Online debate with schoolmate in Govt. class

[EmperorNero]

@Wheylous

Poverty went from being the norm to being the exception. Working conditions improved and the wealth of the super rich actually went down relatively to that of workers

I like this argument and would like a citation so that I may use it as well. What is your source (unless you pull this from memory)?

Thanks for your interest, I’ll be happy to look that up. The part about poverty becoming the exception is from an old Freeman article about the 1800s: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/ideas-and-consequences-presidents-and-poverty

The fact is, presidents of the 1800s did mount a war on poverty - the most comprehensive and effective ever mounted by any central government in world history. It just didn’t have a gimmicky name like “the Great Society.” Those early chief executives might well have said their antipoverty program was, in a word, liberty. […]

And what a poverty program liberty proved to be! Even with a horrendous civil war and half a dozen economic downturns, America progressed from near universal poverty at the start of the [19th] century to within reach of the world’s highest per capita income by the end. Poverty didn’t disappear by 1900, but what was left of it stood out like a sore thumb because it was rapidly becoming the exception.

And if we established that real wealth increased for the common person, it follows that his working conditions improved as well. Since better working conditions are just compensating differentials, a way for employers to compete for workers.

As for the wealth of the super rich relatively to that of workers, I took that from an old Robert LeFevre lecture on youtube. He talks about the first industrial revolution half a century earlier, but it would be plausible that the second industrial revolution had the same effects. He says that around 1700 the richest 2% owned 80% of the wealth, the middle 8% owned 10% of the wealth, and the lowest 90% owned only 10% of the wealth. By 1850 the richest 2% owned just 30% of the wealth, the middle class was now 58% of the people who owned 50% of the wealth, and the lowest 40% owned 20% of the wealth. So even though everyone got richer, the wealth of the rich relatively to that of the poor went down.

We could compare those numbers to today, but modern numbers are all about money, not real wealth. Thanks to constant inflation, the richest few actually have a larger share of money today than they had in 1850, about half. I don’t know what share of real wealth they have, but judging from this data, standards of living are more equal than in the past.