It’s great to lift up the poor, but up to what extent? Poor will still be poor, so what’s an acceptable amount of poor we should allow where they just have to deal with it?

Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.

One day, hopefully not too many days away, our descendants will wake up and discover that the last poor person has been lifted from poverty.

To get there from here, we have to take it one day at a time, and focus on changing what we can.

>Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.

To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty.

Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.

Wealth is not a zero sum game. But it is not possible for one person to create a billion dollars of wealth for other people. What creates wealth is actual productive labor, not some kind of vision.

If one person creates a new process to make $3 widgets cost $2 and sells a billion of them, while paying his manufacturers $1 per widget, he made $1 billion dollars and each of their 1 billion customers are $1 wealthier.

What happens in practice is that one guy in a lab invents a new process in exchange for his paycheck, and then some very different guy in a suit gets to collect the money off that invention.

> It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.

Is that actually true? I’m very curious if there’s any theoretical evidence that a society where everyone is at minimum “middle class” can exist.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It's true that there will always be a lowest class as long as there's income. Currently, in the US there's a percentage that skip meals, heat/A/C etc or work multiple jobs. OP might be referring to minimizing or eliminating the necessities those people go without.

No A/C = poor is a damn weird definition. Does it mean everybody was poor 100 years ago?

Yes. Standards change over time. The acceptable level of poverty is not something morally objective, but rather dependent on the available technology/energy/capital.

But then you're back to the original question: is eradicating all poverty even possible?

A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it.

If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.

Yes, to some degree we'll always be lifting the bottom line up as the top line rises. That said, we're not doing that now; right now we're still trying to get people fed and supply shelters.

Even for getting people fed, we’re moving the goalposts. A while ago it was to just get enough calories. Now „feeding“ gets more and more complex.

If the "standard" for poor is changing over time, then the goal of eradicating poverty can never be achieved. For me, it has to be static: Basic shelter, food, health, and safety. It's a set of criteria that I believe most reasonable and non-idealistic people can agree on to be a universal starting point.

The fact that we're not providing the above basics universally to all citizens right now, as a matter of priority above all else, is a damning critique of government and one of the main reasons that set me down the path of anarcho-capitalist thought.

Probably not technically due to poor being a relative term but we have a lot of discussion these days about housing for the poor which is obviously important but there's a lot less talk about the poor starving (and really, there's more talk about the poor having an unhealthy amount of calories). I think it's important to keep perspective that we are actually making great progress on providing a higher quality of life for the worst off.

The Kingdom of Bhutan. It sounds fabulous, but it's a real place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan

According to the Asia Development Bank 8.2% of the population lives below the poverty line, was your point that this is a low percentage?

https://www.adb.org/countries/bhutan/poverty

Did you read up on the place before looking for that stat?

I did, did you? I’ll ask again, if that wasn’t your point then what point were you trying to make?

There are a few points that could be made. The primary point is that even though they might score low on some metric, the people of Bhutan are pretty much all well-off and happy. The king decreed democracy not long ago. It's a kind of "existence proof" that people can pretty much be alright.

Consider a couple of other stats from that site:

> the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%.

and a 2.5% unemployment rate.

Sure, but that’s the answer to “can poor people more or less be alright “. Which while interesting is orthogonal to the question of “can a society exist with no poor people”.

Fair enough, but I feel that, at that point, we're getting into semantic weeds over the definition of "poor", eh?

For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.

I think it’s axiomatically true that if you change definitions at will then anything can mean anything. I don’t think that’s useful for enhancing understanding.

I’m sure some people will find a way to be seen as poor even if they have an adequate supply of money.

Poor just means they have less than most other people.

Depends on your definition of poor. If bottom 20% is poor as per some definitions, then you’ll always have poor.

If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.

> If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.

I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor.

And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.

There’s no convenient or not definition. But we have to agree on one before we start discussing if we can fix it. If we define poverty as defining bellow median, we won’t ever get rid of it.

Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.

   > It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.

If it's a fallacy, then why has it always proven to be true, 100% of the time?

People up to middle class generally have money issues. There's probably some level of deeper assessment the court could do to determine impact if people are willing to share financials.

At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.

Unconditional food and shelter is acceptable level of poor. I don’t mean unlimited.

This chain so far is disdainfully reductive. Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game, so you can't give without taking. People aren't trying to punish rich people so much as force their hand into helping those that they rest so comfortably upon, given the total lack of meaningful initiative.

The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.

> Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game

No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum.

They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.

It is absolutely not easier to take away than to help. When trying to take away you must fight the will of those you plan to deprive. Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation.

Depends on whether you are giving people what they need, or what they want.

If you ‘give’ an addict rehab they may fight you every step of the way, but if you give them heroin they’ll love you.

Forcing people into rehab doesn't work.

If you're trying to "give" rehab to someone who does not want it you may in fact be "taking away".

That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.

> Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation

Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.