> The reason is that nothing is puzzling about poverty. It is humanity's default state. Until very recently, everyone lived in what would now be regarded as shocking poverty. Even the elites—monarchs, aristocrats, and so on—lived in conditions that were appalling relative to the prosperity enjoyed by most people in affluent societies today.
This is what I meant by the author reframing the question to the point where it feels like they completely missed the point. Your definition would be totally compatible with the way I think a child asking "why is there poverty?" is using the word, but I don't see how anyone could argue that "the elites—monarchs, aristocrats, and so on" were completely unable to meet their needs at any point before between the years 1-1500 CE, which the author describes as this:
> The long, flat line that characterises most of human history? That is poverty: crushing, subsistence-level, Malthusian poverty.
Ironically, the author seems quite smug about knowing better, saying "It is a childish question, one which betrays a naive, uninformed understanding of economics and history". It seems more like they betrayed a naive, uninformed understanding of children to so grossly miss the point of what they were actually asking. If their reaction to an intellectually curious child is to dunk on them for not precisely framing their question according to academic definitions of terms, it's not surprising that they think "ignorance and misrepresentations" are the "default state of humanity".