Modernized poverty appears when the intensity of market dependence reaches a certain threshold.
Subjectively, it is the experience of frustrating affluence which occurs in persons mutilated by their overwhelming reliance on the riches of industrial productivity. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is with difficulty expressed. A profound change in individual and social self-images is here reflected. And the layman is not the only one who has difficulty in accurately describing what he experiences. The professional economist is unable to recognize the poverty his conventional instruments fail to uncover.