The City.

0:28 Once upon a time I almost called

0:30 this YouTube channel some variation of Urbis Historia.

0:33 That was for a reason.

0:34 The history of the city and the history

0:36 of human civilization are spiritually and definitionally linked.

0:41 As cities change, everything about human society must change with them.

0:47 This makes cities the apex of human achievement,

0:51 they are the greatest things that humans ever invented.

0:54 And because of this, the consequences

0:57 of the mismanagement of cities can be catastrophic.

1:05 But before the invention of cities,

1:08 the apex of human achievement was the village.

1:12 Beginning in the Neolithic period, or the late Stone Age,

1:15 humans began to shift away from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle and towards

1:20 a lifestyle centred around seasonal and then

1:24 permanent villages that were “fixed” geographically.

1:27 “Fixed” is really the key word here.

1:30 Archeologists have determined that once

1:32 these villages reached a sustainable size, they stopped growing,

1:36 and could persist unchanging for potentially thousands of years.

1:40 In practice, these unchanging villages settled at no

1:44 fewer than 12 families and no more than 60.

1:48 This remarkable stability meant that Neolithic villages had millennia to mature,

1:54 and as they matured they generally settled on the same design.

2:03 Even more remarkable is the fact that the physical design

2:07 of Neolithic villages tended to naturally produce the same type of government.

2:12 A council of elders which ruled by consensus.

2:16 Villages were just like that for thousands of years.

2:19 But then, in the late Neolithic period, a series of major technological

2:24 breakthroughs suddenly increased crop yields tenfold.

2:27 Now, for the first time ever,

2:30 these tiny sustainable villages were flooded with massive food surpluses.

2:36 The generations living through this transformational era quite

2:40 suddenly became the wealthiest people who had ever lived.

2:44 But the wealth created an entirely new and unforeseen class of problems.

2:57 The food surplus caused an immediate population boom,

3:00 and before you knew it, the first cities were born.

3:03 The archeological record for these first

3:06 cities tells us something really counterintuitive.

3:09 Despite the tenfold increase in food production,

3:13 the people who lived in the new cities actually had a worse

3:17 diet than the people who lived in the old Neolithic villages.

3:22 More food, but a worse diet.

3:25 Huh?

3:26 There are two reasons for this.

3:28 First, the explosion in food production was

3:30 largely limited to three to five crops.

3:33 So there was more food to go around,

3:35 but the food that most people got to eat was basically bread and porridge,

3:40 it wasn’t nutritious at all.

3:42 Second, to the extent that there was nutritious food,

3:45 it went to a growing class of non-agricultural workers.

3:50 As population boom continued, we find archeological evidence of all sorts

3:55 of new diseases popping up in the cities.

3:58 A combination of worse nutritional standards and a rush of new

4:02 diseases meant that when humans moved from the villages to the cities,

4:07 life expectancy fell by about 5 years.

4:10 People had never been richer, but an inability to fairly distribute

4:16 that wealth meant that workers were eating worse,

4:24 living worse, and dying younger.

4:29 Warfare had existed since the first Neolithic villages,

4:31 but the scope of it was mostly restricted

4:34 to the theft of livestock and, uh, women.

4:37 Sorry for putting it that way, but it’s true.

4:41 Warfare fundamentally changed with the first cities.

4:44 The technological boom and the specialized non-agricultural

4:48 workers produced an unprecedented amount of material wealth.

4:53 Copper metalworking, complex clothing, specialized pottery,

4:57 all of this was done with brand new technology,

5:01 which made these new cities unimaginably rich.

5:04 But the wealth brought with it danger.

5:06 Rival cities now had more to gain than just livestock and women.

5:11 Sorry.

5:12 Immediately after the invention of cities,

5:15 we see walls going up around the cities.

5:19 The professionalization of warfare had begun.

5:22 Speaking of warfare, the dizzying level of wealth meant that the consensus-based

5:27 governing structures from the old Neolithic villages had to go.

5:31 The first cities were ruled by a new class of kings and priests.

5:36 Under this new system, society fundamentally changed.

5:40 Power and wealth were brutally and sometimes

5:44 violently centralized under the kings and priests.

5:47 Workers in the new cities were somehow less

5:50 free than they had been in the old villages.

5:53 After a while, that lack of freedom

5:56 became central to propping up these urban economies.

5:59 Limited forms of slavery had existed back in the old Neolithic villages,

6:04 but with the cities, slavery became institutionalized.

