Such a great read. Thank you for sharing!

The last paragraph is so true. Borrowed from the reference https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/poverty-is-a-quality-of-... :

“Poverty is the quality of the heart that makes us relate to life, not as a property to be defended but as a gift to be shared. Poverty is the constant willingness to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences. Poverty is the inner understanding that the hours, days, weeks, and years do not belong to us but are the gentle reminders of our call to give, not only love and work, but life itself, to those who follow us and will take our place. He or she who cares is invited to be poor, to strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership, and to create some room for the person looking for a place to rest. The paradox of care is that poverty makes a good host. When our hands, heads, and hearts are filled with worries, concerns, and preoccupations, there can hardly be any place left for the stranger to feel at home.”

That... goes just totally counter to my (admittedly limited) experience with the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani. They are not at all "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences", in fact the exact opposite. Part of what keeps them in extreme poverty is their cultural ideas of what it means to be Romani at at all.

I would state the exact opposite: poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday" because you are desperately trying to fix the problems/debt of yesterday even if it creates new problems/debt for tomorrow, because the alternative is starvation.

> the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani

They might not necessarily be from Romania. At least from my experience next door in Finland, it has been very common for the media to write about “beggars from Romania”, but if you actually chat with the Roma beggars on the street or the bottle-returners in front of you in the queue, often they come from Bulgaria instead. Yet for some reason Bulgaria never seems to get mentioned, perhaps due to the popular confusion of “Roma/Romani” and “Romania” even though the words are not actually historically related.

> "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward

> poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday"

Both are not exclusive. You're willing to yet you can't, and possibly feel trapped in a miserable existence that's not yours.

That refers to voluntarily chosen poverty.

There is a huge difference between that and poverty that is no deliberately chosen.

I think “chosen poverty” is a fraught notion. Cultural poverty perhaps, but poverty is, according to most useful definitions, an undesirable state.

I’m getting strong Mother Theresa vibes.

> The popular notion of poverty is that it is a deficit, a state of not having enough material goods nor the means to acquire them. Yet scholars of development have identified for us that poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon.

How lucky we are that "scholars have identified for us" what poverty is, so that we don't have to think about it for ourselves, not the lack of money, which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor, but rather a "multi-dimensional phenomenon", which can only mean that it requires more scholarship to address.

OTOH, poverty is multidimensional in a way that simply giving money to the poor will not (because it cannot) solve. Which is not an argument against giving money to the poor, of course. My point is only that real scholarship on poverty and its many effects actually is useful for more than just academics’ job security. What the article said about identity and aspirational aspects of poverty rang absolutely true to me (aside from what I think was a too ham-handed attempt to shoehorn it under SIL’s language preservation stuff). Source: teacher in urban Title I public school. Indeed, I had some ninth graders identifying pieces of those very issues in a reflection thing I had them write that I just graded (e.g., one girl writing about seeing a connection between slavery and jokes/tropes that you often hear among black kids today about darker versus lighter skinned folks; like, yeah, those are rooted ultimately in theories and perceptions of the majority white society (beginning in the 1600s) about darkness of skin indexing mental and physical abilities in a fairly straightforward (if absurdly crude) way. And it gets filtered through and rooted in perceptions of fucking 14 year olds in this Year of Our Lord 2023 (though, again, not in some linear way; we’re talking about large-scale social and cultural conceptualizations that work themselves out over generational time-scales)).

Yes, to what you stated. I teach middle school title one, as well. My students express the same perceptions about dark and light skin as indexes for mental and physical abilities in their jokes and language, as you described.

I’m going to give your words some thought as I move forward in my curriculum. Thank you for these insights.

Nice to see a fellow teacher hanging out in these parts!

> which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor

Nope. What good is money if everyone has it? If you give everyone one million dollars, all you've done is turn one million dollars into the new one dollar bill. And that's being generous, it will probably be worth even less.

I have no idea why people think the government is some evil entity which refuses to give money to the poor out of spite. That's not how an economy works. Even worse is the fact people who believe this get to vote into power politicians who put it into practice. It's literally happening in my country right now and the economic distortions are already observable. It can only be sustained if you subtract money from others via taxes. That money's gonna run out eventually because why be productive when you can apply for government benefits? There are little cities in my country where almost everyone is sustained by this.

Rich people needn't exist.

Bell curves exist in nature. Not that natural == good. But “need” and “nature” hang together.

Industries, computers, surgeons, books… all things that don't exist in nature. Your point?

I’ll bite: some people want to save more, other people want to spend more. To remove inequality from humanity is to remove human nature itself. Whether or not that’s a good thing is totally besides the point. The premise requires a lack of historical understanding. Maybe we could also end prostitution and violent crime. “If only some politician would make a law… “

This a classic is-ought fallacy, and I'm trying to be generous.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Oh I see, you’re saying we can simply eradicate human life! I didn’t consider that was what the parent was suggesting, but it is true I suppose, in a logical if pedantic sort of way.

In a post-scarcity society? Sure. Gotta achieve one first though.

We don't have scarcity… what we have is uneven distribution of resources.

The only reason resouces have to be "allocated" to begin with is because of scarcity. There's not enough for everybody. That's what economies are: a system to decide who gets access to scarce resources. Were it not for scarcity, there would be no need to economize.

I oppose fundamentally dystopian stuff like artificial scarcity. Completely made up stuff like intellectual property doesn't belong in the 21st century. However, the same logic cannot be applied to the physical world where everything is finite and therefore truly scarce. That will continue to be true until someone invents Star Trek replicators.

Nor does completely made up stuff like economics.

The real economy is function of ecosystem, raw materials, energy availability, and collective intelligence.

That's the economy we live in.

But the economy we're told we live in is a fiction designed exclusively for the perpetual growth of hierarchy and privilege.

I don't think anyone knows what would be possible in a reality-based economy.

But it's hard to belive that much broader access to health and education, better social protections, tamed monopolies, plural distributed media, and support for original invention and research, would be less stable and successful than the suicidally short-sighted manic depressive business cycles we have now.

I agree, the economy we live in is a made up one. It's basically fake. It's not based on any of the things you mentioned though. It's based on credit. I've argued against credit here on HN a few times but in hindsight it should have been obvious to me such views would not be accepted in a startup friendly forum. After all, startups are a low interest rate phenomenon.

Still, the concept of an economy is not made up at all. Economies arise naturally wherever there is scarcity and people gotta figure out who gets the limited amount of resources available. Some metric is going to be used to decide that.

For example, the catholic church in italy owns 14% of the buildings on the free market.

Do they actually need that? They don't… most are empty and unused.

So you can oppose all you want, doesn't make it any less true.

So what? Are you proposing people rob the church of their property? Ridiculous. Why stop at the church? Why stop at you?

This stuff isn't based on "need". That's a socialist idea. Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?

> So what? Are you proposing people rob the church of their property?

"rob", lol :D

> Why stop at you?

I do think that ownership taxes should go up exponentially… so almost nothing for your home, but if you have 6-5 it should be considerable. The church doesn't even pay any ownership taxes, so in fact it is them who are robbing me.

> Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?

Right to education? Right to healthcare? Right to have a home? Which of these is exactly making you so angry?

That's a lotta rights you got there. I wonder who pays for them.

Me? And I'd have more with exponential taxation of buildings :)

I believe you may be using a vernacular definition where others are using a technical definition from economics.

In this context "scarcity" does not mean "There is not enough stuff", though that can be implied. It means there is a fundamentally limited amount of stuff and the aggregate demand is greater than the aggregate supply.

Given that the demand for resources is functionally infinite, I think this is basically accurate. Your objection to the existence of rich people is an objection to part of the aggregate demand, rather than to the description of resources as scarce.

But in that sense, post-scarcity can't exist… so it can't be in that sense.

I suspect this is why "post-scarcity" is generally used to describe a state of affairs that does not currently exist, such as the idyllic Federation in Star Trek. In this context it was used to describe a society fundamentally different in significant ways from any past or present human one.

