[leobakerhytch]

A lesson from history shows this not to be the case: hand-wrought nails were such a precious and militarily significant commodity in Roman England, that when the legion left, they painstakingly concealed their hoard to prevent the locals gaining access to them.

Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.

The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.

[jackbravo]

Most likely the person who invented the machine to automate nails didn't become rich. Maybe, just maybe, the people who owned the company that produced nails first, if they had a patent or something like that. So maybe some people can be thousand of times more productive, but that doesn't mean they should earn thousand of times more money.

[jtolmar]

Over a thousand years of technological advancement is not evidence of how effective some brilliant inventor is, given that humans do not live for thousands of years.