Why has the world changed so fast in the last 300 years?

Guest post by Max Winkler:

The Age of Enlightenment was the start of it, the realization of logic and objective facts over religious dogma, superstitions, and the rule of autocrats.

That created scientific comprehensions on a mass scale, fueled by the proliferation of printed matter.

Next came the pivotal part, the one made comprehensible by one of its best observers and commentators, Adam Smith, the Scottish economist.

He described and spread as gospel the new forms of production, of economic relationships that were rising. He attacked the basis of the old worn out accepted rule of a landowner aristocracy and the grip they had over economic relationships, that were no longer controllable by them.

He also attacked the substantial basis of the institution accepted almost without question for the past 10,000 years, that of slavery, beginning the growing process of seeking its abolition in the world.

This was the rise of a Market society that spread exponentially and accelerated technologies as part of its economic manifestations.

It broke up the stagnant social relations of aristocracies and commoners, raised the lower classes in their potentials and possibilities.

Combined with the opening of the New World and the massive expansion of overall world wealth, it fueled the Industrial Revolution, now reliant on growing technologies to expand.

But the most significant part of it was the proliferation of people upward from common and all-pervasive poverty. 

In 1800, the middle class was 3–5% of the planetary population. Now it is past 60%. In China and India, the poorest countries, with the highest concentrations of poverty, those levels dropped rapidly and massively. 

In China alone, within a 35 year period, 800 million moved from poverty to the middle class. In India, in a 20 year period, the poverty rate dropped from 45% to 22% and is continuing to drop.

What developed was people, on a massive basis, better fed, healthier, and most important, far better educated.

Access to information and expanding education was now fueling not only social and economic expansions of people, but the overall expansions of technology worldwide. 

Its outcome as well as prime fuel for its own expansion was the rapid growth in overall wealth, both material and financial, in the whole world.

We are now basically addicted to technological growth, because we are addicted to living well, being wealthier, especially in East and South Asia, and now emerging in several African nations, the ones that are catching on that tribalism and corruption was the only thing holding them back.

Unless there is a true major Pandemic, a Carrington Effect, a Nuclear War or a major asteroid hitting the planet the events of the past 300 years will only continue to accelerate exponentially.