But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least… - Paul Graham

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich.

When someone's audience derives mostly from complaining about some narrow set of problems, they have less incentive to fix them, or even acknowledge progress other people make toward fixing them.

I've been doing office hours with startups for 20 years now. I must have talked to over a thousand of them. How have I not become bored by it? I think the reason is curiosity. Each startup's idea is different, and it's a puzzle to figure out how to make it work.

Some very simple math: if a country has 5% of the world's population and ability is evenly distributed, then 95% of the people who are best at any given thing will be born abroad.