What we're seeing is another revolution It's a repeat of the 1920s. Advances in the early 20th-century caused agricultural prices to fall precipitously in the

What we're seeing is another revolution It's a repeat of the 1920s. Advances in the early 20th-century caused agricultural prices to fall precipitously in the 1920s. This seems like a good thing (more food, cheaper) but it caused rural poverty (circa 1925) which tend spread to the towns (1927) and industry (1928) and finance (1929) and the cities (1930). Then came the Great Depression. This required FDR to save capitalism by (unthinkable before 1930) regulating it within an inch of its life. We still have agricultural subsidies and price controls. We learned that poverty isn't (as conservative thought held) some moral medicine that makes people better. It's a cancer that devours a society. What happened to food production in the 1920s is happening to almost all human labor. Prosperity, badly managed, turns to disaster quickly. Why? Because most people in society (especially at the top) are more interested in doing the same damn thing, more cheaply, than in exploring or doing more. Success in human organizations and "the vision thing" are negatively correlated. You need the latter to prevent the changes of technical prosperity from (paradoxically?) hurting most people. Europe is, socially, further along in the adaptation than we are. It has its own host of problems, some shared with us, but we're at least starting to see what a more future-proof society looks like. European societies respond by increasing vacation (12-16 weeks will probably be the norm by 2050) and education while American societies seem to default to necrotic poverty.