[Borodog]

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My sense is the discussion is not about whether more people live better lives with oil making modern agriculture more efficient than it would be without it, but rather over whether more people would live better lives if ownership were more evenly distributed than it is now.

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They would not. They would live worse lives, because "ownership", over time, evolves into a capital structure that provides consumers the highest standard of living, in the very opinions of the consumers themselves.* I.e., they spend their money buying the things that satisfy them the most, said money being earned at jobs producing the things that people demand the most. Consumers shift capital and labor away from wasteful uses toward productive applications.

Redistributing ownership of capital away from those who use it the most efficiently to satisfy consumers necessarilly shifts it to those who do not, and hence the general standard of living cannot but go down.

* This neglects, of course, the wealth positions that have been accumulated through legalized plunder and mercantilism (political entrepreneurship rather than market entrepreneurship). If we stopped government interventions in the market, than all sorts of inefficiencies and frictions that lower the general standard of living would go away.