If this sounds humdrum, that's what austerity Britain is: humdrum, run-of-the-mill immiseration.
Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted.
Sadly, Zimbabwe's best hope is that the country's immiseration has gone so far that support for Mr Mugabe's misrule is now eroding even in his own ruling ZANU-PF party.
Under a coalition of leftists led by his own Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has won seven consecutive elections, West Bengal was previously best known for industrial action, capital flight and the immiseration of its capital, Calcutta, recently renamed Kolkata.
Rather than reminiscing tweedily about dinners at Magdalen, today's humanities professors are post-structuralists who blame Britain for mass immiseration.
Third, Bernstein noted that rising wages and better working conditions meant that contrary to Marx's prediction of the immiseration of the proletariat the lives of workers in advanced capitalist countries were actually improving.
She started to crib phrases like "dead-level," "squirrel wheel," and "immiseration of the masses" for her verse.
In fairness, Gilmour's biography appeared long before the savage indictment set out in Mike Davis's "Late Victorian Holocausts" (2001), a book that at its most extreme accuses the British Empire of creating the permanent immiseration of the Third World.
In Trollope's fiction, even the most small-scale and homely stories have as a background this special crisis of modernization — not the crisis of industrialization and mass immiseration, seen by Dickens, but a crisis of institutions, produced by reform and standardization.
The later development of industrial capitalism, including the emergence, after Smith's death, of dangerous factories and the immiseration of workers jammed into enormous sordid cities, was not something that Smith had envisioned.
It's true that for all its socioeconomic costs, the decline of marriage hasn't led to immiseration and upheaval on a grand scale.
