The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Peter Thiel and Sam Altman have a plan for you: Come the apocalypse, you’re on your own, while they jet to Thiel’s 477-acre New Zealand redoubt. As put by fellow billionaire, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.”
Thiel, it turns out, had spent a total of 12 days in the island nation when the its Santa Monica consulate thoughtfully conferred his citizenship in a private ceremony.
The egregious irony here is, according to Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, that powerful billionaires like Thiel, Altman, and Hoffman may well have a hand in, or at least be tangentially associated with, ushering in said apocalypse. The primary driver of societal collapse, Kemp believes, is tech-powered inequality, for which Thiel, Altman, and Hoffman are the poster children.
In the event of said apocalypse, Kemp points out that their skedaddle will ultimately fail, as long-term survival in a hostile environment — and not merely weathering the initial collapse — depends less on material resources than on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and ability to cooperate with others, endowments noticeably in short supply among the current crop of billionaire tech bro übermenschen.
Empires Weren’t All That Great for Regular Folks
Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, offers the reader a sweeping perspective of the history of societal collapse that, while at times overgeneralized and overwrought, is always provocative.
Ever had a hankering to time travel to Rome or Persia’s Persepolis at the height of their empires? Kemp advises against: Great ancient empires were deeply unequal societies that immiserated all but a thin upper crust of their populations, a distribution you’d likely find yourself on the wrong side of.
The obverse of this coin is “the bright side of the dark ages”: What might depress the world’s Kenneth Clarks turns out to be a boon for the common man, who saw, as evidenced by their skeletal remains, their well-being improve when freed from the larcenous yoke of their despotic rulers.
Most prosaically, the Romans saw the Germanic “barbarians” as physical behemoths — well-nourished hulks who terrified the puny, underfed legionaries. Nostalgic for the British Raj? During the nineteenth century, Indian life expectancy fell from 27 to 22 years. How about the glories of the Industrial Revolution? Between the wake of the Black Death and 1800, the average height of European males shrank by three inches. On the other side of the coin, collapsing civilizations were manifestly less lethal: Systematic data show that decaying empires are less likely to commit genocide than smoothly functioning ones.
Besides adult heights that shrank then rose with the rise and fall of empires, so too did the homes of ancient commoners: A signal hallmark of advanced ancient societies was extreme inequality of dwelling sizes: thousands of pitifully small houses co-existing with a small number of huge ones—the prehistoric version of the Gini coefficient. Dwelling inequality in this world extended to the hereafter, as reflected in aristocratic tombs featuring a vast array of valuables—and not infrequently, the remains of servants and captives sacrificed to the ruler’s glory. For the average citizen, the collapse of a “great” civilization offered escape from the grip of a tyrannical, extractive state that stole his crops and enslaved his children.
Recipe for a Goliath
Goliath’s Curse explodes other myths. Steven Pinker (most notably in The Better Angels of Our Nature) and others have popularized the notion that violent death pervaded late-Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies, and that the rate of violent death has declined ever since. Not true, says Kemp: Skeletal evidence of violent death such as skull and long bone fracture is, in general, relatively rare in pre-historic hunter-gatherers, and increases with the advent of agriculture, then becomes even more prevalent with the advent of large-scale empires.
Not only are hunter-gathers healthier than the agriculturalists who took over the planet, they are also happier. As John Kenneth Galbraith famously observed, “After you have lived on a farm, nothing seems like work,” to which Kemp adds that there are worse job descriptions than that of a pre-agricultural male: a life spent hunting and fishing with your closest buddies.
How, then, did humankind find itself subject to a non-stop succession of “goliaths”: brutal, extractive despotic empires that exploited its citizens? The answer, Kemp tells us, is “goliath fuel”: lootable resources, “caged” land, and monopolizable weaponry.
Start with lootable resources. The hunter-gatherer has none, just an evanescent but mobile supply of poorly storable meat or berries. In “advanced” agricultural societies, by contrast, pity the farmer who must store in one place his entire season’s harvest, easy pickings for the ruler’s tax collectors. (The opposite of a lootable resource? The gold and jewels sewn into the coat of the fleeing oppressed citizen.)
