The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving. Wherever you draw the poverty line, both the percentage and quantity of people below the line keeps diminishing.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
> Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
I don't understand where this is coming from at all. I value human agency and freedom most of all.
> Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Yes, in the last 300 years we started using soap and also discovered penicillin, this has indeed caused enormous leaps forward in medical care. Did you mean medical access? That is still highly striated based on class, and our royalty class seems to be smaller but far more wealthy now (the difference in net worth between our top .1%, 1%, and 90% is astounding).
> The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving.
People say this all of the time but outside of soap and penicillin I'm not exactly sure what people are talking about. The poor and starving seem to only exist in greater numbers than ever in history. Perhaps the conditions of the absolute poorest in American society are slightly better than the absolute poorest in American society 200 years ago, but at the cost of creating new poverty classes abroad in colonized places that previously had relatively low technological development but much higher happiness and quality of life than they do now.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.