Where did the mentality originate that equates poverty with laziness?

Great Debates
41

** Age Quod Agis**, It seems like you may not be getting it. All that I have been trying to do is to understand where pervert is coming from. To the best of my knowledge, he has clarified his points to me. Not sure why you feel the need to stir the pot some more.

The problem that I have with the “strawman” accusation is that I have had the same experience as the OP. I.e. hearing Conservative talk show hosts put forward the idea that people are poor because they are lazy. In re reading the OP (one of many times for me, as people keep seeing things in it that I just don’t) I do not see the claim that Conservative talk-show hosts are responsible for this notion. Simply that the notion exists and that it has been commented on by those self-same talk-show folks. To be honest, I think that you might need to re read the thread.

As to a “direct response” try this: First, I am dismissing out of hand that there is no notion that poor people are lazy. This is due to the fact that I have encountered this notion many times in my life. As to why some people think that, I gave some of my thoughts on this in the second post in this very thread.

If that is not satisfying to you, I will naturally be glad to directly answer any specific question that you care to pose.

42

In response to the OP:

Check this out:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/social.html

Goggle Social Darwinism; a bit of research will demonstrate that Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ came from social theories prevailing in his time.

In my life time, it was during the Regan presidency.

43

You must know very different people than I did. The “children of wealth” that I knew in high school and college didn’t have jobs- their parents covered the bills. Those who had jobs in high school and college (and I was one of them) actually were class mobility stories - we were working because our parents weren’t wealthy enough to cover our expenses at even a very inexpensive public college (My first year’s tuition in 1981 was under $1000 and my parents couldn’t afford it)

I will say , however , that the people I grew up with who didn’t end up as well-off as I did didn’t end up that way because of laziness as much as an inability to delay gratification. They didn’t go to college (or even droppped out of high school) because they could get a job that paid more than minimum wage if they worked full-time. They moved out of their parents’ homes, got married and had kids way younger than I did. Sometimes it works, and sometimes you’re still a bank teller twenty years later.

44

I was in an area where a difference of 10 blocks was the difference between making $40,000 per year and millions per year, within a few mile radius there were even some billionairres – all within the same school district. My experience was that the wealthy kids usually had some job at a car wash or pizza place during these years of high school. After these years of high school, things changed for them – very similar to what Apos stated, internships, college of their parents (regardless of their grades and test scores) etc… jobs that were landing them several thousand dollars a week by their early to mid 20’s.

45

Let me try this another way. I understand and agree that some people will put forward the idea that “people are poor because they are lazy”. I think such an idea is quite defensible if stated just that way. That is, there certainly are people who are talented enough, smart enough, or healthy enough to do better than they do. I can understand that you have seen talk show hosts and others expound on this idea. I am even willing to believe that some of those expounding on the idea exagerate the percentage of people whose laziness lead to poverty.

However, the OP said “What it boils down to is, if you’re poor, it’s because you’re lazy.” Implying that these hosts and some SDMB posters have asserted that the only reason for poverty is laziness. That is rather than hearing “people are poor because they are lazy”, the OP hears “we know people are lazy because they are poor”.

I claim this is a strawman because I have been accused of very similar attitudes when it is not true. I believe very strongly that each person is responsible for himself. However, this does not mean that I “blame” people for being poor either. Which I have also been accused of.

I agree. I did not mean to suggest that the OP blamed talk show hosts for this notion. However, as I said, I quarrel with the idea that talk show hosts even expound the notion that the OP suggested. They may identify a causal link between laziness and poverty, but I doubt that they suggest that all poverty is caused by laziness.

And I agree with you. As long as you are not taking it too far. That is if you accuse these people of claiming that “all” poor people are lazy, then I would have to ask for evidence.

Also, however, I would ask that you examine whether or not you may have read more into something someone said than that person intended. That is if someone claimed that laziness leads to poverty, did you understand them to mean that all poor people are lazy? I am not accusing you of such a thing. I am merely asking that you be willing to examine whether it could be true.

46

Fear of communism could have played a role. maybe a fear of a lower class who wanted to take money from the wealthy to support themselves played a role in the denunciation of the poor and a desire to convince them they are 100% responsible for their plight. then again, people have looked down on the poor forever, it didnt start recentely.

I guess the fact that we call it ‘work’ is another factor. work = opposite of not working (laziness), money = work therefore by default having money = not lazy. the more money you have, the more work you must do and visa verca. I dont know if linguistics can shape thoughts but if so then the fact that we define ‘work’ as both money and not being lazy could play a role.

47

Not really, no I don’t. Can you find a reference to them? I’m not claiming that this charge is false, simply stating that I don’t remember it.

Well, we should be careful with absolutes. I’d suggest that the words “often” and “nothing” may be a little too extreme for what you are suggesting. I’ve found that in almost any situation, the harder worker will be valued more highly than the less hard worker. They may make the same amount per hour, but there will be a difference in how they are percieved by employers or supervisors.

Again, I’m not sure that you can use the blanket term “most” here. In some cases, surely mobility is due as much to opportunities provided by parents as to talent or effort. However, I’d hesitate to suggest that most stories of people working up from poverty are that way. There is a lot of mobility in the various income groups. While some of it is surely the type you mention, the other type definately exists as well.

48

It’s not as difficult as a lot of people think. I know that when I first became Orthodox, the idea of going 7 weeks without animal products seemed an almost inhuman feat, but I’ve since learned that there’s plenty of food available that is lenten. Besides the standard fasting staples (in the Slavic countries, at least) of bread, potatos, and borscht, most Asian cuisines have a staggering variety of vegan dishes. The matushka (presbytera) at my church is Chinese, and at almost every trapeza can be counted on to have some sort of vegan Cantonese dish. And if you can’t cook, it is indeed possible to live on PBJs and instant oatmeal…

</hijack>

49

As I stated earlier, refusing to accept wealth that one has access to is MORE work in all instances than the act of accepting wealth that you have access to.

I think you’re operating under the assumption that this concept of accepting wealth is work in the first place, or rather, hard work. I see refusing to accept that which you have access to as the anti-thesis of laziness. And yet, by having you subtly define “more wealth” as “better” (“to do better than they do”), you seem to be missing the point completely.

50

Forget the notion that the poor are ‘lazy’. I don’t believe it. And I know lots of very, very lazy people in the middle and upper classes. I never worked harder than I did when I was poor.

But what separates many people’s economic prosperity is poor economic choices. Often starting at a very young age.

In terms of your economic well-being, here are some of the biggest factors outside of your working income:

  1. Buying new cars instead of used.
  2. Maintaining large amounts of debt.
  3. Having too many children.
  4. Getting divorced.
  5. Not saving enough.

Let me give you a comparison between myself and one of my best friends. We both grew up poor. When we got to high school, he got a good paying job in a bakery. Making $15/hr. I was working as a clerk in a small grocery store, making minimum wage. He had a big start on me. He could have put his money away for college, and started his life off on the right foot.

But then he used his high-paying job to buy a new car. Now he was saddled with huge debt. And to afford the car, he financed it over a very long period, so he was ‘upside down’ and couldn’t even afford to sell it.

Work and school got to be a bit much for him, so he dropped out. He planned to go back, but he never did. In the meantime, he saw a couple of good pay raises at his bakery job, and was quite happy. In fact, he was the envy of all of us. New car, lots of cash, etc.

Then the bakery closed. He found other work for much lower pay. But he couldn’t go back to school because he had debt, and by this time he was living alone. In the meantime, I went to college, working weekends and nights to pay my way through.

He eventually got married, but constant money strains and continued bad choices eventually led to a divorce. He lost everything and started over. In the meantime, he racked up huge amounts of debt on credit cards. I lost track of him a bit after this, but I think he went bankrupt at one point. He’s 40 now, broke, with no education, lots of debt. Maybe he’ll turn his life around, but maybe not.

I know other people who did the same kinds of things. Had to have the new car, had to have nice stereos, etc. Went into debt to get these things. Put themselves behind the curve and never recovered.

Now, this doesn’t apply to the truly destitute who can’t work and have no money at all. But the vast majority of people we are talking about here are people who have the ability to work, who do work, but who live lifestyles that prevent them from saving or taking advantages of opportunities that come their way.

I have another friend who comes from a wealthy family and married a small businessman. She had a great life. Two kids. Upper middle class income. But she got bored. Started hanging out in the bar. Started playing video lottery. Started ignoring her husband and getting hostile when he asked where the money went. Eventually, they divorced. She blew the settlement money gambling. By the time reality set in and she realized she was in a dead end, she had nothing left. She hadn’t worked for 20 years other than in the family business, so she had no references and no education. Now she’s 40, lives in a small apartment with another woman, and is on social assistance. She makes extra money by doing manual labor.

The problem we economic conservatives have with excessive safety nets is that they reduce the consequences of poor decision-making, and therefore cause more of it. It’s a lot easier to ignore saving for your retirement or protecting yourself from catastrophic loss if you know someone will catch you if you fall.

Let me give you one more example of a government program that encourages poor choices for well-meaning reasons: Government assistance for house buying. Here in Canada, we have the CMHC, which insures low-down-payment home purchases. The goals are admirable - to allow the working poor to move into home ownership without having to save 25% of the value of a house - something that can take a decade or more of hard savings when you’re young. So the CMHC allows banks to give mortgages with only 5% down, and it insures the mortgage if it defaults. To pay for the system, the CMHC charges a fee which amounts to maybe $4,000 on a $120,000 home. This fee is rolled into the mortgage.

So what are the results? Well, there’s no doubt that it has allowed a lot of young people to move into home ownership. Which has caused house prices to increase. But more to the point, because these mortgages are insured and the banks are protected, they are willing to give mortgages to people who can’t really afford them. So you get a lot of defaults. Plus, having to save the 25% forces you to learn to be frugal, and filters out the irresponsible people who shouldn’t be taking on huge burdens anyway. With 5% down, a lot of people wind up in homes who aren’t emotionally or financially ready for the responsibility, and they wind up losing them. In addition, they’re taking a loan of $4,000 (the CMHC fee) and paying it back over 25 years, which is an added burden they shouldn’t have. It’s the law of unintended consequences in action.

I believe in a social safety net. In our wealthy society, we can be magnanimous enough to ensure that no one starves. But it should be small, it should be temporary, and it should hurt enough to be on it that people do everything they can to avoid it.

51

I’m saying insomuch…
Does it occur to you that people who are “talented enough, smart enough, healthy enough” are the only ones who actually do work… that work is a refusal to accept wealth that you have access to, and that such individuals mark the highest constitutions in the human species? And that “lazy, dumb and unhealthy” refers to people who accept wealth that they have access to?

52

BTW, I found this pdf file which contends that there is a lot of economic mobility. It is pretty partisan, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. However, Exhibit 7 purports to be a chart made from data gathered by the Treasury about the mobility of “housholds”. It suggests that 85.8 of households moved from the lowest 20% to to the next 20% or higher between 1979 and 1988. While I suppose some of these households could simply be students, I find it hard to believe that 86% of the lowest 20% of our economy are made up exclusively of young people.

It also suggests that a lot of downward mobility takes place at the highest income levels.

53

Sam Stone - I agree and i dont. I know many wealthy people who save nothing but by and large i do not think these are the people who go on social assistance. usually they have some kind of education that lets them get another good job.

What about college students who have to juggle 16 credit hours of hard science courses, working 15-25 hours a week, take on loans and still have trouble making ends mee for 4, 5, 6 years straight? These people deserve better than that.

