Engines and Cabooses

‘Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.’ – Joseph Stalin

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Engines and Cabooses

The train cars get to the same place, all at the same time--some with less work. So why does the caboose envy the engine? 

Technology and the individual make a powerful partnership and certainly are factors in the explosion of human economic development of the last 200 years. McClosky suggests that success is partly dependent upon the individual just being left alone to fulfill his vision.

The interference is usually assumed to be caused by religious or government entities. But it also seems to be true that success itself stimulates opposition. Royalty. Kulaks. The Rich. Somehow in us there arises a strange opposition to success. This has expanded from revolutionary minorities into democracies.

Perhaps this explains antisemitism. The proportion of people with an IQ of 140 or more is about six times higher among Jews than any other population. Jews, forming much less than a single percent of the world’s population, have won 32% of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century. They dominate classical music. Many Jews have been factors in the great economic revolution of the last 200 years.

The curiosity of this great growth over the last two centuries is that the expansion of the quality of life and wealth has been led by a very few. Their creations have expanded to fill the culture and enrich everyone. Those discoverers and developers have become more enriched than others, but the growth in wealth of the least in the culture has been extraordinary. A simple comparison of those cultures that have not participated shows the disparity.

So why would those in that successful culture, having benefitted so much from the creators in the culture, resent them?