In his 1926 short story “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” At the time, his world seemed to be fracturing into three classes—those who could buy and do whatever they wanted, those who were constrained to living on the fruits of their own labor, and those who wished they or their children might someday be in one of the other two groups.
In previous ages, the trappings of class tended to be quite visible. The clothes and jewelry you wore, your accent, which railcar you rode in or deck your stateroom was on broadcast to those around you where you fit into a hierarchy of society largely measured by your material wealth.
But in today’s world of blue-jeans-wearing CEOs, twenty-something startup billionaires, private aircraft, and carry-on luggage, identifying the most fortunate among us is a more difficult task. For those at the very top, Forbes magazine publishes an annual ranking, simultaneously a source of pride and embarrassment for many on the list. But for an astonishing array of extremely wealthy people, keeping their riches out of sight is something of an obsession.
It’s one thing to assert your status among your peers, at the Pebble Beach clubhouse or a Four Seasons resort in Hawaii, but standing out at the local movie theater or your kid’s soccer league awards ceremony is another story. People don’t like it, and they don’t like you. So you’re careful to fit in. You don’t mention the Porsche Speedster your husband gave you for your twentieth anniversary, the vacation home you just bought on a whim in Carmel, or what your personal trainer said when he stopped by that morning for your daily workout. Better to be discreet.
I’m going to be indiscreet, not to show off but to make an important point. Some of the readers of this book will be nodding in agreement—yep, that’s the way I live too. A larger group will likely be put off or possibly appalled. Some will simply find what I have to say so outside their own experience they may doubt my veracity. My only request is that you stay tuned for the punch line.
My wife and I live in a nice place. Our home sits on an acre of flat land, graced with majestic oak, redwood, and sycamore trees yet only a short walk from movie theaters, parks, fine restaurants, and just about every imaginable amenity and service. Just before sundown, hundreds of crows often flock to our giant sycamore for a raucous gabfest before turning in for the night, no doubt to discuss their murderous ways. Mated pairs of mourning doves perch stoically on overhead cables to keep tabs on their offspring, occasionally under the watchful eye of a majestic red-tailed California hawk. Bored? You can sit in the graceful Adirondack chairs around the fire pit, play chess on a life-sized outdoor chess board, laze in the gazebo by the pool, take a dip in the hot tub, cook on the outdoor barbeque, relax on the porch swing, play croquet on the front lawn, or stroll through the manicured gardens that brim with multicolored roses for much of the year. Like to listen to music outdoors? There are two separate high-quality sound systems concealed in different areas.
Our house was built in 1904 by a famous architect in the Georgian style. The first floor has ten-foot ceilings in a forty-by-twenty-five-foot living room, a billiard room, a theater room with projection system decorated like a Viennese bordello, a kitchen with four different sitting areas, two refrigerators, two microwaves, two sinks, and three dishwashers, all of which come in handy for parties. But the real jewel is the dining room. It was purchased in Europe by a previous resident, who had it disassembled and reconstructed on site. It sports dark wood paneling, a unique Jacobean floral design on the plaster ceiling, and an original cast-iron fireback dated 1606. Seats up to twenty-four comfortably for dinner. The second floor contains five separate suites, one for each of our four kids and a larger one for us, incorporating a second projection theater system. The third floor has my office, a workout room, and a guest suite with two bedrooms and a bath with an original claw-foot freestanding tub. Almost forgot to mention the wine cellar and elevator.
We can handle about 150 people in the house for a party without breaking a sweat. But for larger groups, we need to use the guesthouse. This two-story structure in the style of a New England farmhouse has two baths, three bedrooms, three refrigerators, two kitchens, and an open downstairs floor plan that can accommodate around 200 guests.
I’m sincerely, truly grateful for my life, and particularly for my wife. I am thankful for my family, my friends, and the freedom to basically do whatever I want with my remaining years, like playing piano and writing this book. Believe me, it hasn’t always been like this. I’ve lived in tenements on the South Side of Chicago, been beaten and robbed at knifepoint, taken the subway home from my warehouse job in Brooklyn to a roach-infested studio rental in sub-freezing temperatures.
