The assignment given is to correct educationalist professional non-answers: When did life get better for the poor? (Not quite for 5-year-olds)
Life got better for the poor around the late Middle Ages when they learned they could take responsibility for their lives, resolved to learn how, and acted on that resolve.
Since then, the quality of life for the poor has gotten better or worse according to time and place depending on the direction of science, education, and social institutions. Mathematics fostered invention of money and science. Understanding science advanced agriculture, improved tools, techniques, and shelter, harnessed energy, and advanced sanitation and medicine. That gave people the leisure to learn to see the universe more clearly, the better understand one's place in it, and advance the social institutions that allow people both liberty and responsibility. Whether life stays better is a choice people make every day by their thoughts and actions.
