- Hoppe, Hans-Hermann.
A Short History of Man.
Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-61016-591-4.
-
The author is one of the most brilliant and original thinkers
and eloquent contemporary expositors
of libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, and
Austrian economics.
Educated in Germany, Hoppe came to
the United States to study with
Murray Rothbard
and in 1986 joined Rothbard on the faculty of the University
of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught until his retirement in 2008.
Hoppe's 2001 book,
Democracy: The God That Failed
(June 2002), made the argument that democratic election of
temporary politicians in the modern all-encompassing state
will inevitably result in profligate spending and runaway
debt because elected politicians have every incentive to
buy votes and no stake in the long-term solvency and prosperity of
the society. Whatever the drawbacks (and historical examples of how
things can go wrong), a hereditary monarch has no need to buy votes
and every incentive not to pass on a bankrupt state to his descendants.
This short book (144 pages) collects three essays previously published
elsewhere which, taken together, present a comprehensive picture
of human development from the emergence of modern humans in
Africa to the present day. Subtitled “Progress and Decline”,
the story is of long periods of stasis, two enormous breakthroughs,
with, in parallel, the folly of ever-growing domination of society by
a coercive state which, in its modern incarnation, risks halting or
reversing the gains of the modern era.
Members of the collectivist and politically-correct mainstream in the
fields of economics, anthropology, and sociology who can abide
Prof. Hoppe's adamantine libertarianism will probably have their
skulls explode when they encounter his overview of human economic and
social progress, which is based upon genetic selection for increased
intelligence and low
time preference
among populations
forced to migrate due to population pressure from the tropics where
the human species originated into more demanding climates north and
south of the Equator, and onward toward the poles. In the tropics,
every day is about the same as the next; seasons don't differ much from
one another; and the variation in the length of the day is not great.
In the temperate zone and beyond, hunter-gatherers must cope with
plant life which varies along with the seasons, prey animals that
migrate, hot summers and cold winters, with the latter requiring the
knowledge and foresight of how to make provisions for the lean season.
Predicting the changes in seasons becomes important, and in this may
have been the genesis of astronomy.
A hunter-gatherer society is essentially parasitic upon the natural
environment—it consumes the plant and animal bounty of nature
but does nothing to replenish it. This means that for a given
territory there is a maximum number (varying due to details of terrain,
climate, etc.) of humans it can support before an increase in population
leads to a decline in the per-capita standard of living of its inhabitants.
This is what the author calls the
“Malthusian trap”.
Looked
at from the other end, a human population which is growing as human
populations tend to do, will inevitably reach the carrying capacity
of the area in which it lives. When this happens, there are only three
options: artificially limit the growth in population to the land's
carrying capacity, split off one or more groups which migrate to new
territory not yet occupied by humans, or conquer new land from adjacent
groups, either killing them off or driving them to migrate. This was
the human condition for more than a hundred millennia, and it is this
population pressure, the author contends, which drove human migration from
tropical Africa into almost every niche on the globe in which humans could
survive, even some of the most marginal.
While the life of a hunter-gatherer band in the tropics is relatively
easy (or so say those who have studied the few remaining populations
who live that way today), the further from the equator the more intelligence,
knowledge, and the ability to transmit it from generation to
generation is required to survive. This creates a selection pressure for
intelligence: individual members of a band of hunter-gatherers who are
better at hunting and gathering will have more offspring which survive to
maturity and bands with greater intelligence produced in this manner
will grow faster and by migration and conquest displace those less endowed.
This phenomenon would cause one to expect that (discounting the effects
of large-scale migrations) the mean intelligence of human populations would
be the lowest near the equator and increase with latitude (north or south).
This, in general terms, and excluding marginal environments, is
precisely what is observed, even today.
After hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers parasitic upon
nature, sometime around 11,000 years ago, probably first in the
Fertile Crescent
in the Middle East, what is now called the
Neolithic Revolution
occurred. Humans ceased to wander in search of plants and game, and
settled down into fixed communities which supported themselves by cultivating
plants and raising animals they had domesticated. Both the plants
and animals underwent selection by humans who bred those most adapted to
their purposes. Agriculture was born. Humans who adopted the new means
of production were no longer parasitic upon nature: they produced their
sustenance by their own labour, improving upon that supplied by nature through
their own actions. In order to do this, they had to invent a series of
new technologies (for example, milling grain and fencing pastures) which
did not exist in nature. Agriculture was far more efficient than the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle in that a given amount of land (if suitable
for known crops) could support a much larger human population.
While agriculture allowed a large increase in the human population, it
did not escape the Malthusian trap: it simply increased the population
density at which the carrying capacity of the land would be reached.
Technological innovations such as irrigation and crop rotation could further increase
the capacity of the land, but population increase would eventually surpass
the new limit. As a result of this, from 1000 B.C.
to A.D. 1800, income per capita (largely
measured in terms of food) barely varied: the benefit of each innovation was
quickly negated by population increase. To be sure, in all of this epoch
there were a few wealthy people, but the overwhelming majority of the
population lived near the subsistence level.
But once again, slowly but surely, a selection pressure was being applied
upon humans who adopted the agricultural lifestyle. It is cognitively more
difficult to be a farmer or rancher than to be a member of a
hunter-gatherer band, and success depends strongly upon having a low
time preference—to be willing to forgo immediate consumption for
a greater return in the future. (For example, a farmer who does not reserve and
protect seeds for the next season will fail. Selective breeding of plants
and animals to improve their characteristics takes years to produce
results.) This creates an evolutionary
pressure in favour of further increases in intelligence and, to the extent that
such might be genetic rather than due to culture, for low
time preference. Once the family
emerged as the principal unit of society rather than the hunter-gatherer band,
selection pressure was amplified since those with the selected-for characteristics
would produce more offspring and the phenomenon of
free riding
which exists in communal bands is less likely to occur.
Around the year 1800, initially in Europe and later elsewhere, a startling
change occurred: the
Industrial Revolution.
In societies which adopted the emerging industrial means of
production, per capita income, which had been stagnant for almost two millennia,
took
off like a skyrocket,
while at the same time population began to
grow exponentially, rising from around 900 million in 1800 to 7 billion today.
The Malthusian trap had been escaped; it appeared for the first time that an increase
in population, far from consuming the benefits of innovation, actually contributed
to and accelerated it.
There are some deep mysteries here. Why did it take so long for humans to
invent agriculture? Why, after the invention of agriculture, did it take
so long to invent industrial production? After all, the natural resources
extant at the start of both of these
revolutions were present in all of the preceding period, and there were people
with the leisure to think and invent at all times in history. The author
argues that what differed was the people. Prior to the advent of
agriculture, people were simply not sufficiently intelligent to invent it
(or, to be more precise, since intelligence follows something close to a
normal distribution,
there was an insufficient fraction of the population with the requisite
intelligence to discover and implement the idea of agriculture). Similarly,
prior to the Industrial Revolution, the intelligence of the general population
was insufficient for it to occur. Throughout the long fallow periods, however,
natural selection was breeding smarter humans and, eventually, in some place
and time, a sufficient fraction of smart people, the required natural resources, and
a society sufficiently open to permit innovation and moving beyond tradition
would spark the fire. As the author notes, it's much easier to copy a good
idea once you've seen it working than to come up with it in the first place and get
it to work the first time.
Some will argue that Hoppe's hypothesis that human intelligence has
been increasing over time is falsified by the fact that societies much
closer in time to the dawn of agriculture produced works of art,
literature, science, architecture, and engineering which are
comparable to those of modern times. But those works were produced
not by the average person but rather outliers which exist in all times
and places (although in smaller numbers when mean intelligence is
lower). For a general
phase transition
in society, it is a necessary condition that the bulk of the
population involved have intelligence adequate to work in the new way.
