The fact is that Malthusian thought has exerted a disturbing, and sometimes deranging, fascination since Thomas Robert Malthus published his original treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). With what looked like irresistible logic, Malthus argued that population growth, which people had regarded as a sign of human flourishing, was a harbinger of “misery and vice.” That’s because humans would, unchecked, breed like blowflies, and their “redundant population” would exhaust whatever subsistence was available. There was ample reason to dread what Malthus, courting another sort of redundancy, called “the future fate of mankind.”
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It followed, as night followed day, that measures to help the “common people,” like the poor laws, would only increase their overall distress, even if they “alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune.” Suddenly, the moral order was turned upside down: Helping people was really hurting them, and vice versa.

It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition - austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are ‘always with us.’ What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to a faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick day or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans - as a state of emergency.