An excellent op-ed from the WSJ today about how the world (as a whole) has improved economically (and dramatically so) over the past few centuries.Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's live An excellent op-ed from the WSJ today about how the world (as a whole) has improved economically (and dramatically so) over the past few centuries.Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant. Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.What caused this uplift to society? Technology.The source of this wealth — the engine of prosperity — is technological progress. And the engine of technological progress is ideas — not just the ideas from engineering laboratories, but also ideas like new methods of crop rotation, or just-in-time inventory management. You can fly from New York to Tokyo partly because someone figured out how to build an airplane and partly because someone figured out how to insure it. I’m writing this on a personal computer instead of an electric typewriter partly because someone said, “Hey! I wonder if we can make computer chips out of silicon!” and partly because someone said “Hey! I wonder if we can finance startups with junk bonds!”Not just technology, mind you, but the business models that enable it. It’s one thing to come up with a great invention, but quite another to figure out how to make money from it. Which is why being as open as possible may well be the source of even greater prosperity for the planet in the next few centuries to come. Open Source