To my knowledge, the theory I’m about to share is completely original. I think it’s mine. However, I’m an avid reader of Niall Ferguson, Martin Gilbert and David McCullough, among others, who sometimes comment on the intended topic.
I’m also reading The Invisible Gorilla, by Dan Simons and Chris
Chabris, who’ve studied human memory and how it works. Apparently, we
often adopt others’ ideas as our own, and don’t even realize it – it’s called
internalizing and happens when we connect deeply with an idea. So it’s
completely feasible that the theory I’m about to share is not mine, and I could
still think it is. As ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, any
plagiarism here surely qualifies.
Having shared that, I really believe this is my
theory.
If it proves to be mine, having blogged it will
provide a publishing date. This could help. If you’ll indulge an
explanation, allow me a diversion before I share the theory. I’m a
college dropout. After my sophomore year my entrepreneurial calling began
shouting and I left Georgia Tech to pursue the almighty dollar. I’ve had
almost no regrets. Whilst I don’t lament missing an undergraduate or
masters education, a doctoral thesis provides an opportunity to spend a couple
of years researching a completely new idea, and setting out to prove it.
Wow. That’d be amazing - to have the luxury of time to investigate
something fully, to be a real-life detective, and to potentially lay down a
completely unique idea in the annals of human history. Alas, when I had
the time, I didn’t appreciate it – opportunity is wasted on the
disinterested. Now it seems I’ll never have time to get that
doctorate. UNLESS, and here we get to the mini-point, an open-minded or
enterprising university official happens to read this blog and decides to award
me an honorary doctorate out of admiration for my sheer academic insight!
Yes, this may be unlikely. Nevertheless, feel free to forward this blog
to anyone you think might have the necessary influence. As a helpful
suggestion, it might help if they get stoned a lot, too. Ok, here's the
attempt.
History can be shared as the story of Empire.
From the vast Roman Empire to the British and presently American empires, this
is where history happens. Empire develops a form of law and a code of
politics, embraces invention and invests in infrastructure.
Following these, it provides an environment for the development of the arts,
and time for the appreciation of those arts. The whole of human existence
ultimately benefits from Empire, although clearly, during the height of their
power, some relatively small groups benefit far more than others.
Nevertheless, their rise and fall is the story of human history, and countless
observers have opined on the reasons for their emergence and demise.
Paul Kennedy has written perhaps the seminal
work in this arena, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In
it, he argues that it is not the winning or losing of wars that leads to power,
as it may seem at the time, but the economic strength of that country leading
up to and during its wars:
The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse
of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed
forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient
utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and,
further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been
rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in
the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's
position steadily alters in peacetime is as important to this study as how it
fights in wartime.
In a seemingly unrelated academic field is the
work of Dan Ariely, a behavioral psychologist and the author of Predictably Irrational. In this fantastic
book (if you haven’t read it, watch this clip on TED and you may find yourself
hooked), he details a variety of interesting experiments about how we make
decisions. We’re quite predictable and irrational, it seems. It throws the notion
of ‘free will’ into its own little tailspin.
Finally, in the little recipe for my intended
doctoral recognition, we must add a dash of Einstein. The little patent
clerk realized a great truth about the world in the form of an equation but
was, alas, an unheralded outsider of the academic community that would one day
herald his genius. Initially, he was lampooned for his ‘special
theory’, but over time the world appreciated the brilliance of his equation,
and he was awarded a few honorary doctorates.
My doctoral thesis attempt combines the work of
these three academic leviathans into an equation that predicts the
future. Trumpets, please.
Moving on from Kennedy’s premise about the explanations for
the rise and fall of great powers, I embrace Ariely’s research to understand that the
decisions which lead to an empire's downfall are entirely predictable - it is
the function of a simple equation that, like Einstein’s special theory of
relativity, is a ground-breakingly unique piece of individual genius. It
will accurately predict when the American Empire will fall. This equation
could be used by banks to short Wall Street and damage the economy, so I think
it’s imperative the equation is publicly and widely known as soon as
possible. Get this out there, people.
E = S / B3
Where E equals the duration of an actual Empire,
S equals the Speed of communication between the centre of that empire and its
furthest military outpost at its height, and B equals the length of time it
takes me to drink a Beer, measured in seconds.
This may seem an unorthodox quotient, but I’m
confident in the research. If you’re surprised the time it takes me to
drink a beer would play a key role in such a groundbreaking equation, imagine
how I felt. Suddenly, all those evenings drinking beer in college
count as bona fide research. If this equation helps me earn some
money, they were tax deductible!
