I made this assertion in the “rise of the robots” thread, and got pushback and was asked for a cite. I don’t really have one, and am not sure how I’d get one, but it sure is the impression I have. As I put it there (but it’s kind of an off-topic tangent, hence starting this thread):
Does this make sense to you guys, or am I all wet?
Well,yes,I agree.
When the kids were small and the youngest got sick and required hospital stays every few months,I could not work… Because,if I had any money coming in their medical benefits were cut off! I could not work long enough to start insurnce,then there was the whole “pre” thing…
Now people are dumb… They can be taught to grow gardens/animals for food,but they’ll be really hungry… The system wants people dependant and stupid. Teens now could not do second grade work from the 1900’s
Poor people 100 years ago were more resourceful because they had no choice. Most people lived on farms, and most people were poor (by modern standards). They were used to raising their own food and getting by with what they had. And there was no modern welfare system. Diseases like rickets and pellagra were not unheard of.
And I think you are correct in your point about resume gaps. Back then practically any hobo could do day labor on a farm, and then move on, and a lot of them did. Being a hobo didn’t stop you from finding work on a farm, any more than being a migrant worker does today.
Plus being on the dole was much more stigmatized than it is today. If you were poor, you made do and shut up about it, because nobody was going to listen anyway. And your neighbors weren’t much better off than you were, so go work in someone’s garden for five cents a day and quitcherbellyachin.
Regards,
Shodan
Property rights keep people from being able to live off the land in the way you describe. Even if a person knew how to build a shack, he wouldn’t be able to build it on land that he doesn’t own. Someone sees you collecting firewood or hunting squirrels on their land, and you might get buckshot in you.
This is why I think society is obligated to provide the basics for all of its citizens. Society makes it impossible for a person to survive without money. If you can’t demonstrate that you are disabled and you can’t get a job (maybe you are a three-time felon and you are really really ugly looking), then what are you supposed to do? It’s illegal to live under a highway underpass. It’s illegal to build a shack on someone’s property. It’s illegal to sell things without a license. It’s illegal to sleep on the sidewalk.
These things were illegal “back in the day” too, I suppose. But maybe in the past, the hobo was given a break.
Society’s recognition that child are entitled to childhood also make poor families less “resourceful”. It used to be that it wasn’t uncommon for poor people to drop out of school before they even got to high school, so that they could go to work and help support the family. Or the eldest daughter would drop out of school to help her mother raise the other kids. Even small children would be expected to hustle. But I know if I saw a little kid collecting aluminum cans, my first instinct would be to call family services.
Yup. During the Great Depression we had “Hooverville” shanty towns. Some were torn down but it sounds like most were tolerated because there was no other option. After the economy improved, there were ‘shanty eradication programs’ that tore them down. These days it seems like most people don’t want anything of the sort around - for understandable reasons - and so squatters get driven off, shanty-type houses are torn down and homeless encampments get their belongings thrown out.
In many, many places it is illegal to hunt anything. During the Great Depression a lot of people ate “city chicken” a.k.a. pigeons but catching and roasting one these days could get you in a lot of trouble these days. Even if you are allowed to hunt, things like licenses cost money. Hunting without licenses or exceeding limits or doing so out of season risks hefty fines. Ammunition costs money.
Gathering food presents problems with things like trespassing again. Gathering from parks is illegal. A lot of poor people simply don’t have a place to garden.
(Fun fact: food stamps can be used to purchase vegetable seeds, so it’s not like the government is cutting off that option. If you have the space and the ability you can essentially get seeds from the government. In Alaska, you can also purchase some types of hunting supplies, like ammo, with food stamps in areas where subsistence hunting is still an option. Again, the option isn’t entirely cut off, but the places where you can legally do these things are limited.)
There are these things called “building codes” that make building a shack for oneself difficult, leaving aside most land being owned and thus good luck finding a spot to build one. Legal camp sites usually charge for the privilege of pitching a tent, illegal camping can get your stuff confiscated and possibly yourself in jail for trespassing. Sleeping on a sidewalk is frequently illegal. Sleeping in a doorway/subway station/etc. likewise.
Open burning of stuff, even firewood, is illegal in quite a few places. Fines and/or arrest again.
People still do collect scrap metal and the like - see it all the time in my area and I’ve done it myself. However, selling such now requires the buyer to record information on the seller in my state - if for some reason you don’t have ID you will be turned away (unless you’re dealing with the unscrupulous, of course, always a possibility). Also, not terribly lucrative, the labor works out to less than minimum wage.
Since it is no longer the social kiss of death for men to pick up a needle and thread those who bother to mend their clothes typically do it themselves. Those who do sewing for a living are not catering to poor people, they’re serving upper middle class folks who want alterations. There’s no money in fixing poor peoples’ clothes.
