In many cases they went from super-poor to just poor. While an improvement, they still lag way behind the so-called industrialized countries.
Put another way, if we divide a family's economic condition into very poor, poor, middle class, and wealthy; the world system(s) appears to be bunching everybody into "poor" (and perhaps a few more into "rich") while the other categories are shrinking. The ideal would be to have most of the population in the middle-class.
Since machines can do a lot of the "real work", yes. Our methods of income distribution may need to change if robots become the "new slaves". We can maybe learn something from ancient Greek society. Our current problem is that the wealth is not trickling down from the machine owners to regular folks.
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In many cases they went from super-poor to just poor. While an improvement, they still lag way behind the so-called industrialized countries.
Put another way, if we divide a family's economic condition into very poor, poor, middle class, and wealthy; the world system(s) appears to be bunching everybody into "poor" (and perhaps a few more into "rich") while the other categories are shrinking. The ideal would be to have most of the population in the middle-class.
It may well be the case that the steady state is '~everyone is poor'.
Can the world function if everyone lives the life of a 50-100K/year income American?
Since machines can do a lot of the "real work", yes. Our methods of income distribution may need to change if robots become the "new slaves". We can maybe learn something from ancient Greek society. Our current problem is that the wealth is not trickling down from the machine owners to regular folks.