Yet that is precisely the character of the human experience since 100,000 years ago. Inexorably, the global nut bowl has yielded ever more pecans, however many get used. The pace of acceleration of returns lurched upwards around 10,000 years ago in the agricultural revolution. It then lurched upwards again in ad 1800 and the acceleration continued in the twentieth century. The most fundamental feature of the modern world since 1800 – more profound than flight, radio, nuclear weapons or websites, more momentous than science, health, or material well-being – has been the continuing discovery of
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