Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.
Plenty of Middle-class Americans deny that the earth is round, even with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.
Potentially, yes, the world is miraculous compared to the past. But for those who are not born into some of that gradual wealth creation (as most Westerners were), they are still very poor and very exploited. Or they are too remote to bother with and so life is hardly any different compared with 100 or 500 years ago.
I talk about your average “very poor guy“ in a modern society: he is just poor compared to his peers, but rich compared to a lot of people.
But no matter who we are talking about: my point all along is that being poor or rich is a relative measure. To say that a person is poor, you need to state “compared to“. Usually we implicitely compare to the “average contemporary citizen“
