Poor Us: an animated history - Why Poverty?

f we want to make poverty history, we need to understand the history of poverty. A funny and sinister animated odyssey through time.

The poor may always have been with us, but attitudes towards them have changed. Beginning in the Neolithic Age, Ben Lewis’s film takes us through the changing world of poverty.

You go to sleep, you dream, you become poor through the ages. And when you awake, what can you say about poverty now? There are still very poor people, to be sure, but the new poverty has more to do with inequality…

Did hunter-gatherers have poor relations? Who became poor faster than anyone else in history? And can Karl Marx make tea? But you also look at big questions: what’s lifted people out of poverty and how?

Is there a formula that would work again? Is poverty an “engine of the system” and a great driver of progress – or a terrible by-product of inequality?