An ever-growing number of folks in 'our' society (presuming Western technological) are making only symbolic contributions. Automation is rapidly overtaking jobs.

Understand what that means. It doesn't just mean unemployment/underemployment. It means nobody has to work to create what automation took over. An ever-increasing fraction of the 'lavish society' has no human cost burden at all.

So that knee-jerk thinking above is growing ever-more irrelevant and obsolete. That's pretty much the whole conversation here.