The New Poverty

(from “The Soul and the Operator”)
By John Berger

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash.

The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.