Dickens knew the condition of the urban poor better than most Victorian writers.
Mr Sen's work, in contrast, was aimed at making the poor better off.
They promised to move beyond Thatcherism and make the poor better off.
India's healthcare system suffers from serious underfunding, although with innovative work on costs, while China's system arguably serves the rural poor better than the urban rich.
The rebate amount would be set to equal what a household living at the poverty level would pay in taxes, leaving some of the poor better off and cushioning the proposal's impact on the middle class.
Put these two points together and you get a third: a village in one state can protect and help the poor better than an apparently similar place only 50 miles away.
Vinod Thomas, the World Bank's former country director in Brazil, reckons the lessening of income inequality has come in roughly equal measure from cash transfers to the poor, better education and jobs growth.
But those two attractions are exactly the point in coming to Washington in the first place, in the view of Mark Plotkin, political commentator for public radio's WAMU, who knows this city, rich and poor, better than any of the talking heads in the Sunday TV ghetto.
