Reply #483: I never said it was uniform [View All]

China's temporary indifference to the wheel may have had as much to do with its geography or cultural factors as anything else. It didn't stop the technology being used elsewhere.

Technology certainly aids in income redistribution, because it lowers barriers to market entry and participation. You can run a design studio from your bedroom with a computer and free or relatively cheap software, for example, whereas in the past this would have required large amounts of expensive equipment for manual compositing. Thus, it can increase social mobility. It's not the only factor in doing so, nor does it obviate the need to compete. But I'm OK with that, since competition is a given in nature.

I see the point you're making that commercial pressure drives innovation in a symbiotic fashion, but on the other hand knowledge is cumulative. Certainly individual technologies becomes obsolete - it's been a long time since I sent or received a telegram, for example - but knowledge doesn't. But while some piece of knowledge like Euclid's geometry is no less useful thanks to the subsequent growth of mathematics, you don't need to absorb it all to make use of, say, a drawing program which has some of that logic built in. Programmers and other engineers are very fond of improving or refining things just because they can, with or without a commercial impetus.

I mean, what do you want to do, limit competition? Forbid people from doing any freelance engineering without permission? You might as well demand that musicians be restricted to producing a certain number of new songs per year, lest too many people become inspired to try learning the guitar. We're genetically programmed to maximize our reproductive prospects as a species. If you could magically equalize all income and assets tomorrow, not only would we quickly revert to something resembling a pareto distribution, but if we were prevented from doing so then other methods of differentiation and status-seeking would emerge.