One thing that #Piketty pointed out in Capital and Ideology that seems obvious in retrospect but that I'd never considered is just how much wealth there is that our civilization has accumulated, but that shows up on nobody's balance sheet.
How much would a copy of today's Wikipedia have been "worth" 2000 years ago? Or even 200 years ago? How much are Maxwell's equations worth? Or germ theory? Or quantum mechanics? Or understanding evolution? Or the fast Fourier transform? 🧵 1/n