*A nation or a culture with an excellent moral foundation can survive bad economic times.....and can even come out stronger.

As, for example.....the United States and the Great Depression.*

That had nothing to do with morality. We are the world's only superpower because we settled a huge continent full of unexploited resources. We'd have to have really cocked it up not to have ended up dominant.

In particular, what happened in the 1930s was we discovered oil, and transitioned from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Without that wealth of fossil fuels, we would not be where we are now, no matter how "moral" we were. The U.S. had more oil than Saudi Arabia. We've just used most of it, and so are no longer an oil exporter. OPEC is modelled on an organization that used to set quotas for U.S. oil companies.

Our societies in the West -- and most societies in the East -- have never been based upon a family structure that amounts to communes.

No, not communes. Communes imply that unrelated people are living together. That is not really natural. The Israelis found that out. They expected the children raised in a kibbutz to marry each other. None of them ever did, because they thought of each other as siblings Even though they were not related at all. We didn't evolve to live in a band of strangers. We evolved to live in an extended family. With people who share our genes.

And, yes -- it has been the norm for most of history. In stable societies, that is.

That is simply not true. It's the extended family that has been the norm throughout history. It's still the norm in much of the world.

And in a sense, it's still true for us. People who live in big cities don't know more people than those who live in small villages, or in a band of hunter-gatherers. (On average, of course.) Even living in cities of ten million or more, humans cannot make connections with more people than would have been in their Stone Age family band, millennia ago.

Certain patterns stay the same.

Definitely true.