Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent. We cannot really have an adequate understanding of the future without some view about how well the lives of the poor can be expected to go. Is there, then, hope for the poor? To answer this question, we need an understanding of who should count as poor. Some types of poverty are easy enough to identify. There is no way of escaping immediate diagnosis when faced with what King Lear called "loop'd and window'd raggedness."
But as Lear also well knew, deprivation can...
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