> If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.

You are talking about a period in history when children were worked to death in mines. When working people in city lived in unimaginably horrible conditions, barely any education, lack of hygiene, 12- to 16-hour work days, flats without windows. A period with horrible wars. A period when Europe build its wealth through the blood and suffering of the global south, by colonization.

It is absolutely crazy that you talk about it as a peaceful time. No, the vast majority had vastly less time than they had in the "dark" medieval times. And it was much, much bloodier.

So what happened? The Industrial Revolution and with it a new economic order: free market capitalism

If you pay people by the hour, you are interested in them working efficiently. You will come up with technical means to increase their productivity.

You can gain a competitive advantage by technological innovation in a free market that has competition.

That is why science exploded. Out for necessity. There was a need. There was a profit to be made.

This is also why progress is now stagnating in the age of big monopoly capitalism. And no, we can't ever go back to free market capitalism. Certain industries simply need a certain scale that makes it not compatible with it. You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model.

We will see a lot of progress once we move beyond our current economic system.