they did, often repeatedly, we only have decent art in Egypt and Greece for so long because they kept taking each other over and reteaching each other to do art, there’s big stretches in both sides where they clearly lost the ability, and the Romans just kept copying the Greek art forever they didn’t make huge leaps you don’t see that until much later when someone in Europe decided statutes could look good from every angle and not just one, which is a very hard line in the temporal understanding of art history. but it’s REALLY hard to get your society to have the labor distribution to allow people to make scientific progress and digest other civilizations works while also being stable for a long time which requires wealth disparity, which clearly requires culture and religion that justifies that, and you need military stability for centuries, and you need to also have the internal will to make progress and not simply declare yourself the master race of men and devolve into eating each other over which pig is MORE equal to which other pig in terms of power, or simply not get taken out by an earthquake, volcano, or, storm, it’s VERY difficult.
but it’s REALLY hard to get your society to have the labor distribution to allow people to make scientific progress and digest other civilizations works while also being stable for a long time which requires wealth disparity
which requires wealth disparity
You’re just going to gloss over this? There’s plenty of wealth disparity and it’s not leading to jack shit
homie, I AS IN ME, don’t have any opinion on this shit. I’m educated enough to know my opinion isn’t even qualified, but unfortunately we have no historical examples of forward progress in all of human history that isn’t marked by huge wealth gaps in civilizations of the past. Again. I don’t have a say in this. the data shows this. and again, just because it happens, doesn’t mean it works. you can put a doctors clothes on, doesn’t make you a doctor. you can have nightmarish wealth gaps, doesn’t mean you’re making progress.
A fire needs oxygen and fuel. That does not mean that everywhere there is oxygen and fuel there is fire.
yeah sure, but the statement is more like “BTW, if you want society, billions must suffer” like fuck off
They didn’t say it’s impossible to have society without wealth disparity.
They said it’s “really hard” to have the necessary labor distribution for scientific advancement and to digest other civilizations’ works without wealth disparity.
And they’re right. It’s really hard to make those advancements without having people whose full-time jobs are to be scientists, artists, and scholars. It’s really hard to be a full-time scientist, artist, or scholar unless you’re wealthy enough that you don’t have to work all day for basic resources, or have the patronage of someone who is. It’s really hard to be wealthy enough not to work all day for basic resources unless there’s wealth disparity.
Advancements in technology and governance since the modern era have made it significantly less hard, but in the grand scope of history, it’s been really really hard.
Specialisation is a different thing to wealth disparity. Surplus of resources necessary for human survival allows people to work in fields other than farming and the generation of human survival resources is what allows specialization, it doesn’t mean that needs to lead to wealth disparities. Through technological advantages and a fair social system you can have more people taking turns in food generation that yield loads of food and other resources, and the distribution of those goods can be fairly done.
I think you get wealth disparities as a result of specialization. Should a surgeon make the same as a ditch digger? They’re both important to society but almost anyone can dig ditches. Not everyone can learn to be a surgeon, and the requirements are strict otherwise people won’t trust surgeons not to kill them, which is a net negative for society if people don’t trust them. As a result it’s a small group of people who can do it, and it takes decades of dedication just to get to “I am a surgeon” levels.
Voila. Wealth disparity.
A healthy amount is fine and normal. We’re at cartoonish levels where even bare mention of the word “wealth disparity” causes anaphylaxis in some people.
I agree with everything you just said but I don’t see how it refutes the statement I wrote:
Advancements in technology and governance since the modern era have made it significantly less hard, but in the grand scope of history, it’s been really really hard.
If “technological advantages and a fair social system” weren’t really hard to implement, then every civilization would have them.
There’s wealth disparity in normal well functioning societies it’s just a healthy amount. It’s like it’s normal for there to be a range of body weights in a population, but extreme levels of obesity or starvation aren’t healthy.
When the US was functioning at its best wealth disparity was present but small. There was even wealth disparity in the USSR and high wealth disparity was also correlated with the decay and collapse of the Soviets.
They took that from the Etruscans specifically
Wat? I thought that what they all did. Sometimes without the overrunning
Didnt work out quite so well for the muslims by the time they tried it on constantinople
