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Steel Chapter 14 Summary

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Steel Chapter 14 Summary
Main Idea: Chapter 14 shows how and why societies evolved from small bands of a few dozen people to huge nation states with millions, or in a couple cases, over a billion people each.
Details: Diamond classifies societies, cautiously, into bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. These vary along many dimensions which in he divides into several classes: Membership, Government, Religion, Economy and Society. Diamond then goes on to describe one way in which these societies differ. Bands and tribes are egalitarian while nations are kleptocratic.
Details: Diamond quickly disposes of several theories questioning why societies evolved this way. For example, Aristotle thought that the state was the natural society - but this is not so, for most of mankind's
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