Abstract:

What sparked humanity’s leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations?

For most of human history, living standards remained trapped near subsistence. Then, over the past two centuries, life expectancy soared, prosperity expanded, and the human condition was transformed. Why did this dramatic change occur after millennia of stagnation, and why have the gains from this transformation been distributed so unevenly across the globe?

In this sweeping journey across continents and millennia, Oded Galor uncovers the universal forces that propelled humanity from stagnation to growth and shaped the vast disparities in prosperity across nations. The lecture illuminates two fundamental mysteries: the origins of the unprecedented rise in living standards and the deep-rooted sources of global inequality.

Challenging conventional accounts, it reveals how technological progress became a lasting engine of prosperity only when it fostered investment in education, smaller families, the decline of child labor, and greater gender equality. Looking toward humanity’s future, the lecture will explore how societies can harness the benefits of diversity while preserving social cohesion—and how these forces can guide efforts to promote prosperity, mitigate inequality, and confront the climate crisis.

Speaker Bio:

Oded Galor is the founder of Unified Growth Theory. His research has advanced the understanding of the process of development over the entire course of human history, the deep-rooted forces underlying the transition from stagnation to growth, and the origins of the vast inequality across the globe. His contributions have explored the effects of inequality on the development process, the interaction between cultural adaptation and economic development, and the role of population diversity in comparative economic development.

Oded Galor has been awarded honorary doctorates by Nicolaus Copernicus University, the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), UCLouvain, and Poznań University of Economics and Business. He is an elected Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society. He is a Research Fellow of CEPR, GLO, and IZA; a Research Associate of the NBER and CESifo; a former Sackler Fellow at Tel Aviv University; and a Fellow of the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Furthermore, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Economic Growth, Editor of the Journal of Population Economics, and Co-Editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics.