Читать книгу The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley, Matt Ridley - Страница 25

Divisions of labour beyond the pair bond had probably been invented in the Upper Palaeolithic. Commenting on the ten thousand mammoth-ivory beads with which the clothing of two 28,000-year-old child corpses at Sungir in Russia were decorated, the anthropologist Ian Tattersall remarks: ‘It’s hardly probable that these young people had made their richly adorned vestments themselves. It’s much more likely that the sheer diversity of material production in their society was the result of the specialisation of individuals in different activities.’ The carvers of mammoth beads at Sungir, the painter of rhinoceroses at Chauvet, the striker of blades from rock cores, the maker of rabbit nets – perhaps these were all specialists, exchanging their labour for that of others. Perhaps there had been different roles within each band of human beings ever since the first emergence of modern people over 100,000 years ago.

It is such a human thing to do, and so obvious an explanation of the thing that needs explaining: the capacity for innovation. Specialisation would lead to expertise, and expertise would lead to improvement. 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.

Specialisation would therefore create and increase the opportunities for gains from trade. The more Oz goes fishing, the better he gets at it, so the less time it takes him to catch each fish. The more hooks Adam the reindeer hunter makes, the better he gets at it, so the less time he takes to make each one. So it pays Oz to spend his day fishing and buy his hooks off Adam by giving him some fish. And it pays Adam to spend his day making hooks and get his fish delivered by Oz.

And, wonderfully, this is true even if Oz is better at hook-making than Adam. Suppose Adam is a clumsy fool, who breaks half his hooks, but he is an even clumsier fisherman who cannot throw a line to save his life. Oz, meanwhile, is one of those irritating paragons who can whittle a bone hook with little trouble and always catches lots of fish. Yet it still pays Oz to get his hooks made for him by clumsy Adam. Why? Because with practise Adam has at least become better at making hooks than he is at fishing. It takes him three hours to make a hook, but four hours to catch a fish. Oz takes only an hour to catch a fish, but good as he is he still needs two hours to make a hook. So if each is self-sufficient, then Oz works for three hours (two to make the hook and one to catch the fish), while Adam works for seven hours (three to make the hook and four to catch a fish). If Oz catches two fish and swaps one for a hook from Adam, he only has to work two hours. If Adam makes two hooks and uses one to buy a fish from Oz, he only works for six hours. Both are better off than when they were self-sufficient. Both have gained an hour of leisure time.

I have done nothing here but retell, in Stone Age terms, the notion of comparative advantage as defined by the stockbroker David Ricardo in 1817. He used the example of England trading cloth for Portuguese wine, but the argument is the same:

England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it in her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth. To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England.

Ricardo’s law has been called the only proposition in the whole of the social sciences that is both true and surprising. It is such an elegant idea that it is hard to believe that Palaeolithic people took so long to stumble upon it (or economists to define it); hard to understand why other species do not make use of it, too. It is rather baffling that we appear to be the only species that routinely exploits it. Of course, that is not quite right. Evolution has discovered Ricardo’s law and applied it to symbioses, such as the collaboration between alga and fungus that is a lichen plant or the collaboration between a cow and a bacterium in a rumen. Within species, too, there are clear gains from trade between cells of a body, polyps of a coral colony, ants of an ant colony, or mole-rats of a mole-rat colony. The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour. Insect social life is built not on increases in the complexity of individual behaviour, ‘but instead on specialization among individuals’. In the leafcutter ants of the Amazon rainforest, colonies may number millions, and workers grow into one of four distinct castes: minors, medias, majors and supermajor. In one species a supermajor (or soldier) may weigh the same as 500 minors.

But the big difference is that in every other species than human beings, the colonies consist of close relatives – even a city of a million ants is really just a huge family. Yet reproduction is the one task that people never delegate to a specialist, let alone a queen. What gave people the chance to exploit gains from trade, without waiting for Mother Nature’s tedious evolutionary crawl, was technology. Equipped with the right tool, a human being can become a soldier or a worker (maybe not a queen), and he can switch between the roles. The more you do something, the better you get at it. A band of hunter-gatherers in west Eurasia, 15,000 years ago, dividing labour not just by gender but by individual as well, would have been formidably more efficient than an undifferentiated band. Imagine, say, 100 people in the band. Some of them make tools, others make clothes, others hunt, others gather. One tiresome bloke insists on prancing around in a deer skull chanting spells and prayers, adding little to the general well-being, but then maybe he is in charge of the lunar calendar so he can tell people when the tides will be lowest for limpet-picking expeditions.

True, there is not much specialisation in modern hunter-gatherers. In the Kalahari or the Australian desert, apart from the gathering women, the hunting men and maybe the shaman, there are not too many distinct occupations in each band. But these are the simple societies left in the harsh habitats. In the relatively fertile lands of west Eurasia after 40,000 years ago, when bands of people were larger and lines of work were diverse, specialisation had probably grown up within each band. The Chauvet rhino painter was so good at his job (and yes, archaeologists think it was mainly one artist) that he must surely have had plenty of time off hunting duties to practise. The Sungir bead maker must have been working for a wage of some kind, because he cannot surely have had time to hunt for himself. Even Charles Darwin reckoned that ‘primeval man practised a division of labour; each man did not manufacture his own tools or rude pottery, but certain individuals appear to have devoted themselves to such work, no doubt receiving in exchange the produce of the chase.’