I don't know if I agree that post-scarcity cannot exist. I know that imagining a way to get there is very challenging. Knowing that scarcity is real certainly informs my politics, though.

If you don't think in terms of money, but rather in terms of stuff, it becomes clear. You can print all the money you want, and the only thing that there's more of is money. There aren't any more houses, or food, or cars. There's just more money.

On the other hand, we can try to move it around some, so that the poor have access to somewhat more of the stuff, even if that means that the well-off have less. But the well-off have to have less for this to work - "we'll help the poor, but it won't cost you" is a lie.

On the other other hand... just giving them stuff isn't likely to change things for many poor people in the way that they really need things to change. (Which is back to the point of the article.)

If you have all the dimensions figured out I recommend you write up a white paper of the solution so humanity can get started with enthusiastic implementation.

Who said you don’t have to think about it yourself?

Being about language and defining expressions for traditional values in it, is there perhaps an identity relation between the poverty levels:

- material, spiritual, civic, social identity, and social aspiration

and the levels of soul in jewish Kabbalah:

- Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Chaya, and Yechida?

I did a field trip for language preservation in the Amazon, it was so weird the difference between the will to preserve culture and language from insider and outsider vs the willingness to learn and be part of global culture and learn Spanish / English. Night lectures were given in evening school for traditional language and then later for English. They were all expecting to enhance they quality of life and situation by learning English and work with tourist. After 5 years they were just able to present themselves. They were stuck between the to world belonging to none and kept in this position it was very special.

Weird read, not sure what to make of it. Muddled between "everybody is poor in something" and "actually being poor is good". It's like corporate-speak mixed with woke-speak for Christian missionaries who get all their funding from USAID.

Do not like these people.

In summary, it reads like "people struggling to get access to clean water are also linguistically-poor, which prevents them from reading scientific papers".

In a way, yes. When you apply Cuil-theory, it means “how many more levels of abstraction do you have to understand, to find an easy ~solution to~ description of your problem.”

Somehow like category theory will enable you to solve your maths homework.

Being linguistically poor reduces your options for sourcing solutions to your problems, or understanding how to stop them being problems in the first place.

There may be methods of accessing clean water that are totally outside their traditional or contextual experience, which they have no hope of accessing or evaluating due to linguistic limitations.

Even the idea that there may be options outside of the traditional and immediate, may be something they had not thought of due to linguistic limitations.

To me it seems like they are taking a word "poverty" that we mostly agree on and then try to define it so everyone is confused. This isn't a helpful approach imo. If there are other ways to suffer, maybe use another word?

Hard to read that and not hear him alluding to the fact that most of the United States is monolingual, and thus linguistically poor. Rural US also frequently exhibits the identity poverty that he talks about. He never explicitly mentions it. I think there's something to this, needs more thought.

Technological poverty is two gold iPhones one in each back pocket of a pair of $300 bedazzled bleached jeans.

It's possible to be surrounded by very expensive convenient magic, drowning in it, yet to own nothing and be subject to abject fealty and dependence. If one lacks the "digital literacy" (or whatever name we give empowering language that opens wide horizons) then like Palahniuk says, your stuff ends up owning you.

This article makes such a crucial point. There are many entrepreneurs and other successful people that set out to do good in the world. And that's laudable and to be encouraged.

But unfortunately, they project their own mindset onto others. "Surely, they are all aspiring entrepreneurs at heart. If only they had access to resources, they'd go ahead and prosper." - And so a lot of anti-poverty initiatives focus on things like micro-credits, mentorship and training that facilitates and unlocks an existing drive towards entrepreneurship.

But what if that drive simply isn't there? What if the hopelessness is inter-generational and deeply embedded into the culture? No amount of external help and support will unlock something, that doesn't exist in the first place.

This article describes this well. First - you must change the mindset towards the notion that - with hard work, skill and determination - one's fate can be improved. Only than will the improvement enabling measures take hold.

Even worse: What if the drive of "I can improve this" doesn't exist because they actually can't improve this? Then changing the mindset won't help.

Not sure there is anything that just "can't be improved" no matter what. Of course, things can be incredibly hard - but even in the poorest regions under the most extrusive of governments, there are ways to carve out niches.

