ABSTRACT
During the two great watersheds of world economic development—the agricultural revolution and The Great Transition—the world changed from hunting and food gathering tribal communities to traditional civic societies governed by elites living in cities, and during the period still continuing, most or all traditional societies are changing from pre-industrial to post-industrial. Both transformations are probably equally deep and profound, but we expect the second to occur twenty times faster than the first. The agricultural revolution started about ten thousand years ago and took almost eight thousand years to diffuse around the world. The Great Transition started about two hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution and should take about four hundred years to complete. Sometime in the twenty-second century most societies should be fully or nearly post-industrial.
