> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…
Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress. Only Elon Musk comes close to this level of economic power in the modern era, especially because he is a hands on industrialist and not a financier, but there were probably a few hundred who had that level of influence back then and they were mostly industrialists.