INTRODUCTION

Creativity, seen from Space

“Wow! That’s where we live. On that tiny, lonely ball!” That is the emotional reaction astronauts often describe having, when they first look back at Earth from outer space. Just listen, for instance, to Alan Shepard after his visit to the Moon with Apollo 14:

“If somebody had said before the flight ‘Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the Moon?’ I would have said: ‘No, no way.’ But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”

The Moon is 384,000 kilometres away, and seen from that distance, Earth is “the blue planet”. However, if astronauts revolve around the Earth at a distance of just 200-300 kilometres, they can distinguish mountains, glaciers, deserts and major lakes beaming with many beautiful colours.

However, even from here, it is still very hard to detect signs of human civilization. “The scenery was beautiful, but I could not see the Great Wall,” said China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei, in 2003. If he had not known better, it could have been a beautiful, but uninhabited, planet.

However, this was only when he saw it from the sunny side. On the shadow side, the signs of civilization suddenly became obvious, because here the planet beamed with artificial light, as if it were a starry sky in itself. This, he would know, was the consequence of some species that had conceived of electric power grids, glass, lamps and more: telltale signs of creativity, in other words.

What if a spaceship from another civilization came by, and its travellers saw this night image? Perhaps they would also think “Wow!” Then one might say: “There must be an intelligent species here!” to which another might respond: “And it found the key to civilization, just like we did!” They might also pass by the Moon and notice footprints, a little flag and, oddly, a golf club and two golf balls (we shall get to that later) and conclude that an intelligent species had definitely been there.

After these initial observations, they might again turn their attention to the Earth at night and notice that there was most light near rivers and coasts. They would also note that large parts of the globe were dark. “Are these areas uninhabitable?” they would perhaps ask one another. “Or has civilization not yet spread to the intelligent beings in those places?”

We Earthlings know the answer. Some of the dark areas are indeed uninhabitable, but others are actually densely populated by our own species. In most of Africa, for instance, there is almost no light at night - at least not enough to be easily seen from space - and yet, it is home to more than a billion people.

Nevertheless, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies over the past decades has actually been Botswana, which is, yes, African. In daylight, this country does not look particularly lush from a satellite, but its purchasing power per capita grew more than eight-fold during the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, which led it to becoming twice as rich as China. At night, the satellite view of rays of light emanating from its capital Gaborone provides a rare, shining gem within the African continent: these guys overtook China!

This is impressive, but here’s something odd: right next-door to this successful state is Zimbabwe, where GDP per capita in 2010 was around $400 – equating to less than a thirtieth of Botswana’s. This seems very strange, not least because the average income in Zimbabwe back in 1980 was not much lower than income in Botswana. But after 1980, the Zimbabwean standard of living almost halved, while Botswana experienced its aforementioned success. In 2009, Zimbabwe’s inflation reached no less than 489,000,000,000%, which led it to drop its own currency and convert to US dollars. To put all this misery in perspective, the country’s average life expectancy decreased from 65 years in 1980 to 34 in 2010. After the government had, with considerable difficulty paid wages in January 2013, it announced it had $ 217 left.

Not $217 million. No, no: $217.

Botswana and Zimbabwe provide an extreme example of neighbouring countries that have evolved very differently, but it is not unique. For instance, in 2010, Israel had an average income that was approximately six times higher than that in Syria (and this was before the latter descended into civil war) and approximately five times higher than income in Jordan or Egypt. The US population was more than three times richer than their neighbours in Mexico, and the people of Hong Kong were about six times richer than their peers in China.

Yes, plenty of direct neighbours have oddly different economies, and here’s another strange tale: In 1900, Argentina was the world’s twelfth richest country, ranking just above Sweden and, over the following five decades, it was neck-and-neck with Germany.

Yes, really. It was.

However, by 2013 Argentina had slipped down the ranks to number 73 in terms of purchasing power, clearly overtaken by … yes, Botswana!¹

Strange. And this is perhaps even stranger: In 1922, Great Britain ruled more than a fifth of the planet and an even greater part of its population and economy, even though England itself accounted for less than 0.2% of its land masses and just 1% of its population. However, around 50 years later, almost all its empire had disappeared, inflation was above 20%, its top tax rate 83% and 98 % on investment profits, and the country had to get emergency loans from IMF to avoid imminent bankruptcy. How did that happen?

The international literature about how poor countries may succeed is enormous, and for instance, the famous american political economist Francis Fukuyama has described how nations could “get to Denmark”, which to him was an example of a country that had been very successful at building its institutions.²

How to succeed is an interesting subject, but it is also interesting to consider how you “get to Argentina” with its history of serial bankruptcies and chaos. Scientists in the West have made countless studies of how poor countries grow richer, but they have been rather less interested in how rich countries become poorer. Perhaps they should investigate this because, as we shall soon see, that route is often taken. But the relative lack of interest in this question tells us, arguably, that people in the West do not believe significant economic decline could happen to them.

But it could. Just consider this: There have been approximately 200 great empires in history and they are all gone now, every one of them! What happened, for example, to the Inca Empire? The Aztecs? Babylonia? The Moguls? The Ottomans? Egypt was once the world’s most developed civilization, but then the lights went out, and one may argue that the country has been stagnant or in decline for more than 1,000 years. The city of Baghdad in Iraq was once an intellectual powerhouse and home to the world’s largest library. The Egyptian city of Alexandria and Cordoba in southern Spain have also been right up there at the top and had very large libraries too. All three libraries were later burned down on purpose. The Athenian civilization was once the shining light of the world, but the same cannot be said of modern Greece or its capital Athens.

More food for thought: 1,000 years ago, China was far richer than northern Europe. The Chinese had poetry clubs and art catalogues while Denmark, for example, was a rather rustic place, to put it mildly. However, then the Chinese economy went into decline and, in 1980, living standards had deteriorated to the level of Somalia’s, while Denmark had become the shining example of a country, cited by Francis Fukuyama.

Why?

This book’s main thesis is that empires and civilizations have predominantly flourished when they have stimulated human creativity, and that they have mostly decayed or collapsed, when they have blocked creativity – which they have strong tendencies to do sooner or later. Their successes and failures are much harder to explain through comparing resources, whether fertile land, useful plants and animals or mineral resources, as many authors have tried to do. In fact, we see an amazing tendency for countries with notably few natural resources (such as Japan, Singapore and Switzerland) to fare especially well in the long term.

Nor do climatic differences offer reliable explanations for most differences in wealth and human development. It is true that hot central Africa has, on average, been less successful than north and South Africa, but there are plenty of examples of the opposite. Furthermore, warm countries such as Malaysia, Taiwan, Costa Rica and Hawaii have done pretty well, and hot, humid Hong Kong and Singapore have exhibited explosive economic growth. In antiquity, most of the world’s richest civilizations were in fact in warm or tropical regions, and people in the Middle East were better off than those in northern Europe – and that was before the discovery of oil.

Why was the industrial revolution launched in wet and windy Scotland and not in fertile, temperate France instead? And if climate is so important, how do you explain the rather considerable difference between the way in which Australia was run by Aboriginal peoples compared with British invaders? Furthermore, in the 15th century, the Aztecs were richer than Indians in North America. A thousand years ago, it even seems that Africans were better off than Europeans, or at least at roughly the same economic level.

Moreover, today there are plenty of communities in the colder zones that are destitute. In parts of Albania, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Belarus, for example, life is often tough and poverty rife.

Of course, there is a third potential explanation: people. While it may be a “hot potato” in academic circles, many laymen may assume that the economic differences are largely caused by differences in intelligence - they may be racist, in other words, assuming that some races are more intelligent than others. However, as we shall see in Chapter 11, the “cause and effect” relationship is the other way around: civilisation stimulates intelligence more than intelligence stimulates civilisation.

So no, it is not in differences in climate, mineral resources, soil quality, presence of beneficial organisms and plants or racial differences that we will find most of our answers. Resources and environment cannot explain why certain countries have periodically been at the forefront of the economic rankings, have fallen back and then recovered again, as China and Great Britain have done. Nor can theories based on natural factors explain why many of the countries with the richest mineral resources or the best land have the poorest people. And they certainly can’t explain the rise and fall of Argentina.

