In Japan and China, too, college graduates face diminishing opportunities. And unhappiness among the young is growing across the developed world. A 2017 study found that young people in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany were even more pessimistic about the future than their American counterparts.

This rising disaffection has severe implications for our political and economic health. Capitalism certainly is not in good stead. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world believe capitalism does more harm than good. More than four in five worry about job loss. It’s hard to sell a system that provides so little opportunity, particularly for new entrants and small firms.

It is possible to imagine a future society in which a small, hyper-productive managerial elite delivers food, housing, and pleasure to unemployed and demotivated plebs. This idea has wide acceptance among American tech oligarchs. According to Greg Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” This notion, usually associated with Universal Basic Income (UBI), has been endorsed by numerous oligarchs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman.