This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."
Elon Musk just used a joke to perform an autopsy on the American economy.
Two economists go for a hike. They find a pile of shit. One pays the other $100 to eat it.
They keep walking. Find another pile. The second economist pays $100 back to eat that one.
They stop. Neither man gained a dollar. Both ate shit for nothing.
But on paper they just generated $200 in GDP.
Musk: “That basically would count as a job. This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.”
That is not a punchline. That is the operating system of the federal government.
Every time a politician celebrates “record job creation” this is what they are describing. Not output. Not value. Not progress. Motion.
The entire bureaucratic machine exists to manufacture friction and then invoice for it.
Compliance layers built to justify the next compliance layer. Oversight committees that produce nothing but the need for more oversight. Consulting firms hired to audit the work of other consulting firms.
Trillions circulating through systems that have never produced a single thing you can hold in your hands. But the GDP number ticks up. So everyone applauds.
The shit gets eaten. The scoreboard moves. Nobody asks what actually got built.
This is why Washington treats AI like a five alarm fire.
AI does not play the friction game. It does not form a committee. It does not schedule a review. It does not file 400 pages of paperwork no one will ever read.
It just solves the problem.
And that is the one thing the machine cannot survive.
The government does not tax results. It taxes the process. The longer the process, the deeper the cut.
AI compresses a ten day workflow into seconds. There is nothing left to bill. Nothing left to tax. Nothing left to skim.
So they will spend the next decade warning you that AI threatens the economy.
What they will never say is what it actually threatens.
The illusion that activity equals progress.
The $200 economy where both men ate shit and called it a job.
The machines are not coming for your purpose.
They are coming to prove that half the economy never had one.