Not in a ditch Gadarene but I definitely grew up poor in rural Louisiana. In a mere five years, I went from dirt poor (raised that way) to upper middle class. This was through the classic American way. Start with a decent four-year college education (I earned a merit scholarship) and the work your ass off once you hit the work force. My income has risen 300% in less than five years. I made a conscience decision to leave my family and friends and move to a prosperous city (Boston) and give it a go in the tech world (no, not a start-up; this is real wealth). It can be done rather easily with a little brains and a lot of hard work.
BTW, I hate the habitually poor. They can’t drive, they are loud and disruptive, their property is a mess, and they deserve their lot in life in my humble opinion. In this economy, there is no excuse for being poor other than disability, poor life choices, lack of will, or catastrophic circumstances. All others are the result of poor character or poor socialization.
And what happened to the just-as-deserving people for whom there was no scholarship available? You can’t tell me that there are enough for everyone.
Provided, of course, that you have no mental illness, obligations to your family, student debts or chronic injuries.
I think you’d be surprised at how many people “disability and catastrophic circumstances” affects. I know at least three formerly industrious people who have been flattened by back injuries from automobile accidents. I know another three who have been struck with cancer (which left her profoundly deaf), MS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, respectively. Yet another became pregnant with twins (with two other children not yet school-age), lost her job due to government cuts to social programs, and had her husband drop dead of a massive heart attack. And those are only the handful of people I know. Imagine all the other teeming millions!
You know, we’re still waiting for a cite on this. It was never resolved in the topic you linked to. I think it’s a pretty low play to insinuate that it was established as a fact by that other thread when it was not. C’mon, Gadarene, play fair.
What do you mean? I cited EJsGirl! Okay, you’re right–for one cite, albeit a dated one, why don’t you check out Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. It explores the idea of American society as a caste system quite thoroughly. I dare say the precepts still hold true. In fact, most of Myrdal’s books explore the concretization of poverty.
You can pretty well intuit it, as well: Let’s say you’ve got two babies. One is born to a single mother making $17,000 a year in East St. Louis. The other is born to an affluent family on Long Island making $385,000 annually. All other things being equal, which of those two babies is more likely to be making $17,000 when they grow up, and which is more likely to be making $300,000+?
And of course, all other things are never equal, when you include disparities in education, etcetera…
Of course it is easier to get a good education and earn a larger income later in life if you have parents that help you get there. What you’re failing to remember, though, is at some point somebody had to work for that money (in most instances). The habitually poor often bitch about their situation and how they grew up, but they do nothing to help along the next generation. Those with money, however, often take an active interest in the well-being of their offspring, which makes it easier for said offspring to become successful. Cases of neglect and improper parenting increase as you approach the poverty line. In today’s circus economy, you are hard-pressed to not find a job that pays a decent wage. With a little education (that you can get just about anywhere nowadays, for pretty low rates) you can learn to manage money and set some aside for your children. I understand that this is mostly generalizations and doesn’t refer to many specific instances, but hey, we can’t argue every case in the US, can we?
When you’re working 60 hours a week to put food on the table, it might be difficult to “take an active interest in the well-being of your offspring.” Furthermore, I find your characterization of indifference and neglect on the part of poor parents extremely unfair to the circumstances surrounding the continuing poverty, as well as uncognizant of the actual difficulties of a living wage, even in this “booming economy.”
Well, I guess if the poor can’t better their lot in life because of this repressive US system, the best thing to do is to knock down the rich so that their is less disparity. I have gone on record stating that we should make smart people dumber so that their is less intelligence disparity. Perhaps, someday, we will be able to make everyone equally poor dumb and miserable, which will solve our social ills.
Now hold on a second there. We’re talking about two totally different things here. Let’s take a vote. Everyone who think there are only two economic strata in this country, one from $0-$17,000 and one from $300,000-$385,000, please raise your hand!
I didn’t think so. Your example is pretty bad. Perhaps a better question is, how many people do better than their parents did? Do you seriously believe that in almost every case (as in, as EJsGirl said, “almost never”) that the child does as well or worse than the parent?
I completely disagree. I know that parents did better than their parents. I know that until this generation (on which the judges are still out) that children pretty much always did better than their parents.
I don’t think there are stats on this sort of thing. But, anecdotally, I’ve almost always heard “So-and-so did better than their parents” and almost never the other way around.
I suspect it may be true that among the abjectly poor, they rarely rise above their circumstances. But in all other income levels (and I’m not talking just based on racial factors, because that’s an entirely different matter, and one not qualified by EJsGirl), I believe it to be just the opposite.
