Bureaucracy

To understand how profoundly bureaucrats shaped modern human existence, we need to travel back in time to the end of the last ice age (11,000 B.C.), which saw the dawn of a new era. It was then that humans began slowly settling down, leaving behind their scattered hunter-gather existence, in exchange for a more sedentary lifestyle. Across Eurasia and Africa, farming, herding, mining, and metallurgy led to massive increases in population size, eventually turning small tribes into large, complex, political organizations (such as kingdoms). This increase in complexity required the rise of two powerful new technologies: writing and abstract thought. While archaeologists suggest that the small groups that composed early hunter-gatherers had relatively limited mathematical capabilities that usually did not exceed counting past 10, larger groups of people are more difficult to coordinate, and hence require more complex ways of accounting and spreading ideas. The Babylonians and Egyptians, who are among the early pioneers of mathematics and writing, developed advanced numeric systems as well as methods for multiplication, solving equations, and working with fractions which, among other things, they applied to advancing construction and taxation. The latter allowed these ancient civilizations to amass great wealth, turning them into flourishing empires.