I'll bite. This is pretty much all I think about anymore, so, after so many years of doing it, the best answer I can come up with is that necessity has been con

I'll bite. This is pretty much all I think about anymore, so, after so many years of doing it, the best answer I can come up with is that necessity has been conflated with profitability. So, if you look around you, you'll find that nearly all endeavors related to sustenance have been saturated. It's difficult to earn a living as an individual in food service, teaching, nursing, transportation, textiles, even construction (when we include downturns in average pay and job security). Or another way to say that is, if you work in a field that isn't scalable (automatable), then your income will approach the incomes of your peers. However, endeavors which are profitable are becoming less saturated. So companies that do nothing related to sustenance are getting billion dollar exits. These endeavors include things like: statistical models to predict what users want so that relevant ads can be shown to them that lower their customer acquisition cost. Or, disruptive technologies that give us what we already had but with more convenience: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/upcoming-ipos-to-watch-in-2019/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/upcoming-ipos-to-w... --- Airbnb: Both? Beyond Meat Inc. (BYND): Necessity Chewy (CHWY): Profitability CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD): Profitability Fiverr International Ltd. (FVRR): Both? Lyft (LYFT): Both? Peloton (PTON): Both? Pinterest (PINS): Profitability Postmates: Both? Robinhood: Profitability Slack (WORK): Profitability The RealReal (REAL): Profitability The We Company (aka WeWork): Both? Uber (UBER): Both? Zoom (ZM): Profitability --- Profitability: 7 Necessity: 1 Both?: 7 Here I'm saying that companies that produce tangible goods or an income stream for their users are necessity-based. Ones that increase efficiency or disrupt/replace an existing industry are profitability-based. For this small sample size, it looks like necessity and profitability are about 50/50. But with ever-increasing wealth inequality, the necessity side is getting squeezed hard. As the middle class shrinks, necessity wages become grouped more strongly towards the poverty side. So if you're working out in the world trying to make rent, you'll never be able to get ahead of the curve enough to do your startup. If you do happen to make it to the other side and become part of the top 10%, you'll have so much money and influence at your disposal that no matter how creative you think you are, you'll underperform against the other 9 entrepreneurs that never made it. Society's realized potential will be 1/10 of what it could be. And that realized potential becomes smaller and smaller as wealth inequality increases. If we want to realize our potential, it starts with reducing the barriers to entry. We need capital for people between the necessity and profitability extremes. So banks either need to start making loans to entrepreneurs again (something between angel investors at $10,000 and venture capitalists at $1 million), or we need something like universal basic income (UBI). This is a macroeconomic argument I'm not seeing much. The microeconomic arguments about discipline and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps are all around us. They self-evidently don't work, as reflected in the unrealized potential of so much capital and technology eating the world, and so little personal wealth (leisure time) available to the masses.