54

Wesley Clark said:

Why do they ‘deserve better’? Is someone forcing them to college? People go to college and make sacrifices so that their lives can be better afterwards. It’s a hard struggle with a payoff at the end. What’s wrong with that?

BTW, your scenario describes me perfectly. That’s exactly what I did. And I had no regrets then or now, even though it took 14 years to pay off my loans. I’m reaping the benefits now. As it should be.

But I’m sure you can find some other example equally odious. What about the guy who works his entire life and then has his legs cut off in an accident and can’t work any more? Should he starve? The answer is no. We should help people like that. But there’s an old saying in law which goes, “extreme cases make for bad law.” Extreme cases also make for bad public policy when generalized over an entire population. Our goal should be to minimize the distortions to the market, allow people to fail and succeed in accordance with their ability and work ethic, and have some minimal amount of protection for those who really need help.

But Democrats want FAR more than that. They want government to manage a vast panoply of services - everything from subsidized day care to tax breaks for studying the ‘right’ things or starting the ‘right’ kinds of businesses. They want to give students more money, and pay for it by higher taxes on the people who are successful. Well, isn’t that exactly what a student loan is? It gets you money now, and taxes you later when you can afford it. These programs often have the unintended consequence of reinforcing the bad behaviour that caused the problem in the first place. For instance, if you subsidize day care, you reduce the penalty for making a bad choice - having too many children. So you’ll get more poor people having more children. Make education too cheap, and you’ll get more people taking frivolous courses or dropping out. Etc.

This can be seen by the number of people in the U.S. who go to college but who do not study science, engineering, medicine, or other ‘hard’ and practical professions. Far more take poly sci, or history, or philosophy, or other programs that have no defined career stream. Now, there’s nothing wrong with those faculties, but it used to be that people taking those degrees were either wealthy, or taking them as a second degree. Because the first thing Dad would ask you when you told him you were going to study Elizabethan drama was, “That’s nice, but how are you going to make a living with that?” it was understood that college was very expensive, and that you had to be able to afford it then, or be able to afford to pay it back later in your career.

Today, I know far too many relatively poor people going to college to study something like that and not even thinking about the cost or consequences. We’ve taught them that education is a good thing no matter what you take, and we’ve put enough programs in place to make it possible to take whatever you please.

But then we’re surprised when India or Japan, both of which crank out doctors and engineers in great numbers, start catching up to us.

55

I don’t think people have “too many” children because they know they can get subsidized day care. I doubt their lives have this much intention. However, subsidized day care gives them some measure of opportunity to improve their lives and in so doing, give their kids more opportunity. This could mean, in the long term, a more productive member of society. It makes sense to provide inexpensive educational opportunities. I would rather have more students of history and fewer drug dealers and gangsters.

56

You logic is faulty for the simple fact that not everyone who is currently in possession of wealth has always had access to it.

57

So I uppose we should give all our money, Sam Stone, to Kenny Lay and others on corporate welfare, for running businesses to the ground, and fiddling their merry way as the businesses do.

58

This class warfare moment brought to you by Capacitor.

Where, out of everything I said, did you see me advocate ‘corporate welfare’? In fact, I’m just as dead-set against government programs that support business as any other.

59

No one I know equates poverty with laziness. The people I know aren’t that stupid. But everyone I know equates laziness with poverty; poverty of spirit,
poverty of individual responsibility, and poverty of the elan- the essence of being alive.
So who are these people who are beset with this stupid class mentality? Kerry?
Kennedy?
May God bless their paternalistic souls.

60

I have encountered this idea. I’ve been accused of laziness because of my dim view of corporate America. This country provides you with many opportunities to have what you want, as long as what you want is money.

Wesley Clark: I do believe linguistics determines attitudes, and have done a lot of study on the subject.

