Expanding on that, you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its least valuable members.

When you need your shoes polished, that food you ordered served or the litter picked up from the front drive, suddenly the "least valuable people" are just as valuable as you are.

Nobody's "least valuable" unless their entire existence seems to serve to act to the detriment to absolutely everybody around them.

'Least valuable' is not the employed poor. They're the entrenched criminals and severely mentally ill - those who only consume resources and can't be rehabilitated.

Your comment got me thinking. (The best kind of comment.)

My first thought on reading it was: is that equivalence valid? A society is a collective; a collective functions at the behest of its members. My experience of human nature suggests to me that society will contain members who both are and aren't kind to "less valuable" members. So can, or should, a society enforce kindness towards them, even against the members who are disinclined to be so?

Another related question: should we measure a society's value by its total accumulated success, or the success afforded to its "less valuable"?

I don't claim to know the answers.

If I had to choose a single simple measure, it would be the median level of quality of life.

The HDI tries to evaluate that, check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality...

Total accumulated success is easily shown to be a false measure with a thought experiment. Consider two thousand-person communities, one full of middle-class professionals, and one with a single multi-billionaire and the rest are all downbeaten impoverished workers. You'd have to be pretty crazy to suggest that the one with widespread crushing poverty is a better society.