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.