advances in productivity, hygiene, education, and the application of scientific understanding to everyday needs has produced an unprecedented improvement in the lives of billions in the 250 years or so since the industrial revolution, especially in their lives outside the workplace, but it is also by no means clear to me that all these improvements can be attributed to a single entity called “capitalism”—or whether it is more sensible to see capitalist economic relations, advances in scientific knowledge, and democratic politics as essentially independent phenomena, any one of which can occur
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