You’ve been very patient, so here’s the punch line: according to the latest statistics, based on income, we’re not even in the fabled top 1 percent of Americans. That is to say, more than one out of a hundred people earn more each year than we do, and presumably live higher on the proverbial hog.1
And I know plenty of people who make us look like paupers. One of our friends owns seven residential properties, including a ranch, houses in Big Sur, Sun Valley, and Puerto Vallarta, and fifty-three acres of prime Pacific oceanfront property a short drive from his main palatial residence in Silicon Valley. Other neighbors have horse stables, jogging trails, and collections of antique cars. There’s one house a short distance from us that’s over thirty thousand square feet set on six acres, with both indoor and outdoor lap pools and a chapel with a full-sized pipe organ. Paul Simon performed as the entertainment for one friend’s private birthday party. Some have not one private jet but two—in case one family member wants to spend the weekend in Aspen while the other prefers Palm Springs. Another bought a ten-story hotel and several surrounding downtown buildings to start his own private school for entrepreneurship, as a hobby. Some host fund-raisers for a parade of supplicating politicians, including sitting and former presidents.
By contrast, I do my own laundry each weekend. My wife does the dishes and takes the kids to and from school every day. I drive a fifteen-year-old car because the damn thing just won’t break down. (Don’t buy a Lexus—they are too well made and last too long.) My wife doesn’t care much for expensive jewelry, so she’s happy to wear earrings from Claire’s, a store that sells shiny baubles to teenagers.
But even our wealthier friends and neighbors aren’t among the richest in the land—most don’t come close to qualifying for the Forbes list. That honor is reserved for people with multiple billions of dollars.
Jeff Bezos is on this list, with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $32 billion (as of March 2011). What does that number mean? Let’s assume an 11 percent annual return, which is the average return on equities over the past fifty years. That’s $3.5 billion a year in appreciation, or $9.6 million per day, including weekends.
By comparison, the average lifetime earnings of a U.S. college graduate is $2.3 million, and the average high school graduate earns about $1.3 million.2 Jeff makes more on a Saturday spent on the golf course than the other college grads in his foursome, taken together, will earn in their entire lifetimes.
Here’s a more disturbing comparison. In the depths of the recent recession (2009), the California state budget ran a deficit of $26.3 billion, far less than Jeff Bezos’s net worth.3 Efforts to close this gap in subsequent years included pay cuts and forced furloughs for state workers of three days a month, approximately a 10 percent reduction in K–12 and community college funding, a shortened school year, early prison releases and summary parole, and reductions in the Medi-Cal program. These cuts disproportionately affected the aged, blind, disabled, children, preschool programs, emergency food assistance, pregnant women, and women enrolled in the California Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Program (BCCTP), to name a few.4
In no way am I suggesting that Jeff didn’t earn or does not deserve his wealth. He’s certainly not in any way responsible for California’s budget challenges and governance failures. On the contrary, in his spare time, he supports a number of projects and programs that serve the public interest. For instance, he gave $15 million for brain research at Princeton University and $20 million to the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.5
But, as with increasing computing power, at some point, quantitative differences become qualitative. Having more than a few tens of millions of dollars under your control today doesn’t affect your lifestyle or your ability to help out friends and relatives in a pinch. It gives you power. The power to sway elections, influence politicians and legislation, impact the public agenda—but mostly, the power to divert society’s resources toward matters of personal interest to you.
For instance, Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin, a company working to reduce the cost of spaceflight so private individuals (as opposed to governments) can explore the solar system. This is laudable, and it’s certainly his right to do it, but might the resources devoted to this high-minded effort be better applied elsewhere, or perhaps be directed by more than a single individual’s passions? Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, remarked, “For better or worse, the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”6
Tourists in Seattle in 2000 may have been delighted by a visit to the Experience Music Project Museum, originally inspired by and dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, but they might wonder why the city hosted an $80 million homage to this particular pop artist rather than his equally talented deceased contemporaries like Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison, much less great American composers like Aaron Copland or George Gershwin.7 Having jammed with Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, on guitar, it’s no mystery to me. He loves and emulates Jimi Hendrix’s playing style (and I might add is very good at it), which is why he personally financed this particular civic project.
The list of wealthy people who have purchased or supported sports teams, or even whole sports, seems endless. For instance, Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison invested $300 million in the America’s Cup yacht race. Thom Weisel, founder of Montgomery Securities, personally organized a bailout of USA Cycling, the governing body for U.S. bicycle racing, in 2000.
