Top 40 James Dale Davidson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the easy that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.”

— James Dale Davidson

2. “The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.”

— James Dale Davidson

3. “You cannot tax unless you can compile records and issue receipts. The symbols employed in the accountant’s ledger became the rudiments of written language, an innovation that had never existed among hunters and gatherers.”

— James Dale Davidson

4. “The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.”

— James Dale Davidson

5. “Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; this, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equivalent of one-hundred-dollar bills in the future.”

— James Dale Davidson

6. “To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.”

— James Dale Davidson

7. “We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom.”

— James Dale Davidson

8. “When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.”

— James Dale Davidson

9. “Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.”

— James Dale Davidson

10. “Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.”

— James Dale Davidson

11. “Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.”

— James Dale Davidson

12. “When weapons or tools of production can be effectively hoarded or monopolized, they tend to centralize power.”

— James Dale Davidson

13. “The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming.”

— James Dale Davidson

14. “Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today’s standards, they were the centers of the first “civilizations,” a word derived from civitas, which means “citizenship” or “inhabitants of a city” in Latin. Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting.”

— James Dale Davidson

15. “In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.”

— James Dale Davidson

16. “The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence.”

— James Dale Davidson

17. “You cannot friend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.”

— James Dale Davidson

18. “Understanding the Agricultural Revolution is a first step toward understanding the Information Revolution. The introduction of tilling and harvesting provides a paradigm example of how an apparently simple shift in the character of work can radically alter the organization of society.”

— James Dale Davidson

19. “Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.”

— James Dale Davidson

20. “The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.”

— James Dale Davidson

21. “The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.”

— James Dale Davidson

22. “The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.”

— James Dale Davidson

23. “In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.”

— James Dale Davidson

24. “Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.”

— James Dale Davidson

25. “Because a hunter’s labor did not augment the food supply but could only reduce it, one who heroically labored overtime to kill more animals or pick more fruit than could be eaten before it spoiled contributed nothing to prosperity. To the contrary, overkill reduced the prospects of finding food in the future, and thus had a detrimental impact on the well-being of the group.”

— James Dale Davidson

26. “Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.”

— James Dale Davidson

27. “The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.”

— James Dale Davidson

28. “Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.”

— James Dale Davidson

29. “Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.”

— James Dale Davidson

30. “If you try to put yourself in the position of a Roman of the late fifth century, it is easy to imagine how tempting it would have been to conclude that nothing had changed. That certainly was the optimistic conclusion. To have thought otherwise might have been frightening. And why come to a frightening conclusion when a reassuring one was at hand?”

— James Dale Davidson

31. “If you see a flash of lightning far away, you can forecast with a high degree of confidence that a thunderclap is due. Forecasting the consequences of megapolitical transitions involves much longer time frames, and less certain connections, but it is a similar kind of exercise.”

— James Dale Davidson

32. “A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation. If they had insurance, or sufficient savings to self-insure their experiments, such strong social taboos would not be needed to help ensure survival.”

— James Dale Davidson

33. “Lent survives as a much moderated version of this self-imposed discomfort.”

— James Dale Davidson

34. “A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.”

— James Dale Davidson

35. “An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.”

— James Dale Davidson

36. “In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure – the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.”

— James Dale Davidson

37. “Part of the reason is that the normal balance of nature tends to make it beneficial for microbes to infect but not destroy host populations. Virulent infections that kill their hosts too readily tend to eradicate themselves in the process. The survival of microparasites depends upon their not being too rapidly or uniformly fatal to the hosts they invade.”

— James Dale Davidson

38. “Few are inclined to imagine that apparently minor changes in climate or technology or some other variable can somehow be responsible for severing connections to the world of their fathers. The Romans were reluctant to acknowledge the changes unfolding around them. So are we.”

— James Dale Davidson

39. “Whatever your current residence or nationality, to optimize your wealth you should primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport, while keeping the bulk of your money in yet a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven.”

— James Dale Davidson

40. “From the vantage point of the Information Society, the spectacle of soldiers in the modern period traveling halfway around the world to entertain death out of loyalty to the nation-state will come to be seen as grotesque and silly. It will seem not far different from some of the extraordinary and exaggerated rites of chivalry, like walking about in leg irons, which otherwise sensible people took pride in doing during the feudal period.”

— James Dale Davidson

41. “Those without the resources to wrest a share of the available and inadequate supply of horses and fodder suddenly found that they and their property were no longer safe. To put their dilemma in contemporary terms, it was as if you were forced to arm yourself today with a new type of weapon, but the cost of doing so was $100,000. If you could not pay that price, you would be at the mercy of those who could.”

— James Dale Davidson