The Rising Floor
Each era, yesterday's scarce skill becomes the new baseline. The scarce skill (highlighted, glowing) is always one layer above where the previous era left off.
This page is a single chart: a stacked view of how the floor of data-and-computing skills has risen, era by era, since the 1880s. For the full write-up of each era, see The Scarcity Ladder — A Timeline. For the argument this builds toward, see "The Floor Keeps Rising" (Article 5).
Commoditised / baseline
Currently scarce
Hypothesis (not yet scarce)
Every column is a moment in time. Every layer beneath the glowing one is a skill that used to be the bottleneck and now isn't — it got tooled, and the value moved up. The 2025 → ? column shows all seven layers as fully commoditised baseline, with a dashed, unclaimed layer on top: Domain Judgment. That layer is marked differently on purpose. It hasn't happened yet, and — unlike every layer beneath it — it might not happen the same way. The other seven columns are a record. The eighth is a question.
Part of The Long Bet series
← The Floor Keeps Rising (Article 5)
The full argument: the compression pattern, the three layers, and why mathematics is the layer that holds.
The Scarcity Ladder — A Timeline →
Each of the seven eras in detail — what was abundant, what was scarce, and who was elite.