Hey, Sam – do you have any cites for this? (Particularly about “people take better care of the things they own”.) I’m asking, not to start a debate over the point, but because it comes up over and over again and I’m wondering how one would even go about measuring such a thing.
Or is it just so obvious that it’s taken as gospel?
Please explain how you get from point A to point B.
I have to get to work now, so I don’t have time to look it up. It is a generally accepted principle, however. Habitat for Humanity operates on that assumption.
There have been plenty of empirical studies that show this to be the case.
Because if you instill the values of point B into people, you help make them more successful. If you convince people that their destiny is controlled by powerful forces outside of their control, you reduce the likelihood that they will be successful.
It’s also much better to make it on your own than to be comfortable because someone else is propping you up. There’s nothing like self-reliance and achievement to improve someone’s self esteem and general level of happiness.
But, in fact, any individual’s destiny is largely dependent on forces outside his/her control. Is it not self-deception to ignore that?
Brainglutton, I mean no offense, but this is exactly the kind of idea which screws people up. Of course that’s not true! Everyone can chart and direct the course of their life. As long as you perceive a goal, and work hard to acheive it, you’ll probably get there, or somewhere near it. Sure, there are a lot of things for which there is competition; the world itself has limited opportunities at any one time. But if you can dream it, and are bright enough to work for it, you can do it. Maybe you’ll chart your course wrong - but that doesn’t mean your destiny isn’t in your hands. people have a lot of pressureson them. The wise ones choose which pressures to accept, make their own, and develop. The foolish just drift around.
But encouraging them to just accept their lot, demand some handouts, and sit around doing nothing? Well, yeah. If you don’t do anything, of course you’ll never get anywhere! I’ve always been amazed by people who tough like that. “I can’t get anywhere. The Man/Society/The Economy/Foreigners/Whatever are keeping me down,” they say. But the mere fact that they accept it, do nothing about it, and sit there makes it comes true.
No, man is not all-powerful. But that doesn’t mean we’re just pawns. The future belongs to those willing to step up and build it; and it gets bigger and brighter the more people who do.
A dramatic expansion of programs under USAID, especially those related to AIDS and other diseases, and also food security, and even in countries whose leaders we don’t like.
Oh, you mean poverty in America?
A successful war on poverty would start with undoing those policies that allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor. Restore the top tax brackets. Restore the minimum wage to its original true value, not the current depreciated value. And stop all of the mergers that would have been illegal just a few years ago. Concentration of power always ends up with ridiculous, undeserved pay increases for the wealthy.
Yes, I understand it’s generally accepted. I’m curious about the extent to which it actually holds, not to mention how it’s determined.
Empirical studies are exactly what I’m looking for. Could you supply something (anything) to look for?
**What would be elements of a successful new American “War on Poverty”? **
Guns. Big guns.
Unemployed people in France aren’t exactly on “government assistance”. The unemployment benefits are taken from a fund coming from a tax on salaries. It’s more a mandatory unemployment insurance than a government hand-out. A civil servant (whose salary isn’t taxed) wouldn’t receive any unemployment benefit if he were to loss his job, for instance (It’ a rare instance for a civil servant to lose his job in circumstances where he would be eligible for unemployment benefit, but it exemplifies the logic behind the system).
Only after 24 months (usually) the unemployed stops receiving benefits and moves on to actual government assistance (which would be a very low but essentially permanent “guaranteed minimal income”).
Currently (tere has beena lot of hanges over the last decades), the unemployment benefit is a percentage of your previous salary (capped at around 10 000 €/month). This percentage ranges from roughly 55% to 75% of the reference salary and can’t be lower than roughly 25 €/day.
You receive it for a duration ranging from 7 to 23 months (or even longer in the case of people older than 50), depending on how long you worked before losing your job.
