> I don't buy the idea that there's a special "thinking class"
What he means isn't about genetics but about opportunity. And the opportunity to get even a basic education was severely lacking until the 20th century, while on the other hand the need to work work work starting from a very young age for the working class didn't exactly leave room to study, even if you knew what that is.
> Education is something that's attainable by pretty much everyone
Only in recent times. The original quote starts with "Throughout the centuries...", so this is about a longer period, and throughout most of it that opportunity you speak of did not exist for the majority of the population.
The statement is about a time when productivity was just high enough to free some (few) people from the toils of daily live. It's not like there was no progress at all, that class was getting larger over the millenia, but the explosion (in productivity) happened only in the (late) 19th century.
What he means isn't about genetics but about opportunity.
Who said anything about genetics?
Only in recent times. The original quote starts with "Throughout the centuries...", so this is about a longer period, and throughout most of it that opportunity you speak of did not exist for the majority of the population.
That's all relative and not really relevant to the overall point. There have always been people who managed to innovate relative to their peers, and they haven't always come from a special "thinking class".
That "argument" is on the level of "my grandfather smoked and died cancer-free at 96" (so don't tell me smoking causes cancer).
In other words, we were not talking about extremely rare individual cases - the rarer the farther back in time you go. The science for and during the industrial revolution wasn't driven by poor farmers and workers. That statement remains true even if you should manage to find some poor fellow who did manage it. Even today we still have the problem of way too low upward mobility from the working class, even though they could do it without nearly as much trouble as in the past!
Even today we still have the problem of way too low upward mobility from the working class, even though they could do it without nearly as much trouble as in the past!
Sure, there are a lot of things we should do to promote upward mobility. But we've gotten away from the point of the quote that kickstarted this particular branch of conversation.
The statement is about a time when productivity was just high enough to free some (few) people from the toils of daily live. It's not like there was no progress at all, that class was getting larger over the millenia, but the explosion (in productivity) happened only in the (late) 19th century.