Joel Waldfogel: Tracing wealth back to the Stone Age

Economic historians divide the history of living standards into two eras, which could be named for the Flintstones and the Jetsons. The Flintstones era runs from the beginning of time through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages and up to about 1800. The Jetsons era begins with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and culminates in a utopian future in which˜Jane, stop this crazy thing!˜machines do everything.

The Jetsons era trounces the Flintstones era in terms of leaps forward in global quality of life. According to some rough estimates, world living standards grew less than 50 percent over the last two Flintstones millennia (from A.D. 1 until the Industrial Revolution). By contrast, they grew a whopping 1,000 to 2,000 percent in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Jetsons era. In light of the importance of this relatively recent past, it would be pretty surprising if the living standards of our prehistoric forbears exerted a lasting influence. But according to a new study, they do.

In"Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?", Diego Comin and William Easterly of New York University and Erick Gong of Berkeley ask, specifically, whether a culture's adoption of technology in A.D. 1, 1000 B.C., and 2000 B.C. can account for contemporary standards of living. The authors focus on five areas: communications, agriculture, military, industry, and transportation. Particularly for the earlier periods, records are often scarce or nonexistent. This is the prehistoric period, after all. So, how do the authors know which nations and cultures adopted which tools?

For the year 1000 B.C., they rely on the decades of archaeology and anthropological research that culminated in Peter Peregrine's 2003 Atlas of Cultural Evolution. The work describes the characteristics of 289 prehistoric cultures, many of which can be geographically associated with today's nations. Societies existing in 1000 B.C. had a large range of technologies even if none, I'm sad to say, had cars powered" courtesy of Fred's two feet." The atlas tracks whether a given culture had written records, nonwritten records, or no records and whether agriculture was its primary food source, its secondary source, or neither. And the atlas charts technological specialization (metalwork, pottery, or none), and form of land transportation (vehicles, pack animals, or human only). The authors infer a culture's level of military sophistication based on whether it used bronze and iron, materials that produced weapons superior to stone....