Jack Goldstone

The normal condition of human societies is stagnation. This is not a pessimistic claim but an empirical one, and Jack Goldstone has spent his career at George Mason University demonstrating it with mathematical precision. Against this backdrop, he named the rarest and most important phenomenon in economic history: the efflorescence—a sudden, intense flowering of creative and economic energy, borrowed from botany—which most societies experience briefly and few sustain. His 1991 work Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World introduced the demographic-structural theory that explained why Song Dynasty China, Renaissance Florence, and Golden Age Amsterdam each blazed and faded: technology catalyzes a bloom, but institutions determine whether it lasts. His framework places the AI moment squarely inside a pattern that has repeated across ten thousand years—and insists, with the weight of that entire record, that the outcome is not determined by the technology. It is determined by the institutional structures built during the gap between catalyst and consolidation, a gap the