[...] somehow humanity’s 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn’t eliminate poverty.
That feels to me about as convincing as saying: “Chemical fertilizers have not eliminated hunger, just the other weekend I was stuck on a campus with a broken vending machine.”
I mean, sure, both the broken vending machine and actual starvation can be called hunger, just as both working 60h/week to make ends meet or sending your surviving kids into the mines or prostituting them could be called poverty, but the implication that either scourge of humankind has not lost most of its terror seems clearly false.
Sure, being poor in the US sucks, but I would rather spend a year living the life of someone in the bottom 10% income bracket in the 2024 US than spending a month living the life of a poor person during the English industrial revolution.
I am also not convinced that 60h/week is what it actually takes to survive in the US. I can totally believe that this amount of unskilled labor might be required to rent accommodations in cities, though.
That feels to me about as convincing as saying: “Chemical fertilizers have not eliminated hunger, just the other weekend I was stuck on a campus with a broken vending machine.”
I mean, sure, both the broken vending machine and actual starvation can be called hunger, just as both working 60h/week to make ends meet or sending your surviving kids into the mines or prostituting them could be called poverty, but the implication that either scourge of humankind has not lost most of its terror seems clearly false.
Sure, being poor in the US sucks, but I would rather spend a year living the life of someone in the bottom 10% income bracket in the 2024 US than spending a month living the life of a poor person during the English industrial revolution.
I am also not convinced that 60h/week is what it actually takes to survive in the US. I can totally believe that this amount of unskilled labor might be required to rent accommodations in cities, though.