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"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World" is a book that makes an excellent attempt to answer this.

Hm. From the description I am not really convinced. It starts with people think "rich gets richer, poor gets poorer" ... and then states this is all wrong.

Except, it is not, by all the data that I know.

E.g. "https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/global-income-inequal..."

Taleb makes the point that this is not as simple as it seems. It is not the same people staying rich.

https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...

Isn't this book about the low-hanging fruit stuff like universal access to healthy drinking water? And isn't it about basically the course of history through the 20th century compared to the previous millennium? That's much more macro, world-wide kind of stuff than whether or not startups in developed countries nowadays feel almost exclusively exploitative versus how they felt innovative 15, 20 years ago.

They were just as exploitative 15 years ago (or 20, or 50).

We can still fix things. We can still change the world - and for the better. Largely we have to slough off the outdated and pernicious idea that “more money == better” first.

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