Old title about 200 years claim: While the Middle East, Egypt, and Greece contain the longest continuously occupied cities, the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries. And few continuous civilizations survive in any meaningful form for more than 250 years / 10 generations on average.
You have to define greed very broadly to make this statement true. Broadly enough that you should tell people to discard any negative connotations of the word when interpreting what you're saying.
I work for money I can spend; that's greed only in the sense that I choose what I do and I get rewarded for it, as opposed to working to avoid being whipped or killed or sent to Siberia or to hell. Self-interest is so far the best motivation we've come up with.
Changed yes. "Lost generational memory" why? If you mean "lost direct memory of 2 or 3 millenia ago" sure.
Economics isnt a science, its an orthodoxy of rules and beliefs.
Sure there are some correlations that hit true, but outside a few true-isms, its basically a religion.
That means that, as much as they try to stuff it with math, economics remains fundamentally an application of loose sociologic principles, which are themselves extremely debatable.
The genius is that that bit of casual math instantly insulate economists from their peers (i.e. historians, sociologists, etc), no matter how bogus such math might be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution
[1] https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v110y2020i5p1572-1602.h...
The economic literature abounds in observational studies that test economic theories. What are you basing your statement on?
Economies in video games fascinate me, because it's another 'world' where you can see whether some economics principles apply or not. Eg the game Path of Exile doesn't have 'money', but various crafting materials ended up being treated as money by the players. The exchange rates between them are set by supply and demand as well.
Even game theory sits on top of the throne of "rational actors", meanwhile human beings are explicitly IRRATIONAL actors.
If economics was a functional science, the richest people in the world would be economists. That it isn't is strong evidence that no economics yet has produced strong predictions, which is a rather significant problem for a "science".