"A poor person today is richer than a rich person of the past"

Great Debates
1

I’ve argued a few times here, but never posted a topic before.

Recently I’ve seen a few variations of the title quote used in different debates, and I’ve always had a big problem with it. As a poor person myself, I have a different perspective on the question.

Wealth is not owning stuff. If stuff is cheap - and it is - then anyone can amass a big pile of shiny crap, and it doesn’t mean a thing.

I own a few things that would impress people from a hundred years or more ago. But is it “riches”? Not really. I do appreciate what I have, probably more so than most people, because I have come very very close to losing all of it.

But wealth is not stuff. Wealth is security, and wealth is choice. I can’t choose where I live, I can’t choose to move somewhere else, my only choice is anything I can find or homelessness. I don’t get to make most of the choices that the majority of people take for granted.

Poor folks like me have better toys than our ancestors. Most of us have better housing and better medical care than our ancestors, which is far more important than the amount of stuff you actually own.

But poor people don’t have meaningful choices, and we don’t have security. Those two things are the real differences between rich and poor.

NOTE 1: I do not want this debate to be about me, so I will not provide any more biographical detail. I’m poor, I have few of the things that most folks in developed countries consider necessities, and I live in a state of constant anxiety about my precarious existence and very limited future. That’s all you need to know about me personally. Please refrain from assuming anything about me that I haven’t said. Please refrain from trying to make it about me, the topic is poor people, not me specifically.

NOTE 2: Anyone who wants to attack me, or poor folks in general, for being poor: take it elsewhere, please. If you think people choose to end up in shitty situations, or that they deserve to because they’re bad people - you need to do a lot of growing up. A lot. Go somewhere else and do it, please. Poverty and wealth have no correlation to moral values.

2

No one ever said that poor life is or should be blissful. If it didn’t suck, why strive to leave it?

And given that people aren’t dying of starvation anywhere in the US, so far as I’m aware, I’d argue that your perception that you have no security is rather blind. That you don’t have options is certainly true, but security you’ve got in spades. Just, you don’t have any options about security plans.

3

Yeah, but Way Back When, they couldn’t. Cheap Stuff is a product of the Industrial Revolution. A game I play when doing laundry is guessing which British monarch would first have more clothes than my daughters. It doesn’t play in Henry VIII’s favor.

4

Well, at least we get running water, the Internet, books on demand, mp3s, and not having to poop…well, wherever.

ETA: I’m assuming most poor people have those things. Maybe not the mp3s , sure, but the running water, yes. And libraries provide things like computers/Internet and books.

5

I’d personally define wealth as quality of life, and access to stuff. Of that the modern developed world is quite wealthy.

6

Being poor is bad no matter where you live. It’s certainly not an enviable position to be in. That being said, though, if you’re poor in this country, or in most of the western world, there’s at least some form of social safety net. You’re probably not going to be homeless…you’re probably going to have to live in a pretty crappy place…it’s going to be, as you put it, “whatever you can find”, but you’ll have some sort of shelter. You’re probably not going to starve to death, and if you’re seriously ill, you’re probably going to be able to get medical treatment. These are things that 1000 years ago, 500 years ago, and even 100 years ago, the poor couldn’t take for granted. It’s not perfect now, but it’s better than it was.

7

I agree it’s better than it was, but that’s not the question, the question is: “Are poor people now richer than rich people of the past?”

No, clearly they are not. Rich folks have more security, they have more choices. Poor folks have less. Owning a cell phone, for instance, does not make you better off than someone 300 hundred years ago that owned a couple of houses.

Another way to look at it is social status: a decent hunter gatherer in their society has a lot more status than an unemployed person in ours who happens to own a car. Mr Hunter-Gatherer can enjoy the best that his society has to offer, even if what it has to offer is not much in terms of consumer goods. I’m sure that’s still a lot nicer than being treated like scum because you can’t find a job. Quality of life is much better for a person who does well in society whatever that society happens to be than for someone who is perceived to be a loser.

8

But people have said that today’s poor are wealthy by historical standards. The OP disagrees with that assertion, and I’m mostly with him. I do think he’s overlooking some mundane facts of modern life that are in historical terms incredible luxuries, like indoor plumbing with hot and cold running water. Most people who haven’t lived without it don’t realize what a transforming thing that is.

So here’s one way to tell whether people really believe today’s poor have it better than yesteryear’s rich. Give them a choice between living the life of someone in the most grinding poverty we can find in the modern industrialized West and living the life at the pinnacle of wealth in whichever era is being used to draw the comparison.

Would you put up with the risk of early death by curable (by modern medicine) disease, the lack of modern amenities, etc., for the payoff of living a life of luxury, waited on by servants, etc?

I’m not sure exactly which way I go on that one, to be honest.

9

I agree with most of what the OP is saying. My favorite counter point to the argument that he is complaining about is what Marco Polo said about the capital of China. Hundreds of years ago.

He said something like: “The silk is so abundant in the capital of China that even the poor people use it.”

Point being that even if poor people had something that it would be priceless in a different location, that does not remove the fact that they are still poor.

I think that people that minimize the suffering of the poor just because they are in a good country are telling themselves that therefore little or nothing else should be done for the poor.

10

1st, I disagree with your definition.

2nd, there’s not enough wealth in the country to guarantee everyone’s security. Even the middle-class is not secure and has feelings of anxiety. Is your anxiety higher than Joe-the-white-collar-mid-level-manager who’s about to lose his job? Probably. Anxiety is relative, sure. But they can rightfully complain they don’t have absolute security, just like you.

Maybe in the year 2152 when we have solar powered robots feeding us grapes in our hammocks and nobody has to work – that’s when there will be enough wealth to ensure everybody is “secure.”

11

Oh, I do appreciate things like plumbing. I was recently, when it seemed like I was definitely going to become homeless, seriously considering buying a tent and trying to convince people to let me camp out in their yards. Believe me, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could live without easy access to plumbing. They weren’t comfortable thoughts.

12

Personally, no. I agree that the poorest of today are living significantly better lives than the wealthiest of most of the past.

Outside of being able to get your feet washed by babes, perhaps, there’s really nothing that the wealthy of yesteryear could do that the poorest can’t today. I’ve seen any number of people in their teens and 20s venturing around the world with a backpack and working as they go. Without modern transportation, a wealthy person could get to all those same places, but it would take months and he’d be just as likely to die of some disease, or at least have to watch any number of his servants and crew die in trying to transport him. If he got in trouble, he’d be screwed, while as in modern day, the nearest US embassy would be flying a helicopter out to save you.

A person of yesteryear would have access to all the finest entertainment available at that time–which would be faaaaaar less than you can get on YouTube, Wikipedia, and the Gutenberg page. Any poor person who can’t afford a computer and an internet connection, can still go to the library and use their computer for free.

A wealthy person of yesteryear would have his selection of every doctor in the land, and not a one would have any hope of doing anything actually effective to treat you.

A wealthy person of yesteryear would be able to write several letters to his family every year. Most of them would be lost in transit, but he’d enjoy being able to get their responses. A poor person in modern day can call their family for free, in real time, reliably. If it’s long distance, he can send all the emails he could ever want, and delivery would be near instantaneous. He’ll get back full color photos of his sister’s new baby and everything.

13

Then you are denying the very base of your claim. Yes, it’s better than it was. Better enough that the “riches” of before pall before it. There is no direct comparison, just a relative comparison. Would I prefer to be poor in 1300 than rich in 1300? Nope. Would I prefer to be rich in 1300 than poor in 2009? That takes more thinking, and one who is aware of the reality back then would jump at the prospect of living in Cabrini Green.

14

That’s true enough. But poor people in the US have access to things that the wealthy of the past couldn’t even dream of, including personal transportation, housing and…food.

How much choice of movement do you suppose that the moderately wealthy in the past had? Many of them were born, lived and died on the family ‘estate’…which is just a fancy term for a farm, unless you were in the very exclusive upper class. You have a rather skewed perspective of what the minor nobility and aristocracy in the past could do and how they lived. You’d be better off simply comparing the poor to the rich today…historical comparisons are pretty much meaningless IMHO.

I was born in Mexico. My parents didn’t even have access to running water and electricity…which you seemingly have, since you typed this on a computer. Trust me…no matter how poor you THINK you are, you have zero idea what real poor is if you live in the US or Europe (or Japan). None. Ziltch. Nada. And compared to our ancestors you have access to things even the kings of yore would envy.

Again, historically even the rich didn’t have that security, or couldn’t make those choices. A more meaningful comparison would be to compare American (or European) ‘rich’ to ‘poor’, in the context of our own system. It’s meaningless to compare them to even ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ in other countries, let alone from a historical perspective. Even the rich and powerful died young, often from violence or disease (at much higher percentages than today), their children died in droves, they didn’t have access to the transporation, information (very few books), or foods that even our poor do today.

-XT

15

Well, I’m not in any of the countries you listed, keep guessing.

Really, unless you have been looking down the barrel of homelessness in the recent past, you don’t get to tell me I’m not poor.

I never said I was poor in comparison to third world people, the comparison here is to rich people in the past. I also said this thread isn’t about me, it’s about modern poverty vs olden days wealth.

To me, being “rich” is about the life that money can buy, not about the goods and chattels.

Are you saying that rich folks in the past all lived lives of unrelenting horror? That none of them had enjoyable and fulfilling lives? That’s obviously not true. Maybe all of the peasants lived terrible lives, but a goodly percentage of the rich folks did just fine. Obviously. They might have loved our modern stuff, but I doubt any well-off merchant or noble of the past would be prepared to swap his life for the life of a beggar, which is basically what I am, despite the fact that I have internet access and indoor plumbing.

16

Um? Decide?

It’s about the stuff you can buy, but…not about the stuff you can buy? Your distinction is not real clear.

The only things that the wealthy can do is own more land and employ people. Everything else, you’re ahead of the wealthiest person of 200 years ago by all measurements. The only thing remaining is psychological.

17

You have to further define the past in order to make a comparison but the poorest person in Western Civilization is certainly richer and more secure than a wealthy person 200 years ago. Starting with the extra security afforded by modern medicine there are many many safety nets in place to protect individuals from total collapse. We have unemployment insurance, social security and an almost limitless number of government programs designed to keep people afloat. We have a tax funded education system and an infrastucture that allows people to move from place to place to persue work.

18

Life: opportunities, experiences, lifestyles. Not stuff, like cars or TVs or diamond rings. Seems pretty clear to me.

19

Except for that:

Opportunities = Wealthy people today worked for theirs. Why do you deserve better ones than you’ve got?
Experiences = More are available today to poor people than the wealthy of yesteryear
A lifestyle = Possessions

So 2 out of 3, you’re better off in modern day. And item #1, you neeeeever would have even had a chance of unless you were born into it.

20

No shit!

Take India, for example. I was there in 2005. It’s an industrialized country with (as far as I saw) everything we have here in technology and modern conveniences. But the poor were REALLY freaking poor. There were beggars (not panhandlers, people were actually begging!:() and lepers. Lepers in the 21st century!:eek::mad::frowning:

I know there are people in dire straits and all in America, but overall most people in the U.S. don’t really know what true poverty is!