Our poor people, at least in the US, are a lot more wealthy than they were several decades ago. Actually if you dig into the economics of deciding how much to work and for what, how preferences vary depending on how much of a resource you have and how cheap a lot of things are compared to decades ago, this is neither surprising nor terrible, nor really even preventable without actually going down to these people and dictating their economic preferences and proper lifestyle to them, which I at least find a repugnant idea.

If you want to live a simple life with nothing from beyond 1950, no modern medicine, no modern tech gadgets, nothing beyond 1950, you can do it substantially cheaper. But it's just so easy to work a few more hours and get the modern stuff that it's the rare person who will choose to do this.

If there's anything to be horrified by, it would be the cheapening of debt that has made it too easy to get buried under it vs. decades past.

This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf

(Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer many objections: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845

In particular, this is not a result of the poor being disproportionately old or young.)

And as near as I can tell you've conjured your "80% of the poor don't work at all." figure out of thin air. You don't adequately address the objections in the linked thread, and you're making the same oversimplifications.

Yes, Michaelchiasri raised this objection. He didn't bother to do the math, which showed that it has little effect. I addressed his concerns in the reply to that comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441

It's very strange - you read his comment, but not my reply to it. Let me repeat one more time, since apparently you are using a browser in which links only work sporadically: Poor adults have a full time labor force participation rate of 15% (vs 73% for the nation as a whole), rather than 10% for all poor people (and 65% for all Americans). The low labor force participation rate of the poor is not caused by demographic differences.

Labor force participation rates usually include everyone. If you object to this practice, take it up with the BLS.

And as near as I can tell you've conjured your "80% of the poor don't work at all." figure out of thin air.

That's because you didn't bother reading the first paragraph of the BLS report I linked to. I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million. Before you object that I'm including children (just like the BLS does), the figure rises to 31% if you exclude children (and to 85% for the USA as a whole).

It increased the figure from 10% to 15%. Why are you deliberately deflating the figure when it still appears to support your point after removing children?

>I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million.

That figure is the percentage of the poor who work or look for work for at least 27 weeks per year, not the percentage of the poor who do any work or look for work at all. Farm laborers for example could work 50 hour weeks May-October and only hit 25 weeks. And they would be poor.

Zinn: There are two issues here: First, why should we accept our culture's definition of those two factors? Why should we accept that the "talent" of someone who writes jingles for an Advertising agency advertising dog food and gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes $40,000 a year? Who is to say that Bill Gates works harder than the dishwasher in the restaurant he frequents, or that the CEO of a hospital who makes $400,000 a year works harder than the nurse, or the orderly in that hospital who makes $30,000 a year? The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the university?

Talent And hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured quantitatively. Since there is no way of measuring them quantitatively we accept the measure given to us by the very people who benefit from that measuring! I remember Fiorello Laguardia (US Senator) standing up in Congress in the twenties, arguing against a tax bill that would benefit the Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, and asking if Mellon worked harder than the housewife in East Harlem bringing up three kids on a meager income. And how do you measure the talent of an artist, a musician, a poet, an actor, a novelist, most of whom in this society cannot make enough money to survive - against the talent of the head of any corporation. I challenge anyone to measure quantitatively the qualities of talent and hard work. There is one possible answer to my challenge: Hours of work vs. Hours of leisure. Yes, That's a nice quantitative measure. Well, with that measure,the housewife should get more than most or all corporate executives. And the working person who does two jobs -- and there are millions of them -- and has virtually no leisure time, should be rewarded far more than the corporate executive who can take two hour lunches, weekends at his summer retreat, and vacations in Italy. ... But better still, why not use as a criterion for income what people need to live a decent life, and since most people's basic needs are similar there would not be an extreme difference in income but everyone would have enough or food, housing, medical care, education, entertainment, vacations.... Of course there is the traditional objection that if we don't reward people with huge incomes society will fall apart, that progress depends on those people. A dubious argument. Where is the proof that people need huge incomes to give them the incentive to do important things? In fact, we have much evidence that the profit incentive leads to enormously destructive things -- Whatever makes profit will be produced, and so nuclear weapons, being more profitable than day care centers, will be produced.

And people do wonderful things (teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, scientists,inventors) without huge profit incentives. Because there are rewards other than monetary rewards which move people to produce good things -- the reward of knowing you are contributing to society, the reward of gaining the respect of people around you. If there are incentives necessary to doing certain kinds of work, those incentives should go to people doing the most undesirable, most unpleasant work, to make sure that work gets done. I worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasurable work compared to the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that created artificially by our culture) do i need more incentive than he does?

End quote.

Some of the 'poor' people here in Colombia work 3 hours a day, earn just the same money as someone who recently got a bachelor degree, and stay the rest of the day drinking beer and saving no money for tomorrow.

They also tend to have very big plasmas or LCD TVs and huge sound systems, while their houses are just bricks without any paint on them.

So, I live in a very rich country (you just can't imagine the delicious and cheap fruits here) but full of poor people.

The BLS disagrees. Can you tell me a reason I should trust Howard Zinn over the government agency tasked with measuring such things?

As for working harder jobs, I am agnostic. If you have evidence, cite it. I agree the poor die younger. I won't address the remainder of your post, it's mostly unsupported value judgments and opinion.

Not sure how many support people Blizzard has, but it is a shame that doing real business is usually outlawed in most MMORPGs.