I agree with this.
On a related note, (to the OP) why do you need to judge anyone?
Well, one reason is that fear of judgement is a powerful incentive. No one wants to be a loser. In a world where no one is judged a loser, you’d get a lot more underachievers.
They have a word in therapy for people who coddle people with pathologies. It’s called “enabling”.
To me, the answer is simple yet complex at the same time. How much poverty is the poor person’s responsibility? Unless they are disabled, 100%. At the same time, we can also recognize what in a person’s background makes them susceptible to falling into poverty, and maybe tailor public solutions that can help at-risk people. Job training is part of that, as is educational initiatives, and I’m sure there’s 10,000 other small federal and state programs to try to give people a hand up(free bus passes in some cities are a help). Another suggested federal program is to help people move where the jobs are by giving people free relocation money to move to a jobs-abundant area.
But I don’t think you can leave out societal and peer pressure. People need to have a healthy fear of failure to go along with their desire for success. People respond logically to incentives. We have more illegitimacy because the stigma is much reduced. Perhaps that’s a good thing. But with greater acceptance of illegitimacy comes more illegitimacy, which brings more poverty.
Another difference is that if someone living paycheck to paycheck gets fired or loses their job, they can find themselves homeless or otherwise unable to support themselves and their family. Someone with a high income their job, they take a 3 month vacation until they find another law firm, investment bank, consulting firm or corporate management job.
The stakes are so much higher for your average minimum wage worker than someone with a plushy office job. If the professional office guy gets caught in traffic and walks into work ten minutes late, he’s probably not going to get fired. Because he brings in a more money to the company than those ten minutes are worth. His time management skills are less important than his business acumen.
The minimum wage guy doesn’t enjoy that luxury. If he shows up late too many times, he will be gone. It doesn’t matter how well he drops those fries.
And the sad thing is, the poor guy is more likely to be in a situation where he will be late. He can’t afford to live downtown. So he has to take a slow city bus or buses. He can’t afford to buy a dependable car. So he’s likely going to be broke down on the side of the road with his jalopy. If the middle class guy says he got caught in a bad car accident, he’s more likely to be believed. If the poor guy says it, he must be lying. Or he should have left home earlier. Somehow the traffic is his fault, whereas the middle class guy catches a break because, hey, everyone makes mistakes.
Poor people are also more likely to do shift work where timeliness matters. No one really cares if I’m five minutes late because I don’t have to relieve anyone. But if you’re supposed to take over for Darlene at the register at 10:00 and you’re not there, then why wouldn’t your ass be grass? People wth “good” jobs don’t live and die on the clock like people with “bad” jobs do.
Life is full of unfairness like this.
Eh, it’s not really like that. Minimum wage employers expect shoddy work and put up with it Thing might be different now while the unemployment rate is still a little high and low wage workers are abundant. But when I was doing my thing it was the late 90s and it was very hard to find people to work for us. We pretty much took anyone with a clean record and for awhile we resorted to prison labor. I objected to that decision and it turned out to be a wise objection. Not one of those people ended up working out long term and some were catastrophic in the short term(as in one of them shot someone and stole their car).
When I ride a city bus that’s running late, it’s always the passengers wearing uniforms who are pleading into cell phones and swearing under their breath at each stop. The people wearing business casual are engrossed in their tables and books like they don’t have a care in the world.
The poor guy may not be fired on the spot, but they are much more likely to be “written up” and have their wages docked. Getting “written up” was a constant fear of mine when I worked in fast food. I’m a goody-goody and even I got written up.
Interestingly, the only people I hear about being put on probation in my current workplace are employees with low status. Their crimes are the same ones that everyone else commits, but HR has to go after someone. Who’s it gonig to be? The executive manager who lunches with state delegates and makes everyone feel like a million bucks simply by winking and smiling at them? Or the guy in the mailroom who has gold teeth? It’s a no brainer.
Heck, I don’t even need to show up to the office if I don’t want to, so long as my work gets done.
The flip side is that your minimum wage burger flipper doesn’t have to work 14 hour days, travel at a moment’s notice, get calls while on vacation, manage to vague or conflicting requirements, deal with organizational politics, or have his personal and professional life blend together. As long as he shows up at 9 and leaves after 5 (with appropriate breaks), he just has to do what he’s told and collect his check.
The ability to zoom up several social levels which the right seems to think can happen to everyone who just tries. Sadly, some are not going to be able to do that do to genetics or pre-natal abuse. And I’ve already said that even if a person can’t get a six figure job it doesn’t mean they deserve to starve. But they’ll still be poor.
I suspect he’d love to in order to make the kind of money that we make.
As for firing, anyone who has been a manager in a big company knows that firing someone is not easy, unless they do something really blatant like hit someone or show up stoned. Layoffs are one thing, firing for cause takes tons of paperwork and lots of prep.
All I know is that I hear stories about how some poor kids don’t have ANY books in their houses- their first exposure to books is when they go to school.
By way of comparison, my son probably has upwards of 150 books of various kinds appropriate for a 2 year old, because we value that sort of thing.
Board books aren’t expensive new, and are even cheaper used (probably in the $3-4 range at a half-price book store for most), and there are programs for low-income parents to get them for their kids if they can’t even afford that every now and then.
It seems to me that if it was a real priority for these parents, they’d find a way to scrape up $4 and go to one of the library used book sales or a half-price book store to get a book.
But they don’t, so I have to conclude that their children are not a priority for them.
How do you convince people who aren’t willing to spend $3 on a board book for their 2 year old that they’re making the wrong decision?
Is it possible, or even probably that there’s a subconscious resistance on the part of the parent to a child growing up to be smarter or more educated than they are?
I wonder how strongly that would factor in.
