Well done on your bit of boasting! Do you recognize that you had support networks to help you on your recovery? I mean, you say $40 for cheap clothes, but the free car and use of an address are not negligible.
Do you mind my asking you about a few more piece of assistance you might have gotten?
- Did you grow up in a home with at least one college graduate, so that during your formative years you assumed you’d go on to get an education?
- Did your parents read to you, so that during the years kids are most language-acquisitive you developed a large vocabulary?
- Did your parents impose regular routines on you as a child, enabling you to know those structures intimately so that setting them up for yourself as an adult was fairly easy?
- Did your parents live in a low-crime neighborhood, so that you didn’t have to fear, quite literally, for your life?
- Did your parents avoid mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, so that you didn’t have a source of PTSD as a child?
- Did you go to a school with professionals of the same sex and race as you, so that you every day saw professional adults that looked like you?
The Jesuit motto, I believe, is “give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” This may be an exaggeration, but there’s also some truth to it. If you received a tremendous amount of support during your formative years, then you wallowed in alcoholism and homelessness despite your upbringing, and maybe you really are to blame. Someone who grows up suffering abuse from uneducated parents in a crime-ridden environment in a racist country is going to succeed despite their formative years, not because of it.
“Responsible” in the way you use it ignores a helluva lot of complicating factors.
I think I look at it differently from a lot of you. If it’s me, I’m not so much concerned with whose fault it is. I ask myself: Do I want to be dependent on others for my well being or do I want to be able to take care of myself? As an adult, it’s not that hard to make good choices and keep yourself out of poverty. It may have been your parents fault that you grew up in poverty, but most people don’t need to stay in poverty if they make a concerted effort to get out. You look in the mirror right now and and ask yourself what things you need to change to make your life better.
I’m not saying everyone can be rich, I’m just saying most people don’t have to be poor. And there are certainly people, who through illness or mental problems or similar, cannot lift themselves up. However, that is not the majority of the poor, I don’ think.
I also think there is some selection bias here. If you are basically middle class, grew up middle class, then the poor people you know are likely people (family, friends, etc.,) who also grew up middle class but somehow slipped into poverty. Those people are much more likely to have made the sort of series of dramatically poor personal choices that make an impression on an outside observer. I have a sister like that. I think lots of people have a brother or sister like that. It’s enough to make you throw your hands in the air and say “you can’t help those who won’t be helped!”
This is very different than when most of the poor people you come into contact with are people who live in poor communities. And yes, within those communities there are always some people who have “fallen out” of the middle class (just like there are people within the middle class that have scrambled up from poverty) but there are also a great many people who are just living the only life they ever knew, and making the same decisions everyone around them makes. It leaves a very different impression: it’s systematic, and it’s such a Gordian knot of terrible, counterproductive feedback loops that it’s enough to make you cry. And when people try to dismiss those problems as just a series of avoidable bad choices, it seems . . .obscene . . .because you’ve seen how stacked the deck is against some people.
I don’t know what the solution is on a macro level. I’ve stayed in the classroom all these years because I see a glimmer of a micro solution there, and that’s about all I can handle.
I’m thinking of the Vimes boots theory. Even if poor people do make a lot of bad decisions, how often are there good decisions they could realistically be making? That’s not a rhetorical question.
None of it.
so it would seem to me that you are saying, AA helped you recover from alcoholism and gave you support meetings to go to on a daily basis, complete with a sponsor and a set of positive principles to live your life by, none of this is your doing, you didn’t start AA, you just used their services. but poor people with no such resource are the ones who keep themself poor.
Irrelevant question. What should we do about poverty is pertinent; identifying the causes of poverty is relevant to that but not otherwise.
I think the better question is what are the traits that allow the people living in poverty to escape poverty, and, try to duplicate that. it would be hard it seems because most of them seem to be naturally strong willed individuals and that is hard to quantify or qualify. so there is no miscommunication, i am saying a person of “average” motivation from a middle class background will wind up doing “ok” but not well in life. a person of “average” motivation raised in poverty will probably wind up not doing too well at all, considering all of the factors and problems set before them.
Clearly, everyone should be just like Sleestak! Because if he can do it surely there is no excuse for anyone else!
At what point do we mature enough to stop seeing the world around us constantly through the filter of our own experience?
How old/mature do we have to be to comprehend that how it us for us, is not necessarily how it us for everyone else?
I’m happy you made it out of poverty, truly. Props to you.
But it’s a shame it left you feeling superior rather than empathetic to others suffering in poverty. Just because your poverty was caused by your bad choices does not mean such is the case for everyone living in poverty. This doesn’t seem to have occurred to you.
No big deal.
As a member of society, the question is, what is my responsibility to help those who are less well off than I am? Blaming them for not helping themselves sufficiently doesn’t obviate my responsibility to pitch in and help. People who just stand around saying, “hey - not my job description” are a bigger load than the people who actually need a hand.
