In fact it's only recent that the commoner could even aspire to wealth, regardless of whether that actually correlates to ability to achieve it.

Islam went through many cycles of this. Corrupt powerful pagan Quraish. Spiritual Muhammad and Rashidun caliphate. Corrupt Umayyad Caliphate. Spiritual Abbasid Caliphate. The Ottomans went through this as well. We're historically at a low point with regards to Islamic society.

Third world faces this - many of them have abundant natural resources, compared to say, Europe. But the wealth brings corruption, not prosperity.

I think the Rashidun Caliphate has a lot of good examples - caliphs turning down state gifts, distributing most of the wealth, selling off luxuries like silk, jewelry, and carpets for infrastructure, making sure that their families didn't profit from state funds.

Anything where an individual can benefit unfairly from the effort of an organisation is a form of corruption, as it involves abuse of power entrusted. This includes CEOs overpaying themselves, or government leaders with excessively high compensation. They're making use of their position to skim resources for personal benefit, and sadly, it's a culture now that this is what people should aspire to.

Things usually improve when people can draw a line where they have enough, and allocate excess resources to the rest of the organization. This is usually (not necessarily) triggered by spirituality because there's nobody else to keep the watchmen in check.

Once leaders do this, those down the command chain also do the same. There were plenty of situations where commoners were well off - in Egypt, Rome, China, Caliphates, and so on. I believe we actually have lower social mobility today than in some eras of the past, but it's far from terrible.

I could well be wrong, and encourage those with more understanding of history to correct and give counter examples.

Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the satisfaction levels off.

It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others) miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.

For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.

1. A recent study that found very high life expectancy "blue zones" were highly correlated with poor record keeping and pensions - the strong implication was that it was mostly fraud. Don't think Hong Kong was one of the areas studied, but I think skepticism is warranted. 2. A common thread I've seen in many longevity studies is that social connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of a long lifespan, and contrarily, "lonely people die young." I'd expect that a very close-knit urban area with relatively low migration (e.g. as opposed to NY or SF where there is so much moving in and moving out) would exhibit this social connectedness.

EDIT it's a lovely place too, Hong Kong (picturesque, pleasant climate, easy to get around). I'd say that would have a lot to do with it as well, once you can pay the rent ...

Misery is a very strong inverse correlate however. I'd be given to thinking that a lot of economic activity is driven by the need to escape [EDIT and stay out of] poverty on one end, and a cohort of super-competitive success-addicts on the other. Most other people are quite content in the middle, and want to stay there. It is the threat of penury we should be looking more at than the lure of riches.

Social capital is what gives people this sense of belonging - of being in a "tight knit tribe". I think that conservatives understand this a lot better than progressives, who tend to see everything about society in terms of either material conditions (wealth vs. poverty), or zero-sum power relations where one side 'wins' and the other side 'loses'. It's not clear that these matter all that much. Plenty of people throughout history had very little in the way of material resources, and were required to answer to people, institutional frameworks etc. exerting some sort of power on them - and yet, they still found lots of ways to smile and be happy at their life. We should understand how they managed to do that.

My favourite definition of a tribe is that it's a group where everyone gives what they can and takes as little as they need to. Everyone should be willing to give their last slice of bread and be offended at the idea of 'owing someone' for it.

This just doesn't scale well, but it happens in things like gaming groups, married couples, etc.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Karl Marx.

If anything, conservatives and liberals, due to their devotion for capitalism, are united in fracturing people and communities. That's just the natural end goal of an economic philosophy that views everything via the lens of corporate profit.

In the real world, capitalism is an unstable system. The "winner" gets too close to the state and then tries to shape the rules so they fit the incumbent and discourages everyone else. Boeing and the FAA is a recent high profile example.

A lot of brainpower in the last century went into technological progress, but we have enough computing power, internet, cloud, data to work on this thing.