Hickel’s suggestion that in pre-colonial times people in those very poor countries were less poor than GDP-based measures suggest because they had highly-non-financial assets like (communal) access to water, livestock, grazing land, etc. This is “a romantic fairy tale”.
Pinker is wrong here. Pastoralists in general and Steppe peoples in particular are a good example.
Though there was an enormous amount of commerce with the latter, and Chinese records are sufficient to make pretty good GDP estimates in the event anyone were to try, as it happens that commerce dried up at the conclusion of the Dzungar-Qing Wars in 1757. With the genocide of the Dzungars, China and Russia conducted trade by treaty, and the civilizations of Inner Asia entered a period of sharp decline right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Pinker is wrong here. Pastoralists in general and Steppe peoples in particular are a good example.
Though there was an enormous amount of commerce with the latter, and Chinese records are sufficient to make pretty good GDP estimates in the event anyone were to try, as it happens that commerce dried up at the conclusion of the Dzungar-Qing Wars in 1757. With the genocide of the Dzungars, China and Russia conducted trade by treaty, and the civilizations of Inner Asia entered a period of sharp decline right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.