Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Losing (opens in new tab)

We’re in a paradoxical situation where although America nominally is wealthier than ever, at the same time, it’s become too hard to succeed for the median person, whether in academia, business, or pretty much anything else in life. This contradiction can be explained by an increasingly skewed distribution of returns, where extreme outliers capture enormous gains, but the median does worse. The outliers inflate the mean, creating the illusion of shared success or a rising tide.