Mingyao’s Reviews > Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future > Status Update

Social development creates winners and losers, new classes of rich and poor, new relations between men and women and old and young. It even creates whole new cores when the advantages of backwardness empower those who had previously been marginal. Its growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated, and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates.