>Some people estimate that a smartphone’s total computing power would have been worth several million dollars in the 1990s[2]. Yet someone with a $500 smartphon

>Some people estimate that a smartphone’s total computing power would have been worth several million dollars in the 1990s[2]. Yet someone with a $500 smartphone today doesn’t consider themselves a millionaire relative to someone from the 90s; we simply cannot quantify the monetary effect of having millions of dollars of 1990s computing power in our pockets[*]. The thing is that if you have millions of dollars of computing power in the 1990s, you have something extremely scarce, so you can trade it for an abundant supply of other things you need. If you have computing power today, it's abundant, while the other things you need are much more scarce. Dollar values here are just illusions hiding the disparity in productivity improvements between industries, as well as the disparities in market concentration, regulatory capture, etc.