Living standards for ordinary people only started to improve in any meaningful way after the industrial revolution, a fact which is immediately obvious if you compare across generations. Technological progress gave us all of the things that distinguish the lives of 21st century Americans from the lives of medieval peasants. Central heating, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, general anaesthesia, antibiotics, automobiles, aircraft, limitless entertainment, food so abundant that poor people are obese. If you think that technological progress is intrinsically bad because it hasn't brought about a utopia of perfect equality, then I really don't know what to say to you.

I didn’t die of pneumonia as a kid so that’s something.

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