The Return Of Culture

Capital, culture, and states are three key powers in the world. Which ones influences the others more, and how has that changed over time? I asked ChatGPT (5.5), Claude (4.6), and Gemini (3) to estimate pairwise influence each way on a 0-10 scale over four time periods. The following table shows medians for the 3 LLMs for each period:I’ve marked in green the more reliable entries, where the range across the 3 LLM estimates is 2 or less, and in red less the reliable, where that range is 4 or more. Note that estimates seem less reliable in more recent periods.Below the main table I show the median estimates, over all the times. Oddly, these values are consistently 6 or 7. Maybe all the time-specific LLM estimates given are normed to be relative to this time-independent reference point? In which case, these numbers are mostly about changes over the periods, not constant-over-time effects.To the right of the main table I show the net (sum out minus in) influence for each power at each…