China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world’s population and was more likely to record population levels—though I’d guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years
Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I’d guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.
China does capitalism well without conflating capitalism with democracy
There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships).
Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds.
Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
Robust models of a region usually depend on knowing the region’s history.
The question is how much “memory” or “persistence” the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn’t predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s.
China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world’s population and was more likely to record population levels—though I’d guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I’d guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.
There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships).
Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
The question is how much “memory” or “persistence” the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn’t predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s.