There’s a widespread belief that for the economy to thrive, we need a robust and healthy middle class. The reasoning is that there needs to be strong demand for consumer goods, and who would buy them if not the middle class? Unfortunately this is completely mistaken.
For much of its existence, ancient Egypt was ruled by a single absolute monarch. The pharaoh, believed to literally be the child of the sun god Ra, personally owned all the resources of the kingdom. A large bureaucracy of administrators and clergy administered the distribution of land and collection of taxes on the pharaoh’s behalf. During many critical periods, after meeting the minimum physical needs of the public for food and shelter, much of Egypt’s excess wealth went into construction of a single monolithic building—a pyramid to serve as the pharaoh’s tomb. These magnificent structures, coated with highly polished white limestone, likely gleamed so brightly in the midday sun that one was forced to avert one’s eyes. The size of the workforce required to build one of the larger pyramids is in dispute, but most modern scientific estimates peg it at around twenty-five thousand workers laboring for a sustained period of two or more decades.8
You might think that this sort of wasteful endeavor in the service of a single person might cause an empire to collapse under the threat of violent revolution. But ancient Egypt had a relatively stable political and economic system for several thousand years, something that seems almost beyond hope for modern political entities. A common misconception is that these workers were slaves. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that they were volunteers, or at least citizens fulfilling compulsory public-service requirements. In contrast to much of the population, they mostly dined on meat.
For much of the relevant time frame, the population of ancient Egypt was around 1.5 million. A proportionately comparable workforce in the United States today to the one that built the pyramids would be about 5 million workers. To put this in perspective, the United States has about 1.5 million active-duty military personnel, second only to China. At its peak in 1967, NASA’s U.S. space program employed thirty-six thousand people.9 Walmart is the largest private employer in the United States, with 1.3 million domestic workers.
It’s hard to imagine 5 million people working on the pet project of some Internet mogul, particularly because the cost would be in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars annually. But ten times this number could work for the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households on a continuing basis. And increasingly, that’s what happening.
The top 1 percent of households cumulatively hold slightly more than one-third of the total wealth in the United States. That pencils out to about $20 trillion. Assuming an annual rate of return of 10 percent, they could afford to spend $2 trillion a year, every year, on whatever they want. At the U.S. worker’s median salary of approximately $30,000, this would employ over 60 million people, or 40 percent of the total workforce. At an average salary of $20,000, which is currently earned by nearly 40 percent of the workforce, the wealthiest 1 percent could employ two out of every three workers in the United States.10 Presumably the rest would be needed to provide the basics for those lucky enough to land a job working for the rich.
What might this look like? As with most such stark pictures, it’s not realistic. Two out of three people wouldn’t be commuting to private homes to rub the feet of the rich. But the truth isn’t as far distant from this scenario as you might hope.
The first reason this isn’t happening is that the wealthy aren’t spending all they could—not by a long shot. This money is being reinvested and put to other uses, with the returns piling up in personal “rainy day,” trust, and retirement funds. This is the proverbial rich getting richer.
The second reason is that you can’t see most of the labor devoted to the whims of the rich because it is embodied in goods and services. If my wife purchases a Gucci handbag for $1,000, that money is going in two directions. Gucci shareholders are getting about $300, but the remaining $700 is going mainly to pay people to make it, either directly (that is, as employees of Gucci) or indirectly to their suppliers’ employees.11 Piercing this dance of the corporate veils, the entire labor force making the bag is, for all practical purposes, working for my wife and others like her. What would a similar bag cost if made as cheaply as possible? That’s an easy question to answer because a visually indistinguishable knockoff costs around $30 (including profit). Of course, you can get an equally practical handbag for even less at Sears. Therefore, roughly speaking, about $650 of that purchase is going not to the practical utility of being able to carry personal items around but to the maintenance of social status and the personal sense of self-worth generated through the display of gratuitous expenditure.
