> Having access to manufactured clothing, some processed food, and fitfully provided or available education and health care does not make those people rich except by comparison to long dead people except in some kind of ‘objective’ bookkeeping.
I think this is very wrong. Obviously there are important relative aspects to poverty too, but the reduction in infant mortality, or the ability to have more than one set of clothes, or to communicate across long distances, are all very real ways that we are much better off than our ancestors in 1870, and similarly for people everywhere.
> Having access to manufactured clothing, some processed food, and fitfully provided or available education and health care does not make those people rich except by comparison to long dead people except in some kind of ‘objective’ bookkeeping.
I think this is very wrong. Obviously there are important relative aspects to poverty too, but the reduction in infant mortality, or the ability to have more than one set of clothes, or to communicate across long distances, are all very real ways that we are much better off than our ancestors in 1870, and similarly for people everywhere.