As a kid, my dad used to tell me stuff like that. He believed it too. He worked 2 jobs 6 days a week all his life to die in relative poverty.

People make wealth issues generational. It’s not. It’s a narrative to divide and conquer.

It’s the rich vs the poor. It’s always been.

Here’s the thing. We could have that right now, today, we’re there, they’re right. Computers and just useful software (fuck AI) alone have increased productivity so much that one guy with fancy Excel can do the work of what used to take 98 people (7 banks x 14 person abacus teams). And that’s just one regional bank. Before email, corporations had internal mailing departments, now there’s dirt cheap and super convenient email. There are untold numbers of shell scripts out there quietly replacing whole ass departments of people. Soft automation alone, no robots needed, has increased human productivity to an absolutely bonkers degree since these statements were written. Thanks to the Friedman doctrine and Reagan and Thatcher and their ilk, all the benefits of that productivity got turned into a benefits for the asset holding class, while the middle and lower classes got lectures on the morality of hard work.

But instead, we decided to make a very small number of people extremely rich.