Karl Marx thought that capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. If someone was to gain, someone else had to lose in the free market. The middle class would become proletarians, and the proletarians would starve. But when Marx died in 1883, the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born, in 1818. By 1900, extreme poverty in England had already been reduced by three-quarters, to around ten per cent. Never before had the human race experienced anything like it.
