There's a lot of historical truth to this - the founding documents of the Confederacy express as much hostility to the North's public infrastructure projects and "internal improvements" as they did support for slavery They saw it as the same issue, their "way of life" https://twitter.com/theashleyray/status/1302024072725839872 …
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The Romans WERE pretty heavy into building infrastructure, they built roads and bathhouses and aqueducts everywhere they conquered. Why were they different?
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Slavery itself was pretty ubiquitous in the ancient world so I would definitely not go as far as saying "slavery = no innovation" But the Romans definitely had a bigger "middle class" to support than the Greeks
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Those examples are lazy. Have you *seen* Incan roads? Wheeled vehicles aren't practical (and they had sophisticated transport). The ability to make practical use of steam engines are limited by the materials to make sturdy pressure vessels -- which the Greeks didn't have.
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Also, watermills were widely used, more robust, and easier to make - and also highly praised for reducing human labor in things like grain processing. There's a great bit by Antipater of Thessalonica about how rad it is you don't have to mill completely by hand anymore.
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I don't think either of these examples fit. The Inka labor system was exploitative to be sure but wasn't slavery, and their non-adoption of the wheel had little to do with excess labor and much more to do with the geography of the region and the lack of large domesticable animals
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Productivity gains just meant having your slaves pump out more kids. Didn’t need the productivity? Sell ‘em to someone that did. Jefferson had a whole paper on how great the return on investment was by selling slaves kids.
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The wheel only becomes a really useful tool when your civilization has draft animals, and unfortunately humans wiped out most of the domesticable megafauna when they arrived in the Americas (what was left was like alpacas in places where you don’t have flat land)
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So that’s pretty unfair to the Incas. But yeah you only really get going on tech advancement when there’s a large number of minds who have the (1) opportunity to innovate, and (2) a personal stake in such innovation, (3) competitive peers who can adopt the innovation
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Hero didn't just build a steam engine, he also built weight activated automatic doors and all sorts of cool shit. But it was for show. The crazy part is he could design stuff that required pretty precise tolerances and involved a lot of math, before there was even algebra.
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There's strong evidence Hero knew how to use negative pressure ie vacuum to do work eg pull something closer. And then...well that knowledge got lost, for like 1500 years.
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