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Except that's not true, there was no poverty in all of North America, for example, up until a couple of hundred years ago. In case this sounds snarky, let me b

Except that's not true, there was no poverty in all of North America, for example, up until a couple of hundred years ago. In case this sounds snarky, let me be clear: this is a really important thing to consider (IMO): there are societies without poverty. It's just that most of us (reading this here today) are unfamiliar with them because they were and are actively destroyed by the poverty-having societies. (E.g. the destruction of the free pirates by the imperial navies. Destruction of Amazonians by loggers. I can list examples all day.) By having a poverty-based system, you can force people to go into the armed forces and then use them to attack and destroy other societies to take their resources and expand your system. Without the "stick" of destitution no one will participate voluntarily in these unpleasant and unnatural systems. (E.g. people preferred Native American lifestyles to European American lifestyles. I've got a great quote from Ben Franklin on lock on that point, BTW...) The way it's usually framed is, "But who will pick up the garbage?"

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Death due to starvation occured in North America prior to Columbus. If that isn't a symptom of poverty I don't know what is.
- carapace 4y ago
  Unless you will cite something specific it's hard to discuss it?
- aexon 4y ago
  Poverty in this context is the lack of financial mobility within a given economic body. If some people starve while others don't because they can't afford the food, that's a socially instituted poverty. Starvation that is equally suffered because there IS no food isn't the kind of poverty being discussed in the article. It's a lack of necessary resources suffered equally independent of financial mobility. We can argue all day on the degrees of implementation of primitive economy, "yeah, but one guy traded a shoe horn for a rabbit leg", but the type of extreme (and extremely disparate) poverty that occurs within modern economic systems is not comparable to pre Columbus North America.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    With that kind of absurd definition, I'd rather take poverty in the contemporary USA where hardly anyone dies of hunger over some egalitarian society in the past where it was common to starve to death.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    This is a silly distinction. All things being equal most would probably prefer the poverty in modern day America to the "Equal" poverty of preindustrial experience. The real reason people get upset about modern poverty is because it's an example of inequality. So sure, let's try to ameliorate and address inequality where possible. But under no circumstances should we try to do so by reducing total progress and wealth on the planet. Preindustrial poverty is just as much a problem of financial mobility as poverty now is. In fact it's even more a case of that since your immobility is caused by the lack of a position to even move to.u It's a fundamental element of progress that it will be distributed unequally. I have seen no evidence that you can bypass that. You could eliminate all inequality by reducing everyone to extreme poverty but literally no one actually want's that. You can't eliminate inequality by elevating everyone to extreme wealth, however, because there isn't enough wealth to do so. This leaves eliminating inequality by reducing everyone to some definition of just well-off enough with no option to reach slightly more well-off than that since it would mean they were now unequal. The most effective solution to poverty is to continue to raise the lower bound as much as you can which alleviates suffering and to remove barriers to forward progress for the individual as that increases everyone's chance to improve themselves and their society a little more.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      > But under no circumstances should we try to do so by reducing total progress and wealth on the planet. Sure, a tiny pie divided equally is inferior to a large pie divided unequally but so that everybody gets a much larger piece. But that's not absolute. Inequality has significant moral and psychological effects, so yes it is worth shrinking the pie slightly if that's what is required to divide it up more equally. It's a balance - strive for both progress and fairness, not for one at the expense of the other.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Death due to starvation occured in North America prior to Columbus. If that isn't a symptom of poverty I don't know what is.

carapace 4y ago
Unless you will cite something specific it's hard to discuss it?
aexon 4y ago
Poverty in this context is the lack of financial mobility within a given economic body. If some people starve while others don't because they can't afford the food, that's a socially instituted poverty. Starvation that is equally suffered because there IS no food isn't the kind of poverty being discussed in the article. It's a lack of necessary resources suffered equally independent of financial mobility. We can argue all day on the degrees of implementation of primitive economy, "yeah, but one guy traded a shoe horn for a rabbit leg", but the type of extreme (and extremely disparate) poverty that occurs within modern economic systems is not comparable to pre Columbus North America.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  With that kind of absurd definition, I'd rather take poverty in the contemporary USA where hardly anyone dies of hunger over some egalitarian society in the past where it was common to starve to death.
- zaphar 4y ago
  This is a silly distinction. All things being equal most would probably prefer the poverty in modern day America to the "Equal" poverty of preindustrial experience. The real reason people get upset about modern poverty is because it's an example of inequality. So sure, let's try to ameliorate and address inequality where possible. But under no circumstances should we try to do so by reducing total progress and wealth on the planet. Preindustrial poverty is just as much a problem of financial mobility as poverty now is. In fact it's even more a case of that since your immobility is caused by the lack of a position to even move to.u It's a fundamental element of progress that it will be distributed unequally. I have seen no evidence that you can bypass that. You could eliminate all inequality by reducing everyone to extreme poverty but literally no one actually want's that. You can't eliminate inequality by elevating everyone to extreme wealth, however, because there isn't enough wealth to do so. This leaves eliminating inequality by reducing everyone to some definition of just well-off enough with no option to reach slightly more well-off than that since it would mean they were now unequal. The most effective solution to poverty is to continue to raise the lower bound as much as you can which alleviates suffering and to remove barriers to forward progress for the individual as that increases everyone's chance to improve themselves and their society a little more.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    > But under no circumstances should we try to do so by reducing total progress and wealth on the planet. Sure, a tiny pie divided equally is inferior to a large pie divided unequally but so that everybody gets a much larger piece. But that's not absolute. Inequality has significant moral and psychological effects, so yes it is worth shrinking the pie slightly if that's what is required to divide it up more equally. It's a balance - strive for both progress and fairness, not for one at the expense of the other.