Meade saw the modern workforce heading back into "a super-world of an
immiserized proletariat of butlers, footmen, kitchen maids, and other hangers-on," altogether, "a hideous outlook." Today's prospects may not be as hideous as Meade feared, but for now it's clear he has the better of the argument, and especially in America.
Realizing, in the wake of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the 1910s, that her career possibilities were limited, she and her then-lover, Pavel Orlanev, took their play, The Chosen People, first to London and then to New York, where its portrayal of the
immiserized conditions of Jewish life in Russia earned it audiences among Jewish immigrants and sympathetic gentiles alike.
* The workers would therefore be "
immiserized"; they would become poorer as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
"
Immiserized Growth in Liberalized Agriculture." World Development 26(5):743-53.
The argument is not the old fallacy that free trade with poor countries is bad for your aggregate income, that your country will be
immiserized by such trade.
In other words, the fear is that our proletariat, the unskilled, will be
immiserized by freer trade with the poor countries of the South.