Do you impoverish others when you enrich yourself ?

Recently while on a flight from Delhi to Pune India, my co passenger and I started a conversation.

We discussed many things but one question got me thinking. The gentleman asked me if I agreed with his contention that people became rich at the expense of someone else and thus made them poorer. We moved on to other topics but my mind kept returning to this question.

To answer this question we have to first review what we mean by rich.
I would say the rich are those who possess the ability to make independent choices of freedom, mobility, residence, food and to a great extent secure themelves, their families and their possessions.

In earlier days the wealthy were the "Zamindar" the landlords who owned large tracts of land who owned slaves and many landless people worked for the landlords for nothing but food. They were exploited and indeed the rich made the majority of people poor.Conquerers of days earlier whether it was Ghengis Khan, or the rulers of the Romans empire were such people.

From the dawn of industrialization, the rich were people who set up all the elements of mass production and their attendant features as mass communication, mass education, etc made who controlled large resources for production either as entreprenuers or as allocating agents in the government. Again by cornering resources and controlling means of finance, distribution etc they made themselves rich at the expense of the original owner of resources who remained poor. This also is an era of exploitation of the poor to make a few rich.

To take an example the birth of the automobile created a huge demand for rubber at the begining of the 20th century. In collusion with local authorities large number of native Indians were enslaved to extract the rubber in the Amazonian forest. As per the statement of Mr. Roger Casement, the British Consul General in Rio Di Janerio reported that to extract 4000 tonnes of Putumayo rubber between the years 1900 to 1911 over 30,000 South American Indians lost their lives.
The colonial rulers /powers were typical of this type of exploitation. This is rampant even to this day in many countries.

Not all Industrialists are robber barons, this was and is possible because they are more efficient than others and hence were able to offer high standards of living to their employees and their associates.

Nowadays a new equitable trend has emerged and that is based on knowledge. You do not need land or commodities to be rich but only knowledge. This knowledge can be in the form of a formulae to produce a material or even a sauce, the lyrics to a song, design for a chip. Wealth created by such efforts do not render anyone poor but increases wealth more universally.

While farming a tract of land only the farmer can use the land wheras when using a formulae several thousand people can be using the same computer program simultaneously and that is why those who focus on knowledge will create more wealth for the least effort. A bigger bang for the buck so to speak.

So my co passenger's wish that wealth be created without exploitation now seems possible.

However it is not going to be easy because Governments and educators are still applying outdated policies and education models more suited to mass production and an era that is not focussed on developing knowledge but the continuation of dogma which is increasingly irrelevant.