Next is caged land. Vast deserts surrounded both the fertile narrow Nile River and Mesopotamia, the Greek term for “between rivers,” rendering escape problematic.
Finally, consider monopolizable weaponry. Recall Max Weber’s definition of a state: a community that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its boundaries. That requires two things: legitimacy, until recently supplied by priesthoods, and a monopoly of force maintained by superior weaponry available only to the ruler, either because of technological difficulty or statute. (In the U.S., the Second Amendment does not extend even to hand grenades, let alone more advanced weaponry.)
Kemp’s thesis channels the cream of today’s deepest historical, anthropological, and evolutionary psychology thinkers. Recently, two of them, anthropologists Christopher Boehm and Joseph Henrich, have described how hunter-gatherers deploy “counterdominance” strategies that prevent the despotism of physically stronger dominant members. In egalitarian pre-agricultural communities, weaker members band together to censure and shame, and then intimidate would-be dictators. When all else fails, they gang up on and murder them.
As agricultural societies evolve, goliath fuel — concentration of wealth in lootable resources, particularly grain, places with forbidding geographical boundaries, and advanced weaponry — overwhelm counterdominance.
A Fragile Peace
Goliaths are inherently unstable: Sooner or later, their ruling structures collapse internally from conflicts among elites competing for lootable resources (especially tax farmers) and externally from resentful subjects. Additionally, the loot eventually runs out as garrisoning and exploiting ever more far-flung conquered territories become prohibitively expensive.
Kemp further posits that as long as the populations are well fed, empires tend to be manageable. But when droughts, floods, or other effects of climate shifts interrupt food supplies, goliaths lose control and collapse. Recent climatological data supports this hypothesis: The fall of the Akkadian empire around 2150 BCE coincided with rapid drying of the Mesopotamian climate, and Rome’s collapse coincided with the end of the “Roman Climate Optimum,” an unusually warm period between 250 BCE and AD 400 that saw today’s Sahara thick with forests and farms.
Curiously, the book omits the close linkage between the invention of writing and the advent of goliaths in both Sumer and Egypt. While he does describe both events separately, he doesn’t draw the obvious connection between the two: Absent written communication, Dunbar’s number (about 150) limits the number of deep face-to-face relationships that any one leader can maintain, making large-scale societal organization difficult, if not impossible. (In South America, non-written recording, the Incan string-based Quipu system, seemed to suffice.)
A Proliferation of Behemoths
Kemp sees goliaths everywhere he looks today, from the post-9/11 surveillance state to the rise of an AI behemoth controlled by a few multi-billionaires. However, his left-wing bias is most clearly on display when he declares that the data troves hoovered up by the NSA and other intelligence agencies “don’t seem to be effective at catching terrorists.” The fact that there have been no large-scale coordinated terrorist incidents on U.S. soil on the scale of the 9/11 attacks warrants not even a passing comment.
In high moral dudgeon, Kemp flatly states that the 1945 Trinity explosion and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not have been allowed. Evidently, he hasn’t read the multiple recent histories of the extreme recalcitrance of five of the six members of the Japanese war cabinet. Until the bombings, it was dead set on resisting a home island invasion that would have seen — according to best estimates — about five million military and civilian deaths.
An English-speaking Martian reading this book would walk away believing that life on this planet has become ever more nasty, brutish, and short. They certainly would be surprised to learn that, over the past half century, the percentage of the world living in extreme poverty has fallen from about 65% to roughly 10%.
Moreover, Kemp exhibits a fondness for lurid adjectives and overgeneralizations. Human beings just don’t despoil the earth; they leave “gouging environmental fingerprints.” He portrays the 2010 financial market “flash crash” as a tech-enabled and fast-moving disaster that vaporized $1 trillion of wealth in half an hour. Mr. Kemp evidently slept through the econ 101 lecture on marginal pricing and never learned that the 1929–1932 bear market, which needed no help from trading algorithms or AI, saw price volatility far greater than that seen in 2007–2009, let alone the blip on May 6, 2010.
Despite its lacunae, overstatements, and inaccuracies, Goliath’s Curse will entertain and provoke even the most casual student of human history. If you enjoy having your beliefs challenged, Kemp’s novel perspective on world history will be reward enough.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
