Charles Darwin spent decades at Down House, financially secure from family wealth, meticulously gathering evidence for evolution without any professional obligations. Adam Smith received a pension from the Duke of Buccleuch that let him spend nearly a decade writing The Wealth of Nations. The 1956 Dartmouth workshop that founded the field of AI was enabled by a modest Rockefeller Foundation grant that gave researchers freedom to explore.
Largely, it’s people who happen to have financial bandwidth—those with inherited wealth, tech industry windfalls, academic positions with light teaching loads, or partners who can support them. This is a privilege filter that operates invisibly. We don’t notice how much of EA’s “independent thinking” comes from people who can afford to do it.
It seems a bit strange to me to hold up family wealth and elite patronage as historically very beneficial features for allowing bandwidth for independent innovation and then complain that in EA this bandwidth is only available to those with family wealth or elite patrons.
It could be the case—but I’m not aware of much evidence to support this. Over the last hundred years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on sinecures and a collapse in the selectiveness—e.g. the rise of state pensions, unemployment insurance, disability insurance. There are a few successes (JK Rowling credits state benefits with allowing her to write Harry Potter, for example) but clearly a much lower rate than under the prior model.
It seems a bit strange to me to hold up family wealth and elite patronage as historically very beneficial features for allowing bandwidth for independent innovation and then complain that in EA this bandwidth is only available to those with family wealth or elite patrons.
Surely both things can be true at once—that it’s been historically very useful and also a shame that it’s available to so few?
It could be the case—but I’m not aware of much evidence to support this. Over the last hundred years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on sinecures and a collapse in the selectiveness—e.g. the rise of state pensions, unemployment insurance, disability insurance. There are a few successes (JK Rowling credits state benefits with allowing her to write Harry Potter, for example) but clearly a much lower rate than under the prior model.