I think a big part of the opposition to negative income taxes and transfer taxes and all the other wealth redistribution programs that essentially give or plan on giving money directly to the poor is that they seem like some unholy combination of throwing down a bottomless pit and incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior. And, worst of all to many middle-class people, it’s money they could have used, but instead the govt. took it and threw it away.
I mean, if the usual modus operandi for poor people on payday is to pay the bills they have and frenetically spend the rest on unneeded crap (as per the Cracked article and some rather poor acquaintances I have), what’s to make me think that the same thing won’t happen, just on a larger scale?
I think the solution to the poverty issue is a combination of education and culture change, but no matter how much you push those two things, they’re sort of like the water you can’t make the horse drink.
Good discusssion. I don’t think we are giving the concept of social acceptance and approval enough credit for helping the poor get out of the ghettos. Good roll models have done a lot in recent years and hopefully their numbers will continue to grow. A black man is just like a white man. We want to feel like we can support a family and provide our wife and kids with all the things they need. When we feel we can’t protect them from social stigmas or provide for them like we feel we are capable of then our pride is hurt and we tend to run. We mask our pain with negative behaviors and the cycle goes on. As a society more education on acceptance by majorities and tollerance by minorities as well as learning how to dress, talk, and behave mainstream like anyone successful does will help a lot.
If you want to be a crutch for family members, that is certainly your prerogative. But I work hard for my money. Why should a single penny of it go to someone like your brother who is able bodied but refuses to make any effort at work?
I’m with **Chessic Sense ** in that “we aren’t all in this together.” Society isn’t some single monolithic “we”. It’s millions of people each with their own individual, often conflicting interests, needs and wants.
And it took smart, educated people to figure out what to do with that stuff. That’s the benefit of having an educated society. Not the middle class notion of “study hard, get good grades at a good college, land a steady 9-5 job with a Big Corporation”, although that is important too. It’s that some portion of those educated people will come up with the technologies and industries of tomorrow that will provide the jobs and improve standard of living for everyone.
And also come up with the technologies and industries of today and tomorrow that will *eliminate *the jobs many people have had in the past. See: TV repairmen, draftsmen, pinsetters, elevator operators and, increasingly, postal service. I’m not one to get nostalgic over the literal and metaphoric buggy whips, but one does have to admit that technology eliminates jobs, perhaps even more than it creates them. Which would be fine if we had some other economic system that didn’t rely on work, but we largely don’t. Granted, the standard of living of the poor in the US has improved ten thousandfold over the standard of living of the poor 200 years ago, or the poor in third world countries today, but it’s still a very sucky, stressful way to live that leads to premature death, increased physical, emotional and sexual abuse and literal violence in the streets. That *is *“us”. We *are *in that together, whether you like it or not, and it has nothing to do with taxes. Your world is made a little more dangerous due to poverty. Even gated communities aren’t immune from burglaries and murders done by the desperate.
Radio today said there are 3 applicants right now for every job opening. That’s not people too lazy to work, that’s not enough jobs for able bodied people willing to work. Meanwhile, other people are putting in 80 hour workweeks and only vaguely remember what their kids look like. This makes no sense to me. I’m not sure how to fix it, but it doesn’t make sense.
What’s in store for the people who are too broke, too stupid, or too whatever to get a college degree?
And what’s next? A Master’s degree to become the school janitor?
I think it’s great to talk about choices at the scale of the individual. Just as long as we can also lay some blame on the structural issues that cause people to throw up their hands and say “fuck it.”
There are more qualified people than there are jobs available. Somebody will always lose. Jobs are limited because resources and demand are limited.
If you deny this is true, then by implication you would have to believe that the number of jobs always increases as long as people work hard. Productivity does increase the supply of marketable goods, but this can only result in jobs as long as there is somebody willing and able to buy what you’re producing. There is a limit to this number, and this number decreases drastically during a recession.
Wealth is not infinite, and only so much can be created de novo, which is why we should be concerned when it essentially drops out of the economy by remaining in the hands of the richest people.
