Why Value Creation Always Mattered: A 100,000-Year Historical Perspective

The article frames value creation as a long-term social force, tracing it from medieval times to the modern tech era. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords extracted rents while the Church and monasteries acted as value creators through charity and education, with guilds and merchants adding mixed dynamics. The piece highlights institutional cycles like Canal Mania in the 1790s and Rail Mania in the 1840s, which spurred investment but also panics. It notes Rockefeller and Carnegie as pivotal figures, revered for production scale yet criticized as robber barons, and describes mass production’s rise under Ford in the 1910s-1920s, followed by the tech-driven value formation of the 1990s and 2000s, despite market busts.