Greetings,
I'm new here and I found this thread by searching on economics.
I haven't read the thread but I searched it for technology and found no mention of it.
What is interesting about last month, the so called Black History month and all previous versions is that Black Americans don't say much about the cotton gin.
Before the cotton gin the seed had to be removed from the cotton by hand. Until I found it on the internet I didn't know how big a difference that technology made. One person working by hand could produce about TWO POUNDS of cotton fiber in a day. But with a hand cranked cotton gin that same person could produce TWENTY FOUR POUNDS of cotton. Think about what that would do to the PRICE OF COTTON. Of course that encouraged more people to plant cotton and acquire more land to plant cotton. But of course where we come into the picture relates to PICKING THE COTTON. So the cotton gin doesn't get mentioned much in that Black version of Black history.
But that is an important lesson in technology and economics and hence CAPITALISM.
Now the funny thing today is that we have all of these computers. And of course big corporations used computers to do their accounting back in the 60's. But today's home computers are more powerful than the mainframe junk of the 60's. But you don't hear anyone saying accounting should be mandatory in the schools. It should be a piece os cake with today's computing power.
Fifth graders can learn accounting as well as collegians
You don't hear about economists calculating what has been lost on depreciation of automobiles for the last 50 years either.
umbra