Most of human culture and philosophy evolved during these periods and bakes in the idea that the pie is finite and that anyone with more of it has stolen it, because that was just an accurate picture of reality.
A growing pie is a rare condition. It has happened a few times during periods of high civilization: Egypt, Greece, and Rome in the West and similar examples exist in lots of other places.
A rapidly growing pie is entirely new. The modern world is an extreme historical aberration built on the scientific method, modern engineering methods, and the discovery of massive amounts of exploitable cheap energy in the form of first fossil fuels, then nuclear power, then (today) learning to exploit things like solar and wind energy at exponentially larger scales. Other innovations that have fed into this unique condition include synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, vaccines, etc.
Humans have never lived in an environment like this. Everything in our evolution and our accumulated culture is screaming that it's wrong -- that it will either collapse tomorrow (hence the perennial popularity of doomerism) or that it must be built on some kind of insanely massive crime because otherwise where is all this wealth coming from? That's because it's impossible. It cannot be. The idea that wealth can be created at this scale is just... not a thing that has ever existed until maybe 200 years ago max but really more like 80-100. Before that there was only subsistence and theft.
Edit: I'm not arguing that there is no slavery or near-slavery or theft/conquest in the modern world. These things certainly still happen. I'm arguing that it is not the primary source of our massive wealth. Slavery and conquest have always been around and no society has ever been this wealthy or grown this fast. Not even close.
Are the new drugs we create immertial ? The better faster processor abstract ? The energy we produce unreal ?
However, most of our so-called ownership begins in a fiat currency that is essentially a company token.
If I could bake a muffin that would make you effortlessly glide through, say, a full day of perfectly laying bricks without taking a break, a warehouse of those muffins would mean I'm extremely wealthy. No money, markets, or currency necessary. It's the purified extract of wealth.
With that in mind, you can see that there is still huge room for more wealth creation. The majority of humans are still doing work that doesn't motivate much work from other humans.
Similarly a lot of our wealth is just a facade. Most of it derives from the stock market, yet the market cap of the stock market is now dramatically larger than all of the money in existence. Consider that the system that created this mess only started in 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods) and it already only being propped up by ever more extravagant financial games. The house of cards is likely to come down without our lifetimes, which will make this one of the shortest lived economic experiments, and failures, ever. 'Doomerism' isn't a response to the growth, but to the increasingly unstable fundamentals underpinning everything, let alone in an era that's also an obvious geopolitical inflection point as well.
I'm not talking about numeric wealth, which I agree is hand wavey, but actual tangible physical wealth as well as our insane increase in knowledge and capability.
I can go watch videos from the surface of Mars and pictures of galaxies from the beginning of time, then go to the doctor and get injected with something that programs my immune system to resist diseases I've never encountered, then ask an AI to explain any concept from the history of science or mathematics. I am middle class and live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, and some of the things I just described are available to the very poor. This is simply nuts and it is not a facade or an illusion.
The collapse of the numeric financial industry won't take all this away unless we let it.
Technology is definitely the driving factor behind all changes in society, and it's an absolute requirement for our species to ultimately survive in this universe. It's also made it easier than ever for a larger chunk of those those of ability to live lives that would not have been possible for them in the past. But on a social level, it's overall effects are, in a seemingly large chunk of cases, somewhat sordid.
Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore.
It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects.
There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways.
This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true.
Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units.
> which is a proxy for political power and social status.
“Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing.
> In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.
No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.)
So what your saying even though peoples baseline expectations are higher they got, cellphones, Netflix, and are taking home more money?
I intentionally avoided entertainment, which is of course also greatly increasing costs even further - though that's probably at least partially balanced by the internet which provides an immense amount of entertainment for just the already accounted for baseline cost.
You keep saying "effect earning less" but your own linked data shows the opposite.