Top Highlights

• Human productivity is the most important force in causing the world’s total wealth, power, and living standards to rise over time. Productivity—i.e., the output per person, driven by learning, building, and inventiveness—has steadily improved over time.
• If I were to add two more determinants to keep in mind, they would be 4) the pace of innovation and technological development to solve problems and make improvements and 5) acts of nature, most importantly droughts, floods, and diseases. That is because innovation and technological advances can solve most problems and further evolution, and acts of...
• the swinging of conditions from one extreme to another in a cycle is the norm, not the exception.
• the really big boom periods and the really big bust periods, like many things, come along about once in a lifetime and so they are surprising unless one has studied the patterns of history over many generations. Because the swings between great and terrible times tend to be far apart the future we encounter is likely to be very different from what ...
• no system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.