> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing.
> Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.
And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor.
This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet.
Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.
And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor.
This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet.
Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.