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I think Russia itself could be used as another example of your rebuttable if you look a bit further back in time. At the end of the 19th century the country was

I think Russia itself could be used as another example of your rebuttable if you look a bit further back in time. At the end of the 19th century the country was still extremely agrarian - far less developed than the other great powers. But by the 1960s it had essentially made up for a century of lost time, at which point the famous stagnation set in. The classic line is something to the effect of 'capitalism is the best system of generating wealth, but not for distributing it'. That does seem wrong. Once the innovations exist, systems like russia or china seem to successfully and efficiently reproduce the wealth generation. What happens after they have caught up to some baseline of industrial prosperity is a different economic issue altogether. I don't think we have enough examples from modern history to draw any sweeping conclusions.

beat 8y ago
I'm no expert, but it seems to me we're seeing something like a phase change in economics... nations start illiterate and agrarian and are basically stable for a long time, then they go through this sudden (2-3 generations) shift to modernism, and then... they're stable again. America isn't fundamentally more prosperous now than it was a generation ago. Worse, what economic growth is happening seems to be efficiently concentrating at the top. And it's not just America. European nations are like this too, Japan is like this. Eventually, China will probably be like this. What's the next phase shift? That's an interesting question. I'm hoping for the abolition of work.