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using history to get rich

I still haven't read any of his books, but here's the summary of Jared Diamond's speech about how to organize businesses to get rich:

So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.

He has some interesting examples, although in speech form they certainly come across as more anecdotal than real research. Not that I'm thinking about starting a huge business, especially one concerned about productivity...