If they're smart, why haven't they found a way out of poverty yet?
I mean, maybe there's some weird outlying cases, but for the most part poverty is caused by shitty decisions. Stupid people make bad decisions and wind up poor.
I mean, maybe there's some weird outlying cases, but for the most part poverty is caused by shitty decisions. Stupid people make bad decisions and wind up poor.
Here's a comic that explains some of the issues: http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
Some other bits and pieces:
- If earning a lot was just a matter of intelligence, you'd have as many people earning $100k coming from ghettos, as from rich neighbourhoods. Because intelligence isn't correlated to the social status of your parents.
- Intelligence isn't knowledge. If you're walking on a path riddled with deadly hidden traps, your intelligence will not help you much. And if you're in a race (and career is a race against other people, and against time), even if you're bright, you'll be left in the dust by people who might not be as smart, but were better prepared by their parents and community.
Those are not the "outlying cases" as you call them. The outlying cases are when someone manages to use his/her intelligence to get over all those challenges and switch into a different social class. A cool book called "Outliers" comes to my mind now. It's one of the classics and I highly recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...
Where did you get this idea? It's not true at all.
If I were a poor child, I'd be really furious on my parents that they didn't use condoms (or another method of contraception) to prevent the suffer that I'd be in from the start.
If you were a poor child, you might not even have been taught or have ever learned the self-awareness necessary to be angry at your parents for such a decision. Plus, I find it hard to believe that you'd have the exact same take on poverty and birth rates were you actually poor, and not simply hypothesizing about what it's like to be poor.
It's tempting to think you're just trolling, but this view seems to be widespread enough that it's worth a serious answer.
It's because of the time value of money. Money now is worth more than money later - and it's extremely non-linear, not only with time but it also varies with the amount you have. So any money you don't have now corresponds to (literally) exponentially more money you won't have in the future, all things being equal. Even a smart person will find this hurdle very difficult, maybe even impossible, to overcome without a large dose of luck.
For example, what do you do if your car breaks down? Obviously you get it fixed and then move on with your life.
Now, what do you do if you're poor and your car breaks down? Assuming we take starving to death off the table, your choices likely boil down to losing your job because you can't travel to it or getting a payday loan at an usurious interest rate. Ironically, if you make the conscientious choice then people on internet message boards will call you lazy, whereas if you make the rational choice then people on internet message boards will call you stupid.
Whatever you choose will suffice to keep you poor for long enough for your car to break down again - which it will, because at no point would you have had enough money to invest in one that won't. Now apply this scenario to absolutely everything, large or small, that you ever have to buy and there is the answer to your question of why the poor haven't found a way out of poverty yet: because being poor is much more expensive than not being poor.