crush it, to rebuild it’.33 The Real Agricultural Revolution, or Why We Get Nostalgic About Nomads In 1671, fifty years after the publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle asked, ‘When we see that Timber is sawd by Wind-mills and Files cut by slight Instruments; and even Silk-stockings woven by an Engine . . . we may be tempted to ask, what handy work it is, that Mechanicall contrivances may not enable men to performe by Engines?’

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These people would have had access to a smallholding – enough land to grow vegetables and raise chickens along with a few other animals – or else they would have roamed with herds and done their spinning, weaving and rug-making on the move, as the Bakhtiari were doing in the Zagros Mountains. Which is to say they would have lived as the heirs to Cain and Abel had lived for millennia, until the real Agricultural Revolution. ‘From the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two,’ the Swiss philosopher and walker Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained as he distilled into a single sentence humankind’s long fall out of grace and into the problems of agriculture, ‘equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow.’

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom

agricultural Revolution, clean water, Garrett Hardin, Gödel, Escher, Bach, land tenure, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, RAND corporation, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs

Central and West Basin Water Replenishment District. 1987. Annual Survey Re­ port on Ground Water Replenishment. Glendale, Calif.: Bookman, Edmmonston Engineering. Chamberlin, J. 1974. Provision of Collective Goods as a Function of Group Size. American Political Science Review 68:707-16. Chambers, J. D., and G. E. Mingay. 1966. The Agricultural Revolution, 1750­ 1880. New York: Schocken Books. Chambers, R. 1981. In Search of a Water Revolution: Questions for Canal Man­ agement in the 1980s. Water Supply and Management 5:5-18. Chapagain, D. P. 1984. Managing Public Lands as a Common Property Resource: A Village Case Study in Nepal. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Through the early part of the eighteenth century, this unease showing itself was born from more than just the simple freelance acts of enclosure that so troubled the peasantry of the day: rather there was a distinct feeling of an inchoate unease, a gathering impression that the country had become awash in newfangled ideas, part of what we now know to have been the beginning of the Enlightenment. There were new and unsettling developments in farming techniques, the introduction of machinery and of four-crop rotation methods, which we in retrospect now recognize as the Agricultural Revolution. There were hints of the coming of the Industrial Revolution too, a revolution that would soon sweep like a gale through all of English society and would massively enhance the rise and role of cities, which would lure workers in vast numbers away from the countryside. The unease of the times parallels to a degree the same kind of bewilderment at the rate of change in society that so clearly afflicts twenty-first-century humankind.

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aboriginal people of Australia, 199–200 antiquity of, 200, 239, 244 bias against, 199 controlled burning by, 240–41, 241, 243, 244–45 Cook and, 235–39 Earth as their mother, 402–3 Guugu Yimithir group, 238 Gweagal family, 237, 237 as landowners, 235 as T.O.’s (Traditional Owners), 200, 239, 244 wisdom of, 235–45, 241 Accursius, Franciscus, 215 Adams, John, 139n Adams, John Quincy, 146 Afghanistan, 49n, 71 border (Durand Line), 81 Africa anti-imperial rebellions, 366 borders and countries created and mapped, 367–68 British and European colonies in, 98–99, 131–32, 363–66, 365 Bronze Age arable farmers, 40 claims of white settlers, 369 competing claims of tribes, 368 concept of landownership and, 369 confiscation of settlers’ lands, 370, 371, 371 country names changed, 368 English as lingua franca, 366 European partitioning of land, 365–66 Europeans leave, 367 missionaries in, 364 nation-building efforts, 368 poverty in, 372 restoration of land in, 366–73, 371 rule by indigenous people, 368 shared land, concept of, 403 trope defining British missionary behavior in, 98, 326 uncultivated land in, 372 See also specific countries, places agriculture Agricultural Revolution, 174 ancient, in China, 44 animal-drawn plough, 44 Bronze Age, 40, 42–43, 46, 172 caschroms (digging sticks), 42–43, 43 demarcation of land and, 42, 45–46 enclosures and, 44, 46, 173 history of, 40–42 Iron Age, iron plough, 43–44 plough’s moldboard, 44 strip lynchets, 45, 45 tools, 42–43 Akhmatova, Anna, 285 Albania-Montenegro border, 75 Aldridge, George, 245 Alexander I, Tsar, 50, 56, 58–59 Algic or Algonquian languages, 16, 16n Algonquin people, 136n Alsop, Joseph, 290 American chestnut trees, 12 American Geographical Society, 72 American Public Land Survey System, 152 American Revolution, 24, 136 Amherst, Jeffery, 137, 137n Anak Krakatau island, 104–5, 105n Andamanese Islanders, 243–44 Andersonstown, Northern Ireland, 265, 266 Andorra-France border, 75–76 Angle Inlet, Minn., 91–92 animals, endangered species on Anak Krakatau, 105 Bolson tortoise, 204 Korean DMZ and, 225–27, 226 Plains bison, 204–6, 206 in Richmond, Bushy, and Greenwich Parks, London, 249 wilding, abandoned farms and, 232–34, 232n wilding and Knepp estate, England, 230–32, 231 wilding and Oostvaardersplassen, Netherlands, 228–29, 234 Anne, Queen of England, 34 Apache people, 150n, 203, 261 Appalachians, 11, 135, 136, 138, 152 Aramaki, Akira, 301–8, 311–16, 318–19 as birthright citizen (Nisei), land buying and, 306–7 family and heritage, 303–5, 313 incarceration and release from Minidoka camp, 301–3 land of, Bellevue, Wash., 302, 303, 306–7, 315–16, 318, 318n obituary of, 319 Aramaki, Hanako Tanako, 313, 319 Aramaki, Hikotara, 303–6, 311 Aramaki, Towa Tasaki, 306, 311, 313 Arapaho people, 149, 261 Argentina’s borders, 75, 77 Aristotle, 53 Armitage, Simon, 225 Ascent of F6, The (Auden), 265 Ashanti people, 403 Asia ancient agriculture, 40, 44 boundaries and, 46 ocean expansion and land loss in, 400 Yellow River (Huang He), 40 Yellow River Valley, 46 Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, 142, 151, 152 Atlantic (Winchester), 131 Atlantic Ocean, 10, 11, 99, 367n crossing, 130, 191 rising waters of, 398, 401 Auden, W.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Sowers testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in September 2017, outlining his perceptions of private-sector exploration of the Moon. Space resources are plentiful, he asserted, and utilizing them will free human progress from the resource constraints of Earth. In recorded human history, there have been two major economic revolutions, he recounted: the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, which gave birth to human civilization, and the industrial revolution of 300 years ago, which gave rise to the tremendous increase in human well-being and prosperity we enjoy today. “Space resources will be the third major economic revolution and will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and flourishing,” Sowers concluded.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

And even if the strength of these demographic and resource constraints remains contested, there can be no doubt that—in von Glahn’s words—the “lack of significant innovation in productive technologies” placed a growing burden on the agricultural base. At the same time, England benefited hugely from an agricultural revolution that supported both ongoing population growth and concurrent urbanization.206 In all of this, details matter little. A simple counterfactual shows why. Even if, on that occasion, imperial destabilization and breakdown could somehow have been avoided or, perhaps more plausibly, if an equivalent empire could swiftly have been put back together after such a breakdown and resumed business as usual—featuring ostensibly benevolent and light-handed central policies such as low taxes, agrarianism, basic welfare provisions, and the preservation of peace—such outcomes were not likely to precipitate transformative innovation.207 It is telling that “despite China’s integration into global trade networks, movement toward an industrial revolution was almost wholly absent before the twentieth century.”

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For similar statistics, see Wrigley 2016: 45–50, 67–74, who emphasizes that English urban growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hugely exceeded the continental rates: the urban population in England grew by more than 700 percent compared to 80 percent in continental Western Europe, and the urban share quadrupled in England while rising by one-third in Western Europe overall, with much of the latter growth due to the former’s: see chapter 10 in this volume. Cf. Palma 2016 for the observation that international trade boosted real wages in some other Atlantic economies of Europe as well. Agricultural revolution: Overton 1996; Wrigley 2016: 51–60, 65, 67–74. 65. Allen 2009b: 129 (quote); Hoffman 2015: 211–12. See also chapter 10 in this volume. 66. Allen 2009b: 111, 162–63. Also see, e.g., Pomeranz 2000: 61; Cuenca Esteban 2004: 55. 67. Goldstone 2002: 363–64; G. Clark 2007: 242; Wrigley 2016: 34, table 3.2.

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Ostrowski, Donald. 1998. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural influences on the steppe frontier, 1304–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Sullivan, Shaun. 2006. “Coptic conversion and the Islamization of Egypt.” Mamluk Studies Review 10, no. 2: 65–80. Overton, Mark. 1996. Agricultural revolution in England: The transformation of the agrarian economy, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2014. “Divine institutions: Religious practice, economic development, and social transformation in mid-Republican Rome.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Pagden, Anthony. 2001.

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

Immediately after the Younger Dryas, sea levels rose at a dramatic rate, which eventually slowed until another warm-up hit and produced the highest post-LGM temperatures, causing the final over-topping ‘flood’ of the Black Sea around 7,500 years ago.74 Now, let us see what our ancestors were doing in this post-glacial springtime, also known as the Mesolithic. 4 ULTIMATE HUNTERS AND GATHERERS: THE MESOLITHIC The cultural period following the Younger Dryas Event, the Mesolithic, saw the final and most sophisticated flourishing of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in Europe. It was the golden age of coastal hunter-gatherers. The Mesolithic was a time of rapid innovation in stone tools and increasing use of microliths – very small, multipurpose stone tools which had already been in use in Africa and India for 20,000 years – and preceded the Neolithic agricultural revolution. Quite a bit is known about how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived, and one major feature in the evolution of their lifestyle in north-west Europe was a reduction in big game hunting and an increasing reliance on the beach and sea. In making this change, our Mesolithic ancestors resembled their African forebears, who were the first humans to see the great advantages of seafood,1 but the reason for the change in Europe was the encroachment of the forest, not the desert.

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Large parts of the world, such as South-east Asia, still practise some form of labour-intensive agriculture, many elements of which would be familiar to their Neolithic ancestors, apart from the change to rather more effective metal implements such as iron ploughshares and iron hand-held rice-cropping knives. The Neolithic is therefore rightly seen as a culturally more dramatic threshold than our more recent Agricultural Revolution (immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution), although the size of its effect on population growth in Europe was controversially less than previously thought.1 The Agricultural Age, as the Neolithic is sometimes called, is certainly the most researched period of European prehistory. The Neolithic Revolution in the western part of Eurasia started at least 10,000 years ago, but did not impinge on Britain and Ireland until 6,500–5,500 years ago.2 Not only were the British Isles at the very end of the long trail of agricultural influence that began in the Near East, but they seem to have received their Neolithic inputs, agricultural and otherwise, via two completely different routes: north and south through and round Europe from the Balkans and the Near East.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“It’s interesting,” he said, “that individual human beings didn’t benefit much from the agricultural revolution. Life was actually better for hunters and gatherers.” Some of the people in the helicopter looked a little confused, but I knew that he’d rewritten the speech to pose questions about whether the march of technology would inexorably lead to the destruction of humankind. His tangent made a certain kind of sense. “Why?” I asked, knowing I had to keep this conversation going. “Because of feudalism?” “No,” he said. “That was part of it, but it was also because for most of the early agricultural revolution, people focused on grain. Grain is not as nutritious and balanced as eating a diet with proteins, fruits, and nuts.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

This period is called Neolithic which can be translated from two Greek words neos (new) and lithos (stone) – thus Neolithic is New Stone Age. Because of what was going on in settled farming, it is sometimes called the Agricultural Age and is seen as a ‘culturally more dramatic threshold than our more recent Agricultural Revolution’.3 Yet, if we look at the New Stone Age or Agricultural Age in the British Isles, we would probably date it c.5,500 BC–c.2,500 BC. But the same age in the region where Europe meets Asia started not c.5,000 BC but c.10,000 BC. The three larger reasons for this late start were the distances from the origins of change in the Middle East; climate; and resettlement that came from two distinct directions.

