Sublime

These growth rates will depend on the nation’s variable capacity to learn and the value of its knowledge, as well as some of its natural endowments and institutions.

Plato said those who tell the stories rule society and he was right.

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

As you can tell, I like neither theory. I am going to argue that the answer lies not in climate, nor genetics, nor in archaeology, nor even entirely in ‘culture’, but in economics. Human beings had started to do something to and with each other that in effect began to build a collective intelligence. They had started, for the very first time, to

The physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute made a remarkable discovery about cities.

Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But

From Chapter Four, the social utility of money is realized not in moving on from barter, but in moving on to capital, and from Chapter Five, that capital is very much a resource that needs to be cultivated, nurtured, grown, replenished, and not strip mined!