Immiserate (pronounced ih-mis-uh-reyt)
(1) To cause to become impoverished.
(2) To make miserable (a contested meaning).
Circa 1656: A translation of the German Verelendung (to sink into misery), the origin being the New Latin immiserāre & immiserāt- (both derived from miser (wreched), the construct in German being ver- (the causative prefix) + Elend (poverty). Although it appeared in words concerned with the state of the working class during the industrial revolution, the word surged in use (as both immiseration & immiserate) during the 1950s although it had appeared in papers published in journals of economics as early as 1940, use noted especially in critiques of the European colonial empires, then in their early stages of dissolution although this was at the time by many either not realized or ignored. The paradox of use increasing during the 1950s (a time when, in the West, real-wage outcomes for workers were (unusually) tending to improve) is thought a function of the vast increase in the publication rate of books and periodicals concerned with economics. Im- was from the Middle English in- from the Old English in- (in, into (prefix)), from the Proto-Germanic in, from the primitive Indo-European en. Misery was borrowed from the Old French miserie (from which Modern French gained misère), from the Latin miseria (from miser). The suffix –ation was from the Middle English –acioun & -acion, from the Old French acion & -ation, from the Latin -ātiō, an alternative form of -tiō (from whence –tion). Immiserate, immiserating, immiserates & immiserated are verbs and immiseration is a noun; the noun plural is immiserations. Perhaps surprisingly, neither economists nor political scientists seem to have been tempted to coin immiserative.
Wage growth and the money supply
In Marxist theory, the immiseration thesis (emiseration thesis in some translations) suggests the nature of capitalist production tends to stabilizes real wages, flattening wage growth relative to the money supply (however measured) in the economy, thus sustaining the ever-increasing power of capital over labour. The theory has been refined in recent years to reflect also the way technological innovation has lowered demand for labor relative to plant and other capital equipment. Karl Marx's (1818-1883) early (1840s) work reflected the influence of English economist David Ricardo's (1772–1823) wage theory which held wages will tend towards a subsistence minimum. Marx however was an empiricist and his observations of industrial societies noted the working class didn’t necessarily suffer an absolute decline in living standards and by the 1850s was suggesting instead the most important metric was the relative immiseration of workers vis-à-vis capital.
Until the twenty-first century, the most innovative work on the thesis concerned the implications of technological change (the displacement of labor by machines) but in recent years, there’s been much attention to the ownership of assets and capital in an era which has seen an extraordinary rise in the money supply, induced firstly by the so-called Greenspan put (1987 on) and later, in the wake of the (2008-2011) global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing quantitative easing by many central banks.
Dictionaries are divided on whether immiserate really has the alternative meaning "to make miserable". Some list the meaning without comment while others suggest the use (which must be rare) began as a mistake which was repeated. There are dictionaries which are prescriptive (stating what the language should be) and those which are descriptive (recording how the language actually is used) but there seems no correlation between this and views of immiserate's allegedly alternative meaning. The idea that there is some connection between poverty and misery does seem uncontroversial and while the dreary phrase "money doesn't buy happiness" is often repeated, a probably more helpful observation was that attributed to George Bernard Shaw (GBS, 1856-1950): "Money might not buy happiness but given the choice, one would rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable".
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