I was born in the United States in 1938. I was born in the place and the time that is the most propitious in all of human history.
Let's begin with the fact that medicine has developed 90% during my lifetime. Before that year there were only two or three effective medical treatments. Among the treatments of real significance I would only list nitrous oxide as an anesthetic, x-rays and the development of cleanliness in medical practice and public sanitation.
Since 1938 we have penicillin, vaccines of every sort. Vaccines that have virtually wiped out nearly every contagious human disease in the United States, including polio. By the 1960's emergency medicine had been perfected and brought to the United States from our war experience. Trauma is now well treated. By the 1980s we had pharmaceutical treatments for breast cancer and the beginnings of catheter labs for heart surgery to provide a rapidly extending lifespan .
Simultaneously to the medical explosion, beginning in the mid 30's we developed most of the current effective pesticides as well as significant hybridization of major crops. The output of farmers has increased at least four fold in the interim and reduced the cost of every form of food.
I have also lived at the time when America got rid of its hereditary elite class. In roughly 1959. America, to this day, became the first and only society without a hereditary upper class. This allowed me to rapidly move to the top of my field in banking. From new employee in 1964, to offers of several bank CEO jobs, in six years. (I left banking at that point.)
Paralleling that development, was the end of anti-Jewism in the United States.
This end to a prejudice that effected me, was partly due to the Catholic Church’s Vatican II deciding its core teachings about Jews killing Christ was wrong. It also coincided with the emergence of the hippies belief in universal love.
At the same time, in roughly 1960, commerce began to explode. There were legal changes in the late 50's that eliminated restrictions on retail pricing and allowed an extraordinary explosion of imported goods. The net result was a new global economy with significant innovations in technology.
I am grateful I was born at the right time and in the right country.