The fundamental constraints on human history

Human history is about trends and constraints, not names, dates and events.

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This Substack and my From Poverty to Progress book series focuses on explaining the origins and root causes of human material progress. At its most fundamental level, I am arguing for a theory of history that both:

• Explains the origins and causes of human material progress, humanity’s greatest achievement, and

• How we can apply that knowledge to policies and practices to keep that progress going.

Most rival analyses of material progress focus on contemporary factors, such as:

• Technological innovation

• Science

• Institutions

• Culture

• Government policy.

I believe that all the above factors matter, but not as much as most other thinkers believe. They are intermediate causal factors, not ultimate causes that rest on a solid historical foundation. So any attempts to implement policies that focus on intermediate causal factors are less likely to be successful than policies that focus on ultimate causes.

What caused the cause?

Don’t get me wrong. All of the above factors matter, but they are not the ultimate causes of material progress. They all suffer from the “What caused the cause?” problem.

Let me give a few specific examples of this problem:

• If government policies cause material progress, what caused those beneficial government policies to occur in the first place?

• If specific characteristics of culture cause material progress, where do those cultural characteristics come from?

• If a specific set of institutions causes material progress, where do those institutions come from?

Without a specific explanation of “what caused the cause,” we are left with:

• the “Turtles all the way down” problem, or

• vague statements about randomness, or

• “It depends”

I believe that to truly understand the workings of human material progress, one needs to build a foundation on factors that were critical before modern humans even evolved. Only by going very far back in time can one be sure that one is focusing on an ultimate cause and not an intermediary cause, such as those listed above.

In other words, Progress Studies researchers must study not just recent history (for example, the origins of Silicon Valley or silicon chip manufacturing) but “deep history” that goes back thousands or even millions of years.

I know that seems like a strange statement, but bear with me. To explain myself, I need to take a brief detour into the problems with how most people explain and understand history.

So what is history, and how should we study it?

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I have a few series of articles on related topics:

• My theory of history (including before Progress evolved and after)

• Society Types, a crucial concept for understanding human history.

• The origins and causes of human material progress

• Commercial societies, where human material progress was invented long before the Industrial Revolution.

• How progress spread across the globe.

• Energy and its importance to human material progress

• Agriculture and food production and its importance to human material progress

• Impact of geography on human history

• How the United States became an engine of progress for the last 150 years

If you enjoyed reading this series of articles, you might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:

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History is taught all wrong

I love history. One of my great passions throughout my life has been reading history books and watching historically accurate movies.

Unfortunately, most people do not feel that way.

I am saddened to say the History major is one of the most rapidly declining majors in universities. I can understand why young people would want to major in a field that prepares them for a highly paid profession, but that only explains part of the decline. The fact is that most university majors, particularly those that young women choose, do not pay all that well. And a desire for well-paying jobs does not explain why history classes in K-12 education are regarded as boring by many students.

I believe the fundamental problem is how history is taught. It is typically taught as a relentless string of names, dates, and events that need to be memorized and causality takes a back seat to thick description.

In other words, history is taught from the “bottom up” with the primary focus being on a large number of seemingly unrelated facts.

How we teach history is the opposite of other fields

Almost every other academic topic is taught the other way around. Other academic topics are taught via a method that goes something like this:

1. Here is a general concept that is critical to understanding the field. In physics, it might be the Four Fundamental Forces or elementary particles.

2. Here are a few specific examples of that concept being applied that you can practice with.

3. Here is a little more specific concept that is embedded within the bigger concept that you just learned. In physics, it might be explaining gravity or quarks and atoms.

4. Here is an example of a more specific concept that you can practice with.

5. etc.

Almost all other academic fields go from the “top-down” from high-level concepts down to the specifics. The specifics are all used to illustrate the usefulness of the higher-level theories and concepts.

History is taught in the opposite way.

History is taught from the “bottom up.” History is typically taught as a long string of names, dates, and events. A good historian will wrap those names, dates, and events with a narrative, but sometimes even that is not done. In other words, history is taught at best as a narrative without any over-arching concepts to tie all the masses of raw data together meaningfully.

And worse, most history never actually gets to the over-arching concepts at the top. So history is simply a very complicated and often boring narrative or just a string of names, dates, and events.

