Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

Figure 3.4. The $8 million cup of coffee: compound interest plotted on a conventional graph. Even though the cost of a cup of coffee spirals from $1 to $8,192 across fourteen weeks, the race to financial disaster remains invisible on the graph until week 17.

Figure 3.6 tells the story of my ruin in a different way.

Statisticians call Figures 3.4 and 3.5 linear-linear graphs, because the scales on each axis...

that is, each week that passes occupies the same amount of space along the horizontal axis, each dollar of debt the...

Figure 3.6, by contrast, is what statisticians ...

Time is still parceled out along the horizontal scale in linear units, but the vertical scale records my debt logarithmically, meaning that the space between the bottom axis of the graph and the first point on the vertical axis covers my debt’s tenfold growth from one to ten dollars; in the space between the first and second points it again expands tenfold, from ten to a hun...

Politicians and advertisers have turned misleading us with statis...

But all it really does is highlight a different aspect of my debt than Figures 3.4 and 3.5.

A linear-linear scale does a good job of showing just how bad my debt is; a log-linear scale does a good job of showing how things got to be so bad.

In Figure 3.6 the black line runs smooth and straight, showing that without any payments the size of my debt accelerates steadily, doubling every week. The gray line shows how after four weeks of doubling, my series of five-dollar payme...

When I stop paying, the gray line once again rises parallel to the black one, since my debt is once again doubling every week, but does not ...

Figure 3.5. A poor way to represent poor planning: the black line shows the same spiral of debt as Figure 3.4, while the gray line shows what happens after small payments against the debt in weeks 5 through 9. On this conventional (linear-linear) graph, these crucial payments are invisible.

Thus Figure 3.7, showing social development scores from 14,000 BCE through 2000 CE on a log-linear scale, produces a wildly different impression than the linear-linear version of the same scores in Figure 3.3.

There is much more going on here than met the eye in Figure 3.3. The leap in social development in recent centuries is very real and remains clear; no amount of fancy statistical footwork will ever make it go away.

But Figure 3.7 shows that it did not drop out of a clear blue sky, the way it see...

By the time the lines start shooting upward (around 1700 CE in the West and 1800 in the East) the scores in both regions were already about ten times higher than they were at the left-hand side of the gr...

Figure 3.6. Straight roads to ruin: the spiral of debt on a log-linear scale. The black line shows the steady doubling of the debt if no payments are made, while the gray shows the impact of the small payments in weeks 5 through 9 before it goes back to doubling when the payments stop.

Figure 3.7 shows that explaining why the West rules will mean answering several questions at once.

We will need to know why social development leaped so suddenly after 1800 CE to reach a level (somewhere close to 100 points) where stat...

Before development reached such heights, even the strongest societies on earth could dominate only their own region, but the new technologies and institutions of the nineteenth century allowe...

We will also, of course, need to figure out why the West was the first part of the worl...

Figure 3.7. The growth of social development, 14,000 BCE–2000 CE, plotted on a log-linear scale. This may be the most useful way to present the scores, highlighting the relative rates of growth in East and West and the importance of the thousands of years of changes before 1800 CE.

It also shows that the Eastern and Western scores were not in fact indistinguishable until just a few hundred years ago: Western scores have been higher than Eastern scores for more than 90 percent of the time since 14,000 BCE.

This seems to be a real problem for short-term accident theories. The West’s lead since 1800 CE is a reversion to the long...

Figure 3.7 reveals clearly that Western social development scores have not always been higher than Eastern.

After converging through much of the first millennium BCE, the lines cross in 541 CE and the East then remains ahead until 1773.

the most sensible way to put things may be to say that the Eastern score rose above the Western in the mid sixth century CE and the West regained the lead in the late eighteenth.)

The facts that Eastern and Western scores converged in ancient times and that the East then led the world in social development for twelve hundred years do not disprove long-term lock-in theories, any more than the fact that the West has led for nearly the whole time since the end of the Ice Age disproves short-term accident theories; but again, they mean that a successful theory will need to be rather more sophisticated and to take account of a wider range of evidence than those offered so far.

They are visible in Figure 3.7, but Figure 3.8 makes them clearer.

This is a conventional linear-linear graph but covers just the three and a half millennia from 1600 BCE through 1900 CE. Cutting off the enormous scores for 2000 CE lets us stretch the vertical axis enough that we can actually see the scores from earlier periods, while shortening the time span lets us stretch the horizontal axis so the changes through time are clearer too.

Two things particularly strike me abo...

The first is the peak in Western scores in the first century CE, around forty-three points, followed b...

If we look a little farther to the right, we see an Eastern peak just over forty-two points in 1100 CE, at the height of the Song dynasty’s ...

A little farther still to the right, around 1700 CE, Eastern and Western scores both return to the low forties but this time instead of stalling they accelerate; a hundred years later the Western line goe...

Line A shows a possible threshold around 43 points, which may have blocked the continuing development of the West’s Roman Empire in the first centuries CE and China’s Song dynasty around 1100 CE, before East and West alike broke through it around 1700 CE. Line B shows a possible connection between declining scores in both East and West in the first centuries CE, and line C shows another possible East-West connection starting around 1300 CE.

I mentioned in the introduction that, in his book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz argued that East and West alike ran into an ecological bottleneck in the eighteenth century that should, by rights, have caused their social development to stagnate and decline.

Yet they did not, the reason being, Pomeranz suggested, that the British—more through luck than judgment—combined the fruits of plundering the New World with the energy of fossil fuels, blowing away traditional ecological constraints.

If so, maybe the dominant pattern in the last two thousand years of history has been one of long-term waves, with great empires clawing their way up toward the low-forties ceiling then falling back, until something special happened in the eighteenth century.

The second thing that strikes me about Figure 3.8 is that we can draw vertical lines on it as well as horizontal ones.

Rather than (or as well as) focusing on the West hitting a low-forties ceiling, perhaps we should be looking for some set of events affecting both ends of the Old World, driving down Roman and Han Chinese social development scores regardless of the levels they had reached.

We could put another vertical line around 1300 CE, when Eastern and Western scores again followed similar patterns, although this time it was the Western score that was much lower (30.73 as against 42.66 points).

The Eastern score had already been sliding for a hundred years, but the Western score now joined it, only for both lines to pick up after 1400 and ...

Again, instead of focusing on the scores hitting a low-forties ceiling in the early eighteenth century, perhaps we should look for some global events that started pushing Eastern and Western devel...

Perhaps the industrial revolution came first to the West not because of some extraordinary fluke, as Pomeranz concluded, but because East and West were both on track for such a revolution; and then something about the way the West reacted to the events of the fourteenth century gave it...

Because they largely ignore the thousands of years in between, they rarely even try to account for all the spurts of growth, slowdowns, collapses, convergences, changes in leadership, or horizontal ceilings and vertical links that jump out at us when we can see the whole shape of history.

We might well ask the same question about Figure 3.9, which takes the rates of increase in Eastern and Western social development in the twentieth century and projects them forward.

The Eastern line crosses the Western in 2103. By 2150 the West’s rule is finished, its pomp at one with Nineveh and Tyre.

The West’s epitaph looks as clear as Scrooge’s: WESTERN RU...

I would say that the absence of premodern historians from the discussion has led us into the mistake of talking exclusively to the Ghost of Christmas Present. We need to bring the Ghost of Christmas Past back in.

To do this I will spend Part II of this book (Chapters 4–10) being a historian, telling the stories of East and West across the last few thousand years, trying to explain why social development changed as it did, and in Part III (Chapters 11 and 12) I will pull these stories together.