Cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life

Edward Tenner in What the iPhone 4S Says about Inequality. We live in interesting times and our latent concern about unbridled technophilia and its possible impact on the quality and value of life has much fuel. Yet there are strange things going on. When the bottom 20% in income in the US have an asset profile (home ownership, cars, computers, TVs, etc.) equivalent to that of middle income Europeans, our sense of who is poor and what constitutes poverty becomes unmoored. The disruption to established work forces arising from new technology is well established. That said, for all the decades of anguish about change, people are ever better off in terms of measurable things.

Our conundrum is that people, by and large, have what they need and much of what they want. What is poverty then?

It is interesting to see that this discussion is age old.

Or perhaps the times are actually driving technophilia. That's what George Orwell argued about England in the Great Depression, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. ... Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.