Yes, but quantitative numerical approximations still do quite a good job of modeling the behavior of such problems in a given situation. Physicists encountering a 3-body problem don’t just shrug and say, “Oh well, an analytical solution is theoretically impossible so we might as well give up trying to figure out anything at all about it quantitatively!”
You are disingenuously trying to pretend that the impossibility of complete and 100% certain knowledge about complex problems means that it’s somehow unnecessary or unfair to seek realistic approximate quantitative estimates about such problems.
Which is absolute unadulterated bullshit. You are deliberately championing willful ignorance on this subject because you’re afraid that finding out any actual realistic estimates about it might not support your ideological fantasies.
Once you’re done tearing through Strawville, let’s be clear on the issue here. In another thread which I opted not to derail, the issue of widespread, systemic poverty was brought up in the context of “handouts”. Starving Artist offered the argument proffered in the first post, and I saw it as problematic at best. Over and over and over throughout the thread, people have repeated the same thing: “This is not a solution for systemic poverty. It can be a way out for individuals, but it is not a useful answer to the question of how to end systemic poverty”.
The reason this distinction is important? Because of the moralizing. Because ridiculous statements like the ones offered by SA are, essentially, twisted around into a bizarre logical knot that leaves out a lot of steps on their way to being able to blame the poor for their poverty. Here’s the pattern: First they go from “I know a guy who was really successful doing X and did X to escape from poverty” to “You can do X to try get out of poverty”, then it gets twisted even further to “Why haven’t you just done X to get out of poverty? It must be because you don’t try hard enough/are too stupid/are too lazy, you deserve to be poor.”
See the problem here?
And as for your other question:
Depends. Are we looking for a way to help your buddy Steve, or are we talking about the overall economy and the state of the nation? In this thread, it’s the latter. So with that in mind: YES! If we’re talking about proposed solutions to help prevent and deter systemic poverty, and especially if we’re going to start moralizing about how lazy people are because they haven’t taken these steps, then yes, it should bloody well matter what the success rate is. And the failure rate. And the consequences for failure. And whether it has severe diminishing returns (as I heavily suspect this would, for reasons Kimtsu has already pointed out). You should be expected to give a damn about whether this solution works for one dude you knew a while back because of his specific circumstances, or for the millions of people who comprise the working poor in this country.
[QUOTE=Octopus]
I wonder what the left wing response would have been to a topic titled “Working at a Job Can Get You Out of Poverty.”
[/QUOTE]
“Most of the poor work. It’s called “the working poor” for a reason. Clearly, just having a job is not enough.”
So “anyone can get rich” isn’t just untrue, it’s insultingly untrue. You can’t have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can’t have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).
It’s like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, “Now fight for it!” Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, “Hey, you could have had it if you’d fought harder!” and that’s true on an individual level. But not collectively – you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren’t getting any hooch that night. So why are you acting like it’s their fault that only one of them is drunk?
You’re intentionally conflating “anyone can have the moonshine” with “everyone can have it.” And you are doing it because you’re hoping that we will all be too busy fighting each other to ask why there was only one jar.
One man’s “respectable business” is another person’s scourge.
Take the squeegee man. Would you like Mr. Squeegee Man setting up business in your neighborhood? I know I wouldn’t. The only place Mr. Squeegee would be tolerated (by citizens or the police) is where he isn’t likely to get a whole lot of business. He’d be better off saving his squeegee energy and just holding up a sign and begging.
But I do think governments should be more supportative of small business. I’m totally okay with local governments not requiring licensing for stuff like hair-braiding or yard maintenance. Yeah, if I buy a chocolate cake from some random lady on the street, I really would like some assurance it won’t kill me–so I’d appreciate knowing that the health department has inspected her kitchen recently, which means that random lady needs to pay a licensing fee (and have liability insurance in case I decide to sue her). But it should be a reasonable fee, and the red tape should be minimal.
It produces something. Street panhandlers don’t just pocket their earnings. They spend it on nearby businesses (usually of the liquor store variety).
Beggars ARE annoying and they DO make the neighborhood look like shit. But so do many “respectable” businesses, especially of the “poor man getting his hustle on” variety. If you’re running an elegant boutique, maybe you don’t want a sidewalk vendor selling cheap handbags setting up right outside your door. So you’ll fight city hall so that an ordinance will get passed limiting sidewalk vendors to the shitty part of town, where they aren’t likely to make much money. The sidewalk vendor and Mr. Squeegee are screwed by the same system.
Your own link was unable to determine if there was a net negative or net positive to minimum wage. If “scientists” can’t agree on the sign what confidence should we have in their numbers?
And please do tell me what my ideological fantasies are? I know reading is hard, but I’ve said more than once in this very thread that I don’t think free market mechanisms are sufficient for dealing with poverty.
And you are being the disingenuous one, still, by insisting that these numbers are accurately calculable. If they were than the debate would be solved as policy makers would have incontrovertible proof that there economic models were correct. We have recessions and depressions here in the United States even though the government has access to thousands of PhD level mathematicians and trillions of dollars of resources to model the economy. If these economic problems were analytically solvable and there is a huge incentive to solve them than why haven’t billion dollar corporations and trillion dollar governments solved them? C’mon now! Kimstu, you merely repeating your demand for unknowable information does nothing to convince anyone other than the most ignorant of multi-variable systems that your demand is justified.
Your understanding of the actual logic of my actual position, as usual, is pretty far removed from reality.
I never said that I think begging is “work”. What I said, repeatedly, is that I just don’t see why libertarians/conservatives arbitrarily exclude begging from the free exchange activities that they claim to support.
If poor people can make $20 more easily by sitting in a Home Depot parking lot with a sign saying “Give us money” than by mowing manson1972’s lawn, then why are conservatives/libertarians upset if they choose to do that?
I’m intentionally conflating nothing. I’ve said multiple times in this very thread I don’t think free market mechanisms, in isolation, solve everyone’s poverty. Free market can’t fix stupid, lazy, or crazy. In order to mitigate the effects of poverty government policy can be useful. But it has to be rational government policy. Not sound good for a vote government policy.
I much prefer the poor beggar on the median being an eyesore to the rich exec making more profit by spilling chemicals into our water supply or cutting corners on food safety. Conservatives probably differ.
Which tells us something quantitative right there: namely, that whatever the effect is in either direction, it’s not massive enough to entirely overwhelm opposing factors.
Why are you so obstinately opposed to learning useful information merely because it’s approximate and large-scale rather than 100% precise and certain in every detail?
[QUOTE=octopus]
And you are being the disingenuous one, still, by insisting that these numbers are accurately calculable.
[/quote]
I repeat for the nth time, I never insisted on any demonstrably 100% accurate quantitative projection, or claimed that it was even theoretically possible to produce one.
All I said is that you need to produce at least an approximate realistic quantitative estimate for the effects of the policy you’re recommending, if you want reasonable people to support it.
But you just expect your policy recommendation to be accepted without any realistic quantitative rationale to support it, because you accompany it with a generic fortune-cookie maxim such as “Labor adds wealth!”. Uh, sorry, no, that’s not how reasoned debate about policy ideas works.
No. In the context presented, it’s a explanation of the sort of confounding factors a scientist would want to control for before drawing too many conclusions.
No, I don’t mean squeegee men, panhandlers, buskers and other street people.
Unless you are talking about a corporation that collects homeless people, grinds them up into a multi-purpose nutrient slurry and then dumps them into the water supply, I’m not sure what one has to do with the other or why they should be mutually exclusive.
Except the economy is not anything like that really.
…You, uh, really don’t get this? My response was mostly off-the-cuff, because I was hoping you were joking. No, I’m sorry, you don’t get to pretend that starting a business is a no-risk venture for the poor because “all they lose is money and they don’t have any of that anyways”. That makes no sense. Even if we assume the absolute best case scenario - the person in question has all the tools necessary, needs no additional starting capital, and has found a way, despite this, to distribute - there was clearly time spent on this failed (i.e. not making enough money) business venture. If they’re serious about it, at least a week or two. This is time where they’re either not making enough money or not making any money. How are they paying the rent? Clearly, there’s either some capital there, in which case that’s money they could have spent on the rent while finding a stable job… Or they’re going to get evicted, something that carries some rather extreme costs with it.
That’s the best case scenario. Any other case of business failure involves more costs. More money spent investing in the failed venture that had to come from somewhere (hopefully not a bank loan you now can’t afford to pay back). More time spent pursuing a venture that wasn’t successful. More of things the poor do not have in great supply. Then again, for some people, I suppose it really can’t get any worse. But the homeless and destitute probably aren’t thinking about entrepreneurship, for a number of reasons.
