[chongli]

We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence.

None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”

[wongarsu]

Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.