Wait, what’s your evidence that he decided to be an unskilled worker?
ETA: To head off a comment at the pass–I’m not here engaging in an argument about whether we “all end up where are by accident.” I’m asking you how you know what you know about this guy.
He also made the mistake of buying a house that he couldn’t afford. That not only broke his budget, but locked him into a longer commute.
I somehow missed that info in the article. How much was he making when he bought the house, and how much are his monthly house payments?
(I should mention, despite the questions I’ve asked above, that there are several red flags in the article which make me believe it is a fable rather than a factual account. But the general idea of the thread seems to be to take it literally and draw out the implications, and I’m okay with that.)
Amazingly enough? It’s because we have decided as a society—much to the dismay of some in this thread—that we’re going to put forth a good faith effort to not let people fall off the bottom. Fifteen-some years ago I was making $8/hour full-time. I got by, but I was sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other guys. I don’t know what Nashville area is like, but this was midwestern suburb life for me. If I had to support a child, it could definitely only have been done with social assistance. Such social assistance is there to make up for the fact that people aren’t paid a living wage. Would you rather this support structure be in place, or living wage regulation be in place? Or are you imagining that neither should be here?
I’m sorry, are you already supposing everyone over 50 owns their own home in the first place?
No, because moving home with mom and dad around here often means moving into their apartment.
What are the parameters for a living wage? If he had seven children, should we pay him enough to have them all enrolled in basketball? If the house he bought that he can’t afford now has a $2000 a month mortgage on it and his car loan is $500 a month, do we set the living wage at that number?
It is my understanding that there are regulations against such living arrangements in general when children are involved, but being stubbornly and willfully single I do not keep up on such things.
I don’t know, and I don’t see why such parameters must be agreed upon prior to the decision about whether we should aim towards such a wage in the first place.
If by whiskey.
Knowing what I know about the world, it’s the null hypothesis. People with skills don’t just accidentally wind up acquiring them. It takes personal agency. People without skills have therefore effectively chosen to not acquire them in the same way I effectively chose not to eat Louisiana gumbo last night (which never crossed my mind). Now if you want to talk about getting into the Oval Office, then there might be some discussion about luck and circumstance, but jeez- we’re just aiming for the board room here.
You’re beginning from an assumption “those who have skills acquire them as a result of their own decisions,” and deriving a conclusion “those who do not have skills fail to have them as a result of their own decisions.” But this doesn’t follow at all. Bob and Cathy may both make the decisions which are the right ones if their goal is to acquire skills–yet Bob may be fortunate and so his decisions will have their intended effect, while Cathy may be unfortunate and so her decisions will fail to have their intended effect.
Then there’s Dawn, who made poor decisions, and failed to acquire skills as a result. You’re saying you know the guy in the article is more like Dawn than he is like Cathy. I’m asking you how you know this about him.
And if you were somehow able to measure skills, I’d say your conclusion would be sound. But that is not what your metric is. Your metric is economic success. Now we need dig a little further, because with two adjectives (‘skilled’ and ‘successful’) there are the following four cases:
[ul][]skilled and successful []skilled and unsuccessful []unskilled and successful []unskilled and unsuccessful[/ul]Apparently, a priori, you have ruled out “unskilled and successful” and “skilled and unsuccessful” and I would appreciate hearing why this is plausibly so.
Not really…the are in theory, but since homeless shelters arent able to provide sufficient beds for families and there is not enough subsidized housing, cps would rather you have too many kids in a one bedroom apartment than have them living in cars. They have bigger fish to fry. One of my sons friends had nine people living in a two bedroom duplex for two years in a hideous neighborhood. Another just moved out of grandmas, mom dad, two kids grandma and grandpa in a two bedroom bungalow (mom and dads house was foreclosed on). This economy has been hellish for a lot of families. But a living wage doesn’t help when you arent employed. and my girl scout mentioned unthread, her dad finally stopped struggling to move him and his kids back in with his mother and her husband. There are lots of multigenerational households right now, most of them sharing bedrooms.
