Affluence creates poverty.

McLuhan’s aphorism points to a paradox he often explored: new wealth, convenience, and technological “progress” can generate new forms of deprivation. As standards of living rise, expectations and dependencies rise with them; what once counted as sufficient becomes “lack,” and people can be made poor relative to new norms. Affluence can also concentrate resources and attention, displacing older skills, local economies, and social supports—so that abundance in one sector produces scarcity elsewhere. In McLuhan’s media-theory terms, every extension (of power, speed, reach) also creates an “amputation”: gains in one dimension can erode capacities or communities in another, yielding poverty amid plenty.