&gt; What you generally want in a society is: lots of poor people to be able to get out of poverty (into middle class), middle class to have a decent chance to become upper middle class, etc -- and of course most middle class to be stable and not fall into poverty.<p>I hear this a lot but I really don&#x27;t understand the logic. Because the middle class is a subjective and proportionate categorization, your target is always going to be moving. Who cares about joining the middle class if most of their needs already being met.<p>If, for instance, a replicator was invented that provided food and shelter to anyone who wanted it for free, a hell of a lot of people could live quite happily and comfortably without being middle class. So the goal should be to get to that sort of scenario as fast as possible. That is, a world in which the cost of covering our basic human needs is so small that nobody <i>needs</i> to be middle-class or higher to be happy.