Our civilization is so amazing that people from Jane Austen's time would not, indeed could not comprehend it if you explained it to them

It has literally turned the assumptions about Rich and Poor upside down.  From Scott Sumners blog:

The grumpy old reactionary in me liked this Kevin Erdmann post:

Again, thinking of Jane Austen characters, or even of people in many pre-capitalist societies today, for peasants, human capital would be largely unattainable or pointless.  For the landed elite, it would be insulting.  Traders and commercial innovators – producers – became tolerable, and capitalism was the result. 

Because of the capitalist revolution, not only is being personally productive tolerated today, but we would find it incomprehensible to imagine it another way.  In fact, we are concerned about it!  We say: It’s not fair that rich kids get the opportunity to be more productive!  Today, high income workers work longer hours than low income workers.  Imagine the look of confusion you might get from a pre-capitalist gentleman if you told him that in your society, the poor work fewer hours than the rich and the government is implementing school lunch programs to make sure poor kids don’t ingest too many calories.  He wouldn’t just have a hard time understanding how that could be.  Those words literally could not form that sentence.  You might as well speak martian to him.  Don’t even try to explain to him that you’re outraged by how the richest kids have an advantage in attaining productive employment.  He’ll think you’re crazy before you even get to that.