Wealth & Money Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a trapdoor: it looks like a stern dismissal of “Social Questions” as cocktail-party abstractions, then drops you into a brutal diagnosis that indicts everyone in the room. The provocation is strategic. By calling poverty “what is the matter with the poor,” he rejects the era’s moralizing habits - the Victorian tendency to treat deprivation as a character flaw, a failure of thrift, sobriety, or “deservingness.” Poverty isn’t a puzzle to be debated; it’s a material condition to be ended.

Then he swivels the blade toward the comfortable. “Uselessness” is a devastatingly unromantic charge against the rich: not that they’re wicked, but that the social order has rendered them functionally inert, living off ownership rather than contribution. It’s Shaw’s socialist dramaturgy in miniature - class critique delivered as a punchline, with the rhythm of a stage line engineered to land. Poor/Poverty. Rich/Uselessness. The parallelism is neat enough to feel like common sense, which is precisely the point: he wants the audience to hear reform as obvious, not ideological.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in a Britain rattled by industrial inequality, philanthropic pieties, and early welfare debates, and he spent much of his career skewering “do-good” sentimentality that left structures intact. “Do not waste your time” isn’t anti-politics; it’s anti-handwringing. Stop discussing the poor as a social problem and start treating poverty as a policy crime - while admitting that idle wealth is its own kind of decay.