No longer young, I was just checking I’d understood the problem correctly.

As for Toynbee’s motivation, I think the truth is rather more scary than you are willing to allow. She genuinely believes what she says.

You must be young. People entirely ignorant of business, the size of profit margins, and attendant expenses do, indeed, tend toward such more-or-less childlike confusion and have done so forever.

The reality–insofar as are concerned the many left and left-ish among the more educated classes, whether writers, “educators,” or politicians, is that, regardless the actual state of their knowledge, they aim to encourage precisely those misunderstandings among the general populace which serve to aggravate such invidiousness.

The older you get, the more you’ll come to realize that most of such are deliberate, calculating malefactors. To award them a “pass” on presumption of ignorance might be tempting–we want to regard ourselves as generous of spirit and “fair,” recognizing that it’s a general mistake to ascribe to malevolence that which can be explained by stupidity. But those we discuss are not the “general,” but a particular subset whose social position (and income ) is entirely derived from their ability to misinform and mislead (and, in the process, injure almost all others). They are a bane, not merely to all others, but to civilization itself.