My recent work has been on the origins of the modern world.
I published on this subject in my book The Most Important Book in Human History. I have worked to promote this insight for the past several years. The sources of the modern world can be easily lost and we would revert to a static world. The static world is clearly envisioned in the Green New Deal promoted by a major U.S. party. It has been the reality of Europe since WWI and not visible because Europe has covered their stasis with American innovation.
The popular notion of the origins of the modern world focus first on the Enlightenment for the origins of modern science which is partially correct. It is more correct to focus on the Radical Enlightenment that is described in Jonathan Israel's book. Secondly popular opinion focuses on the Industrial Revolution.
That focus only takes us to the early 1800s with the steam engine and the Bell combine. From there on, the major innovations in the world came almost exclusively from the United States.
From 1850 until today, 80-90% of all innovation has come from the United States. Why?
Not just because of America's large prosperous market, England had that too with its Empire.
As I look at this history and with my experience of working with hundreds of the people who created much of the modern innovation in the world (from the hippie world of the Briarpatch), I see the opening of the American West in 19th century as the genuine source.
What happened in the western expansion of America was the fall of the static world. The static world is held in place by hereditary elites, all over the planet.
The oldest son becomes the trustee for the family and its elite status. But competence, imagination and innovation are genetically distributed to everyone, not just the oldest son of an hereditary elite family. Getting out from under the hereditary elite is what makes meritocracy and innovation possible. That was the great expansion of the West in America. The source of meritocracy and innovation.
The issue became fresh in 1960 when the WWII meritocratically-promoted officers from the American Army worked their way up and replaced the hereditary elite managers of American industry throughout the 1950s.
Today, as before, and with even greater vigor since 1960, America has contributed nearly 90% of all significant innovation in the world. Innovation in commerce and other fields.
Israel, a new country, a tiny delicate country that could only survive on meritocracy and innovation, has become the second largest source of innovation in the world. It lacks a meaningful hereditary elite.
I would be remiss to ignore the important contributions to commercial innovation that come from post-war Japan. Japan has the only permeable hereditary elite in the world where meritocrats have been promoted into the elite.
Why am I so seriously worried that the great innovative commercial engine of the United States can be destroyed?
Because government is only a source of innovation in periods of wartime when meritocracy trumps the power of the hereditary elites. The world over, government suppresses genuine commercial innovation.
Unfortunately, American politics has no understanding of its true source of commercial innovation and a large part of the voting public wants more government.
It is this alarming reality that has been my focus for the past few years.
My contributions to commerce are slow to percolate in the world. My summary of the Briapatch genius is written in Marketing Without Advertising and embedded in one of its offspring, Google. Now 40 years after publication, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the first two decades to a generation of entrepreneurs. In the past decade about 500 references, per year, are found to this book around the world in business universities and graduate papers.
That may not be enough to sustain commercial innovation in the face of enduring hereditary elites the world over and the new American barbarians.