"Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a few people.."
I feel is off base: the last 20 years has seen the absolute carpet-bombing of the very definition of American middle class. An entire new layer of workers (tech workers in their tens upon tens upon tens of thousands) make salaries that blow the old-trend / old-trajectory middle class out of the water.
I understand that the modern tech world has created billionaires in astonishing numbers, but I dislike skipping over the part where vast numbers of people in America are making in some cases full-on double what a without-them income trajectory would see for our middle class. FAANG salaries aren't representative - I get it. But those FAANG salaries are being paid to vast numbers of people - and salaries that what I'll call a "conventional" middle class person blanches at.
Tech cities are experiencing massive inflation in no small part due to this entirely new explosion of what we have to now call the new "upper middle class," at a scale that is unprecedented in the moderate-range past.
Tech has created a wild number of billionaires - I understand that. But it has also created an entirely new, and substantially large, additional income-demographic slice that didn't exit much before.
So to disagree with the author, tech has created unprecedented wealth for a very large number of people.