I'm pretty sure that our parents had new technology, too. More to the point, I'll bet that when they were 23, they were bragging about how their new technology was going to allow them to change the world. It's almost a cliche, really.
Granted, our didn't have computers or the internet; technology has marched onward. But regardless of whether we're discussing the modem or the mimeograph, the story of the young usurping the old with 'modern' technology is a classic.
Yes, it's the beginning of a fairly tale, a standard mythological motif - by which I don't mean it is fictional or trivial, but that it is universal. BTW: Matt does acknowledge that the next generation will do the same to his (at the end).
He's right about greater productivity - but if everyone is more productive, then the competitive bar simply resets at a higher level. It's an endless trudge, if the finish line recedes as you approach...
There's a sophisticated argument that with a smaller firm-size, you have more CEO's. The problem with competitive success remains that not everyone can be a winner - it's a zero-sum game by definition. But everyone can have a family. Everyone can have the satisfaction of improvement and mastery. Everyone can enjoy the thrill of risking a lesser thing for a greater thing. Everyone can take pride in effort and sacrifice for a worthy goal.
And ultimately, these things are immensely more satisfying than vacationing for months in Europe.
(Actually, the research in question had caveats: absolute income correlated with happiness until one's basic physical & health needs were satisfied. After that point, it didn't matter: instead, what mattered was how well you were doing relative to your peer group. So for there to be winners, there had to be losers as well.)
People have their own definitions of winning. If I want to be a millionaire and I have 1000 dollars in savings I am a loser. If I want to own a home and I rent an apartment I am a loser. The parameters of the game are not well defined and the rules are not universal.
I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker from the Midwest and for the first time I understood how the defition of winning and happiness differs. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life where I needed something and couldn't have it whereas my co-worker had to work hard for everything he has. His definition of "winning" is having a nice place to sleep, being able to eat a nice meal, and go out every once in a while. And once he has that, maybe a little bit nicer place to sleep, a little bit nicer meals, and going out more often. What other people have is not important to him, therefore, in his world everyone can win.
My definition of winning pretty much requires losers. I don't understand how you can consider yourself a winner unless you are more/better/faster/stronger/etc. than someone else.
Some people have their scale of success calibrated to be absolute (my co-worker), and other have it calibrated to be relative (myself). I hypothesize that the absolutes are happy more often but the relatives have the drive to achieve a greater magnitude of success albeit less of the time, which explains why some people are happy with (relatively) little and others are unhappy even with extreme wealth.
Not all technology is created equal. The ability to communicate, coordinate, and compute has reduced the optimum size of the firm in many industries. What is more important, it has reduced the minimum size of a successful firm. Steam power and heavy industry, by contrast, had the opposite effect.
Ultimately, you both can be right. It's about where you stand relative to everyone else. If the younger folks are enabling themselves via tech faster than the older, it should be possible to position yourself better.
I think it's more a testament to the improvements we've made in technology how easy it is for kids to become BIG deals quickly with good ideas.
That's true, but I think that a serious argument can be made for the last few decades being the first point in time in humanity's recent history in which we are absolutely capable of achieving it.
There's definitely a shift going on. I suppose there has always been a shift going on - but it seems like throughout history the "shifts" have been relatively evenly spaced with regards to how they affect the "average persons" lifestyle, and what new things they enable us to do. The "shifting" going on right now, due largely to the advent of the internet, has obvious potential to radically change a lot of things about they way people live and organize.
It's become so much easier for a couple of people to start up a business doing what they like to do, and make a living off of it in the last decade that it's hard to believe - and this is almost all due to massive increases in the ability of people to communicate over large distances.
I'm young, but I really think that we may be living in a time where something closer to "utopia" for humanity (if you can ignore the cliche term) has moved, in about ten years time, from being the stuff of "nice ideals that simply won't happen" to "oh my this could actually happen, and is indeed happening in some areas".
Of course, just because we have the ability to doesn't mean we will. I would guess that as the average person becomes more aware of the sheer scale of the things we could be accomplishing that we will continue to move closer to all the failed promises and visions of the past, at an increasing rate.
To put it another way, the promises of the last century that you speak of were made by people who saw the potential of what could be done, but the advances were not enough to push the small groups ability to successfully implement things to the point where they could do so easily, or without a lot of capitol - large infrastructures, and people working 40 hours a week in said things were, at least partially, still necessary as business expanded to utilize the advances.
Now (for example) we have people paying their rent and bills by selling shirts that they silkscreen themselves in their homes, and they can sell to a global market with relative ease. A passionate individual or small group of people do not have nearly the amount of an uphill battle that they would have had even 5 years ago.
Granted, a lot of these people aren't going to be getting rich - but for a lot of people my age and younger (I'm 23), simply being able to have a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs without having to succumb to the 9 to 5 doing something that we absolutely do not care about at all (and that could probably be automated) is incentive enough.
Ours is the first generation with the technology to enable it.