[concordDance]

Note that this assumes the new people are statistically just as likely to contribute in those ways as the average person today/40 years ago but we don't know this is true (and indeed there's some weak evidence it's false)

[somenameforme]

I don't disagree with this in the least, but I would say that people are contributing less per person today not because there are more people but because of other reasons. There's no doubt that in at least some instances the next [insert really cool person here] instead just got sucked in a vapid world of social media, or endless self indulgence with entertaining videos, or other "niceties" of today.

The point of this though is that it's all still on a distribution. We've lowered the mean but a higher quantity still means more outliers, which are those that ultimately do neat stuff for all of us.