Economy
Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty
A history of how we came to change our minds.
There is no better way to channel the mind-bending logic of 18th century thinkers on poverty (men who we can assume were not poor themselves, by virtue of the fact that history remembers them) than to simply quote their words. Meet Philippe Hecquet, a well-known French doctor speaking in 1740:
With a little less lyricism, here is Englishman Arthur Young, in 1771: