On the Material Foundations of Intellectual Production
Producing research and writing requires time and money, so inequality impoverishes human knowledge. How many great discoveries and cultural works are we missing?
My title is just a pretentious way of saying: before anyone can write, they have to eat. If you’re sick, thinking becomes much harder, and if you’re dead, you can’t think at all. Building the wealth of human knowledge depends on having human beings who are alive and well, and we can expect that the factors which determine how well (and if) people live are also going to affect which thoughts get thought and what knowledge gets produced.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
If you’re fifteen years old and your family depends on you to go out and pick tobacco, it doesn’t matter what contributions you could make to science. You are stuck. The economic circumstances you find yourself in demand that your time be spent otherwise. Whatever brilliant thoughts you might have thought if you had been able to spend all day in a library rather than a field will simply not get thought. They will never come into existence.
