Why peasants stay poor
A panelist at a United Nations-sponsored meeting observed that to understand why peasants (a class of people, of low social status, who depend mainly on agricultural labor) stay poor, one has to study first why their neighbors have become rich. He was saying that the rich exploit the poor.
Studies from early civilizations to the present have shown how ruling and other classes accumulated enormous wealth at the expense of peasants. As the rich accumulated more wealth, the effort to extract surplus from the peasants grew ever more.
Thus the growth in wealth on the one hand was accompanied by the growth of poverty on the other hand driving living standards of peasants down to the minimum level or even lower.