One of the downsides of living in a prosperous society is that we can’t stand to think about the things we really should be thinking about and instead are obliged to expend enormous amounts of energy inventing non-meaningful things to worry about, e.g. this Wall Street Journal report on Google’s high-speed Internet service in Kansas City, Mo., and the resultant “digital divide.” Get this, kids: People living in poor neighborhoods were less likely to shell out significant sums of money for super-fast Internet service than were people in more affluent neighborhoods. Any bets on how wide is the hybrid-car divide or the organic-quinoa divide?

As the Journal reports, low-income residents of Kansas City most often cited expense when asked why they had not signed up for Google fiber, which can be 100 times faster than traditional Internet services but costs about three times as much. So, lower-income people seem to have less disposable income – crackerjack reporting there, Wall Street Journal.

This is not something to worry about. For context, consider that 30 years ago, you pretty much had to have Wall Street money to afford a mobile phone, and those mobile phones were terrible by contemporary standards. Ten years from now, it will almost certainly be the case that rich people will enjoy better Internet service than do poor people, but that everybody will enjoy better service than rich people do today. That is the general trend in technological development — which also could be the general trend in education, health care, and much more, if we’d let it.