Nutshell-sized hypothesis about the last 150 years of economic history. People can be induced to get educated, work fairly hard, and adopt technological best practice, with only middle-class incentives. But to induce the extraordinary risk and vision that fundamental innovation requires on the part of inventors and investors, there needs to be a chance to attain vast wealth. The low-tax, laissez-faire Gilded Age produced radio, TV, cars, the assembly line, airplanes, electricity, etc.-- the technological basis of 20th-century prosperity. Confiscatory tax rates and invasive regulation largely shut down fundamental innovation from the 1930s on, so middle-class lifestyles today resemble the 1950s (IT/communications excepted). But there were a few more decades of strong growth as the economy absorbed and came to fully utilize the technological possibilities unleashed in the Gilded Age. Deregulation and tax cuts since the 1980s have sufficed to unleash the IT/dot-com/internet boom, but to get Gilded Age-style technological breakthroughs again, well need to rein in government a lot more, on many fronts.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:03:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015