I do wish you'd gotten props, Bret, for your work in creating the openstack case at Rackspace that we took to the board, and for your work in building the ecosystem! We couldn't have done it without you, no doubt about it.
They may not have more money in their pocket, but they have an iPhone or android in there which I think qualifies as a pretty amazing form of "participation" in the amazing gains driven by technology.
The more relevant question in this global age is: what are the global stats? How many people were lifted out of poverty during these "bad" decades on a global scale? Country specific stats just don't mean as much as they used to.