Human history in the very long run - by Matthew Yglesias
As we often do on Federal holidays, we’re unlocking an older paid post (today’s is from December 2021) that many of our current subscribers haven’t yet had a chance to read. We’ll be back with a fresh mailbag tomorrow. In the meantime, have a great 4th of July!
That’s mostly meant the history of relatively recent events in the west — things like Eric Foner’s book on the ideology of the early Republican Party or nationalism and revolution in the 19th century Habsburg Empire. But more recently I’ve been getting interested in some topics in the distant past like the origins of the Indo-European languages, the origin of states, and ancient DNA research into prehistory.
These are interesting topics in their own right. But they also cast more recent history in a different perspective, especially the history of economics and living standards. Or I guess, to put it another way, thinking about the distant past underscores that recorded history proper is a relatively small portion of the total story of humans, and the modern era of technological dynamism and rising living standards is itself a small portion of recorded history.
And when you start to see it that way (or at least when I do), your level of certainly about the meaning of relatively recent, relatively small-scale trends starts to go down. We mostly take for granted a tendency toward steady progress and rising living standards that is, in reality, not at all a constant feature of the human story.
