Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act or process of making paupers of or reducing to pauperism. Also spelled pauperisation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or process of reducing to pauperism.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act or process of reducing to pauperism.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a state of extreme poverty or destitution
  • noun the act of making someone poor

Etymologies

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Examples

  • As she came to understand what didn't "add up," it was that the process of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weakness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.

    False Promises Johnson, Diane 2003

  • She encounters many especially distressing illustrations of the effects of "pauperization," connecting the decline in California's system of public education and the rise in the California prison system to the bleak ignorance and moral defectiveness exemplified by a tawdry but emblematic incident in Lakewood, California, former site of defense-industry prosperity, and more recently of the "Spur Posse."

    False Promises Johnson, Diane 2003

  • Was it not a kind of pauperization to make men secure in person and property through no efforts of their own, by the agency of a state machinery operating over their heads?

    Liberalism 1896

  • Social Security's pauperization could well be taken as the federal budget's last shoe to fall… and keep falling and falling and falling.

    Social Security's Glimpse Into the Left's Priority J.T. Young 2011

  • She asked them about their lives before the war, their experiences during the siege of Warsaw, the impact of the first stages of occupation on their lives, how they responded to German regulations that stripped them of rights and possessions, their efforts to cope with the increasing pauperization of their families in the ghetto and how they dealt with the starvation, diseases and unemployment in the ghetto.

    Cecila Slepak. 2009

  • The independence of some cannot cost the enslavement (pauperization) of others in a democracy, and unemployment is a hard reality with barbarous consequences (for example, employees have health care supplied by the employer as a deductible cost, a completely different situation of unemployed people) to many Americans.

    Unemployment, Labor Market Regulation, and Sour Grapes, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • She vividly described the process of pauperization of the Sephardi lower class, the petty shopkeepers, the artisans and the workers of Sarajevo in the 1930s.

    Yugoslavia. 2009

  • In the face of the progressing pauperization and general corruption, the basic middle-class values such as law, order, honesty and rationality lose their meaning.

    Mina Tomkiewicz. 2009

  • In 'Capital', as a tendential law of the development of capital, Marx predicted it as the coming geometric progressive explosion of global pauperization of millions of global workers, and even of the middle and upper classes.

    Obama, this is no economic crisis, it is the systemic breakdown of capitalism 2009

  • "We are not seeing the pauperization of the middle class," says Robert Shapiro, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute.

    The Contemplative Bomb-Thrower 2008

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