Jeff Bezos has his image floating around and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it. The plow? Seriously? The man has bazillions of dollars, yet he couldn’t afford to get a clue?

I’ve said many times the shortage of historians is a crisis in the tech industry. Bezos is now the poster child of historical levels of willful disinformation.

Saying “we all got wealthier” from the plow is cruel because it is so cynically backwards. The archaeological evidence says exactly the opposite happened. James C. Scott’s “Against the Grain” documents that early agriculture made most people shorter, sicker, and more overworked than their forager predecessors.

Sounds like an Amazon warehouse.

What the plow actually enabled was storable grain surplus, which enabled taxation, which enabled states, which enabled conscription and slavery. The surplus went to elites. The laborers got coerced.

Sounds like an Amazon warehouse.

Gee. I see a theme here. The plow made everyone poorer, except for that one guy.

Set aside the fact that no one person invented the plow. That speaks to his disinformation coming in multiple flavors. Just revel in the fact that Bezos can not grasp basic history, while claiming it to be the basis of his new company, which is why he’s surely going to ignorantly repeat the worst chapters.

The bad plow line is what has been floating a $41 billion valuation by asserting that invention itself is the engine of all wealth, and that Bezos will accelerate that engine. The historical claim is both the entire pitch and the growing proof it can’t succeed.