You might enjoy the book "Why the West Rules -- For Now" (http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611692 http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-N

You might enjoy the book "Why the West Rules -- For Now" (http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611692 http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611...) One of the main premises is that the impact of societies on other societies ("ruling" in the vernacular of the book, as this impact has often been military and brutal in the time scale the book covers) has a lot to do with the kind of social organization they are able to use. There's amplifiers to this of course -- you can either mobilize a huge number of people to build a pyramid, or mobilize a huge number of people to invent cranes and bulldozers and let a few people build the pyramid. But the bottom line, according to Morris, is that this kind of social goal-oriented organization is a key metric of a society's impact.