> So it's not 2020 that's the anomaly here, but 1982. The real question is why so few people had gotten rich from starting companies in 1982.
It seems more likely to me that industrialization and mass-production in the late 19th century, and information technology in the late 20th century were inflection points at which the gradual progress of new technologies enabled revolutionary businesses across a wide spectrum of the economy. There is no reason to assume that this is always possible, or to extrapolate into the future.
> we should expect both the number and wealth of founders to grow, because every decade it gets easier to start a startup.
Non-sequitur. If the technology that there is is sufficiently well exploited by Google, Amazon, Facebook, then where is your supposed opening? We are not at the end of the IT tech revolution now, but we are also nowhere near the beginning. The best VR experience right now is engineered by Facebook, not by some plucky start up acquiring new customers.
It's easy to imagine that tech will enter a consolidation and comodization phase in the next decades, if it hasn't already.
In fact, if the forces that are claimed to be behind the resurgence of founders getting rich were really correct, we should see lots of new manufacturing start ups. Yet those are extremely rare, and not terribly disruptive in the grand scheme of things.
Edit:
The Gini coefficient bits are also pure ideology dressed up as data. Sweden has more billionares per capita than the US, has a better per capita start up rate than the US, and yet because it never followed the disastrous right turn on economic policy, it has far far far lower inequality (though rising somewhat recently it's still lower than France for example).
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/no-coun... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=S...