Forgot to address this.

Quote Originally Posted by Renton View Post
While collectivism held sway, the global GDP was a stagnant horizontal line for the first 199,850 years since homo sapiens emerged, and then a sharp nearly vertical spike for the last 150 thanks to a sudden injection of individual rights and free enterprise. This unbelievable progress is met with nothing but skepticism and scorn by most scholars. Scholars with the brass-plated balls to state that we consume too much, that our standard of living is too high, that money shouldn't determine everything, and that free trade exploits poor people and children. Scholars who would do well to reacquaint themselves with the default state of humanity: abject poverty, hunger, and a miserable struggle to acquire the absolute basics of life support.
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.