For example, I wrestled with how much I should worry about the differences between countries, kingdoms,
nations, states, tribes, empires, and dynasties. Nowadays we think mostly in terms of countries. However, countries
as we know them didn’t come into existence until the 17th century, after Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. In other
words, before then there were no countries—generally speaking, though not always, there were kingdoms instead.
In some places, kingdoms still exist and can be confused with being countries, and some places are both. Generally
speaking, though not always, kingdoms are small, countries are bigger, and empires are biggest (spreading beyond
the kingdom or the country). The relationships between them are often not all that clear. The British Empire was
mostly a kingdom that gradually evolved into a country and then an empire that extended way beyond England’s
borders, so that its leaders controlled broad areas and many non-English peoples. It’s also the case that each of
these types of singularly controlled entities—countries, kingdoms, tribes, empires, etc.—controls its population in
different ways, which further confuses things for those who seek precision. For example, in some cases empires
are areas that are occupied by a dominant power while in other cases empires are areas influenced by a dominant
power that controls other areas through threats and rewards. The British Empire generally occupied the countries
in its empire while the American Empire has controlled more via rewards and threats—though that is not entirely
true, as at the time of this writing the US has military bases in 70 countries. So, though it is clear that there is an
American Empire, it is less clear exactly what is in it. Anyway, you get my point—that trying to be precise can
stand in the way of conveying the biggest, most important things. So in this chapter you are going to have to bear
with my sweeping imprecisions. You will also understand why I will henceforth imprecisely call these entities
countries, even though not all of them were countries, technically speaking.
Along these lines, some will argue that my comparing different countries with different systems in different times
is impossible. While I can understand that perspective, I want to assure you that I will seek to explain whatever
major differences exist, that the timeless and universal similarities are much greater than the differences, and that
to let the differences stand in the way of seeing those similarities which provide us with the lessons of history we
need, would be tragic.
Most Everything Evolves in an Uptrend with Cycles Around It
As mentioned earlier, over long periods of time we evolve because we learn to do things better, which raises our
productivity. Over the long run, that is the most important force, though over the short run, the swings around this
upward trend are most important. This is conveyed in the chart below, which shows the estimated output (i.e.,
estimated real GDP) per person over the last 500 years. As shown from this top-down, big-picture perspective,
output per person appears to be steadily improving, though very slowly in the early years and faster after around
1800, when the slope up becomes much steeper, reflecting the faster productivity gains. This shift from slower
productivity gains to faster productivity gains was primarily due to the improvements in broad learning and the
conversion of that learning into productivity. That was brought about by a number of factors going as far back as
the invention of the printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century (it had been used in China substantially
earlier), which increased the knowledge and education available to many more people, contributing to the
European Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the first Industrial Revolution in Britain.
That broader-based learning also shifted wealth and power away from 1) an agriculture-based economy in which
land ownership was the principal source of power, and the monarchies, nobles, and church worked together to
maintain their grip on it, toward 2) an industrial-based economy in which inventive capitalists created and owned
the means of production of industrial goods and worked together with those in government to maintain the system
that allowed them to have the wealth and power. In other words, since the Industrial Revolution, which brought
about that change, we have been operating in a system in which wealth and power have primarily come more from
the combination of education, inventiveness, and capitalism, with those who run governments working with those
who control most of the wealth and education. While in the first half of the 20th century there were deviations
away from capitalism toward communism (which in the years between 1950 and 1990 showed that it didn’t work
in the forms that have been tried) and socialism (which is essentially a hybrid wealth and opportunity distribution
system that people can debate the merit of), the formula for success has been a system in which educated people
come up with innovations, receive funding through capital markets, and own the means by which their innovations
are turned into the production and allocation of resources, allowing them to be rewarded by profit-making. This
happens best in capitalism and the government systems that work symbiotically with it. At the same time, how this
is happening continues to evolve. For example, while ages ago agricultural land and agricultural production were