This is not an accident. While Social Sciences and Hard Sciences are based on theory and concepts to help us understand causality, historians are deeply skeptical of theory and models. Historians typically complain that models and theories oversimplify very complex events.

In this claim, historians are correct, but they miss the fact that the purpose of intellectual inquiry is not to understand all the complexities. Understanding is derived from useful theories that help us to focus the most important characteristics of a phenomenon.

Usefulness is the criteria for good theory

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

statistician George E. P. Box

The key to an important theory is not how detailed it is, but how useful it is.

A theory and a concept should give just the right level of specificity to be useful, but no more. The theory helps us to understand which factors are important and which are not. Theory also enables us to make falsifiable hypotheses that can be tested against the raw data.

So the thick description of the historical narrative is the starting point for research, not the ending point. Most historians refuse to push beyond the starting point to create a useful theory that accounts for the most important causal variable.

How you teach a topic is not the same as how you research the same topic. Anyone trying to teach science or social science with a mass of details first will lead to very confused students. Students need to understand the most important high-level concepts first before they can get into the details.

So, to be useful, history needs high-level theory and concepts. Fortunately, those same theories and concepts also make history more interesting and memorable. History can move beyond memorizing a string of names, dates, and events towards something much better.

So what is history?

I believe that rather than a string of names, dates, and events, we should view history as the combination of:

• Constraints (discussed in detail here)

• Trends (discussed in detail in a later article)

Constraints are the problems in the human condition that need to be partially overcome or adapted to. And the Trends enable us to understand how previous generations of humans have overcome or adapted to those Constraints.

In this article, I will focus on the Constraints and leave Trends to a subsequent article.

Constraints

All biological organisms live within constraints. So, a study of constraints on humanity must start with those that we share with all other biological organisms.

I believe those fundamental constraints are:

• Physics/Chemistry

• Biology

• Energy (what biological organisms require to survive and reproduce and what machines need to consume to augment human labor)

• Geography (spatial variations of the above factors on planet Earth)

And the best means of understanding long-term trends among non-human animals is:

• Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and

• his lesser-known theory of evolution by sexual selection.

By the way, Charles Darwin was not the first to notice evolution of biological origins, but he was the first that explained how the process worked.

Because evolution is not under the control of any one person or group of people, evolution is also a constraint. It is just one that changes over time far more than the other constraints.

So we must add in Evolution to our list of key Constraints on the human condition.

The four key constraints on the human condition

I believe that a general theory of history (and a more specific theory of material progress) must start with those four fundamental constraints that dominated early human history and all subsequent history. These factors are best thought of as the key constraints of the human condition that we always struggle against and have been only very gradually reducing their impact over centuries.

So my modified list of the Four Key Constraints are:

• Biology

• Energy

  • what machines need to consume to augment human labor.

  • and food, which is a form of energy that enables humans to survive and reproduce.

• Geography (particularly the uneven distribution of natural food and energy sources)

• Evolution (how biological lifeforms change over time)

  • via biological evolution via natural selection and sexual selection,

  • as well as more recent cultural evolution, which combines both biology and culture.

Note that I do not focus much on Physics and Chemistry because they do not vary and I think their impact is largely captured by the other factors (plus I know far less about those topics than the others).

I might also consider Human Psychology as a fundamental constraint, although I consider psychology to be a sub-set of biology. It is important, however, to understand that biological constraints work upon our bodies as well as our brains.

Three phases in human adaptation to the Four Key Constraints

So human history can be best conceived as a quest to adapt to and overcome those Four Key Constraints. Of course, no humans were fully cognizant of those Four Key Constraints. They were just trying to get on with their lives, survive, reproduce, and perhaps enjoy a little bit of their brief existence.

The adaptation came in three main phases:

1. Biological evolution gave humans far better tools than any other species for pushing back on those constraints.

2. Cultural evolution gave humans more and more complex societies that were better adapted to living within those Four Key Constraints in a specific geography. In particular, leveraging energy that indirectly comes from the sun to acquire food, energy, and other natural resources.

3. Material progress that actually created a higher material standard of living for the masses. All previous evolution provided little long-term material benefits for the masses. The bulk of my writing in this Substack and my book series is about this phase, but it is important to understand that this material progress would not have been possible without the two prior phases.

Human behaviors from biological evolution

Modern material progress is the outcome of a long evolutionary process that grew out of those Four Key Constraints. For millions of years, that evolutionary process was entirely biological.

