¶ Wealth
Index Entry
Wealth:
"was discovered by the scientists and they discovered that local systems always lose energy. And they discovered that because man didn’t know that light had a speed-- and he thought of Instant Universe… Everything Einstein introduced as not thinking Instant Universe because Mr. Newton did think Instant Universe. And if that was so, then Universe itself was a system and it too was losing energy, running Down. Therefore we had a basic negative accounting. When I cam to Harvard University before World War I, the intellectuals assumed that the Universe was something being run down. What we used to call a fundamental conservatism was based on the bias that energies were always being exhausted anywhere. And anyone who makes any changes, that just means that it’s running down a little faster.
“This was very convenient actually for the early great fortunes who went from the sea onto the land to produce steel steamships and the equipment for them. Suddenly they found they could make money with both-- and up on the land, too! Once they had a factory, they didn’t want to change the factory. Up to World War II, anybody who wanted to propose change-- he got fired. And after World War II, suddenly it was an entirely new story: if you didn’t propose change, you”
