Did it not happen? Even poor people today have objectively much better living standards than rich people 100 years ago.

Ah, surely the aristocrats of before would instantly jump at the opportunity of giving up their lifes of free-time, leisure, education, servants, 3-hour-meals, giant houses, countryside retreats, upper-class-socializing, to trade it with the shopping-mall-worker that does 60h weeks(no weekends), for he'd have a smartphone! Funny.

This argument, which I've read before, only works with a really, really narrow definition of 'rich' and 'poor', maybe what you mean is upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class?

Lots of people would choose electric lighting, refrigeration, aircon, television, automobiles, etc.?

As if there isn't a counterpart. Honestly, I've been in farms where simple people lived in with no electricity(my grandparents lived in a farm, and it took some time for electricity to arrive, and around the place there were people living even more simpler, completely isolated, which I'd visit to greet with my cousins), it's actually pretty ok. Now, seriously, using "television" as an argument is just lame, who cares about this trash?

Just because you or someone else never got used to living without these, it doesn't mean everyone else needs it, not at all. From my point of view, autonomy is the greatest thing ever, it is freedom, and dependence is weakness and slavishness, subjulgation. IMHO Only a fool would think in terms of "if I enslave myself I'll get to play with this!"(plus, isn't it a bit like the deal with the devil?), to me it's just an example of how little some people can see what is actually beautiful and good in life to raise stuff to this level. Sincerely, I think people who think like this don't have a clue of what freedom feels like(and gladly, I think I've enjoyed plenty and been introduced to it early on). My life is not made of stuff, it is made of time, living, thinking, appreciation, growing, caring.

As another personal example, my father is also deurbanizing and moving back to the farm(which is not an industrial farm as in a business, but actually a place to live, think straight, work on living things which do need upkeep but not artificially). There's no AC, the only thing he watches is F1 races. He's busy most of the time anyway, usually having a beer and working on the farm, he loves it.

Haha I'm a farmer myself. Your comments seem a bit intense, but objectively it just isn't as cut-and-dried as you have it here. Living in a big drafty house with some servants and a coal fireplace seems somewhat romantic but mostly just cold. One would have time to read, but with no internet and about twenty unique books in the county a lot of that would be re-reading. In every age, we should appreciate new and old things both.

Not to mention "not dying of influenza and tuberculosis"...

Please explain what you mean by: poor people today, rich people 100 years ago, living standards.

hard to argue with your statement, one way or another, if those aren't clearly defined.

Objectively, there are many health indicators that have improved dramatically. Elimination of many commonly fatal diseases, prevention of starvation, better communication, cheaper goods and services, fairer laws (i.e. anti-discrimination against minorities and women).

Since I'm not interested in arguing about it I'm not particularly motivated to define it clearly. But good examples are life expectancy, physical pain relief, availability of the entire sum of human knowledge through a small glass and metal rectangle that fits in your pocket, likelihood of living in a democratic country, likelihood of avoiding a violent death, etc.

But housing and education prices continue to outpace wage growth, with medical care becoming increasingly expensive. Things are objectively better, but the non-wealthy see their societies stagnate and wealth being extracted and concentrated far away from their communities.

Education at least, the best chemist, economist, physicist or whatever fresh out of school probably wouldn't do to well against even a poor graduate today.

Relativity, quantum mechanics, crystal growth, there is just so much they didn't know. In any field, really.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Even poor people in 1960 have objectively much better living standards than rich people 100 years before, yet we work longer hours and have less security. What happens to you today if you loose your job tomorrow, and cannot find employment within 6 months ?

Huh? Working hours in 1960 were significantly less than in 1860. And working hours in 2016 were significantly less than 1916. Other than ramping up for war production I think hours worked has been monotonically decreasing.

> What happens to you today if you loose your job tomorrow, and cannot find employment within 6 months ?

You'd be less screwed than you would have been 100 years ago in that situation, for sure.

It's always been the problem that the previous social orders tried to excuse as a natural consequence. Be it divinely ordained or a material necessity (calling the rich job creators when in practice their ventures act as a conduit for which demand is satisfied). Folks like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were acutely aware of this (go back further still to Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics for just price theory) problem but people continue to clutch pearls whenever any distributionist notions are entertained. It seems to me that it's time to push back hard against anti-distributionist (be they anti-Marxists or otherwise) because it's gotten to a point that the next generation after the Millennials may be poorer than them.