Our story so far: in a thrilling series of bold acquisitions and mergers, occasional plague- or famine-related downsizing and aggressive management restructuring rounds, the human race has managed to invent, in approximate sequence: banditry, tax, cities, bureaucracy, capital wealth, relative wealth, underclasses, social revolutions, writing, statist/hierarchical models of governance and universities. [1] This brought us to the point of answering the initial query: “Just what is it that centralised, statist/hierarchical models of capitalist civilisation are better at than all of the competitor systems human ingenuity has suggested?”.
The answers are scaling, and technological boot-strapping
The view across the bar. 