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As Milton Friedman would say we are standing on the shoulders of the giants. People who came to these shores with almost nothing and built this amazing economy.
by tn13 10y ago
As Milton Friedman would say we are standing on the shoulders of the giants. People who came to these shores with almost nothing and built this amazing economy.
- mynameishere 10y agoIt doesn't really matter, but I just hate when some old cliche is attributed incorrectly to someone modern as if it was clever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
- tn13 10y agoI am aware the original phrase belongs to someone else but mentioned milton here because he said in the exact specific context of economic situation in USA.
- antisthenes 10y agoYou're standing on the shoulders of giants but not in the way that you think. The modern anomalous rise in wealth is directly correlated to an increase in the use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the 20th century. So if you want to talk about giants, you should mean to say you're standing on the shoulders of trillions of carbon lifeforms condensed into coal, oil and natural gas over hundreds of hundreds of millions of years. What people have accumulated in wealth between when life arose and 1850 is entirely insignificant than what was built in the last 167 years (roughly).