Quotes from James Dale Davidson

Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620. It proved drastically destabilizing. The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions.

Before the discovery of quinine in the mid-nineteenth century, white armies could not survive in malarial regions, however superior their weapons might have been.

Why not pay prime ministers and presidents even a tiny share of the gain that their policies promote?

This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group.

With the advent of farming, human horizons expanded.

Where a relatively small proportion of those participating in a given activity create most of the value, it is all but mathematically impossible for them to be left better off by a coerced outcome that averages incomes.

Apokalypsis means "unveiling" in Greek. We believe that a new stage in history—the Information Age—is about to be "unveiled.

The Information Revolution will destroy the monopoly of power of the nation-state as surely as the Gunpowder Revolution destroyed the Church's monopoly.

Efficiency will become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. This means that provinces and even cities that can effectively uphold property rights and provide for the administration of justice, while consuming few resources, will be viable sovereignties in the Information Age, as they generally have not been during the last five centuries.

Piety Without Virtue

species went extinct.

Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained. The cost of garrisoning the empire's far-flung borders exceeded the economic advantages that an ancient agricultural economy could support. The burden of taxation and regulation required to finance the military effort rose to exceed the carrying capacity of the economy. Corruption became endemic.

For better or worse, the societies of the twenty-first century are likely to be more unequal than those we have lived in during the twentieth.

The dividing lines between territories tended to become clearly demarcated and fixed as borders in the nation-state system. They will become hazy again in the Information Age. In the new millennium, sovereignty will be fragmented once more. New entities will emerge exercising some but not all of the characteristics we have come to associate with governments.

Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained.

Grasping for temporarily higher wages at the expense of placing your job in jeopardy is like burning your furniture to make the house a few degrees warmer.

Another important contributing factor to Rome's collapse was a demographic deficit caused by the Antonine plagues.

The lamb and the lion keep a delicate balance, interacting at the margin. If lions were suddenly more swift, they would catch prey that now escape. If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve.

We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nation-state, a peculiar two-hundred-year phase in history that began with the French Revolution.

The average North American has probably lavished one hundred times more attention on O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky than he has on the new microtechnologies that are poised to antiquate his job and subvert the political system he depends on for unemployment compensation.

For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity.

In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.

topographic conditions also played a major role in the prosperity of yeoman farmers in ancient Greece, enabling that region to become the cradle of Western democracy.

Other than such delicacies, foragers developed little surplus food. As anthropologist Gregg notes, "mobile populations generally do not store foodstuffs against seasonal or unexpected lows in resource availability." Consequently, foragers had little to steal.