I’d just like to point out that Norway (as do all the Nordic countries) have a culture of marriage-like cohabitation without actually getting married, and the law treats these two lifestyles as practically identical when it comes to children of such unions. So an unwed mother in Norway is very unlikely to be a single mother, compared to her American sister.
So that particular comparison really isn’t all that relevant, as such. The only people getting married in large numbers these days are gay people, who get far more bennies from marriage than straights.
Norway also doesn’t really have the same problem of large-scale generational poverty, for complicated reasons. I mean, the cards are stacked against children of poor parents, just like anywhere, but it’s a rare child who grows up in a bubble of poverty, where everyone you know is poor.
I think with books, it’s more about what you are used to. I grew up with my mom reading to me, so of course I can’t wait to share my favorite books with my daughter. Bookstores were always a big outing for me, and I’m sure for kiddo it’ll be the same. But I didn’t grow up in a very active family, and not surprisingly I’m not one for sports. People share what they know and what brings then joy with their kids.
There is resistance when it comes to higher education, but not because of the “crab pot” mentality as much as trepidation about a life path that is so unknown. And every parent does that- I can’t tell you how many middle class people I know who has serious family rifts because they wanted to spend two measly years in the Peace Corps.
Absolutely, and that’s part of why I brought Norway up: the problem isn’t so much the difficulty of raising a child out of wedlock, as it is raising a child without the assistance of another competent adult in the household. If we focus on marriage, we’re barking up the wrong tree.
It may really surprise you, but people aren’t born into this world knowing what’s best in everything. If they didn’t have anyone reading to them as a little kid and in their estimation they still came out “ok”, then reading to their children isn’t going to jump out at them as a priority. People don’t readily connect the dots.
My parents didn’t read to me as a little kid. I had books (forgotten library books passed down from older siblings, pilfered text books, and an entire set of encyclopedias). But my parents didn’t sit down and read to me. And my parents were educated. Hell, my father was an elementary school principal! They weren’t neglectful; it just didn’t register that we needed any more reading, beyond the class- and homework. And seeing as how 3 out of their 4 children somehow turned into voracious readers, I don’t think they wrong in that assumption.
But what my mother did better than anyone was tell the best bed time stories in the world, from completely off the top of her head. They were far more entertaining than any story book (because they contained topical information and celebrity guest appearances!) They didn’t teach me how to read, but they sure did teach me to imagine.
Books are great. But I’m not about to sit in judgment of a parent who doesn’t read to their kids as long as they do other enriching activities.
Were there books in your house? (Besides the ones you mentioned.) Did you go to the library? And, most importantly, did your parents ever give you the impression that reading was a waste of time? And did your parents read?
It is not just the lack of reading to kids that is a problem, it is the attitude that reading isn’t very worthwhile. And I’m talking middle class people here, not poor people. You know, the people who read one book a year. The people, when I was on a committee advising about the selection of a new school principle looked at me like I was nuts when I said that academic excellence was the main thing - and then argued more about support for sports.
I can give lots of other examples.
We read to our kids, and they are both voracious readers, but I think our attitude towards books was more important than just reading to them.
But you don’t even have to spend money. At our library I see parents checking out about a dozen board books for their little kids. You read them and come back for another dozen if you don’t have the money to buy them.
When my mother was little her parents couldn’t afford to buy lots of books. Getting one for her birthday was a special treat - but she had the library, so she never did without.
There were bibles. Lots and lots of bibles. But that was about it.
I started going to the library because my older sis would take my twin and me there for story time during summer vacation. Once we got old enough to roam the neighborhood, we’d go there alone. Our parents didn’t even know. I’d do research at the library for school, and that was about it until I hit high school. That was when I realized I didn’t have to just read books assigned in school.
My parents didn’t read. They argued over Scripture so vehemently that they would have made yeshiva students blush, but that was it. They didn’t even read the paper. Not everyone likes to read. I try not to hold it against them because they grew up hard.
But no, they didn’t discourage this activity. They liked that their children were smart. But so do plenty of poor people.
My parents’ attitude was pretty hands-off. If none of us had ever opened up a book outside of school, that would have been fine too, just as long as we were respectful and didn’t get in trouble. They wanted us to be smart, don’t get me wrong. But they weren’t into making us the “best” of anything. They weren’t raising rats for a rat race. They just wanted us to have a decent life, which can mean everything from flipping burgers at McDonald’s (which my father did while he was vice-principal) to being the president of the US.
One thing I never heard growing up was, “If you don’t do X, you’re going to be wearing a paper hat/pushing a broom/cleaning a toilet when you grow up!” Maybe because my parents came from folks who wore paper hats, pushed brooms, and cleaned toilets, and we lived in the midst of people who did these things for a living…it would have seemed disrespectful to threaten us like that. So we were never pushed.
But yet none of us kids turned out poor. Bully that. I think it has something to do with the fact that our parents weren’t poor rather than how great we are as people.
So … you’re saying it’s due to their decisions but not the choices they made?
Putting my skepticism aside arguendo, it’s fairly clear that a strong work ethic is not sufficient to get someone out of poverty.
I mean, I keep seeing statistics to the effect that there are 100-something people out of work for every job opening. If that’s true, even assuming that’s arithmetic, no amount of not-whiningness will automatically help you cut through that. And the number could be off by an order of magnitude and it still wouldn’t make that a complete solution.
There is no complete solution. Full employment, speaking in terms of the national economy, does mean that everyone who is willing to work and control their family size will stay out of poverty(you can be making median income and still be in poverty if you have enough kids, but there’s no public policy solution for that).
But sure, when work is hard to come by, being hardworking isn’t always enough. But that’s another problem. A bad economy is a bad economy and there’s a lot of suffering in a bad economy. So the public policy problem and solution are different than for fighting chronic poverty, which is not caused by economic conditions, but persists through good times and bad.