So, in the best case scenario, you’d probably get something like 5 500 €/month for two years (which would be a long way from poverty) and in the worst case something like 750 €/month (which isn’t exactly poverty, either, assuming you don’t have a family to feed, though there are also “family benefits” if you’ve children, regardles of your employment status) for half a year.
That, if you’re eligible for unemployment benefits. I would assume that most people under the poverty line aren’t eligible for them (or don’t receive them anymore).
The more articulate you get, Sam, the more sensible you sound. But your initial zinger ("…it’s your fault") was a crude soundbite that implied a lot of things.
One of the things implied in “…it’s your fault” is blame. Blame is NOT one of the habits of successful people. It helps status-quo economic Calvinists get their rox off, but it doesn’t help anyone in need of greater personal empowerment.
:dubious: What you say is both true and false – and much more false than true. I don’t know what meritocratic utopia you think you’re living in, but it ain’t the U.S. of A., nor any other society on this planet. The progress of industrial civilization has gone hand-in-hand – in a kind of two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion, with a lot of one-step-forward-three-steps-back periods – with the expansion of the autonomy and opportunities open to the individual. But we’re still a long way from reaching a point where circumstances within your control are anywhere near as crucial as circumstances beyond your control in determining your lot in life. You can’t choose your genetic endowments of intelligence, etc. You cannot choose the race, ethnic group, social cass or gender into which you are born. You cannot choose whether you are born into a Third-World country or a modern industrialized country. You cannot choose whether you are looking for opportunities in a prosperous time or an economic depression. You can do nothing to affect the economic conditions of the particular job market within you are searching. For the most part, you cannot choose your educational opportunities. All you can do is adapt to these circumstances as best you can. If you have the good luck to be a citizen of a real republic, then you can, by voting, organizing, and other individual actions, exercise some influence on the state – negligible influence all told, but still much, much greater than any direct individual influence you can have over the course and conditions of the economy.
In terms of practical results, there is relatively little social mobility in America – and rather less than there used to be, according to the recent New York Times series on the issue.
As Karl Marx said (and he did indeed get many things right):
In sum, simply telling the poor, “Get off your ass!” is not necessarily an effective way to help them, even if they listen to you.
We all make mistakes though. Some of us just have more options, less temptation to make the wrong turns in life and a bigger safety net when we do. If I can’t find a job I can just borrow money from parents who are in the highest 5% of income earners. Crime isn’t really an option for me as I grew up in an environment where street crime was abhorred. If a poor person loses a job he/she may end up doing what they see get done daily, which is breaking the law and getting a criminal record which will make it harder to get a job, leading to more crime. The point is that some of us have options and networks that make life easier for when we make the mistakes that everyone makes or have the same troubles everyone else has. What I need to see is a legitimate scientific study that shows things like a positive, goal oriented mindset leads to working oneself out of poverty. To my knowledge no long term studies have been done on what works long term for helping people escape poverty. I’m not denying that a good attitude is much better than a crappy attitude, but by how much?
According to a sociology book I read several years ago the children of those in the lowest quintile make about 16k on average. The kids of the highest make about 60k on average.
I don’t want to live in my grandparents America. I don’t know many/any people who want to live in a darwinistic society. Besides, there was charity back then and people helped each other out privately. It wasn’t darwinistic because human nature isn’t purely darwinistic. Even in the depression people provided for each other.
Unemployment is also due to a lack of jobs in general. Sometimes nothing needs to be done.
The US has low unemployment partially because we don’t keep track of it as well. That is like saying North Korea has a low imprisonment rate because their official incarceration rate is low. However their unofficial rate is much higher. THe US un/underemployment rate is higher than 5%, but only 5% of the population collects unemployment benefits.
Numerous studies have shown that most taxpaying, voting naturalized citizens believe that if you are willing to work a full time job that you deserve better to live in poverty. In a representative liberal democracy their opinions count.
