Modern medicine is great, if you can access it. The other stuff is under-funded, under-resourced, and despised by everyone including the people who have to use it.
When did I say anything about anyone deserving anything?
You know who the hardest working people are, as a class? Drug addicts. They’re out there, all day, every day, doing everything they possibly can to feed their habits. You haven’t seen a work ethic till you’ve observed a junkie in action. It’s amazing. Repulsive, too. But if you’re a fan of hard-working and industrious people, go hang out with some drug addicts.
I’m just going to quote the whole second note of the OP back to you, please take the time to read it and think about it. 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.
Feh. The Emperor doesn’t need your daughters’ dresses. He doesn’t care : he’s got new clothes 
Are you saying that poor folks in the present all live lives of unrelenting horror? That none of them have enjoyable or fulfilling lives?
I don’t know, if you just told the merchant about the physical facts of your life, like internet access and indoor plumbing, even adding in the probability of security, etc., I think he’d be more than willing to swap places. If you pointed out that you were at the bottom of the food chain and were basically a beggar, and had very little power over your own circumstances or over anyone else, I agree with you he might not be quite so willing, but that’s a social/power thing rather than a physical comfort thing, right? I tend to equate the word “rich” with “possession of physical comforts” rather than “one’s place in society.” If you define it the second way I guess I don’t really disagree with you (I mean, in that case it’s kind of a tautology that people at the top of society are richer/higher than people at the bottom of society, right?), but most people are gonna assume you mean the first.
Question: Imagine Person A who lives in a gigantic mansion with access to every kind of physical luxury imaginable. It all legally belongs to him, too-- but only IF he caters to every whim of Person B (so that Person A is in essence a slave of Person B). Is Person A rich?
Interesting question. I think it would depend on how Person A felt about it, really. I’d want to know how much time was spent serving and how much time was spent luxuriating before I called it.
Which is, I think, your point. I’d agree that a person’s level of richness has a lot to do with the person’s own feelings of richness or poverty.
Anyway, in talking about poor people in modern society, I’m talking more about people without jobs and without much chance of changing their circumstances than I am about people who are not well off but are basically doing OK. There’s a difference between skimping on food to pay the rent occasionally and facing immediate eviction and homelessness.
“Homelessness” is a misnomer. The only people who are truly homeless are generally the mentally ill who can’t figure out how to do the paperwork and can’t be legally committed. And it would be an interesting bet to take whether or not a person living out of trashcans, but who was mentally well and knew how to use public facilities for regular baths or how to head to the ER, was living a more well nourished and healthy life than your average peasant of yesteryear.
I echo this.
The OP needs to realise that there are ‘poor’ people in the USA and truly poor people in the Third World.
‘Poor’ people in the USA have housing, food, education, pure water, effective sanitation and (based on this thread) access to the Internet. Health care access may vary as would owning a car - but they often both exist.
Here’s some examples of poor children:
- Peru
Depends on your defintion of ‘poor’, doesn’t it?
If you were a severely malnourished child orphan in war-torn Eritrea, with low life expectancy and no hope of education or clean water or sanitation or shoes, you’d think a ‘poor’ person in the US was incredibly rich.
Shakester, are you considering the comparison as between a poor person in the modern world having a couple of basics but no real opportunities in terms of freedom of movement, freedom to do whatever they like all day, or luxury goods. Versus a rich person in earlier times who has their basics attended to, all be it primitive by today’s standards however the rich person has such a wealth as to not have to work ever, and they can choose to spend their whole life travelling, indulging in their fantasies and enjoying all the luxuries that their time/culture provides?
If so, I’d agree that it could be preferable to be a wealthy person in the past - just because I couldn’t get cable tv and internet doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy myself gourging on the best cuisines, spreading my seed amongst the many gorgeous young women, travelling the lands, basking on my estates, hunting, fishing and sailing around on my [comparitively] luxurious boat. Versus being in the modern world, living in a hellhole or homeless and eating only the crappiest of foods, working a shitty job or relying on the kindness of strangers.
I think people are quick to define life by possessions rather than by quality of experiences.
The best cuisine of yesteryear probably wasn’t all that great compared to modern day. There was steak and steak and steak and steak.
I already mentioned traveling the lands, anyone can do that today if they so choose.
