Progress

I am reading the recent History of the State of Guerrero in Mexico. As a whole the country lags behind Canada and the US, but even inside the country this state lags behind other more prosperous states like the State of Mexico, near Mexico City. I got here last April and everything has been slow, starting from my own way of doing things. I am not the most efficient worker. 

I can imagine two scenarios going forward. We keep playing second fiddle to the rest of the country and North America, or we show the way. It all depends on what progress is.

When I was young I thought there was some kind of linear path, you were behind or ahead of the line.

As an older man, and after studying complexity theory, now I know it is not so simple. Is Detroit better than Chilpancingo? They have a ghost town over there now. There are some of those ghost towns in Mexico also. A place called "Real del Catorce" comes to mind, some boom and bust mining town in the Mexican State of San Luis Potosí.

Is Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg again, better off than Chilpancingo? And more pointedly is a cockroach less advanced than a dinosaur?

The late Stephen Jay Gould thought that evolution was not as simple as I once thought. Besides the temporal part of his ideas, Punctutuated Equilibrium, as he called them, the very idea of a single future of life was put into question. Now I believe that at a given moment some places are going to have a better chance than others to contribute to human civilization.
From the Wikipedia article we can read:

"But small, peripherally isolated groups are cut off from their parental stock. They live as tiny populations in geographic corners of the ancestral range. Selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly. Small peripheral isolates are a laboratory of evolutionary change."

Maybe this is Guerero's moment?

How will I know, for one thing I should start making more money!