Most of eternity was poverty. Something radical happened in the last few-hundred-years, in the west.\n1. The Enlightenment fostered thinking, and thinking that you could create something.\n2. The abandonment of primitive concepts such as serfdoms, replaced by property ownership which gives people a vested interest in continually improving, rather than stagnating.\n3. The means to displace existing products & technologies, w/o being slaughtered for it.\n\nAll of this really means the freedom to act and the protection by the government to be free. Look at the poor nations & you'll see there are no institutions of freedom.