Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

the shift to services—with many low-paying and many part-time jobs in retail and hospitality sectors—and losses of well-paying manufacturing jobs have contributed to rising economic inequality.

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

By 2015 nearly 38% of the people living in the five boroughs were foreign born (the largest groups coming from the Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, and Jamaica) and they provided 45% of the city’s labor force

The most practical step to make this situation less onerous would be to raise the retirement age to 69 and thus bring the number of economically active people closer to 2 people per retiree.

consequences of the shift from subsistence to adequacy and then to ostentatious waste of resources.

550,00 t and

Higher yields reduced land needed per unit of output and allowed reforestation of previously farmed land, a trend particularly notable in parts of Europe and in Eastern North America

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