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It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. The other thing that should be driving innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than any other time in history. The combination of these two things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace. We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely to see another massive explosion of innovation.

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> It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history.

Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.

Running on the hamster wheel is a choice people make. If you wanted to you could live in a LCOL city and work remotely. People want to live in HCOL cities and in bigger fancier houses than they need, they drive bigger fancier cars than they need to, they take fancier vacations than they need to. Obviously this isn't true for everyone but through the middle and upper middle class, it certainly is true.

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