A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline

​A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline
By Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Published in March 18 2015
144 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 5/5


A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline is an amazing piece of work by Hoppe. He makes numerous interesting points that I have never considered, such as that hunter-gathers are stuck in a Malthusian trap. No matter how hard they work, an increase in their population necessarily means that their collective living standards will decline because they don’t produce - just hunt and gather. I hadn’t realize how prone to conflict this made them.


He also defends intelligence as a key economic factor, something often tragically ignored by many libertarian thinkers.


This books is a brilliant and short synthesis of many ideas that I’ve been absorbing over the last few months, and I strongly recommend it.