72 karma · joined September 18, 2009
Please don't take this question as conspiracy theory flame bait. I'm just curious about what is known about this.
"But the natural sciences rightly forewarn us that there are limits to this process – the law of entropy, while the dominant discourse of mainstream and conventional economics from Harvard to Cambridge to Beijing University to Delhi University has no theoretical notion of limits and is therefore the most dangerous of all social science disciplines when it comes to thinking about ways to live in harmony with our environment. It is not for nothing that one of the earliest and most thoughtful and ecologically sensitive of economists, Kenneth Boulding, way back in the 1950s said, that to believe in unlimited growth in a finite world one had to be either a fool or an economist!"
The question that follows (and that I honestly don't know the answer to) is whether the invention of modern weapons was a historical tipping point that obliterated previous routes of national economic development. What if mechanized warfare had been invented before the rise of the West by a non-Western civilization and transferred (via trade) to the medieval European feudal lords. Would they have allowed the rise of the middle class in the West the way it did?
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do" -- Samuel Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51.