The Institutions That Improved Our Standard of Life
The reason we our standard of life has improved is pretty obvious and it is due to human beings that have recently discovered a number of new technologies and more are being invented every day. If you want a more detailed analysis you will need to ask yourself why there was previously not a society that innovated technologically.
The ancient Greeks invented a simple vapor motor and the vending machine that was operated with coins. They even developed the basic idea of a programmable computer but they were not able to obtain an industrial revolution or achieve a sustained economic increase.
The world has always been full of very intelligent people in all the existing societies, however it was only after the end of the XVIII century that the Industrial Revolution took off in England and in which the standards of life increased considerably in many nations and continued to do so year after year.
There were certain factors at the end of the XVIII century that were combined in order to increase sustained economic growth, these are:
- Democracy: Due to the fact that the number of townspeople outnumbered the nobles, the arrival of democracy meant that for the first time the governments responded to the interests of a society as one. An important result of this was the creation of a governmental policy that favored the merchants and common people instead of only favoring the nobles.
- Society with limited responsibility: Under this structure, investors can only lose the value of their investment and are not responsible for the debts that the company cannot pay. Limited responsibility significantly reduces the risk of investing in businesses and in consequence, led to more investing.
- Patent rights to protect individual investors: In the past before patents came into existence, inventors were robbed of their ideas before they were able to make money off of them. Having given them exclusive rights to commercializing and selling their inventions, patents turned into a financial incentive for many to produce new inventions. After patents were invented, the world gained its first full time inventors, which were people that made a living inventing things.
- Literacy and generalized education: Without inventors with high levels of education new technology cannot be invented, and without an educated work force, mass production cannot be carried out. As a consequence, the fact that many nations decided to make education obligatory cleared the way for a more rapid and sustained economic growth.
The institutions and policies that have been mentioned have opened a world of growth and opportunity and such an abundance of things in the history of the world that today the main health problem in many countries has to do with obesity.
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