But don’t worry, you will be at moderate risk of the car breaking down before 10,000 miles and you can’t fix the part because it has been deliberately engineered so that mechanics can’t fix it and it has to be replaced.
https://xcancel.com/unusual_whales/status/1987985187918192870
Has wealth ever been more stratified? Like really objectively? Because I don’t think it has. I think right now the level of opulence enjoyed by the bourgeoisie would beggar all the Caesars and ancient emperors of China. Meanwhile the poverty of the poorest living human is probably nigh identical to the poorest in antiquity. They have taken an incomprehensible amount. They’re taking more than they have ever taken before.
Because this shit is happening and we’re all paying for it. The environment is paying for it. The biosphere is paying for it. If we seek to change this arrangement? They say…. WhO iS gOnNa PaY fOr it?
Edit: making the late capitalist bourgeoisie is the most expensive fucking thing we have ever done as a species and that sucks. Fuck that sucks so much, dawg.
I remember reading many years ago that we had passed the level of wealth stratification in ancient Egypt when the pharaoh owned all of the land by the Nile and leased it to peasants to grow food, so uhh I’m guessing “no”.
how could we possibly know enough about ancient egypt to quantify the wealth stratification at any point in time? sounds made up to me, even if it is believable
We know more about the economy of ancient Egypt than like any other ancient economy thanks to the climate preserving papyrus. We have much more records.
Because legions of scientists have dedicated their lives to studying it
no shit. i’m asking about the methodology, obviously
It’s a complex topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, and of course with thousands of years of history there were multiple systems with multiple levels of stratification at different times, but during the time of building the pyramids at least we know from written records that the Pharoh in theory had extremely strong, centralized control of the country through a system of ownership of the land and its resources, which allowed them to marshal all of that labor into megaprojects like the pyramids. Later dynasties weren’t able to do this, not because they lacked the technology or desire, but because economic control had decentralized to a degree where they simply couldn’t control labor the way their predecessors did.
From there there’s a lot of extrapolation, assumptions, and estimates, and it’s totally valid to say that those estimates are too unreliable or that comparing an ancient economy to the modern one is an apples to oranges comparison and therefore not applicable. If we limit ourselves to just industrial economies the answer to the original question is still “no” but the data is much more concrete.