Interestingly, the societies that do this - now and throughout history - are the ones that thrive.
There is always a tension between success of the individual and success of the populace. Government is supposed to be the ameliorating force. When it tilts too much one way or the other, societies collapse and we get things like the French Revolution, Fascism, and Russian and Chinese communism. The US, and especially the EU, remain strong because they actively seek the balance point (well, at least until recently). One person's "war on poverty" aspiration is another's "wealth distribution" boogeyman. But remember this: A rising tide lifts all boats. Something that the OP article demonstrates in spades.
We weren’t, actually, all that good at it until the Crash made enough people angry from its obvious resulting from greed based overreach of the Gilded Age elite causing the misery that befell the populace.
We had rising fascist, communist and even anarchist movements. Luckily we wound up with this guy, FDR, and this compromise; the Democratic Socialist “New Deal’.
We didn’t get much better at it till post WW2 “G.I Bill”, suddenly college educated formerly working class men looking to move into corporate management and a need for them in the work space, powerful labor unions and other social changes. (Over simplifying but it would take a book to get into it fully).
We had an age of real growth in the sharing of GNP and political power between the economic classes. It even started to cross economic lines to include race and sex and there were improvements in those areas.
Didn’t last though. The economic elite, the first tenth of the 1%’ers, put up with all of this but took umbrage when the riff-raff breached the halls of the Ivy League, which they considered their own, and it crossed a line when it hit them in the wallet and they stopped a war. (Again, over simplified to get to the crux of the point).
There has been a long game since “68. Union busting “Right to Work” laws, the corruption of those unions from within by corporate money and position of those union hierarchies (I fault the corporate types for being corrupters and the weak union political types for being as corruptible as other politicians). Changes in education that created our current generations of those with little to no knowledge of civics, the processes of deductive reasoning and critical thinking, their application to history, etc.
So we have been devolving back into a post Civil War Industrial Revolution style “democracy”, heavy on corporate robber barons, throughly corrupted politicians, an under educated masses…. (All greatly over simplified but, again, this would turn into something no one would read if I went into detail). I think I got the key points across.
BTW, I am NOT claiming the truly wealthy have meetings to define and plan all of this. It’s not some criminal conspiracy.
I’m claiming that kind of wealth over time changes individual reality. They become so removed from the rest of us, insulated and isolated from the mainstream, that their thinking changes. Their filters aren’t our filters. Their reality not our reality. This creates enough people thinking similarly and pulling, individually, in the same direction that when you add the power of money and the access to influence it allows they cause change. That change, moving in similar directions, becomes unified in its confluence and reaches a point where it might as well be that they held meetings and planned it.
