Richard L. Currier – Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink
I hastily bought this book on sale thinking it was a yet another Schumpeter-inspired history of technology by an economist. I was pleasantly surprised to find it is written from an anthropologist’s perspective, and most of the book has little to do with economics or markets. Moreover, it is excellently done.
Currier has packed Unbound with evolutionary, biological, social, and behavioral insights into how technology has influenced the human condition, and vice versa. Causality’s arrow points in both directions, with massive implications for everything from our anatomy to gender roles, sexual behavior, and even our species’ geographic range. Bipedalism freed up our hands to use weapons and tools. The extra food provided calories for larger brains to use and improve these tools. Larger brains meant longer gestations and tougher childbirths, which effectively made hunting a men-only activity; this is the origin of gender roles that are unique to our species, though obviously this dynamic does not apply as it once did. To tease out these insights, Currier ranges all the way back to our Australopithecine and Homo habilis ancestors, as well as other primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos.
Among the other things the reader learns is that our species’ relative hairlessness was a direct result of our taming fire. This had obvious safety benefits, and I was probably not the only reader to have a Gary Larson-inspired chuckle at how this may have affected some of our more hirsute ancestors as natural selection did its work.
Chapters on tools, fire, clothing, and language give way to agriculture, transportation and eventually industrial production, around which point the book changes tone. By the 19th century or so the book begins to read less like an anthropology story and more like a history of business and technology, along the lines of Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. The eighth and final technology is the emerging digital age, which is still maturing as we speak. Even at this early stage, Currier is correct about how the Internet, digitalization, and rapid globalization are having a transformative impact on par with the other great technologies.
There is another abrupt change in the final chapter, which is mostly paint-by-numbers hysterics over mass extinction and environmental apocalypse. This is alluded to in the book’s subtitle, though mostly absent until this point. Here, Currier shows that he has not often ventured outside his disciplinary home of anthropology. He would have benefited from an understanding of more diverse thinkers such as Julian Simon, Hans Rosling, Johan Norberg, Deirdre McCloskey, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Joel Mokyr, Bjorn Lomborg, and other scholars from a range of disciplines from statistics to economic history to psychology, who are more adept in the study of progress.
Unlike the rest of an otherwise carefully written book, this final chapter reads like it was written in a single caffeinated cram session. Cautious words like “could” and “might” gradually morph into more certain proclamations such as “will” and “have” as the chapter proceeds. The very end also oddly mentions the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, but Currier correctly identifies tariffs as harmful policies, and his emotions carry him in favor of international openness and inclusion. At the very end, Currier suddenly goes through another mood swing and ends on an optimistic note about. Unlike just a few pages before, Currier now argues that dynamism and progress might forestall the coming environmental apocalypse after all. Before he can change his mind again, the book ends. In all, that odd journey reminded me of the occasional all-nighter I pulled back in undergrad trying to finish term papers on time.
Despite the weird rollercoaster ending, Unbound was one of my better reads of the year. It is almost like a wider-ranging sequel to Richard Wrangham’s excellent Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which Currier cites liberally in his early chapter about fire. It also pairs well with Arthur Diamond’s Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, though that book’s Pollyanna-ish tone is a bit much even for this optimist.
Inertia Wins! 