The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [34]
Fanciful, maybe. And no doubt wrong in all sorts of details. But the point is how easy it is to envisage both opportunities for trade among hunter-gatherers – meat for plants, fish for leather, wood for stone, antler for shells – and how easy it is for Stone Age people to discover mutual gains from trade and then to enhance that effect by further specialising and further dividing labour. The extraordinary thing about exchange is that it breeds: the more of it you do, the more of it you can do. And it calls forth innovation.
Which only raises another question: why did economic progress not accelerate towards an industrial revolution there and then? Why was progress so agonisingly slow for so many millennia? The answer, I suspect, lies in the fissile nature of human culture. Human beings have a deep capacity for isolationism, for fragmenting into groups that diverge from each other. In New Guinea, for instance, there are more than 800 languages, some spoken in areas just a few miles across yet as unintelligible to those on either side as French and English. There are still 7,000 languages spoken on earth and the people who speak each one are remarkably resistant to borrowing words, traditions, rituals or tastes from their neighbours. ‘Whereas vertical transmission of cultural traits goes largely unnoticed, horizontal transmission is far more likely to be regarded with suspicion or even indignation,’ say the evolutionary biologists Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace. ‘Cultures, it seems, like to shoot messengers.’ People do their utmost to cut themselves off from the free flow of ideas, technologies and habits, limiting the impact of specialisation and exchange.
Ricardo’s magic trick
Divisions of labour beyond the pair bond had probably been invented in the Upper Palaeolithic. Commenting on the ten thousand mammoth-ivory beads with which the clothing of two 28,000-year-old child corpses at Sungir in Russia were decorated, the anthropologist Ian Tattersall remarks: ‘It’s hardly probable that these young people had made their richly adorned vestments themselves. It’s much more likely that the sheer diversity of material production in their society was the result of the specialisation of individuals in different activities.’ The carvers of mammoth beads at Sungir, the painter of rhinoceroses at Chauvet, the striker of blades from rock cores, the maker of rabbit nets – perhaps these were all specialists, exchanging their labour for that of others. Perhaps there had been different roles within each band of human beings ever since the first emergence of modern people over 100,000 years ago.
It is such a human thing to do, and so obvious an explanation of the thing that needs explaining: the capacity for innovation. Specialisation would lead to expertise, and expertise would lead to improvement. Specialisation would also give the specialist an excuse for investing time in developing a laborious new technique. If you have a single fishing harpoon to make, there’s no sense in building a clever tool for making harpoons first, but if you have to make harpoons for five fishermen, then maybe there is sense and time-saving in first making the harpoon-making tool.
Specialisation would therefore create and increase the opportunities for gains from trade. The more Oz goes fishing, the better he gets at it, so the less time it takes him to catch each fish. The more hooks Adam the reindeer hunter makes, the better he gets at it, so the less time he takes to make each one. So it pays Oz to spend his day fishing and buy his