Quotes About Development

Humans were always far better in inventing tools than using them wisely.

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

The world's first commercial railroad opened for business in 1830, in Britain. By 1850, Western nations were criss-crossed by almost 25,000 miles of railroads

Sin la industrialización de la agricultura, la revolución industrial urbana no habría podido tener lugar: no habría habido manos y cerebros suficientes para llenar fábricas y oficinas.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

principal tenet is that economic growth is the

La búsqueda de la humanidad de una vida más fácil liberó inmensas fuerzas de cambio que transformaron el mundo de maneras

Yet as noted earlier, economic entrepreneurship will have to be accompanied by a revolution in education and psychology.

humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research.

babies and children

Qué potencial desarrolló Europa a principios del período moderno que le permitió dominar el mundo moderno tardío? Hay dos respuestas complementarias a esta pregunta: la ciencia moderna y el capitalismo. Los

You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements.

La consideración tradicional del mundo como un pastel de tamaño invariable presupone que solo hay dos tipos de recursos en el mundo: materias primas y energía. Pero en realidad hay tres tipos de recursos: materias primas, energía y conocimiento. Las materias primas y la energía pueden agotarse: cuanto más las usamos, menos tenemos. El conocimiento, en cambio, es un recurso en aumento: cuanto más lo usamos, más tenemos.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. An

Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating.

In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.

Like a government diverting money from defense to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.

The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms.

Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation

Al igual que un gobierno que reduce el presupuesto de defensa para aumentar el de educación, los humanos desviaron energía desde los bíceps a las neuronas. No

With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.