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?
It is useful to differentiate wealth from money, and real wealth is nothing strange or new to mankind. Only since centralization has emerged, because industrial agriculture requires management, has poverty become the baseline, and that only because of the greed of management, of overlords that get to decide who gets what from the enterprise, and keep as much as they can for themselves.
People have been on Earth for ~500ky. It's possible that H.erectus were people in the same way we're people, and that pushes the time back to ~2M years. Up until ~13kya there were many more very large species of mammal that people preferentially hunted for food. In fact, carefully examining the remains of their kills shows that hunters took the largest bulls, and almost never young or small prey. During Ice ages and droughts, through blizzards and floods, these huge animals in abundant herds were all around us. That's wealth.
Why would people prefer to hunt the largest animals? You'd think people would prefer to hunt bunnies instead of 10 ton Palaeoloxodon antiquus twice the size of the largest African bull elephants today. Less danger of becoming toe jam when hunting rabbits. But Ice Age hunters would rather take the terrible risk of hunting these massive and deadly prey animals with handheld pointy sticks than hunt deer, cows, and such. The reason is that they only had to do so very rarely. One mammoth provided ~4k meals of ~4kcal each. That's enough food for a large village, with a horde of dogs and cats, for a month. The men only had to make one kill a month to feed their whole society.
Now, I don't know how you define luxury, but 29 days off and one day on seems like a mighty luxurious schedule to me. I work seven days a week sometimes. So, poverty is a new invention, created by agriculture, after the Younger Dryas extinguished 77 genera of megafauna - all the preferred prey animals that made humanity extremely wealthy. To grow crops people basically are enslaved to plants. They have to clear land, plow or dig rows, plant seeds, weed the crops lots, water them a lot, keep the deer from eating them, and so on, and that's just to get a chance to do all the work that comes when it's time to harvest. Not only that, but the diet of lots of red meat with some herbs for flavor and maybe side dishes or garnish is highly nutritious. It's far and away more nutritious than any plant, and packed with fat that is the real fuel for our exertions. After agriculture became necessary people suffered far more malnutrition. Starvation became much more common, and people actually shrank in stature as poor nutrition kept them from reaching their full height.
Worse yet, the overlords that became necessary to coordinate all the labor, land, storage, and protecting it all from bugs and thieves, took most of the wealth, and it is centralization that enables overlords to become wealthy by withholding most of the wealth we produce. They parasitize us every step of the way, from birth to death.
Freedom is prosperity, and centralization is slavery.
Thanks!
Having a look now.
We may want to consider the very few societies that arose in abundance - that never developed "money" of any kind, and all lived richly - and the fact that We can now automate any needed work We need done but no One wants to do...
"What if man was never meant to be born into wealth? What if being rich is just an anomaly?"
Being rich is only an anomaly in scarcity. We are "post-scarcity" now (and can automate needed work no One wants to do) and only held back from living richly by money and the interests that emerge in moneyed systems.
Energy: free.
Resources: abundant.
Supply chains: automated.
Maintenance: automated.
Infrastructure... When We all are solving problems Ethically, the best way - not the cheapest/most profitable - and We all are doing what We love to do that helps the most...
We will have the infrastructure.
My point is not that We presently have everything set up - far from it, as profit motive is in control. My point is that We have what it would take, and if We get free energy out in the open, it will emerge as the accounting for Our energy dissipates.
By "post-scarcity" I mean that without the moneyed profit motive in the way, creating artificial scarcity, what We need is abundantly there.
And I work to get free energy out - prompting Ones with the wherewithal to do so - in the open so that We can obsolete the accounting for Our energy added into a system. And bring abundance to All.
I know the score now. I work for better in the future.
And We can access the abundance of Our planet, but the moneyed Ones ensure it does not flow freely as it should to all of Us.
I'm not working "hypotheticals." Not "speculating." I know that free energy will bring the end to the reign of the moneyed psychopaths in control on Our planet. That is why They are so avid in hiding it.
And just going along to get along is not My cuppa. If We do not do something soon most of Us will be dead, and the rest will be in 15 minute corrals, eating bugs, tied down with digital ID's, CBDC's, and social credit scores, and hooked up like Borg.