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Having escaped the Malthusian trap, is humanity now heading for a new limit to per capita growth and prosperity? This might be the conclusion after reading Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “A Short History of Man – Progress and Decline”. The short book is a compilation of three essays, titled “On the Origin of Private Property and the Family”, “From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution: Reflections on Social Evolution”, and “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy”.

In the introduction, Hoppe, who is an economist and sociologist, not a trained historian, makes clear how his study is different from other teachings on (pre-)history: He is writing from the vantage point of “Austro-Libertarianism”, i.e. his methodology is not to compile facts first and then to try to make sense of them, to find patterns etc., as the “normal” historian does. Hoppe starts from the position that there are “non-hypothetical or aprioristic” laws of praxeology and ethics. There are non-reducible starting points of thinking about the world, e.g.: “humans act”. It is impossible to refute this statement without engaging in “performative contradiction” – in order to refute it I have to act. It is also impossible to refute that humans purposefully utilize means over a period of time in order to achieve desired ends – the action axiom. Applied to history, one can discern interpretations of some given historical data set into those that are “possible and possibly (hypothetically) true (and so […] scientifically admissible)” and those that “must be ruled out instead as impossible and impossibly true”.

Hoppe thus turns the science of history on its head (or maybe one should say, puts it back on its feet). He self-consciously refers to it as “revisionist history”, opposed not only to “dominant leftist ‘mainstream’” history, but also to “some circles of ‘politically correct’ and ‘progressive’ so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ establishment-libertarians.”

On this footing, Hoppe reconstructs the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, two momentous events in the history of man, as manifestations of growing intelligence or “human rationality”. The result of the “‘breeding’, over many generations, of a more intelligent population.” With “breeding” Hoppe doesn’t mean someone’s planned action, but the process of natural selection: Even in hunter-gatherer times, the more intelligent people were the more successful and thus had more mating partners and more offspring. At some point, we became intelligent enough to not only realise the advantages of agriculture, but to have the skills (numeracy, literacy, accountancy, long term planning) to actually get it started.

Here is an example of how Hoppe’s praxeological approach works. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, humans were not producers, only consumers of food. They did indeed produce certain other things such as tools and weapons, but up until the Neolithic Revolution these only served to increase the rate of food consumption, not production. This allowed a continual, if slow, rise of the population. For a while an increased population (of individual tribes) also increases the consumption opportunities due to the law of the division of labour. However, because of the law of returns there comes a point when adding more labourers will mean a net loss for everyone, what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises called the “Malthusian law of population”. Hoppe explains that the law “does not assert where exactly this optimal point lies – at so-and-so many people per square mile, for instance – but only that such a point exists.” After this assertion comes the fact finding: It happens to be, for hunter-gatherer societies, “that one square mile of territory was needed to comfortably sustain one or two persons, and in less fertile regions even larger territories were necessary.”

Praxeologically, the exact figure is of no interest. What is of interest is what happens when all territory is thus taken by hunters and gatherers. Only three different alternative reactions are possible: fight, migrate, and invent. As long as there was space to move to, fighting was limited. But at some point, all territory usable for hunting and gathering to sustain a given population was taken. Then, fighting took precedence. And so it is no surprise to Hoppe that “anthropological evidence has … made abundantly clear [that] primitive man has been considerably more warlike than contemporary man. It has been estimated that on the average some 30 percent of all males in primitive, hunter-gatherer societies died from unnatural – violent – causes, far exceeding anything experienced in this regard in modern societies.” Further evidence is brought by the observation that when modern man clashed with remainders of primitive societies (the US Army against the Seminoles in 1834, the British Army against the Zulus in 1879 and the French against the Tuareg in 1890), “state armies prevailed in the end only through larger manpower and attritional campaigns, not by superior fighting skill.”

This is how the whole book is structured. Building on irrefutable axioms, Hoppe constructs a logical sequence of historical events, and then goes and finds the evidence. The results are compelling and surprising. As when he explains how the family as we know it was a direct result of the Neolithic Revolution. The innovation that made it possible was the appropriation of land as private property. Prior to that by the way, “land” was not considered “collective” property (as some communist romantics assume). It was not property at all. Instead it was simply “the environment” or “general conditions of action”. It was only when, after all land had been occupied by hunters and gatherers, that it became “scarce” and thus an economic good. So it was “privatised”, beginning in areas such as the fertile crescent in the Middle East – and food was not only consumed, but also produced. With privatisation comes internalisation of costs and benefits – including those of having children (= labour as a factor of production). Consequently, fathers needed to make certain that their children were indeed theirs. Because prior to DNA tests they could not be, an institution was created to make reasonably certain that they were: marriage and (especially female) fidelity.

