Early foraging societies maybe? (Before agriculture or systemized bartering, let alone economic specialization or capitalism.)

that's kind of how it was. there were no earnings from investments when there was no investment; when everybody was working it was workers who took all of the gains because there was nobody else involved.

Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction. Ie 18th century was better than 19th century was better than 20th century.

> Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction.

The original quote seems to pretty explicitly say its a trend across all industries, not a historic trend across all time.

???

In what way was the 18th century better than the 19th????

I agree with you, that the 20th century was better than the 19th and the 19th was better than the 18th. Thus I disagree with PythonicAlpha, who said

> In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings from investments (pure money makes money business) have to climb."

I guess my argument by contradiction relied too much on the context higher up in the thread.