Standards of living (in "the West") have improved such that even the poor of today would be considered to be enjoying "upper middle class" comforts from 100 years ago, and the old saw about kings of 400 years ago being unable to buy the luxuries and comforts of the poor today is very true. But that doesn't change the skew of the distribution. We're headed back to kings and peasants, and ultimately that will bring down the kings' absolute standards of living - even as they continue to dominate the peasants ever more decisively in wealth and power.

The part that bothers me the most comes from my experience living in the City of Miami, where the wealthy lived along Biscayne Bay and the working poor staffed the shopping along Biscayne Boulevard. I could afford a house between the two, so that's what I bought. With the poor and disenfranchised in such close proximity, the rich had to be hypervigilant about security. You would worry about being mugged, burgled in the night, vandalized while not present, etc. etc. etc. worried because you saw examples of it. We had a car stolen, apparently as part of a gang initiation. When the poor have more opportunity for advancement, they do actually spend less time making trouble, have less of a pissed off attitude when working in the shops, etc. For an extreme extension, Key Biscayne was a popular community for rich Colombians to buy into, they literally were relieved that their children could play in the streets without worry of kidnapping and ransom - back home where they were so rich relative to their fellow citizens, those kidnapping and ransom situations were common.

So, sure, we should "work hard to get ahead" - not game the system so that a select few who get ahead have multiples of thousands of times the wealth of the median and leave no realistic avenues for the rest to follow them.