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by
Ian Morris
In 1920 came latex condoms; in 1960 the oral contraceptive; and in rich countries the birth rate dropped below the replacement level of two per couple.
The first American computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), had been unveiled in 1946.
the invention of the microprocessor in 1971.
Steve Wozniak,
Steve Jobs
Mao Zedong quickly adopted Lenin’s example and reorganized his realm as a subcontinental empire.
About 20 million starved between 1958 and 1962. After
“Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,”
Great Leap Forward,
Deng Xiaoping,
Every experience suggested that given peace and a united government—both largely lacking since the 1840s—China, too, could prosper within the Western-dominated global economy, but Deng went further still, actively pushing China toward integration.
Mikhail Gorbachev
On Christmas Day, 1991, he bowed to pressure to sign a decree formally dissolving it. The end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman. The United States had won the War
Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This … requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
output fall 40 percent in the 1990s and real wages 45 percent.
The West rules because of geography.
Biology
soci...
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geog...
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greedy, lazy, and fearful;
“Morris Theorem”
Karl Marx cut to the chase a century and a half ago: “Men [and women] make their own history,” he insisted, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.”
(Stigler’s Law,
Younger Dryas,
This is an astonishing number. In the fourteen thousand years between the end of the Ice Age and 2000 CE, social development rose nine hundred points. In the next hundred years, says Figure 12.1, it will rise four thousand points more. Nine hundred points took us from the cave paintings of Altamira to the atomic age; where will another four thousand take us?
The five familiar figures—climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and disease—all seem to be back.
