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> In the US, the rights came first.

Impossible, given that the first three items on my list predate Europeans settling on the American continent :). But in the other sense, desire for those rights was present with people throughout history - you can see echoes of those in any ancient empire that reached some degree of stability.

My point is that it seems you need to reach a certain level of economic and technological advancement to create a "fertile ground" for "social advancements", otherwise they won't hold. After all, many of those are no-brainers and would be trivial to achieve if there wasn't some opposing force preventing it. Those forces, I think, are always economical in nature. Things like, "survival of typical household requires so much labor there isn't time for anything else", or "there is a strong demand that's best fulfilled by ${something abhorrent} and there are no viable alternatives". While they're it play, advance is impossible. Once they weaken, advance becomes inevitable.

Compare: it's not the ecologists that stopped whaling before whales were hunted to extinction. It's the petroleum industry coming up with synthetic oils and crashing the market for whale oil pretty much overnight.

Compare: it's pretty clear in sciences that progress happened incrementally, and wasn't dependent on rare geniuses - once theory and tooling advanced to certain point, the next step was pretty much inevitable, which is why many (most?) breakthroughs in history have been made independently and simultaneously by many people around the world.




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