HG Wells' the Time Machine reminds me of the contemporary state of the world and its problems that can actually be reduced to three attributes: environmental causes, political conditions, and economic conditions. Environmental conditions:

The Eloi seem at first sight to be a peaceful Utopian community who, although not intellectual, has used technology to control their environment and to make it work for them. Only through the duration of the book and more significantly much later, does the narrator realize that the activities of the Eloi have actually despoiled the environment. The traveler travels ahead to approximately 30 million years ahead of his own time and sees lecherous insects swarm over the country and ravage it. The further he travels, the more closely he sees the earth's rotation gradually cease, the planet become increasingly colder, and the Earth become a more forbidding, dank, and lifeless place. Eloi and similar civilizations have ruined it.

This is relevant to our own times of how we use technology to ruin the Earth. The spoilage of fresh water, forestry, confiscation of land, and pollution of resources as well as confiscation for other purposes cause a shortage of crops and unfair distribution of resources where - similar to Well's Time Machine in regards to the Eloi and the Morlocks - the privileged receive more than those hwo have little. The end-result is that a gasp exists between those who have a lot and those who have little and brutality is a consequence. This is particularly true in places where poor people are underrepresented and lack a voice to articulate their complaints. Often too, these individuals are forced to move off property compelled to relocate to unstable poor land and to overcrowded cities where their poverty only becomes aggravated and their hunger,...

This may occur in all countries and was particularly prevalent in America during the Great Depression. Wells foresaw this in his rendition of the planet Earth 30 million years ago.
2. War:

A related cause of inequality is conflict. We see this with the Eloi and the Morlocks where the Eloi depress and subdue the Morlocks (in true bourgeois fashion) and the result is conflict. The Morlocks feed on the Eloi, and the Time traveler theorizes that theirs is the life of the jungle with each preying in the other. All -- he concludes -- have lost the intelligence, wisdom, enlightenment, and rationality of Man at his peak becoming instead animals that prey on one another.

We are no different as evidenced from the enduring friction that plagues the Earth where humans battle one another simply (oftentimes) because they feel attacked by the other and view the other as aliens. Advantaged nations depress disadvantaged nations who, in Marxist fashion, bounce up and retaliate in return. Powerful and greedy corporations do the same sucking vulnerable individuals in their engines of so-called progress. The Eloi seemed at first blush to be advanced. The Time Traveler realized he was mistaken; they were intrinsically primitive despite their technological suaveness. How different are…