Five-Digit Years

A little bit from hive.org:

The History of Entrepreneurship

By Ryan Allis

The Beginnings of Trade

The original entrepreneurs were, of course, traders and merchants. The first known instance of humans trading comes from New Guinea around 17,000 BCE, where locals exchanged obsidian, a black volcanic glass used to make hunting arrowheads for other needed goods. These early entrepreneurs exchanged one set of goods for another.

Around 15,000 BCE, the first animal domestication began taking place, and around 10,000 BCE, the first domestication of plants. This step toward agriculture was critical for the advancement of the human species. Now, instead of having to continually move around as nomadic tribes, seeking new places to hunt and to gather, we could stay in one place. Agriculture allowed us to start to form larger stationary communities and cities (the basis for civilizations), which set the stage for the development and spread of human knowledge. Agriculture changed everything...

When the last Ice Age ended around the year 8,000 BCE, the poles melted, raising sea levels and creating a divide between Siberia and North America. This divide created two separate human civilizations for nearly 10,000 years, until European explorers reached the Americas again in the 15th century.

Free Enterprise

Free enterprise? Oh yeah, I'm all for it! I say let's get rid of tax code that favors bigness, so Mom'n'Pop can compete with Big-Box.

And let's get rid of the free trade agreements that impede the domestic policies of national economies. Adam Smith wrote about The Wealth of Nations, after all.

If we don't honor and respect and preserve the system of nations, we're going to end up with global government. If we don't reverse present trends we're going to end up with global government. I know, I know, Star Trek A Piece of the Action, Babylon 5, and all that. That's fine. We can get to global government eventually. We have to get to it eventually. But we have to evolve into it. You can't just cram it down our throats, force it on people like they forced the European Union on people, with all that BS about how it would make the economy better.

That didn't work out so great for the European economy anyway, did it.

We have to make the economy better first. Then -- after we satisfy each other that we know how to do that -- then we can spend the next thousand years working on global government, trying to write a Constitution better than the one we have now.

After that, we can aim for those five-digit years.

Professor Commons

HARI SELDON-- ...born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069.

Nations last two hundred years. Civilizations last two thousand. Why is that? Why can't we keep it together for twelve thousand years?


Read these two pages, and you'll know as much as I do about Professor Commons. Or read the abridged version below, from Essays in Persuasion:

Professor Commons... distinguishes three epochs, three economic orders, upon the third of which we are entering.

The first is the Era of Scarcity... In such a period, 'there is the minimum of individual liberty and the maximum of communistic, feudalistic, or governmental control...'" This was, with brief intervals in exceptional cases, the normal economic state of the world up to (say) the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

Next comes the Era of Abundance. 'In a period of extreme abundance there is the maximum of individual liberty...'" During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we fought our way out of the bondage of Scarcity into the free air of Abundance, and in the nineteenth century this epoch culminated gloriously in the victories of laissez-faire and historic Liberalism. It is not surprising or discreditable that the veterans of the party cast backward glances on that easier age.

But we are now entering on a third era, which Professor Commons calls the period of Stabilisation... In this period, he says, 'there is a diminution of individual liberty....


Scarcity... Abundance... and Stabilization. If there are business cycles -- and cycles within cycles -- then there is a Cycle of Civilization. The Dark Age is a Great Depression. The Era of Scarcity is the long, slow, painful recovery. The Era of Abundance is the boom, the peak of the cycle. And the Era of Stabilization is the Professor's optimistic misnomer for crisis-and-decline.

If we're good, if we choose wisely, if we don't proceed blindly, then there is a chance we can ride that economic wave like a surfer. But if we proceed blindly, it's over.

Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted 400 years."

If we can learn to surf the economic wave, we can have our Era of Stabilization. We can get to those five-digit years.