For virtually all of our history, humans were controlled by the same natural factors that all other animals were controlled by. Fortunately for us, humans evolved certain behaviors that enabled us to push back against these constraints. We never fully removed those constraints, but we have at least lowered their negative consequences on our material existence.

Those key human behaviors are:

• innovate new technology,

• learn skills associated with those technologies,

• work together to solve common problems,

• compete against other groups, and

• copy what worked for other humans

All the human behaviors listed above gradually enabled us to overcome these natural constraints.

I go into more detail on each of these human behaviors in my series on “How Progress Works.” For lack of a better term, I will borrow a term from biology and call them “behaviors.” They are tasks that humans instinctively perform. Some of them are presumably encoded in our DNA, while others are conditioned by culture.

It is important to note that these behaviors are not the ultimate causes of what gets progress started. This is a mistake that many thinkers make, and it causes their advice to be unhelpful.

The Five Keys to Progress are the ultimate causes that create the initial conditions necessary for progress. How Progress Works explains in more detail specific human behaviors that make progress work while the Five Keys to Progress are in effect.

Our most important ability is to acquire naturally existing energy, transform it, and harness that energy for use in solving local problems.

Cultural Evolution led to increasingly complex societies

Those human behaviors mentioned above enabled us to innovate key food subsistence and energy technologies that gradually created larger and larger food surpluses. Those food surpluses enabled larger and more complex societies to evolve in certain geographical regions. To more easily understand them, it is useful to categorize those societies into “Society Types.”

A society type is a category for how a society organizes itself to transform energy and other natural resources into food and other useful technologies. This is most easily measured by how people acquire a majority of their calories. If, as they say, “you are what you eat”, then the society type concept emphasizes that “we are how we acquire what we eat.” See the graphic below for examples of Society Types.

The concept of Society Type is useful because with one simple label we can communicate a large number of important characteristics about any given society in history. I cover these characteristics in much greater detail in my series on Society Types. For now, it is sufficient to say that each Society Type has common levels of:

• population size

• population density

• political structure

• economic structure, and

• rates of innovation.

And these characteristics differ from societies of other types.

The concept of Society Type enables us to understand why some groups of people evolved culturally at vastly different rates than other groups of people. This is because the society type is to humans what the natural environment is to animals: the critical environmental factor that drives evolutionary change. Among animals, that evolutionary change is entirely genetic. Among humans, that evolutionary change is genetic, cultural and technological.

Humans adapt to their society type through changes to their genes, culture, technology, skills and social organizations. Any factors that fundamentally conflict with survival and prosperity in their society type will be under substantial pressure to change.

With adaptation via innovation and diffusion, each generation is slightly better adapted for surviving, reproducing, and prospering in that society type than the previous generation. Within a single lifetime, the changes can seem trivial, but when viewed from the perspective of centuries, these changes can be dramatic.

I do not want to go into detail, here as I already have written an article on this topic and much of it is explained in the following graphic. Cultural evolution caused great change in human societies, but it did not lead to increased material standard of living for the masses.

The above graphic combines together three critical concepts to understand how humans created progress out of poverty:

• Society Type (essentially how a society acquires enough food to eat; see a previous post explaining this concept).

• Biome (essentially the dominant vegetation in any one geographical area; see a previous post explaining this concept).

• Enabling Technologies (key technologies that enable societies to transition from one Society Type to another; these technologies typically are related to food and energy).

Note, however, that all these changed until recently did not create an increased material standard of living for the masses. With the exception of elites, the vast majority persisted in absolute poverty for millennia.

And then came material progress

Material progress was the accidental outcome of prior cultural evolution. The story of how that happened is covered in the following series:

1. Understanding human material progress (the series)

2. How Progress spread across the globe (the series)

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I have a few series of articles on related topics:

• My theory of history (including before Progress evolved and after)

• Society Types, a crucial concept for understanding human history.

• The origins and causes of human material progress

• Commercial societies, where human material progress was invented long before the Industrial Revolution.

• How progress spread across the globe.

• Energy and its importance to human material progress

• Agriculture and food production and its importance to human material progress

• Impact of geography on human history

• How the United States became an engine of progress for the last 150 years

If you enjoyed reading this series of articles, you might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: