Brad DeLong — Should-Read: Ian Morris (2013): The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

…The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century....

WCEG — The Equitablog

Should-Read: Ian Morris (2013): The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

Brad DeLong

See also

Occasional Links & Commentary
Utopian socialism
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Lord Keynes — The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 1: A Summary

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is a truly extraordinary book that every person on the Left should read. In essence, Cochran and Harpending challenge the notion that human evolution stopped around 50,000 years ago....

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 1: A Summary
Lord Keynes