I think VR could be one of these bottom-up forces of transformation. There is no fundamental limit on virtual lands and goods. In VR, every person could have his/her own virtual palace without imposing burdens on other humans (except for maybe on the sysadmins running the VR servers). Even if your physical surroundings are modest, your virtual surroundings could be breathtaking.

With more of our lives occurring in the inexpensive digital world, perhaps we'll be less concerned with the expensive physical one and thus less concerned with working for money.