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from HumanProgress.org Education Website
Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000 b.c.e. would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the mid 18th century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why? Our story has to begin with income, for, as Oxford economist Paul Collier has noted, economic “growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.” The history of economic growth, as Angus Maddison and his team at the University of Groningen found, resembles a hockey stick. For thousands of years, growth was negligible. This period is represented by the shaft of the stick. Toward the end of the 18th century, however, economic growth started to accelerate, first in Great Britain and then in the rest of the world. The blade represents this sharp upward turn.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from University of California Press
The story of the Transcontinental Railroad cannot be told without recognizing the workers whose labor helped turn the nation’s dreams of a continental empire into a reality. The following adapted excerpts from Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad and Ryan Dearinger’s The Filth of Progress:Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West salvage stories often omitted from the triumphant railroad narrative by focusing on the suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders.
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