Capital's multiplier effect includes all society's wealth available to you -- you're richer because you can buy aluminum foil for $1 a roll when it used to cost more than gold; richer due to COTS computers available at white and glass stores worldwide; richer due to the Internet; and richer due to open source software.
Even a poor person today has access to potentially far more labor-amplification than anyone in the past.
But people adjust to new stuff, so it doesn't contribute much to their happiness. But psychological things like lack of economic security,haviong time to be with yur kids and friends, being treated as shit at you're job, and you're relative wealth and status are what matter to humans.
Things like security, power, status and time(freedom) were always at the core of what it meant to be rich.
But do are new technological societies offer more of those things ? i'm not sure.
Let me just say, as a fellow white middle-class guy, you can't eat aluminium foil or COTS computers available at white and glass stores worldwide. Food prices are a larger percentage of average income than since records began. I would disagree with your definition of "wealth" on those grounds alone.
It is fairly easy for one person to live off of $20 of food a week. I say this as someone who has done it in a major east coast city, without ever clipping coupons, buying in bulk or buying on sale.
You can feed yourself for less than 1 hour of minimum wage a day. At no point in history has food been this cheap.
edit: Just in case this becomes a thift-fight, my $20 is relatively high as I was eating +2500 calories a day (running and bicycling a lot). And most of the time I'd be under $15, but the remainder would be spent on treats.
I have no idea what my calorie intake is, but I eat lots of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, and I spend $200/ week. So, I'm curious what one's diet looks like when spending $20/ week. I'm not sure what else one could eat other than Ramen on that budget, and then I question the nutritional value of those calories. Just curious if you could give a better idea of what such a diet consists of?
Ramen was actually too expensive for me. (Spaghetti has identical nutritional information and costs less.)
If you are buying food on a minimal budget, you go calories per dollar (which I'll abbreviate as C/$). If you have money left over, nutrition per dollar.
Set a target - if you want to spend $14 a week, avoid buying foods that do worse than 1000 calories/dollar.
Sugar is 4000 C/$, flour and rice are about the same. Olive oil is 1000 C/$. Ice cream, 700 C/$. Oatmeal, 2000 C/$. Whole milk, 500 C/$. Potatoes (even instant flakes) and peanut butter are also good deals. Eggs and beans are cheap protein.
Vegetables are a bit trickier. Kale for instance is only 140 C/$. An all-kale diet would be $100 per week! Wheat sprouts were the best I could find at 400 C/$ (and that jumps to 700 if you can find a local supplier). Fruit is also tricky. Grow your own if you have space. Raspberries have great yield, require no effort besides picking them and grow almost everywhere. But I'll assume this is not an option.
Meat is stupidly expensive per calorie. Spam is one of the better deals at 400 C/$, but I do have standards.
So anything cheap becomes a staple. Work these into being a large part of every meal. A lot of my breakfasts were "something on oatmeal" and a lot of my dinners were "something on rice". But the more you fill up on the cheap stuff the more money is left over for nice things.
The nice stuff you "ration". For example, I limited myself to at most 8oz kale and three pieces of fruit a day, as well as 8oz of nice steak a week.
Of course, budget a few bucks to flavor - soy sauce has no calories to speak of but it makes rice much more palatable.
Probably the biggest way to save money is to never eat any food you did not make your self. Lots of clever ways to do this. For example, lunch at work: fill a vacuum thermos with rice and boiling water, and it will be done in 90 minutes and keep hot until you eat it.
Can I afford to eat out all the time? Sure. But I like to cook and this is a fun little numbers game.
Thanks for the breakdown. It looks like you've put some significant time into getting those numbers and I'm going to keep them for future reference.
Our approaches aren't all that different as I cook all my meals at home now, but because I've forced myself to do this, I allow myself to buy whatever I want at the store. This gets especially expensive at the specialty meat store.
Good god man, $200 a week? How much meat do you eat?
Meat's expensive, but that is still a huge sum for just one person. Do you eat a lot of prepared food as well? Snack foods, boxed cereal, frozen prepared meals, etc.?
I spend between $100 and $150 a month feeding my family of four. Very little meat, lots of fruit and vegetables, eggs regularly, beans all over the damn place. The most expensive things in our diet are nuts, and next in line is the eggs/dairy.
And honestly, we only spend this much because we're not very disciplined. We could fairly easily keep our bill under $100 a month with better storage and more reliance on bulk foods.
I also hit somewhere in the the $100-200/week, especially if you include wine. And that is basically doing all my own cooking and no prepared meals. Meat is a large part of it, as is fresh fish, but I eat less meat the many people I know, however when I do buy meat I buy the best quality I can find. Basically I don't buy more than most people, but I tend to buy the more expensive stuff in each category. Especially my Cheese monger can see a 'sucker' from a mile away and always manages to convince me to buy something hideously expensive he's just imported from France.
I have no doubt that I could easily get under $100 a month if I had to, but I love food, love to cook, and have the money, so I see no reason not to spend that money on food.
I think he means you have easier access to means of productions. Which means you can produce and distribute, while in the past it's hard/almost impossible. A good example is a guy that made a cover for the iPad. This wouldn't be possible if the means of production are not accessible.
Even a poor person today has access to potentially far more labor-amplification than anyone in the past.