However, the rise of the Enlightenment is also recent when compared against the duration of monarchies and the oligarchies that support them. It is, however, somewhat traceable to the Athenians, who were around about 2500 years ago. To my knowledge, the oldest continuously existing democracy is Iceland (930CE).
As far as I can tell, the "Great Accelleration" (to use your term) is actually pushing us back towards oligarchy and monarchy, because it takes deliberate work to prevent upward accumulation of wealth. Innovators become corporate CEOs who eventually become the new nobility (at least in the USA and possibly Europe; I'm not familiar enough with other places to make the same claims for elsewhere).
To get back to Iceland: I suspect the thing that protects Iceland's democracy is its small population. Fewer people means you know a fractionally larger percentage of your fellow citizens, and untoward accumulation of wealth gets noticed, so it's harder to use one's wealth to accrue/buy power without getting in trouble with said fellow citizens.
Tangential: Iceland's economic recovery is interesting to me, because they learned from Argentina's mistake. The took one look at what the IMF and World Bank wanted them to do, realized Argentina's economy didn't start improving till the Argentines stopped cooperating with the IMF and WB, and promptly told them to go fuck themselves. Result: fraudsters arrested, new constitution, and Iceland's economy is on the rebound. Makes me wonder why Africans keep trying to borrow money from IMF/WB, but poverty does weird things to one's decision-making and prioritizations (look at the blossoming payday loan businesses in the USA's recession for a smaller-scale example). Perhaps the African oligarchs are in on the shell game.
]]>Since I can afford $25 a month, the question is whether I am willing to live with depression for whatever the mean life expectancy turns out to be (accidents and microbes eventually get everyone). How would my life change? In the short term, not much. I still have to earn a living in order to keep myself and my partner housed and fed. It does give me a longer time-frame in which to save sufficient funds to achieve a non-employed retirement, at which point I would travel extensively, then return to school (because I am a student at heart), and eventually back to work to earn more "fun money" and enter a second retirement. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If lifespan is long enough, buying a single lotto ticket weekly may [I have not run the numbers to verify] turn into a reasonable strategy for eventually becoming super-rich, at which point the work-retire-work-retire cycle may collapse to Lifestyles of the Stupidly Rich.
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