The pie was smaller back in the day, but it was sliced more evenly.
If real income had kept up with productivity gains, we might still live in a world where ordinary people could afford to invent and patent expensive new forms of recreation.
It still happens, but only the extremely wealthy can participate in their devopment. Water-jet hoverboards, VR, green homesteading...
I personally have prototyped an idea for a small, cheap, flexible consumer product that I would love to build and sell, but I don't have 7 figures to burn if it doesn't work out - I can't even afford a house on a low 6-figure salary, nevermind saving enough to start a business! So it will remain a pipe dream until some large organization with loads of capital picks the low-hanging fruit.
From what I've seen, that's a good way to give the drop-ship economy-of-scale undercutters a head start.
Honestly, I think something like as-seen-on-TV would work better for a novel widget idea. You could sell an initial run all at once, and fund future development if it turned out to be popular: I guess the modern equivalent would be Instagram or YouTube ads. But I don't have enough capital to build up enough stock for a launch, when the runway for clones is about 4 months from the point where a mainland factory catches wind of your idea.
The incentive to actually implement and sell an idea once you see that it can be done cheaply and easily doesn't exist in our current economy, unless you already have so much capital that you don't need to work. It's a frustrating catch-22.
If real income had kept up with productivity gains, we might still live in a world where ordinary people could afford to invent and patent expensive new forms of recreation.
It still happens, but only the extremely wealthy can participate in their devopment. Water-jet hoverboards, VR, green homesteading...
I personally have prototyped an idea for a small, cheap, flexible consumer product that I would love to build and sell, but I don't have 7 figures to burn if it doesn't work out - I can't even afford a house on a low 6-figure salary, nevermind saving enough to start a business! So it will remain a pipe dream until some large organization with loads of capital picks the low-hanging fruit.