One way to see how the wealthy are reshaping our economy is to look at sales growth of these so-called luxury items. While the latest economic downturn certainly had an impact, the general consensus among industry analysts is that consumer demand for luxury brands is recession-proof.12 According to a report from the Carlyle Group, global sales for luxury apparel, accessories, and goods have experienced double-digit annual growth every year since 2009 and are expected to be four times the projected European GDP growth for the next three years. Bain & Company reports that the highest 2013 luxury segment growth was in the Americas, surpassing China, the previous leader.13
When the growth rate of luxury goods consistently exceeds the growth rate for all retail sales, it doesn’t take long for it to account for a large proportion of total spending. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, the top 5 percent of income earners account for about one-third of all spending, and the top 20 percent account for close to 60 percent of spending.14 It’s quite plausible that, within the next decade, the wealthiest 5 percent could generate more than half of retail spending in the United States. That would be a thriving economy driven not by the mythical middle class but rather by an ever-concentrating cadre of the elite.
It’s uncomfortable to realize that Jeff Bezos alone, with the stroke of a pen, could have wiped out the 2009 California annual deficit and still have had several billion dollars left to enjoy. I can’t speak for Jeff, but were I in that position, I would sleep a bit less soundly at night. How many lives could I save? How much suffering could I alleviate? How many dreams fulfill?
The superwealthy carry a burden, wittingly or not, that the rest of us do not. Many come to realize that charitable endeavors are a moral imperative that they cannot or should not ignore, regardless of what they might personally prefer to do with their time and money. Bill Gates is an example that comes to mind. Even I have misgivings when I contribute to my kid’s private school capital campaigns instead of a local homeless shelter. We are all faced with choices, and tax deductibility does not indicate righteousness.
Another affliction unique to the rich is the erosion of meaning in their lives. When everything is freely available, nothing has value. When you don’t have to strive to acquire something you covet, when you can buy your way out of uncomfortable situations and aren’t forced to compromise with others, you lose the psychological boundaries that give shape to your life. One thing I’ve noticed when my friends “make it” is that their emotional growth tends to cease. Their level of personal maturity is frozen in time like an insect in amber, for all to see. Recognizing this risk, one of my most successful and accomplished friends, a star partner at a top-tier venture capital firm, segregates his day-to-day living expenses from his enormous wealth, which he consciously ignores by leaving its management to others. He prefers to live a relatively modest, though comfortable, lifestyle.15
But enough about the rich. Let’s look at the other side of this coin—the myriad of talented people who work hard yet struggle all their lives for simple things that the elite take for granted. It’s easy to display statistics and charts showing just how difficult life is for the working poor, much less the nonworking poor. But somehow these tools don’t capture the real gravity of their circumstances. So instead, I’ve selected a single individual—typical in many ways—to profile, in the hope that his story will convey these struggles more graphically.
Emmie Nastor is the perfect employee. I know, because I hired him. In 2009, I was running a small Internet game company called Winster.com. When we grew to about ten employees, it was clear we needed a receptionist. The job required good computer and people skills, a pleasing demeanor, and a willingness to do a wide variety of randomly assigned tasks. So I asked my overworked office manager to post a job on Craigslist.
A few days later, I asked her how the search was coming. “Terrible. I’ve gotten over 250 résumés. Just to read through them is going to take most of the day. And they’re still coming in.” This was a big surprise because even during the recession, you had to lure software engineers to interviews with promises of hefty salaries and generous stock-option packages. I instructed her to review the first hundred or so, select a dozen to discuss with me, and ignore the rest.
When I reviewed the résumés I was aghast. Most applicants were grossly overqualified for this entry-level job, which offered a starting salary of $29,000 per year. There were MBAs from local universities, homemakers attempting to return to work with years of obsolete experience under their belts, and people with extensive skills in some irrelevant specialty, all plainly desperate for any paid position. Some offered to work for free for a while to demonstrate their abilities; others simply promised that they would stoically accept their reduced circumstances indefinitely if only we would give them a chance.
As sad as this was, I knew that there was no point in hiring someone who would be unhappy with the work and constantly on the prowl for a better opportunity. So I selected two or three candidates with appropriate credentials to bring in for interviews.
It was a tough choice, but Emmie’s strong skills with Microsoft Office and his thoughtful and direct responses to my questions won him the job.
What I didn’t know at the time was the path he took to arriving on my doorstep. Emmie was born and raised in California, son of a hard-working immigrant couple. His parents emigrated to the United States after his father enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a mechanic back in the Philippines. Eventually he got a job installing telephone lines in people’s homes with a major telecommunications company. Emmie grew up in Daly City, a working-class suburb south of San Francisco, along with an older sister and younger brother. He graduated from Westmoor High in 1994.
