The author doesn't even seem to agree with himself.
This line:
> "We have never yet failed to become richer; as a species, our lives have always gotten better. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but Greece today is more affluent than the Germany of 1974. Even the least among us own technology that would have been science fiction just a dozen years ago. Our ancestors would be amazed at the splendor of our lives, and by this I mean our grandparents, not cavemen."
is directly at odds with this:
> "What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years?"
If the benefits had been large monopolised by the 1%, Germany in 1974 would be substantially the same (for the 99%, that is) as today, and there would be little splendor for our grandparents to be amazed at.
Sure, some amount of wealth seems to have accumulated at the top, and that's generally undesirable, but the fact that there has been huge leaps in quality of life for all is so blatantly obvious that the author, despite trying to drive the opposite point, (accidentally?) uses it as a throwaway rhetorical device.
This line:
> "We have never yet failed to become richer; as a species, our lives have always gotten better. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but Greece today is more affluent than the Germany of 1974. Even the least among us own technology that would have been science fiction just a dozen years ago. Our ancestors would be amazed at the splendor of our lives, and by this I mean our grandparents, not cavemen."
is directly at odds with this:
> "What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years?"
If the benefits had been large monopolised by the 1%, Germany in 1974 would be substantially the same (for the 99%, that is) as today, and there would be little splendor for our grandparents to be amazed at.
Sure, some amount of wealth seems to have accumulated at the top, and that's generally undesirable, but the fact that there has been huge leaps in quality of life for all is so blatantly obvious that the author, despite trying to drive the opposite point, (accidentally?) uses it as a throwaway rhetorical device.