Recommended: Why The West Rules – For Now

Ian Morris’s new book, Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, is a dense, well-researched review of history from the emergence of modern humans to the present, directed toward answering the question “Why did the Western world end up ruling instead of the Eastern world?” After all, the East had advanced civilizations in China and India, among other places, while Westerners were still fairly primitive. Why did science and the industrial revolution advance so much faster and earlier in the West than the East?

Morris examines a number of theories, but concludes in the end it was geography more than anything else that gave the West the advantage it now holds. But he also argues that power and influence is now shifting inexorably to the East, for complex reasons that he explores in depth in the book.

Of particular interest is his methodology for measuring the “social development” of societies across time (a pdf document detailing the methodology - in 233 pages!! - can be found at http://www.ianmorris.org/socdev.html). The methodology is based on such things as the daily energy capture per person, the level of information technology, the level of civil organization, and the war-making capability of the society. One can quibble about details, but the overall picture on all the measures is startling – they run almost flat near zero for most of recorded history, and then take off toward the stratosphere in the past hundred years or so. Clearly something profound has happed to society over the past century, and even more profound changes are likely in the next century. So profound, indeed, that the distinction between East and West may soon become meaningless.

A good book, but be prepared to work to follow his arguments.