Everyone (+/- 0.03%) in the last 10,000 years of history qualifies as poor. There is some argument as to when the average person in a rich western country beat the average quality of life of an average hunter-gatherer. The answer appears to be pretty clearly sometime between 1850 and 1950. Before then...it'd be pretty clearly better for you (more pleasant) to be a hunter-gatherer in 10K BC than to be any non-aristocrat.
So...what do people who aren't poor do? We have no f'ing clue. It currently requires something like 2% of the population of the US working in Agriculture to feed the entire population of the USA, who eats like kings compared to the rest of the world, not to mention being able to export huge amounts of food. Manufacturing appears to be on the same path, dropping to (currently) somewhere between 6 and 12 % of the population , with monotonic increases in annual quantity manufactured. I don't expect this percentage to stabilize at too muhc less than that of Agriculture...but if we spend more energy opposing illegal immigration, we can probably move both numbers down to 1/2% as we move to robots doing all of the work.
Repeating...within 20-ish years, I expect that the entire food and durable goods output of that year will require roughly 1% of the population of this country to accomplish.
Our material wealth will be almost entirely produced by robots, and almost entirely independent of the work done by any individual. The link between work and stuff will be nearly gone.
What will happen? People will pursue more of what they want and less of what they have to. Girls will pursue (on average) an ever increasing number of people-facing activities. Boys will pursue technical and mechanical activities. Boys will chase hot girls, not girls who can cook. Girls will chase hot boys, not boys who can provide. Marriage will disappear except among high-status consciousness upper classes.
And we'll discover the extent to which the Menckenite theory of democracy holds:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.We should see, in the present and near-future, what people want. Bad for anyone who says people should do what they're supposed to...not what they want. For anyone else...the Chinese curse: Interesting times.
*This is rather huge when it comes to explaining why in India and China (both very poor), girls enter technical fields at far higher rates than in rich countries. Because eating is high priority.
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I'll have a review of Charles Murray's new book up soon, but it's very relevant to this post.
Essentially, he argues that people get happiness from: family, work, community and faith.
He notes that as these things are disappearing/declining, we are getting wealthier.
He refers to this as a paradox, but I think there's a causal relationship.
I've long argued with you that economic growth is not all that matters. Murray makes a strong case that growth may be becoming increasingly opposed to happiness.
Interestingly, your view of things would also support the Murray-esque view that there will be an elite upper class (the X% that do productive work in a modern economy) and a lower class (that have no productive skills). If you can't figure out a way to civilize the folks at the bottom, we're screwed.
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