I was born into a middle class family in New Mexico, my father was a lobbyist and ran a state association. By the standards of the area we were doing ok, my parents had massive medical bills to pay my entire life. I didn’t go to college when I got out of school, I always wanted to live in New York City and that was my only dream. I moved to New Jersey 3 weeks out of HS and have been living in New York since 97. I still have yet to go to college and I doubt that I ever will, I don’t believe in college because I think it’s too much bureaucracy to learn what I can learn by experience or by picking up a book.

I had some help from my family getting started, and my first job was building PCs for a computer store. By the time I was 22 I was making 40k a year with full bennies and married. While my job didn’t particularly bother me, wasn’t difficult I left because it was boring. I’ve found that corporate America bores me to tears, so I don’t want to work in it. I don’t like the lack of a communal environment (replaceable parts). I am extremely skilled in that I can do tech for Macs and PCs, both workstations and servers. I have done design jobs and know Photoshop and other graphics apps as well as anyone I’ve ever met. I COULD do web design if I chose to apply myself to it, but I just simply DO NOT WANT to. So what I do is freelance tech support where I can work a minimum number of hours a week and charging between $40-100 an hour I can make enough money to survive for two weeks in a single day if I’m fortunate. This facillitates other things that I want to do.

I think Maoism and Stalinism are Fascism defined as communism, though I don’t see how they resemble communism in ANY way shape or form. I think it’s just remnants of cold war propaganda that fears communism. Communism DOES in fact work. Hippy communes have existed for years as well as Kibbutzes in Israel. Communism is basic tribalism, it is the way many societies have existed for millenia. It merely means a society where people “share”.

So on to my original point, I have been accused of laziness because I have complained about not having money and people tell me that if I worked harder I would have more money. Sometimes I am not working all that hard, but I choose to take time off to do spiritual work for myself, or to do other things that do not pay me in cash. Last year I made less than 12000 the entire year, but I have worked on building communities around the underground music scene in New York and have been pretty successful. I have a grid of people around me that I can turn to for help, and I exist on this grid if they need to turn to me for help. I work really hard all the time, and I actually tend to LOSE money on my projects more often than I make it, but we’re working to make a communal environment where money is not necessarily required, and money rarely changes hands among us.

Money represents goods and services, but we seem to forget that when there is a sense of entitlement. IE people who have lots of money thinking they “DESERVE” it and others don’t. What about the goods and services that money represents? The disposable Wal-Mart employees, the land that the rich ostensibly ‘own’. Why is it that one person should own massive amounts of land when another owns none and yet they both work equally hard?

I understand that when Bill Gates has billions of dollars, he doesn’t really have billions of dollars, that money represents ownership of a concept called a corporation, this concept then pays employees with that money and that money circulates throughout our economy. If Bill Gates tried to cash out, he would get a mere fraction of what he is purportedly worth because it would devalue Microsoft stock incredibly. And I understand that a CEO must control the wealth of the corporation to facillitate his job. I generally don’t dislike Bill Gates nearly as much as the stereotype of the CEO ie Ken Lay.

However the idea of “deserve” or “have a right to” are specious ideas. To quote Captain Jack Sparrow :wink: “There is only what a man can do, and what a man can’t do.”, which is a might makes right attitude, but in my opinion it’s really the only honest approach to “rights” and entitlement. I personally recognize that if I take a macro view and I benefit the web of people to which I belong to then that web will benefit me back. I look at it as an investment that doesn’t require a deed of ownership. It depends upon the good will of others, but I’ve found that it does actually work out.

What I would attribute this idea to is not some singular source like Calvinism or the Protestant Work Ethic, but merely a disconnection from social community. The desire to watch vapid writers live out dull uninteresting lives through pretty characters on Friends, or even disgusting self-serving uncaring fools on Seinfeld, rather than walk out the door and interact with your own friends, and live your own life with your own stories. We worry about whether our ideas are “original” or not. Who cares? If you’ve never experienced it before then what does it matter if someone else has or not? We make each other feel guilty for being who and what we are, for being “lazy” because we are “poor” and sell the idea that we shouldn’t do it ourselves when we can buy it from someone who did it smarter, and more efficiently than we ever could.

