I’m looking forward to reading this series by Tim Pratley. He’s an author and engineer I have a lot of respect for and I’ve grappled with a lot of similar thoughts he raises here. I always appreciate data-driven arguments and an approach to topics like this based on convincing your audience with evidence.

When everyone has a chance to participate in the economy we get more ideas, more productivity, and more opportunity. Extreme wealth concentration blocks innovation and limits broad prosperity.

This only makes sense to me. I think disagreement arises around what we mean by “participate in the economy”. I’d argue that working for wages to survive is not meaningful participation. When people aren’t free to pursue their ambitions or desired careers for whatever reason (sometimes education is too expensive, or maybe they’re stuck at a current employer because they need to retain certain benefits, maybe they can’t afford to move to where the opportunities are, maybe the job market isn’t recognizing their skills, whatever), that limits their potential contributions to society in ways that only limit innovation and degrade overall prosperity.

My nephews and nieces have entered a workforce that offers none of the opportunities I had. Humanity is on a long-term positive trajectory, driven by knowledge creation and sharing, yet we are clearly self-inflicting unnecessary pain in the short term.

This has been on my mind a lot more since a had a kid earlier this year. The world is already unrecognizable to me relative to when I entered the workforce. The way I got into tech and built my career would never work for someone starting out today. I wonder what the world will be like by the time my child reaches working age. I really hope we’ve figured out some of these problems by then and want to be part of the solution.