Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

All three major cradles of civilization suffered downfalls around the fourth century driven by barbarians. Since Rome’s capital had effectively moved to Constantinople, however, Roman culture mostly survived. Feudalism, with it’s system of serfs, vassals, and lords had a multitiered system that could go ten layers deep. This gave it a fractal type of structure that was resistant to total destruction.
While it’s nice that a band of monks saved the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, the rebound of cultures relied on technology and would have done just fine without Aristotle and Plato. Energy, information, and material technologies were key. Waterwheels and vertical windmills were important and continued to improve. Once you have coins and writing, all you need for capitalism is a little imagination. Capitalism is a big time non-zero-sum game and leads to political diffusion.

Why did the industrial revolution happen in Western Europe? While China and the Islamic world were comprised of monolithic empires, Western Europe was composed of many neighboring laboratories. When Columbus, for example, couldn’t get funding in 1492 from Portugal, he simply went next door and got it from Spain. Being closer to the New World also helped, but when the meme of “Sail West” was invented by Columbus, it wasn’t long before other European countries were doing the same.
The idea that steam could produce power was discovered in France, while the first steam engine was invented in England. Paper, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass were invented in China, but their power was unleashed in Europe. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire outlawed the printing press and offered a justice system centered on bribery. India gave Europe the zero, the decimal system, and roman numerals but it was bogged down with the caste system.

The official start of Europe’s “modern era” is often considered to be circa 1450 with the invention of the printing press. It brought bibles within reach of laypeople, allowing them to get their religious instruction from the source. This lubricated the Protestant protest. By the early 1500s news pamphlets were available with true newspapers to follow. This paved the way for the nation-state. Despotic governments with their tight reigns on the press were less prosperous and their politics less popular. Vest centralized governments could no longer control written information.
Although China invented movable type, the press had less impact due to the fact that each printer needed thousands of characters rather than a hundred or so. Their religion, Confucianism, was less fragile than Catholic dogma. When the train came along, it carried coal, steel, and printed ideas. You can think of Europe as having a “single brain” due to the spread of written knowledge.

Projecting trends like improvements in transportation, energy, and information are a long way from predicting their social consequences. As products advance there is less emphasis on the materials and more on the design. Granting broad access to technology and the freedom to use it is the path that successful countries have taken. This is the story of history.
We have gone from broadcasting to narrowcasting, from a few TV channels to more than we can count. Thanks to Internet publishing, a smaller and smaller niche of information consumers can be served at little or no cost. While the world is still an immoral place, the standards we apply are much more tougher all the time.

Much power, now concentrated at the level of the nation-state, will migrate to international institutions. Again and again, supranational “tribes” such as environmental groups, labor groups, human rights groups, trade groups, and multinational corporations have abetted order, not chaos. It seems that supranational “tribalism” is a natural outgrowth of the whole of human history.
Workers in high-wage countries and low-wage countries have a common interest in elevation pay in low-wage countries. By the nineteenth century, the notion of international law had taken root, and the intangible strength of international norms was growing. Wars are increasingly things that poor nations do; rich nations intervene to stop them. The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations are examples of this trend in action, although their actions have left a lot of room for improvement.

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