There’s a full post in here somewhere, maybe someday I’ll write it. For now we’ll just have to let Ian Morris and his book, Why the West Rules – For Now, speak for itself….
The paradox of social development – the tendency for development to generate the very forces that undermine it – means that bigger cores create bigger problems for themselves. It is all too familiar in our own age. The rise of international finance in the nineteenth century tied together capitalist nations in Europe and America and helped push social development upward faster than ever before, but this also made it possible for an American stock market bubble in 1929 to drag all these countries down; and the staggering increase in financial sophistication that helped push social development up in the last fifty years also made it possible for a new American bubble in 2008 to shake virtually the whole world to its foundations. – Ian Morris; Why The West Rules – For Now
Lauren C Sheil 
…. All True !