I can't think of a bigger complement to a writer than to explain something clearly and yet that somehow turn into a controversy.
Because if the writing is clear, which in this case it is, it means the problem is the audience. It means the writer found a genuinely confusing and probably undervalued topic.
First: "Sweden, for instance, has a higher startup rate than America, and less income inequality — as do a number of other countries."
To the extend it can be measured, the metric that matters isn't the number of startups ("employer enterprise birth rate" in the Sweden link). It's the net value generated by them.
Second: "Would anyone choose the second world?"
Yes, startup founders would. Because they can fix poverty with the value their startup generated.
My PhD advisor never seemed to care particularly about publishing papers; rather, he wanted to move the needle for the field, and he did (multiple times).
Racking up publications is fine, but if you want to have impact on the real world, there's a lot more you can do.
You are discounting a strong trend: expensive products become commodities.
Plus there are degrees of richness. It's easy to name examples where rich people have been trusting their personal information to faceless entities for years.
> to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases
You don't know the purchases of the audience you are referring to.
A central place with 10-sentence (or less) summaries from the most important books. So I could read everything from this one place in 1 month and bootstrap myself as a human.
While reading, I take a photo of a sentence I like. Later, I look at the photo and write down the part I liked: writing seems to ingrain the conclusion in my mind.
You put a lot of effort into this. What makes you believe it's important to consciously remember things we learn? Maybe the knowledge is supposed to seep into our bones.
Maybe it's enough to record, find something when we need it, but not necessarily remember it. What proof do you have that remembering everything doesn't come at a cost?