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It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of tw

It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of two World Wars. I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.

atoav 1y ago
I think prosperity is what you have to tear from the forceful claws of those who profit if the masses do not have it. A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part: > The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution. Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century: > I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration. Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.

atoav 1y ago

I think prosperity is what you have to tear from the forceful claws of those who profit if the masses do not have it. A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part: > The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution. Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century: > I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration. Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.