Why are the Danes so individualistic?
A fully updated and revised Chapter 2 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom
I have just arrived in Sweden after a two-day trip to Denmark. Given my Scandinavian excursion, I thought it would be appropriate to publish the (preliminary) updated second chapter of the new edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom, out in South Africa in September. Please consider a paid subscription to access the full chapter and all of my twice-weekly content, including columns, guest essays, interviews and summaries of the latest research.
In his bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes: ‘We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.’[1] This statement captures a fundamental truth about the Neolithic Revolution, sometimes also called the Agricultural Revolution, which began about 10,000 BCE. This was a period in history when humans transitioned from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement.
For most of our history, humans have lived nomadic lives. We would cluster into small bands of between 30 and 150 people – and roam the countryside looking for animals to hunt, and seeds, berries and fruits to gather. We know something about this lifestyle of our nomadic ancestors by observing the few groups of people that still live in this way. In southern Africa we are most familiar with the San, although most San people today have now switched to a sedentary lifestyle.
Life as hunter-gatherers was tough. In periods when food was plentiful there was ample time for leisure and procreation. But because hunter-gatherers are nomadic, there were limited opportunities to save and accumulate for the proverbial rainy day. When resources were scarce, this could quickly lead to famine and conflict. A large proportion of men in hunter-gatherer societies died violently.
Humans were hunter-gatherers for many thousands of years and then, quite suddenly, we adopted agriculture. We did so in at least seven different locations all around the world, from the Middle East, West Africa, East Asia to Central America. The obvious question is: why, after hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, did we transition so suddenly?
What is even more surprising is that we seemingly did so against our will. There is now enough evidence to suggest that the first farmers did not live materially better lives than their hunter-gatherer counterparts.[2] Farmers were substantially shorter than hunter-gatherers, for example, suggesting that their living standards were much lower. Why did hunter-gatherers switch to farming, then, if their lives did not materially improve?
Until now (and in earlier versions of this book), our only answer had been climate change. The timing of this shift correlates with the end of the last Ice Age: as sea levels rose because of warmer climate, the argument goes, access to animals they were hunting or the fruits they were gathering had dwindled. In order to survive, people had to find an alternative source of sustenance. Grains such as wheat and barley offered one.
But the economic historian Andrea Matranga has a different hypothesis…
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