I don’t agree. Redistributing wealth helps society as a whole. Technology is moving at a clip, we discover more scientific and technolgoical information in a decade than humanity used to discover in a century, and even if living in a welfare state slows down the economy (which is conjecture, you can assume it does the opposite) that is a price I and many others are willing to pay. I’m happy with a slightly slower growing economy if it means life is better for millions of americans. If everyone has access to an education, food and medicine that is better for society than only giving these things to the wealthiest among us. Education makes up about 25% of the US governments spending. Another 20% or so goes to protection for us all in the form of the military and the legal system. Another 15% or so goes to interest on the national debt, which we have to pay for. So off the bat you can’t really eliminate most gov. programs.
The only things you can eliminate are healthcare and social security. But you wont find more than 3-5% of americans who want to eliminate social security and medicare and there is good reason for it. Most people don’t save for retirement properly, if you eliminated SS you’d have a situation where huge chunks of the US population couldn’t survive on their own. They’d have to move in with family which would hurt the economy because their kids would have to balance both being parents to their kids, caregivers and supporters to their parents and employees. Something would have to give.
Back to the original jist of this thread, I really dont know. I do not know if any long term studies have been done on what works vs what doesn’t for eliminating poverty. The easiest, quickest way is to cut the expenses of the poor and increase their income. You do that by raising the minimum wage, offering subsidized housing, universal healthcare, extra employment opportunities and food stamps while discouraging habits that cost money in the short and long run (having kids, buying flashy things, having a criminal record) and encouraging habits that increase income in the long run (education, savings, learning how to prioritize a budget). However in the long term I really don’t know. There is alot of debate on what role attitude plays in poverty but as I said I have read that the kids of the lowest quintile make about 1/4 what kids of the highest quintile make. What role can attitude play in overcoming that, and what kinds of attitudes need to be fostered to do it? It is easy to focus on all the Horatio Alger stories but also easy to ignore all the times that it didn’t work. With things like cancer numerous studies have been done showing what works vs what doesn’t. I really don’t know if the same has been done with poverty.
Here we go, an actual study on what works and what doesn’t.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PovertyintheUnitedStates.html
In sum, a variety of factors have influenced the incidence of poverty. Those that have reduced the poverty rate, in rough order of importance, are the growth of cash transfers, the investments in government training and education programs, and the overall growth in the economy since the midsixties. Factors that have increased the poverty rate include, in order of importance, the increase in the unemployment rate, the growth of female-headed families, and (possibly) an increase in dysfunctional behavior associated with the rise of the underclass. All of these factors together have left the incidence of poverty much the same as it was in the late sixties.
This is a liberal site.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-welfarepoverty.htm
This is a conservative site that feels single parenthood is the biggest factor (the first article agreed that single parent, female run households are one of the biggest risks)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
So if you’re a woman don’t have kids and don’t get divorced.
