We have been in a state of abundance for a long time. We just choose not to distribute the abundance.
Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?
Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.
“ Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”
This isn't the case with purchasing-power adjusted GDP, which is specifically adjusted to account for the actual purchasing power of people's money.
Look at the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_me... - huge disparity between mostly flat income versus rapidly growing per-capita
Not sure where PPP puts it but the median figure will be lower because you can get a lot richer than you can get poorer.
Nobody's stopping you giving all your excess income above 18k to charity. If you try to make other people do it, you'll find a lot of people would rather just stop working than give away the majority of their income, which is why the economy collapsed and tens of millions of people starved in China and Russia after their communist revolutions.
Americans in the 50s were a lot happier than Americans in the 2020s, very little mental illness or obesity, housing was affordable, people weren't at each others' throats like nowadays.
Shame about the institutional racism, mysoginy, homophobia, etc though.