Dat inequality

[Renton]

Forgot to address this.



I think there has been far more government intervention and regulation in place for the past 150 years than for the previous 199,850. On the contrary, I feel most of that time people lived in something much more akin to a free market. We've never been as prosperous as we are today, and we have exponentially more and more complex regulations in place every year. Undoubtedly capitalism and freeish global trade have had a key role in the recent (relatively) prosperity boom, but I'd argue scientific advancement being at least, if not way more important. I would also argue that private sector investment into basic scientific research (rather than productization of discoveries) is a very recent phenomena, and had far less to do with the advancements in the past 150 years compared to publicly funded research.

As human beings languished in the millenia before the 1800s, it was mostly authoritarian. It's worth pointing out that some of the most advanced civilizations of ancient times were the earliest attempts at a mostly free society. The great ancient empires were at least pseudo-democratic. The end of birth-based nobility on a large scale to my knowledge did not occur until the 1800s, though. Now whether you can say that the great advances of the industrial revolution happened because of increased individual liberty or in spite of it is a reasonable question. Global GDP per capita was stable with a pseudo-capitalistic society in Great Britain for quite a while before the first industrial revolution. Either way, you're wrong about private vs public research.

The vast majority of gilded age era advancement was due to private money. The first industrial revolution was mainly due to the steam engine, a private invention. James Watt's research was funded by private means and he become a very rich man from it. Huge piles of wealth were created in the late 1800s - early 1900s by the great captains of industry who brought us modern steel, railroads, cars, communication, human flight, all by private means and with private money. Governments didn't do a lot to intervene one way or the other in technological advancement until the modern era. They did, however, actively and brazenly, try to prevent advancement in many cases (horses vs cars being one example among innumerable). I guess you can give them a little credit with the space programs, which were mostly spectacularly expensive failures of public enterprise if I'm honest.