| | Both views are correct.
It is true, as Stephen says, that we keep ourselves alive by being productive. If genius were even rarer than it is, progress would only be slower. We suffer losses when our products are taken from us. Whether kings or barbarians, it makes no difference to the victim who it was that stole the fruits of their labor.
In a complex society - in any city these past 10,000 years - every special skill is necessary or it would not exist. If not for the refuse collectors, an army of doctors could not keep us healthy.
But it is an error to assume that the keeping of good sewers is the same thing as the discovery of anatomy and physiology or of germs, bacteria, and viruses, or of vitamins.
France in the 1600s had a "telegraph" system, a network of semaphores for conveying important messages. It did little to promote anyone's welfare. Two hundred years later, the electric telegraph did just that. Again, as Stephen noted, the myriad spinoffs were the relatively small achievements of a great many people. I suggest just one from an interest area of my own: cryptography. To save money and assure some privacy, companies developed 5-digit (or five-letter) codes for transmitting financial and commercial information to and from agents abroad. This in part lead eventually to Claude Shannon's information theory. But without Galvani, Volta, Coulumb, Faraday and Morse, none of that could have happened.
Genius is rare. When perhaps 100,000 of us or fewer walked the Earth, a new idea might come every three generations, maybe. We know that stone tools were remarkably (or unremarkably) constant across the homo erectus span, including as well the Neanderthals and even Cro-Magnon ... until the micro-lithic revolution of the New Stone Age... I have posted here about the origins of writing. It took thousands of years - 100 generations, perhaps more - to change little clay tokens into cuneiform symbols for them. And the process was not gradual, but a set of quantum leaps. Until even art became an ordered narrative that we take for granted, as if it were natural. Genius is rare.
But, as both Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises pointed out, the creator is not engaged in economic production: the creator pursues a personal truth, even as other people reject it. ...until they decide that they really needed it all along...
That said, perhaps the real glory of capitalism is that to whatever extent each of us owns that spark of creativity, we are only less than but not different from DaVinci or Franklin or Edison. Ayn Rand is known best for glorifying the titans, but anyone who actually reads her books meets just as many common people with titantic virtues. That itself may be another of Rand's very many underappreciated innovations. The millions of us who read her fiction saw ourselves in her heroes: we learned to appreciate our economic labor as creative effort. Regardless of which meaning of "Java Beans" applies to your work, without the conscious application of mind, it would not exist.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/07, 2:24pm)
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