39 Quotes by James Dale Davidson

The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.

The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.

An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.

Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.

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.

Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.

Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today’s standards, they were the centers of the first “civilizations,” a word derived from civitas, which means “citizenship” or “inhabitants of a city” in Latin. Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting.

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.

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.