The frivolous examples all have something in common, spending money.<p>One thing all underclasses have in common, is not having much money.<p>As income and wealth concentrate into ever smaller groups of people, technologies that extract money are naturally going to focus on ever smaller demographics.<p>The point of the article is possibly there is some social good in doing something other than finding new ways to extract money by entertaining the ever shrinking pool of ever richer people, and by doing that, possibly, we can avoid joining the underclass.  Ironically that joining is inevitable, much as people can try to avoid death but can&#x27;t really, &quot;we&quot; can&#x27;t avoid demographic pressures and we will all be poor sooner or later.<p>One aspect carefully tiptoed around in the article is if the number of rich people only decreases and the number of poor people only increases, there is some enlightened self interest involved.  All of us are far more likely to become poor than to become rich.  And that makes us and everyone around us extremely uncomfortable for obvious reasons, so its really cool to help exotic people on the other side of the planet, and really uncool to help our own people locally, beyond the minimal symbolic stuff like saying we support the troops and putting a ribbon on the car, for example.  If you help a poor white male, that&#x27;s going to make people extremely uncomfortable because its socially unacceptable to discuss that as our inevitable future, even if we all know it is our future and even worse we can&#x27;t talk about it.