Conjecture

Where power is split among many evenly matched rivals, any edge is copied at once, so a technology that a unified empire left idle gets driven hard, and the race moves standing to whoever can pay for it. Ansary's ch. 14: Europe was "a multitude of distinct, autonomous, more or less evenly matched political states competing with one another, about 500 of them in the year 1000"; "If some weapon gave one state a slight edge, Its rivals quickly adopted the same technology to stay even," while "The Tang didn't have any real need for guns." Then "if money made the difference in war, the new elites would be the people most adept at making money," and "a man could make his fortune by building a better gun." Clay's step: this is the many-rivals form of P7. No single actor chooses the race; the structure runs it, and it hands power to a new class that nobody voted in.

How groups think together