The center of wealth goes west?

[nancylebov]

Back in the 70s, one of Timothy Leary's books had the idea that the center of wealth goes westwards--it started in the Egypt and Babylon, then went to Greece, Rome, Western Europe, the Eastern US, and then the Western US. IIRC, at the time I read it, California was still ascendent with Japan doing well, so I remembered the theory as something to keep an eye on. (There are some obvious weak points in the theory--I don't know if it has anything useful to say about pre-modern Asia and it doesn't explain how the Italian penninsula got lucky twice.)

Since then....the Little Tigers and China, and things are getting better in India. The EU may be the next superpower.

Leary, cheerful soul that he was, didn't discuss what happens in countries the center of wealth is moving away from--do they necessarily do gratuitously stupid things instead of declining gracefully? Or do people always do gratuitously stupid things, but the effects are more visible when you aren't lucky?

Leary didn't offer a plausible mechanism for the center of wealth going west, and I can't imagine what such an explanation would look like.

The good news (if there's anything at all to the theory) is that the center doesn't just go west, it's accelerating. The acceleration was part of the theory in the 70s, and it's still part of the pattern. Things may well improve dramatically (though maybe only for a couple of years) here on the East Coast of the US in a decade or so. Eventually, the center of wealth will be zorching along around the planet so fast that people will make their investments exactly timed to accomodate it.

Comments

[esmereldachubb.livejournal.com]

My dad and I have talked about this before, and I've thought about it as a possibility. It seems plausible, although I can't think of any reason why it should go west as opposed to east. That is to say, it seems reasonable that every culture grows, peaks, and then declines, but why they would do it in order is a mystery to me. Maybe it's a spillover effect? It's only been very recently that rapid long-distance travel has been practical. Maybe before that, it was just that when certain areas were on the rise, everybody within traveling distance rode the wave, so to speak. And then when the center started to decay, the best areas were on the outskirts, like with urban sprawl.

That still doesn't explain the westward thing, but it's an idea, anyhow.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I first encountered this idea through Robert Anton Wilson, and it took me a little while to realize that it's so Western-Euro-centric it's insulting. After Rome, the center of wealth in the world shifted to Byzantium for about three hundred years, and then shifted further east to Baghdad for another five hundred. And that's not counting how much of the world's wealth was in south or east Asia or strung out along the Silk Road.

It's really hard for modern Westerners to keep in mind that from around 300 AD to 1500 AD, Western Europe was an economic and social backwater compared to the real seats of culture.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Another beautiful theory shot down by an ugly fact.

Do I get brownie points for at least noticing that the theory doesn't cover most of Asian history?

Also, the Japan-east Asia-Europe phase is more about increasing prosperity rather than a center of wealth.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Yes. Have a brownie.