So, the lesson I draw is that competition between entities that have free communication between them spurred on Europe. In China one despot could and did halt innovation in China. Instead, China's experience of technological innovation came during the times when China's unity fell apart, or when China was taken over temporarily by an outside invader.

You've seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world's most populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, whereas it's impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe. This suggests, then, that Europe's fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not. India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.

Okay, let's now start to apply all this to what we should do if we want to try to go out and get rich. Let's apply this to some affluent modern industries and companies. I'll give you two examples. The first example concerns that image of productivity that we Americans have as we look toward Japan. We fantasize that the industrial productivity of Japan and Germany is greater than that of the United States. And that's not true. On the average, American industrial productivity is higher than the industrial productivity of either Japan or Germany. But that average figure conceals differences among the industries of the same country, related to differences in organization — and those differences are very instructive. Let me give you two examples from case studies carried out by the McKinsey Corporation, an economics study industry based in Washington. These two examples involve the German beer industry and the Japanese food-processing industry.

What about the German beer industry? Well, the Germans are very efficient in some of their industries. The German metal-working industry and the German steel industry are equal in productivity to those of the United States, but the German beer-producing industry has a productivity only 43% that of the United States. And it's not that the Germans make bad beer; the Germans make wonderful beer. Whenever my wife and I go to Germany, we take along an extra suitcase specifically for the purpose of filling it up with bottles of German beer, which we take back and dole out to ourselves for the year after each of our trips to Germany. Why, then, since the Germans make such great beer, and since their industrial organization works so successfully for steel and metal, can't they achieve a successful industrial organization for beer?