3 ms·

This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to

by nickff 2y ago

This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man.”

yellowapple 2y ago
This is palpably false, as evidenced by the tendency for rich people to want to make themselves richer. Notice how the overwhelmingly-vast majority (if not entirety) of the rich happily did away with those candle-lighting servants in favor of electric lighting; why pay a bunch of servants, after all, when that money could be invested elsewhere? Likewise with the cheap cloth and cheap cotton and rayon fabric and boots and motorcars and so on; the ultra-rich have adopted these in droves because the alternatives require money better spent elsewhere. Yeah, candles and silk garments and horse-drawn carriages do still exist, but for the rich they are nothing more than novelties for occasional enjoyment; for their day-to-day lives it's all lightbulbs, cotton, and cars. Not only that, but the rich tend to be the early adopters of these very innovations - that is, capitalism begot these innovations specifically to cater to those able to afford them, and only later (after the requisite infrastructure and economies of scale took hold) did they serve as any sort of boon to the common man. Electric lighting and automobiles are two particularly-egregious examples, and they continue to be examples to this day; it ain't the rich who are still reliant on candlelight and animals pulling wagons, after all, but rather the poorest of the poor.

3 ms·

This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to

by nickff 2y ago

yellowapple 2y ago
This is palpably false, as evidenced by the tendency for rich people to want to make themselves richer. Notice how the overwhelmingly-vast majority (if not entirety) of the rich happily did away with those candle-lighting servants in favor of electric lighting; why pay a bunch of servants, after all, when that money could be invested elsewhere? Likewise with the cheap cloth and cheap cotton and rayon fabric and boots and motorcars and so on; the ultra-rich have adopted these in droves because the alternatives require money better spent elsewhere. Yeah, candles and silk garments and horse-drawn carriages do still exist, but for the rich they are nothing more than novelties for occasional enjoyment; for their day-to-day lives it's all lightbulbs, cotton, and cars. Not only that, but the rich tend to be the early adopters of these very innovations - that is, capitalism begot these innovations specifically to cater to those able to afford them, and only later (after the requisite infrastructure and economies of scale took hold) did they serve as any sort of boon to the common man. Electric lighting and automobiles are two particularly-egregious examples, and they continue to be examples to this day; it ain't the rich who are still reliant on candlelight and animals pulling wagons, after all, but rather the poorest of the poor.