>homeless person now stuck on the streets lives better than Rockefeller did,
Ok good point, not the absolute lowest, but someone in the bottom 10% has access to food from all over the world that Rockefeller did not. They are usually overweight, which poor people back then were not. They have access to medicine the Rockerfeller couldn't dream of.
>Do not conflate general human progress of what's available with more knowledge, science, and basic technology
You seem to imagine that these things magically just appeared. They were created because humans with money invested in them.
>China is arguably just as technologically advanced as the US.
China stole every single thing it had from the US. They have developed almost zero technology. (You could very nearly say the same for Europe, though they are less socialist than China and so have developed some things on their own - barely). This is always the way. Countries with authoritarian, dominating governments never develop anything - they can't. They can only steal and destroy, they can't create. Individuals develop new things and push humanity forward and only countries that empower individuals can create.
You need to ask the question about why humans have progressed so much, and why all that advancement happened in certain places only and not others.
>Do not conflate general human progress of what's available with more knowledge, science, and basic technology
You seem to imagine that these things magically just appeared. They were created because humans with money invested in them.
>China is arguably just as technologically advanced as the US.
China stole every single thing it had from the US. They have developed almost zero technology. (You could very nearly say the same for Europe, though they are less socialist than China and so have developed some things on their own - barely). This is always the way. Countries with authoritarian, dominating governments never develop anything - they can't. They can only steal and destroy, they can't create. Individuals develop new things and push humanity forward and only countries that empower individuals can create.
You need to ask the question about why humans have progressed so much, and why all that advancement happened in certain places only and not others.