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… is from page 151 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s splendid volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics [2] (footnote deleted; link added):
Economic outcomes are affected not only by attitudes toward work but attitudes toward progress as well. In modern industrial societies, progress is more or less taken for granted, but this was not always so, even in countries that are today modern societies. A history of the rise of Western civilization [3] said of Europe in medieval times, “the very idea of innovation was lacking: men did what custom prescribed, cooperated in the plowing and to some extent in the harvesting, and for many generations did not dream of trying to change.”