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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I disagree on both counts.
You can find vague rumblings about something like free markets for thousands of years, we don't tend to find a fully fleshed out theory mostly because of what texts survive and what and who was politically effective and powerful throughout most of human history. It took centuries for merchants to be powerful enough to write important texts, and for enough writing to be preserved that we could read them, but you find evidence that people understood the idea of market pricing forever.
The flip side is, free markets are radically counterintuitive, and almost no one actually understands and believes in them because of their understanding. A bright 17 year old who "understands" free market superiority is just doing so in the way that a 17 year centuries before us "understood" the trinity: they can't work it out from first principles, but they can recite it.
Almost no one actually believes in free markets in the true sense, witness the recent Republican turn against the free market while still claiming to be free market true believers. Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time. Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry. Surrendering fully to the impersonal evolutionary logic of the market is near impossible for most people. When you talk to people, almost no one can truly grok that it's all by accident, they point to designs, to national or international planners, to individual heroes; they have trouble emotionally comprehending the idea that the market is made up of an infinite number of selfish actors.
Similarly with evolution, the belief in micro-evolution may be obvious, but the idea of macro-evolution from single-cell to elephant, is not at all intuitive, and requires an understanding of time scales that almost no one possesses.
The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.
And they are sometimes right.
Free markets are a tool. They are not ideology. They are not a goal. What governments don't understand is that to have price control you have to manipulate demand and supply one way or another for them to match at the price you want.
Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.
A market has no objectives aside from matching buyers and sellers.
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