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cb75607
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Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.
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James Dale Davidson |
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78a3ce5
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Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the easy that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.
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James Dale Davidson |
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2a7f49a
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Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
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James Dale Davidson |
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8277916
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The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.
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James Dale Davidson |
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f2791e8
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When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.
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James Dale Davidson |
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cb37074
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The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.
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James Dale Davidson |
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64d8105
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Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.
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James Dale Davidson |
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a072abd
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The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming.
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James Dale Davidson |
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b52e040
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Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.
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James Dale Davidson |
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c7d8e6c
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The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence.
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James Dale Davidson |
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001f32e
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The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.
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James Dale Davidson |
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96ee1c4
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Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; this, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equivalent of one-hundred-dollar bills in the future.
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James Dale Davidson |
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70b344f
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Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.
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James Dale Davidson |
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9a6d527
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Because a hunter's labor did not augment the food supply but could only reduce it, one who heroically labored overtime to kill more animals or pick more fruit than could be eaten before it spoiled contributed nothing to prosperity. To the contrary, overkill reduced the prospects of finding food in the future, and thus had a detrimental impact on the well-being of the group.
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James Dale Davidson |
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f23865a
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Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.
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James Dale Davidson |
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8b667e8
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To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.
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James Dale Davidson |
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2e2e95a
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Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year..
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technology
twenty-first-century
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James Dale Davidson |
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8e34377
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We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom.
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James Dale Davidson |
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443a934
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You cannot friend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.
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James Dale Davidson |
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3a95902
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Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must stain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence.
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James Dale Davidson |
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13b55fc
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When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope.
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James Dale Davidson |
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df36b48
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Topographic conditions were the foundation of Greek democracy, just as those of a different kind gave rise to the Oriental despotisms of Egypt and elsewhere.
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James Dale Davidson |
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12f31a4
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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.
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James Dale Davidson |
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4ea8c80
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The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.
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James Dale Davidson |
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ef52482
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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.
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James Dale Davidson |
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83408d9
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This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group.
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James Dale Davidson |
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78a9a82
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With the advent of farming, human horizons expanded.
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James Dale Davidson |
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79ce7b9
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A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation. If they had insurance, or sufficient savings to self-insure their experiments, such strong social taboos would not be needed to help ensure survival.
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James Dale Davidson |
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f633920
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The control of violence is the most important dilemma every society faces.
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James Dale Davidson |
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d973a8e
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Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think about how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place.
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James Dale Davidson |