| > Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital I do not think that is true. The consumers of all goods and services also benefit from technological progress, because they become cheaper, more widely available, higher quality (different ways of saying the same thing). Technological progress in the last ~200 years has radically improved the lives of everyone, most significantly by freeing them from being subsistence farmers and clothes-makers. Even though most people today do not own a lot of capital, the cost of living well has come down so substantially that even poor people today arguably have much better quality of life than historical kings. For example, the majority of US households below the poverty line own an automobile, have multiple televisions with cable TV, a refrigerator, air conditioning, mobile phones, etc. [1] Despite owning no capital, the life of even those in poverty is astronomically better off than 200 years ago. Are you familiar with the trope where poor people from the distant past would wear clothes until they literally turned into rags? The reason that happened is because clothing was ridiculously expensive compared to today. There was an article about this on Hacker News about two years ago called "The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. To summarize, in the pre-industrial age, a single shirt required so much labor that its cost was on the order of $3500 - $4000 in modern dollars. Buying a single piece of clothing could cost you multiple months' wages. > Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." [2] NPR also published an article on called "The History Of Light" [3] which traces how much light (like candle light or lamp light) you could buy with a day's worth of labor, at various points in history. In Babylonian times, your day's wages could buy you 10 minutes worth of light. Light was therefore relatively expensive and in-affordable. By the 1990s, a day's wages can buy about 20,000 hours worth of light. Light is so cheap everyone has practically unlimited amounts, which led to substantial changes across modern society. Technological progress has drastically improved the lives of everyone. It has not made everyone rich, but those in poverty today are phenomenally better off than at any time in the past. [1] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950 [3] http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-one-t... |