I think an even deeper question is, is it possible for the masses to get rich and what would the macroeconomics look like? I would think competition and resource scarcity would prevent this.
Did I miss it or did they not cover the effects of the easy money they talk about for loans? If the availability of the money is increased, usually you will get much lower returns. Not to mention, much of the market is built on speculation and this increased money is not actually going to companies on the stock market (because most of us don't have access to private equity).
I do understand and agree with the part about increased productivity (decreased scarcity and cost) raising quality of life. I just don't see that applying to everyone equally (companies will keep some of that cost decrease as profit and return some to investors but not everyone can afford to be investors). I think there are a lot of finer points the article glosses over, especially around inefficiencies. And of course this is far from a settled topic as there are many economists debating this sort of thing.
I would argue that middle class today is a lot richer than 50 years ago. Larger average homes. More cars. More trips. Better healthcare. Food is cheaper as a percentage of income.
Those advances are adjustments in quality of living driven by efficiencies in manufacturing, etc. This would be more on the resource scarcity side and less on the rich/income side. I would exclude food as an indicator since that is heavily subsidized. Healthcare has also increased substantially as a percentage of income.
There is also a distinction I have seen ignored - everybody (any individual) vs everybody (all individuals).
Take a group of randomly selected non-rich people 1 to N and assume you have a "dart board" of varied strategies and their return in this iteration. Take the normal distribution over time and the outliers at the right end of the bell curve you will find that some will become rich in the proper flux.
You can't all just throw them at the same spot and get an absurd economic yield. It would in the end regress to both a standard distribution and the mean.
Competition mostly diminishes the returns in a given investment faster. The price differentials close through the generation of profit and fulfillment of demand. You are being paid to be a servant of entropy lowering things to their base state. This isn't a bad thing but one specific plan will not last forever.
Resource scarcity is weirdly peripheral to all of it and how you define rich in absolutes vs relative.
it depends what counts as "rich". I can imagine a world where everyone has a structurally sound shelter, maybe even a large one. I can't imagine a world where everyone lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking central park (without killing billions of people first).
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/09/what-if-everyone-...