What is basic housing?
Today's poor housing would look like a damn luxury 100 years ago. Today's luxury housing will probably look bellow standards after 100 years
Today's poor housing would look like a damn luxury 100 years ago. Today's luxury housing will probably look bellow standards after 100 years
So the point is that following your reasoning there is really no end to the depravity you can reach and somebody would still be able to claim that is all fine, because only rich people in the stone age could afford such luxury.
The point Smith made was that poverty is always a relative phenomenon. What is a necessity is always defined in terms of the society you live in. There is no such thing as a universal definition of necessity.
I had an interesting conversation about this with my wife's American parents. Despite the fact that her parents were noticeably better off economically in their childhood than my parents, they felt a severe stigma of poverty my parents never felt. My parent grew up in a country where they were much the same as everybody else. In fact a little better off. They did not feel poor at all. They had a happy childhood both of them. But one of my wife's American parents had a bad childhood, plagued by a strong feeling of being lesser than everybody else. Never having people over on visit out of shame over their own poverty. She was used to seeing everybody else being better off and internet the idea they they were somehow lesser people.
Today my home country is richer than America by GDP per capita but comparisons of wealth and of people's feeling of wealth or poverty is difficult. Many of my american relatives enjoy bigger houses and cars than I do, but one always gets the feeling that their life is much more of a struggle than mine. I live in a smaller house and have no car. But I have no financial worries like them. I have long vacations, I am not constantly overworked. I don't worry about health care insurance, saving for college education to my kids, getting fired.
So I think one should have some respect for the desperation and despair the poor in America feel. Knowing that a surprising car repair or medical bill could send you onto the street in no time. Even poor in much less wealth western countries have to deal with quite that level of insecurity.
> I live in a smaller house and have no car. But I have no financial worries like them. I have long vacations, I am not constantly overworked. I don't worry about health care insurance, saving for college education to my kids, getting fired.
In America, we trade stability for social mobility (probably truer before the WWII), and our government promotes car and home ownership, but I doubt those were tradeoffs you made for longer vacations and "free" health care and education. We became more socialist and fascist after WWII and during the Cold War, but we've still managed to maintain steady income growth for average Americans, despite what the media would have you believe with "household income": http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-discov...
Poverty will always be with us, but there are plenty of things our bureaucrats can give up to fight it better. Our federal government has more or less the same number (very few added in the last 100 years) of representatives despite our population tripling. This system has become more susceptible and beholden to corporate interests, including media corporations that promote stories like this one and the problems and divisions in our society without any context of our achievements and commonality. This promotes bandaid and politically expedient half-measures that only make the problem worse in the long-run.
And you can't have success with capitalism without a healthy and prosperous working/poor middle class to be your consumers.
I'm thinking of democratic socialism. It's capitalism with a heavy emphasis on welfare and super strong social safety nets.
If you look at the quality of life index (the "where-to-be-born" index), you'll see that the top 10 countries all employ a form of democratic socialism. That's saying something right there.
If we hope that they might compete fairly to improve their lot, are they started well behind in a house with failing power, or heat or cold that keeps them awake or sick and so on?
Without a fairer playing field, they can fall further behind.
A satisfactory home that complies with regulations would ideally allow the occupant to get a decent sleep, prepare food healthily and present themselves appropriately for work.
A modern small home, with electric lighting, an indoor flush toilet, a refrigerator and other electric appliances, hot and cold running water, thermostatically controlled HVAC, microwave, and cable TV? Absolute luxury compared to the typical house built and lived in in 1916.
My house (a quite respectable house built in the mid-1920s in Cambridge, MA) appears to have originally been fitted with a coal furnace and has had electric lighting retrofitted (originally had gas lighting). An oil furnace was retrofit in 1937. It seems to have had flush toilets from the start.
However there are a number of luxuries that have not increased in these years that are pretty important, such as personal space and privacy, my house and I suppose yours have this luxury. The houses I grew up in, and which poor people are living in now, often do not have these luxuries.
There is another thing that it seems was not a luxury in 1916 and is becoming now, relative freedom from the threat of eviction. According to the article there is a greater deal of eviction of today's poor than there was in the past, and I think that luxury might be really important if you have children. Important enough that I would be willing to trade indoor plumbing, microwave and TV for it, maybe some other luxuries if I was given the tools to make up for them (tools like ice delivery and so forth).
Finally given the low quality of poor people's housing not all of these luxuries you list can be counted on as being available, if for example the heating breaks it might take months to fix etc, so the luxury at the level is highly variable.