The human mind's obdurate tendency to overconfidence becomes a major liability for humanity when the decision-making is delegated to tiny numbers of highly privileged minds.
In 1987, Robert Solow stated that 'we can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics'. Henceforth, this was known as 'Solow's paradox'.
Kuznets hoped that inequality would fall; he originally regarded his theory as 'perhaps 5 per cent empirical information and 95 per cent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wishful thinking', but it was so enthusiastically received that he shed his doubts and the 'Kuznets Curve' soon gained the status of a natural law.
the 'Jevons Paradox' (often known nowadays as the 'rebound effect') has been observed again and again with every subsequent major technology