Economic Progress

The improvement of the condition of the poorest 20 percent of households is one of the most notable accomplishments of the third religious-political cycle. The real income. . . .of these households increased nineteenfold between 1890 and 1990, several times more than the gain in the balance of the households, the upper four-fifths. The poor of the 1990s are relatively rich by 1890 standards because, a century ago, only households in the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real incomes that exceeded our current poverty line.

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, p. 170.