Um, because self perpetuating societal structures and, like, biological limitations.

From the beginning of human civilization, the needs that require the most workers have always been low-skill jobs that don't require education or foreknowledge. Most of the time these jobs were agricultural in a time when agriculture was much harder and dependent on seasons. People who needed to administrate the agriculture and other things, such as building, also needed to be educated, and because they were educated they were also to maintain control and come up with a variety of ways to keep the poor farmers/workmen placated while they enjoyed the wealth of their times.

Capitalism and industrialization changed the calculus of this without hellza changing the arithmetic. The economy got more complicated with markets deciding the prices of things rather than lords and despots, but in the end the jobs that required the most people were low-skill, low-wage jobs. The bottom of the ladder, and in a market-based economy the lowest skilled and most common jobs are the least paid.

Do you note a bit of irony there? The most essential, fundamental jobs needed to keep civilization running are also the ones that are the least paid and get the least respect, generally. Meanwhile, the people who were the most paid were those that sat back and "managed" with intellectual skills, and the only thing that gave them this ability was the fact that they could read bigger, more fancy words than the filthy peasants.

Some radical French revolutionaries were the first people to recognize this basic irony, and Karl Marx was one of the first to turn the idea of flipping this weird system on its head in a very detailed way and create a detailed alternative. Marx's plan was flawed in a variety of ways that would have been difficult for him to foresee at the time, the biggest fundamental problem being that simply throwing all the rich people out also means you're throwing all the educated, smart people out. Most of the Communist movements, particularly in Asia, were vehemently anti-intellectual, Pol Pot's regime being the most extreme example but China's perhaps being disastrous on a much larger scale. Part of the reason why China had been doing a lot better since the 80s is because they finally came around to the idea that shaming intellectuals and forcing them to perform hard labor and even killing them is basically civilization suicide.

The countries that currently have come closest to eliminated poverty have been the "welfare state" style countries that utilize the benefits of capitalism, along with all the poor jobs, but you artificially raise the standard of living of the people working those jobs so they aren't poor anymore.

Currently the main "problem" with the poor is our own moral ambivalence toward them, on one hand Christian and general western morals tells us to look out for the poor but our baser sides and the overestimation of our own abilities also cause us to lose empathy for them, saying that they deserve to be poor for being criminals/druggies/having too many kids. American moderate neoconservatism has created the idea that with the right free-market policies, no one can be poor, which is sorta dumb since that's never been the way it works. Harder-righties and libertarians are at least internally consistent, taking a fuck the poor attitude because they've internalized the idea that the poor are naturally incompetent/stupid and don't deserve to even be middle class.

Globalization adds another complicating layer on this, as instead of our people doing all the hard work, we take the world's poor and ask them to do it, which has a rather profound effect on unemployment and the sheer amount of jobs. It used to take literally everyone working in order for society to keep running, now thanks to utilizing the world's poor only about half of the people actual work a job, and even less do a job that is actually essential in some way. Whether or not this is sustainable is hard to say, today's poor factor workers might be Asians and South Americans, in the next era it will be Africans. That's why China is investing so heavily in Africa, because their plan is to have a more European-style service economy with a middle class so they don't have to be the world's factory anymore, because that will lock most of them into a state of poverty, so if they can export the bitch work to basketball americans then they'll be set. It probably won't work though, but that'll take a while more to explain.

That's why people are poor, Charlie Brown.

if nobody is poor then we can't have rich people

it's all relative man

because hey deserve 2 b and abuse wellfare and to many kids

  I'm technically poor. I work 20hrs a week, make less than 25k/year, don't own anything in any meaningful sense (no property or car) and have no debt other than maybe $200 but I never have a larger credit card balance than I have cash on hand.

But I am doing just fine, save money every month (though not much), and I'm thinking about setting up a mutual fund of some kind. Who knows.

Anyway the point is I'm statistically impoverished but have never felt like a part of an impoverished group or demographic of "poor people." Much of my ease in this regard no doubt comes from having no children or elderly parents to take care of.

I have no idea what the point of this post is, it's just what I thought of when the topic of poverty came up. I feel more empowered at this point having little money but lots of my own time rather than having more money but less time. It's freeing when neither your values nor life necessities put much weight on money but I'm also in the relatively privileged position of being young, white, having a strong social support network, no nuclear family or dependents, and not minding sleeping in a crawlspace or living in a van for months at a time.

>>74392
Well yeah, there's a reason why every previous civilization had children working in some capacity, because having a bunch of dead weight that takes up resources and money without contributing anything is quite the drain.

I've learned a lot of lessons since playing tons of Fallout Shelter, most of them about how secretly racist I am, but also that stuff.

>>74407
How racist are you, casper?

>>74408
Pretty racist, apparently. I started just breeding whoever with whoever but then a realization hit me like a freight train when babies started being born: that if I continue like this there will be no more whites in the vault. So I started pairing only whites with whites, which has probably caused some issues with incest but that's the cost of purity I guess.

>>74410
I hope the redhead gene never dies out.

  cuz they ain't got 8 fucking thousand dollars yo!

Is it hard to get out of poverty?

>>74426
No, but it is easy to stay in poverty.

NEGRO WISDOM COMMIN' ATCHA

>>74410

The trick is to send all minorities out into the wastes for guns and equipment

>>74431
I just listened to an episode of This American Life about how Puerto Rican police and government authorities ship impoverished drug addicts to the mainland United States, mostly Chicago, supposedly to luxurious detox facilities that are in fact underfunded, unlicensed, not staffed by doctors or nurses, and that confiscate the addicts' passports and foodstamps, resulting in them ending up on the street with nowhere to live and no way to get back to Puerto Rico.

Basically they send their poor to the wasteland of Chicago.

>>74432
>This American Life
Sorry, I misspelled The Close-mic'd Superjew Hour.

>Basically they send their poor to the wasteland of Chicago.
Shit! That must hellza annoy the poor and druggy who are already there.

>>74455
It strains the already limited resources, yes.