The takeaway from sleestak’s post isn’t that he’s some terrifically self-reliant guy, but rather (like others have already pointed out), he’s “middle class” in terms of his attitude toward money, saving, working, etc…
In a sense, you can take the boy out of the middle class, but you can’t take the middle class out of the boy, in that even though his current circumstances put him below some sort of poverty line, his behaviors, actions, and outlook were such that he’d relatively quickly rebound above that line once you took away the alcoholism.
The same sort of thing happens with the poor from what I can tell- while you can give someone an income above the poverty line, their behaviors, outlooks and actions are those of people below that line, and they’ll be very precariously perched above that poverty line ready to fall back below in case of any sort of unforeseen expense or disaster.
The big question to me then, isn’t “how do you take the boy out of poverty?”, but rather “how do you take the poverty out of the boy?” because merely solving the first question in a fiscal sense doesn’t answer the second question.
Getting out of poverty involves a fair amount of luck. I don’t mean that those who escape poverty don’t work hard – they almost certainly do. But, as I noted in post #6, working hard alone is not enough, if the circumstances are not in your favor.
Sometimes the choice really might be “do I work hard for a few years and actually lift myself out of poverty?” or “do I help care for my grandmother so that her last few years on Earth have a little dignity and joy?”, or something equivalent.
And further, even when people have made bad choices – say they get a criminal record, or have children out of wedlock. If you start poor, those bad choices can pretty much relegate you to poverty forever in most cases. But if you start middle class or above, you can absorb those kinds of bad decisions and often get back on your feet and stay out of poverty.
While I get what you’re saying, I hope you’ll agree that these things are far harder to do for some folks than for others.
Graduate from high school? A person in poverty with a learning disability is statistically far less likely to get effective help than a wealthy person. Moreover, a person in poverty is likelier to go to worse schools than a wealthy person, and is more likely to need to work during high school to support the family, and for a variety of other reasons has a much harder time graduating than does a wealthy person.
Get married? I’m not actually convinced that getting married young is a good sign for someone in poverty: getting married at a young age often ties you to someone that you might not want to be tied to. If you’re gay, you often can’t get married. You might not have the option to stay married, if your spouse decides to leave. I’d like to see evidence of a causal relationship between getting married young and leaving poverty; it seems suspect to me.
Avoid having children? Sure–but often folks in poverty are themselves the children of very young mothers, and grow up seeing young mothers as the norm. If that’s what you think the norm is when you’re a teenager–especially if you don’t have access to good sex ed and contraception–you’re likelier to end up with young kids based on your upbringing and based on what you decide as a teenager.
Get a job and stay with it until you have a better job? Again, this is easier for someone with a support structure to do than someone without. A working car, and money to fix it, is often a prerequisite for keeping a job. If you have a sick relative you have to take care of sometimes, and nobody else can help out, you can lose a job. Even the work habits you learn as a child have a very heavy influence on your ability to do these things.
I know this isn’t like I’m telling you something new, but in the context of the OP, I think it’s important to acknowledge the profound effects of environment in someone’s ability to exit poverty. Sure, some folks escape poverty despite all the factors I mention; others escape because their parents minimize some of the deleterious environmental pieces I mentioned above. But in this discussion, we can’t ignore them.
Too late ot edit: I reread your post, Shodan, and I think we’re substantially in agreement; we’re just emphasizing different aspects of the problem.
We all know there are rich countries and poor countries, right? Luxembourg is different than Chad in a lot of ways, and the primary factor really isn’t that people from Luxembourg are just better people than those lazy Chadians.
Same thing here. The amount of social mobility in the US is well documented, and it’s not great. There are always exceptions, but the rich tend to stay rich and the poor tend to stay poor. Wealth can buy you a lot more bad choices than poverty can, and a lot of “bad choices” are actually smart adaptations for the circumstances.
FWIW, most of the chronically poor people I’ve know in the US have been that way use to health problems for which they cannot access treatment (including but not limited to mental health problems.)
Conservatives have a habit of applying Microeconomic analysis to Macroeconomic issues.
Take this bit:
The last pronoun is singular. There are 40 million people living in poverty in this country. If all those people did these things for 5 years, would 40 million people now have great jobs with awesome benefits?
Would nobody be working 2nd shift Cashier at Wal Mart anymore, or would that Cashier be pulling down $60 grand a year, since he’s totally got his shit together? I’m thinking… No.
The tricky part is that the analysis, the advice, WORKS on a Micro level, it’s good advice. For one person. As a Macroeconomic plan to reduce poverty it’s worthless.
If the economy is such that 15% of the population is in poverty, someone is going to wind up there, you can only fault people for not making sure it was someone else.
AFAICT, yes we are.
That assumes that the poverty does not and cannot drop below 15%, which is obviously incorrect.
That’s not tricky, just silly. If you believe drops in the divorce rate, rate of unmarried births, and a rise in high school graduation levels, would have no effect on the poverty level, then you need to pay closer attention.
Regards,
Shodan
