The Age of Prosperity

Or: How We Learned to Decorate Around Poverty and Call It Progress

We are repeatedly informed that we live in the most prosperous era in human history.

This is not presented as an opinion. It’s delivered as a fact. Charts are involved. Upward arrows. Keynotes. Annual reports with tasteful gradients. The phrase “never before” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Never before has so much wealth existed.
Never before has technology moved so fast.
Never before has productivity been so high.

And yet… here we are.

In an age where global wealth now exceeds $450 trillion, around 700 million people still live in extreme poverty. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not a transitional phase. That’s a small continent’s worth of human beings quietly failing to benefit from humanity’s greatest economic victory lap.

But let’s not dwell. It’s December. There are lights to switch on.

Christmas: The Annual Prosperity Pageant

Christmas, we are told, is a season of goodwill.

In practice, it is a seasonal stress test of the global supply chain. Retail spending spikes into the trillions. Online sales alone now exceed $1 trillion annually, much of it condensed into a few frenzied weeks of festive obligation and dopamine chasing.

Indulgence is no longer indulgence. It’s tradition.

To opt out is to be “difficult”. To question it is to be “negative”. To point out the contrast between excess and deprivation is to be accused of “ruining the mood”.

Meanwhile, food banks report record usage year after year. In many wealthy nations, reliance on emergency food aid has become so normalised that it barely makes the news unless the shelves are completely empty.

That’s not prosperity. That’s coping mechanisms wearing tinsel.

Poverty Didn’t Disappear. It Rebranded.

Here’s the clever bit.

Poverty used to be a collective embarrassment. Something societies tried, at least rhetorically, to solve. Now it’s been rebranded as a personal failure.

If you’re struggling, you must have missed a memo. Didn’t optimise your mindset. Didn’t hustle correctly. Didn’t pivot. Didn’t leverage. Didn’t invest early in the right decade, with the right parents, in the right postcode.

Globally, the top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. This is presented as an interesting statistic, occasionally followed by a panel discussion, and then promptly ignored so we can get back to talking about innovation.

Prosperity, it turns out, is doing brilliantly… just not inclusively.

The Myth of the Rising Tide

We love the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

What it fails to mention is that some people were never given a boat. Some were handed a leaky dinghy. And some were told the water rising around their ankles was actually an opportunity if they just reframed it.

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have barely moved in decades for vast swathes of the population, while productivity has soared. In other words, people are producing more value than ever… and keeping less of it.

That gap didn’t happen accidentally. It was engineered carefully, politely, over time. With policies. With incentives. With PowerPoint decks.

And now, at Christmas, we’re encouraged to celebrate the success of the system by purchasing novelty socks.

Insulation Is the Real Luxury

The true luxury of modern prosperity isn’t wealth. It’s insulation.

The ability not to see poverty.
Not to smell it.
Not to encounter it unless it arrives as a carefully edited charity advert between festive films.

We don’t eliminate suffering anymore. We mute it. We move it out of sight. We outsource it geographically and psychologically.

If suffering becomes too visible, we adjust the algorithm.

Christmas doesn’t reveal how generous we are. It reveals how effectively we’ve learned to look away while congratulating ourselves for caring.

This Isn’t About Guilt

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a call for guilt.

Guilt is performative. Guilt buys a candle, shares a post, donates once, and returns to normal programming by January.

This is about honesty.

If we truly live in the most prosperous age humanity has ever known, then persistent global poverty is not a mystery. It’s not an oversight. It’s not a temporary glitch.

It is the cost of a system that works exceptionally well… for a very specific group of people.

And Christmas, with all its warmth and excess, doesn’t create that contradiction.

It simply lights it up.

If this stirred something uncomfortable and you’d rather do something useful than feel guilty about it, organisations like Oxfam, UNICEF, CARE, Save the Children, or the World Food Programme work globally to address poverty where it actually exists… not just where it photographs well.

Until Next Time