[hohloma]

I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".

[rustmachine]

100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.

[kragen]

Nowhere was dominance of fossil fuels or the very powerful industrial upswing stronger in 01922 than in the United States. But the US did not then have the huge international network of overseas military deployment and occupied territories it developed later that century. It did have some overseas territories: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Alaska, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Wake Island, the Panama Canal, and arguably Honduras; but these were primarily naval bases and tourist resorts, not pools of cheap labor or troves of resources to exploit.

To be sure, sugar from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii, pineapples from Hawaii, and bananas from Honduras were obtained by exploitation of the residents of those unfortunate lands, enriching the US colonists, and gold was mined by the colonists in Alaska; but these resources were peripheral to the projects of US industrialization and energy supplies. 50 years earlier the US had none of them, just huge tracts of land taken by force from Native Americans.

In Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, the story was of course quite different. But it is perhaps not coincidental that the industrial power least addicted to plundering resources from colonies abroad became the land most prosperous in the epoch when industry and invention reshaped the world.