@MichaelACT123 England had something of an internal frontier in the form of Scotland and Ireland. Italy is a different case, it wasn't really a country until 1861, there was more instability, internal warfare, and constant changes of borders.

@eyezcreems Yes, that occurred to me as I was reading. And old, Malthusian civilization without much mercy for the failures.

RT @kalpurrnia: "In the end, the civilized man is a hard man. He doesn't have the wild hospitality and generosity of the nomad."

@JackS11229 She somewhat deals with that, notes that many Frenchmen avidly feared *having to* move to the new world. It was a thing that might happen to you if you failed in business, lost your niche in the old country.

@NormanLeRoy I do not know but I would assume it was always extremely common. Our post-war American society is somewhat anomalous in having so little visible prostitution. So almost all other cultures or past cultures seem to us like they have an usual amount.

@SardaukarOrigen Excellent way to put it!

RT @SardaukarOrigen: France- the Occident that becomes an Orient again.

@patriciamdavis The book seems largely focused on effectively secular bourgeois culture, which is implicitly post-revolutionary. She largely ignores both religious life and also the true aristocracy. But yes, it seems that many of the bourgeois tendencies harken back to the old upper class.

@VariolationT Exactly. And this aspect of French culture was surprisingly durable even after the revolution.

@ChiknSandWedge No hustle, no get rich quick selling Escalades, etc.

@ctdonath Yes, perfect example.

@goblinodds Most Catholics spend very little time thinking about protestants at all.

Wharton also explained the famous French propensity/tolerance of extra-martial affairs as arising from materialistic arranged marriages, which were considered to be indivisible for life. As a sort of compensation for this, once legitimate children had been produced, it was essentially accepted that love affairs might be conducted among adults. Again, this applied to the better classes, where the women were almost in purdah during girlhood, and had no opportunity to date or have romance during their teen years at all.

So far, the progress of techno-industrial society has tended to *reduce* the supply of labor relative to demand. The number of people willing/able/available to do something like hoe a field or nail shingles decreased *faster* than the actual need for the work. This is why the largest and richest economy on earth (the USA) has an endless and ravenous hunger for completely unskilled 3rd world labor. And still has the world's highest wage rates, regardless of how many come!

It seems like the Multipolar concept reflects certain desires, rather than being inevitably suggested by the facts. A certain type is nostalgic for more clearly bounded nation-states, and/or for old fashioned "national empires" of the 19th century. So they predict this.