In the frame of the article, I think the innovations of the last few decades need to be measured by the economic growth they've created, not their essential com

In the frame of the article, I think the innovations of the last few decades need to be measured by the economic growth they've created, not their essential complexity. So how is our economy doing, then? Corporate profits and shareholder value are soaring, and a lot of these recent "innovations" (gig economy, Amazon warehouses and the broader logistics sector, etc.) seem to be creating many new jobs. And yet, we're looking at vast swaths of [young] American adults in their productive prime who (by the metrics I've seen) own less of America's wealth than ever before, who can barely afford to rent housing and certainly not to buy their own property, and who are—for some mysterious reason, hmm, I wonder what it could be?—not having kids. From a job creation perspective, at least, I can tell you why these new "innovations" are not the economic boon they look like on paper: they create jobs, but many of those jobs are worthless because they don't pay a living wage. In many cases (looking at you, Walmart) it's an open secret that employees essentially must supplement their meagre incomes via welfare programs. I don't know if I totally follow the author's sketch of innovation as a cause of economic growth, but I think the two are at least related. Propertyless, shackled to intractable debt and pecked to the bone by rent-seeking parasites like corporate landlords (natch) and the healthcare industry, most Americans do not have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to pursue innovation and/or entrepreneurship^[1]. They might have the essential hunger, but the aforementioned factors suppress it. Corporate feudalism is rising, and these new barons are using every tool at their disposal to grow their fiefs and maximize the extraction of wealth therefrom. ^[1] Possibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship".