The appeal to a golden era “when we used to make things” isn’t just nostalgia or judgmentalism. It refers to a qualitative but real difference between building vs. taking. Building things imposes a certain rigor not only on our thinking but also our values. When we build we are advancing the aggregate capability of humanity in some small way. We don’t all have to be sending people to Mars, we can also build by working out the inner mechanisms of some new gadget that others will find useful or putting together a cake others will find delicious. When we take, we are instead simply shifting around the spoils of such efforts from others to ourselves by, say, helping ourselves to their savings by opening fake bank accounts.
The simplest way to see where we each lie on this spectrum is to ask yourself who your adversary is. If your adversary is another person, your competitor or even your customers whose money you want, you are in the business of taking. If instead your adversary is some aspect of the physical world, if your day is spent trying to organize some small part of that world into a more useful state, like gold into a watch or steel into a train or bits into a video game, then you are in the business of building.
To lament that “we used to make things” is to remember an emphasis on those efforts to create what wasn’t previously there and to advance, in however small a way, humanity’s collective ability and delight. And when that is our focus, we find we are all on the same team.