Heyyyy, Necros? Show me where I said anything about there being only two economic strata in this country. Those strata are representative–I could have as easily picked any two divergent economic levels and inquired as to the possibility of children in those respective levels migrating towards one another. That being said, there are discrete socioeconomic strata–roughly divided into lower-, middle-, and upper-class, and subdivided further beyond that–that are useful in determining class mobility in this society. So when you say:
You’re misapprehending the point. It’s not that children will almost never make more than their parents, but that they’ll almost never move out of the same socioeconomic strata–lower class, middle class, upper class, whatever. This punctures the whole Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches, “if you can’t do well in this country it’s your own damn fault” mythology. I chose a lower end income and a higher end income to better illustrate my point–which, by the way, you haven’t really addressed: who’s more likely to have a higher income once grown up, the one who’s born into poverty or the one who’s born into affluence?
Which is why, after iteration upon iteration of children doing better than their parents, we have a society where poverty is confined to the feeble, shiftless, and itinerant, right? And it’s certainly why our middle class has expanded so greatly in recent years, right? And there couldn’t possibly, then, be a widening wealth gap between the top 20 percent of the population and the bottom 20 percent of the population if most people are doing steadily better that previous generations, right? Never mind that 1 percent of the population hold 40 percent of the wealth in this country, because a rising tide has lifted all boats, and the growing number of children born into poverty just have a little bit further to swim on their own. Right?
Might be the company you keep. grin Poor people don’t necessarily get much press.
An astonishing claim, and one I’m sure you can quantify. What, by the way, do you qualify as “abjectly poor?”
Actually, I don’t think that the liberals are saying this. What they are saying is that life in the US is unfair. If we were so wealthy a nation that the poverty line was $1 million, they would still complain that it was not fair because others had $10 million.
Liberals think that life is unfair and full of people victimizing others. THey have to beleive this otherwise they can’t take the moral high ground. Who could possibly be against helping people, against giving people free health care, against making life “fair”? It is an enviable position. But it requitres injustice and suffering.
It is not about doing better, or doing well…it is about others doing better than you, which is unfair and CAN’T possibly be due to hard work or talent. No, it is all just luck and screwing the little man.
So what justification do conservatives use for taking the moral high ground?
(Isn’t playing both sides fun?)
Gadarene and others: Class in the United States does tend, on the average, to be sticky across generations, but in the United States, there are class markers more numerous and, arguably, more important than income level.
Style of dress, occupation, hobbies, education, and cultural interests are far more obvious and representative class markers in this country. In fact, I’d argue that there is far more income mobility in the country than there is class mobility. Someone who makes $250,000 a year but drives a Chevy S-10 pickup to work, is a plumber, and like tractor pulls and country music is never going to be considered “upper-class,” at least not by those who consider themselves “upper-class.”
I agree with the idea that, statistically speaking, a person born into poverty is more likely to remain in poverty, as well as it’s converse, but I take issue with:
I never though I would say this (old AOL SDMB posters will know who I’m talking about), but I wish Shawn Wilson were here. The fact is that, in a vacuum, those numbers are meaningless. While the gap is widening, the populations of those two quintiles are not constant. Someone in the top quintile may have been in any of the others 10 years ago; ditto people in the bottom quintile. Without time-series data, we have no way to even begin to assess what those numbers mean. There aren’t a lot of people jumping from the bottom quintile to the top, and vice versa, but it does happen, and mobility increases even more the closer together the quintiles are.
[ul]
[li]Canada currently spends 24% of its government budget on interest on the debt. A lot of those poor people were given benefits with borrowed money.[/li][li]Our poor may be better off, but we have more of them. The Canadian unemployment rate is about double that of the U.S.[/li][li]Canada’s economy is now underperforming the U.S.'s, partially due to our heavy tax burden and high debt service costs. That means that whatever gap their may be now between the poor in Canada and the U.S. will surely start to shrink.[/li][li]Canada is suffering a massive brain drain to the U.S., meaning our standard of living will lag behind yours even more in years to come[/li][/ul]
If you want to see a perfect example of the differences in our two systems, go visit Maine, then go visit the Maritimes. Both areas started with the same culture, both were fishing cultures. The poor in Maine may be poorer than those in the Maritimes, but the Maritimes have an unemployment rate of something like 30%. Why? Because the Fishermen go on government assistance in the winter when they can’t fish. So their lifestyles suffer, they are a burden on Canada, and they are seemingly always angry at the government for not providing enough for them.
In Maine, there is no massive government handout for seasonal jobs. So guess what? The fishermen have evolved a lifestyle that leads them to fish in the summer, and do something else in the winter. Some work construction, others have small businesses, etc. The Maine economy is much healthier, and the people are much happier! Overall lifestyle satisfaction surveys revealed that overall, Maine residents are much more satisfied with their lives than are people in the Maritimes, despite their receiving far less government assistance.
Class Mobility in the U.S.: I don’t have a cite handy, but several studies have shown that people in the lower class in the U.S. do not tend to stay there. In other words, there may be 10% of the population living in poverty today, and 10% in poverty 5 years from now, but it’ll be a different 10%.
I’m totally with you when you say there are different economic strata in this country. Where I thought you might be playing a little unfairly with your examples was when you provided two levels of income so wildly divergent from each other to illustrate a point about lack of mobility between income levels.
For example, if you had given us one family who makes $17,000 a year (poor), and one who makes $40,000 (entering middle class) and asked us to decide which child had which odds, I think the answer will not be as clear cut. See what I mean?
And then:
Well, c’mon. Of course the person born into affluence. Their family buffer is that much larger. That’s really a no brainer. But in my example about, don’t you think making guesses about their futures, not to mention out-and-out pronoucements that neither of them are going anywhere, is a little more difficult?
and then:
Holy crap, Gadarene, what do you expect me to do, provide cites?
My point is that you’re using all sorts of stats to prove a point, but they aren’t really stats that support your point. They just seem to. As pldennison pointed out, you need a different kind of study to get to the facts of this issue. I personally don’t know of any such studies, but I’d be very interested to see them.
And by abjectly poor, I was referring to those people in this country who really are cut off from any hope for advancement. They aren’t given educational opportunities, they don’t have housing, they don’t have even barely adequate food. Most of the poor in this country, I believe, are the working poor. Most of them have a place to stay, and jobs, but haven’t worked up to where they are at all sure that they won’t be out on their asses next week. But these people at least have a vague sense of stability, and their children have an opportunity to go to school, they the pressures against them are enormous.
honestly though, it is very difficult to argue against giving handouts to the poor except based on pragmatism. IT is much more powerfull to say “we need ot feed the starving children” than to say “we need to encourage personal responsibility.”
I imagine that Dubya and his helpers finally figured this out.
–This one is a Senate Report on income mobility, showing surprising movement between quintiles, much of from the bottom up. Even the turnover in the highest quintile, however, was as high as 35%.
–THis links to a rather large (1.1MB) Adobe PDF file of a Dallas Federal Reserve Report on income mobility. Extremely detailed.
Remember, somebody is always going to be “the lowest 20%.” It doesn’t matter what the mean income is, it doesn’t matter whether everyone is a millionaire. Economic stratification for its own sake means nothing. It doesn’t even really matter what the gap is between the top and bottom quintiles. The questions that have to be asked are:
–How much mobility occurs between quintiles?
–What is the highest wage in the lowest quintile?
–How long do people tend to remain in one quintile?
Those are the kinds of questions that assign meaning to economic stratification.
Well, let’s just hope the rich hard workers in Canada keep moving to the U.S. and the unempoyed U.S.ers keep moving northward.
On a more serious note, the number that concerns me isn’t the lowest 25% or the average, it’s the average and the median. And the U.S. kicked butt there to the tune of 29% and 13%. When it comes to macro things like running a country, I’d much rather see a high average and median, i.e. better life for everybody then a high bottom 25%, i.e. comfortable dole recipients.
And on another note, has anybody checked out the actual report? In addition to English, they’ve got some other weird language on it.
Because it is quite possible to live comfortably in America as a member of the lower middle class you have a signifigant numbre of people who consiously opt for a lower standard of living. I will never make anywhere near what my parents make, despite the fact that have had many more opertunities than they did (my father grew up behind a bait shop–they didn’t have indoor water of electricity til he was 6). I could go to school and get a techie degree and be making six figures in 10 years, but I would be misrable. Instead, I am studing to be a teacher, something I enjoy. I can live comfortable on 30k a year. Now, maybe my sample is biased because I am a libral arts major, but I see this alot. Many people do not aspire to the highest level of income they can achieve. Many opt for a carreer they love, or one that is low stress, or one that allows time for hobbies or children. Compard to the rest of the world the standard of living in Canada and the US are so high that the choice to persue a middle class or better lifestyle is truly optional; in other places and it the past it was much more urgent.
That would be French, dear. You know, how we have two languages that contribute to our political life, rather than pretending that a third of our population don’t, linguistically speaking, exist?
Okay, you’re right–for one cite, albeit a dated one, why don’t you check out Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. It explores the idea of American society as a caste system quite thoroughly. I dare say the precepts still hold true. In fact, most of Myrdal’s books explore the concretization of poverty.
