Mass poverty
This kind of poverty can often be seen in underdeveloped economies. The majority of people are poor in the early stages of economic development in every country owing to low productivity.
In this case, the majority of poor people usually live in rural areas. We may call it rural poverty, but Galbraith calls it mass poverty because people are generally poor except only a few privileged members of society (The Nature of Mass Poverty, 1979).In the early stages of economic development, the economy is a subsistence economy which cannot produce any economic surplus, or it is already above the subsistence level with some surplus, but the surplus is used up in population growth, or production and consumption of luxuries, or maintenance of unproductive classes, and cannot improve the average standard of living of common people. Even when a part of the population leaves the rural areas in order to work in manufactures in town, they are usually still poor.