I am going to take a stab at this. I would look at two things: the first is the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the second is comparing Indonesia (as an American living in Indonesia) to the US.
When Rome fell, the result of the lack of central administration meant that the institution of Roman slavery began to evolve from proprietary rights over other people's actions to proprietary rights over land entrusted to other people. Over generations, the descendants of slaves became peasants with rights over the land they worked, with strong access to common resources. Nutrition improved in the lower classes. Laws were simplified.
Now this took some time. You don't see slavery turn into serfdom during the rein of Theodoric the Great, for example, but it's a general trend in history that during most of the Middle Ages, when power was not well concentrated in the hands of the King (which was the norm until relatively late) that the poor did relatively well.
Another good comparison might be between Indonesia today and the US today. Indonesia has a weak central government, with a very decentralized society. The result is that society runs, at least in the cities, in almost an inverted order to what we think of in the US: everyone but the obscenely wealthy live in gated communities, food production is widely distributed (and a substantial part of fruit and vegetable production happens in the cities). As a result, the diet of those in poverty in Jakarta tends to be rice, tempe, and fresh produce (though access to unpolluted drinking water is a problem, I suppose right now, the US has issues there too at least in some states).
Families are stronger and they become the primary form of support, instead of the government. This means that vertical transmission of wealth happens earlier in life (i.e. invest in your children's businesses because that's your retirement plan), and so forth.
On the whole, the elites in the US today use the power of the state to shape a culture where families are de-emphasized and undermined as a support structure, where we replace people with things as the necessary way out of poverty, and therefore where people are isolated from eachother in order to be made ready for the corporate workforce.
Corporations are creatures of the state. It is unthinkable that corporations could totally dominate the economy if there is no large, powerful state backing them. (BTW, one of the big issues with some strains of Libertarian thought is that if the government's role is reduced to that of enforcing contracts, then it becomes reduced to backing powerful corporations. What are the just limits of contracts cannot be purely found in the limit of a contract but has to be found from wider political controls.)
the USA is a livestock operation, and we are the livestock. Growth Uber Alles! is the underlying theme. Mass immigration is the primary tool of growth, that and using american military to open up new markets for exploitation, oops, I mean spread democracy.
I think that mass immigration is part of the substitute strategy to isolate people from eachother, actually. It's also a way we can discourage people from having kids at the cost of their careers here.
When Rome fell, the result of the lack of central administration meant that the institution of Roman slavery began to evolve from proprietary rights over other people's actions to proprietary rights over land entrusted to other people. Over generations, the descendants of slaves became peasants with rights over the land they worked, with strong access to common resources. Nutrition improved in the lower classes. Laws were simplified.
Now this took some time. You don't see slavery turn into serfdom during the rein of Theodoric the Great, for example, but it's a general trend in history that during most of the Middle Ages, when power was not well concentrated in the hands of the King (which was the norm until relatively late) that the poor did relatively well.
Another good comparison might be between Indonesia today and the US today. Indonesia has a weak central government, with a very decentralized society. The result is that society runs, at least in the cities, in almost an inverted order to what we think of in the US: everyone but the obscenely wealthy live in gated communities, food production is widely distributed (and a substantial part of fruit and vegetable production happens in the cities). As a result, the diet of those in poverty in Jakarta tends to be rice, tempe, and fresh produce (though access to unpolluted drinking water is a problem, I suppose right now, the US has issues there too at least in some states).
Families are stronger and they become the primary form of support, instead of the government. This means that vertical transmission of wealth happens earlier in life (i.e. invest in your children's businesses because that's your retirement plan), and so forth.
On the whole, the elites in the US today use the power of the state to shape a culture where families are de-emphasized and undermined as a support structure, where we replace people with things as the necessary way out of poverty, and therefore where people are isolated from eachother in order to be made ready for the corporate workforce.
Corporations are creatures of the state. It is unthinkable that corporations could totally dominate the economy if there is no large, powerful state backing them. (BTW, one of the big issues with some strains of Libertarian thought is that if the government's role is reduced to that of enforcing contracts, then it becomes reduced to backing powerful corporations. What are the just limits of contracts cannot be purely found in the limit of a contract but has to be found from wider political controls.)