It's easier to take away than to give and help. So I don't blame them for that mentality, but it would definitely be great if society worked to lift the poor up more.
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.
That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.
Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Poor just means they have less than most other 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.
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.
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.
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.
The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
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.