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practical_romantic  1yr ago (text post)   3281 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is there any theory for why sophisticated European societies all developed alongside opulently wealthy families? It seems counterintuitive as you’d expect the society that opted for less “vanity waste” would dominate any with a family that owned huge estates and castles etc. is there some reason for why, in history, the countries with opulent royal families performed better? Does “place enormous abundant wealth into this one avaricious family” counterintuitively promote something that helps the whole society?

I would naively expect the correlation to run the other way; only a society as wealthy as France can build Versailles.

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