>You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default.
They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state of non-privation through human labour.
>Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
Nobody is denying this fact, and no serious philosopher (with the exception of Barbon in the 18th century) contends that "distributing everything perfectly equal" is possible or even desirable.
What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? What is its rhetorical function?
The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. What happens when a society stops doing anything, does it remain in it's current state? Then that is the default state and they have truly altered it. But it doesn't, of course.
Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught us over and over again that it's not, that civilization may crumble and advances can be lost. Like somebody relying on their car always working because "it never died on me before" and not maintaining it well, they will eventually find that suddenly it does.
> What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us?
I believe it's an important fact, because it changes the perspective. If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. If poverty is the default, it's the opposite: you need to do something to end it, and you need to keep doing it.
>The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering.
This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth.
>If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state.
Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.
> This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour.
I'm not so sure. There are a few (more or less) "unconctacted" tribes left that are pretty stable in their environment and haven't progressed beyond a certain state that's very close to the default mode (and which we would call poverty if compared to us). I see no reason to believe in inevitable progress.
> Humans need to make things to have wealth.
That's short and correct, and it's why I think it's important to keep in mind that poverty, not wealth and comfort, is the default. It's not that anybody denies that you have to maintain and improve, but it helps to understand what came first: the effort or the reward?
They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state of non-privation through human labour.
>Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
Nobody is denying this fact, and no serious philosopher (with the exception of Barbon in the 18th century) contends that "distributing everything perfectly equal" is possible or even desirable.
What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? What is its rhetorical function?