Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my RSS feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss any chapters from my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment on why we choose to consume, or not.
After explaining the real difference between the New Yorker and Yanamamo tribes, economist Eric Beinhocker summarizes 2.5 million years of economic history on pages 9-11 of ‘The Origin of Wealth’ —
The lifestyle of the Yanamamo is fairly typical of our ancestors circa 15,000 years ago. This sounds like a long time ago, but in terms of the total economic history of our species, the world of the Yanamamo is the very, very recent past. If we use the appearance of the first tools as our starting point, it took about 2,485,000 years, or 99.4 percent, of our economic history to go from the first tools to the hunter-gatherer level of economic and social sophistication typified by the Yanamamo. It then took only (15,000 years, or) 0.6 percent of human history to leap from the $90, 102 SKU economy of the Yanamamo to the $36,000 per capita 1010 SKU economy of the New Yorkers.
(What’s)… even more surprising… (is that) it took 12,000 years to inch from the $90 per-person hunter-gatherer economy to the roughly $150 per-person economy of the Ancient Greeks in 1000 BC. It wasn’t until 1750 AD, when world gross domestic product (GDP) per person reached around $180, that the figure had finally managed to double from our hunter-gatherer days 15,000 years ago. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, something extraordinary happened — world GDP per person increased 37-fold in an incredibly short 250 years to its current level of $6,600, with the richest societies, such as the New Yorkers, climbing well above that. Global wealth rocketed onto a nearly vertical curve that we are still climbing today.
To summarize 2.5 million years of economic history in brief: for a very, very, very long time not much happened, then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose. It took 99.4 percent of economic history to reach the wealth levels of the Yanamamo, 0.59 percent to double that level by 1750, and then just 0.01 percent for global wealth to leap to the levels of the modern world. Another way to think of it is that over 97 percent of humanity’s wealth was created in the last 0.01 percent of our history.
While the growth of per capita GDP over the last 250 years is dramatic, the growth in the number of SKUs (the types of things you can buy) in the last 250 years must be even more dramatic.
So, another way to think of it is that over 97 percent of humanity’s complexity was created in the last 0.01 percent of our history.
No wonder some of us want to return to a simpler life.
