You wouldn’t call it a classic joke. It’s more of a quip, to be honest; something you might hear at a computer-science convention. It is said that the number of people predicting the end of Moore’s law doubles every two years. Lol.

For the uninitiated, Moore’s law refers to Gordon Moore’s prediction, in 1965, that the number of transistors on a computer microchip would double every two years while the cost of computers would be halved. It was a brave prediction to make when microprocessors and home computers were still just a distant dream. But despite the countless experts predicting the demise of Moore’s law, as the quip insinuates, it has remained true for almost five decades, as Figure 31.1 demonstrates.

In April 1816 eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin travelled to Geneva with her lover, the poet Percy Shelley. (They had eloped and were to marry later in the year.) They stayed in Geneva for the summer with her half-sister, Claire, and another of England’s great poets, Lord Byron. But the weather was terrible. Instead of rowing on a calm and pleasant Lake Geneva, Mary wrote of a ‘wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain [that] often confined us for days to the house’. It was during one such dark and stormy evening that a member of the travelling party suggested a game: each should write a ghost story. After several days of toying with different ideas, Mary Shelley conjured up the story of Victor Frankenstein, who creates a monster in a scientific experiment. Published in 1818, Frankenstein changed literary history and is today considered one of the first science fiction books. It still sells approximately 40,000 copies per year.

At least two decades before the arrival of the first European colonists at the southern tip of Africa, Autshumao, the chief of the Gorinhaikonas, settled in Table Bay. Although Europeans had sailed past the Cape in 1488, the volume of ships only increased after the establishment of the VOC in 1602 and the expansion of the spice trade between Europe and the East Indies. For many a ship’s captain Table Bay offered a place of refuge and replenishment, where they could find fresh water, wood for fuel, and meat purchased from the Gorinhaikonas, the Khoesan clan who lived in and around the bay. But communication for the purpose of trade proved difficult and so, in 1630, Autshumao was taken aboard a Dutch ship to Bantam in present-day Indonesia, where he learned Dutch and English. Two years later he opened a trading post on Robben Island, delivering letters for European ships, before moving back to the mainland in 1640.

Since the board game Settlers of Catan was first released in 1995 it has sold more than 25 million copies. It works like this. Play starts after tiles of different land types – mountains producing iron ore, pastures sustaining sheep, and so on – are laid out – and numbers between 2 and 12 are randomly assigned to each tile. Every player picks a spot on the board to establish his or her first village. When the dice is rolled, a player receives a resource that matches the number on the dice if his or her village is located next to that resource. So, if the pasture next to my village has 9 on it, and the two dice thrown add up to 9, I receive one sheep. Those resources I then use to buy roads and villages and cities – and so expand my empire.

How has Augmented Human Development been distributed across countries? Chapter 3 offers an answer. It presents long-run inequality trends for AHDI and its dimensions and examines gains across the distribution using growth incidence curves, in absolute and relative terms. Augmented human development inequality declined since 1900. In the long run, countries in the middle and lower deciles obtained larger relative gains over the last century. Over time, changes in the international distribution of augmented human development largely depended on the behaviour of schooling and civil and political liberties, even though life expectancy was inequality’s main driver until the 1920s since the uneven diffusion of new medical knowledge and technology and health practices in the early stages of the epidemiological transition provoked unequal life expectancy gains. The global spread of schooling and the diffusion of epidemiological transition made a substantial contribution to reducing AHD inequality between the 1920s and the early 1980s. The rise of authoritarian political regimes partly offset AHD inequality decline, since its dispersion only fell from the 1970s. These findings are at odds with the evolution of per capita income dispersion that increased until the late twentieth century and only fell since 1990. (198 words)

Chapter 1 addresses the challenge of moving from an abstract concept, human development, to an empirical measure, the AHDI. The chapter discusses the measurement of human development, examining each of its dimensions: access to knowledge, a healthy life, and other aspects of well-being leading to a meaningful life, and exploring the reduced forms of these dimensions used as proxies. Then, it proposes a new, augmented human development index that combines achievements in terms of health and education, and material welfare in a context of freedom of choice and, therefore, satisfies the capabilities approach. In order to allow for its bounded nature and quality improvements, the new AHDI, unlike the HDI, derives the proxies for health and education, namely, life expectancy at birth and years of schooling, as Kakwani indices that transform them non-linearly, so increases at higher level represent higher achievements than similar increases at a lower level. Moreover, the AHDI adds a crucial dimension, civil and political liberties, to proxy agency and freedom. As in the HDI, the four indices are combined using unweighted geometric average to obtain the AHDI, as all of them are considered indispensable.

Did augmented human development improve in Latin America since 1870, what drove it, and did the gap with the OECD widen? Chapter 5 addresses these questions. Latin America presents sustained AHD gains since the late nineteenth century, especially during the 1940s and 1950s and from 1970 onwards, the 1980s in particular. AHD advance was not restricted to phases of economic progress, i.e., the 1940–1980 phase of state-led growth, but extended to the globalisation backlash (1914–1950) and the ‘lost decade’ (1980s). Schooling, as a result of the diffusion of new ideas, nation-building, and urbanisation, and life expectancy, due to the spread of the epidemiological transition, drove AHD over the long run and accounted for catching up to the OECD until 1960, while civil and political liberties did so in the 1980s. The rise of life expectancy before drugs spread internationally since 1950 points to the diffusion of new medical knowledge that through hygienic practices and low-cost public health measures helped eradicating communicable diseases and played a major role in reducing infant and maternal mortality.

The purpose of this book is to provide an account of well-being in the context of modern economic growth and globalisation over the past one and a half centuries. It is inspired by Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. Its central tenet, the enlargement of people’s choices, informs the concept of human development and its reduced form, the augmented human development index, on which the volume rests. A long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and command of resources to enjoy a meaningful life are human development dimensions, and their achievement represents for individuals a historical path to freedom.