In the late eighteen hundreds New York was filling with immigrants from around the world who came to make a better life for themselves. How the Other Half Lives explores poverty during a time when poverty was a temporary condition for most people.
The key ingredient is not in this publication, but is in the differences between then and now, of opportunities and constructed impediments to opportunities to escape poverty today.
The immigrants of that time learned how to escape poverty, and many of them who managed to escape, were able to cut the rope or break the ladder behind them, to unfairly impede competition, and maintain the level of poverty and lack of progress that exists today with such tools as Patents.*
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the tenements of New York
By Jacob A. Riis
http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html
* An inventor should have the right to a reasonable royalty for the use of an invention. Patents should be owned by the inventors and not bought or sold as a commodity. Any new technology should not be prevented from being used by anyone, including the inventor. Reasonable Royalty is defined as a percentage of net profit that does not impede the use of a product.
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