Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail.
This is how upstarts succeed—by avoiding arrogance and cultivating modesty. But even more important, they need to demonstrate to the people that the hierarchical social order is preferable to the alte...
It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states,
This is not to deny that there have been plenty of wicked kings in the past 2,500 years. Most likely they were in the majority. Nevertheless, the new trend was that rulers were at least supposed to be...
Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monk...
Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization—the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources...
For example, the populations of both the Roman Empire and Han China grew to 50–60 million people at the peak. This is the point when we surpassed the social insects. During the past two millennia no o...
But while Ashoka is unusual in his exceptional degree of care for the wellbeing of his subjects, he is not unique. In fact, he represents a new trend: all across Eurasia, rulers were getting intereste...
We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or...
Malthusian-Ricardian theory predicted that an increasing population would result in a specific progression of effects. Rents would rise first, with grain prices lagging behind rents, the price of indu...
For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand...
Ashoka not only exhorted others to cultivate Dhamma, he practiced what he preached. He abolished human and animal sacrifice. He made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for...
The Asian War Complex, appeared in Alaska. It spread rapidly through the continent—east to Greenland and south to California and the American southwest. The central innovation of the package was the r...
The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoner...
Why was cultural group selection the key to the transition from forager to farmer? Because you cannot switch to farming when everybody else in your community is foraging. The whole group needs to shif...
Ranged weapons, together with the mastery of fire, literally made us human. They also defined what may be called the human way of war. The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability...
In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually le...
Moral of this mathematical digression is that, on flat plains, with warriors using projectile weapons, any numerical superiority that an army can achieve over its enemy is magnified out of all proport...
These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the...
Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.