His parents were staunch believers in the American dream and felt strongly that a college education was the ticket to a better life. The most practical way for Emmie to achieve this goal was to enroll in a local community college. After four years of attending classes while working part-time jobs, Emmie was able to transfer to San Francisco State University. After another four years, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, he fulfilled his parents’ aspirations for him, earning a college degree. (Unfortunately, his mother never lived to see it. She died of colon cancer in 2007 after a protracted illness.)
Armed with his new degree, he set out to find a full-time job. With his characteristic diligence, he would spend at least eight hours each day scanning the Internet for opportunities, composing cover letters, and sending out résumés—usually twenty to thirty a day. He did this nonstop for three months straight. Five to seven days a week, twenty to thirty résumés a day for three months works out to over eighteen hundred job applications—without so much as a single invitation to interview.
Now, some people might have gotten a tad discouraged and stopped looking for work. But not Emmie. In addition to the usual motivations, what kept him going was his understanding with his childhood sweetheart that they would get married only after he was bringing home a regular paycheck. So failure was not an option.
Then suddenly he got a break. Actually, two breaks at the same time. We called him in to interview for the receptionist job, and Enterprise Rent-a-Car tapped him for a position as a sales management trainee.
As luck would have it, a friend of his who was already working for Enterprise could offer some insight into the position. The title sounded good, but the job required him to put in ten or more hours a day for basically the same salary that Winster was offering for eight. Even worse, he would have no control over his schedule. The company could require him to work any random hours, day or night, seven days a week, entirely at its discretion. He would be eligible for a promotion after he delivered a certain level of sales, but there were no guarantees. So Emmie accepted the offer from Winster.
Emmie never voluntarily missed a day of work. I say this because he would occasionally show up sneezing and coughing, and we would send him home for the sake of everyone else in the office. You could set the office clock by his prompt arrival at 9:00, and if there was anything left to be done at the end of the day he would stay to complete it. No task was beneath him. Cleaning up after weekly company lunches, running to Staples for an odd cable, selecting a get-well card for a sick employee—Emmie was up for it all. I could never persuade him that he didn’t need to ask permission to go to lunch.
At one point, I was surprised to learn that his car was in the shop for an indefinite stay. It had blown a timing belt, and he couldn’t afford to pay the $500 repair until his paycheck cleared. How did he get to work? Since he was the main breadwinner in the household at that point, his family decided that his younger brother would have to miss school so Emmie could use his car.
In mid-2012, we sold Winster to another game company, and Emmie’s position was eliminated (along with mine). So Emmie went back to searching for a job. I wrote him a stellar recommendation, of course, but it turned out not to matter—no one cared to even ask for it. This time, things were a little easier. He spent only two months sending out résumés before he got an expression of interest, from the same telecommunications company his father had worked for, to become a premises installer. This was basically an updated version of the job his father had wiring up people’s homes, but this time for cable and Internet in addition to telephone service.
Soon after applying, he learned that there were over a hundred applicants for the same position. To be considered for the job, he first had to pass a two-hour competency test. This covered not the usual high school math or English but rather the applicant’s knowledge of wiring standards and installation practices. In other words, you had no hope of landing the position unless you already had the specific skills required or the diligence to learn the subject on your own (the company provided no training materials in advance). Emmie’s big advantage was that his father could tutor him on the subject.
But that wasn’t the end of the process. Next, fifty or more people were called back for face-to-face interviews. When Emmie’s turn came, he was questioned by two different people for about ten minutes each. He must have made the cut, because he was then instructed to report to a medical facility for a physical exam and drug test. The company finally offered him the position at a starting annual salary that was $6,500 more than his Winster salary. He was elated to accept.
The job did not turn out to be what he expected. Working conditions mirrored those of nineteenth-century factory workers; plainly many of the extensive regulatory reforms and safeguards put in place to protect workers are ineffective. He was sometimes required to work six consecutive days a week, often for twelve or fourteen hours a day. Refusal to work these hours was considered “insubordination,” which is legalese for grounds for termination. No one in his work group was permitted to go home if customers were still waiting for their promised installation or repair appointment, no matter how late it was. Occasionally he didn’t finish work until close to midnight.
