Societies compete with each other like organisms. Successful societies propagate. Primary dimensions of competition are demographics, economics, and military. T

Societies compete with each other like organisms. Successful societies propagate. Primary dimensions of competition are demographics, economics, and military. Thus the history of social organization is necessarily a history of extracting ever-more value from the labor of society's members. Keynes and others seem to have labored under the delusion that the history of social organization is a history of ever-increasing happiness for society's members.