Be careful with the word &quot;aggregate&quot;, it obscures a lot of the complexity of what&#x27;s going on.  In aggregate, for example, the average person will remain...average.  That&#x27;s not a useful conclusion when looking at absolute wealth (which nobody really cares about anyway - the working poor today have more information available to them than a corporate CEO did 20 years ago, yet it doesn&#x27;t do much good for them), nor is it all that useful when predicting how to raise <i>your</i> social status (which a good number of people <i>do</i> care about).<p>What&#x27;s really happening is that the class structure of society is being replaced entirely, similar to what happened during the industrial revolution.  During the Renaissance, the class system consisted of landed aristocrats =&gt; merchants =&gt; guilds =&gt; working poor.  The Industrial Revolution raised the productivity of certain industries so much that the owners of these machines displaced the previously wealthy class, leading to a class system of industrialist&#x2F;financiers =&gt; unionized workers =&gt; non-union &amp; service workers.<p>What&#x27;s happening now is that &quot;software is eating the world&quot;, and displacing the existing networks of production throughout the economy.  That&#x27;s leading to a class system of &quot;those who own the data&quot; (entrepreneurs &amp; executives of large tech companies) =&gt; &quot;those who work with the data&quot; (software engineers, and likely hardware engineers &amp; material scientists in the near future) =&gt; &quot;everybody else&quot;.  This transition has just begun, in the grand scheme of things; I&#x27;d estimate that we&#x27;re at the equivalent of around 1900 on the Industrial Revolution timetable.  The big losers likely won&#x27;t be the middle class, who are probably the best positioned (in aggregate - see, it obscures a lot of relevant details) to move into the engineering class.  The losers are likely to be the formerly wealthy, the descendants of the former owners &amp; executives of old-line corporations.  The landed aristocracy didn&#x27;t make a great showing during the Industrial Revolution, and it&#x27;s unlikely that the country-club set will make a great showing during the Information Revolution.<p>Pick where you want to be in the new world order, and work hard to get there.  One thing capitalism definitely <i>does</i> reward is action.  The old economic order has just been blown up, but few people realize it yet; that makes it the best time to build the new one.