Just after having heard P.J. O'Rourke say much the same thing, I see it expounded on a site linked by Karen Hall:
Genuine, and global, increases in wealth -- not a mere redistribution of it -- have been a feature of the last two hundred years, something truly new in Man's economic life...Although misery has not vanished from the face of the earth, in many ways, for billions of people, it is not nearly as constant a companion, and billions more are now wealthy, not only in material goods, but in simple physical well-being, beyond the dreams of their great-grandparents.
For example, for the average worker, the cost of a simple but valuable thing, light, has probably fallen a thousand-fold since his great-grandmother's day, and light today is about 30,000 times cheaper(in constant dollars) for the average worker than it was only two hundred years ago. By contrast, the cost of light for an English worker in 1800 AD was probably only about ten times less than it had been for his Babylonian counterpart in 1800 BC. The cost of light for the average worker today is about 300,000 times less than it was for the average worker in 1800 BC. Between 1800 BC and 1800 AD, 3600 years of human history, for the average worker, the cost of light probably dropped only about ten-fold. In the last two hundred years, it has dropped a further 30,000-fold.
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Catholic -- as well as biblical -- moral thought regarding wealth was historically -- and realistically -- framed in terms of the distribution of and access to an amount of wealth that was, within one human lifespan, or even several, essentially fixed. For most of human history, wealth was a zero-sum game. If the cost of light dropped only ten-fold in 3600 years, that probably means that human beings have essentially always lived in a world that as a whole was not getting any richer over any realistic time frame. If you -- or your people -- were getting richer, it was realistic to assume that someone else -- or someone else's people -- were getting poorer. Moreover, it is very likely that the idea of becoming 30,000 times richer simply doesn't register with any human being. We're probably set up to react -- and vigorously -- to a fairly small range of economic wealth or scarcity, since that range was our lot, from time immemorial.
Thus, both our common sense 'natural' economic rules of thumb, and Catholic moral theory, are simply not set up to handle a situation in which new wealth is being produced because new knowledge is being produced. Both our common sense, and Catholic moral theory, has simply ceded that whole territory to the New Class, to figure out as best it can.
--John Kelleher in "The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology"
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