I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why so many people in my generation feel like no matter how hard we work, things aren’t really getting better. A concept from anthropology pointed by Clifford Geertz’s idea of “Agricultural Involution,” based on his research on rice farmers in Java, Indonesia back in the 1960s. What Geertz described was this: the population kept growing fast, but there wasn’t any new land to farm. Instead of big innovations like machines or moving to other types of work, the farmers just kept making their methods more and more complicated on the exact same rice paddies. They added layers of careful water control, hand weeding, staggered planting, and detailed ways to share every bit of the harvest among more and more people. They got really efficient at squeezing more total rice out of the land overall. But the key point is that the amount of rice each person actually ended up with didn’t increase much.…