I recall an anecdote about a college professor who had students pull cards out of a bucket. What card you pulled out of a bucket determined your fate as a perso

I recall an anecdote about a college professor who had students pull cards out of a bucket. What card you pulled out of a bucket determined your fate as a person born during the Middle Ages. Most of the cards were peasant or died at age n (where n < 25). I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming. Going back to why I replied, the sad fact about an information age economy is that working with information or your community (e.g. coding or using that information to trade) is leveraged and worth more than pure manual labor. At the highest level, you have CEOs with insane networks of personal relationships (I knew a family friend once who, with one phone call, got the best eye surgeon in the state to do an emergency operation on one of his friend's friends) and surgeons who can save lives. At the medium level, you have coders. From a rational economics standpoint, everyone is expendable. But the replacement costs are quite high for those higher up the power-law curve of the information economy.