This uber-productivity creates growth, but not necessarily
prosperity. Giants of the industrial age, including General Motors and
IBM, employed hundreds of thousands of workers. The spoils were
carved up more fairly than today. Investors and executives got rich,
though not billionaires, and workers, many of them unionized, could
buy homes and motorboats and send their kids to college.
That’s the America that millions of angry voters want back. They
tend to blame global trade and immigrants, but the tech economy, and
its fetishization, is as much to blame. It has dumped an enormous
amount of wealth into the laps of a small cohort of investors and
incredibly talented workers—leaving much of the workforce behind
(perhaps believing the opiate of the masses will be streaming video
content and a crazy-powerful phone).
Together the horsemen employ about 418,000 employees—the
population of Minneapolis.^5 If you combine the value of the Four
Horsemen’s public shares of stock, it comes to $2.3 trillion.^6 That
means our 2.0 version of Minneapolis contains nearly as much wealth
as the gross domestic product of France, a developed nation of 67
million citizens.^7 This affluent city will thrive while all the rest of
Minnesota scrounges for investment, opportunity, and jobs.
This reckoning is happening. It’s the distortion created by the
steady march of digital technology, the dominance of the Four, and a
belief that the “innovator” class deserves an exponentially better life.
It’s dangerous for society, and it shows no sign of slowing down. It
hollows out the middle class, which leads to bankrupt towns, feeds the
angry politics of those who feel cheated, and underpins the rise of
demagogues. I’m not a policy expert, and I won’t weigh down this book
with a lot of prescriptions I’m not qualified to make. However, the
distortions are visible and disturbing.
Purpose
How are we using our brain power, and to what purpose? Think back
to the middle of the twentieth century. When it came to computing
power, we were impoverished. Computers were big primitive
tabulators, with transistors gradually replacing vacuum tubes. There