Three generations isn’t a long time. It’s about a century, close enough that the first person in this story and the last one overlapped, and far enough that the rules of the game changed completely, twice.
My grandfather
The available options were agriculture and livestock. That is close to the literal set. You could grow something or raise something, then sell it to people near enough to reach.
Every constraint was physical: land you could work, and the distance a cart could cover before produce spoiled. Weather decided the year for you and didn’t consult. The market was whoever lived close enough to buy, and the ceiling on the whole enterprise was set by how much one family could physically do between sunrise and sunset.
The interesting property of that economy is how little leverage existed anywhere in it. Working twice as hard produced roughly twice as much, and no more. There was no mechanism by which a good idea could multiply, no way to make the same effort serve a thousand people instead of ten. A brilliant farmer and a competent one differed by a margin, not by an order of magnitude.
My father
Born 1956, and the ground had already moved before he started.
Concrete was available and ordinary, which sounds mundane and isn’t. It changed what an individual could build and how fast. Construction became something with a supply chain behind it, rather than something you did entirely from what was to hand. Supermarkets appeared, which meant distribution was suddenly somebody else’s business; you could make a thing without also having to solve how it reached people.
The constraint loosened from physical output to access. Skills could be acquired and applied to more than one job. Value could be added at one step of a chain without owning the whole chain. Someone could be good at a trade and have that be a career rather than a subsistence.
But the market was still fundamentally local. Larger than a cart ride, and still a place. You served the people who could reach you. Where you were born set a ceiling, and moving was the only way to raise it, which is why that generation moved so much.
Mine
My location barely matters.
I write this from one country, working on systems used in another, for a company registered in a third. Not one part of that arrangement is unusual any more, and every part of it would have been unimaginable to the man growing food.
The constraint that dissolved is distance, and dissolving it changed more than reach.
The market is everyone with a connection. The question changed from who can reach me to who has this problem, which is a completely different question with a completely different answer.
Infrastructure is rented, not owned. My grandfather needed land. My father needed premises and equipment. I need an account and a card. The capital required to begin has collapsed to almost nothing, and with it the requirement to be born into capital.
Institutional gaps are routable. If banking where you live is poor, incorporating elsewhere is a form you fill in online. If the local market doesn’t value what you do, it isn’t the market you’re in. Problems that were once absolute (you were simply stuck with the institutions you were born under) became logistics.
Leverage exists everywhere. The thing entirely missing from the first economy. Work done once can serve any number of people, and something written today can be read for years by people you’ll never meet, which is the difference between effort that adds and effort that compounds.
What this actually means
Two conclusions. One obvious, one less so.
The obvious one: the ceiling moved enormously, in three generations of the same family, with no change in the underlying people. Whatever my grandfather’s capability was, the economy he was in had no mechanism to express it beyond a few kilometres. That wasn’t a fact about him.
The less obvious one: each generation’s constraints were invisible from inside. Nobody ever experienced “I am limited by distance.” They experienced a set of options that felt like the complete list. The constraint only became visible once it was gone, at which point it looked obvious and slightly absurd.
Which raises the useful question, and the reason this is worth writing down rather than just being family history:
What currently feels like the complete list of options, and will look arbitrary to someone in fifty years?
I don’t know. But I’d rather guess badly than not guess, so here are the candidates I’d bet on, in descending order of confidence:
- That work requires an employer. The unit of economic participation has been “a job at a company” for so long that it reads as natural rather than as a specific arrangement with a specific history. The infrastructure for smaller units already exists and is improving quickly.
- That expertise requires a person. I don’t believe judgment gets automated. What has been rationed, by who you happen to know, is access to competent judgment in a domain you don’t know, and that rationing is visibly weakening.
- That physical presence is required for anything. Already half-gone for knowledge work and barely started for everything else.
- That legal and financial identity is tied to a place you were born. The hardest and slowest one, and the one whose removal would matter most to the most people.
Some of those are wrong. The pattern says at least one isn’t, because there always has been one, and because the rate at which they fall has been increasing rather than slowing.
The part that did not change
I want to state this plainly, because the story reads like pure progress and it isn’t quite.
None of these shifts removed the need to make something people actually want. My grandfather could grow food nobody bought, and I can ship software that solves a problem nobody has, faster and more cheaply than he could have failed.
The distribution problem got solved. The value problem didn’t move at all.
If anything it got harder. When your market was a town, the demand was known: people needed food and shelter, and you could see it on their faces. When your market is everyone, the demand is unknown, and finding it is now the difficult part of the work. Cheap building has not moved that part at all; if anything it tempts teams to grow wider instead of finding it.
The bottleneck travelled from land, to access, to judgment. That last one has no infrastructure you can rent, which is exactly why it’s the part worth protecting as the tools get better at everything around it.