I consider political systems, language, cultural institutions, religion, values, educational practices, sports and so on to be social technologies. Functional

I consider political systems, language, cultural institutions, religion, values, educational practices, sports and so on to be social technologies. Functional institutions and political systems, trust, capacity for co-operation etc are social capital, which had to be built up and developed. An explanation which ties everything to resources, hardware and luck is "nice" in that it means we can cleanly ignore any possible value judgements about social technologies, which are a sensitive topic.