From Charles Karelis. Surely, as you point out, there is no absolute standard of poverty across different times and places. Nevertheless, the suffering of poor

From Charles Karelis. Surely, as you point out, there is no absolute standard of poverty across different times and places. Nevertheless, the suffering of poor Americans today, some of whose objective circumstances would have qualified them for the middle class back in the U.S. of 1930, is real suffering, and seems to call for a response. In addition, I think it lowers the marginal utility of small improvements in their consumption. The conundrum is, that in a (we hope) super-prosperous future America, there will be poor people (by the standards of that time), who are objectively better off than middle class Americans today, and it is (for many people at least) hard to care a great deal about their plight. So do we absolutize contemporary intuitions about poverty and say these future people won't be "really" poor, or do we say they will be really poor but that that doesn't impose a moral obligation on us today, e.g. to conserve so they will be less "poor"? Neither answer feels totally right.