Id argue we're likely relating economic growth (which is measured by contended metrics) to the boom in quality of life we've seen. The problem with this is that the improvements in materials chemistry that have allowed for all these magical things was on the cusp of happening with or without IP. The drive for developing an IP system was more out of necessity in order to capitalize on the coming boom than it was to help that boom occur.

Case in point: look how far LLM's have come since llama hit the public sphere vs. how far organisations like google managed to get, with more time and more resources at their disposal.