One view of today's world

[podfish]

.. by a demographic that's not as common in this community, as far as I can tell anyway, but I find fascinating. This is from a Reader's Digest-level thought piece (now there's a reference for this community! ) posted on linked-in by a guy named James Altucher. Kind of trite but still, I think it's accurately describing how the world looks to a lot of young people, especially those who would have been called 'yuppies' a while ago.

Everything has turned upside down. FOR THE FIRST GENERATION IN HISTORY, since Julius Caesar, we are on track to make less money than the generation before us. And with $1.2 trillion in college debt to pay back on top of it.

This is not just in America. The entire world is having this problem. This generation will make less than the generation before. We were all told to go to school and get a job and incomes would rise.

We were all told a lie.

Admittedly, we have some good things going for us. I can take any course I want for almost free. I can read books on my kindle.

I have a computer (courtesy of college dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) and I can always see what my friends are up to (courtesy of college dropout Mark Zuckerberg) and I can even diagnose any diseases I have cheaper than ever (courtesy of college dropout Elizabeth Holmes).

I can stay informed if I want (but I don't) courtesy of an expelled college student (Ted Turner) and I can eat healthy (courtesy of college dropout Whole Foods founder John Mackay).

You can say, these are all anecdotes. That's true!

I have no defense. And yet, I can read, write, connect, eat, stay healthy, etc so I have time and energy to learn.

[Valley Oak]

I wonder how they manage to feed and house themselves while they are learning and connecting with their lattes and laptops??? Learning almost for free? Hmmm. Well, if you don't mind accruing a +100k student debt, sure!

.. by a demographic that's not as common in this community, as far as I can tell anyway, but I find fascinating...

[podfish]

I wonder how they manage to feed and house themselves while they are learning and connecting with their lattes and laptops??? Learning almost for free? Hmmm. Well, if you don't mind accruing a +100k student debt, sure!

I know this seems like a marginal part of the world, and I admit it's hard to see how it applies to ag or construction or other trades-style work.

But the world I work in has turned over completely in the last twenty or thirty years to a degree that I think flies below everyone's radar, even within the business itself. There's a reason that athletes, entertainers, financial groups and now internet companies make ungodly amounts of money - they are at the pinnacle of interest from a zillion others, and so if they harvest a little bit from each, it amounts to a ton. So the despite the value of brain surgeons, much less schoolteachers, they can't tap as much money. They deal with retail, not wholesale, numbers of people.

Now with communications being what they are, everyone can project themselves, maybe in limited ways, to millions or billions of people. If you're just putting out cat videos, it still won't be easy to monetize - though you'd maybe be amazed by how much money is generated by cat videos. The reverse is true - millions are putting out their work (or "work", depending on how you feel about it) for essentially free. Maybe just because the cost of distribution is little or nothing so they truly distribute what they do for free, or because getting back small amounts from a small percentage of people exposed to it adds up to enough.

This has resulted in me using free software every day that would have cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars when I started working, and I have access to information and knowledge that I would have had to spend immense amount of (hopefully recompensed) time researching. Sure, it's software and knowledge, which seem intangible and therefore different. It seems real enough when I can find video on how to repair my car when before I'd have had to wheedle info from a mechanic and buy expensive shop manuals. And soon physical devices (robots, but not always in the obvious sense) will be impacting the things and services we spend money on as well.

So this generation is feeling the first impacts of this change. They have access to amazing things for very little expense. The flip side is that as you say, things like rent, food and transportation aren't being transformed as quickly or in ways that make them cheaper. But the value of what many people can do is dropping fast. This is why of all the various rants people on this site go on, and things they express concern about, the ones about the power of the 1% are among the few that resonate with me. The productivity of the world is going up all the time (though that doesn't mean that overpopulation is an imaginary issue) but the economic system that used to do a somewhat piss-poor job of spreading it around is now beginning to fail completely.

How many people work for Facebook compared to those at GM or who were at Carnegie's U.S. Steel? To oversimplify, Adam Smith claimed selfish motives led people to do work that benefited everyone else. That was because of the biblical injunction about not binding the mouths of the kine that were treading that grain, so they got a share. But now the kine aren't a necessary part of the process, so the grain goes straight to the expensive whiskey and none need be wasted on bread for the masses. Looks like we need a new set of organizing principles. The good side is in what he observed about his access to information and more importantly to other people. That's improving all the time, and that's what's good about life and where meaning lies, isn't it? It's the interaction of the economy with the basic essentials of life, the food and shelter we all need, that's causing his cohort so much stress. It's not at all obvious how that's going to work out. The old days of horse & buggy are going, but what brave world we all live in now?