Blogs > Liberty and Power > What a Disappointment!  Feb 27, 2011
10:09 pm  What a Disappointment!  I expected Ian Morris’s book
Why the West Rules—For Now to be much better than it is, having
read Tyler Cowen’s recommendation on Marginal Revolution.
Frankly, I hated it.  The book is one of those grand-themed
books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Kenneth
Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence but it is not nearly as
insightful as those (I’ve directed conferences on both).
Morris’s ambition is to explain the progress of mankind starting
about 50,000 years ago and, in particular, to answer the
question of why the West overcame the East in social
development.  But his theories are pallid, almost nonexistent.
The major theory is that people are greedy, lazy, and afraid.
Social development (his label for progress) occurs because
people respond to changing circumstances—especially climate
change—in ways that reflect these attributes.  Yes, that's
basically it. And it's a pretty horrifying book because in hi