The scientist Jared Diamond proposed some of those flawed explanations, but he added another one that sounds more interesting: Eurasia (the combined continental landmass of Europe and Asia) is a predominantly east-west orientated super-continent, which has enabled people to intermingle within a very wide area called “the Fertile Crescent”, throughout which the climate is much the same. The Americas, on the other hand, is more North-South orientated, so intermingling involved passing through many different climates as well as a fairly narrow bottleneck in Central America. For sure there is a valid argument there regarding economic outcomes, say, 4,000 years ago, but it doesn’t explain why the “fertile crescent” today include countries as varied as Albania, Afghanistan and Germany and the Americas includes nations as different as Bolivia and Canada.

In this book we will see that there is only one geographical factor which, in fact, does seem to correlate rather well with success internationally and over the very long term: the presence of navigable coastlines and rivers. We shall study that issue later but please note that the importance of this resource does not lie in fishing, drinking water or irrigation. Instead, such water access is important because it facilitates trade and migration. It enables, in other words, voluntary win-win transactions under competition. Singapore, with its plentiful coastlines, didn’t become one of the world’s wealthiest nations because of fishing or farming and, in fact, today it imports both fish and drinking water. No, it became wealthy because it was good at trading and exchanging ideas, and its access to the seas was very helpful in that respect. So its success was a question of transactions, not resources: It was about creativity.

Creativity is the main key to long-term success, but what is required to access it? As we shall see in the subsequent chapters, creativity occurs spontaneously, when a few, essential elements are present in a dynamic system - in any dynamic system, in fact, whether it is an ecosystem, a business sector, a civilisation or something else. When such a combination is present in a system, magic development starts to happen in the form of spontaneous, creative development. No plan or intention is needed for it to work - it just happens. We can observe such self-organizing processes take place right before our eyes in natural ecosystems, in commercial markets and in human civilization, and over time, the results can be amazing.

Within this book, we will look, initially, at the general principles of spontaneous creativity. These are introduced in the first chapter, elaborated on in the second and should be fairly clear by the time we reach the end of the third chapter. After this, we will use these principles as a frame of reference.

Along the way we will see how the Western nations, hundreds of years ago, started an incredible, creative chain-reaction that led to massive improvements in people’s lives - even though no-one seemed to plan specifically for general creativity. In fact, if anything, there were lots of leaders who made plans for curtailing the creativity once it had started; they just couldn’t succeed in halting it, for reasons we shall hear later.

One of the arguments we will examine is that creativity (and the change it brings) is not just a pleasant feature of a civilization, but a necessary one. Stagnant societies, it seems, simply cannot survive in the long-term, partly because stagnation tends to create some nasty cultural changes.

Since creativity is essential to successful civilizations, we will study it further in the second part of the book, as well as examining why the West became so much more creative than all other civilizations.

The book’s third section is about one of the most fascinating consequences of civilization - and especially of Western civilization: the so-called civilizing process. After that, we move on to some reasons that many people now want us to prepare for a static society: concerns about lack of innovation opportunities, ever-increasing capital concentrations, resource depletion and the environment.

This brings us to parts five and six, in which we will study current problems such as debt crises, structural unemployment, irrationality, anti-technology bias and much more. Summing up all of this, we will see there is a real risk that many Western nations have chosen the road “to Argentina”.

The book’s final section contains a number of specific suggestions about how we could make Western societies – any society, in fact - much more creative and dynamic than ever before. Of course, it is the author’s hope that readers will think of extra and varied solutions that are better.

All of this is rather a big story, and we will take it right from the beginning; from the time, when pre-humans or apes started to evolve in unusual ways that would eventually make them creative. Embedded in this story is another one which will lead us to the reason why we developed civilization and thus also to why parts of our planet are now lit up at night (and why there is golf gear on the Moon). As aliens in a spaceship passing Earth would observe, we did indeed find the key to civilization, and we shall now study what that was.