To be somewhat optimistic though, and to continue with my poorly-received (I’m shocked!) Titanic analogy, it’s quite possible that the lifeboats are not being filled to capacity – in other words, that you can greatly reduce (but not eliminate) poverty while still operating within a capitalist system.
Wow- for me, too. I distinctly remember selecting food for the fat and calories- not that I knew what those things were- but that I knew the food selection would last a long time in my belly. Which of course lead to problems with weight, which led to other problems, etc. It took years and education to change my mind about food selections because I still had the mind set that I needed as much as possible at every opportunity.
This was what I wanted to ask, but you’ve covered it better.
I work in a fairly technical field, and the minimum requirements are gradually rising to a Master’s degree (and that from a select few colleges). With roughly 20 years (on average) spent in expensive schooling, it seems like we’re headed for a situation where the ROI just isn’t worth it (tuition + lost income). As parents, my wife and found ourselves discouraging one child from college, as we felt that a “middling” degree with average grades was a wasted investment. We’ve steered him to a trade and it appears to have been a much better choice (and training investment). University seems almost a waste unless you’re one of the advanced, stellar students.
I don’t have any solutions to offer, just that extrapolating the situation is worrisome.
A university degree is still the single most effective way to earn a middle class income. The differences between average salaries with and without a degree are striking. While the need for education has become higher, our workplaces have become more advanced.
When I was in high school, my parents encouraged me to learn to type because “a typist will always have a job.” And indeed, there were ample “typist” positions at any office. Today, of course, knowing how to type is not even worth putting on a resume, and today’s administrative assistants are working with Excel, designing documents, and often doing fairly extensive internet-based research-- fairly advanced stuff. Someone who banked on being able to type and file is going to be screwed.
Wealth doesn’t “drop out of the economy” like that. Most of the 1%'s wealth is tied up in the large corporations they own. Walmart, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Oracle, Amazon, Google, and so on.
Everyone throws around education as a solution, but I think talking about university degrees is the wrong kind of education. Math and science is great, but if we’re trying to lift kids out of poverty, we need to educate them about different things.
They need to be taught things that they are not taught at home - the value of money and how it works, the steps to take to gain a better life, how to fill out standard forms, how to compartmentalize school and home, and that these things are accessable to them. They need stress coping skills - there have been numerous studies that demonstrate how the tremendous stress poor kids deal with effect their ability to learn anything. Education about depression, addiction, pregnancy, etc.
Basically, they need to be taught things that are taken by granted middle class people. An AP trig class is fantastic, but a stress class or a budget class is far more valuable.o
Let’s try to get poor kids the same basic things that middle class and rich kids have, and then we can start talking.
My high school had one counselor per five hundred students- and they spent most of their time with students facing problems like homelessness, etc. Our “college counseling” was basically a ten minute session where they handed us a handout of what classes you need to get into a state university.
And yet at the school down the street, students had weekly college coaching meetings with counselors guiding them through SATs, apps, college visits, etc.
Which school do you think sent more people to good colleges? Why?
I don’t understand - what is your point? That a high end high school has more kids going to college? Duh.
Are you saying there’s a lack of resources in poorer schools? Duh.
What I am saying is that, for a bad school, the educational focus should be on more practical life skills and inspirational skills than forcing an advanced math class or something. Can’t we jettison a social studies class or a history class for a life skills class? Bad schools often get big money, and when they pour that money into more testing and more AP classes, we aren’t seeing results. Putting that money into a “how to get into college” class is good, but maybe we even need a class in “why college matters and how to try for it”. Those are the lessons most of these kids need, not just pressure to get into an advanced math class, with no help in study skills, life skills and a why the hell it matters skills.
You went to a bad school, and then ended up traveling the world, blah, blah. What is the difference in what you were taught (presumably by your parents) and what the other kids were taught? Think about it - it probably wasn’t math, it was ambition and stress management and non book lessons.
