What Causes Empires to Fall?

Carroll Quigley, Laozi, and the Destiny of Civilizations

Better stop short than fill to the brim.
Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it.
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.

—Laozi

---

For thousands of years, philosophers have noticed the ways in which the world cycles—and the ways in which human attempts to push in one direction only result in a countervailing motion in the other direction. The rise and fall of civilization may be the most poignant example of such a cycle, when human effort and optimism has given rise to glorious empires like those of Babylon and Rome, only to see them dwindle and fade into history.

Is this inevitable? Different historians have offered similar perspectives on the subject, but the facts are that few—if any—civilizations have ever survived for long. But if it is the case that civilization tends naturally to cycle from expansion into success and then to decay, then why?

And, is there can anything that can be done about it?

Carroll Quigley

The topic of civilizational rise, decay, and renewal interested me a great deal in my youth. My limited readings of history at that time gave me a sense that America was following a trend set 2000 years ago by the Roman Empire, but it was hard for me to know whether there really was a trend, or why the trend would exist, or whether there was any way to escape it. Back then, even science and history felt to me a bit like philosophy does now¹—I hated school badly enough that I avoided college, and I had no idea what kind of treasure was literally lying around in university libraries.

But I had another option that hadn’t even existed about five years earlier: the Internet. And I was not slow to get online. Given the limitations of dial-up Internet, I should consider myself lucky in retrospect to have been able to get in touch with someone who could even mention the name of a man who studied the rise and fall of civilization, and a book where he laid out his ideas. The man was Carroll Quigley, and his book, The Evolution of Civilizations, was easy to find once you knew it existed.

Quigley earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, and eventually settled into a professorship in Washington D.C. at Georgetown University. I understand he was a phenomenal professor; Bill Clinton was one of Quigley’s students, and mentioned the personal influence Quigley had on him in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:²

As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I head that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things—that tomorrow can be better than today, and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.

For all that Quigley comes across as a clear-eyed student of history and an inspiring teacher, his model of the rise and fall of civilizations is fundamentally—and disappointingly—economic. Although he never wrote it this way, in its briefest outline, Quigley’s model looks like this:

Economic Surplus → Instrument of Expansion → Decays into an Institution → Civilization (slowly) collapses

Discussing his work with other people, and browsing through it to get the gist, the economic nature of Quigley’s model is something I totally missed at first. Reading through his Evolution of Civilizations in my 20’s, I found myself saying “But what is an instrument of expansion, really? Why is commercial capitalism³ an instrument of expansion, but Christianity isn’t?”

The answer is that a value or idea can be an instrument of expansion if it motivates the conversion of surplus into runaway economic growth. But we’re getting ahead of things, here; before you can have an instrument of expansion, you need an economic surplus.

Inequality and Surplus

I think you can tell a lot about Quigley by looking at the very start of his reasoning. The soil from which everything else grows is the idea of surplus. According to Quigley, if everyone shares equally, there isn’t enough extra for any creative, enterprising person or group to invest it. Equality entails stagnation. Better is for the many to eke out a meager subsistence and give all their surplus to the few, so that they have something to build from.

Better still (though Quigley doesn’t say this explicitly) is for a few people even to have less than the minimum that they need to live, so that they suffer and die there can be more surplus.

He probably doesn’t mean it to sound as bad as this, but this is literally what he writes about distributing food in a society:

Accumulation of surplus …is so necessary to expansion that it means that some persons must have more than they need, even if others must have less than they need.

Isn’t that unjust?

If a society containing 100 persons is producing 100 square meals a day, it would, perhaps, be "just" for each person to obtain one meal a day, but such a distribution would never allow the society to increase its production of meals except by temporary and accidental increases called "windfalls."

The obvious rejoinder is Whatever, so why not just wait for a windfall, and then pounce on that as an opportunity to invest? But Quigley’s not interested in that, he’s already getting really excited about the idea of a starvation economy, and gives us a table of two kinds of societies with two different ways of distributing “meals” (arbitrary units of food I’m guessing represent enough peanut butter and chocolate to just barely sustain life for a day):

TYPE A
100 persons at 1 meal each

TYPE B
50 persons at 1/2 meal each

25 persons at 1 meal each

25 persons at 2 meals each

With Type A distribution there can be no increase in output even if someone thinks of a new invention, since no one would have leisure to make it. With Type B distribution there may be an increase in output but only if someone thinks of a new invention and if the surplus of meals controlled by the twenty-five richest persons is redistributed to the poorer persons as payment for these poorer ones making the new invention.

So in Quigley’s thought experiment the wealthy don’t even invent anything; they just hold the threat of starvation over everyone else, saying “OK, give me your best pitch,” and then feeding them if what they come up with sounds like a good investment idea? IDK

The point is that Quigley doesn’t care that much about whether his idea is palatable. He thinks surplus is so necessary to starting a civilization that who cares if a bunch of people starve to create that surplus, because otherwise there’s no way you’re going to get the critical instrument of expansion required for civilization to start (and for him to sell his book).

Instruments of Expansion

So I mentioned that instruments of expansion aren’t values or ideals that characterize a particular civilization, but rather a set of cultural practices or tools that drive spiraling economic success. The good news is that values and ideals can be instruments of expansion, just that (again) they have to drive this spiraling economic success. If you want an instrument of expansion, capitalism works. According to Quigley, slavery works.⁴ And I suspect ethica pomi would also serve as a wonderful instrument of expansion (at least up to the point where productivity was sufficient to guarantee a weekly slice of pie for everyone).

The way Quigley describes it, an instrument of expansion is what you get when a society is organized in such a way that:

1. it has an incentive to invent new ways of doing things,

2. there is accumulation of surplus—that is, some persons in the society control more wealth than they wish to consume immediately; and

3. the surplus is being used to pay for or to utilize the new inventions.

Quigley summarizes the three essential features of an instrument of expansion as

[I]ncentive to invent, accumulation of surplus, and application of this surplus to the new inventions. Economists might call these three "invention," "saving," and "investment," but the terms used by economists are generally so ambiguous to noneconomists that we hesitate to use them.⁵

So even though Quigley is a historian rather than an economist, and even though he shies away from economists’ language, and even though everyone I’ve encountered always talks about his idea in terms of society and sociology rather than economics, and even though we’re nominally talking about a sweeping theory of civilization spanning thousands of years of human history across the entirety of the Earth, Quigley’s grand idea is, at its heart, an economic idea.

The 7 Stages of Civilization

A proper review of Quigley’s ideas on civilization might well span a dozen blog posts. What I’ve decided on here is something of a compromise: I tried to be thorough in covering the groundwork because it was a sticking point for me when I first read him. Next, I’m going to try to cover the main points quickly enough to make the picture clear. Lastly, I’ll give a lengthy quote to give you a sense of what reading Quigley is really like.

So here’s the simplified overview:

1. Mixture

According to Quigley, civilizations are born very quietly, when different peoples intermingle, and no one is sure what norms and rules should prevail. New ways, new customs are invented to deal with new conditions, and from the mixture of cultures has come not a mere blending, but a genuinely new culture whose character is unique to itself.

2. Gestation

The period of gestation follows. This is a time of waiting—waiting either for a neighboring society to swallow your society up, or, for the development of an instrument of expansion. This instrument is all-important; without it, a civilization cannot form; lacking it, a civilization cannot last.

3. Expansion

Once a civilization has a functioning instrument of expansion, it will begin to grow. Production, population, territory, and knowledge all increase. Growth can be very dramatic, as expansion in any one of these four things feeds into the others. But whether growth is rapid or more muted, life during the age of expansion is full of optimism and opportunity.

There are just two details I want to mention here. First, civilization tends to expand outwards from a geographic core, and the core is always culturally ahead of the periphery—it rises first, but it also tends to decay first.

Secondly, (contra John Glubb) Quigley has no reservations about intellectuals; he sees both empiricism and rationality as features of an expanding civilization. Quigley regards irrationality as rising during the following age of conflict.

4. Age of Conflict

Quigley, like his predecessors Toynbee and Spengler, viewed civilization as subject to entropy—time corrupts all things, turning instruments which exist for the furtherance of expansion, into institutions which exist to further their own ends, and the ends of those who control them.

That is the meaning of an institution for Quigley: something which once existed as an instrument to serve some purpose, but now serves merely its own ends.

I’d like to clarify by example, and one example Quigley gives of this process of institutionalization is the military. A military starts out with a clear purpose: Protect the society. But every branch in the military has its own role, and naturally everyone begins to confuse the idea of fulfilling their own duties with the real purpose of the military. Secondly, people are only human, and they will begin to act according to their own incentives for advancement and pay. (According to my own reading, this process will be led by those lower in Honesty.) Thirdly, the social conditions surrounding the military will change over time, requiring the military to adapt; but the members of the military have vested interests in resisting such change.⁶

What’s interesting to me now, looking back, is the way that none of Quigley’s enumerated reasons for institutionalization—the process central to his understanding of civilizational decay—can account for problems we’re seeing in America’s military today:

But Quigley’s claim is that gradual institutionalization of the instrument of expansion causes a decline in the rate of expansion. This begins the age of conflict, wherein we see,

• Economically, geographically, technologically: a decline in the rate of expansion

• Politically: class conflicts

• Militarily: imperialistic wars

• Culturally: irrationality and general pessimism

Although the ossification of the instrument into an institution merely slows the rate of expansion rather than stopping expansion entirely, workers produce less, and what they do produce is burned through by the elite living within the core of the civilization without reinvesting it to further expansion.

Quigley writes that, deprived of expected expansion and unable to get ahead through other means, people turn to imperialist wars. They turn to political action, and plunder their political neighbors. They turn to class warfare, as the elites struggle to maintain their position. And the common people turn to irrationality as a salve for the rising anxieties of the day: “This is generally a period of gambling, use of narcotics or intoxicants, obsession with sex (frequently as perversion), increasing crime, growing numbers of neurotics and psychotics, growing obsession with death and with the Hereafter.”

But unlike the models of Quigley’s predecessors, Quigley claims that there is a chance, in the age of conflict, for reform. If the society can manage to correct its course and revitalize its instrument of expansion, then it will return to the age of expansion. Though he doesn’t dwell on it for long, the crucial passages in Evolution of Civilizations are here:

The vested interests encourage the growth of imperialist wars and irrationality because both serve to divert the discontent of the masses away from their vested interests (the uninvested surplus). Accordingly, some of the defenders of vested interests divert a certain part of their surplus to create instruments of class oppression, instruments of imperialist wars, and instruments of irrationality. Once these instruments are created and begin themselves to become institutions of class oppression, of imperialist wars, and of irrationality, the chances of the institution of expansion being reformed into an instrument of expansion become almost nil.⁷

And clarified here:

[T]he whole first part of the Age of Conflict (Stage 4) is a period of crisis and of hope. Only when the vested interests create new instruments of class oppression, of imperialist wars, and of irrationality, and when these new instruments, in turn, begin to become institutions, does hope fade.⁸

I’ll leave attempts to identify examples of the age of conflict, and any instruments of class oppression, imperialist wars, or irrationality we may be building, as an exercise for the reader. Personally, I don’t believe Quigley’s model is exactly correct, and I’ve obviously formed my own opinion about the long term prospects of America.

But I will say Quigley believed at the time of his writing (in the middle of the 20th century) that the United States had already entered the age of conflict. I’m not sure that one could make the case under Quigley’s system that things were too late then, or even now—but we would most definitely have to stop any instruments of class oppression, imperialist warfare, or irrationality as soon as possible. Failure to do so will inevitably mean, according to Quigley, entering the phase of the universal empire.

5. Universal Empire

Usually, wars will sweep across the civilization at the end of the age of conflict, led by a peripheral state which has not decayed as far as the core. Once this state has won, once it has imposed its pattern over the whole civilization, a universal empire has been achieved.

Peace and prosperity reign in the absence of discord. Under the harmonization of values, standards, and procedures, the difficulties in life are smoothed. An apparent Golden Age ensues.

But this appearance of prosperity is deceptive. Little real economic expansion is possible because no real instrument of expansion exists. New inventions are rare, and real economic investment is lacking. The vested interests have triumphed and are living off their capital, building unproductive and blatant monuments like the Pyramids, the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," the Colosseum, or (as premature examples) Hitler's Chancellery and the Victor Emmanuel Memorial. The masses of the people in such an empire live from the waste of these non-productive expenditures. The golden age is really the glow of overripeness, and soon decline begins.⁹

6. Decay

Gradually the civilization is swallowed up by economic depression, declining standards of living, petty civil wars, and growing illiteracy. The masses abandon the values and ideals of the society, and new political and religious movements arise. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even to support it by paying taxes.

The period of decay, like gestation, is a period of waiting. It is not, however, for salvation that such societies wait, but rather for the final invasion.

7. Invasion

Barbarians at the gate. The center cannot hold.

Au revoir! Auf wiedersehen!

May the future bring something better.

Dalnawillan Burial Ground by Peter Moore, via Wikimedia Commons

Is Quigley’s Model Accurate?

So now you have the general idea. I haven’t really gone into the numerous examples throughout history that fit Quigley’s model; he admits “The seven stages are merely a convenient way of dividing a complex historical process,” and in his detailed analysis of several civilizations he notes exceptions to the trends he’s identified.

Is his model any good? I’m aware that you’ve probably been wondering about the timeframe of Quigley’s stages. This isn’t nearly as fixed under Quigley as you might be used to from reading other thinkers, and if you’re suspicious that Quigley doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the timeframe raises at least one red flag:¹⁰

The age of conflict in Mesopotamia lasted 1700 years? Meanwhile in Russia, it lasted 17 before returning to expansion? Some might shake their heads and assume that Quigley’s dragged out the processes in ancient history because there’s so little to go on. It’s also possible that there’s another interpretation—maybe all the stages genuinely happened more slowly due to the smaller population sizes, or slower innovation, or slower rates at which information could travel at that time. If that’s true, though, our own age of conflict may offer an even more narrow window, which doesn’t seem likely, given that it seems we’re still in the same Age of Conflict as when he was first writing. So I tend to lean toward the idea that, if Quigley’s model is correct, there were probably numerous ages of conflict in past civilizations we just didn’t see because there wasn’t enough detail in recorded history.

If Quigley glosses over that kind of detail, it isn’t because he lacks any respect for it. Quigley was a thinker who had an interest in both the large and small processes that unfold across history. His writing isn’t always well broken up into paragraphs, but it is always clear, patient, and worth following, even when he covers something I wouldn’t otherwise be interested in at all, like the history of American football:

A game called football was invented about 1870 to provide healthful physical exercise for the undergraduates on bright autumn afternoons. Seventy years later the undergraduates who needed exercise most were seated in the stands of a city baseball park on Friday night, with their flasks and their coeds, while on the grass (or mud) below, the undergraduates who needed exercise least pushed each other about under the floodlights.

The process by which football was, almost imperceptibly, transformed from an instrument for providing physical exercise to an institution acting as an obstacle to exercise for many students who loved the game and needed the exercise is as instructive an example of social development as changes in military tactics. The informal games of the 1860s and early 1870s between groups from the same campus led, little by little, to challenges for games with other institutions. This led to travel expenses, more formalized rules, nonpartisan officials, and uniforms. The increase in interest led to larger groups of spectators. What could be more natural than to pass a hat among these spectators to raise money for the players' expenses? Defeats led to desire for revenge, and thus to stricter rules of team membership, practice, and training. All of this led gradually to more formalized coaching. This task rested at first with the captain and more experienced players, but, as established intercollegiate rivalries began to grow, an experienced player of previous years, usually the last victorious captain, was asked to return from the outside world to coach intensively during the week before the "big game." As other colleges adopted this pattern and several "big games" a year emerged, the demands on graduates to return to the campus for coaching duty became more than could be fulfilled. The obvious solution, a full-time paid coach, made it essential to have an established team income. "Passing the hat" among the spectators was replaced by sales of tickets at a fixed price. But sold tickets entitled spectators to a seat, which led very quickly to the building of the first modern stadium (1903). In time stadiums were being built with borrowed funds, with the result that their mortgage charges, along with coaches' salaries and other expenses, made it essential that the stadium's seats, no matter how numerous, must be filled, or nearly filled, on the eight or so Saturdays a year it was used. Gradually the interests of the spectators and the need for football income became dominant over the interests of any undergraduate who liked football or needed exercise. The team had to win, at least most of the time, and the game had to be spectacular to watch. Scouts looked for able players outside and, in one way or another, persuaded them to come to the scout's college to play football. Financial rewards proved, in many cases, to be powerful persuaders. Thus the game shifted from undergraduates who needed exercise to those who had already had too much exercise. At some institutions, where football incomes were earmarked for educational uses such as for building funds, almost all games were played in baseball parks of large cities remote from the campus, with the result that the team could rarely be seen by its own students. Teams that played on the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast on successive weekends spent much of the autumn traveling and might be away from their college halls for weeks.

When the depression cut attendance in the early 1930s, many games were scheduled in the evening to attract working spectators. For the same purpose the rules were manipulated to give more open play, high scores, and superiority to the offense. By reducing the diameter of the ball, it was made easier to pass and harder to kick, in the belief that spectators preferred passing. Restrictions on passing requiring a minimum distance behind the scrimmage line for the passer or penalizing successive incompleted passes were removed. To keep the ball moving on offense, the referee was instructed to move the ball in fifteen yards from the side lines when it became dead closer than that distance from the sides. At no point in this process did many persons stop to ask themselves, "What is the purpose of football anyway?" But those who look at football's ninety years of development can see quite clearly how an organization which originally rose as an instrument for undergraduate exercise had become something quite different, to the jeopardy of undergraduate exercise.

This process, which we call the institutionalization of instruments, is found in almost all social phenomena.

So be honest. If you read this through and found it enjoyable, you should probably read The Evolution of Civilizations for yourself. If you’re a student of history, looking over the details his arguments rely on is one of the best ways to determine how accurate Quigley’s ideas are.

I don’t think this is the only way, though. At this point I should stress that, although I’ve read it more than once, I’m not a historian, and my attempts to weigh his work are indirect. For example, I can definitely verify that his discussion of climate types is good—but this is something I haven’t written about much on this blog, and I don’t want to take a huge detour no one will be interested in.

But I can also test Quigley’s ideas by treating them as hypotheses—hypotheses that have, since his death in 1977, already been tested by sociology:

Culture and Inventiveness

In his discussion on societal innovation, Quigley describes something I’ve read from sociologists, and something I’ve touched on before—a pattern of individualism falling, and then rising, as technology advances and society becomes more complex:

When I use the word “Individualism” in this graph, I mean something very broad, something that transcends the modern era. I mean a set of values, expectations, and norms that include liberty, equality, a focus on the person rather than the group, postmaterialism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, neolocal residence patterns, and—most critically for this discussion—innovation.

For example, a 2012 investigation into the relationship between country level individualism and innovation finds:

This article analyzes several independent datasets of culture and innovation from 62 countries spanning more than two decades. It finds that most measures of individualism have a strong, significant, and positive effect on innovation, even when controlling for major policy variables.¹¹

More recently (in 2023), sociologists are beginning to determine why individualism might have such a strong relationship to innovation:

Individualist societies are more innovative, but little is known about the underlying individual behaviors. I use international labor-market and patent data to show that individualism—the cultural dimension that emphasizes individual achievements over collective action—positively affects individual innovation. Comparing migrants from different cultural origins within the same destination country and using variation in individualism at the country, region, and person level, I find that more individualist migrants select into more innovative occupations—including research, creative jobs, and ambitious entrepreneurship. Individualists also engage more readily in knowledge diffusion on the job—even when accounting for occupational selection—by investing more time in active learning. Taken together, those innovation choices account for 44 percent of the individualism productivity premium. Individualism also positively affects patenting behavior as a direct innovation output measure.¹²

So this relationship between the broad cultural traits of individualism on the one hand, and innovation on the other, is pretty well established at this point. And when we go back in time to when Quigley was writing, we find him saying things that seem, in light of future findings, pretty plausible:

Inventiveness depends very largely on the way a society is organized. Some societies have powerful incentives to invent, because they are organized in such a way that innovation is encouraged and rewarded. This was true of Mesopotamian civilization before 2700 B.C., of Chinese civilizations before A.D. 1200, and of Western civilization during much of its history. On the other hand, many societies are organized so that they have very weak incentives to invent. Suppose that a primitive tribe believes that its social organization was established by a deity who went away leaving strict instructions that nothing be changed. Such a society would invent very little. Egyptian civilization was something like this. Or any society that had ancestor worship would probably have weak incentives to invent. Or a society whose productive system was based on slavery would probably be uninventive, because the slaves, who knew the productive process most intimately, would have little incentive to devise new methods since these would be unlikely to benefit themselves, while the slaveowners would have only a distant acquaintance with the productive processes and would be reluctant to invent any new methods that might well require the ending of slavery for their successful exploitation. For these reasons, slave societies, such as Classical civilization or the Southern states of the United States in the period before 1860, have been notoriously uninventive. No major inventions in the field of production came from either of these cultures.

When Quigley writes about some societies being uninventive, and describes the conditions for innovation in ways that seem reminiscent of the features of collectivist societies, that supports the idea that he knows what he’s talking about overall.

I’m not saying his reasoning was exactly right; I don’t really see Egyptians laboring under the dictates of a deity who went away saying they weren’t allowed to change anything. But the extreme hierarchy of Egyptian society, and the low level of freedom available to the typical Egyptian, left them living under extremely collectivist conditions that were probably not far from those which we would associate with slavery.

This static image wonderfully articulate the feel of ancient Egypt: Musicians play, and rest, and play; the music is the music. Water flows, and ebbs, and flows; the Nile is the Nile. Civilization rises, and falls, and rises; Egypt is Egypt.

Oscillation

But ultimately, being completely honest, I still don’t think Quigley has everything right. I’m not trying to say he was specifically incorrect about some major part of his model. Rather, I think Quigley is missing something.

Before everything else, I’m a physicist. When we discuss civilization rising and falling, we’re talking about something I recognize as a complex dynamical system. Note down a few differential equations, watch the system evolve in phase space, see how it behaves; this is what physicists do all day.

And the very simplest systems we study show simple harmonic motion, like this:

Taken from Wikipedia

There are numerous physical systems which show oscillation; the most obvious examples being masses on springs. Move the mass down, and a restoring force pushes upwards; move the mass up, and a restoring force pushes down. If we see a situation where cyclic behaviors appear, it makes sense to consider them in terms of restoring forces—forces which strengthen as we move further from equilibrium, as on a mass on a spring.

So what if we model civilization as a mass on a spring? Then any time you perturb the system, it will snap back past its original state; the stronger the perturbation, the faster it snaps back, and the further it goes beyond the center before returning to the equilibrium position again.

And if that’s the case, then the way to avoid a collapse is never to cause a perturbation. Never grow above equilibrium. If the equilibrium position rises, rise with it; if the equilibrium position falls, fall with it. Hang loose; go with the flow; ride the equilibrium.

If Carroll Quigley says instruments of expansion create crises when the rate merely tapers off, don’t expand so rapidly that a loss of expansion spurs a crisis. If John Glubb says empires fall, don’t be an empire. If Laozi says not to oversharpen the blade, not to fill to the brim, not to amass a store of gold and jade, be satisfied with what is enough.

Is there a way to test this model?

I’m not a historian. But my sense is that China has done better over history, with slower expansions and shallower shocks than other nations. Egypt is a close second, surviving not just one but two collapses (known as the Intermediate Periods). Maybe these were never the best places to live, particularly if you were poor,¹³ but keeping a civilization going under even mediocre conditions is pretty good.

Compare the character and feel of these civilizations to my own—a civilization that exploded onto the world scene to seize the dominant global position, topple its most powerful rivals, and rise to the moon in only a few short centuries. While China is definitely floundering, things could be much worse; and while Egypt finally succumbed, it lasted three thousand years.

Things To Read Has Survived For Only One Year

And after a full year of weekly posts—a year of consistent articles, rain or shine, sick or well, busy or not—the time has come for this blog to fall quiescent; I, too, need rest.

A year of working, raising five children, and blogging has taught me a straightforward lesson: Keeping up this pace of one post per week, with the occasional extra in between, is above my equilibrium position.

I will most definitely continue to update this blog, sharing thoughts as they arrive. And one day I may once again devote myself to this enterprise with the same vigor and energy I had at the very beginning.

But for now, better to retire, when the work is done. Please do not be disappointed next Friday when the next post does not come! Be patient—I’ll write more in a little while.

1. My math teachers kept telling me I couldn’t divide by zero, and I kept thinking, sheesh, the educational system is really, really stupid.

2. Bill Clinton, (July 16, 1992). "Acceptance Speech." New York: Democratic National Convention.

3. Quigley, Carroll (1979). The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. p. 240

4. Ibid, p. 257

5. Ibid, p. 132

6. Ibid, p. 102

7. Ibid, p. 152

8. Ibid, p. 164

9. Ibid, p. 159

10. Ibid, p. 165

11. Taylor, M. Z., & Wilson, S. (2012). Does culture still matter?: The effects of individualism on national innovation rates. Journal of Business Venturing, 27(2), 234-247.

12. Hartinger, K. (2023). Individualism, Creativity, and Innovation (No. 2313).

13. Though that may depend a bit on whom you ask