[krnsll]

Thanks for sharing this. The piece makes an urgent point that needs to be appropriately acknowledged. It falls in the vein of arguments I've come to term as "relational poverty" or "relational inequality" arguments (what Popper is presented as terming "moral inequality" in the piece) that most social science research I've come across has failed to or is ill-equipped to account for. I do recall Amartya Sen making a definition of poverty along these grounds (in the sense of dignity, or lack thereof, in what one perceives as their social environment) some years back but haven't been able to trace it down since or see if any further work was done on it. (If someone reading this happens to know more about such work, I'd appreciate being directed towards it).

The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.

Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.

https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...

[claudiawerner]

Sen's work is closely associated with philosophical and economic concerns about exploitation, not just poverty, and I think it's a shame that's missed out on. J.E. Roemer was the main theorist of post-Marxian theories of exploitation, but I've observed that when the discussion centers around poverty rather than exploitation, the resulting theory is much more tame. Also related is capability theory and the various objections to purely negative liberty (something I've also noticed many people miss out on - to speak of liberty as if it is strictly a concept that belongs to the liberal tradition and no other tradition may use it, and to then claim that the only real kind of liberty is negative liberty).

Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.