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I think this has a lot to do with the widespread availability of information on the internet and much more efficient markets than people realize. We think about this in the context of trading and arbitrage, but it increasingly applies to everything.
A few hundred years ago, basic information about the market in the next village was enough for a profitable career as a middleman. Today, when I can look up week-over-week sales estimates for Chipotle outlets nationwide derived from a cross validated combination of bluetooth beacon and credit card data on Bloomberg in 20 seconds, a few large hedge funds go to extreme lengths for tiny slivers of additional data to drive alpha.
The same thing happened in employment markets, and is responsible for a lot of the extreme neuroticism of the upper-middle class. 50 years ago, third-world strivers and domestic peasants wouldn’t even have any idea how to guide their children to become doctors and investment bankers, wouldn’t even know how you apply (many barely knew many PMC jobs even existed). Today they can Google it in 5 minutes, which is why medical school and Goldman Sachs application numbers keep going up even as the number of places remain the same, making it ever harder for the established PMC to guarantee their children the same quality of life.
Online dating kind of did the same thing, opened markets, made things more efficient. Instead of being limited to their own circle, people were now in competition with everyone for everyone. A more efficient market creates more losers, not more winners. Inefficiency is what creates a large middle class - in sex, in income, perhaps even in fitness. This was Marx’s big mistake, there is no tendency for the rate of profit to fall toward zero, just for all the profit to become increasingly concentrated among the very most intelligent, as market friction evaporates.
"For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically"
-Will Durant
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