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Abaixo destaco as melhores partes no meu ponto de vista.
Chapter 1: A Better Today: The Unprecedented Present
"years of lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water (...) means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout." P. 12
"vaccines, vitamins" P. 12
"Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation) (...) buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer." P. 14 (highlight in bold is mine)
"Over that half-century, real income per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none." P. 14
"Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they were fifty years ago." P. 15
Affluence for All
"In 1958 J. K. Galbraith declared that the 'affluent society' had reached such a pitch that many unnecessary goods were now being 'overprovided' to consumers by persuasive advertisers." P. 16
"Americans (...) were three inches taller in 1950 than they had been at the turn of the century and spent twice as much on medicine as funerals - the reverse of the ratio in 1900. Roughly eight out of ten American households had running water, central heating, electric light, washing machines and refrigerators by 1955." P. 16 (highlight in bold is mine)
"spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily - because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age - at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group." P. 19 (highlight in bold is mine)
"Even justice has improved thanks to new technology exposing false convictions and identifying true criminals." P. 19
Saving Time
"Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s." P. 23 (highlight in bold is mine)
Happiness
"A small cottage industry grew up at the turn of the twenty-first century devoted to the subject of the economics of happiness. It started with the paradox that richer people are not necessarily happier people." P. 25
"Americans currently show no trend towards increasing happiness. Is this because the rich had got richer but ordinary Americans had not prospered much in recent years? Or because America continually draws in poor (unhappy) immigrants, which keeps the happiness quotient low? Who knows? It was not because the Americans are too rich to get any happier: Japanese and Europeans grew steadily happier as they grew richer despite being often just as rich as Americans. Moreover, surprisingly, American women have become less happy in recent decades despite getting richer.
Of course, it is possible to be rich and unhappy, as many celebrity gloriously reminds us. Of course, it is possible to get rich and find that you are unhappy not to be richer still, if only because the neighbour - or the people on television - are richer than you are. Economists call this the 'hedonic treadmill'; the rest of us call it 'keeping up with the Joneses'." P. 27
"Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate." P. 27 (highlight in bold is mine)
"political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle - about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on." P. 27
Crunch
"Until he was rumbled in 2008, Bernard Madoff offered his investors high and steady returns of more than 1 per cent a month on their money for thirty years. He did so by paying new investors' capital out to old investors as revenue, a chain-letter con trick that could not last. When the music stopped, $65 billion of investors' funds had been looted. It was roughly what John Law did in Paris with the Mississippi Company in 1719, what John Blunt did in London with the South Sea company in 1720, what Charles Ponzi did in Boston in 1920 with reply coupons for postage stamps, what Ken Lay did with Enron's stock in 2001." P. 29 (highlight in bold is mine)
"If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decade's time, to invest in a business that invents a gadget that saves his customers time, then that money, brought forward from the future, will enrich both him and those customers to the point where the loan can be repaid to posteriority. That is growth." P. 30 (highlight in bold is mine)
"In the Spain of Charles V and Philip II, the gigantic wealth of the Peruvian silver mines was wasted. The same 'curse of resources' has afflicted countries with windfalls ever since, especially those with oil (Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria) that end up run by rent-seeking autocrats. Despite their windfalls, such countries experience lower economic growth than countries that entirely lack resources but get busy trading and selling - Holland, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea. Even the Dutch, those epitomes of seventeenth-century enterprise, fell under the curse of resources in the late twentieth century when they found too much natural gas: the Dutch disease, they called it, as their inflated currency hurt their exporters." P. 31 (highlight in bold is mine)
"As long as new ideas can breed in this way, then human economic progress can continue. It may be only a year or two till world growth resumes after the current crisis, or it may for some countries be a lost decade. It may even be that parts of the world will be convulsed by a descent into autarky, authoritarianism and violence, as happened in the 1930s, and that a depression will cause a great war. But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others' needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume." P. 32 (highlight in bold is mine)
The Declaration of Interdependence
"Where does all this free time come from? It comes from exchange and specialisation and from the resulting division of labour. A deer must gather its own food. A human being gets somebody else to do it for him, while she is doing something for them - and both win time that way." P. 33
"In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37. If you are on an average wage you knew that it would take you a matter of tens of minutes to earn the cash to buy whatever new clothing you need and maybe an hour or two to earn the cash to pay for the gas, electricity and oil you might need today." P. 34 (highlight in bold is mine)
"As I write this, it is nine o'clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink." P. 35 (highlight in bold is mine)
The Multiplication of Labour
"'a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work'. (...) That is to say, having consumed the labour and embodied discoveries of thousands of people, you then produce and sell whatever it is you do at work." P. 39
"So this is what poverty means. You are poor to the extent that you cannot afford to sell your time for sufficient price to buy the services you need, and rich to the extent that you can afford to buy not just the services you need but also those you crave." P. 41 (highlight in bold is mine)
Self-sufficiency is Poverty
"suppose your local wheat farmer tells you that last year's rains means he will have to cut his flour delivery in half this year. You will have to go hungry. Instead, you benefit from a global laptop and wheat market in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations." P. 42 (highlight in bold is mine)
The Call of the New
"Why, asks Geoffrey Miller, 'would the world's most intelligent primate buy a Hummer H1 Alpha sport-utility vehicle', which seats four, gets ten miles to the gallon, takes 13.5 seconds to reach 60mph, and sells for $139.771? Because, he answers, human beings evolved to strive to signal social status and sexual worth." P. 45
Chapter 2: The Collective Brain: Exchange and Specialisation after 200,000 years ago
Shall we trade?
"At Mezherich, in what is now Ukraine, 18,000 years ago, jewellery made of shells from the Black Sea and amber from the Baltic implied trade over hundreds of miles." P. 71
"Suppose, for example, that Adam lives in a grassy steppe where there are herds of reindeer in winter, but some days' walk away is a coast, where there are fish in summer. He could spend winter hunting, then migrate to the coast to go fishing. But that way he would not only waste time travelling, and probably run a huge risk crossing the territory of another tribe. He would also have to get good at two quite different things." P. 71
"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." P. 73
"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." P. 74
"There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference - their collective brains." P. 78
Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue
The Trust Juice
Cites Theory of Moral Sentiments from Adam Smith.
"benevolence and friendship are necessary but not sufficient for society to function, because man 'stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons'. In other words, people go beyond friendship and achieve common interest with strangers" P. 93
"As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth." P. 97 (highlight in bold is mine)
"A 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy,' says Paul Zak, 'raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.'" P. 97
Chapter 4: The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Farming after 10,000 years ago
Intensive Farming Saves Nature
"In the early 1960s the economist Colin Clark calculated that human beings could in theory sustain themselves on just twenty-seven square metres of land each. His reasoning went like this: an average person needs about 2,500 calories of food per day, equivalent to about 685 grams of grain. Double it for growing a bit of fuel, fibre and some animal protein: 1,370 grams. The maximum rate of photosynthesis on well-watered, rich soils is about 350 grams per square metre per day, but you can knock that down to about fifty for the best that farming is in practice able to achieve over a wide area. So it takes twenty-seven square metres to grow the 1,370 grams a person needs. On this basis and using the yields of the day, Clark calculated in the 1960s that the world could feed thirty-five billion mouths." P. 146 (highlight in bold is mine)
"In 2004, the world grew about two billion tonnes of rice, wheat and maize on about half a billion hectares of land: an average yield of four tonnes to the hectare. Those three crops provided about two-thirds of the world's food, both directly and via beef, chicken and pork - equivalent to feeding four billion people. So a hectare fed about eight people, or about 1,250 square metres each, down from about 4,000 square metres in the 1950s. That is a long way above 100 square metres." P. 147
"If we all turned vegetarian, the amount of land we would need be still less, but if we turned organic, it would be more: we would need extra acres to grow the cows whose manure would fertilise our fields: more precisely, to replace all the industrial nitrogen fertiliser now applied would mean an extra seven billion cattle grazing an extra thirty billion acres of pasture." P. 147 (highlight in bold is mine)
"fully 70 per cent of all the world's water usage is for crop irrigation." P. 147 (highlight in bold is mine)
"If the world decides, as it crazily started to do in the early 2000s, that it wants to grow its motor fuel in fields rather than extract it from oil wells, then again the acreage under the plough willl have to balloon. And good night rainforests." P. 149
"When human beings were all still hunter-gatherers, each needed about a thousand hectares of land to support him or her. Now - thanks to farming, genetics, oil, machinery and trade - each needs little more than a thousand square metres, a tenth of a hectare." P. 149
The Many Ways of Modifying Genes
"Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, 'You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?" P. 154
Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade After 5,000 years ago
"Cities exist for trade. They are places where people come to divide their labour, to specialise and exchange. They grow when trade expands - Hong Kong's population grew by thirty times in the twentieth century - and shrink when trade dries up. Rome declined from a million inhabitants in 100 BC to less than 20,000 in the early Middle Ages. Since people have generally done more dying than procreating when in cities, big cities have always depended on rural immigrants to sustain their numbers.
Just as agriculture appeared in six or seven parts of the world simultaneously, suggesting an evolutionary determinism, so the same is true, a few thousand years later, of cities. Large urban settlements, with communal buildings, monuments and shared infrastructure, start popping up after seven thousand years ago in several fertile river valleys. The oldest cities were in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Their emergence signified that production was becoming more specialised, consumption more diversified." P. 158 (highlight in bold is mine)
Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus's trap: population after 1200
"On the way up the graph, abundant food encourages some people to specialise in something other than growing or catching food, while others produce food for sale not for self-sufficiency. The division of labour increases. But when the food supply becomes tight, near the top of the graph, fewer people will be prepared to sell their food or will have a surplus to sell." P. 192
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