“It gradually dawned on me, and it is much clearer these many years later, that the pace of increasing knowledge and change is getting faster and faster with each passing year. The recorded history of man in the modern world is roughly 6,000 years, yet the first ideas of a nation state (as advocated by Thomas Hobbes) only began to appear in 1650. The evolving world as we know it really didn’t begin until the mid-1800s, with economic thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who lived during the industrial revolution.