FTR ‘cash transfers’ = welfare in case you guys don’t want to read the whole article (but I’d recommend it). The author says that poverty is cut by almost 9 percentage points due to social security, AFDC, subsidized housing and things like that. So it may be about 25% if not for these programs. Eliminate other forms of welfare (subsidized education, subsidized ehalthcare) and the poverty rate would probably climb to 40% or more (that is conjecture though). Plus consider that alot of poor people use the military to escape poverty and the military is government funded. The evidence seems to consistenly support the idea that gov. intervention lessens poverty.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PovertyintheUnitedStates.html
Finally, some researchers blame the persistence of poverty on income-transfer policies. These are typically divided into two categories: public assistance programs, like AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid, which were designed to help people who are already poor…The antipoverty effectiveness of these programs is typically measured by counting the number of people with pretransfer incomes below the poverty line whose incomes are raised above the poverty line by the income transfers. According to government estimates, social insurance and public assistance programs moved over 40 percent of the pretransfer poor above the poverty line in 1989. This implies that the poverty rate is reduced by nearly 9 percentage points by these programs…This body of evidence suggests that the persistence of poverty cannot be attributed to income-transfer programs themselves. Although transfer programs surely have not reduced poverty by the full 9 percentage points mentioned earlier, they clearly have reduced poverty significantly. Indeed, one of the greatest success stories is the decline in poverty among the elderly, due in large part to the growth of Social Security and Medicare.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-welfarepoverty.htm
Relative poverty rates for various age groups (mid-80s) (10)
Sweden (1987) 1.6 6.6 0.7 4.3
West Germany (1984) 2.8 2.6 3.8 2.8
France (1984) 4.6 5.2 0.7 4.5
United Kingdom (1986) 7.4 5.3 1.0 5.2
Australia (1985) 9.0 6.1 4.0 6.7
Canada (1987) 9.3 7.0 2.2 7.0
United States (1986) 20.4 10.5 10.9 13.3
Wilson describes poor women in a series of statements, a sample of which follow. 1) Women who head their own households are nearly 5 times as likely to be poor as men who head their own households. 2) Over the past 2 1/2 decades, the share of poor people living in female-headed households has risen from 18% to 35%. 3) There are as many poor married women as poor women who head households. 4) Over the past 15 years, the average size of poor female-headed households has declined somewhat. 5) Only 1 in 5 poor women with children heading their own households receives any financial support from their children’s fathers. 6) Nearly 6 in 10 poor women heading households received public assistance in 1984. Multiple strategies to combat poverty among poor women must be instituted. The most important antipoverty strategy is creation of a productive, high-employment economy. Most poor women work, but have low wages and too few work hours. Other helpful policies include raising the minimum wage, providing health coverage to uninsured or inadequately insured working poor families, and increasing financial support for child care. Improving the educational system, discouraging high school drop-outs, and discouraging early pregnancy would also help, as would enforcing child support payments and extending public assistance to 2-parent families in poverty. Increasing benefit levels to all eligible households would further diminish poverty.
Sorry for the slight hijack, but I’ve got to ask for a cite on the social security part. While I’d be surprised if the percentage that supported elimination was anywhere near a majority, I’d be shocked if it were as low as 5%. From a personal economic standpoint, I, as well as a significant number of others, would be far better off giving up any right I’d have to future benefits (including anything I’ve theoretically “accrued” up to my current age of 36) in exchange for no longer having to contribute. Since I am not completely motivated by self-interest and am aware of the consequences of this, I do not support wholesale elimination of SS, but, again, I’d imagine the number that do support it because of the above rationale is significantly higher than 5%.
btw Wesley, GO HOOSIERS!
So what? The mere fact that we are limited by some theoretical absolute doesn’t change the fact that none of us ever reach that limit, and that human factors weigh far more closely than inhuman ones.
Look at those third-world hellholes you mention. Are the people there held back by climate? Somewhat. By knowledge and wealth? Somewhat. Yet climates can adapted to, or even be engineered with hard work. Knowledge and wealth can be made and developed, even from almost nothing. What keeps them back is human factors: tribalism, government graft and theft, a lack of fair and just laws. And these things can be changed. Sure, one man can’t do it. But one man can lead many others.
In the 19th century, long before anything imagined by modern equal rights ideas, women became nurses and sparked a revolution in American medicine. Blacks in the South did not become poor and repressed because people made it so. And when the downtrodden stood up and demanded their rights, they took them back. Because they convinced many men, over a great area, that it was wrong to repress people.
No man is an island, but neither are we drops of water in the ocean. Call it a very large flock of birds if you like; those who see a future clearly, prepare well, and convince others succeed. To do these things, one does not need to be a firebrand or brilliant or a natural speaker. But one must believe, and be willing to work and suffer. Men like that rarely vanish from history. If they fail in their own time, they often lay the seeds for the generation after.
No, we are not limited meaningfully by other men, but by whether or not we see ourselves and others clearly. And while education, and money, and class can help with that, they are not the root of it, nor the end.