He was rarely home before his wife had gone to bed. With about an hour of free time most days, he got to see his family for more than a few minutes only once a week. His last vacation had been shortly after he started at Winster, when he took time off to get married and honeymoon in Hawaii for a few days. That’s five years without a break.
Emmie researched positions within the company that might offer him opportunities to learn or get on some sort of career path. But in a Catch-22, he wasn’t allowed to apply for an internal transfer without his supervisor’s approval, and not one of them—he had five different supervisors during his eighteen-month tenure—was willing to even give him a chance. He was too valuable where he was.
Ever wonder what happens with those annoying customer-satisfaction surveys you are pestered to fill out? If a customer is unhappy with the service, the installer is called in to the office for a reprimand. Unless there’s a reasonable excuse, the employee is commonly disciplined with a suspension without pay.
After a year and a half of back-breaking work, crawling under houses and climbing over roofs, Emmie’s back actually broke. It happened early in the workday as he was carrying some heavy equipment into a customer’s home. In accordance with what he believed was proper procedure, he called his supervisor. There was no answer, so he left a message. In serious pain, be returned to the dispatch depot—but not before completing the installation, for fear of a reprimand. But he got one anyway—for not making more of an effort to reach a supervisor immediately after an on-the-job injury. He was suspended for three days without pay.
During his rehabilitation for sciatica and lower back pain, the company restricted him to “light duty,” basically sitting in the office and calling customers to confirm their appointments for the next day. His employers apparently expected him to hate this and quit, but they don’t know Emmie. He soldiered on with his characteristic upbeat demeanor. But the temporary respite gave him time to ponder what his newborn son’s life might be like if he grows up in a household where Dad is never around. So he took the opportunity to see what opportunities with saner hours might be available. After once again sending out a blizzard of résumés, he finally got a bite … from Enterprise Rent-a-Car, before giving up the search in despair.
Despite the appalling working conditions, lack of respect, and dearth of prospects for advancement, Emmie remains grateful for the job and the paycheck. He accepts with equanimity the broken promise that his eight-year slog to get a college degree would offer a path to a life better than his father’s.
What happened to his dad? After retiring a few years ago, he decided that he didn’t like retirement, so he landed a job with his old employer as a premises installer—at half his previous salary. Even worse, the position was in Sacramento. After suffering through a multihour commute for about a year, he decided to pull up stakes and move, leaving his house in Daly City to Emmie and his siblings.
Emmie is happy for his dad. He also regards himself as lucky to inherit a partial interest in the house his father was able to purchase decades ago with savings accumulated by working at essentially the same job that Emmie has now. Without this, there’s no way he could possibly hope to set aside enough for a down payment on a similar property, much less qualify for a mortgage, particularly considering the mountain of student loan debt he’ll be paying off for the foreseeable future.
I asked Emmie if he was concerned that my telling his story might affect his employment status. “Not really,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s very unlikely that anyone I work with would ever read your book.”
Like my own story, Emmie’s has a punch line. Including his overtime pay and some contributions made by his wife and brother, his household income is well above the national median, $53,046 in 2012. And with his part ownership in the house and some other assets his father is leaving to him, his net worth also far exceeds the median of $77,300 (2010).16 Which is to say that Emmie and his family are in better financial shape than more than half the households in the United States. Yet he’s constantly worried about falling behind. “I can’t say that we are better off than others, nor can I say that we are free from having financial issues … all that I can say is that we are trying our best to stay afloat in this dog-eat-dog economy. So far, so good.”
But the real threat to Emmie’s future isn’t even on his radar screen yet. It seems obvious that his assignment confirming customer’s appointments can be easily automated. But his entire profession is under threat from technical advances in wide-area high-bandwidth wireless communication. These systems use enormous computing power and sophisticated adaptive AI algorithms to continuously adjust radio signals to local conditions at multiple receivers simultaneously, eliminating the need for on-premises wiring entirely.17
One such technology is DIDO (distributed input, distributed output), developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman, whose previous accomplishments include QuickTime and WebTV. If his approach wins out in the marketplace, he will add handsomely to his already vast fortune, while the 250,000 people currently employed installing and repairing wiring in the United States will be applying for entry-level jobs with Enterprise Rent-a-Car.18