Arguably they weren’t as powerful or as eldritch before. The economy has always been a complex beast, but it was probably relatively more manageable when it boiled down to “90% of all people work on making barely enough food that we do not starve, 7% make tools for the 90%, 3% are on military and administrative duty and get to syphon off all the surplus”. And each local system was relatively isolated. It’s an interesting question whether the growth in complexity has outstripped our growth in understanding; maybe we hit an optimum ratio of understanding/complexity around Adam Smith and then things have gotten out of hand.
Arguably they weren’t as powerful or as eldritch before. The economy has always been a complex beast, but it was probably relatively more manageable when it boiled down to “90% of all people work on making barely enough food that we do not starve, 7% make tools for the 90%, 3% are on military and administrative duty and get to syphon off all the surplus”. And each local system was relatively isolated. It’s an interesting question whether the growth in complexity has outstripped our growth in understanding; maybe we hit an optimum ratio of understanding/complexity around Adam Smith and then things have gotten out of hand.