200 Years in 4 Minutes

Here’s an amazing graphic of the world’s economic history. Notice the tremendous influence of the industrial revolution and the discoveries by science that resulted in huge technological advances, all of which applied disproportionately to the “West.” The West also innovated social, economic, and political systems capable of taking advantage of these cumulative innovations, doing it in such fashion that the broad population enjoyed the results, not just the elite few, as in the past.   Reactionary conservatives don’t like change, and want to take us back to “the good old days;” but here is evidence of why their cause is hopeless. Assuming, of course, we do not blow ourselves up, or a black swan does not swan in, destroying it all, or we cannot innovate ourselves out of dwindling resources and climate change, or the upper elites of today do not decide not to share the even more miraculous innovations already in the pipeline….