After investigating human progress on the grand scale over long periods of time,
the author turns to the phenomenon which may cause this progress to cease and
turn into decline: the growth of the coercive state. Hunter-gatherers had little
need for anything which today would be called governments. With bands on the
order of 100 people sharing resources in common, many sources of dispute would not
occur and those which did could be resolved by trusted elders or, failing that,
combat. When humans adopted agriculture and began to live in settled
communities, and families owned and exchanged property with one another,
a whole new source of problems appeared. Who has the right to use this land?
Who stole my prize animal? How are the proceeds of a joint effort to be
distributed among the participants? As communities grew and trade among them
flourished, complexity increased apace. Hoppe traces how the resolution of these
conflicts has evolved over time. First, the parties to the dispute would turn to
a member of an aristocracy, a member of the community respected because of their
intelligence, wisdom, courage, or reputation for fairness, to settle the matter.
(We often think of an aristocracy as hereditary but, although many aristocracies
evolved into systems of hereditary nobility, the word originally meant “rule by
the best”, and that is how the institution began.)
With growing complexity, aristocrats (or nobles) needed a way to
resolve disputes among themselves, and this led to the emergence of
kings. But like the nobles, the king was seen to apply a law which
was part of nature (or, in the English common law tradition,
discovered through the experience of precedents). It was with the
emergence of absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and finally
democracy that things began to go seriously awry. In time, law became
seen not as something which those given authority apply, but
rather something those in power create. We have largely
forgotten that
legislation is not law,
and that rights are not granted
to us by those in power, but inhere in us and are taken away and/or
constrained by those willing to initiate force against others to work
their will upon them.
The modern welfare state risks undoing a thousand centuries of human
progress by removing the selection pressure for intelligence and low
time preference. Indeed, the welfare state punishes (taxes) the
productive, who tend to have these characteristics, and subsidises
those who do not, increasing their fraction within the population.
Evolution works slowly, but inexorably. But the effects of shifting
incentives can manifest themselves long before biology has its way.
When a population is told “You've made enough”, “You
didn't build that”, or sees working harder to earn more as
simply a way to spend more of their lives supporting those who don't
(along with those who have gamed the system to extract resources
confiscated by the state), that glorious exponential curve which took
off in 1800 may begin to bend down toward the horizontal and perhaps
eventually turn downward.
I don't usually include lengthy quotes, but the following passage from
the third essay, “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy”,
is so brilliant and illustrative of what you'll find herein
I can't resist.
Assume now a group of people aware of the reality of interpersonal
conflicts and in search of a way out of this predicament. And assume
that I then propose the following as a solution: In every case of
conflict, including conflicts in which I myself am involved, I will
have the last and final word. I will be the ultimate judge as to who
owns what and when and who is accordingly right or wrong in any
dispute regarding scarce resources. This way, all conflicts can be
avoided or smoothly resolved.
What would be my chances of finding your or anyone else's
agreement to this proposal?
My guess is that my chances would be virtually zero, nil. In fact, you
and most people will think of this proposal as ridiculous and likely
consider me crazy, a case for psychiatric treatment. For you will
immediately realize that under this proposal you must literally fear
for your life and property. Because this solution would allow me to
cause or provoke a conflict with you and then decide this conflict in
my own favor. Indeed, under this proposal you would essentially give
up your right to life and property or even any pretense to such a
right. You have a right to life and property only insofar as I grant
you such a right, i.e., as long as I decide to let you live and keep
whatever you consider yours. Ultimately, only I have a right to life
and I am the owner of all goods.
And yet—and here is the puzzle—this obviously crazy solution
is the reality. Wherever you look, it has been put into effect in the
form of the institution of a State. The State is the ultimate judge in
every case of conflict. There is no appeal beyond its verdicts. If you
get into conflicts with the State, with its agents, it is the State
and its agents who decide who is right and who is wrong. The State has
the right to tax you. Thereby, it is the State that makes the decision
how much of your property you are allowed to keep—that is, your
property is only “fiat” property. And the State can make
laws, legislate—that is, your entire life is at the mercy of the
State. It can even order that you be killed—not in defense of
your own life and property but in the defense of the State or whatever
the State considers “defense” of its
“state-property.”
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May 2015 