But once agriculture had spread to all areas of the globe, and human population continued to grow, an old problem resurfaced: More people were being born than could be sustained. Per capita income remained essentially the same. When it did increase, population increased, then overshot, leading to poverty, famine and diseases and a return of per capita income to the norm. Until the Industrial Revolution beginning around 1800 that is, when the increased production of capital goods led to an explosion of labour productivity. However, argues Hoppe, economic theory cannot explain why it took us “so long” to get out of the so-called Malthusian trap. It was not, he insists, insufficient protection of property rights. These were better protected in 1200 England than in contemporary England. Similarly, Hoppe asks, why did it take so long for the hunter-gatherers to invent agriculture? His answer is the same as the one he gives for the occurrence of the Neolithic Revolution: growing intelligence through natural selection, which takes a while.

Hoppe then makes an important point. He explains how the Industrial Revolution fed the state, and how this is endangering its progress:

“Under Malthusian conditions the State doesn’t matter much, at least as far as macroeffects are concerned. A more exploitative State will simply lead to a lower population number (much like a pest would), but it does not affect per capita income. … All this changes with the Industrial Revolution. For if productivity gains continuously outstrip population increases and allow for a steady increase in per capita incomes, then an exploitative institution such as the State can continuously grow without lowering per capita income and reducing the population number. The State then becomes a permanent drag on the economy and per capita incomes.”

This in turn leads to “dysgenic effects” especially via the welfare state, as it undermines the natural process of the economically successful producing more offspring.

In the third chapter, Hoppe dissects the development from an almost “natural society” (feudal mediaeval Europe had it not been for serfdom), when an aristocracy ruled without a territorial monopoly of ultimate judgment, via absolute monarchy to the democratic state. This is reconstructed “as the outcome of a sequence of cumulative intellectual – moral and economic – errors and as a step back in the development of human rationality and a growing threat to the achievements attained with the Industrial Revolution.”

This short book is full of astute observations and inferences such as these. However, I would have liked to have read more about the (economic and/or non-economic) reasons for “moral and economic errors” we made to reach the point of “dysgenic effects” we are now apparently at.

Let me end with two thoughts: One is that after escaping the Malthusian trap we may now have entered the age of a neo-Malthusian trap, which might be called the “Hoppean trap”. One in which per-capita wealth and population increase over a number of generations, until a sufficient part (say, more than a third) of the population ceases to know anything about wealth creation except that its produce seemingly come from “heaven” (i.e. the government). At that point productivity decreases, followed by a decrease of the “manna”, until it (the manna) ceases altogether. At some point a per-capita wealth and income decrease sets in, then a population decrease. Or, looking at Western Europe in the past few decades, the population decrease may have set in earlier in a vain attempt to counter the already perceived slowdown or reversal of productivity growth.

It is too early to tell when a positive reversal within the “Hoppean trap” will set in. However, if we consider Moore’s law of information processing and Metcalfe’s law of telecommunications, the likelihood is that the overall trajectory of productivity and population growth will continue to point upward. The demise of the Soviet Empire (helped along by more information becoming available via TV and radio) has shown that, even though the state tends towards totalitarianism, it either never gets there or doesn’t stay there for long (the case of North Korea simply raises the question of what “long” means). So the dysgenic effect of the state may act as an “automatic stabiliser”, as a “floor” in the “Hoppean trap”: the population becomes too lazy or stupid or careless to uphold the system that (supposedly) supports it.

Another point to make is about the moral dimension to the state, which Hoppe acknowledges. No amount of intelligence or rational thinking capacity will overcome this moral problem, something that Hoppe does not discuss. The possibility to live off the produce of someone else is a temptation which will remain with us as long as resources are scarce. The ethical framework still current today to counter this temptation was very likely developed at or soon after the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. We probably gave up the earth goddess at that time (parcelling up the land sort of scratches at the image of an earth goddess) and turned to a sky god instead. According to the Bible it is this god who told us that theft (from each other, not “from the earth”) is bad.

What is also in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 17, is a concise set of rules as to what a king is and is not allowed to do. Most importantly, “he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the Levitical priests.  It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites and turn from the law to the right or to the left.”

Whether one considers this and other commandments of the Bible to be revealed wisdom from God, or instead the Hayekian result of centuries of human action but not planning, it seems sound advice: A kind of constitution, but not a “constructivist” one based on the authority of man (which only increases government power, as Hoppe has explained elsewhere); instead based on a “higher justice” pre-discovered and compiled “organically” in some way or another. And it seems to be the one thing that would, if adhered to, enable us to break through the emerging “Hoppean trap”. This is the reason, by the way, why I continue to promote the idea that libertarians need to consider the religious dimension of the human condition, if they ever want to see a libertarian world realised.

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