Alright, comments.

The Bakers, Smiths, and Shoemakers were in their own sense entrepreneurs. They ran their own businesses, kept their trade within their families, and profited strictly through the fruits of their own labors rather than a capitalists willingness to give them crumbs of their efforts. Owning your own small business, or having a family owned business, is incredibly divergent from the status quo of employment to international megacorp where everyone you ever meet involved with the company is still just a low level cog in a larger machine.

The Bakers et al saw their prosperity often strictly through their skill and talent. We have normalized that significantly in modern society for better and worse, but the inventive Smith who could improve on his metalcasting skill through ingenuity would reap tremendous benefits in the kingdom. Trying to innovate in shelf stocking at Walmart will get you fired. The ability to dictate ones own destiny like that, even if constrained to the skills passed down from parents, is still providing absolutely useful work being done. The Bakers and Shoemakers existed because of real demand from not only the nobility but their neighbors for their work.

There were few or no unemployed in the era of Smith families formation - if you did not have practical utility to your community you were often discarded. You prayed on the good nature of your own children to keep you around in old age when you were decrepit and could no longer work. Before the Industrial Revolution, the marginal cost of maintaining an individual persons working conditions was enormously high, such that 80% of people at least were working as farmers for thousands of years.

My point is that today we face a crisis not of a lack of resources as those before us would have faced. Today the labor participation rate, which I much prefer to fictitious employment rates, is at a 20 year low and continuing to drop. It is today below the rates we saw when women were en masse entering the workforce in the 70s and 80s. It is dramatically higher for those younger rather than older, predominantly because rather than train and hire new recruits to do the old jobs we either obsolete them or automate them. It is also valuable to consider that even before the rise of working class women, women were serving critical functions in society as caregivers and child rearers, that we have done a lot to professionalize and integrate into that labor force as paid work, so even today the 1:3 people over the age of 16 that are not posting working income are much less likely to be doing work without pay.

If we had this rate of labor participation a thousand, or even two hundred, years ago we would have seen mass famine and social collapse because you needed way more than that ratio of people farming just to feed everyone. We obviously do not have that problem today. Hell, we cannot even fathom an unemployment rate where would actually reasonably see a shortage of anything. Our only concerns when dealing with unemployment is how we would have millions of destitute and homeless, not due to a lack of resources, but because they lack any money to buy them with.

On the standard of living in the US, we can practically see what is happening. I don't believe it is any adjustment for climate change. We still do not give a shit. It is simply globalization, and oligarchic state control. The US did what facists and communists did to a degree with capitalism. We treated it like religion throughout the cold war, and eroded liberty and individual empowerment to hold the ideology sacred. We killed unions and sat idle while global monopolies were formed under our stead, and while our politics enabled the gross transfer of wealth from the middle to the top, and from the middle to foreign markets where the act of producing goods traveled.

On the backs of the vast majority of American wealth falling, the rich have gotten dramatically richer, billions were lifted out of extreme poverty, and nations like Korea, China, Brazil, Mexico, and India have seen the rise of dramatic middle classes in very short spans of time from the wealth we send overseas.

That is economics driving the dissolution of median wealth, not the environment. As long as our economic policy systemically ignores negative externalities like human rights and greenhouse gasses (and it always has, we just did a better job long ago at managing them through collectivism, environmental protection, and workers rights in the era before gargantuan business interests took over most western democracies through amassed wealth <and thus power>).