People who look back on the 50s and early 60s as a golden age of prosperity forget that the prosperity people had back then only looked like prosperity compared to the 30s and 40s. Go through the Great Depression and WWII, and a steady job in a factory and a shitty car and a tiny detached house with a lawn and weekends off to drink beer with your buddies looks pretty damn good.
The reason things are more expensive today is that we expect better. Your house is a lot more expensive because it’s twice as big, and is stuffed full of insulation and air conditioning and appliances.
Your car is more expensive, but it doesn’t break down every 5000 miles. Remember back when a car’s odometer turning over at 100,000 was a big deal? People used to get flat tires every week. Safety was crap, performance was crap. Try looking on youtube for videos comparing a bone stock 2016 Suburu station wagon with the 1980 Ferrari from Magnum PI. The station wagon outperforms the Ferrari in every respect–acceleration, top speed, handling.
Health care was a lot cheaper, because they didn’t have treatments for most things back in the 50s. You save a lot of money if you get cancer, because back then when you got cancer they’d just tell you to go home and die.
Point is, things cost less because people expected less. You can easily live a 1950s lifestyle on a modest salary if you only expect an actual 1950s lifestyle. A middle class lifestyle of 2016 is a lot more opulent and requires more money. What is true is that the kind of salary that would support a 1950s middle class lifestyle won’t buy you the same level of respect that it would in the 1950s. A guy in 1955 who worked all day at the factory and had a crappy car and a tiny house and a stay at home wife had a certain level of social respectability. The same guy who works all day at Walmart with a literally comparable shitty car and cramped primitive house and a wife that doesn’t work might have a literally comparable lifestyle, but he’s not going to be viewed as a middle class success.
If you are talking about someone with minimal academic credentials, few skills, and no experience, then yes, they will probably stay at an entry-level job their entire life. Wages are assigned based on the scarcity of people willing and able to do a job. That is why neurosurgeons command high salaries and garbage men do not.
If you have a multi-million dollar idea that will revolutionize the tech world, you need to make up a prototype and schematics and present it to an investor or get a small-business loan. This is Business 101. If you don’t have the expertise to do any of this, then you probably won’t succeed.
I’m dismayed, but not surprised, at the replies I’ve gotten so far. I’m still open to any advice anyone could offer. BTW, it’s not an “idea”, it’s a “technology”, which unfortunately is complex enough to have required thousands of dollars in tools and supplies to develop - but it works, and I’ve built multiple prototypes.
“Investors” are not easy to come by, or even find with intensive searching. Companies which purport to help inventors are scam artists, and TV shows that claim to be an avenue for inventors are as manufactured as any other “reality” show, and have impeded the chances of many people to keep IP rights. Small business loans are not available to the poor, and it’s no longer possible to approach a large corporation with a new product.
You have got to be kidding. There is an entire industry of venture capitalists who do nothing but evaluate and invest in technologies which they can be persuaded are workable and potentially profitable. They are generally pretty sophisticated in evaluating concepts, generally requiring a proposal which includes some proof of concept, market research, a development business plan with stages of evaluation, et cetera, but they are often willing to invest in speculative technologies with the potential for high payoff if successful, and definintely on technology that has a clear path to market and well-supported profitability. There are also manybooksandreferences about generating business models, getting financing, and running a startup as well as [online and IRL business development groups, not to mention workshops, classes, groups, and incubators](tech startup workshop), all existing in support of technology innovation. There has literally never been a better time to get a potentially workable idea off the ground without having to sell your idea at a fraction of the value to a large corportation (which has never been a viable option for inventors or innovators who wished to retain IP rights or make large profits from their ideas).
But hey, if you want to just sit around on a message board and whine about how there aren’t angel investors lining up at your door unsolicited to dump truckloads of cash into your “million dollar idea”, feel free. Just don’t expect a lot of sympathy or to have your proprietary view of how the world “should” work be reinforced by anyone who gives enough of a good piss to respond.
Your multi-million dollar technology would require thousands of dollars to develop?
Yes, I believe that. But what’s the problem that you can’t scrape together tens of thousands of dollars to develop your business?
If you can’t put your hands on 5 figures to start your business, then you’re never going to create a profitable business. This is granting you that your technology really is revolutionary and really could be worth millions of dollars. It really is plausible that this could be the case, as I said million dollar ideas are very common.
What’s not common is the ability to turn a million dollar idea into a profitable business. And being able to manage money and deal with finances is a core part of that ability.
To take an example, people have been trying to build handheld devices for literally decades. Everyone could see that a handheld computer would be a great idea that could make a lot of money. But nobody could make these things for a profit until the iPod came out. That was the first profitable handheld device that is now in everyone’s pocket.
So the idea was nothing. Everyone had the idea. People, really smart people with multiple millions of dollars in financing, tried to make it work. And nobody could. Until someone did.
So if you can’t scrape together a ten grand to work on your technology then you might as well forget about it. If you’re not disciplined enough to have saved that much money from your day job over a couple of years, or not persuasive enough to convince your friends and family to loan you the money, then you’re not entrepreneur material. A good idea is not enough.