While I'm sure that there are ways in which our society could be much better geared to cultivating technological progress and/or prosperity, looking to the standards of earlier times does not seem like a particularly effective way to do so.
Considerations of how to best cultivate further prosperity aside, I would say that there is a lot to recommend having people in a society behave as they like to behave, rather than ways that they don't like to behave.
While I'm sure that there are ways in which our society could be much better geared to cultivating technological progress and/or prosperity, looking to the standards of earlier times does not seem like a particularly effective way to do so.
Why not? Look at societies that achieved and/or maintained prosperity and imitate them; look at prosperous societies that collapsed and avoid doing what they did.
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)