“1pc keeps me in the conversation”, he says. It is funny, satirical and, of course, only fiction. But it paints a picture of an unequal America where the value of money among the financial elite is so fundamentally different to its value for everybody else.

Poverty by America, a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist Matthew Desmond asks the question of why there is so much poverty in the biggest economy in the world. He comes up with some pretty stark conclusions.

Along the way he references how not enough is talked about poverty in the US and while TV series like Succession satirise the super-rich, Desmond doesn’t believe it is as critical as we think. He still sees the real pleasure taken in affluence.

The current poverty line in the US is represented by an income of $13,590 a year for an individual and $27,750 for a family of four. The number of Americans caught below this very modest threshold has remained more or less between 10pc and 15pc for decades.

That equates to between 33 million and 49 million Americans. Two million Americans don’t have running water. Another two million are in prison.

Lots of people have previously pointed out the diminishing prospects of realising the traditional American dream where a new generation has a reasonable chance of becoming wealthier than their parents were.

That is a story of reduced earning opportunities for the working class or lower middle class. Desmond is focusing on those who are poorer than that.

He concludes there are a number of basic reasons why poverty still pertains in a rich society like the US at such depressingly high levels.

One factor is that the system is structurally loaded against the poor, from welfare, tax credits, housing, health and education.

Another factor is that America, collectively, doesn’t seem to care enough about the problem. A more polarised society fails to actually see what is right in front of it.

The lack of progress in tackling poverty is where Desmond begins. The poor can avail of cheaper goods, but rents are more expensive and prison awaits a growing number of them.

In the US of the 1930s and 1940s “eviction was often a very rare, scandalous thing that drew crowds. Now we are delivering 3.6 million eviction filings every year”, Desmond said in a recent interview.

With the possibility of a surge in evictions so strongly in the news here in Ireland, it is worth considering the parallels and differences between the worst economic aspects of American society and the challenges people face here at home.

You would have to say that both societies are starting off in very different places. As a European society Ireland has a great many employment protections, state help and support or safety nets across education, health and work than might be the case in the US.

The tax system in the US is barely progressive. Rich families pay an effective tax rate of 28pc, while poor and middle earners pay 25pc. In Ireland our tax system is seen as very progressive in how the tax burden is distributed.

But there are some real warning signs in the structural rigging of the game in the US that could apply to Ireland.

We tell ourselves in Ireland that access to healthcare is a universal right and that we have a “sort of” free public health system. However, it isn’t working effectively. This drives more people into private health care.

As a private health insurance customer myself, I can see the benefits that it brings. But the greater the backlogs in the public system, through inefficiency, under-investment and a growing population, the more households turn to the private option.

This drives a bigger wedge in outcomes and quality of life between those who can afford private health care and those who cannot.

In education, we are seeing another rush towards the private sector where those who have access to “better” private education for their children benefit disproportionately.

Thankfully, Ireland is still a country where those who have talent can progress in society through opportunity. However, that isn’t the best measure. Most people are somewhere in the middle when it comes to talent and the average pupil in an expensive private school still does better and gets more from the system than the average pupil in a Deis school.

Access to housing is perhaps the most emotive structural issue right now. A whole new generation of people are looking at prospects of ever owning their own home fade away. This will have profound effects on our society into the future because while there are pros and cons to home ownership versus renting, those who come from home-owning families enjoy better social mobility.

We are definitely heading into territory where a person or a couple doing modest but steady lower paid work may never own their own home. This wasn’t always the case in the past. It is a recipe for greater polarisation in communities and cities.

Desmond quotes the sociologist Gerald Davis who said: “Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. That’s been the story of the American working class and working poor, anyway.”

One of the real dangers is how the situation may get a whole lot worse, particularly in the US. The rapid development of technology, automation and now AI may well mean that many of those “tasks” don’t need to be done by workers at all.

Everyone thinks of automation as a series of robots on a production line. In fact, the development of AI in particular will see all kinds of service jobs change fundamentally too, in everything from generation of online content, to auditing, to education itself.

Putting the brakes on technological progress won’t work. Regulation developed at speed is the only way to protect society from the worst aspects of rampant AI application.

Think of AI-generated decisions on bank loan applications, which exclude certain postcodes. It already happens with job applications and post-code driven motor insurance.

The Succession series name seems appropriate for differentiating future generations – those who inherit and those who don’t.