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I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
I haven't read it yet, but this is much the argument of Acemoglu's new book "Power and Progress," that it's perfectly possible for technological innovation to not spill over into benefits for normal people.
Before him, the tech history Joel Mokyr argued that the middle ages were more technologically innovative than classical Rome, but of course quality of life was very low.
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That's easily disproven by the widespread adoption of the cotton gin and sawmill.
This is a fascinating question. There were washing machine designs which didn't reduce the amount of work involved to where it is today but were a significant improvement over a washing board in... wait, really, the 1790s(https://infogalactic.com/info/Washing_machine)? Yep, massively labor-saving devices for laundry were first patented in the 1790s and there was an electric version in 1904. But it seems like washing machines caught on about as quickly as people could afford them- infogalactic says 60% by 1940.
Now I want to put a pin in it there, because permanent press fabric(another innovation that greatly reduced women's household work dramatically) wasn't a thing yet, and before it you had to iron everything extensively. And I don't know if anyone here has extensive experience ironing but it's not a quick process and I'm given to understand that before electric irons it took much longer. Of course infogalactic says(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clothes_iron) that the first popular electric iron was introduced in 1938 and became widespread over the course of the 40's and fifties, so we're talking about roughly the same timescale.
Back to the pin, I don't think that to a middle class or richer family(and poorer ones wouldn't have been early adopters of washing machines for obvious reasons) would have avoided buying a washing machine because "eh, the Mrs. stays at home, and I don't care how hard she has to work", but that labour saving devices, if they caught on slower than was reasonable to expect(although it doesn't seem like they did), did so largely because, well, generally high income inequality made servants cheap for anyone who could afford one. And IIRC most middle class families in the era before washing machines hired out their laundry for poor women to take home and bring back cleaned and ironed; that's why washerwomen are such a cliche in older literature. Middle class families had servants at least part time because that's pretty doable when income inequality is extremely high. Poor women obviously worked much more under this system, but, uh, so did their husbands, I think the balance of the evidence suggests that being poor in the past just involved a lot more work.
That points to a different hypothesis, that husbands love their wives and are willing to spend a reasonable portion of the household budget to make their lives easier, but that they prefer to do so in ways which make economic sense.
So, I think what we have here is evidence that income inequality has clear net negatives and people in the past weren't pointlessly evil or oppressive. But we already knew that.
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