> The poorest people around us probably aren't dying of hunger anymore.

Which makes them better off than previous generations, right?

> The poorest people around us probably aren't dying of hunger anymore. But there is more to life than a full belly.

Sure but what's that got to do with poverty? If you're not poor you don't necessarily have purpose either. The world is full of idle, clueless rich people who live off inherited wealth and contribute nothing. Just look at Paris Hilton.

Oh and my point wasn't that Bill Gates wasn't rags to riches: but he has accumulated wealth in his lifetime many orders of magnitude to what he had when he started. That's the point. What we take for granted today didn't exist centuries ago in an era of the birthright aristocracy and serfdom little different to slavery.

> If you moved into the "big city" from the farm with a 6th grade education 100 years ago

100 years ago, relatively speaking, that would've been a lot better education than a 6th grade education is in today's terms.

> How would you do?

It's hard to say because that's a life story I simply don't have. Statistically speaking however, pretty poorly would be the answer. Like I said: the circumstances you're born to (parent's education and so on) correlate positively to the choices the children make.

But in all honesty your post reads like a "bleeding heart" infomercial (and a request for donations). The sad truth is that many are poor because they make poor choices. It's just unfortunate that their offspring tend to be detrimentally affected by that.

Let's also consider that the definition of poverty is extremely political. What is poverty? In the developing world, being largely disease free (to the extent the developed world is) and having shelter, food and a clean drinking water would mean a lot. Here? There is a subjective definition covering far more than that.

Consider: 91% of Americans use cell phones [1] but 12.7% of Americans are below the poverty line [2]. So at least one quarter of all those deemed poor use cell phones, which can still be considered a discretionary expenditure.

Add in other discretionary behaviour like alcohol, tobacco and even drugs and what you see is a pattern of people making poor choices. Not in all cases but certainly a lot.

Look there are genuine social problems in America. Health care is almost inextricably tied to employment. Insurers can dump you over trivial terms like being two cents short on your payment [3]. The war on poverty has had many detrimental effects such as Section 8 Housing [4] creating ghettoes. Quality of education seems to largely be a factor of how wealthy your district is. The powerful educational unions stifle any attempt at teacher and school accountability. The list goes on.

But if you think the poor of 100+ years ago didn't have problems--problems of life and death, forced servitude, disease, etc--and that those problems aren't relatively speaking worse than those of the so-called poor in the developed world, you're kidding yourself.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/wireless-survey-...

[2]: http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp

[3]: http://abcnews.go.com/US/cancer-patient-vietnam-vet-ron-flan...

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)