We’re rich. Even the very poor in Britain are astoundingly rich by historical standards, some three thousand percent better off in food and housing and clothing and healthcare than the British poor two centuries ago. Economic historians can tell you.

Yes, I agree: the poor, even if much better off, are still poor by our elevated standards, and you and I want to raise them up. But schemes of redistribution, or the impossible goals of equality (What? Equality of height? Equality of intelligence? Of fast-twitch muscles?), don’t do it. The Liberal Lady Glencora Palliser (née M’Cluskie) in Anthony Trollope’s political novel Phineas Finn declares, “Making men and women all equal. That I take to be the gist of our political theory,” as against the Conservative delight in rank and privilege. But Joshua Monk, one of the novel’s radicals in the Cobden-Bright-Mill mould, sees the ethical point more clearly, and replies to her: “Equality is an ugly word, and frightens.” The motive of the true Liberal, Monk continues, should not be equality but “the wish of every honest [that is, honorable] man . . . to assist in lifting up those below him.”

How? Not by Oxfam calculations of billionaires expropriated to lift up the poor. True, Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in the world, the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, is a jerk to own six yachts and a bunch of chateaux, and to give a mere one half of one percent of her wealth to her so-called charitable foundation. But it turns out that righteous anger, and not so righteous envy, grabbing the wealth of the rich and doling it out, would not much help the poor of the world. One or two percent. One year. Do the arithmetic.

What really raises up the poor, and will keep doing so as places like China and India adopt liberal economics, was and is the Great Enrichment, 1800 to the present, that three thousand percent. It was a factor on average of thirty: ten times better food, thirty times better healthcare, a hundred times better lighting.

Why, then? The usual explanations follow ideology. On the left, from Marx onward, the key is said to be exploitation. Capitalists after 1800 seized surplus value from the workers and invested it in dark, satanic mills. On the right, from the blessed Adam Smith onward, the trick was saving. The wild Highlanders could become as rich as the Dutch – “the highest degree of opulence,” as Smith put it in 1776 – if they would merely save enough to accumulate capital, and stop stealing cattle from one another.

But both of these arguments are wrong. What enriched the modern world was not capital stolen from workers or virtuously saved, nor was it institutions for routinely accumulating it, and it was certainly not government or unions redistributing capital’s income by compulsion. Capital and the rule of law were necessary, of course. But so was a labour force and liquid water and the arrow of time.

What made the capital productive was this or that idea for betterment, proposed by a country carpenter or a boy telegrapher or a teenage Seattle computer whiz. As Matt Ridley puts it, after 1800 “ideas started having sex.” The idea of a railroad was a coupling of high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea for your lawn mower couples a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical reaper. Coupling of ideas in the heads of the common people yielded a population explosion of betterments.