There ARE self-sufficient, or at least partially self-sufficient, poor people in the US. You don’t see or hear much about them because they largely don’t get in the news, being too busy making ends meet to get into much mischief. They also tend to be outside inner cities. Since inner cities are much more constrained on things like property rights, hunting privileges (usually none), or gardening the poor within them yes, are more dependent on hand-outs. Rural poor are much more likely to do things like garden simply because they have the space in which to do it.
But also keep in mind that 75 or 100 years ago people really did do things like starve to death, or freeze to death in the winter. Between soup kitchens and food stamps it is really unlikely that a person in the US will starve to death. Indeed, obesity is now a serious problem among the poor. People don’t freeze to death as often in the winter. Children are less likely to grow up with limbs twisted by things like rickets (though it could still happen). The poor today may be more dependent, but poverty is also less likely to kill or maim. These days, a “basic survival skill” is knowing how to negotiate the benefit bureaucracy, not so much how to build a fire with just one match.
Keep in mind that a lot of poor folk live in cities these days, and you’d get arrested for discharging a weapon for any reason in a residential neighborhood.
And they still garden if given the opportunity: http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2010/03/12/reporting-from-familyfarmed-community-food-security
In fact, urban community gardens are very often used to help with food security, at least here in Chicago. I imagine other cities, too.
I have an indoor container garden, but “indoor” limits my options of what I can grow. I had to give up my tomato plants when I was forced to move, because there’s no place that’s “mine” that gets enough sun.
Friend of mine did a documentary titled “Scrappers” on the guys who collect metal scrap for a living here in Chicago. It’s not lucrative at all anymore. Gas prices are rising, so by the time you’ve driven around long enough to fill your truck, what you pay in fuel costs is often more than the value of the scrap you got.
Very true, especially if you don’t qualify for a lot of the “standard programs” and have to go hunting for the “experimental” ones. For example, I can’t qualify for TANF aka welfare because I don’t have kids. But I’ve gotten professional schooling and will shortly be getting small business development support on the government’s dime. Both were/are pilot programs at the time I participated.
Poor people in the old days could legally live off the land and do odd jobs for sustenance, and possessed the working skills to do so. Modern Americans don’t know how to do things well enough to get paid a days wage to be a hired hand. And employersl won’t do the necessary paperwork to hire you. Nowadays, life is so regulated, that it is illegal, in one way or another, to do practically everything that people did a century ago to get by. For starters, if you try to live by your wits alone, somebody from the state will come and take your neglected or abused children away and put them in foster homes. There are very few populated places where you would be free to raise chickens or keep a milk cow. If you’re in a populated area, hour home will be condemned if you don’t hook up to the electric and sewer grid. Non-governmental charities will turn you away and tell you to apply for food stamps, which is nearly impossible to do if you don’t have a phone or internet service and a scanner and printer, or an insured car that passes inspection to drive to the welfare office in some distant city. If you don’t live in a city of at least 50,000, there is absolutely no public transport of any kind whatsoever. I’m just getting started.
You also had generational skills - through WWII even in the city people kept chickens - not everyone, but a lot of people. Which means you knew when you moved out how to keep chickens. And not only feeding them, watering them and collecting their eggs, but you could butcher them. My mother and mother in law (72 and 76 respectively can kill and clean a chicken - I can’t, I’ve never even seen it done - I’m sure there is a youtube video though). Not everyone knew everything - but there were a lot of skills that you knew the way my kids know how to post photos to the internet.
I can bake bread, which I think my mother in law can do in her sleep - and my mother without a recipe. And I can make soup out of pretty much anything and water. I can stretch a chicken and work miracles with four eggs and two potatoes (cheese is nice, but not necessary). But I know a lot of people whose cooking skills end with frozen pizza.
I can’t garden. My mother can. I’m really really lousy at it. I don’t know when to put seeds in the ground, or what is a weed and what is lettuce - I can grow herbs in pots, but that’s about the extent of it (I meant to do squash this year and didn’t get the seeds in the ground - squash is easy, right?).
I can sew a button and fix a popped seam. I’ve made sure both my kids can do the same…but I’ve sewn on buttons for people at work who don’t know how to sew on a button, much less sew a complete dress from flour sacks :). Not that you get flour sacks to sew from anymore anyway.
Men my father’s age can usually fix small engines, change their own oil, tile a bathroom, replace a toilet etc. We call the plumber when the faucet leaks - and I think changing the oil involves climbing out of the car and finding a cap under there, letting it drain out into a pan, then putting the cap back on and putting more oil in - but its completely theoretical.
This ignores the other issues that have been brought up - or will be - lack of a kitchen so even if you knew how to cook, you can’t. Or regulatory issues that keep you from working an odd job for cash or keeping chickens.
