[Jim Yanik]

-- the
machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very
greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened
the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a
hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had
enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and
possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps
the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it
once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible,
no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal
possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a
society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were
enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally
stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for
themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realize that the privileged minority had no function,