Great essay. I would quibble with the following though:
> [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.
The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity.
Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means that technology actually depletes opportunity at the same time as it increase ability. Which I think means that we're actually going toward integration, not fragmentation. Only this time we don't need another WWII to integrate society because it's already happening, it's just less visible.
E.g. the vast majority of the traditional media is controlled by the same six corporations. And to quote Fred Wilson's 2015 wrap up, "10 of the top 12 mobile apps are owned by Apple, Facebook, and Google."
There's no question that individuals are way more free than they were in 1950 or whatever. But I think it's more analogous to free-as-in-beer, as opposed to free-as-in-speech.
When I was a lad I got my hand on a great prize: a copy of Delphi 3 (already obsolete by then), which got me started coding. Today anybody can download much better tools (Visual studio, IntelliJ, etc for free). Any question you have can be searched on the internet, etc. Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.
That's ability, not opportunity. (Ability is what you can do, whereas opportunity relates to markets, regulation, social capital, etc.)
My argument is that everyone has the same 15 or 20 basic human needs, and increasingly each of those needs is being met by two or three global corporations, as opposed to two or three local or national companies. Which means that even if you as the individual are more talented or whatever, there is actually less opportunity to use those talents to fulfill human needs at scale in a profitable way. That's why such a large percentage of employees today work low wage jobs in the service industry, as opposed to physical/digital manufacturing.
And network effects are only one way in which technology has decreased opportunity. Another is environmental degradation. E.g. 300 years ago anyone in manhattan could feed themselves just being sticking their arm in the Hudson river. But now all 100% of those (edible) fish are gone, and all the profits that were made from dumping industrial chemicals into the river have been privatized by the wealthy.
A third way is legal regulation. Every time a new technology comes onto the market the government has to regulate, which often shuts out everyone except the super wealthy from competing. (Want to start a cell phone company? Good luck with that.)
There are more one-in-a-million lottery ticket opportunities than ever before. But for the average person, there is actually much less opportunity for them to be successful. And not just less wealthy relative to the rich because the rich can gather sticks faster or whatever, but less wealthy on an absolute scale because there are no sticks left to gather.
It's nice to talk about making furniture and fixing up cars or whatever, but I think the number of fortunes that have actually been created by making wealth without externalizing massive costs onto the poor and middle class are probably few and far between.
Seconded. I learned assembly code on a DOS 2.0 machine by disassembling tons of random bytes and making a hex->assembly lexicon that I could use to write programs in hex. Not because I was trying to be hardcore, but because I was in an information, and software, and hardware desert. My kid, on the other hand, has a 24-hour, 50 gigabit connection to any information he wants, a computer made in 2015, and his choice of nearly any IDE and any programming language he could possibly want.
> Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.
The only problem is that it's increased for everyone else, too. Used to be you were a king if you had a board with a nail in it. Now everyone's packing Uzis.
And a significant joy of those 'desert' years was the need for and rise of the hacker community which brought learners and tech fans together socially and educationally. That sharing of common experiences and cool hacks is gone now, replaced with near infinite code repositories that send a clear message to neophytes, "There be no dragons ahead, only well trod pavement".
When I made a shareware game using Delphi in the 90s distributed via BBS, tens of thousands of people downloaded it. Now there is so much "stuff" that I have to pay or beg for downloads.
There is no guaranteed formula for success, it is heavily luck dependent. Those who think otherwise are suffering from survivor-ship bias and/or the just world fallacy.
The opportunity is the luck though, since its out of your control, if you take it that the constituent parts of personal behavior that present you with opportunities come from your own motivation.
Luck is far more than just opportunity though; luck is also all the things that didn't happen that could have, things that caused others who followed the exact same path to fail. Sudden disease, unexpected deaths and disasters, all of which are invisible luck for those who haven't been affected by them.
> [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.
The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity.
Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means that technology actually depletes opportunity at the same time as it increase ability. Which I think means that we're actually going toward integration, not fragmentation. Only this time we don't need another WWII to integrate society because it's already happening, it's just less visible.
E.g. the vast majority of the traditional media is controlled by the same six corporations. And to quote Fred Wilson's 2015 wrap up, "10 of the top 12 mobile apps are owned by Apple, Facebook, and Google."
There's no question that individuals are way more free than they were in 1950 or whatever. But I think it's more analogous to free-as-in-beer, as opposed to free-as-in-speech.