social development
- Definition: a group’s ability to get things done
- Levers available
subsistence - extracting energy from the environment
environment: physical
- Technological - invention or innovation
- organizational - management
environment: social
- grounded in information processing
- cultural - stability in way of life and thinking
environment: intellectual
Detractors of social development
- Bigger cores create bigger problems for themselves
geography's temporal advantage gets inhibited by the social development it facilitated
- Detractors
Famine - population growth not sustained by food supply
- Epidemic - plague n diseases killing mass population
- mass migration - encroachment of other groups into territory
- state failure - mismanagement
- climate Change - causing crop failure
Premise of argument
- Two groups of sufficiently large people are not very different
- The only difference between two groups of people is their geography
- East and West are divided by agricultural centers - YangZi basin versus Mesopotamia
Insights
- Agriculture lead ability to accumulate wealth inevitably leading to wars
- Change is caused by lazy, greedy frighten people looking for easier, more profitable and safer way to do things. And they rarely know what they are doing
- Each age gets the though it needs
intellectuals are asked the questions social development forces onto them
- Examples
Low end states versus high end states
network of allegiance
- maintaining own armies
- Axial age came after age of high-end state - Buddhism, Daoism, Confucius
Meaningful quotes
- The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see, Winston Churchill
References
- *The Great Divergence*, Pomeranz
- *Guns, Germs, and Steel,* Diamond
- *The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers*, Paul Kennedy
- *1421: The year china discovered America,* Gavin Menzies