At the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children’s lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050.
So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a “polycrisis” – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.
Yet there is one sliver of society where optimism still reigns supreme: Silicon Valley.
