A huge proportion of the world was still under direct colonial control after WWII. Like most of Africa, swathes of Asia. Pick a country on a map and look at the date it was granted independence. I can almost guarantee that it will be later than you expected. Post-WWII is not a low point for colonialism.

I would further argue that many of the countries that were granted independence only received the ability to install administrators who were of an indigenous ethnic group. Trade agreements and terms dictated by loans from groups like the international monetary fund still directed a large proportion of domestic and foreign policy. So even though the government of a country may have had a constitution and veneer of democracy it was still operating at the behest of foreign interests (ex. Shell in Nigeria, Firestone in Liberia, Exxonmobil in Indonesia, etc.), who propped up puppet leaders that allowed them to continue to extract resources under the same or similar agreements they enjoyed under colonialism.

I don't think it's a placebo effect. Buffers do a tangible thing. They set input impedance and increase the gain in a signal. Turning on a low or high pass filter does something tangible. Depending on how they're used/designed they'll cut frequencies, which gives the impression of emphasizing others. A charge pump changes the voltage in the circuit. I think this one gets bumped up to 15v (I could be wrong about that). Usually this gives the impression of headroom. If you've ever tried something like the Hudson broadcast, the charge pump in it is switchable from 9v to 27v - it's a huge change.

I probably should have mentioned that your original post calls this circuit magical and mysterious and I was partially responding to that. It's not. It looks over-engineered and I'm dubious that it does something that a different buffer or even an eq pedal couldn't do, but that's my own take. I don't think there's anything wrong with buying one. I have a ton of pedals. 80% of which are extremely redundant.

It's a buffer with a charge pump and three switches that drop different passive EQ filters into the circuit.

From what I can tell from the reverse engineered schematics it's a dual sided op-amp buffer (as opposed to something like a transistor based jfet buffer), kind of like what a klon uses, three passive tone filters built around dropping different cap/resistor combos into the circuit, an "effects loop" aka a buffer bypass for anything that misbehaves when the guitars output impedance is changed before the effect (range master, germanium fuzzes), and an overbuilt power section with an unusual amount of power filtering (there are so many electrolytic caps in this part).

I will not comment on whether I think it's worth the pricetag.

I'm not indicting capitalism. My point was that capitalism isn't responsible for the last century of social improvement.

No I'm not. Capital usually refers to the individuals or corporate bodies that control or direct investment. Capital is the anticident to capitalism.

This post is completely absurd. All of these things have happened in spite of capitalism and they've developed simultaneously in non-capitalist states. We (mostly) have access to clean drinking water because of environmental activism that forced companies to stop dumping industrial waste in bodies of water. We have access to healthcare because activists maneuvered politically to ensure it became a right, not a privilege. That's to say nothing of developing capitalist countries that offer none of these privileges to their people. Capitalism didn't give us these things. If you spend any amount of time reading about the history of labor or the development of regulatory bodies, capital has hindered social progress wherever possible to avoid any restrictions or taxation. These things were demanded and fought for by the people they were affecting. Industry and finance are owed none of the credit.