Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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From Hunter-Gatherers to Homeowners
The Evolution of the American Dream
Tanzania’s Kalahari Bushmen are persistence hunters who track antelope until they wear them out. This might seem inefficient, but Bushmen are well designed for extreme long-distance running in the desert heat. They can also carry water. A large-horned kudu antelope can run fast for many miles. After eight hours of being tracked through the desert, though, the animal can reach such a point of thirst and fatigue that one small man can kill it with a simple wooden spear.1
Halfway across the world, the Dani people of the Indonesian province of Papua, Western New Guinea, are subject to the heavy rains of a large tropical island, so they get by on Stone Age farming methods. The Dani plant tubers such as sweet potatoes and cassava, grow banana trees, and cook pork in earthen ovens. Bedecked with ornate feathered headdresses but little more than waist straps to cover their nakedness, the Dani were first discovered by the outside world in the early twentieth century.
The Kalahari Bushmen and Dani give us two glimpses of what the long prehistory of humanity must have looked like: hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers who subsisted on whatever the land provided and accumulated no wealth over the course of their lives.
Civilization began with the domestication of animals and the advent of larger-scale farming. Still, for thousands of years, most people were desperately poor by modern standards. They lived at or just above subsistence, always at risk from disease, climate, and predation.
Only in the last few hundred years have large numbers of people created more wealth than they consumed, and lived much longer and healthier lives. Graphs that chart economic growth from about 8000 BC to the present show a nearly horizontal line for most of that history, which quickly curves upward in hockey-stick fashion in the last three centuries, with most of the spike coming in the last century.2
Before the sharp “elbow” of this line, life for most people was brutally hard by today’s standards. Thomas Hobbes surely missed some of the joys and beauties of life in primitive societies. But his famous description of the imagined state of nature might just as well have applied to the past. “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Hobbes observed.3
Hobbes wrote from his ascendant perch in England—in 1651. In other words, he wrote just before the elbow of the curve had turned sharply upward. How much harsher and harder must the lives of our distant ancestors appear to us now, on the other side of Scottish inventor James Watt. Watt’s work tripled the power of steam engines in the decade before 1776.4 His miracle gave rise to massive factories, cities, railways, and everything else we associate with the Industrial Revolution.5
People moved from using wood to coal, oil, and natural gas. They learned to harness electricity, purify water, refrigerate food, and build indoor plumbing.6 With such advances came new forms of industry, transportation, and cities, as well as prosperity that previous generations could not have imagined. On average, the global population today is “about twenty times richer than it was during the long Agrarian age” before 1500 AD.7
There are now far more people living better, longer lives than ever before. This is especially true in the developed world, but even much of the developing world is catching up. Since 1990—as more countries have embraced trade and economic freedom—extreme poverty has been cut in half worldwide and continues to plummet.8 The Brookings Institution projects that such poverty could disappear by 2030.9
Also, “life expectancy in the past 150 years has more than doubled,” notes Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. “One and a half centuries ago, more than 75% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, consuming less than $1 a day, in 1985 money. This year [2015] the World Bank expects extreme poverty to fall below 10% for the first time in history.”10 There’s more. Globally, infant mortality, malnutrition, and illiteracy are on the decline.11 In 1962, people in fifty-one countries consumed, on average, under 2,000 calories. By 2013, only one country was still below that grim threshold.12
Any such major change comes with costs, of course—sometimes severe ones. Today we fear that all the growth is behind us, with little but stasis or decline ahead. We worry about jobs and living standards for our children in a world where machines do so much of the work.
No one can prove just what jobs the future will bring. What we do have is the proof of the past. Throughout history, every large economic shift has meant disruption, when one form of life gave way to another. A nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers meets a kind of crisis when it settles down and starts to plow fields and plant seeds. So does a culture that moves from farms in the country to cities and factories. What’s new about our time is not change itself but the pace of change. For most of human history, such major shifts were few and far between, and took place over thousands of years. For instance, the feudal era that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire lasted about a millennium. That was long enough for the trades to settle into guilds, and for jobs to pass from father to son. Many surnames in England and elsewhere—Miller, Miner, Baker, Chandler, Taylor, Carpenter, Tanner, and Smith—hint at how slowly things changed in that era.
The reason we speak of what came next as an Industrial Revolution is not because it came out of nowhere or swept aside all that took place before but because of the time scale.13 Compared to the leisurely stroll along the foothills of human history—starting a flint fire here, chiseling a wheel there, domesticating cows over yonder—industrialization was a catapult into the stratosphere. Now the changes come fast and hard—over the course of a decade or even a year—though human nature has not changed at all. Taxi driver and insurance adjuster, webmaster and social media manager: These will never be surnames.
