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Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

The thing I took away from Capital in the Twenty-First Century was his conjecture that the post-WWII (until about 1990) period was one of the few times in history that prosperity was widely shared with workers. The era that I consider to be normal (since I lived it) is in fact very abnormal.

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Normal or abnormal it's worth thinking about about the conditions that make it arise and how to support that condition of more widely shared prosperity - otherwise I think we get stuck in a local optimization peak or worse imho.

That time in history when the production capacity of the entire world was crushed, millions were killed, and a free trade regime dominated. It's insane to call this normal, but that's a routine comparison.

pg makes a similar argument here : http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

Yeah, I realised that too at some point. And I immediately formed a (maybe obvious) hypothesis about the timing.

I'm assuming you don't mean communism? Because even in the book he is fairly down on communism/socialism. It seemed to me the more likely (and unpleasant) hypothesis is that war/nationalism generates growth like nothing else. When the threat of war looms and patriotism is high, government investment in technology and society is also high, and corporations are more likely to be invested in their home country rather than spreading across international boundaries looking for the best ROI. And the rapid succession of WWI/WWII/Cold War basically ensured that environment existed for decades.

Somewhat. The hypothesis was that the end of the cold war meant that a big incentive to make the common people in the west feel good about their affiliation suddenly vanished. Competition is good for the customer, after all.

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