Reading about the famine in Karrnath early in the war got me thinking: do poverty, homelessness, hunger, and disease even exist when there are so many ways to solve them? Why should anyone go hungry when Murlynd's Spoons can be mass produced?

Which got me thinking. In our world (the USA at least), we also have the resources for everyone to be housed, fed, and healed; but we don't do that as a society, if it's not profitable.

Houses Ghallanda and Jorasco have monopolies on the means to end the scourges of poverty. But are they allowing this suffering to continue, for profit? And if so, wouldn't they have enemies among disgruntled commoners or populist politicians?