I find this surprising. In what way is, in today's world, failure any more catastrophic than at any time in the past?
Are there very many examples of people who have never failed at anything? For the rest of the population who has experienced failures, am I to understand that we're now doomed?
I am also waiting for an explanation of this winner-take-all idea. A couple/few posters have mentioned it. Sounds quite depressing.
Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the highest brackets. The delta between someone in the top 5% and the top 1% has increased markedly. Competition for that 1% slot has increased dramatically. Tenure-track positions now have thousands of applicants.
In tech, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. made tens of thousands of millionaires. Google made, say, thousands. Facebook made, say, hundreds. Instagram made ten. (I exaggerate for comic effect.)
I don't entirely disagree with the authors general point: kids are extremely shielded today, but I don't think he is properly sympathetic to the context in which kids (and parents) find themselves in. To the point of a comical lack of self-awareness. (In fairness this is an article in psychologytoday.)
You're making the classic zero sum game error. And the language of the rest of your reply should reveal this: " Microsoft, Oracle, etc. made tens of thousands of millionaires"
Notice where I quoted you, I emphasized the word "made". This was indeed the correct word to use, because Gates, Ellison, etc., did indeed create something. They got rich not by taking something away from me or you or anyone else. They got rich by building something new, something so compelling that people willingly gave them money, and considered themselves better off having done it.
The creation of Windows, of Oracle, etc., made the world a better place. And some of that betterment is reflecting in the wallets of those guys. They're not holding anything that would rightfully be yours, they made the economic pie bigger, and are enjoying a portion of that growth.
Humans generally rate themselves in relative terms: how are they doing compared to the people "around them". This wealth gradient has become more extreme in the last thirty years, leading to more intense competition for the higher slots. Additionally, modern media has brought more people "around us." I say this descriptively and without any value judgement, simply to explain the current behavior of children and parents.
It's a long conversation that is hard to carry out in HN comments, but suffice to say that despite the fact that I lean stoic, I cut parents and kids quite a lot of slack given the context they find themselves in.
But if there exists a tiny set of super-rich people, that only affects our perceptions, and doesn't do anything to actually make our life worse. Most of us will never even come into contact with the stratospherically rich; why should their theoretical existence bother us?
Disproving my own point a bit... I actually do regularly come into contact with one such person. My employer is a billionaire (or so says Forbes magazine), and I interact with her regularly. But, believe it or not, she's a real person. She drives her own car, I've bumped into her at CostCo, and so on. And I'm really glad that she is so successful, because her success is the success of the company that puts food on my table, pays my mortgage, etc. I can see that it's her skill, her work, that has built the enterprise, and I'm grateful that she continues to invest those into its success. And for what it's worth, I know that she personally feels the responsibility of the livelihood of a couple of thousand employees on her shoulders.
It's funny how the obesity epidemic started in the 1980's too...