Link: www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-...

(The original post was either deleted or the person blocked me.

But for posterity, the claim being responded to here is that American minimum wage workers are actually dramatically poorer than Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol.)

This sort of absurd, ultra-bleak reading of the remarkable prosperity of modern societies is not only embarrassingly wrong - and I saw a historian retweet this sincerely (!!) - but also helps fuel not materialist, left-wing politics, but rather reactionary right-wing politics ('RETVRN-ism').

So what you have *actually* discovered is that an American family working at minimum wage is *meaningfully better off* in terms of access to real resources than someone on the lower runs of Victorian Britain's educated *urban middle class.*

Quite the opposite of the intended implication!

You can see the same sort of redefinition of 'relative' poverty in something like Jane Austen's Bennets, who are 'poor' by the standards of regency gentry, which is to say they are very rich by any normal standard, poor compared only to the even-more-rich.