The Red Queen Effect
History teaches us that high society develops in stable, peaceful places where conditions foster widespread prosperity and leisure time.
Historically, Egypt was a modestly sized country surrounded by desert with a river running through it that was a relatively peaceful, stable country for thousands of years because of an accident of geography.
It's called The Jewel of the Nile. The Nile River is possibly the longest river on Earth, though some sources claim the Amazon is longer, its lower reaches run through desert which supports farming and other essentials of human civilization.
In addition to providing water essential to life -- providing hydration, food and hygiene -- large cities typically occur at the mouth of majors rivers because rivers and oceans provide cheap transport for goods.
I have read that the Nile runs north and prevailing winds blow towards the south. With minimal technology and minimal effort, barges could drift down river and sailing ships could travel up river, providing reliable transportation for goods and people long before most places had sufficient development to do something similar over long stretches of their terrain.
Egypt is one of our oldest civilizations and prior to modern technology when an invading army had to travel by foot or on horseback or something like that, the surrounding desert was a natural barrier to invasion that made it difficult to seriously threaten it.
They had some knowledge of electricity and used that knowledge to coat small trinkets in precious metals via electroplating. I don't know why that became a lost technology and didn't lead to an industrial revolution long before the 1700s.
For some time, modern archaeologists thought ancient Egypt was more primitive than it was. Then someone realized that a lot of their "gold trinkets" were actually gold plated and figured out the technique used to accomplish that.
Generally speaking, technological advance requires substantial time, money and security for people to get educated and study problems etc, combined with some friction or problem of some sort to motivate problem solving.
China is another old, stable country and much larger than Egypt. Its language and culture is very different from Western cultures where I was born and raised and Westerners tend to wildly misinterpret Eastern history and culture. It apparently is somewhat like the fictional race Star Trek race The Borg who just absorb their enemies. China has a long history of making other countries a part of it and that's why it's one of the largest countries in the world.
The Chinese invented fireworks. They get called the inventors of gun powder, but that's not what they invented.
They invented exploding devices for painting the sky with colors at night during large celebrations for their large population. They're called fireworks.
Westerners got hold of this technology and turned it into weapons, so the Chinese almost certainly didn't call it anything like "gun powder" when they created it as harmless entertainment for large crowds in a big country. It was Westerners who saw that and reimagined the mechanism behind entertaining sky displays as weapons of war and then named the substance involved "gun powder."
Egypt is still an important influence on this world and archaeology has put a lot into studying their rich history and the extensive burial chambers of their kings.
But they had the concept of electricity and it could have birthed the development of electrical energy and didn't. Had they developed electricity as a power supply, history may have gone very differently.
It's quite challenging to study civilization at scale over long periods of time and develop mental models for why things work the way they do which you can support. Such exercises tend to be treated dismissively while people with multiple competing ideas all agree on one thing: This is ridiculous and doesn't hold water, though their criticisms tend to vary.
Places that are too pleasant tend to not develop as far as they could and China was victimized by the more aggressive Western heathens. The US has a seemingly idealistic governmental foundation where we claim we welcome your poor, your desperate, those longing to be free but our founding fathers almost certainly stole ideas from the Haudenosaunee Confederation and then forcibly removed those peaceable peoples from their lands and called it Manifest Destiny and pretended God wanted this.
My favorite line from I believe the Kung Fu television series starring David Carradine is "A man of peace must be strong." Kung Fu temples have on probably more than one occasion saved China's butt and then on at least one those occasions, the ungrateful, backstabbing Emperor went "Holy Fuck! They could take ME down if they wanted to! YIKES!" And desired to dismantle them rather than thank them.
The current US penal system has a standard of innocent until proven guilty. It is based on British Common Law.
The French have a different model of legal system and I'm not especially familiar with it. The British are also best known for colonizing the world and thereby abusing and oppressing Native American tribes throughout the Americas, local peoples throughout Africa, island nations across the Pacific Ocean and China and other Asian nations.
The British have tropes like Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and have to the poor, and the US had people like Bonny and Clyde who stole from the banks and gave to the poor and were widely viewed as a variation on Robin Hood.
I believe that global colonization of more peaceful cultures by various European powers was rooted in the Black Plague wiping out too many peasants, leaving behind people who expected to be in charge and now had no labor force to order around.
Rather than travel and treat sovereign nations as new peoples to establish diplomatic relationships with following a process of diplomatic courtship, they ignored the rights and local existing traditions, wealth of knowledge etc. and viewed them as peasants they could forcibly draft into a private work force not much different from slaves.
The American legal system is not born of ideas about how to establish a healthy country where good people get rewarded for it. It is born of traumatized people fleeing corrupt nations and assuming that everyone in power is corrupt and trying to establish protections for the peasants from leadership known to intentionally mistreat their underlings.
Australia was a penal colony and culturally speaking the US is most akin Australia. America was founded by people so unhappy with the Old World they traveled for months under harsh conditions to alien lands that should have been a death sentence and often was. American tropes reflect the reality that the few who survived beat the odds and we have deluded ideas about how everyone here is better than average and can beat the odds.
A healthy society needs to somehow combine the traits of peace loving cultures like the Native Americans we wiped out and ancient Egypt and the Chinese culture that existed prior to Westerners shafting them with sufficient aggression to enforce that other nations won't fuck with us AND our citizens will behave themselves as well.
I believe "communism" in places like China and Russia is an attempt to say that you need to SOMEHOW take care of everyone if you want a healthy society, but the book Seeing Like A State documents the failures of such idealistic efforts.
Similarly, tribal cultures like Native Americans typically have the tribe own the land rather than selling off pieces of it to individuals and this has a track record of actively interfering with modern development.
The US has become a place where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and probably the rich are such assholes because they live in terror of what we do to everyone else and no amount of money is enough to guarantee they won't fall from "grace."
Our current model requires you to "earn" basics and creates a situation where that's a moving target that gets harder to hit with each passing year. It's a kind of Red Queen Effect where you have to run faster and faster to try to stay in place while the cast majority of us fall further and further behind.
If you want a healthy society, you need to somehow allow most people to adequately support themselves without making it nigh impossible to do. And then intentionally exclude people who refuse to behave.
We currently exclude most people from The Good Life then desperately try to reform them and claim they are innocent victims when it inevitably leads to high rates of crime while REWARDING vile behavior in our richest citizens and taking it as a given that wealth inevitably leads to moral bankruptcy.