Uhm, excuuuuuse me, he very clearly said “null hypothesis,” the magic spell that converts idle speculation into Science!
No need to ask “Well, Chessic, usually the formulation of a ‘null hypothesis’ precedes the execution of an experiment. What experiment, or really any investigation of any kind whatsoever, did you conduct in support of your conclusions?” But all of that really is unnecessary; he said “null hypothesis” after all. Don’t make a bee take off her earrings and bust out the phrase “statistically significant” too!!
The point was just that your advice to people is to break the law to get by (again—given my understanding of the law). People may in fact break the law to get by, but I don’t know that I’d consider this reasonable advice (which laws are ok to break, exactly?)
Problems are vast with the human condition. But our discussion needn’t digress.
There are lots of things going on, no question. We could surely have a fascinating thread on recounting statistics alone. But what I thought was in question was whether a living wage is something we should aim at as a society, whether people working full time should be able to support their family, and so on, rather than questions of descriptive fact.
Allowing more and more wealth to accumulate into fewer and fewer hands doesn’t make it any easier. I don’t see how you expect to have a middle class majority unless a majority of families have middle class incomes.
“Allowing?”
I can’t stand phrases like this… the implication being that wealth belongs to all of us jointly, and we allow certain of us to have some of it.
People create wealth.
I suppose we “allow” people to create wealth in the same way we allow people to draw breath. And i assume you’d find it vaguely disquieting if someone were to discuss how we allow you to continue to breathe.
And quite likely he was enticed by a real estate broker and a financier who knew perfectly well he couldn’t afford the house they were selling him. The risk that he wouldn’t pay off the loan was passed on to anonymous others through financial instruments so complicated even the people who created them didn’t understand them. There is also a great deal of social and cultural pressure to own a home, the idea being that somethign must be wrong with you if you don’t. An awful lot of people took out loans for houses they couldn’t afford, and guess what? They weren’t solely responsible for the ensuing disaster. Policy makers at every level both public and private share a huge part of the blame for the housing bubble and its collapse.
Believe it or not, it’s entirely possible to be a responsible adult and still have serious financial problems.
It’s a presupposition of the conversation–the conversation is about what society as a whole should do with everyone’s money. By force of the fact that this is the topic of conversation, it follows that everything’s going to be in terms of what is “allowed” and “not allowed.”
What you’re signaling is that you don’t think any such conversation is a legitimate one to have.
“Middle class” is a mathematically defined term, ensuring that most people always have a “middle class” income. But really, your statement has nothing to do with the validity that if you artificially inflate wages, you make it harder to hire people.
Yes, it’s entirely possible. But all the excuses you listed above are still bad choices. Buying a home because you listened to real estate hype or felt peer pressure to do so are bad decisions.
I can’t stand the assumption that wealthy people must have earned every penny honestly and with great effort, or that people lilke Warren Buffet and George Soros should be permitted to manipulate markets to their own benefit at the expense of millions.
Yes, but the people who have the wealth aren’t necessarily the people who created the wealth.
Barring highly unusual circumstances, I can breath without denying anyone else access to oxygen.
I have an awful lot of problems with Karl Marx, but I think he was dead on target when he pointed out that, in the absence of external restraints, more and more wealth and power will accumulate into fewer and fewer hands, ending in an impoverished and despotic society.
I’m in a union that negotiates our contracts and raises. There is a COLA and merit raise every year. Someone who has stayed in the same job for the last 10 years, however, will be worse off than they started due to the unrealistic metric that the COLA pivots from (always less than 2%) and the ‘merit’ raises that give lower raises to the longer time workers.
The only way that I’ve been able to increase my salary is to job-hop to better positions. If I’d stayed put in a single union position and grade, I’d be wondering how to pay for gas and food also. The only thing our union has been good for, salary-wise, has been providing lots of detailed metrics showing that I’ll be worse off if I continue in the same job.