6:07 In Mesopotamia, we know that at least

6:10 5% of the population of cities were slaves,

6:13 and as these cities became more and more wealthy,

6:18 the number of slaves tended to increase.

6:21 The important takeaway from this is that all

6:24 of this new wealth did not really help workers.

6:27 Cities unlocked an unlimited amount of material wealth,

6:31 and because of an inability to distribute that wealth,

6:36 people had no choice but to work harder and die younger.

6:46 What a tragedy.

6:48 And yet despite these initial setbacks,

6:51 the city continued to evolve as it moved into Europe through Greece.

6:56 The agricultural land in Bronze Age

6:58 Greece was relatively poor compared to Mesopotamia,

7:02 which reduced the amount of material wealth floating around these new cities.

7:07 Over time, this reduced the power of the kings and the ruling class of priests,

7:12 making these new cities a lot less hierarchical than their Mesopotamian cousins.

7:18 Tough geography meant that these new cities

7:20 had to grow up in a dangerous neighbourhood.

7:23 As a response, they developed robust political systems that were

7:27 able to mobilize the entire city when under threat.

7:31 The old Mesopotamian cities evolved to be top down and fragile,

7:35 while the new Greek cities evolved to be bottom up and resilient.

7:40 By the 5th century BCE,

7:42 Greece’s complex political institutions meant that Greek cities could

7:46 field armies 2-3x larger than similarly sized Mesopotamian cities.

7:52 As the Greek cities began to mature,

7:55 so too did their thinking about what cities aught to be.

7:59 Greece still had many villages that were modeled

8:02 on the old Neolithic villages from back in the day.

8:05 These villages were still governed by councils

8:08 of elders that ruled by consensus.

8:10 The Greeks struggled to understand what separated these old consensus-based

8:14 villages from the new dynamic cities with their complex political institutions.

8:20 They knew that they were different,

8:22 but they wanted to understand why they were different.

8:25 They said that if an urban centre was too small, like the old villages,

8:29 then they would lose their autonomy and fall

8:32 into the political orbit of a larger city.

8:35 If they were too large, then they would lose their unique character

8:39 and their shared political purpose, and fracture.

8:42 Where does one draw this line?

8:44 Aristotle says that the ideal city should be large enough to be self sufficient,

8:49 but small enough for a person to easily see the whole city at once.

8:53 Large enough to be political independent, but small enough to walk across.

8:59 Aristotle didn’t know it at the time,

9:03 but he had just stumbled upon a Universal Human Constant.

9:18 In the late 1970s, an engineer working for the US

9:22 Department of Transportation named Yacov Zahavi made a remarkable discovery.

9:27 He found that across cultures,

9:29 people will happily commute for about 1 hour per day.

9:33 30 minutes each way.

9:34 This may not seem that exciting at first,

9:36 but his breakthrough discovery was that this remains

9:40 true regardless as to the mode of travel.

9:44 Walking, biking, horseback, rail, car, dirigible, space ship,

9:48 Zahavi found that people will happily make the trip so long

9:52 as the travel time is no more than 30 minutes each way.

9:56 This was a significant breakthrough in the field of urban planning.

9:59 It meant that one could mathematically predict the natural size of a city

10:04 simply by figuring out how far one could travel in 30 minutes.

10:09 15 years later, an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti popularized Zahavi’s

10:15 discovery in his paper "Anthropological

10:17 Invariants in Travel Behavior,” (nerd alert),

10:20 and henceforth this principle became known as Marchetti’s Constant.

10:26 Isn’t that annoying?

10:30 In the years since its discovery,

10:33 Marchetti’s Constant has been tested and found to be

10:36 true not only across every region of the world, but across all of history.

10:41 Remember what Aristotle said?

10:43 A city should be small enough for a person to easily see the whole city at once.

10:48 How far away is the horizon?

10:50 About 5km.

10:51 So according to Aristotle, a city should be no larger than 5km from end to end.

10:57 Or, to think about it another way,

10:59 a radius of no larger than 2.5km from the centre of the city to the edge.

11:04 How long does it take to walk 2.5km?

11:08 30 minutes.

11:09 That’s Marchetti’s Constant.

11:10 Aristotle was saying that when people can no longer

11:12 make most of their trips in 30 minutes or less,

11:16 cities begin to lose their unique character and their shared political purpose.

11:21 He knew it 2300 years before Zahavi or Marchetti.

11:26 I mentioned this briefly years ago in the video “Work,”

11:29 but it’s worth repeating here that human brains love 30 minute increments.

