Again, I recommend Mike Duncan's book, "The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic." It details many, many cycles of the same ph

Again, I recommend Mike Duncan's book, "The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic." It details many, many cycles of the same phenomenon, and not just in Roman society. The truth is, it's hard NOT to make some rather firm generalizations from reading a lot of history (or anthropology.) There's lots of variation, but the themes that derive from Darwin's Spotlight: namely reproduction/sexual selection and survival, are extremely reliable. Re elite classes, Roman economic history shows that the Gini coefficient back then was remarkably high. In the book I mentioned just reading, a contemporary famously says that only 2,000 people in Roman society - at that moment in time - owned productive land. The elite were agrarian (their wealth was) until mid-nineteenth century Britain. But they funded education and public libraries (say, in the baths.) If you think today's elite are different because they are mostly creating wealth, that's just not what Wall Street does, and it's obvious from research that finance, while capturing immense riches, actually diminishes innovation. Elon gets a lot of press because he is the exception, not the rule. Neoliberal reforms - although I've been given that label at times (with considerable opprobrium), you'd have to specify what is sticking (or a reform.) If you mean global trade, the aforementioned book "How Asia Works" has convinced me the current reversal isn't a blip - it's impossible to police subsidization (he gives endless examples) so free trade isn't possible, much less sustainable. The tech gains in developing countries should persist, but the current system of trade is dissolving now. "kept out of trouble", no, the bloody revolutions (mostly attempted) tended to come every ten to twenty years. This was a cycle in which the Republic regularly went from "in name only, pretty much" to "partly or mostly true," and back again. I do get from your comment that we should probably be making a more conscious attempt to focus attention and acclaim on creators and funders of creation, particularly of technology and science. From the perspective of future generations, they will be "the elite that actually mattered."