Without disputing the substance of what you wrote, this seems to be a suburban problem – you’re allowed to keep chickens within the city limits of NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and I’m sure many other major cities. I have several neighbors here in NYC who do keep chickens for their own use and there’s a community garden that keeps community chickens; honeybees are also allowed but all the honey operations I’m aware of are small businesses.
To me it seems like the suburban poor really have it the worst. Urban poor usually benefit from programs localized to where they live (ie, community gardens, immigration outreach, etc.) and public transportation that lets them reach a wider range of jobs and resources; the rural poor often have a piece of land they can use for subsistence, and/or a hunting license to get them through the winter. The suburban environment is by far the most regulated through the use of restrictive covenants and you always need your ever-more-expensive car to get anywhere at all – it seems like the worst of all worlds if you’re poor.
I haven’t seen it but I saw an interview with the director/producer of the documentary Rich Hill and from what she said, that’s pretty much what the movie is about. Suburban/rural poor in Missouri.
I agree, though. I’m not poor myself but I’ve had to help out with some friends who are down on their luck out here and the number one problem is lack of public transportation. Also lack of programs. My aunt lives in Cleveland, which is the county just north of mine, and while we’d love for her to move out here to the suburbs to a safer, cleaner neighborhood, she would lose access to so many social programs she would probably die.
That’s a good point, that suburbia is the worst place to be poor–yet there is a trend for poverty to shift to the inner-ring suburbs as the central city becomes gentrified, and the wealthier suburbanites move outward to the exurbs.
And there’s no doubt that shifts in the legal landscape around zoning, laws regarding child welfare, etc. are constricting poor people’s ability to eke out an existence without handouts from the state. Which is all the more reason, IMO, to support a robust safety net. We’re not going back to the old ways (nor should we in most cases, though I do strongly dislike the way people get blackballed out of eligibility for work); so it is highly unfair for the government to on the one hand place all these restrictions on poor people, and on the other not provide them with at least a subsistence-level existence.
That’s a total myth, tsk-tsk: the evidence points to just the opposite conclusion.
It’s not just poor people–Americans get more helpless and dumb every year. Every task is supposed to be done by a hired specialist or professional. In the past, people prided themselves in being capable and having a wide range of skills. Now people have no shame in their incompetence and don’t think they should know anything outside of their own specialty.
FTR in the original thread I was calling cite when I thought SlackerInc was implying better social mobility in the past.
But on this topic, I’m also not convinced. It’s the utility of outdoors and craft skills is debatable.
For example, I can’t change a horse’s shoes, but I can drive a car. Does that make me more or less self-sufficient than someone who’s skills are the reverse? I would say in most environments in the developed world, you’d prefer my skills to the other option.
Or being able to use a computer versus…I dunno…glass-blowing.
I’m not sure those comparisons are apt. What I’m going for is: if an ultra-libertarian, Ayn Rand type government were somehow swept into power (which I hope and expect will never happen), cutting off all government aid programs, I’m saying that most of the poor nowadays would be unable to deal with it. Whereas 80 or 100 years ago, a much higher percentage could eke out an existence without government aid.
But people generally don’t just live on government aid, they work.
And in the modern world, being able to operate a till and understand and take orders is much more likely to feed your family than being able to start a fire from scratch.
I’m still not seeing the point you’re trying to get across.
I’m not talking about the working poor, or those who technically qualify as being under the federal poverty line. In my OP (even before my OP, in the other thread", I referred to “*desperately *poor people”. The 20 million or so people described in this article.
(When looking for cites on the group in question just now, I initially decided on “unemployable underclass” as my search term. Every hit on the first page referred to “robots”, a nice callback to the original thread.)
This NPR story on a county in Alabama where one in four working age adults is on disability, hints at what I’m talking about here.
If you’re part of the “unemployable underclass” and you live in an urban area then being able to negotiate the mass transit system (if one exists in the area) and deal with the aid bureaucracy are better survival skills than knowing how to hunt. Those who know how to “work the system” are actually adapted to an impoverished urban environment, just as those who know how to garden and can vegetables are adapted to a impoverished rural environment. Different environments require different skills.
Also, if someone is disabled (let’s presume legitimately) then what makes you think they’d be able to engage in subsistence activities? In the old days crippled people died more often and sooner than able-bodied ones due to physical capabilities being so prominent in those survival skills mentioned like hunting and farming. Again, if you’re disabled then living in an urban area and being able to work the system is more to your advantage than being able to start a fire with flint and steel
Okay, if you are going to define living on the dole as equivalent to farming/hunting/carpentry then sure: my argument doesn’t hold. But my premise is that they are now more unable than ever before to survive *without those government programs *(which I would argue is all the more reason they should be permanent entitlements).