Why The West Rules – For Now summary

West and East are amorphous terms, so the author is precise. For him, the West began in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and Egypt and expanded westward from there. The East encompasses civilizations that developed between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China.

If you want to compare East and West, you must start by evaluating social development scientifically and rigorously.

About 100,000 years ago the world slid into a long glacial period. Ice covered large portions of the Northern hemisphere.

To survive this harsh environment, humans developed a strategy. They lived as small groups, set up camps, killed animals and scavenged for edible plants before moving on to the next location.

After ten thousand years of coursing ahead, the West found that its lead over the East had been reduced to a whisker.

In 1200 BCE, Eastern development was a thousand years behind. However, the West's sudden crisis in the Mediterranean meant that Eastern social development could begin to catch up. This crisis is known as the Late Bronze Age collapse.

The arrival of centrally organized high-end states meant the age of empires had arrived. In the West, the Assyrian and Persian empires were the first fully-fledged high-end states. In the East, it was the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) that blazed the trail.

But these forerunners paled in comparison with what came next. In the East, the most prominent high-end state was the Chinese Han Empire. In the West, the Romans were dominant.

Western social development continued to outpace Eastern at the start of the first millennium. The Roman Empire at its peak had double the coinage in circulation as the Han dynasty.

It was only when the western half of the Roman Empire began its decline that the Chinese Eastern empire hit its stride. For starters, the East recovered more quickly from the downfall of its early empire. By 1100 CE it had reached a new peak in social development and overtaken the West.

You’ll no doubt know the Venetian merchant Marco Polo who composed his celebrated travelogue at the start of the fourteenth century. It was a marvelous account of his journeys in the East. The Chinese palaces and the wealth of rulers he described knew no equal in the West. China’s social development was simply eons ahead of his world’s.

But things would soon change. By the late thirteenth century, Eastern social development had plummeted. China was fighting interminable wars against the Mongols on their northern frontiers. In the wake of the Mongol advance, China’s complex infrastructure collapsed. Instead of an expected industrial advance, China was faced with destruction, famine and disease. By the time Polo put pen to paper the world he portrayed had already ceased to exist.

Between 1500 and 1800 the social development scores of both the East and West continued to rise. But the pace of change was uneven. Western social development was advancing at twice the rate of the East.

By the late eighteenth century, the West had finally managed to overtake the East.

The twentieth century was grim. It saw the largest, most abominable and disastrous wars known to humankind: the First World War and the Second World War. The Cold War that followed stretched over almost half a century, between 1947 and 1991.

Among them, the three wars resulted in a hundred million deaths and threatened human survival itself.

So the West rules – for now. But how long will it last?

The author has extrapolated Eastern and Western social development indices and calculated that the East will regain its lead by 2103. Or rather, that will be the point when Western rule comes to an end.