I personally am poor by choice, and see it as a temporary condition, because I am building things that don’t belong to some corporate master and I am trying to do it with no reliance on the government whatsoever, by avoiding looking for government grants.

I do not believe we live in a free-market, so statements like “That’s what occurs in a free-market” don’t seem relevant. There are many levels of protectionism on the state level and the corporate level as well. The death of intellectual property is going to have some far reaching implications that I don’t think people even realize just yet. I think it will be a good thing, it will shatter the illusion of original ideas, and people can stop living off of an idea that their father came up with before they were born. The inequity between the rich and the poor is abundantly clear to me. I don’t see how people can live under the illusion that the rich “earned” their money. The rich “took” their money more often than not. Martha Stewart was ruined for doing the same thing that most of her peers do. (though she’ll never be destitute) When one is in that position it’s almost impossible to NOT know insider information and use it to one’s own advantage. We have Ken Lay stealing from people’s pensions and Enron falls sparking a whole slew of corporate investigation that brought down many corporations, but the people doing the actual stealing seem to be mostly ok, while the employees of the destroyed corporations are left to dip into dwindling unemployment coffers when they thought they had a savings and a pension from their “hard/smart work”.

The system is lies built upon more lies, there is no equity, poor people aren’t lazy, a lot of times the poor are poor because they just don’t play the game as well as the establishment who keeps the rules obscured, ever changing and then tell us that ignorance of them is no excuse. We are required to go into debt immediately to get a generic education just so we can get a job in middle management that requires only 3 months of training with Quickbooks and Excel. People always assume I have a college education because the concept of learning from experience is foreign to them. I learned photoshop in internships and on pirated copies. (I have since gone to put tens of thousands into Adobe’s coffers by legitimizing corporate environments in which I worked though have yet to spend my own money on an Adobe product).

Just why is hard work a virtue anyway? Just because someone else chooses to work hard what does that have to do with me or anyone else anyway? It’s more about the social network than it is about the money. I have a pretty good social network and we use the technology available to us to keep track of our networks, to make it EASIER, so we have to work LESS.

I have opportunities available to me that a lot of people don’t have. Cheaper ski trips because we go as a large group. Lofts where ten people live there that have clubworthy soundsystems, photo studios, dark rooms and projectors. This is all because of the system called “Communism” that doesn’t work. It’s not about working harder, or working smarter, it’s about who you know, it always has been and it always will be. If you get enough people together you can control resources and issue your own currency if you like. People who allow the system to seperate them into seperate boxes so that they are dependent upon it and must work within it’s pre-designed methods will always live the life that they fall into.

Presupposing that “hard work” is a virtue forgets that the machine is there to facilitate the society, not the society there to facilitate the machine. Without the people the machinery has no purpose and ceases to function becoming a piece of the terrain. Without the machinery the people can still go on, and will. The machinery is reducing the quality of life not enhancing it, therefore it doesn’t work simply, it’s malfunctioning and needs an overhaul. Instead of being provided for better by robotics people are put out of work and lose what they used to have. Jobs are sent overseas because it’s much cheaper to have Indians answering the tech support call, but what happens when there are no more jobs here? Who is buying the goods that the companies who sent their work to India are manufacturing? Why should I support a federal government that has 500,000,000,000 to spend on Offensive military capability calling it “Defense” but not enough to provide food or medical care? I don’t want the government to provide either, but I don’t want it to provide for my defense either, because I don’t think those with the keys are using that power responsibly. THAT is FAR from a free-market. Bush calls it exporting freedom when all I see is foreign people’s trading a local dictator for a foreign one, due to some pretentious assumption that we are more qualified to help them, than the competitor we just removed.

Erek