Can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.
Through the history of the study of history there have been several ways of doing history (ie historiographies). One is Marxist historiography, trying to find the class struggle in everything. Another is whiggish historiography, named after the Whig history of Britain which viewed history as an inevitable progression towards constitutional monarchy, but which more generally refers to seeing history as intentionally leading to the present day.
To only present 'Marxism' and 'Whiggism' as the schools of thought is very silly and a very unflattering explanation of historiography. Neither are really studied in academia anymore and you should read more if you think they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
I definitely didn’t mean to suggest that that those are the only possibilities. Only that they are relatively common examples of (what I would consider) bad ways of looking at history, and that I disagree with your claim that history is all about class struggle.
> To only present 'Marxism' and 'Whiggism' as the schools of thought is very silly and a very unflattering explanation of historiography. Neither are really studied in academia anymore and you should read more if you think they are.
And yet your first comment is asserting that Marxist historiography is the definition of the study of history:
> The study of history is the study of struggle between classes.
Marxism is everywhere in the american university system. If you've taken classes in the sociology, comparative literature, philosophy, anthropology, or any of the -studies fields (e.g. gender studies) chances are that you've been taught by many openly marxist professors.
Marxism for the american academy refers to the liberal strand of it (e.g. the kind that John Bellamy Foster advocates for) rather than the authoritarian flavors.
The left-wing bias in parts of the academy is real.
For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards and there would be no rich class to contrast them against. Ah, it becomes obvious now, poverty is a product of nature. You are born poor by nature. Your children are born poor as well.
Those 2 humans give birth to 6 children. 2 of them die because of a disease. Are the children who grew up to adulthood the rich class? Repeat this until there are 100 people. They organize, they build and invent things. The rich are born, not by nature but by society. Wealth is a product of society.
> For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards (...)
Not true. Our standards define poverty either as the inability to afford lower-tier living expenses, or as the inability to ensure an income higher than a certain quantille of the population's income distribution (typically around 60% of the median income )
Both interpretations of poverty imply that none of your hypothetical examples represent poverty.
