I'm part of this trend and I hate it. I have to be careful who I tell anything to. Many people dislike me for it. The world is so weird. I spend so much time pursuing utility via automation. It's so sad to see it mostly alienate people. Just as all of this stuff is becoming so easy and accessible. It has definitely crushed many childhood ideals. At a young age I observed a world in which people had to work too hard and couldn't focus on making good choices. I wanted them to have more time. Not less. It seems as if more and more people are entering a doom loop. Less aware. Less optimal. More time working. Less time learning. Less aware...
What's really happening is that the class structure of society is being replaced entirely, similar to what happened during the industrial revolution. During the Renaissance, the class system consisted of landed aristocrats => merchants => guilds => working poor. The Industrial Revolution raised the productivity of certain industries so much that the owners of these machines displaced the previously wealthy class, leading to a class system of industrialist/financiers => unionized workers => non-union & service workers.
What's happening now is that "software is eating the world", and displacing the existing networks of production throughout the economy. That's leading to a class system of "those who own the data" (entrepreneurs & executives of large tech companies) => "those who work with the data" (software engineers, and likely hardware engineers & material scientists in the near future) => "everybody else". This transition has just begun, in the grand scheme of things; I'd estimate that we're at the equivalent of around 1900 on the Industrial Revolution timetable. The big losers likely won't be the middle class, who are probably the best positioned (in aggregate - see, it obscures a lot of relevant details) to move into the engineering class. The losers are likely to be the formerly wealthy, the descendants of the former owners & executives of old-line corporations. The landed aristocracy didn't make a great showing during the Industrial Revolution, and it's unlikely that the country-club set will make a great showing during the Information Revolution.
Pick where you want to be in the new world order, and work hard to get there. One thing capitalism definitely does reward is action. The old economic order has just been blown up, but few people realize it yet; that makes it the best time to build the new one.
Big corporates are aggressively moving to dominate technology niches, while still dominating their existing verticals.
* All the banks have strong deal/shopping apps
* Property developers are continuing to build ever larger malls while investing in Amazon-like marketplaces (see Matahari Mall)
* Every big corporate is investing in external startups or growing internal startups and innovation divisions
* Practically all the big startup successes in Singapore, Indonesia and China are owned, often quite directly, by well-connected families or the state
Everyone's aggressively responding to the tech upstarts and trying to control their own turf.
The US-educated scions of well-connected families are especially responsible for techologising their behemoth family businesses and launching modern apps. New local players will have difficulty competing with old money's new generation of leaders.
In other words, what I see here in Asia is the entrenchment of old money. The market is saturated with new entrants, but the leaders are those who are backed by old money, simply because of the firepower that those connections give them. I think this is fundamentally different from the situation in the Valley, where more disinterested VCs (rather than old money) back the new horses.
My assessment is from the gut rather than statistical, so I'd love to be given an alternative view.
This is exactly correct. The GP's post reminded me of The Coming Transformation, a report by VC firm Formation 8: http://formation8.com/resources/the-coming-transformation/
The report draws a similar comparison between the decline of the landed aristocracy during the Second Industrial Revolution and the coming decline of the industrial aristocracy due to "software eating the world."
However, Formation 8 is taking advantage of this opportunity: one of their partners is the scion of a Korean conglomerate, and he's no doubt leveraging his family ties to obtain buy-in from many other HNW families from all over Asia:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-05/why-formati...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-25/sun-yat-se...
Unexplained data: $3500/month one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco. If technologists are on top of the hierarchy, why can't they get society to give them easier access to better housing?
Counter-hypothesis: because the rentier-owners of land, natural resources, and financial assets are actually still the ones on top.
Eh, what you really want to look at is a series of cohorts moving on up as people grow older: a lot of US population growth is from immigration (legal and otherwise) who tend to have less income (which is why they immigrate), and from children born to recent immigrants (who have substantially more children than rich people in this country).
Also, Google "calculated risk blog" and read the last 2 months or so of posts. Pay careful attention to the posts about reduced GDP due to demographics, as well as new household formations lagging due to structural economic issues.
TLDR Ain't nobody moving up in any cohorts. 70% of people make less than they did 12 years ago.