What exactly is so bothersome, so troubling, so offensive about poverty?
I think those implicit assumptions need to be brought to the fore and explored first, before one can attempt to think about solutions to the problem of poverty.
What exactly is so bothersome, so troubling, so offensive about poverty?
Yes and poverty is not necessarily static. I think poverty is over-emphasized, and I prefer Milton Friedman's argument that class mobility is even more important. There have been many people who went from rags to riches, or even just a comfortable lifestyle from working hard. My parents came to North America with nothing and living in a basement and are now in the 1% just from working their butts off.
So, is it at all possible to get rid of poverty entirely? Maybe, as long as it's possible for humans to get rid of stinginess entirely.There is the case where a woman or man is not a giver of food, drink, cloth, sandals, garlands, scents, ointments, beds, dwellings, or lighting to brahmans or contemplatives. Through having adopted & carried out such actions, on the break-up of the body, after death he/she reappears in the plane of deprivation... If instead he/she comes to the human state, he/she is poor wherever reborn. This is the way leading to poverty: not to be a giver of food, drink, cloth, sandals, garlands, scents, ointments, beds, dwellings, or lighting to brahmans or contemplatives."
No takers?
I don't think its possible.Pareto originally used this distribution to describe the allocation of wealth among individuals since it seemed to show rather well the way that a larger portion of the wealth of any society is owned by a smaller percentage of the people in that society. He also used it to describe distribution of income.[8] This idea is sometimes expressed more simply as the Pareto principle or the "80-20 rule" which says that 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth.[9] However, the 80-20 rule corresponds to a particular value of α, and in fact, Pareto's data on British income taxes in his Cours d'économie politique indicates that about 30% of the population had about 70% of the income. The probability density function (PDF) graph at the beginning of this article shows that the "probability" or fraction of the population that owns a small amount of wealth per person is rather high, and then decreases steadily as wealth increases. (Note that the Pareto distribution is not realistic for wealth for the lower end. In fact, net worth may even be negative.) This distribution is not limited to describing wealth or income, but to many situations in which an equilibrium is found in the distribution of the "small" to the "large".