I would equate wealth as what the average American could buy while making minimum wage. To make sense of what I'm saying minimum wage was around $1 an hour in the 1950s and 1960s. So what could you buy with one hours wages?
First of all, even in 1969 you could buy regular gas at a cheap station for 17 cents a gallon. Basically this means that you could buy 5 to 6 gallons of gasoline by working one hour at a minimum wage job. So, working one hour bought this much gasoline. A new VW Bug was 800 dollars around the same time so for working 800 hours you could buy a brand new car. I bought a 1956 Ford Stationwagon in 1964 when I was 16 for about 800 dollars that was 8 years old at that time.
Compare that to now. What is the minimum wage? I'm not exactly sure but I think it varies from about 5 dollars an hour to 7 plus dollars an hour depending upon the state. How much is gas?
Regular gas is about 4 dollars a gallon now where I live. So that means that you are now going to work 4/5 an hour for 1 gallon of gas but in the 1950s and 1960s you could work one hour and get 5 to 6 gallons of gas. Why is this? The biggest reason of the change is that all the easy oil to make gas has already come out of the ground. So now it takes a lot more work and money to pull it out.
How much is a VW Bug now? Basically you can buy one now for about 20,000 dollars for a new one in 2013. So, if you are making say 7 dollars an hour how many hours is that? 2847+ hours.
And how many hours would you have worked in the 1960s for the same thing pretty much?
800 hours.
So basically you are now working 3 1/2 times as long to buy a similar thing.
Since most people in the U.S. likely make minimum wage (a larger group than most others) in regard to buying a car you now work 3 1/2 times as long for a similar thing for a car.
And you now work at least 5 times as long for a gallon of gas as you would have from 1950 to 1973.
And the primary reason is the cost of energy has gone up faster than wages which have actually stagnated from the early 1990s. So, in some ways people are actually making less now (in real terms) than they did in regard to actually buying things than in 2000 or even the early 1990s. Another factor in all this is automation. I was listening to a report of how a person could buy a robot to do a job for 20,000 dollars. But the robot would wear out and have to be replaced in 3 years. However, for a company this was actually cost effective because it only cost around 3 dollars an hour during those three years and the company could buy another one in 3 years. So, it was like buying one Chinese worker when they bought one of these robots.
My concern is this: If people can't make enough money to feed themselves and their families worldwide how will they survive? I really don't have an answer to this question but it seems like things have to change in some positive way or poorer governments around the world will fall one by one just from the frustration of the people not being able to survive, or get married or raise children.
It is still possible to make enough money even at minimum wage and working in a fast food place or something like that to rent a room and to pay for enough food to survive here in the U.S. But that is no longer true in up to 50% of the countries on earth. So, what are they supposed to do? Die? Likely if they can't get enough to survive they will bring down their governments. This is just a fact of too many people with not enough resources including too high energy prices worldwide.
It is my thought that some way to subsidize people worldwide needs to be thought of in order not to be dealing with something like Al Qaeda in the 50% of nation states of the world that are likely to collapse within the next 20 to 50 years because of everything costing too much worldwide in relation to wages in those countries.
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