Sublime

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a

Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero c

There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.

believe in the invisible hand of the data flow.

Intriguingly, when prosperity skyrocketed in recent centuries, it did so only in some parts of the world, triggering a second major transformation unique to our species: the emergence of immense inequality across societies.