Game of Thrones: Why Dragons Halt Progress

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1. The thing is it's gunpowder that isn't guaranteed. Of all the history and peoples of the world only one culture developed it... by accident. Westeros is simply what you get when the gunpowder accident doesn't happen.
2. this is dumb. they could be pumping money into how to kill dragons.
3. Also they have magic that can fix anything. And WW... But my biggest suspect for why they are not progressing(scientifically) would be the long and deadly winter seasons. It's like if we had a nuclear war once in a while. And given that they all know that "The winter is coming... eventually" I'm pretty sure it can be counted as a pretty good incentive for the technological progress. But it doesn't work apparently.
4. "You lose incentive for more money" - you got... You got me real GOOD :D
   
   Could it be that industrial revolution freed more resources so the governments could grow bigger and not vice versa? It's not like you can sustain a large army when 95%+ of population has to constantly work in the fields or tax people into prosperity when they consume almost all the food they can produce. Also centralization looks like logical outcome of moving from Castles (defensive structures) to standing armies that can be used offensively. I don't see evidence that centralized governments are more efficient. They tend to turn into tyranny and be stagnant with overblown budgets. Look at Russia and USA for example. Regulations are growing like weed after a rain. The same with government debt and bureaucratic offices. This is what you get when a hundreds millions of people are ruled by a handful of politicians from the Ivory Tower.
5. Your content is awesome!
   Love your man.
6. dragons have only been around in westeros for 300 years after aegon the conqueror came to westeros. the seven kingdoms that we know existed independently for a long time before that, but were ruled by different families like the Florents in the reach. I'd attribute the lack of progress in the continent to the erratic nature of seasons and hard winters which stagnate growth in the region.
7. Nukes halt progress
8. i loved that man
9. I think a majority of people still favour in monarchy over the government.its more hopeful in a way.people want to worship or blame a single person rather than say a council because blaming a single person can bring a change.people can March against a single ruler and get immediate results.
10. You forget wildfire, which is somewhat equivalent to cannons in terms of the amount of damage and distance it's able to cover. It burnt an entire sept down. But overall I like this video :)
11. A Napoleonic Era Game of Thrones would be awesome
12. As I've been binging your content, I feel compelled to start by saying that this was a very good video.
    
    However, I can't help but feel like it was based on a couple of flawed premises:
    
    1) Cannon really didn't change that much for warfare. There are cannons as early as the mid 14th-century, and they just get included in lists of supplies to field an army, as if they were grain or arrows. In addition, they were often used ass an opening volley during field battles, especially in northern Italy (the Italians tended to already fight on fields, mostly due to the nature of city-states to lack individual lords). And, though there was a brief moment where cannon could shatter walls, people just changed their walls to 1) be thicker and 2) be more angular, so there weren't blind spots on the castle. 1453 is a bit of an exception, but Constantinople was already lost. The giant cannons just sped things up a bit.
    
    2) States existed before cannons. Medieval England is perhaps the best example of this, though Scandinavia also provides some good examples. By the start of the Hundred Years' War at the latest, the King of England could simply announce rules for a campaign, and everyone would obey. There would be some mucking around in Parliament, but we have the royal charters, and histories of the events that seem to not indicate very much noble protests (there was a Peasant Revolt, but that doesn't matter for this argument). They also had an effective tax system dating back to the 10th century, so taxation wasn't the issue. While some countries (cough Germany cough) were still "feudal" in the traditional sense, characterizing decentralized authority on the Middle Ages as a whole, especially when Westeros is based on late medieval England, doesn't hold water.
    
    3) You state that Dragons were the equivalent castle-busters. But, that couldn't be right, because everyone just immediately settled back into castles. You would expect to see rapid innovation to either try and defend against the dragons, or to ensure that if someone else got a dragon, they couldn't just do the same thing. Especially for the houses that didn't have dragons on their own, I would expect to see very angular, spiky fortresses with pointed roofs and an emphasis on ballistae, if not on Westeros than elsewhere. But, even in the books we don't see this. Winterfell is pretty easy to climb around, which doesn't indicate sheerness or a sharply slanted roof. This indicates that the dragons, though an important tool for that brief moment, could not have been the reason for this stagnation.
    
    Instead, I would propose that the awkward seasonal cycle would play a larger role. Summer seems to be a time of peace, contrary to historical fact, hence why Lorell's knights spend their time on tournaments instead of war. Without war, there isn't need to focus on innovation. Instead there is a focus on tradition. Everyone is focused on recreating old traditions, and new social orders aren't really a focus when there is no group in that world that is really out of the summer mentality.
13. you're closer to a mil!
14. I just thought of something and I can't believe I didn't think of this before. Weren't the Valyrians a highly advanced people with technology and architecture that still can't be duplicated during the current timeline in Game of Thrones. The Valyrians started off as goat herders and learned to tame dragons. Then later on became the most advanced civilization in the world.
15. wow, GRRM actually thought this?
16. Yes the reason society evolved was because they listened to the liberal socialists. Just forget the 19th century and the industrial revolution.
17. let's discuss magic mike. :)
18. I love the game of thrones soundtrack at the end, how is that song called?
19. Seeing quite a lot of confusion in the comments section, so anyone curious about what leads to larger nation states as mentioned in this video, I would recommend Jeremy Rifkin's 'The Empathic Civilisation'. The answer has more to do with the narratives that we tell about ourselves than new technologies that break down old social orders. Although arguably, new technologies (such as faster transport or better communications) force us to imagine new collective identity projects to cooperate with the wider group of 'others' that these new technologies open us to. Without empathy you just have bloodshed - as illustrated in Game of Thrones (or whatever fallout from Trump/Europhobia that might occur in the real world).
20. I kinda wonder how the eventual invention of black powder and early guns would go down in a world with dragons, such as these.