If you just look at things in terms of economic and physical prosperity, the working-class outrage Donald Trump represents makes absolutely no sense. Things have never been better for America's bottom third. If looked at in economic terms, they're easily the global 1 percent now, not to mention by far the historical 1 percent.

Ancient emperors would have killed to have the medical facilities available today to illegal immigrants in the United States--and anyone else, for that matter--at no cost to them. The hot showers I enjoy each morning cost me something between two and three minutes of working time. Just about anybody can have a hot shower nowadays, even homeless people (shelters are everywhere); but practically nobody could 100 years ago. A century ago, one in ten U.S. children died before their first birthday. Now, almost no children do.

 

Economist Mark Perry has a regular blog feature showing how many more and better time-saving, drudgery reducing, and personal enjoyment devices--such as washing machines, iPhones, and cars--we can buy now for far less of our disposable incomes. Heck, the fact that we plebeians have disposable incomes at all is itself a historical miracle. Fifty years ago, it was not possible for any random person to hit up McDonald's or Starbucks to "treat yo self." Now, we can and do treat ourselves constantly, even if we're not the ancient Roman Emperor Nero (he had to send runners up to mountaintops to gather snow to make flavored slushies for his parties).

"From 1952 to 2000, real income per person in the U.S. rose from $16,000 to $50,000," the Wall Street Journal's Bill McGurn notes. Brookings Institution researchers recently found there's statistically just about no chance a person will be in poverty if he or she takes three simple steps: graduate high school, marry before making babies, and work full-time.