Despite the notoriety and inconvenience of this
discovery (I’m mostly a wine drinker now), some explanation is in order.
As you’ve read this far, coddle me a bit longer whilst I share both the
principle and the mathematics.
The principle is simple. The reason
the Roman Empire lasted 600 years, and the British Empire for only 360 years,
was not because the Roman form of government was superior to the British.
It wasn’t better at collecting taxes or more efficient at spending them.
It wasn’t more ambitious in its conquests or better at administrating
them. It wasn’t stronger militarily as compared to its rivals, or
cleverer in its strategies. The Roman Empire lasted twice as long as
the British Empire because of one simple factor. It took news longer to
travel. Events developed more slowly.
One may rise and fall more quickly than the
other, but the stages are analogous. They have a similar
trajectory. Various historians have suggested a life cycle to be found in
all empires, and I’ve amalgamated them into my own version
here: 1. The Era of Creators, 2. The Era of
Conquest, 3. The Era of Commerce, 4. The Era of
Affluence, 5. The Era of Collapse.
These stages are like a blueprint. Every
empire goes through them. If I had time to actually write my doctorate, I
would detail the characteristics of each one. But you get the idea.
The more interesting idea I’m proposing is that
the time it takes for an empire to go through these stages is entirely
predictable. And the time it takes for news to travel is the most
important part of that equation. My beer drinking is just a mathematics
devise used to show proportionality, but we’ll get to that later.
Consider these ideas. When Caesar
vanquished Gaul, it took months for the Senate to discover. During this
time, Caesar was able to think, plan and act. He recruited, set up lines
of supply, and mobilized his forces. During the height of the Roman
Empire, in about the 2nd century, it took 63 days for the cursus
publicus (Roman mail) to travel between two major economic
centers: Rome and Alexandria. A return letter would thus take six months
to arrive. Whilst urgently good or bad news was quicker (specific time-lines
are hard to find) the standard of communication was biannual at the empire’s
height.
The British Empire enjoyed slightly more
advanced communications. On 10 May 1857 in Meerat, India, many
sepoys mutinied. It was India’s First War of Independence, involving tens of
thousands of soldiers and took the British nearly a year to quell. The
British responded with incredible ruthlessness, in some cases blowing the
captured mutineers from cannon. Some reports consider this the beginning
of the end of the British Empire. Despite the importance of their final
victory, it took almost four weeks for reports of this to be published in The
Times on 8 June 1857. Standard news took far longer.
When the second tower was hit on 9/11, George
Bush was informed within seconds. America enjoys instantaneous
communication. As the American Empire can be said to start in 1989, how
long have we got?
Hold on. Are there true parallels here?
Do the lessons of history teach us anything about today?
They do. An examination of the history
shows that politicians and generals in the Roman, British and American Empires
were (and are) equally brilliant and boneheaded, comparably
honorable and sleazy, evenly inspiring and pathetic.
Their stories are similar. They changed the world. Their empires’
demise was down to internal factors. But as the trajectory is similar,
and the timing can be shown to be also.
This is where Dan Ariely comes in. Ariely
has proven that, given certain situations, we act very predictably. These
behaviors are irrational and unexpected, but still predictable. His
clever research has provided examples ranging from choosing a holiday to
choosing a life partner. In order to establish this, Ariely did
require similar decision platforms to study. It’s impossible to predict
what someone would do when confronted by a twenty-foot dinosaur because we
don’t have any patterns of behavior to observe.
Fortunately, when it comes to empires, we have
an immense level of history and observation. Since Plutarch, perhaps the
only topics that have been written about more plentifully are romance, sports
and cooking. Therefore, we can use this history to predict exactly
when the American empire will crumble. For those who know the formula,
we’ll be able to finally beat the banks at shorting the economy, and go on that
holiday and buy that house which proves money isn’t everything, but you can’t
believe it for sure until you find out for yourself.
Unfortunately, this blog has been my own little
holiday writing diversion, and my holiday is now over. I don’t have the
time to rant further, nor to mathematically prove the brilliance of my theorem.
Einstein would understand - he received lots of honorary doctorates, and
never did prove his Unified Field Theory. Hence, my theory should still
qualify for an honorary doctorate, preferably before America
implodes.
[Once mathematically proven, the only remaining
variable to establish is, of course, the exact timing of the demise of America,
which simply requires the time it takes me to drink a beer. That is
top-secret. Only those readers privileged with the opportunity to buy me
a beer, and secretly time the drinking of that beer, will have access to the
final pieces to this puzzle. I encourage and applaud the scholarship and
enthusiasm of those determined to overcome these obstacles for their own
enlightenment.]