You can bask in a public park all day, if you want. Or, just sit outside of your apartment.
You can grab a stick and some string and go fishing any time you want. That’s not exactly something you have to be rich to do. There’s a river near everywhere.
Getting a job on a cruise ship or fishing ship isn’t an amazing feat to accomplish. If you want your own boat, you can work hard and earn one. In oldentimes, you could never have that boat if you weren’t born into wealth.
If you’re not creative then sure, you’re stuck with whatever you’ve got. But it really doesn’t take all that creativity to figure out that if you want to bask out in the sun that there’s frickin sun right outside your door and it’s perfectly free and allowable to go sit in it. That people somehow think that they’re deprived of the ability to go and enjoy life is not based on reality. People think they can’t education or learn to use a computer, and yet there’s a whole library sitting a few blocks away from them with all the knowledge in the world. Again, the only think blocking people from going out and living the life of a wealthy person of 200 years ago is the belief that they can’t.
A poor person in a Western country today has better health protection today than the richest of kings had before. Pharaoh would die of tooth ache complication and queens in child labour their princes and princess die of easily preventable (today) diseases. On the other hand poor people today still get crappy food, live in crappy houses, have to work hard, the pretty girls won’t look at you, etc. I would prefer being rich in the past.
Of course if you were female, in the past, you were property. Modern day ideas of dating didn’t exist.
If you were a wealthy man, then yeah you might be able to have a mistress. However, you would have to be far more concerned about pregnancies than in modern day. Contraceptives weren’t nearly as good (I’m not actually sure if they were effective at all), and childbirth was risky for both the child and the mother.
If you were a woman born into a wealthy family, then you would be sold to whomever your father picked out for you, and you’d exist to bear children and you would be encouraged to not concern yourself overly with anything substantial. You would spend most of your time sowing while your husband was out hunting and meeting with his mistress.
So the really poor and homeless people today eating scraps or shitty junk foods like KFC and McDonalds have it better cuisine-wise then all of the kings, pharoahs or roman senators?
And the bevy of buxom beautys? And the ability to spend all day every day doing anything you like and having all of your hearts desires and wants attended to, and being waited on hand and foot?
Getting a job on a cruise ship trumps all that does it? How does a homeless guy get a job on a ship to begin with?
I think part of the problem is how rich are we talking about in the past? Rich with a little r or rich with a big R? And how poor today?
The farther back in time you go IMO, the smaller the fraction of the population you could consider rich, even in relative terms to the poor of the time.
There would have to be a lot of ancient gold being offered for me to give up holt-and-cold running water.
And machine-washed clothes. Heck, the rich didn’t wear powdered wigs just for the heck of it - it was because their natural hair had been shaved in an effort to control head lice. I’d have to be pretty freakin’ rich to put up with being bitten by nits all day long and the attendent sores on my skin, and the attendent risks of infection and pus…
Sorry, once chamber pots come into play, I don’t care how much wealth I’m being offered, unless I could retain my 20th-21st century knowledge. Then I could rig up the first medeival palace with flush toilets, showers, solar-heated water, and basically anything else I could slap together to try to recapture the casual comforts of modern living.
Yeah, but that was because Europeans were scared of water. If you look at Asia at that period, they did have hot water and no nits to speak off. A lot of these ‘issues’ were driven by culture and not necessarily due to a lack of tech.
This also goes to the OP; as noted, compared to other parts of the world, being homeless in the US, (with a ability to have the state provide for you) is better than what some poor in the other countries have.
I think if he’s using the worst poverty stricken countries in the world as his litmus, he has a valid point; but he needs to specify how poor, is poor.
There are (I already posted an example) millions of people living on rubbish tips with no access to clean water and no sanitary disposal.
No health care, no libraries, no transport, no food stamps - nothing.
As opposed to living on rats or whatever leftover scraps you can find on your rubbish tip.
Unbelievable. Do you really have no idea about how millions of mankind live in utter poverty?
They don’t have an apartment!! :smack:
Based on my experiences living in a very poor semi-feudal village in Cameroon, I’d say that if health is not a factor, they lived better lives than your average impoverished American. Why? Let’s compare the average person in my village to a single mother working for minimum wage in America (much like the conditions I grew up in).
First, let’s look at material living conditions. In my village, people mostly lived in single-room mud houses with gravel floors. If they owned a bed, they were rich. Most people’s furnishings were limited to sleeping mats. Electricity and running water were available, but most people could not afford that. Most people owned only one or two sets of clothes.
Still, I’d rather live there than the living conditions that I grew up in. The first reason is a huge luxury- space. In Cameroon, all you needed to do was ask the local traditional leader and you’d be given a plot of land that was yours to farm, build on, and live on for generations. Even the poorest person in the city could be own their own land and had the freedom to build whatever they wanted from the abundance of local materials. Most people choose to build simple houses, since the great outdoors was their real home. Living in a tiny rented apartment, no matter how well appointed- is no comparison to having an unpolluted stretch of earth and sky that you can start your family on.
You can get used to not having things like electricity and running water. Unless your well is miles away or something, it’s not a big deal. But you can never get used to living in a rattletrap apartment.
Let’s look at another luxury Cameroonians had- time. Yes, farming is damned hard work. But you do not need to farm most of the year. People in my village were never sleep deprived. They slept from sundown to sunrise and often napped through the hot parts of the day. And since few people worked outside of their farm, they never had to leave their children. Nobody missed their kids’ first words or first steps. Nobody had to feel bad that they were never there for their family. Nobody felt like they didn’t have enough time to do the things they wanted. Most people had ample time to enjoy their family and neighbors, pursue their hobbies, rest, etc.
Our single mother, on the other hand, probably rarely sees her kids and is probably tired all of the time. No matter how comfortable her life is, she is probably missing most of it. Tell me, what price would you pay to have more time with your kids? This is a question my Cameroonian friends didn’t have to answer.
So there are just a few examples of the riches that some people may have had in the past that our own poor people do not have today. There are plenty of others. In my experience the only things that truly make us happy are family, spirituality, and meaningful work. And given modern America’s depression rates, etc. I wouldn’t be so quick to decide that we have the better end of the stick. After all, by definition you’d be happier as an average peasant than as a depressed middle-class American. And isn’t happiness what counts.
A final caveat- all bets are off when it comes to health. There is nothing worse than watching your kids die of disease. And every mother I knew in Cameroon had watched a child or two die. Nothing can compare to this, and so when health is factored in the person with reasonable access to modern health care will always win.
One last thing to say. I don’t think there is any meaningful way to compare different types of poverty.
Urban poverty produces some of the worst horrors imaginable- kids living on garbage piles, etc. Rural poverty is often much gentler. But millions leave their sustainable rural existence to risk it in the slums. Why?
Can a person in a war zone ever think of themselves as richer than a person living a meager but peaceful existence?
How about a middle class person in, say, India. They probably have a nice home with marble floors, ample household help, spend their nights at parties with interesting people, etc. But they might not have enough money to buy a car. Poor or not?
Or what about the fact that they poorest American can have a passport that will allow them to enter nearly any country in the world, but even the richest Tchadian may not be able to get a simple American visa to take his kids to Disneyland.
Or what about my rich Chinese friends, who drive BMWs and own multiple mansions in some of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. They will never be allowed to have more than once child- a freedom that even the poorest American has.
What about the American who is $100,000 in debt, but lives like a king. Is he rich or poor?
There are no answers to these questions. The only one thing we can ask is- is this person happy? If they answer is yes, then they have the greatest riches in the world. If the answer is no, then what they have is not worth having.
As well as who you were in that rich household.
A well off woman in the 18th or 19th century in Western Europe had few choices. If she were well enough off to be “not poor” but not well enough off to have her own fortune, her life was pretty bleak. She had to marry, become a paid companion or governess, or live off charity or her brothers. Look at people like the Bronte sisters. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Jane Austen’s “choice” was to live in a house provided by her brother with her mother and sister or to marry someone she didn’t love (but at least at one point she was given that choice - it does not seem like Anne Bronte ever had any choice other than to be a governess. And Mary Wollstonecraft created her own unconventional choices - but it doing so took huge risks).
Likewise, second and third sons.
If your family were truly rich - all daughters and sons would have some choices - and their paths would be well paved to assure them success.
So your solution is to institute slavery of mechanical-Americans? Your comfort, their bondage. And please note that the demeaning term “robot” is not to be used to describe mechanical-Americans.