It is time for me to think seriously about the conditions that could stop the modern world.
Only the United States and Israel have broadly meritocratic societies. Japan is the only close second. So the modern world can't arise from anywhere else.
One thing is obvious to me: pharmaceutical and medical appliance businesses are the source of all important medical and surgical advances. All significant improvements have come from these commercial sources with the exception of Emergency Room and Trauma tools which came from the military.
Sure big pharmaceutical companies buy up small ones where the innovation occurs. But that is obviously because the cost of FDA approval is so high that only big companies can afford to get products to market.
If the U.S. had a government health system that stifled these companies, the radical century long improvements in health would come to a stand still. The evidence is overwhelming, no socialist country produces any innovation in medicine or surgery. The few innovations that occur do so because the U.S. market exists.
Innovation require several ground conditions. The first is meritocracy. The second is optimism. The two are intricately related. Hereditary class societies don’t have optimism. Look around the world. Optimism is virtually non-existent outside the U.S. and Israel.
What about Europe? Europe is 'decorating'. Europe is stuck in 1914 but it is not so evident because Europeans spend all their time decorating their world to make it look contemporary. They finally got central heating, toilets, running hot water and kitchens that make their world look like they are in 2014. It is a giant 'Potemkin' society.
The 8 years of Democrats and Obama showed that a strong socialist government squashes optimism and consequently market innovation. The hippie revolution which gave us Apple and the tech world we are in today was pure optimism and I haven’t seen anything like it since the early 1960’s.
Could the hippie revolution occur again or could it occur in a similar form. This is a good place to point out that the first hippie revolution followed the American Civil War with a baby boom that stretched from 1866 to 1930. The technological innovation in that period was just as great as the one from 1946 to 2010. (The telephone was patented in 1885 followed by the gasoline engine, radio and the airplane.)
I can not see the future to know if more wars like the Civil War and WWII will occur and influence a large non-hereditary-elite country like the U.S. Nor can I tell if the kind of rebellion that elected President Trump will persist in the U.S.
President Trump understands how he stands astride the great eco-Leftie-Luddite effort to quash the modern world. Here is what he said in Poland In July of this year: “Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.”
That is a man who understands where he stands in history. Will there be enough Americans to support this wisdom into the future and be able to act politically with enough influence to win majority support?
I honestly don’t know.