It is hard to know what distributism might look like because we have no real-life examples we can point to. The ideals of distributism are noble and I would like to see it realized, but I just don’t see how any kind of governmental structure could actually create and maintain distributism. What would you have? Laws that limit the maximum production capacity any one person could own? When you start with a society with a huge disparity in this regard how do you transition to one with wider distribution of production capability? Re-distribution? That sounds a bit like communism to me. But let’s say that somehow a society got established that achieved the goals of distributism. How would you keep that society from transitioning to what we have now where wealth and production capability are concentrated? I don’t see how it could be done without violating somebody’s civil rights. Of course if you could change human nature so that people were satisfied with their own fair share of production then it would be easy to have distributism.
As to your original question, there is some reason to believe that certain technological achievements could only be possible by concentrating lots of research capability to work on problems that individuals or small groups of people would have no hope of solving. Sure the Wright brothers made a plane, but they could never make a Boeing 787.
