According to Adam Smith, the wealth of nations is not how much gold they have in their treasuries or how many weapons they have in their armories. “The wealth of a state,” he writes, “consists in the cheapness of provision and all other necessaries and conveniences of life.”
I don’t want to wade into the arguments over income inequality. But at least one under-appreciated dynamic is that the necessities and conveniences of life have become not only dramatically cheaper for poor people, they’ve improved enormously.
See for yourself. Mark Perry compares what you could have bought with roughly 152 hours of your labor at the average hourly wage from the Radio Shack catalog in 1964 and what you can buy today.