I'm now 250 pages into Ian Morris's Why The West Rules For Now, and thoroughly enjoying it – although I fear it's putting my bag under strain as I carry it around London. The first part of the book ends with the heroic calculation of an index representing the state of development in West and East respectively from 14,000 BCE to 2000 CE. The index consists of four sub-measures: energy capture, urbanisation, information processing capability, and military power. Details are presented on the author's website. One just has to admire the ambition.

What's more, the resulting index puts in perspective the debate between Angus Maddison and Kenneth Pomeranz on the relative status of The West and China in the 18th century. Literally so – after all, their debate covers a mere millennium of history. Morris takes The West to be all the societies descending from the 'Hilly Flanks', the first areas of southwestern Asia to see settled farming, an arc around Mesopotamia, and The East to be the societies descended from the first settled farming in China, between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers. His index of the grand sweep of history shows the two had a very similar trajectory to start with, but one which started 2000 years earlier in The West due to accidents of climate and ecology. The West then suffered a setback which resulted in The East taking the lead from around 550 CE to the mid-eighteenth century, although  – again – the trajectories were similar until a setback in the East in the Middle Ages. By the early 18th century the two were close. Then The West accelerated back into the lead and – as we know – The East is rapidly catching up. Quibble with the index, sure, but this broad pattern seems consistent with Maddison's GDP data and actually with both sides of the 'was China really ahead' debate. The overall picture is actually one of broad similarity in development paths.

I also like the dynamics Morris injects into his account. There is an advantage in backwardness – those societies are made more ingenious by need, and can leapfrog the current leaders. And there is a paradox of development which is its converse: “The price of growing complexity was growing fragility.” (p191)

Besides, what's not to love about a book whose author complains about the absence from the debate about future geopolitical trends of the archaeologists and ancient historians? What do we mere economists know?