Is the poor an inevitable feature in any society?

Firstly, we need to define what is called poor. Materially, if you are worse off than other people, if you are having lower standards of living compared to other people, than you can be said to be poor. Trickily, this assumes that there is a basis of comparison. That is, there must be someone who is definitely living a better life than you. If everyone had the same kind of living standard, then the concept of 'poor' would not exist.

In the concept of poor, we need not talk about the idea of money here, even though the system of money has a tendency to enlarging the rich-poor divide. In a society with no concept of money, and that everything is based on trade, then everyone should have something that everybody else wants. I said should have, because, your goods can either be in high demand or in low demand. If your goods are in high demand, everyone will want to trade with you, and you would get to enjoy a whole lot of stuff through trading. If your goods are in low demand, then nobody wants to trade with you, and you will enjoy nothing but your homegrown stuff. That isn't so bad, if you are self-sufficient that is.

But we are greedy people, for we are not contented what we already have, we want to have what other people have too. Now, in a society that does not have the concept of money, what happens then, is violence and oppression. Since nature endows different amount of strength and muscles to all of us, there would be some who would use this strength to force others to give their share. Perhaps that was how landlords appeared in the first place. You might be forced to become a servant to other people, and your life would clearly suck in comparison to the person you serve.

We can perhaps try to correct this with a governing body, whose self-professed goal is equality of opportunities and wealth. So this particular government will take back all the wealth and redistribute in equal proportion to everyone. But how should we divide this? For you cant distribute to everyone exactly the same portion of food. There will be some people who needs a bigger portion of food. And then there is a problem of who should get which piece of land, because all property assets are unique by virtue of the fact there are all in different locations. And how best to justify the approportionation of wealth? Furthermore, the incentive to work hard is lost, because what you sow is not reaped, for it is divided into many little pieces and distributed. If everyone thinks like that, then progress as whole for the society is slow. In comparison to another country, we would appear poor. Besides, the logistics required to coordinate to entire society by human means likely to be astronomical.

Even in a democratic society, where it is claimed that everyone is equal with equal voting rights, there is still paradoxically, the inequality between the majority and the minority that is always present in any voting system. Any decision would then benefit only the majority but not the minority. If the decision involves on how best to divide up wealth, then we can imagine there will be people who would become worst off. It is the same issue for a society that follows the Utilitarian approach. More often than not, we will end up sacrificing the few to achieve benefits for the society as a whole. In such a sacrifice, it remains to be seen if you are the few that have been made worst off compared to the others who have benefited.

Here, we have moved off from materialistic well-being to, well, psychological well-being. I do not know if we can be psychologically poor, because this is an extremely fuzzy issue. If we remain in the easily quantified domain of materialistic well-being, than I think, we can conclude that the poor is an inevitable feature that one can encounter in any society.

However, this is not an excuse to not to show care and concern for the poor. What we can try to do, is to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. We can transfer wealth in a one-time event that gives them the benefit and the opportunity to enjoy the latest fruits of labour of the society. Accessibility to technology, should be enlarged to the poor so that that they are able to benefit. And that means, creating more supply of the particular technology, decreasing prices of the technology. Also, the people living in poverty might not be that up to date with the knowledge of the latest progress of the society. So, attempts should be made to educate them on the benefits a particular technology will bring.

The poor is definitely a feature is any society, but I think we should share the fruits of labour by the society with them. Not a constant stream of support, that causes people to lose the incentive to improve their situation, but by giving them the opportunity to know about it, and to use it.