> miserably poor Poor as in not wealthy, sure. But miserable? No, I doubt that. Yes, if you compare wealth between different time periods many people have mor

> miserably poor Poor as in not wealthy, sure. But miserable? No, I doubt that. Yes, if you compare wealth between different time periods many people have more wealth today than they did yesterday, but that's not important. Poverty is a measure of economic relationships: What matters is differentials in access to resources and means of production and how those differentials shape the structure of our society today. Even if an impoverished family in Appalachia today has more wealth than hunter gatherers several thousand years ago, their poverty marginalizes them, immiserates them, and drives the decay of the social structures around them. The issue is social relationships, not absolute wealth. It's about the dynamics of our society and how class structures form around economic relationships. Comparing wealth between time periods is always a red herring in discussions about poverty. Poverty certainly does exist because it's profitable because poverty is about class and economic relationships today, not the relative wealth between, say, a vagrant in San Francisco and a vagrant in Rome circa 50 CE.