Speculating...
What if man was never meant to be born into wealth? What if being rich is just an anomaly?
What if the questions we ask about poverty are the wrong questions entirely?
For most of human history, man has lived next to an abundance of resources and still lived poorly way before during and after it's own power to obtain these resources. They only lacked organization, technology, and incentives to convert them into wealth.
Before crapitalism became a thing, man lived in poverty. So, if humans were poor before capitalism, then capitalism cannot logically be the cause of poverty.
For thousands of years, humans lived in what economists call subsistence conditions. It is the state of having just enough to survive. Just enough food, water and money even but just enough to stay alive.
Most production went immediately to survival such as food, shelter, basic tools, etc.. There was little surplus for the luxury life. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that large populations began escaping that baseline. Which raises the real mystery:
What changed?
Across history, a few patterns consistently appear where wealth emerges. People can keep enough of what they produce, freedom to experiment and innovate, trade and specialize.
Most importantly, the culture respected its builders instead of condemning them.
When societies admire those who create, improve, and experiment, innovation accelerates, but when societies begin to resent them, something else begins to happen. The incentives shift. Creation slows. Risk-taking disappears, eventually, the system begins drifting back toward its natural baseline.
Scarcity.
Today in the western world in the ununited Stnatkes of America, we may be watching another shift in narrative. As the average people's poverty is increasing and the hold of the wealth against the poor is losing its grip, there is a subtle increase of hatred being drawn out against the blue-collar class workers. And the new generations are feeling it strongly as less and less are incapable of making enough to hold onto any properties. Wealth and prosperity are essentially non-existent to most millennials and onward.
More and more policing are targeting the backbone of its own society whilst the rich escape judgment from their own causalities. And judging from hundreds of years of this same game, is this not what is likely happening right now?
Is society slowly beginning to view wealth creation itself as something suspicious?
Or are we simply watching the stage where those who already hold power begin locking the system down so their positions can be held indefinitely?
History suggests both are possible.
Poverty is the natural state of the world. Wealth is the strange exception. So the real question isn’t why poverty exists. The real question is what kind of system allows wealth to appear at all.
And if we are going to continue this wealth endeavor, then what kind of system best protects wealth creation without turning into rule by force?
