The Measure of Civilization

Ian Morris builds a numerical index of social development — energy capture per person, organisation and urbanism, war-making capacity, and information technology — and scores East and West against each other from the end of the last ice age to the present. It is the quantitative companion to his narrative history Why the West Rules — for Now, and it exists to make an argument checkable: if civilisational rise and fall can be measured, then claims about why the West pulled ahead, and when that lead might end, become empirical rather than rhetorical.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s opening section is deep human history rather than finance, and Morris is one of the authors he lists twice in it — this book alongside Why the West Rules — for Now — which makes the measurement method, not just the narrative, part of what he is recommending.

Where I saw it: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 3 of section I, cited as Princeton University Press, 2013. Full transcription: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• Why the West Rules—for Now — Morris’s narrative companion volume, the entry immediately before this one on the list.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel — the entry that opens the same section; Morris is arguing in Diamond’s territory with a scoreboard.
• Sapiens — also in section I, the same deep-history frame told as narrative.
• Progress — the underlying question the index is trying to quantify.