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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The OP's point is that funding is not the issue.

You are correct to note that the real problem is that the poor are more likely to be bad people in general, and that they will drag down other poor folks. Poor people are likely to be bad parents (as you note) and are far more likely than non-poor people to engage in violence against friends, relatives and neighbors. No one disputes this.

The point is that it's not economics keeping people from the sciences.

(Here's some numbers on violence among poor people as compared to non-poor people: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf )

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Does poverty create "bad people" or do "bad people" end up in poverty?

That seems like a question that you would need answered before you can assert that "it's not economics keeping people from the sciences."

That's easily answerable.

First, we can look at the past or other countries. Either the US 1950's or the top 10% of India consists of people who live in what we call "poverty" in 2016 USA.

Second, we can take good people, drop them into poverty, and watch what happens. For example, take an upper middle class 22 year old, drop them into the poverty of graduate school, and check whether they go bad.

Both of these are ways of letting the people vary, but holding the economic stimulus constant.

From what I've seen, both groups are extremely reluctant to engage in violence. When I was in grad school, even the 10'th year graduate students ("lifers") did not start robbing people or beating their wives! Also, very interestingly, both groups rarely stay poor for long when placed in the US.

Grad students have job security, health insurance, physical security, and good job prospects upon graduation. It's not really a fair comparison to, say, a part time minimum wage job at home depot, even if the take-home pay is similar. The tax ramifications of graduate school are usually pretty good too, so the money goes further than the salary numbers would indicate.

There's also a big difference between being low paid in a generally high paid cultural group vs being in a generally low paid cultural group, in terms of social safety net and psychological climate.

In terms of goods and services consumed, grad school was definitely comparable to poverty. Insofar as it differs it's by perhaps a few thousand dollars/year.

Are you suggesting that if we took poor Americans, but gave them health care an extra couple of thousand $/year, that they would suddenly reduce their crime levels to that of graduate students? I feel like this can be tested by comparing the generosity of various state-level welfare programs.

Or again, by looking it (very poor) upper class Indians.

There's also a big difference between being low paid in a generally high paid cultural group vs being in a generally low paid cultural group, in terms of social safety net and psychological climate.

If you switch on showdead you'll see that in my now flagged post, we are discussing whether economics causes poor people to become "bad people". You might be right that psychology does, but that's a totally different claim.

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