This reads like a satirical version of Robert Putnam's book Our Kids. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the topic and likes their data interwoven with personal stories to bring it to life.

I don't know how often a project dies because it has planned obsolescence vs. people stop using and updating it, but for the latter case I think https://2019.stateofjs.com/ is pretty great.

Thanks, that's exactly what I want!

His book, Letters to a Young Scientist, is a great read even if you're not a scientist. It's one of those books you wish you had read when you were a teenager.

> I tend to agree, but you also have to recognize that by 30 years old, we shouldn't be treating people like children.

But we should be treating children like children and in America they largely inherit the disadvantages of their parents.

> It may have been harder or they may have had to work hard, but there's no reason to make the argument the opportunity wasn't there, because it typically is.

The evidence disagrees. Our Kids by Robert Putnam examines this exact issue. While there are many, here's a particularly sobering quote from the book: "high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29 percent) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30 percent)."

David Quammen is a treasure. The Song of the Dodo is one of my all time favorites.

Exactly. It's like claiming that because I drive to work every day I can eventually become a racecar driver.

Some argue our hunter-gatherer ancestors had far more leisure time than us. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

There is an insidious survivorship bias here: all that leisure time was only enjoyed by the ones who survived.

A society where the mean lifetime is 35 that works 20 hours per week gives people significantly less total leisure time than a society where the mean lifetime is 85 that works 50 hours per week.

Or in other words: all those dead infants got no leisure time at all.