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Hunting and Gathering Age had slow pace of time and minimal forms of wealth.
Agricultural Age had gradually faster pace of time, stockpiles of grains and metals as forms of wealth.
Industrial Age has faster pace of time, with paper certificates symbolizing grains and metals as forms of wealth.
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Hunt and Gather Age had clans to organize resources.
Agricultural Age had castles to organize resources.
Industrial Age had businesses and governments to organize resources.
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How One was Clever
In dawn of Agricultural Age, people control land and cultivate farms.
In dawn of Industrial Age, people learn industrial processes, then through their labor, they save and invest.
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The Past
Leadership is crucial for the long run survival and improvement of any society. As illustrated
by both the inability of China to use its remarkable technological advances to generate the industrial revolution and the
inability of the Dark Ages to get back to levels of productivity that had previously
existed, the best social systems
do not automatically arise even though the necessary technology is present. The message of history is clear. Social institutions
do not take care of themselves.
The Chinese invented all of the technologies necessary to have the industrial revolution
hundreds of years before it occured in Europe. At least eight hundred years before they were to occur in Europe, China had
invented blast furnaces and piston bellows for making steel; gunpowder and the cannon for military conquest; the compass and
rudder for world exploration; paper, movable type, and the printing press for disseminating knowledge; suspension bridges;
porcelain; the wheeled metal plow, the horse collar, a rotary threshing machine and a mechanical seeder for improving agricultural
yields; a drill that enabled them to get energy from natural gas; and the decimal system, negative numbers, and the concept
of zero to analyze what they were doing. In the fifteenth century, China would have been the candidate if historians had been
asked to pick who was about to conquer and colonize the rest of the world militarily and to pull ahead of it economically
by converting from an agricultural to an industrial base.
With the onset of the Dark Ages (476 to 1453), real per capita incomes fell dramatically from
their imperial Roman peak. The technologies that allowed the Roman Empire to have much higher levels of productivity did not
disappear. There were those in the Dark Ages who knew everything that
the Romans knew about technologies such as fertilization.
What later Europeans lost was the organizational ability to produce and distribute fertilizer. Without fertilization, yields
fell to the point that on land that had been the part of the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, for every one seed of grain
planted, only three would be harvested. In the end, there was simply not enough calories to sustain vigorous activity and
the quality of life had to decline.
Rome's downward spiral did not begin with an external shock. It began with a period of uncertainty.
Further military expansion no longer made sense, since Rome was at its natural geographic limits- steppes, deserts, and dense
empty forests surrounded the empire on all sides. With its communications, command, and control systems functioning at their
technological limits, expansion no longer led to individual or collective wealth. Without conquest as a unifying social force,
citizens of Rome were reluctant to pay taxes to support the large political apparatus and army that were necessary to maintain
the empire. With public consumption rising and the willingness to pay taxes falling, investments that had been made
were no longer made. Eventually an economic decline set in that fed upon itself.
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