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One migration came along the southern European-Balkan corridors then up the western coast of Europe. The second claw in the migratory pincer was from the near neighbours of northwestern Europe. Agriculture followed by settled farmers (as opposed to herdsmen who would follow the grazing) is in evidence in East Anglia as early as 6,300 years ago. It took hundreds of years for the Agricultural Revolution to spread throughout the islands from the south, the east and the west as far north as the Orkneys.4 What is not so clear is the answer to the threefold question of the consequence of the introduction of the new society: Were the influences of the new cultures spread by the migrants from Continental Europe or by the indigenous population?

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James ref 1 Act of Reformation ref 1 Act of Uniformity ref 1 Act of Union (Ireland) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Act of Union (Scotland) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Acts of Supremacy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Adams, Sam ref 1 Addington, Henry, Viscount Sidmouth ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen ref 1 Adrian I, Pope ref 1 Adrian IV, Pope ref 1 Ælfthryth ref 1 Ælla, King ref 1 Ælle, King ref 1 Æthelbald, King ref 1 Æthelberht, King ref 1, ref 2 Æthelflaed ref 1 Æthelfrid ref 1 Æthelred of Mercia ref 1, ref 2 Æthelred of Wessex ref 1 Æthelred the Unready ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Æthelwald ref 1 Afghan Wars ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 passim, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Africa ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 passim, ref 7, ref 8 Agincourt, Battle of ref 1, ref 2 Agricultural Revolution ref 1 Ailwin, Henry fitz ref 1 Aiscough, William ref 1 Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of ref 1 Albert, Prince ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Alexander I of Russia ref 1, ref 2 Alexander I of Scotland ref 1 Alexander II of Scotland ref 1, ref 2 Alexander III of Scotland ref 1 Alexander III, Pope ref 1 Alexandra of Denmark ref 1 Alfred the Great ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Alfred the Innocent ref 1, ref 2 Allenby, Gen.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

The adoption and diffusion of settled farming during the Neolithic era—starting 11,000–12,000 years ago in the Middle East and eventually spreading to all continents with the exception of Australia—was credited with the first notable population increase. This is ascribed to an expanded and more reliable food supply. This Neolithic demographic transition (also called, inaccurately because it was a long process, Neolithic or agricultural revolution) was seen as the first notable period of population growth and its extent has been documented by a variety of linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological evidence (Barker 2009). One of the convincing archaeological studies based on cemetery sequences has shown an abrupt increase in the proportion of juvenile skeletons as an indicator of an increase in the total fertility rate, a shift seen as one of the fundamental structural processes of human history (Bocquet-Appel and Bar-Yosef 2008; Bocquet-Appel 2011).

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Szeged, Hungary: University of Szeged. Barfield, T. J. 2001. The shadow empires: Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier. In S. E. Alcock et al., eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 10–41. Barker, G. 2009. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barkey, K. 2008. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnosky, A. D., et al. 2011. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471:51–57.

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Growth and survival of New Zealand sea lions, Phocarctos hookeri: Birth to 3 months. Polar Biology 30:459–469. Ching, F. D. K., et al. 2011. A Global History of Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Chongqing Municipal Government. 2017. Comprehensive market situation. http://en.cq.gov.cn/. Chorley, G. P. H. 1981. The agricultural revolution in Northern Europe, 1750–1880: Nitrogen, legumes, and crop productivity. Economic History 34:71–93. Chu, W., et al. 2016. A survey analysis of energy use and conservation opportunities in Chinese households. In B. Su and E. Thomson, eds., China’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation. Berlin: Springer, pp. 5–22.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

That may be because Eurasia was richer in large mammals that could be domesticated. Horses and oxen greatly improved farm productivity – but livestock were mainly owned by the rich (who could also rent them out). In traditional African societies, livestock remain an important store of value. The agricultural revolution was good for humanity, because it supported a larger population and paved the way for modern civilisation. But it was awful for egalitarians. Nice digs Gini coefficient of house sizes at archaeological sites 1=perfect inequality, 0=perfect equality Source: “Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica” by Timothy A.

Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes by Richard C. Francis

agricultural Revolution, autism spectrum disorder, cellular automata, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, meta-analysis, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

These individuals could thrive during lean times because of their “thrifty genes,” but they become fat and diabetic in an environment where food is plentiful. The thrifty-genes hypothesis was criticized on a number of grounds. Most damningly, there is no evidence that humans experienced periodic famine until the agricultural revolution 9,000 years ago.2 Neel himself soon abandoned the idea, but it survives to this day in mutated forms.3 The thrifty-genes hypothesis reflects a genocentric view of the obesity epidemic, a view that is also manifest in the search for obesity genes.4 There is no lack of candidate obesity genes, but none of the candidate genes, alone or combined, go very far toward explaining who gets fat and why.5 While the gene hunters were busy at their labors, other researchers approached the obesity issue from a different angle, based on the fact that Americans and many Europeans were getting fatter at an accelerating rate.

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation by Nicholas P. Money

agricultural Revolution, bioinformatics, CRISPR, double helix, flex fuel, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, microbiome

The rate of grassland loss in America—percentage not acreage—is comparable to the deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia.4 Financing for the construction of bioethanol plants relies upon generous government subsidies. Corn growers, agribusiness lobbyists, and senators representing Iowa—the biggest producer—and neighboring states claim that this is an essential investment to meet our energy needs. We are witnessing an agricultural revolution and Saccharomyces is the catalyst. 106 t he l i t t l e y e ast on t he pr a ir ie: biot echnology Corn ethanol is a controversial fuel, marketed as a clean, environmentally friendly solution to our energy needs by the biofuel industry, and vilified as a waste of valuable resources by its critics.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

It happens in all class systems, meaning all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.” “They’ve all been class systems?” “There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post–ice age agricultural revolution, which was one of those more general revolutions that took perhaps a thousand years, a division into classes was institutionalized as a state power apparatus. All over the world, and independent of others, there emerged a four-level division into priests, warriors, artisans, and farmers.

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

Are these male behaviors all due to cultural indoctrination, as many believe, or are they hard-wired into the male nervous system? If the latter, to what evolutionary factor do we owe this extraordinary bloodthirstiness, and why is it so skewed toward the male of the human species? ————— Prior to the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, hunting consumed the majority of a male’s “working” life. To understand better why Homo sapiens took so eagerly to his life’s chief occupation, we must examine predatory behaviors in earlier hominid species. That the immediate precursors of modern humans ate meat is not in doubt.

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But despite the sapients’ having acquired a three-pint brain, the pace of innovation advanced with the speed of spreading molasses. And then, rather suddenly, sapients crossed some sort of an invisible barrier forty thousand years ago. Art, tombs, and artifacts began to appear in profusion. The pace of novelty accelerated with the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago and went into hyperdrive in the last century. At present, it has switched to a breathtaking perpendicular ascent. The amazing shift in the celerity with which humans embraced innovation has necessitated converting the 2.5-million-year-old curve from a geometric representation to a logarithmic scale for the last 1.5 percent of its length.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

There are large parts of the world where rights remain severely and often violently curtailed (not least China), but the global trend is away from autocracy and toward respect for civil and political rights. And once again there was faster improvement in previously more autocratic regimes.16 VIOLENCE Over the very long term, the world is a considerably more peaceful place than it was before the agricultural revolution, when somewhere between 5 and 30 percent of deaths were probably caused by violence. And the world as a whole today is also comparatively crime-free compared to Britain in the Middle Ages, when homicide rates were around 23 per 100,000. The global average is one-third that level today.17 Still, evidence from a global sample of countries suggests that the homicide rate increased from 5 to 7 per 100,000 people per year between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking