Both views are right, and more. Wealth is created by a large number of workers under leadership by a smaller number of inventors and managers but neither is abl

Both views are right, and more. Wealth is created by a large number of workers under leadership by a smaller number of inventors and managers but neither is able to do anything without demand. Demand requires a strong middle class. Aligning those three groups through a set of compromises is the American System, or at least the postwar one that created the greatest explosion of wealth in human history. Look up wages vs productivity. We have an almost exact date for the collapse of that system: 1971-1974. What happened? I don't know. There are many candidates: the Nixon Shock (end of Bretton Woods), the opening of outsourcing as a way to break labor (and thus the middle class) allowing the upper classes to economically "defect," the rise of automation, or something else.