The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [61]
Hence, the invention of metal smelting was an almost inevitable consequence of the invention of agriculture (though some very early mining of pure copper-metal deposits around Lake Superior was apparently done by hunter-gatherers, perhaps supplying the almost agricultural salmon ranchers of the Pacific coast). Copper was produced throughout the Alps, where some of the best ores are to be found, but it was exported to the rest of Europe for several thousand years after Oetzi’s death, only later being displaced by copper mined in Cyprus. A little more than a thousand years after Oetzi died, and a short distance to the west in the Mitterberg region of what is now Austria, there were settlements inhabited by people who apparently did little else but mine and smelt copper from lodes in the nearby mountains. Living in a cold mountain valley, they found it more profitable to make copper and exchange it for, say, meat and grain from the Danube plains, rather than to raise their own cattle. It seems not to have made them very rich – nor would Cornish tin, Peruvian silver, or for that matter Welsh coal enrich their miners in the millennia to come. Compared with the farmers on the Danube Plain, the Mitterberg copper miners left behind few ornaments or luxuries. But they were better off than they could be trying to live self-sufficiently in the mountains raising their own food. They were not supplying a need; they were making a living, responding to economic incentives as clearly as any modern person. Homo economicus was not an eighteenth-century Scottish invention. Their copper, turned into ingots and sickles, standardised for weight, then broken up and circulated far and wide, would soon become a primitive form of money widely used throughout Europe to lubricate exchange.
Conventional wisdom has probably underestimated the extent of specialisation and trade in the Neolithic age. There is a tendency to think that everybody was a farmer. But in Oetzi’s world, there were farmers who grew einkorn and maybe farmers who grew grass for weaving into cloaks; coppersmiths who made axes and maybe bear hunters who made hats and shoes. And yet there were things that Oetzi no doubt made for himself: his bow was unfinished and so were some of his arrows. At a rough estimation, typical modern non-industrial people, living in traditional societies, directly consume between one-third and two-thirds of what they produce, and exchange the rest for other goods. Up to about 300 kilograms of food per head per year, people eat what they grow; after that they start to exchange surplus food for clothing, shelter, medicine or education. Almost by definition, the more wealthy somebody is, the more things he acquires from specialists. The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation. The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency. Go to a poor village in Malawi or Mozambique today and you will find few specialists and people consuming a high proportion of what they produce. They are ‘not in the market’, as an economist might say. And quite possibly they are less ‘in the market’ than ancient agrarian folk like Oetzi were.
Indulge me in a little sermon. The tradition among many anthropologists and archaeologists has been to treat the past as a very different place from the present, a place with its own mysterious rituals. To cram the Stone Age or the tribal South Seas into modern economic terminology is therefore an anachronistic error showing capitalist indoctrination. This view was promulgated especially by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who distinguished pre-industrial economies based on ‘reciprocity’ from modern economies based on markets. Stephen Shennan