I think this nails it on the head, to a larger degree. A couple examples:
My wife come from a family that is not poor, per se, but fucked-up in a drunk, Irish, Gallaghers in *Shameless * sort of way. What amazed me when I first met her was that their (often self-inflicted) problems were always made so much worse by a complete and total lack of coping skills. Whenever something went wrong, the reaction was always (1) totally shut down, cry, and lay in bed for hours, and then (2) just assume that the problem was something that had to be borne. There was a total lack of awareness that were often positive steps one could take to ameliorate, if not solve, the problem. There was also no awareness that totally shutting down was massively counter-productive to making the problem go away. Once I pointed this out to my wife she was quickly able to stop this, but when you grow up with everyone around you behaving in a certain way, you often don’t realize there is any other way to respond to things.
I’m a attorney who does a lot of workers’ compensation law for claimants. The nature of workers’ compensation is such that most of the claimants are blue-collar, if not downright lower class people (doctors, software engineers and the like tend not to get hurt at work). What often surprises me is that many of the blue-collar clients I see actually make a fair amount of money. Jobs like steamfitters, masons, and cable repair can pay very well - like $75k plus when overtime is factored in. Yet, despite these guys making pretty good money, they don’t do the things that middle and upper class people would. They stay in the same shitty neighborhoods, they piss away money on motorcycles and other recreational crap, they have a bunch of kids with different women, etc., etc. So even though these people have the means to make their lives better, they fail to and instead wind up living pay check to pay check.
The point of this is that “poverty” is not necessarily about a lack of money, but instead, as monstro said, about stupid, counter productive behaviors.
My point is that before we start giving poor kids the dumbed down version of high school, maybe we ought to give them the same education support that other people get and see how that goes.
Always? I don’t agree. The world doesn’t need waiters and bartenders when the trend is for premixed drinks and flavored malt beverages and technology improves frozen and shelf stable foods that anyone can “make” at home when they want a meal but don’t know how to cook. Automation in restaurants is cutting the need for staffing. McDonald’s has cut their staffing dramatically with mostly automated restaurants already - two people can staff a kitchen that used to require six. Now they’re using touch screen ordering systems so they can cut counter staff. A sushi restaurant chain in Japan has almost eliminated waitstaff by using conveyor belts to send out food, and use 3 managers to remotely manage more than 200 restaurants. Could Fast Food Automation Replace Low Wage Workers? – Martin Ford
How is it dumbed down? These are kids who need a different kind of education. If you insist on giving them trig instead of stress skills, the trig is useless, complicated, and goes a long way toward making them beat down and hopeless.
They are getting the same educational support that other kids get - they need different educational support. The walls of the hallway are covered in graffiti, and the walk home can be deadly. So their school performance suffers, because the unbelieveable hopeless stress they live with everyday makes it impossible for them to function educationally in the same way a “normal” kid does. So they get fed up and angry and start spraying graffiti and shooting.
So how are smaller classes and better teachers going to help if you’re just trying to stuff the same (or more) typical education goals in them? The problem is not that they can’t read, the problem is that their emotional and social state makes it so they can’t see the value in reading or learning history or planning for college.
If we have any hope of battling the absolute horrid conditions in inner-city and deeply rural schools, we have to address these issues. We can’t ban jerks from having babies, but we can give their kids the tools they need to cope with their parents and their peers, which is a real chance to get them out of poverty. And maybe, just maybe, if we start when they’re young, we have a real chance that some of that emotional education can rub off on what is typically a young, beat down parent, and help them as well.
Math is great, and college diplomas are wonderful. But these kids are damaged in a deep way by a terrible home life, and at this point, cramming it down their throats is doing more harm than good, IMO.
Again, I ask the question, “what is the alternative?”
If you neglect people that live around you to the point that they starve or live on the streets – expect robberies and violence. Then you can pay their stay in jail.
That article is about replacing workers at fast -food restaurants , which don’t have waiters and bartenders anyway. But I don’t know many people who go to actual restaurants simply because they don’t know how to cook or who go to bars because they can’t figure out how to heat up some frozen chicken wings and open a beer at home. They go for the experience, and part of the experience is being waited on. I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future, anymore than I can imagine hairstylists and manicurists being replaced by robots.
And it’s not three managers- it’s small groups of managers based at three control centers according to the NYT article