Abundance

Not the bulb. Someone else had the incandescent glass, someone else the battery. What Edison built was everything around it: switches you could turn on and off, generators delivering steady power, wiring, and a meter so the energy could be billed. He thought about the whole system. That is the part people forget and the part that mattered.

This is my extension rather than theirs. We say Millennial the way we say the lightbulb, as though it were one thing. It is not. It is many components strung together, layered over years, until the assembled result gets a single name. The iPhone works the same way. It invented almost none of its parts and systematized all of them.

Research on a lizard whose saliva lets it go months without eating became a diabetes treatment and eventually the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Nobody funded that expecting Ozempic. It is the cleanest illustration I know that the biggest breakthroughs come from work that looked pointless, and that we are steadily defunding exactly that kind of work in the name of reducing risk.

Not fully. Their framing is that someone asleep from 1835 to 1905 wakes to skyscrapers, cars, film, and the hamburger, while someone asleep from 1995 to 2025 wakes to faster computers. It is a powerful comparison and it is not universally true, because biotech and AI are real. The general point, that visible life-changing innovation has slowed, is still defensible.

Film in Hollywood, finance in New York, software in the Valley, because the people who want to make it have to move there. Concentration of talent produces innovation, with real downsides. I watch this happening around me with biotech in Raleigh-Durham. It is also how generations form, since shared geography produces shared formative experience.