Reply #13: I'd been wondering about this too

[Ratty]

I like your answer. I'm not what you would call a "deep thinker" but I've often wondered very hard (usually when daydreaming about my own utopian civilization) whether the poor were needed "to be the garbagemen" as it were. If everyone was educated, had food, housing, clothes, and if everyone made a comfortable sum of money, who would be left to do our poop jobs?

Actually, there are a lot of poop jobs I wouldn't mind having, compared with a lot of preofessional jobs. I'd much rather be a garbage man all my life than a lawyer or MBA.

So anyway, that is an amazingly cogent, even comforting answer. I wouldn't mind reading something or other on the subject either.