Those who are in poverty suffer hardship.
Penury is the scarcity or lack of essential things. Whoever suffers hardship, therefore, experiences the lack of something essential for a dignified life .
For example: "It seems that the hardships in Africa never end," "When I am president, I am going to put all my effort into ending the hardship of children," "I am fed up with the hardships and miseries, I don't know what to do anymore." » .
Examples of hardship
Concepts such as deprivation , insufficiency , poverty and indigence , therefore, can be associated with the notion of penury (which comes from the Latin penuria ). If a newspaper headlines "Fuel shortage in the city" , it is referring to the fact that, in a certain location, there is not enough fuel to supply needs.
Hardship, however, is not always associated with material things. The phrase "Juan has been suffering hardship for several months" may be linked to the fact that said man does not have the necessary means to satisfy his basic needs (such as food or housing) or to the fact that this person is experiencing a complicated emotional moment (due to the death of a loved one, a distancing, etc.). Of course, both problems can also appear combined (perhaps "Juan" has no money or affection).
The idea of penury has its antonyms in terms such as wealth or abundance . If above we talked about "fuel shortage" to exemplify how the lack of said material can be indicated, the opposite would be to express that there is an "abundance of fuel" in a city (the level of fuel reserves allows local needs to be covered and also market the surplus).
A hardship is a suffering.
Kornai's contribution
The economist János Kornai , originally from Hungary , coined the concept of hardship economics in the early 1980s to express his critical opinion about the old centrally planned economies that were used in Central and Eastern Europe in communist countries.
In an article he authored that bore the name of said notion, a work of great relevance in the field of economics, he argued that the shortages that were experienced on the European continent during the 70s and 80s, almost chronically, They did not arise from poor planning or poorly defined prices, but from failures in the system itself.
It should be noted that when a good is scarce this does not mean that no one is producing it, but that when it reaches a certain price , its demand becomes greater than its supply, and this same phenomenon was criticized by Kornai in his article, taking it as the cause of the aforementioned shortage (for example, this can occur if the government forces a price too low).
Penuria Band
Penuria is also the name of a music band that originated in Santiago de Chile in mid-2007 thanks to the intense work of Leonardo Signorelli , a musician who plays various instruments and who has been responsible for the composition of many of their songs. Thanks to Leonardo 's incessant publishing work on the social network Myspace , the acceptance of other musicians was immediate and he soon achieved the notoriety he expected.
The band's genre is known by the name funeral doom metal ; The term funeral has basically the same meaning as in Spanish, while doom can be translated as death , curse, fatality, fate , ruin or destruction, among other possibilities that always point to a condemnation or a terrible destiny.
Funeral doom metal is a subgenre of doom metal , which in turn belongs to the heavy metal genre. Doom metal is very slow and heavy and is easily distinguished from trash and death metal . The funeral doom , finally, takes the doom beats to become extremely slow and dense, trying to create an atmosphere of despair and desolation, frequently making use of distortions and growls. This explains the choice of the name “penuria” for the aforementioned music group, which seeks to create moments of particular darkness through its lyrics and melodies.