This uses a well-chosen thought experiment to demonstrate that our understanding of ‘poverty’ is maybe somewhat askew. I tend to lean toward feeling like we — including poor people, at least in the US — have become much better off, and that UBI could solve a lot of the remaining problems. This seems like a legitimate challenge to that view that I’ll have to spend some time thinking about.
I think this is the problem with saying that modern society can’t have real poor people, because they own an amount of clothing and fabric that would’ve once put somebody well into the realm of nobility, back when women spent most of their days stretching wool with a distaff in order to let anyone have clothes at all. That amount of fabric doesn’t mean you can’t be poor, just like having vast amounts of oxygen in your apartment doesn’t rule out poverty. It means that a resource which was once very expensive, like fabric in medieval Europe or oxygen in Anoxistan, has become cheap enough not to mention.
And that is an improvement, compared to the counterfactual! I’m glad I don’t have to constantly worry about running out of clothing or oxygen! It is legitimately a better planet, compared to the counterfactual planet where life has all of our current problems plus not enough oxygen!
But if you agree that medieval peasants or hunter-gatherers can be poor, you are acknowledging that no amount of oxygen can stop somebody from being poor.
Then fabric can be the same way: there can be no possible sufficiency of clothing in your closet that rules out poverty, even though somebody with plenty of clothing is counterfactually better off compared to somebody who owns only one shirt.
The sum of every resource like that could rule out poverty, if you had enough of all of it. What would be the sign of this state of affairs having come to hold? What would it be like for people to not be poor?
I reply: You wouldn’t see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.