The First American Dream
Even in the short history of the American Experiment, there have been disruptive shifts between three versions of the American Dream, each one lasting for a shorter period than the one that came before. The heart of the first American Dream was the farm. Having left an aristocratic, agrarian culture in Europe, where they worked as tenant farmers, America’s early colonists dreamed of a place where they could not just work the land but own a piece of it. They believed that in the New World their family tree need not keep them rooted to the same patch of someone else’s ground. For millions, the desire to own a farm meant freedom, independence—what today we call “self-employment”—and a morsel of wealth beyond mere survival.14 Personal success was not guaranteed, but neither was it unthinkable.
As late as 1776, more than 90 percent of the colonial inhabitants of what would soon be the United States of America still lived on farms. This included American Founding Fathers such as John Adams, a Massachusetts lawyer, and Virginians Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both of whom owned large plantations and slaves.
With the Homestead Act of 1862, enacted by Abraham Lincoln, and the promise of free or cheap land, the same agrarian spirit pushed western expansion. Hundreds of thousands of families packed up all their worldly assets on little more than a hope of fertile earth over the western horizon. Even as late as 1920 and well into the Industrial Revolution, more than half the US population still lived and worked on farms.15 And more than half the compensated workforce was self-employed.
My grandfather on my mom’s side of the family, V. B. Hubbard, was born in 1899 on a small family farm in Hill County, Texas. His family had hoped to buy a larger plot someday, so they scrimped and saved until they could purchase land in West Texas, near Odessa. My grandfather’s earliest memory was of the 350-mile journey west with his parents and sisters in a covered wagon. Unfortunately, their new property was smack dab in the middle of the Dust Bowl. It was sandy and useless for growing crops. It still is.
This drama had played out for decades. Many of the common soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War were paid with farmland. The best land had been nabbed by the time of the Civil War. By the early 1900s, it was slim pickings. So the Hubbards soon sold their barren patch of dirt—where, according to family lore, oil was later discovered. They then moved to the tiny town of Wheeler in the Texas Panhandle, population 904. They bought a house with cash. To be more precise, they bought a converted post office with three small rooms, a cold-water well, gas lights, and an outhouse connected to the town sewer.
The Hubbards had moved into town, but my grandfather’s work remained tied to the land. He quit school in the seventh grade to pick cotton. As an adult, though, he ditched King Cotton and invested in a cutting-edge technology: a truck for hauling cedar posts, which at the time were used to build barbed-wire fences. At twenty-seven, “Posty,” as he was called, married Etta Kate Crowder, who had grown up on a proper farm, and they started a family. His nickname and job soon became obsolete, since metal posts replaced cedar. He spent the rest of his life baling and hauling hay for cattle.
My mom and her five siblings also knew the pleasures of picking cotton at their uncle Clarence Crowder’s farm. I grew up hearing stories of dust, mosquitoes, bleeding fingers, and sore backs. And the heat. Oh, the incessant heat. But by the 1950s my grandfather realized the old way of life was giving way to something new. Railroads, refrigeration, and labor-saving farm techniques meant far more and cheaper food for everyone. The downside was that small family farms and related jobs were no longer the dream they once were, especially in the dry Texas Panhandle. So V.B. and Etta Kate Hubbard, whom I knew as Papaw and Mamaw, pulled up their roots in Wheeler and moved with their six kids to Canyon, Texas, the closest town with a state university. They didn’t know it at the time, but the Hubbards were embarking on the second American Dream—the one centered on owning a home.
Their third son, my uncle Gene, had just returned from the Korean War. He got a Veterans Administration loan to buy a house, where the whole family could live, less than a mile from West Texas State College. The move to Canyon meant that the kids could get college educations and clerical or teaching jobs. None of them ever returned to farm life. Picking cotton is fine, unless you can do almost anything else.
There are millions of such stories. In The Grapes of Wrath, poor Oklahoma farmers had it worse than my mom’s family. Steinbeck’s characters had to flee the Oklahoma Dust Bowl for faraway California in search of jobs. Progressive politicians such as William Jennings Bryan built careers on the loss of family farms, unable to see the big picture or imagine the better days ahead.
By the mid-twentieth century, a new social order had emerged. It was dominated by industry, cities, suburbs, financial markets, the Federal Reserve, private banks, and stock markets—all of this because we learned to produce vastly more food on less land than we used just a few decades earlier.16
In contrast to the previous two centuries, only 10 percent of workers were self-employed.17 But contra the gloomy guesses of Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx, the teeming masses enjoyed longer and richer lives because of ingenuity, industry, and Henry Ford‒like mass production. In this environment, most Americans dreamed not of owning a farm but of owning a home. That dream, like the one before, was not preordained. It happened for millions of common Americans only because of the right mix of laws and policies as well as personal and civic virtues. And as we’ll see, with the right virtues and policies it can happen again in the twenty-first century.
