<i>&quot;We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn&#x27;t slowed down yet.&quot;</i><p>If by &quot;we&quot;, you mean &quot;citizens in the most prosperous cities of the world&quot;, then yes.<p>If you mean &quot;people in most of the USA&quot;, then I have some news for you: the train&#x27;s wheels are locked, and sparks are flying while everything skids to a stop. It&#x27;s absolutely shocking how much of the country has declined in prosperity in my lifetime. The smaller cities near where I grew up -- places that were thriving small towns as recently as the 1980s -- are nearly all trapped in downward spirals of poverty, debt and addiction.<p>If you mean &quot;the citizens of this planet&quot;, well...for most people, the train never left the station. Even in modern &quot;success stories&quot; like China, you don&#x27;t have to try very hard to find appalling levels of poverty and despair. A few have become incredibly wealthy, but mostly, people are struggling to keep up. In the third-world? Forget it. Yeah, people can pay for cellphones now, while they&#x27;re dying of preventable diseases due to filthy water.<p>Optimism is one thing, but it takes a Silicon Valley (aka Leibnitzian) view of the world to claim that this is a &quot;golden age&quot;. Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates (or just barely inches forward).