11:34 Across the world, we find that Neolithic humans measured time

11:38 by tracking how long it took to make a certain tool,

11:41 or how long it took to cook a certain meal,

11:43 or how long it took to grind a certain amount of grain,

11:46 or how long it took to burn a certain amount of wood,

11:50 or how long it took to walk a certain distance.

11:53 All around the world, people considered these things 1 unit of time,

11:57 and they all worked out to be approximately 30 minutes.

12:01 We find that the same 30 minute benchmark was important even

12:05 in the semi-permanent seasonal settlements

12:07 that predated the first Neolithic villages.

12:10 Even here, we have archeological evidence that people built their sleeping area

12:14 no more than 30 minutes away from where they made their stone tools,

12:18 which was no more than 30 minutes away from where they stored their food,

12:22 which was no more than 30 minutes away from their religious shrine.

12:30 Marchetti’s Constant, even among hunter-gatherers.

12:37 Marchetti’s Constant obviously applied to the first Neolithic villages,

12:41 but it remained true for the first cities.

12:44 Uruk, considered by many to be the world’s first major city,

12:48 had a walking radius of almost exactly 30 minutes

12:51 from the centre of the city to the walls.

12:53 The Royal City of Ur had a walking radius of no more than 15 or 20 minutes.

12:58 The city of Babylon had a walking radius of about 12 minutes.

13:02 The city of Nineveh was similar, about a 12 minutes.

13:06 The city of Memphis was even smaller, it had a walking radius of only 8 minutes.

13:12 Fast forward to the Iron Age.

13:14 At the peak of its power, the Greek city of Athens was a sprawling metropolis

13:18 and one of the mightiest cities in the world,

13:21 but even mighty Athens had a walking radius of no more than 18 minutes.

13:27 If you’re watching this video you probably have at least

13:30 a passing familiarity with the ancient city of Rome,

13:32 so I trust I can go into a little more detail here.

13:35 The Pomerium, which as we all know was the semi-mystical line

13:39 that showed where the walls of the old city used to be,

13:43 were at most a 22 minute walk from the centre of the city.

13:47 What made Rome unique was that the extreme amount

13:50 of wealth and treasure and slaves flowing into the city

13:54 allowed for it to grow beyond the Pomerium

13:57 into a megacity of more than 1 million inhabitants.

14:00 This made Rome way too big.

14:03 Marchetti’s Constant sets a maximum walking radius of no more than 30 minutes,

14:07 but the walking radius of ancient Rome was more like 90 minutes.

14:11 As a consequence, people rarely left their own neighbourhoods,

14:15 and these areas became self-sufficient and took

14:19 on unique characters of their own.

14:22 Because of its extreme wealth,

14:24 Rome always struggled to function as a cohesive city.

14:28 On paper, it violated Marchetti’s Constant, but in practice,

14:31 it was really one central city within the Pomerium

14:35 with several self-contained suburban cities glommed onto it.

14:38 It made no sense, and the people at the time knew that it made no sense.

14:44 Over the centuries, many elaborate schemes were

14:46 drawn up to move thousands of people

14:48 out of Rome and shrink the city down to a more manageable size,

14:53 but none of these schemes were ever successful.

15:02 What about the big Medieval cities?

15:04 Around the year 1400,

15:06 the largest city in Europe was either Paris or Constantinople.

15:09 In Paris, it was possible to walk from the centre

15:12 of the city to the edge of the city in just 22 minutes.

15:17 In the case of Constantinople, geography made the city oddly shaped and huge,

15:21 but even here the urban walking radius never exceeded 30 minutes.

15:26 Around the year 1450, the largest city in the world was Beijing,

15:30 with a population 3-4 times larger than that of Paris or Constantinople.

15:35 Was Beijing’s walking radius also 3-4 times larger than Paris or Constantinople?

15:41 No.

15:42 Despite its size, Beijing’s walking radius never exceeded 30 minutes.

15:48 Marchetti’s Constant was a remarkable natural limit

15:52 on cities that emerged spontaneously all over the world.

15:56 It’s remained consistent across all of human history.

16:00 Across all types of geography,

16:02 across all levels of wealth, and across all different cultures.

16:07 That is, until something catastrophic happened to cities in the 1600s.

16:19 Capitalism.

16:21 Beginning in the 17th century,

16:23 there was an explosive increase in overseas trade,

16:26 which caused a severe concentration of wealth in port cities across Europe.

16:32 The old Medieval cities had spent centuries evolving into a useful

16:35 form with a walking radius of no more than 30 minutes.

