Don’t look now, but that’s still the case. In England it’s really the case, and the old joke that it helps to have an ancestor who was close to William The Conquerer is genuinely true.

Craftsmanship and high demand for skilled labor led to the middle class. Automation could be the new land. A wealthy "owning class" owns all the means of production (and less skilled labor) and has no incentive to open it up. Automation could lead to a small wealthy class, but a rapidly expanding lower class with little access to self-ownership of means of production.

Again, that has largely already happened, and never really stopped. We just see things differently because we’re not one of billions who can only look up at everyone else’s boots, and because we’re at the tail end of a stable period born from two world wars and the teror of nuclear annihilation.

Key word being "encouraging". A possible(!) recent example of this would be the maga hat kid. The beauty of this incident is, the initial incident is guaranteed to polarize people, but even if more truth comes out it the result is even more polarization. Can't lose strategy, provided no one notices what's going on.

I believe this is a bi-partisan issue, I imagine many similar examples could be found with the political roles switched.

An effective modern day Napolean is going to need the persuasive skills of Donald Trump combined with political beliefs from both poles (~ Trump + Bernie Sanders), but even then with the top down control (censorship) over modern means of mainstream communication it could be difficult to even get your message out there.

So far there always seems to be reason for hope though, while Bernie is getting along in the years almost out of the blue here comes this Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez girl, almost like a "far left" Donald Trump to keep things interesting.

If 1000 people spend $1000, that isn't the same as a person spending all that in one month. The 1000 people are going to spend the money differently and on a variety of things. Phone bills, electric, car payments, groceries, rent, clothes, entertainment, coffee. Perhaps a restaurant or two or a bar. Might need school supplies and medicine. Even better, these 1000 people are likely to do this monthly.

One person spending 1,000,000 isn't likely to spend it on those categories nor spend that monthly. Even then, the spending is going to be different. The spending is also more likely to be stable.

The economy generally will survive if the one person doesn't spend their 1,000,000. Even if they stop spending that monthly, that'll be OK.

However, the economy will suffer if the many people do not spend 1000 a month, depending on how close the people are to each other. All in one town probably means an employer has had hard times, and eventually other businesses close because of it - unless, of course, things start getting better again.

The economy hurts if trends shift. When folks get more poor and cannot spend on small luxuries or stop buying as mnay cheap clothes, the economy suffers.

The person able to spend 1,000,000 a month likely very much depends on those 1000 people spending 1000 per month, consuming the things they do.

This is basically Marx and the theory of capital, e.g already describing our world since industrialization.

The computer is the greatest automation tool for office work, and that scenario is obviously not the case if you look at what happened to the PC revolution. Local area networks with various file and application servers were a huge market for small and medium sized businesses, and there was lots of hype similar to what you are describing. Now everyone is back to centralizing on virtualized remotely leased computers, just like small and medium sized businesses used leased time-shared (and for IBM 370 series, virtualized) remote mainframes in the 1970s.

Same thing happened with the centralization of the automobile industry in the 1910s, and is happening today in the centralization of agriculture: better combines, tractors, Round-Up pesticides etc. are all available to family farmers, which are all being bankrupted by large factory farms.

Of course, there's also an interesting worry that's not connected to jobs here, namely, whether we may end up in a new age of SaaS companies selling automation to small and medium sized businesses as their main business model. Imagine if instead of large companies using tech alone, or people buying these machines alone, the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft/whatever started leasing them through an AWS esque service for X amount of dollars a month. We've already got Maker Labs and what not, this could be the future for that.

The elites used to pay people to stand around and practically wipe their arses, that quickly diffused as more markets developed, and there were other, better things to do.

The issue is not 'automation', it's 'the rate of automation' and the extent to which the economy can re-absorb those out of work by whatever means: retooling, retirement, UBI, whatever.

That trend is very cyclical and depends on the state of the inequality in the economy, not on automation. Marx observed that the number of servants in England increased dramatically during the height of the industrial revolution:

> The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackets, etc. [footnote: Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords' preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921.]

Capital volume I, chapter 15.

The same thing has been going on in the last 25 years: elderly caretakers, nannies, personal shoppers, personal assistants, virtual assistants, personal chefs, personal trainers, food delivery persons, package delivery persons (especially Amazon contractors), Lyft/Uber drivers, dog walkers, pet sitters, pet groomers, etc.

Times have changed, at least a bit. You will see pitchfork revolutions unless state provides basic needs to the masses, via taxation to the robot owners.