The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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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.

Economist Eric Beinhocker describes the real difference between the New Yorker and Yanamamo tribes on page 8-9 of his brilliant book ‘The Origin of Wealth’ —

Consider two tribes. First we have the Yanamamo, a stone tool-making hunter-gatherer tribe living along the Orinoco River on the remote border of Brazil and Venezuela. Second, we have the New Yorkers, a cell-phone-talking, cafe-latte-drinking tribe living along the Hudson River on the border of New York and New Jersey. Both tribes share the same thirty thousand or so genes that all humans do and thus, in terms of biology and innate intelligence, are essentially identical. Yet, the lifestyle of the New Yorkers is vastly different from the well-preserved hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Yanamamo, who have yet to invent the wheel, have no writing, and have a numbering system that does not go beyond one, two, and many.

The average income of a Yanamamo tribesperson is approximately $90 per person per year (this, naturally, is an estimate as they do not use money), while the average income of a New Yorker in 2001 was around $36,000 or 400 times that of the Yanamamo. Without any moral judgment on who is happier, morally superior, or more in tune with their environment, there is clearly a wide gap in material wealth between the two tribes.