The Greatest Factory We Ever Built: How Mass Education Rewired the World
For most of human history, literacy was a luxury good. Like silk or spices, it belonged to the gentry and priests who could afford the time, tutors, and texts. For everyone else, literacy was unnecessary - and dangerous. A literate peasant was a questioning peasant—prone to challenge his station, his lord, or, worst of all, his taxes. Ignorance suited the social order. The masses toiled with their muscles while a small elite safeguarded humanity's accumulated knowledge in mon
Jan 1910 min read
The Acid and The Glue: Science and the Paradox of Progress
For 2,000 years, Europe believed women had fewer teeth than men. Why? Because Aristotle said so, and nobody bothered to count. Questioning Aristotle was heresy. (1) That is how most of human history worked. The ancients—Aristotle, Confucius, the Prophets—knew everything worth knowing. Our job was to preserve their wisdom, not question it. Progress wasn't a consideration because the golden age lay in the past. Then something extraordinary happened. We developed Science, a syst
Dec 28, 202514 min read
Print, Profit, and Upheaval: How the Press Broke the Medieval World
For most of human history, books were a bit like medieval castles: rare, expensive, and exclusively in the hands of elites who could afford them. A single manuscript Bible might cost the equivalent of a modest estate and bear the marks of a scribe's two years of cramped labor. Knowledge circulated slowly and expensively, each copy bearing a scribe’s quirks, flourishes, or more often, mistakes. Audio and/or video version of the article From Luxury to Mass Production The invent
Dec 14, 20257 min read
The Sorcery of Ink: How Writing Conjured Modern Civilization
Before writing, humanity suffered from collective amnesia. A master architect's ingenious drainage solution died with him. A physician's discovery about infected wounds evaporated after three generations. A merchant's trade route to distant tin mines became legend, then myth, then forgotten. Every society was trapped in a perpetual present, unable to accumulate knowledge faster than it could forget. Writing changed everything. Not because it made humans smarter—after all, t
Nov 30, 20256 min read
CHAPTER 3: HUMANS and LEARNING
Why don't chimpanzees build cities or cathedrals? It’s not for a lack of ambition, and they certainly have complex social hierarchies. The fundamental problem, as it so often is, is one of information management. Every chimpanzee generation is forced to start, more or less, from scratch. Humans, by contrast, stumbled upon the ultimate hack: we learn from the dead . This unique ability to accumulate, compound, and transmit information across time and space is the foundational
Nov 30, 20252 min read
Conclusion: Money, Trade, and the Unending Quest for Scale
The core of human progress, stripped to its essence, is about our remarkable capacity to Learn, Cooperate, and Innovate, at Scale - amplified by the trio of Money , Trade , and the Rule of Law . Money and Trade In exploring what gives rise to human progress, we started with this chapter on trade , as old as humanity itself, and money , humanity's most ingenious invention. Trade expands the overall pie, while money serves as the indispensable lubricant of economic growth. Ac
Nov 16, 20253 min read
When Distance Died: The Transport Revolution and Its Discontents
Before the late nineteenth century, the world was lumpy. It was a planet of pockets where, for millennia, distance was destiny . Travel moved at the speed of horses and sailing winds—perhaps thirty miles per day if you were lucky. A letter from London to Calcutta took four months and risked shipwreck. A person born in a rural village would likely die having traveled no farther than fifty miles from home. Markets remained stubbornly local, and cities couldn't grow beyond the
Nov 16, 202512 min read