16:39 But the massive influx of wealth triggered a sudden building boom

16:42 in the port cities and a sudden disinvestment in the old inland Medieval cities.

16:48 This change was incredibly disruptive to daily life.

16:52 The old Medieval cities had evolved slowly along topographical lines,

16:56 meaning that they were all uniquely shaped

16:59 depending on the hilliness of the area,

17:01 or the access to fresh water, or the quality of the soil.

17:05 In other words, they obeyed the laws of nature.

17:08 The booming port cities were suddenly so rich

17:11 that they could afford to ignore the laws of nature.

17:14 In order to accommodate all of this new wealth, they began blindly building out

17:19 into the undeveloped land surrounding the cities.

17:22 But they didn’t build in the way that cities had been built in the past.

17:26 The old Medieval cities had been carefully built

17:29 up over centuries until they reached a sustainable size.

17:33 Beginning in the 17th century,

17:34 the booming port cities were no longer built in that way.

17:38 Wealthy capitalists bought up huge stretches of empty

17:41 land and developed it all at once.

17:44 They built straight over the hills and the rivers and the rocky

17:47 soil that had served as natural barriers for the old Medieval cities.

17:52 What had once been done carefully over

17:55 centuries was now built recklessly over decades.

17:58 This explosion of wealth allowed

18:00 for behaviour that was completely anti-historical,

18:02 in the sense that people began to ignore

18:05 the natural physical constraints that were placed upon cities.

18:09 They also began to ignore the psychological constraints on the human brain.

18:14 For the first time basically… ever,

18:16 the capitalist builders began to systematically violate Marchetti’s Constant.

18:21 This reckless expansion meant that in an ever-increasing number of cities,

18:26 it became impossible to walk from the centre of the city

18:29 to the edge of the city in 30 minutes or less.

18:33 Think carefully about what happened here.

18:35 The influx of cheap money into the port cities induced a kind of mania.

18:41 Natural laws of the city like Marchetti’s Constant were

18:45 disregarded in order to build as quickly as possible.

18:48 Real human preferences were ignored in order

18:51 to accommodate this fake thing called capital.

18:54 Lewis Mumford, a 20th century historian specializing

18:57 in the history of the modern city, summed this change up in one sentence.

19:02 “The nature and the purpose of the city

19:07 had been completely forgotten.” Urban growth,

19:14 or sprawl, is really a creature of capitalism,

19:17 and as it accelerated through the 17th, 18th,

19:20 and 19th centuries, a really perverse thing began to happen.

19:25 Land speculation grew into an industry unto itself,

19:28 and in some cases became even more profitable than

19:32 the overseas trade that kicked this whole thing off.

19:35 The buying and selling of land

19:37 on a speculative basis was basically just gambling.

19:40 It added nothing to society, but whoever happened to be holding the right

19:44 land at the right time hit the jackpot.

19:47 All of this speculative churn dramatically drove

19:49 up the price of land all across Europe.

19:52 To be clear, these speculators often weren’t even building anything,

19:56 they were just buying and selling and buying and selling

19:59 and driving the price of land up and up and up.

20:02 By the 19th century, empty land was 50 to 100 times more

20:07 expensive than it had been before the mania began.

20:12 Land speculators were becoming unimaginably rich without even building anything.

20:18 A new term was invented for this new class

20:21 of capitalists who got rich over dubious schemes like land speculation.

20:26 They called them “millionaires.” It was not meant as a compliment.

20:32 This speculative mania of the 19th century led to some unintended consequences.

20:39 Back in old Medieval Europe,

20:41 housing took up about 10% of a working person’s income.

20:45 Costs were fixed and consistently low.

20:47 The thing that made Medieval workers lose sleep at night was the price of food,

20:53 which consumed about 50% of a worker’s income.

20:56 That’s why there were riots whenever the price of food spiked.

21:00 By the 19th century,

21:02 the unambiguously good news for everybody was that industrialization

21:06 was beginning to drive down the price of food.

21:09 This was probably one of the greatest things that has ever happened,

21:13 each marginal decrease in the price of food

21:16 instantly increased the standard of living of poor people,

21:19 it’s hard to think of any other innovation

21:21 that has helped so many people so quickly.

21:24 However, while the price of food was beginning to be driven down,

21:29 rampant land speculation was driving up the cost of housing exponentially.

21:35 It would seem that this would all be heading for a crash.

21:38 There is, after all, a physical limit on how much a city can sprawl.

21:43 But in the 1860s, our old friend the Industrial Revolution intervened,

21:48 and that physical limit fell away.

21:50 By this time, passenger rail for the purpose

21:53 of commuting to work was beginning to go mainstream.

21:57 If land speculators could influence where the new rail lines were built,

22:02 they could hit the jackpot just for owning

22:04 random bits of land in the middle of nowhere.

22:07 This kicked off a second golden age of land speculation,

22:11 and since it all depended upon where the rail lines were built,

22:17 it created limitless opportunities for corruption.

22:20 The thing about Marchetti’s Constant is that it

22:24 remains true irrespective of the form of transportation.

22:27 Human brains will naturally favour a 30 minute walking radius,

22:31 but they will also favour a 30 minute radius when traveling by rail.

22:37 As speed increases, so does distance.

22:40 This meant that with the railways,

22:42 cities began to sprawl in every direction at once as fast as people could build.

22:48 Industrial sprawl in the 19th century

22:52 created an unconstrained capitalist feeding frenzy.

22:54 We’ve never seen anything like it before or since.

22:57 And what made the feeding frenzy particularly egregious was that throughout it,

23:02 very little was done to actually

23:05 improve the material conditions within existing cities.

23:09 Through this period, the city was reduced to nothing more

23:13 than a money-making instrument of the capitalist class.

23:16 Lewis Mumford vividly described the decline of the city in the 19th century.

23:21 “In the interest of expansion,

23:24 capitalism was prepared to destroy the most satisfactory social equilibrium.

23:29 No matter how venerable these old uses might be,[...] they

23:36 would be sacrificed[...] to financial gain.” In the 19th century,

23:51 working class people really got to experience

23:53 the wonders of the Industrial Revolution first hand.

23:57 Welcome to Hell!

24:03 The old Medieval cities were never great and they were rarely even good,

24:07 but at least they worked.

24:08 In the 19th century,

24:10 because of all of this new capitalist churn, European cities stopped working.

24:15 Medieval cities were extremely expensive to build,

24:18 but they always stopped growing before they hit a walking radius of 30 minutes.

24:23 This meant that once Medieval cities were built,

24:26 and they could be maintained relatively cheaply for centuries.

24:29 The Industrial Revolution flipped this equation on its head.

24:33 The rampant land speculation in the 19th century incentivized cities to sprawl

24:39 in all directions at once using the cheapest building materials possible.

24:44 Nowadays we have a term for these types of neighbourhoods.

24:47 Slums.

24:48 The new industrial slums were awful places to live,

24:51 but they were extremely profitable to the land

24:55 speculators and the industrialists who built them.

24:58 The cost of maintaining the old Medieval cores of cities was trivial,

25:02 but in the end it was less profitable

25:05 than building brand new slums on empty land,

25:08 and so over time, capital investment flowed away from the old

25:13 Medieval cores and into the more profitable industrial slums.

25:17 The ultimate irony is that these new industrial slums were so poorly built

25:21 that they had to be torn down and rebuilt after only 20 years.

25:26 The old Medieval cities were expensive to build, but they lasted for centuries.

25:31 The new industrial slums were cheap to build, but they only lasted decades.

25:39 Over the course of the 19th century, European cities became objectively worse.

25:45 The material living conditions of workers did not improve at all,

25:50 and yet industrialists and capitalists became extremely rich.

25:54 The exponential growth of industrial slums reduced cities to nothing

25:59 more than a money-making instrument of the capitalist class,

26:08 and everybody else paid the price for it.

26:16 Up to this point in history, most cities had been built alongside rivers.

26:21 The reasons for this should be obvious.

26:23 Free drinking water, free sewer system.

26:25 Two sides of the same coin, so to speak.

26:28 Obviously one of these should happen downstream of the other,

26:31 but it took humanity an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.

26:36 One of the problems with these new industrial slums was that they were

26:40 being thrown up so quickly that they

26:43 ignored the natural geography of existing cities.

26:46 The new slums either lacked access to fresh water,

26:49 which meant that they lacked access to a natural sewer system,

26:53 or they were built on land that was prone to flooding,

26:57 which meant that at certain times of the year, they became the sewer system.

27:02 Welcome to Sh*t City!

27:09 Lewis Mumford described the disgusting living conditions of 19th century slums,

27:15 “never before in recorded history had such vast masses

27:19 of people lived in such savagely deteriorated environment, ugly in form,

27:26 debased in content.” Cholera and typhoid fever became alarmingly

27:31 common in a way that it never had been before,

27:35 a single outbreak in a city could easily wipe out 10,000 people.

27:40 Even the air became poisonous.

27:42 The new industrial slums and their adjacent factories spent all

27:47 day burning coal and belching poisonous black soot into the air.

27:52 The soot got all over people’s clothes, into the soil,

27:56 into the water, into people’s homes, and even into their lungs.

28:01 We now know that prolonged exposure to this soot causes permanent brain damage,

28:07 and everybody in the industrial slums was exposed.

28:11 Researching this video I was surprised to learn

28:15 that breathing soot damages one’s taste buds,

28:17 which may explain why English cuisine evolved to be,

28:21 let’s say, heavy on texture and light on flavour.

28:26 Nobody could taste anything!

28:28 In short, the industrial slums created a hell on earth.

28:32 The long-term health effects of this prolonged

28:36 exposure poisonous air and contaminated water was catastrophic,

28:41 and to examine these effects it might be

28:44 best to look at 19th century New York City.

28:48 In 1810, New York City booming

28:51 and just beginning the process of industrialization.

28:54 And since it was the 19th century,

28:56 we know that the rate of infant mortality was extremely high.

29:00 12% of children died before their first birthday.

29:04 Over the next 40 years industrialization came to New York,

29:08 and with industrialization came the vast industrial slums

29:12 that ignored the natural geography of the city.

29:16 By the year 1850, pollution and poor sanitation

29:20 had poisoned the air and contaminated the water,

29:23 which moved infant mortality from extremely high to extremely-extremely high.

29:29 By 1850, 18% of children died before their first birthday.

29:34 By the mid-century, industrialization kicked into overdrive,

29:37 which meant that the problem was significantly worse only 10 years later.

29:42 In 1860, 22% of children died before their first birthday.

29:47 Ten years after that, it was even worse.

29:51 In 1870, 24% of children died before their first birthday.

29:55 In only 60 years, New York City had increased its population by 10x,

30:01 had industrialized its economy,

30:03 and in doing so had become one of the richest cities in the world.

30:07 And yet over the same time period,

30:10 the the living conditions of working people was declining,

30:13 and because of this, infant mortality doubled.

30:17 New York became rich, but it had to step over the bodies

30:21 of tens of thousands of children to get there.

30:24 Earlier, I called industrialization driving down the price of food

30:28 probably one of the greatest things that has ever happened.

30:31 According to some studies,

30:33 cheap and available food increased life expectancy by 4-5 years.

30:37 But according to these same studies,

30:40 out of control pollution simultaneously reduced life expectancy by 4-5 years.

30:46 The living conditions in the industrial slums were so bad

30:50 that the immense health benefits

30:52 of the Agricultural Revolution were completely wiped out.

30:56 Working people did not begin to see the benefits

30:59 of industrialization until well into the 20th century.

31:13 What am I saying here?

31:15 I’m saying that cities are the greatest things ever invented by human beings.

31:19 By almost any metric,

31:21 people today are unimaginably wealthy when compared to our ancestors,

31:26 and the thing that has made us wealthy is the city.

31:31 And yet throughout history, there’s this weird paradox.

31:35 Whenever there’s a societal change and a massive

31:38 amount of new wealth flows into cities,

31:42 this creates temporary distortions which tend to cause

31:46 the standard of living of working people to decline.

31:50 When we moved from Neolithic villages to the first cities,

31:53 the kings and the ruling class of priests became unfathomably rich,

31:57 and yet the people had no choice but to harder and die younger.

32:04 When cities found their natural size,

32:07 land speculators reduced cities to nothing more than a money-making

32:11 instrument of the capitalist class by inducing endless sprawl,

32:15 enriching themselves in the process

32:17 and impoverishing everybody else in their wake.

32:20 When industrialization showed the promise of eliminating

32:23 food scarcity once and for all,

32:26 which to our ancestors would have seemed like an infinite amount of wealth,

32:31 industrialists instead created endless seas of industrial slums,

32:35 which led to a steadily declining standard of living.

32:40 They took infinite wealth and made working people live in their own filth.

32:46 Obviously people today are better off than people were 100,

32:50 1,000, or 10,000 years ago.

32:52 But the pattern over time is fairly consistent.

32:55 A wave of capital rushes into cities,

32:58 the ruling class gets drunk off of the new wealth,

33:02 and they begin to behave erratically in a way

33:06 that you could describe as anti-social or even anti-human.

33:11 This behaviour can be overcome,

33:13 the influx of wealth can find its way to workers,

33:17 but reform is difficult, and it often takes centuries.