I have referred to the above chart as “The most important economic chart in Western civilization.” How did that amazing growth trajectory happen? As Deirdre McCloskey suggests, the West became a business-admiring civilization and that changed everything. We started respecting and rewarding innovators — and the creative destruction they unleash. But as James Bessen explains in Harvard Business Review, it took awhile for workers to benefit:

Too often, when people think about technology, they only think about the initial invention … Yet most major technologies develop over decades, as large numbers of people learn how to apply, adapt, and improve the initial invention. The initial power loom—one of the transformative technologies of the Industrial Revolution—automated weaving tasks, allowing a weaver to produce twice as much cloth per hour. But over the next century, weavers improved their skills and mechanics and managers made adaptations and improvements, generating a twenty-fold increase in output per hour. Most of the gains from this technology took a long time to realize, and involved the skills and knowledge of many people. …