The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Merit, wherever it arises, will be rewarded as never before. In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich.

History Speeds Up With events unfolding many times faster than during previous transformations, early understanding of how the world will change could turn out to be far more useful to you than it would have been to your ancestors at an equivalent juncture in the past.

Transactions on the Internet or the World Wide Web can be encrypted and will soon be almost impossible for tax collectors to capture. Tax-free money already compounds far faster offshore than onshore funds still subject to the high tax burden imposed by the twentieth-century nation-state.

Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. As they do, the naïve view that history is what people wish it to be will prove wildly misleading. It will therefore be crucial that you see the world anew. That means looking from the outside in

“The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior.”

Nationalism was an invention that enabled a state to increase the scale at which it was militarily effective. Like politics itself, nationalism is mostly a modern invention. As sociologist Josep Llobera has shown in his richly documented book on the rise of nationalism, the nation is an imagined community that in large measure came into being as a

You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now under way, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.

For the same reasons that Lane noted in observing that no government has ever been able to monopolize violence on the sea, it is even less likely that a government could successfully monopolize an infinite realm without physical boundaries.

Entrepreneurs can provide collective goods by market means. Many already do so now in real world communities. Foldvary’s case studies show how the privatization of communities can result in new mechanisms for providing and financing public goods and services.35