First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 12

Man is born with needs and he creates needs for himself.  He gets the former from his physical constitution, the latter from habit and education.  I have shown that in the beginning, man scarcely had more than natural needs, only wanting to live, but in the proportion that the pleasures of life have become more extensive, he has developed the habit of indulging in some of them, and the result is that they have become as necessary to him as life itself.  I will city the use of tobacco, because tobacco is a luxury good that has penetrated almost into the desert and that has created an artificial enjoyment among the savages that they must obtain at all costs.  Tobacco is nearly as indispensable to the Indians as food; they are just as tempted to resort to the charity of their peers when they are deprived of one as the other.  They have, therefore, a reason to beg that their fathers did not have.  What I have said about tobacco applies to a variety of articles that one does not deny to oneself in civilized life.  The more a society is rich, industrious, prosperous, the more the pleasures of the majority become varied and permanent; the more they are varied and permanent, the more they are assimilated by habit and example as real needs.  Civilized man is therefore infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of fate than the savage.  What happens to the latter very infrequently can happen incessantly and in very ordinary circumstances to the former.  Along with the set of his pleasures, he has extended the set of his needs and has cleared a larger space in his life for the blows of fortune.  This is why the poor of England appears rich to the French poor; and the French to the Spanish poor.  What the Englishman lacks was never in the Frenchman's possession.  And so it is as one goes down the social ladder. In highly civilized societies, the lack of a multitude of items causes misery; in a savage state, poverty consists of not finding something to eat.

First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 11

I have only spoken of the case in which a population restrains its wants.  Many other causes can bring about the same effect: overproduction by other citizens, foreign competition...

The industrial class that serves the well-being of others so powerfully is then more exposed than others to sudden and irremediable misfortune.  In the great fabric of human societies, I consider the industrial class as having received from God the special and dangerous mission of catering to the material happiness of everyone else through risk and peril.  But the natural and inevitable movement of civilization unceasingly tens to increase the proportion of those in it.  Each year, needs multiply and diversify, and with them grows the number of individuals who hope to create greater comfort in working to satisfy these new needs rather than staying in agriculture: a great subject for the statesmen of today to meditate on!

This is the principal cause of what is happening in wealthy societies, where comfort and indigence are to be found in greater numbers than before.  The industrial class, which provides for the pleasures of the majority, has exposed itself to miseries that would be all but unknown if this class did not exist.

Nevertheless, additional causes contribute to the gradual development of pauperism.