I’m a professor of economics based in Warsaw, Poland. As a researcher I was always drawn to most fundamental questions about the long run and the big picture. I study long-run economic growth at the global scale, concentrating in particular on the role of technological progress, technology choice and the accumulation of productive factors such as physical and human capital. Recently I have put forward a novel hardware-software framework, based on first principles from physics and generalizing previous economic frameworks to include any era in the human history, from simple hunting and gathering to automated multi-step production processes of the digital era.
I wrote
Accelerating Economic Growth: Lessons From 200,000 Years of Technological Progress and Human Development
Why are some regions of the world so much richer and more technologically advanced than others?
Reading this brilliant book by Jared Diamond opened my eyes to the fact that development processes are rooted in geography, and small differences in initial conditions can generate massive differences in the level of development due to self-reinforcing feedback loops.
For example, availability of wild wheat species in the Middle East and wild rice in China encouraged the adoption of farming there ahead of other parts of the world – and centuries later these regions became the most populous and technologically advanced.
A top pick for anyone who wants to figure out the Big Picture about the roots of the human civilization.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
Bored with history books full of battlefields, military equipment, long lists of battles and treaties, and discussions of changing alliances among the heavily intertwined royal families? I certainly was. And that’s why I found Yuval Noah Harari’s unique look at the history of our civilization so appealing.
In particular I greatly appreciated his focus on scientific and technological progress as drivers of development, highlighting in particular the role of the European Scientific Revolution of 16th century CE, an episode much less appreciated than the later Industrial Revolution but probably equally consequential.
A top pick for anyone who wants to figure out the Big Picture about the roots of the human civilization and its current state.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
A great book, fun to read – I felt like I’m being taken on an exciting guided tour of the Silicon Valley.
The book was eye-opening to me in terms of the endless possibilities offered by modern-day digital technologies. Before reading it, in my research on economic growth theory I was largely under the spell of Robert Solow’s famous one-liner “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Having read it, I marked that view as obsolete.
However, a comment must be made that this book came out in 2014 so that it could not anticipate the scale of the recent AI revolution, represented by large language models such as GPT-4. As it turned out, the potential of “brilliant technologies” was even larger!
In recent years, computers have learned to diagnose diseases, drive cars, write clean prose and win game shows. Advances like these have created unprecedented economic bounty but in their wake median income has stagnated and employment levels have fallen. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the technological forces driving this reinvention of the economy and chart a path towards future prosperity. Businesses and individuals, they argue, must learn to race with machines. Drawing on years of research, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies and policies for doing so. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will radically alter…
I strongly recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the topic of economic growth and not already an expert in it.
For me personally, having read tons of academic papers in the area, including many influential papers by Oded Galor himself, this book did not make a big impact. However I greatly appreciated how smoothly the author has synthesized a large body of literature.
I also appreciated the special focus of the book on the Industrial Revolution – the first period in human history when affluence was made available for larger groups of people, not just a narrow elite. This became possible when productivity growth was finally decoupled from population growth, breaking the Malthusian trap: more prosperity -> more people -> per capita consumption returns to subsistence levels.
This breakthrough scientific masterwork - and INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - reveals the underlying forces that have shaped human history and will secure our future...
'Masterful. Galor answers the ultimate mystery' Lewis Dartnell
The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision overturns a host of long-held assumptions to reveal the deeper causes that have shaped the journey of humanity:
Education rather than industrialisation Family size and…
With recent advances in large language models such as GPT-4, it is predicted that AI capabilities in terms of general decision making and problem solving may exceed that of humans even in less than a decade. Is this good or bad news?
This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand and navigate this difficult topic. Of particular interest are Bostrom’s two groundbreaking observations: the orthogonality thesis (any level of intelligence can be combined with any final goal) and the instrumental convergence thesis (any sufficiently non-trivial final goal will also create instrumental goals of self-preservation, efficiency, creativity, and unbounded resource acquisition).
A top pick for anyone who wants to figure out the prospects for the human civilization in the face of superhuman artificial general intelligence.
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.
If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.
What made it possible for the human species to conquer the world, build a global digital economy, and still want more? What drives technological progress and economic growth in the long run? And how will technological progress, economic growth, and the overall prosperity of human civilization unfold in the future?
This book sheds new light on these big questions by incorporating findings from physics, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and computer science in a brand-new theory of economic growth. Looking back across the millennia, it identifies five major technological revolutions which have transformed humankind’s capacity to process energy and information—the cognitive, agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital revolutions—and characterizes the new avenues of economic development which they have opened while also exponentially accelerating growth.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
