The rich/poor divide does indeed exist and has always existed, but that floats separately to the poverty divide. changing one does not change the other. Imagine

The rich/poor divide does indeed exist and has always existed, but that floats separately to the poverty divide. changing one does not change the other. Imagine an ancient communist utopia where all the bread is split evenly - and the 20% who aren't making bread spread their more interesting items across the population equally. Maybe you'll get some nice pottery. By any modern measure of poverty, you have created a utopia of poverty, everyone would be below the modern poverty line. The rich of ancient times had to scrape their wealth from the labour of _so many_ people. Meanwhile, if we tried applying the ancient poverty line to a modern rich society, we'd have trouble defining it clearly, even homeless people might sit above it, it barely makes sense.