[tater]

Well, you've been telling yourself wrong for years then.

It's wrong on a few levels.

One, wealth is not zero-sum. The rich do not get richer on the backs of the poor or less fortunate. Wealth increases globally. The poor get slightly richer, the rich get much richer.I wonder if net worth for the richest includes leveraged assets, too... (who skews them higher for "theoretical" wealth—regardless, it's all on paper and is on the backs of no one, it's wealth conjured out of thin air).

Two, and this is critical, IMHO, "wealth" is very hard to measure in a way that is meaningful for comparing people's lives, particularly compared across time. The poor are farther now from the rich than they would be from the rich in 1920? Guess what, the poor are richer in many ways than the richest people in 1920 looked at in other ways.

Let's take the lower middle class, not dirt poor, homeless types. In the US they live in large homes compared to the earlier history of the US. They have cars (how do you monetize the ability to drive instead of walk comparing wealth over time?). They have television. They likely have instant communications everywhere they are (cell phones). They more and more carry more computing power in their pockets than the entire darpanet combined 30-40 years ago (even a freebie smart phone). They have better healthcare (US rates of death per incidence for potentially deadly diseases is as good as it gets, and that includes all the un/under-insured in the stats). Heck, even violence is at the lowest rate in history (worldwide). We can fight a war for a decade and lose less in 10 years than a week in ww2.

Given the choice, would you be super rich at the turn of the 19th/20th century, or lower middle class in the US today? It's not an easy choice to make, you'd be taking a hit in terms of lifespan right off the bat (US average lifespan being low compared to the EU is entirely a function of death reporting, the US counts all infant deaths, even preemies, the EU doesn't count infants til they reach a certain age as people. A bunch of age = 0 deaths really throw off an average). You'd have no internet, etc, ad nauseum.

Bottom line is that The stats are just that for the OP. Stats. You can look at them different ways, and you need to make sure you are comparing the same things, and useful things, too. Comparing "wealth" is dubious.