No, I don't think it makes any sense. It seems to be saying that a "post-communist society" is a place "where bike mechanics don't invent flying machines". This seems to imply that a communist society is the kind of place where bike mechanics do invent flying machines, which, historically, is laughably far from the truth. Those bike mechanics, first, had the money to be able to invest some of it in experimenting with flying, and second, did so in the hope of further profit. They were very much capitalists, not just in the society they lived in, but also in behavior and motivation.

Child’s play. True capitalists (1) hire wage labor to do the actual work, and (2) enlist the aid of the state to do all R&D and later use any technology that comes out of the research (socialize the costs (risks), privatize the profits).

I didn’t get the post communist part either. But I connected with the idea that we are moving to a world where people think that innovation can only be produced by certain classes of people.

The Wright brothers lived at the same time that Kafka and Weber were writing about bureaucracies. It was the time of positivism; the belief that social sciences could usher in scientific societies led by technocrats. Bourgeois professionals of the less progressive inclination thought that people could be managed in a mechanical fashion (now only certain kinds of less socially aware engineers dare to admit to their self-serving professional biases in public).

I don’t think the turn of the 20th century was more egalitarian in the sense that you speak of.

I don’t think that time was more egalitarian. The Wright brothers are just an excellent example of innovation coming from people nobody expects it to come from. Even their methods were top notch.

Back then they had classes of people who thought innovation was theirs solely and we have that now too.