The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The Journey of Humanity

The Journey of Humanity

And the Keys to Human Progress

Summary

This breakthrough scientific masterwork - and INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - reveals the underlying forces that have shaped human history and will secure our future...

'Masterful. Galor answers the ultimate mystery' Lewis Dartnell

The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision overturns a host of long-held assumptions to reveal the deeper causes that have shaped the journey of humanity:

Education rather than industrialisation
Family size and gender equality as much as inventions and technology
Geography and diversity rather than wars, disease and famine

'Unparalleled in its scope and ambition . . . All readers will learn something' Washington Post

'An inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork' New Statesman

'His optimism about humanity shines through' Observer

'If you need an evidence-based antidote to doomscrolling, here it is' Guardian

Reviews

  • A wildly ambitious attempt to do for economics what Newton, Darwin or Einstein did for their fields: develop a theory that explains almost everything ... an inspiring, readable, jargon-free and almost impossibly erudite masterwork, the boldest possible attempt to write the economic history of humanity
    New Statesman

About the author

Oded Galor

Oded Galor is Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founding thinker behind Unified Growth Theory, which seeks to uncover the fundamental causes of development, prosperity and inequality over the entire span of human history. He has shared the insights of his lifetime's work in this field at some of the most prestigious lectures around the globe and has now distilled those discoveries into The Journey of Humanity, which is being published in twenty-eight languages worldwide.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more