Overall, it’s more like 3-5 persons per job. But once you take out the highly specialized jobs (and all the various “non-jobs”), it’s the common ones like a cashier opening that gets the 1 to 100 ratios.
I’ve seen a lot of people come and go from all sorts of jobs. A work ethic and friendly, cooperative attitude, and smarts, seem to provide pretty good safety in a job and great chances of advancement.
Bullshit. There are any number of reasons why someone might be willing to work but be unable to maintain a job, starting with being primary caretaker for a needy family member, and moving on from there.
If cohabitation in Norway is the functional equivalent of marriage in the US, then focusing on marriage in the US is not barking up the wrong tree at all. If poor people engaged in long-term cohabitation instead of marriage, it would have the same effect on poverty that marriage would. The trouble is that they don’t. Cohabiting couples break up more than married ones do. It’s the instability that increases the likelihood of the children growing up in poverty, and the risk that they will be persistently poor as adults.
Notice that the caveat was “get married and stay married”. If you want to change that to “get married or live together, and stay together, but statistically it is less likely that you will stay together if you just live together”, OK.
Regards,
Shodan
Respectfully, I disagree that there is a flip side. If you have any experience with doing low wage work, or were familiar with what is really involved in that life you would not describe it this way. If a low wage worker had the option of doing what you are doing, I believe most of them would take it.
Have you paid attention as well, though, to how often the non-poor also make poor financial decisions? If not, then for all you know, making poor financial decisions is something that people do across the board, and is not in itself a cause of poverty.
I suspect he would. But I’m sure that like me, you didn’t just wake up one day earning six figures.
See, here’s the problem. Sure, there are a lot of great reasons that people end up poor. Some of it is their fault, while some of it is beyond their control. But it seems unfair to me to expect that people who did make good choices and ended up successful should be forced to subsidize the lifestyles of people who made bad choices. Not only that. By mitigating the consequences of bad choices, it removes the incentives to not make them in the first place.
In the end, the discussion always comes down to “jobs” which is really just a placeholder for “how does one create value for society”. It does seem to me that we are all better off when we figure out how to enable people who want to contribute to develop the skills that will allow them to.
Although, IMHO most of these posts tend to come across as “I had shit luck and someone should pay for that”.
The poor should be subsidized out of compassion, but doing so ends up creating a trap from which they never escape.
In Buddhist mythology one of the things you can be reborn as is a “demon,” and one becomes one by being stupidly generous and getting people dependent on your generosity.
Strangely enough, those who produce the product, those who run the register selling the product and those who clean the bathrooms and mop the floors are considered without value while the guy who is trying to offshore more jobs has value. Go figure.
And just because someone makes bad decisions doesn’t mean they deserve to have their wages subject to CEO abuse.
And how do you determine who made bad decisions and who just had bad luck or is low/no skill?
We all subsidize each other’s bad choices. When a rich banker makes bad decisions, his company gets bailed out with tax-payers money. When an executive embezzles from his company or when the executive is just incompetent, the shareholders feel the pinch, as well as the folks who get laid off. When rich people do bad things, the economy crashes. Interest rates drop. Wages stagnate. We end up paying more for consumer goods just so that rich can keep on rubbing their hands together.
Hell, our economy is just now recovering from the worst recession since the Great Depression and it was caused by greedy, risk-taking rich people. And we’ve got politicians who want to help these people make even MORE money. If that’s not a moral hazard, what is?
So it seems fair to me that we subsidize poor people for their “poor” choices too.
Interesting. Cite?
Leave off everything after the second “together” as irrelevant to the point, and we’ve got a deal :).
Climbing out of poverty, having fallen into through your own bad choices, is a different kettle of fish entirely, than climbing out of poverty you were born and raised in. And it’s disengenuous to attempt to equate them.
If you want the poor to take ‘responsibility’ for their poverty, it seems to me, the very first step would be to ensure equal funding to all schools. Whether in rich or poor neighbourhoods. And yet advocates for one, never seem to be advocates for the other too. Funny that.
All I can say is I’ve been so warned several times by well-intentioned monks: I tend to be generous sometimes. Of course if one wants to be cynical one could say they would rather the monastery got the money.
What kind of work was this?
It seems to me that the giving of money to others needs to be done without expectation of outcome. Few people are capable of that.
You may think you have a right to tell people what to do with the money after you give it but the recipient may see it entirely differently.
So mandated giving leads to resentment and social stress when the desired results aren’t observed.
I see.
If you’re ever interested in discussing the various Buddhist views on charity and generosity, please feel free to open a thread about it; I’d be happy to discuss it.
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I’m a Communist of the “let’s put off the revolution indefinitely and here and there apply market economics school”.
I admire Buddhism (especially Theravada Buddhism) and teach English *gratis *to a lot of monks, but have no intention to preach it, although since it is part of the culture I’m in now it is hard for me to avoid occasional references to it.
I suspect were I to try to explain some of the deeper parts of their teaching I would misinform.
nvm
a) money is not a natural resource, nor is the need for it an aspect of human nature; while it is certainly ubiquitous at this point, humans have lived within human societies for eons longer than the money system has been around, and it can usefully be thought of as a marker within a “game” that humans play — it is the rules of the game that attribute value to money, and it is the rules of the game, also, that determine the circumstances under which money is acquired and distributed and spent and so on.
b) loosely speaking, the rules of that game revolve around an assumption of scarcity and, hence, competition for resources (otherwise phrased as “ya don’t work, ya don’t eat”). I have noted that the game, and its rules, do not adjust for the possibility of scarcity ceasing to be the status quo, and indeed am of the opinion that we mostly inhabit a post-scarcity world at least here in modern western culture (and probably globally if we average and do some distributive math), leading to some paradoxical situations.
c) specific among those paradoxical situations: JOBS (opportunities to do work in return for financial compensation) are scarce to the point that there is competition to fill them, leading to (for example) opposition to labor-saving devices on the grounds that reducing the overall amount of work that needs doing would result in the loss of people’s jobs; and resources exist in sufficient plentitude that not only do we distribute a modicum of them to people not currently employed but we also refrain from distributing significantly more NOT because we don’t have them (“can’t afford it”) but because we fear encouraging laziness or removing the impetus to competitively seek jobs.
d) just as in Parker Brothers’® Monopoly™, the game inherently requires losers and will produce them; the mechanisms of the money system inherently (i.e., without reference to such irrelevant considerations as personal greed or selfishness or whatever) concentrate winning ability in the hands of those who have won so far — money operates as a resource, not merely as a marker in the competition for other resources, and without it it is hard to obtain more of it, or to invest in and obtain the additional tools for better competing for it; like all competition, the game produces winners and losers.
e) people who don’t find a game to be particularly pleasant and who are also not doing well in it and aren’t likely to do well in it even if they try hard will often stop trying, especially if it is to some degree possible to opt out.
SO… an individual poor person may be responsible for not having played the game better, but with the codicil that the poor person’s ability to compete in the game will under normal circumstances have been sharply truncated by poverty; meanwhile, there is no moral reason for placing an intrinsic value on playing the game well and hence “blaming” the poor for being poor as if it were in some fashion morally wrong to fail to compete better. There will be losers whether this individual poor person is amongst them or not. Moreover, the entire game is unweildy and poorly suited to our actual needs and a better question might be “how much of the continued existence of the scarcity-based economy is the poor person’s responsibility?”, although that question doesn’t yield easy answers either. (Even if we ask instead about the RICH person’s responsibility, it isn’t immediately apparent what an individual person ought to be expected to do about it).