Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

the size of the population residing in the country’s nth largest city is equal to 1/n of the largest city’s total, corresponding to a power law with a coefficient of –1

The average American now reads only four books a year, and a quarter of Americans do not read any books (Pew Research Center 2018).

Such rotations have been known since antiquity but the common use of optimized sequences (such as Norfolk’s four-year rotation of wheat, turnips, barley, and clover) dates only to the middle of the 18th century. Subsequent widespread adoption of the practice had at least tripled nitrogen available to non-leguminous crops and began to raise long-sta

Abundance of material possessions, frequent travel and massive information flows are among the most notable accomplishments of modern civilization,

the supply of inexpensive fuels and electricity—created a powerful labor pull factor.

healthy life expectancy defined as the average number of years that a person can expect to live in “full health”:

Moving from a traditional village to a modern megacity is commonly associated with the doubling or tripling of per capita claims on the biosphere’s resources.

that dietary and behavioral intervention (reducing intake of total energy and sweetened drinks in particular, exercising more) in individuals with prediabetes can reduce the disease’s onset by 30–60%

In 1900 7.2% of the US non-farm labor force worked for government (federal, state, and local), by 1950 that share was 13.3%, and by 2016 it rose only marginally to 14.2%

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