[Terr_]

> Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule.

I'd like to point that that mantra on its own can go in two wildly-different directions, depending on whether you believe "innovation" comes from:

1. An incremental process of millions of contributors doing small unsung pieces of work until eventually some threshold of opportunity, motive, preliminary ideas, and luck is reached which makes for a visible shift and simple story.

2. A magical threshold only broken through by Great Men, who were not lucky at all and deserve Great Wealth for their Greatness.

As you might guess, I subscribe to (1). Humans are wired to dislike randomness and broad causes, so we dramatically underestimate (and undervalue) all the people making innovations of higher-precision parts, or a chemical reaction that can use a cheaper reagent that's also waste from another process, or basic research like "these proteins are highly conserved in the virus."

[corimaith]

It's both. Individuals are also constrained by perverse incentivzes that sometimes you do need someone unconstrained from it all to make the critical push.