You just don’t get it. This is not a difficult concept. Again, if this were provable corporations or governments who have billions and trillions at stake would be able to prove it. Have you no education in chaotic systems?
And your side profits from the existence of the poor. Liberals have a vested interest in a captive, poor and ignorant demographic. And don’t you think it’s a bit odd that several times I’ve conceded this is a problem that requires multiple actors to solve and yet you are so adamant on a precise answer for the contribution of only one of the actors for justification of it’s promotion? Quantitatively provide accurate calculations of each government program the left supports. I bet you can’t.
But as I keep telling you, this isn’t about any kind of 100% certain proof: this is about realistic quantitative approximation so we have at least some kind of notion what the plausible prospects are for real-world outcomes.
[QUOTE=octopus]
Have you no education in chaotic systems?
[/QUOTE]
:rolleyes: Oh good, now you’re augmenting your ill-informed snippets of economics buzzwords with ill-informed snippets of physics buzzwords. Once again, the fact that a problem doesn’t have an exact analytical solution doesn’t mean that it can’t be approximately quantitatively modeled in a useful way.
Do people really think that the poor need to be told they can do odd jobs to make extra money?
On what planet does someone (besides a sheltered rich kid) need to be told something so self-evident?
I once had an acquaintanceship with a street urchin. He wasn’t homeless (he resided at a board-and-care place), but he was the kind of guy you’d see hanging out on street corners, not doing anything. He was severely mentally ill–only somewhat functional because of court-mandated medication. So there wasn’t much he could do but watch the world go by. And yet he managed to do a couple of odd jobs a week. Scooping up dog poop from this lady’s backyard was one of them. These jobs were of course “under the table”, because he didn’t want to risk losing his disability payments.
I remember all of this because every time I’d bump into him, he would proudly talk about his “work”. He had a major crush on me (something he talked about a lot) and even though I think he was smart enough to know it would never be reciprocated, he still wanted me to know he had some hustle.
Hustling is a basic instinct. My neighborhood is full of little boys walking around with lawnmowers and weedwackers, looking for customers. And there’s a little girl around every tree, looking for babysitting opportunities. If you are a regular bus rider in any US city, you’ll see women wearing weaves and hair extensions that Tameka-from-Around-the-Way put in. Poor people, moreso than middle class people, know all about the value of cottage industry.
But cottage industries simply aren’t going to take the average person off welfare or foodstamps. If long-established, family owned businesses are struggling to stay afloat in the day and age of Amazon and the Big Box Store, why would we expect poor people to do any better?
Just because you don’t know what wealth is or what a chaotic system is doesn’t mean I don’t. You have clearly demonstrated in this thread that the concept of wealth and wealth generation is beyond you. Your repeated asking for unknowable values for chaotic systems have proven you don’t understand what a chaotic system is.
This is undergraduate level economics and differential equations.
The fact you don’t comprehend that the generation of wealth leads to an increase of wealth is baffling.
Hey, Bear! Long time, no see! It’s great to hear from you! I’m tied up with other things right now but will try to get back to you later. Thanks for your post!
And I posted a study I found quickly. But apparently, since it didn’t take into consideration 65 year old men with 5 dependents, a back injury, and one eye, the study isn’t valid.
There have been many, many threads about this. I do have a clear idea of what that something should be, or how likely it is to pay off for them.
Graduate high school - studies show that high school graduates make more money than those who don’t graduate (I hope I don’t have to find this to “prove” it)
Don’t get pregnant before graduating high school (same thing basically)
Attend some sort of trade school or community college or regular college (same thing again)
Don’t waste money on frivolous items that don’t help you get ahead in life ($150 shoes, $500 rims, brand new trucks, etc) (should be self-evident)
Don’t expect to be rich by the time you are 25 years old (again, self-evident)
Work really hard and chances are if you have done 1 - 5 above, you will be successful. Rich? Probably not. Middle class? Probably
Now, do you disagree that these will pay off for almost EVERYBODY who tries and succeeds?
In other threads when i list these, it is a stream of excuse after excuse after excuse about why poor people can’t do ANY of them. And because SOME poor people can’t do one or more, it becomes a bad idea to suggest ANY of them.
