For millennia, social development was tantamount to social survival: the daily goal of people, with the exception of a tiny ruling minority, was to get by, make a family, and steal a few moments of joy out of the harshness of the human condition. This is still the lot of many. Yet over the last two centuries, with the advent of the industrial age, social development came to involve the goal of improving peoples livelihood. Capital accumulation and investment, technological development geared towards material production, and massive inputs of labour and natural resources were the generators of wealth, both under capitalism and under statism. Social struggles and political reformor revolutiontook care of diffusing the harvest of productivity within society at large, albeit with the shortcomings of a world divided between North and South, and organized in class societies that tended to reproduce themselves.