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As Lane said, “I would like to suggest that the most weighty single factor in most periods of growth, if any one factor has been most important, has been a reduction in the proportion of resources devoted to war and police.”

James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Essentially, as we increase group sizes beyond 80, to 150, 200, or even 350-500, we typically do so by breaking larger groups down into smaller ones, and continually reducing community sizes down to the point where they can be understood and managed by people -- and so efficiency reasserts itself.

Christopher Allen • The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

The ideology of frugality, the interests of factory owners, and the availability of surplus labor via immigration inevitably suppressed wages. With wages stagnant and production increasing, the system went out of balance and finally, in 1929, went into a deep crisis.

George Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

Well, by contrast, in Germany the Great Depression produced hyperinflation which broke the financial system and hammered the economic layer. In fact, it went all the way down to the sociopolitical layer with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, which then penetrated into the cultural layer. Things like the Holocaust, were Germans turned against Ger... See more

Jordan Hall • Four Layer Model of Social Systems | Deep Code Experiment: Episode 1

Historian Tony Judt notes that the state of affairs was so bad in postwar Europe that only the state could offer hope of salvation to the masses of displaced people. So it did. Everything from generous unemployment insurance to universal health care became common after the war in ways that never caught on in America.

Morgan Housel • Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes: " ... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neoc... See more

Christopher Allen • The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

As we move from the 1950s to the 1970s and then to 2008, we notice a problem. A perfectly good idea morphed into another good idea, spread beyond housing, and then culminated in uncontrolled insanity. By 2008, no one, including the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, had any idea of the fragi

George Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

A precursory understanding of economics will make it clear that price controls are always counterproductive, resulting in surpluses and shortages. The problems faced by the American economy in the 1930s were inextricably linked to the fixing of wages and prices. Wages were set too high, resulting in a very high unemployment rate, reaching 25% at ce

Saifedean Ammous • The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

The end of World War II and the dismantling of the New Deal meant the U.S. government cut its spending by an astonishing 75% between 1944 and 1948, and it also removed most price controls for good measure. And yet, the U.S. economy witnessed an extraordinary boom during these years. The roughly 10 million men who were mobilized for the war came bac