Why would we not want the baseline to improve over time? I genuinely do not understand the attitude that we should establish some extremely low bar like “is not currently at risk of starvation” and then never move the bar, but merely congratulating ourselves when more people pass that bar.
Because humans need an objective minimum to survive. Below that they face slow death. There's a difference between social norm vs existential need, and many people have a vested interest in conflating the two.
There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage, above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now."
Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard of living, whereby people don't existentially need X but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or opportunity thereto).
The definition of "not poor" is not supposed to amount to "barely surviving" but to "living and being productive members of society".
> many people have a vested interest in conflating the two.
Just like you are conflating being poor and being a bad person:
> your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now.
This implicitly suggests that you are only poor because you were too lazy/stupid/<insult> to follow that path. Maybe there are people like that, but many people are poor because being poor is expensive.
At some point it's up to a competent adult to do with their lives what they see fit under the circumstances dealt them by life. They are not automatically the charge of others just because they don't achieve some nebulous whim of strangers. Each has their own dependents to prioritize.
So now they are poor either because they are "incompetent" or because they "saw fit" to be poor. Okay, there is nothing implicit or suggesting about this, you are explicit about it.
No. I'm saying: if they meet an objective baseline of essentials, they're not poor.
And that's the core problem: everyone is tossing around the word "poor" to fit their ulterior motives (yours currently being to demean me for no apparent reason) without any agreed-on definition thereof. You're beating me up for suggesting there be an objective common definition, which happens to not be what you want it to mean (which, apparently, is whatever implication you see fit to win an unprompted argument with a stranger).
> Because humans need an objective minimum to survive.
I don’t even agree with this. Even for starvation there’s no clean dividing line. Malnutrition leads to reduced lifespans and health problems. I think that quality of life both can and should increase as society improves its technology and wealth.
You're bolstering my case. "Malnutrition" is, obviously, below the line I'm trying to draw. Meet the line, and you fundamentally want for nothing, no "reduced lifespan and health problems". Humans have a natural lifespan; what is the minimum necessary to support that (aside from externalities brought on by personal choice or random $#!^)?
I’m not being clear. I mean that as your nutrition gets worse, your expected lifespan decreases and you are at greater risk of health problems. Again there is no clean dividing line between malnutrition and good nutrition. In fact, in the future we might know so much more about nutrition that many common human diets in 2020 will seem like malnutrition.
Then let's err in favor of what we can deem "good nutrition" now, and objectively adjust it later if appropriate. "You'll never meet my whimsical specification of sufficient, so your earnest objective suggestion is wrong" doesn't work.