Which often involve drugs and gang violence.

That's not rhetoric. There's ample evidence linking poverty and inequality with crime.

The reasons are complex, but it's not hard to suspect that crime is the most accessible and rewarding career choice when other options aren't available.

Crime is risky, but the rewards are immediate and obvious. Businesses and self-employment are riskier financially and less risky personally, but the rewards are more distant.

Entrepreneurial mentoring schemes - for example - will always struggle to fix problems that are rooted in aggressive economic apartheid.

> But what if that drive simply isn't there?

I'd argue there are always exceptions, people who have initiative and drive despite growing up in conditions that would not seem to foster them, and giving the exceptions a chance to succeed will raise the spirits and expectations of the next generation. It makes a huge difference to children to be able to point to examples they can follow, even if they're rare.

Of course you can't lean on that as your only solution. It isn't going to do much to diminish other systematic barriers, and it makes it easier for privileged people to deny the existence of barriers. Providing a little bit of opportunity and fostering the success of a few individuals doesn't give society a license to neglect other aspects of the problem.

Of course - societies are heterogeneous - there's always exceptional people that could be a prove to others that change is indeed possible.

I think, however, that fighting poverty is a numbers game. In a society that values entrepreneurship and striving towards a better live at its core, there will be many more people that achieve success and that uplift their surroundings.

In a society where hopelessness prevails and ambition is met with suspicion, anyone ambitious or successful will soon leave for greener pastures.

So, to really fight poverty at large, you have to move the general mindset towards a fundamental believe that a better future is possible.

All the claims made in this post feel incredibly tenuous.

One thing I dislike about this type of "scholarship" is that the author will just confidently assert a concept via moral preening without actually bothering to try and rigorously substantiate it.

They are a Christian organization after all...

Ironically I personally find this type of writing more representative of social "science", likely because I am more familiar with that discourse than Christian discourse.

Wow this reminds me so much of a novel I read a few months ago:

> Loss of identity and loss of the ability to foresee and aspire to a better future are rarely identified as issues that need special attention. It is to these faces of poverty that the discipline of linguistics has particular relevance.

> Identity poverty and aspirational poverty are inextricably connected with the role of language and its uses as a creator and marker of identity.

The Duncan reference they give is from 2008, but the novel I'm thinking of is Ismael Kadare's "The Traitor's Niche" from 1978. It's a parable for the Albanian-Soviet split.

In it there's a harrowing description of the techniques used by the Ottoman empire to suppress rebellion in their provinces. They aim exactly to extinguish the peoples' language first and foremost, introducing a sort of primitive language, in order to preclude the very possibility of formulating a thought that can distinguish future from present or past. In this "eternal moment", the idea that tomorrow could be different from today, or that yesterday might have been different, doesn't even enter people's mind.

Of course it bears strong resemblance to Orwell, but for some reason (maybe Kadare's amazing prose) it really gave me shivers and stuck with me. I've been meaning to write an English language review of the book because I didn't find one so far that really does it justice. Highly recommended in any case!

Side note: I did a cursory web search to see whether the techniques Kadare ascribes to the Ottomans have any grounding in reality but came up empty. If anyone has sources to substantiate them or knows for sure that this was not the case, I'd be super interested. :)

Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same.

The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.

I love HN! Thanks for the explanation. I'm very glad this isn't real, it really gave me the creeps. :)

I'm actually just halfway through "A concise history of Albania" by Fischer and Schmitt, so I just got past the Ottoman Empire in that. Most definitely not a historian of course. :D But indeed none of this shows up there. Although for the record, in the book I mentioned Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire (a lot of the book happens on this trajectory). And yeah, none of the Albanians, in Albania or outside, that I've talked to ever had any such problems. Although a lot of them do suffer from what looks a lot like "aspirational poverty" to me...

> Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire

Still fantasy. The tense system of Bulgarian[0] and Macedonian is one of the most complex within the Slavic family, and contact with Turkish, if anything, only made it more complex by introducing an evidential distinction to the past tense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs