Privilege vs Opportunity

While growing up, I have always had this question battling my mind that who was more opportunity in life: my father or me? Now this is an extremely difficult question to answer. It is very difficult to compare opportunities between people of the same generation, let alone that being done between people of two consecutive generations.

What I have kind of partially answered is this: there is an inherent tradeoff between opportunity and privilege that everyone goes through in his generation. So I would say that I got less opportunity than my father. But I was certainly more privileged than him. In other words, with the advent of technology, more access to the modern way of living is inevitably more easily available to the younger generation. Hence there is certainly a lot more privilege than the previous generation.

But at the same time, I must admit that there was much more competition in our generation in order to achieve success in any given field. Thus there is much less opportunity. This increase in competition can be attributed to several factors: rise in population is a major one. Increased quality of life for more number people, meaning poor people moving to the middle class is another important factor. A third most pertinent factor is the advent of technology. Now when computers came, there was a great opposition to mass scale adoption in India since it would supposedly take away many jobs.

While I do not completely agree with this proposition since there are I believe much more nuances and complexities than being a binary outcome, I think there is some amount of truth in this statement. Now there are talks of a fourth Industrial Revolution coming, with things like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and automation, I genuinely believe further traditional jobs are going to be slashed. But as I always believe, more jobs will be created in other sectors which do not exist today. So, my point here is that future generations will be even more privileged. But I’m afraid, there will be more competition.