Then why don't we say that?" Professor Burns's theory is that "the word has risen with prosperity and will promptly decline if there is a recession".
In developing economies, such as China and India, meat consumption has risen along with prosperity.
As people have left subsistence agriculture for more productive work in cities, inequality has risen along with prosperity.But that cannot be the whole explanation, if only because the experience of today's Asian tigers is in striking contrast to that of an earlier pack.
Perth itself now has the look of an Australian Dallas, its skyline dotted with skyscrapers that have risen as landmarks to its prosperity.
"Rents here have risen," he said, hinting that the prosperity artists have brought to their districts may force some of them to leave.
John Church, the publican whom Webster had attempted to implicate, was himself a former servant who had risen to lower middle-class status and earned a measure of prosperity and effective management of his pub.
"When you have rising inequality and record prosperity at the same time, it's a biblical issue".
Rising prosperity has actually accelerated their growth.
For 40 years, America's promise of rising prosperity has eluded nearly half of the population.
Over decades, rising prosperity has encouraged comparatively wealthy nations to build ever-larger, more expensive welfare states.
A continent that was divided by the iron curtain until 1989 now enjoys free movement of people and common political institutions for 25 countries, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the borders of Russia.This new period of peace and prosperity has coincided with the rise of a new form of political and economic organisation.
