> By putting capital ahead of everything else of course capitalism gives you technological progress. If we didn't have capitalism we'd still be making crucible steel and the bit would cost more than the horse [1] -- but if you can license the open hearth furnace from Siemens and get a banker to front you to buy 1000 tons of firebricks it is all different, you can afford to make buildings and bridges out of steel.

The history of how steel got cheap is not really capital-based. It wasn't done by throwing money at the problem, not until the technology worked. The Bessemer Converter was a simple, but touchy beast. The Romans could have built one, but it wouldn't have worked. The metallurgy hadn't been figured out, and the quantitative analysis needed to get repeatability had to be developed. Once it was possible to know what was going into the process, repeatability was possible. Then it took a lot of trial and error, about 10,000 heats. Finally, consistently good steel emerged.

That's when capitalism took over and scaled it up. The technological progress preceded the funding.