here's one of those pesky tabs opened on a whim and never returned to

The grandeur of the Roman Empire was built on the aggregation of wealth. Using its superior military organization, Rome conquered its neighbors, took their gold and silver and sold their populations into slavery. When the empire ran out of neighbors, the Roman economy began to falter.

Nice enough a story. Important, if true.

"Today America is in the midst of the greatest epoch of wealth creation the world has ever known."

Billionaires don’t keep their wealth locked in Scrooge McDuck-style money bins. They invest it in ever more wealth-creating enterprises.

Important, and true!

In 1982, the first year of the Forbes 400, it took $100 million to make the list, and the wealthiest American was Daniel Keith Ludwig, worth $2 billion. In today’s dollars, those figures are approximately $346 million and $6.9 billion.
In 2025 it took $3.8 billion to make the list, and the man at the top was Elon Musk, worth $428 billion as calculated on Sept. 1.

Wealth generation from the microprocessor and the internet.

...then author proceeds to go through every major tech and energy innovation:

• James Watt and steam engine (1781)
• factories and distributions, trains (19th C)
• light, oil and then electric (19th C)
• first oil well drilled (1859)
• steel, Henry Bessemer's process (1856)

"The ancients knew about steel, but it was so expensive to produce for most of history that it was almost a semiprecious metal"

The word “skyscraper” came into usage around 1891, and Carnegie, Frick, Phipps and Schwab were soon household names.
In 1946 the first programmable computer, Eniac, came online. It was far faster and more versatile than the electromechanical devices it replaced. It was also the size of a school bus, had more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and sucked up 150 kilowatts of electricity an hour.

aaaand:

The microprocessor, a computer on a chip of silicon, came to the market in 1971, thanks to Texas Instruments and Intel. The cost of the storage, retrieval and manipulation of data began to collapse. It was the most consequential technology since the steam engine made energy cheap.

Spin-offs: all the world's modern commerce, more or less.

• Sam Walton and Walmart ("cheap computing made very close inventory control possible.")
• PC to internet -> Jeff Bezos, distribution.
• Elon and SpaceX ("greatly reduced the cost of using outer space, thanks to the reusable rocket. We can expect more fortunes—and cheaper goods and services—as a result of this innovation.")

Capital and labor are the two fundamental inputs into an economy. Many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation, want to tax wealth heavily, which would reduce the available capital needed to make the economy grow. If there was ever a prime example of ideology blinding people to reality, this is it.

Mr. Gordon is author of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.”

aaah, I thought: this is basically a popular-outlet plug to the author's book... turns out Empire of Wealth came out in 2005!

archive: https://archive.md/B1HYS