Without a duplicate Earth to utilize as a control in any experimental setup, it is very difficult to determine whether any given technology improvement came abo

Without a duplicate Earth to utilize as a control in any experimental setup, it is very difficult to determine whether any given technology improvement came about because of a specific historic factor, or in spite of that factor. I think you are making a reasonable assumption that theoretical systems that allow for concentration of capital result in greater technological advancement than theoretical systems that tend to diffuse capital. But the real world is complex and messy. Living people sometimes behave in ways that are surprising to the economist. It is very difficult to "design an economic system". You either have to devise an incremental path to it from the old system, or march people to it under the threat of death. If you're really going to ask someone to compare historic civilizations with the modern global civilization we have now, you're probably going to need to make some adjustments in order for that to be a fair comparison, instead of one implicitly biased to your own point of view. I'm not certain it is even possible to do that for a comparison between a pre-industrial civilization and a post-industrial civilization. What we can say for sure is that it hasn't always been this way and therefore it doesn't always need to be as it is now.