What Makes a Historical Golden Age? And What Ends One?

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Are we Rome?

[00:00:03]Throughout our history, Americans have been haunted by that question.

[00:00:07]The more powerful we become, the more we've worried about an inevitable fall.

[00:00:11]So far, those fears have always been wrong.

[00:00:15]But someday they may not be.

[00:00:17]And here's the question that should keep you up at night: How would we know?

[00:00:22]How would we tell the difference between paranoia and actual decline?

[00:00:27]Well, it turns out scholars think there's some pretty clear patterns.

[00:00:41]The story of human history is punctuated by “golden ages”— —eras where one society pulls away from the pack and produces extraordinary advances in economics, culture, or national power.

[00:00:54]And that leads to an obvious question for countries around the world: “How do I get me one of those?”

[00:01:01]And the answer to that question......may not be what you assume.

[00:01:05]It's not necessarily about natural resources, or some earth-shattering technology, or one brilliant leader.

[00:01:12]So, what is the key?

[00:01:14]That's the question the scholar Johan Norberg set out to answer in his 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

[00:01:24]Norberg examined seven golden ages from throughout world history— —everything from Ancient Greece to the modern wave of innovation that kicked off with the Industrial Revolution— —looking for clues.

[00:01:36]And he boiled the formula for success down to a single word: openness.

[00:01:43]Now, to be clear, this wasn't emotional openness, which......has not always been a hallmark of golden ages.

[00:01:51]Rather, it was openness to new ideas, new people, and new ways of doing business.

[00:01:58]Which might leave you saying...... “that's it?”

[00:02:02]And there's a reason for that reaction: It doesn't seem unusual to us to be open to new ideas, new people, or new innovations because we're living in one of those golden ages.

[00:02:14]But it hasn't always been this way.

[00:02:16]In fact, it hasn't usually been this way.

[00:02:19]Because the default setting of civilization is suspicion.

[00:02:25]Throughout history, most societies have punished the voicing of unpopular ideas, treated outsiders as threats, and restricted trade.

[00:02:33]And the few that didn't follow that pattern......produced almost everything we think of as human progress.

[00:02:40]Openness to ideas?

[00:02:41]Take a look at ancient Athens.

[00:02:44]That was the society that gave us philosophy, democracy, the first real works of history, drama, and comedy.

[00:02:53]After Athens defeated Persia, the moment when the Golden Age arguably kicked off— —the playwright Aeschylus declared that “the people have been released so that their speech is free.”

[00:03:05]And he was broadly right.

[00:03:07]Athens developed an unusual willingness to let people speak their minds, even if it provoked others.

[00:03:13]So you can ask, “how do we know what's true?”

[00:03:17]Or “how do we know what's good?”— —which quickly enough turns into philosophy.

[00:03:22]You could write accounts of the past without weaving in mythical elements — which turns into history.

[00:03:28]You could tell the stories of your fellow men rather than just the gods— —which turns into drama.

[00:03:35]And, importantly, you could also take shots at the powerful.

[00:03:39]Pericles was arguably the most important statesman in Athens’ history.

[00:03:44]And playwrights in Athens constantly made fun of him: for his politics, for his love life, and for.... the shape of his head.

[00:03:57]Openness to new people?

[00:03:58]Here, ancient Rome provides a powerful example.

[00:04:02]After conquering a territory, Rome didn't just rule its new subjects— —it made them citizens integrating their ideas, their innovations, and also, you bet your ass their tax dollars into Roman society.

[00:04:15]And the Romans didn't do this for charitable reasons.

[00:04:18]They did it for strategic ones.

[00:04:21]More people, more resources, more ideas.

[00:04:24]Which resulted in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen.

[00:04:30]The economic historian Peter Temin estimates that the early Roman Empire's levels of wealth per person weren't surpassed by Britain, France or Germany for almost 1500 years.

[00:04:42]The economist Joel Mokyr points out that in the year 100, Rome had better paved streets, sewage systems, water supplies and fire protection than the capitals of Europe in 1800.

[00:04:56]In other words, it took Europe more than 1500 years to get back to a Roman standard of living.

[00:05:04]And, honestly, they're still kind of working off that deficit.

[00:05:11]Openness to new ways of doing business?

[00:05:13]The leaders of the Abbasid Caliphate, based out of Baghdad, created the world's richest and most advanced culture, which flourished for centuries at a time when Europe had become stagnant.

[00:05:24]And one of the ways they did it was by creating an integrated economic area even larger than Rome's.

[00:05:30]And welcoming international trade from what was essentially the entire known world.

[00:05:36]In ninth-century Baghdad, you could buy goods from places as diverse as Scandinavia, India, China and the Baltics.

[00:05:44]And unlike European thinkers who regarded business as a necessary evil, the Abbasids celebrated merchants —  to the point where they were considered more important than senior government officials.

[00:05:55]And this openness spilled over into intellectual life, with the Abbasids drawing on sources like Greek philosophy, Indian astronomy, and even other religious faiths.

[00:06:05]When a Christian bishop from Syria was invited to debate Muslim scholars about religion, he was told not to worry about making controversial points because “this is the day on which truth is to be made evident.”

[00:06:20]They didn't care where good ideas came from.

[00:06:22]They just cared that they were good ideas.

[00:06:26]Which is something all these societies had in common.

[00:06:30]Although, let's be clear: as impressive as these places were... none of us today would actually want to live in those earlier golden ages.

[00:06:39]Their standard of living was vastly lower than ours.

[00:06:42]And we'd be nauseated by the suffering, up to and including slavery.

[00:06:47]But the question isn't how they compare to today, It's how they compared to the other options at the time.

[00:06:54]And, on that front, you have to conclude that they were exceptional.

[00:06:59]Which raises the big question here: If openness was such a surefire recipe for success, why did these societies eventually decline?

[00:07:07]Johan Norberg’s answer to that question is that all of them eventually gave up on that openness, retreating inwards as the result of some external crisis.

[00:07:17]In the case of Athens, the Peloponnesian War with Sparta caused the city to lose its confidence, abandon its principles, and look for scapegoats to blame.

[00:07:26]Which is how it went from celebrating philosophy to executing the father of philosophy.

[00:07:31]Socrates, by forcing him to drink poison.

[00:07:35]In the case of Rome, a long succession of disasters — plague, political instability, economic crises, and territorial losses — caused the empire to centralize power, persecute minorities, and eventually crumble.

[00:07:49]For the Abbasids, the story was similar: a wave of religious persecution, military losses, slave uprisings, devastating drought.

[00:07:57]Though the specifics differed, the pattern always looked the same: Crisis led to fear.

[00:08:04]Fear led to closure.

[00:08:05]Closure led to declining.

[00:08:08]All of which brings us back to where we started.

[00:08:12]While we're not without hardships, the United States is, by any measure living in a golden age.

[00:08:17]American's average income is roughly seven times what it was in 1900, where the wealthiest, most powerful society the world has ever known.

[00:08:27]And at some level, we're uneasy about that — because of the pervasive fear that at some point it's going to come to an end.

[00:08:36]The golden ages don't end because the fates decide.

[00:08:40]They end because societies lose their confidence, turn inward, and abandon the principles that made them great.

[00:08:47]So, are we Rome?

[00:08:50]Turns out that's not a mystery.

[00:08:53]It's a choice.

[00:08:56]Though f we do collapse......at least we'll have dryers.