It just occurred to me, while reading about skyrocketing real estate prices in NYC, that as the rich keep getting richer the rest of us are going to develop our own society. We won’t all be driven into hovels; humans are far too resilient for that. But we will create an “underground” society of sorts, where we find ways to get our needs met and take care of one another outside of the established system. Some of us will be well educated in the established system, then return to the underground in order to help everyone else, because we recognize our moral responsibility to look after those who did not have the same opportunities we had. I don’t envision a post-apocalyptic society, either, where we literally live underground. (Think the underground city of Zion, from the Matrix trilogy.) It will be a kind of reverse “Atlas Shrugged”, where we withdraw from (or move in and out of) the system in order to better take care of one another, rather than continuing to be exploited by the wealthy and established powers that be.
(Those that recognize the only thing missing from the outside society in Atlas Shrugged was an understanding of one’s moral responsibility to look after others will recognize this will, in fact, be an Atlas Shrugged scenario, just led by the non-wealthy, rather than by the wealthy.)
This is a far more hopeful view of humanity than the one I have had up until now.