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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

People like us that used to care just got fatigued out on these issues. We're never given the full story. The right doesn't cover these topics, and the left exaggerates and manipulates them. Leaving a large gap of information about causes and effects both long term and short term. My relatives came to America with little to nothing, they were dirt poor back home, and dirt poor when they moved here. Lived in a poor neighborhood and the first thing they did was get the hell out of there. Reason: the lack of civility of the people living there. Not all poor people are "uncivilized" but not all poor people are "just unfortunately people trying their best" either. Too many of them are where they are for a reason, defective characteristics. And it seems no one wants to be honest about that.

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I grew up poor. I still am really. This is entirely true. Now that is not to say that it is entirely their fault, if your parents are two minimum wage, alcoholic, chain smokers who had kids at 16 what example do you have to emulate?

I think we do education all wrong. 12 years of education should leave you in a position to feed and house yourself. If it can't do that, why bother with it? I say more trade schools, less focus on college prep.

Example:

I bought a house that is essentially right on the line between the wealthy and poor areas in my town. If you go to the Wallmart on the poor side the carts are just left everywhere but the Wegmans on the wealthy side the patrons bother to put them away.

"Civility" is learned behavior, and an unending history of government-imposed racial and economic segregation is bound to result in a gap in learned behaviors. Maybe we should stop allowing our governments to create exclusive neighborhoods for the wealthy. The market has no power to exclude cheaper homes.

Uh, we're from eastern Europe where everyone in the country is the same ethnicity. We had the extreme rich and the extreme poor and we all behaved. Money and civility are two different things. In fact we had communism which followed and really kept people out of opportunities. We didn't walk around acting like rednecks or gangsters. Same as in the USA 50 years ago. When blacks and whites used different bathrooms, and racial segregation was at its peak, still both black and white communities dressed well to go to church, authority was more respected, the family stayed in tact, sex before marriage was taboo. Now despite "integration and desegregation" culture and morality has rotted out society.

Long story short, I don't agree with "government is the problem, government is the solution". Low culture and standards are the problem. High culture and standards are the solution. Regardless of neighborhood or income.

America is not integrated. I agree culture and standards are the solution. Those do not spread easily in segregated societies.

Culture & standards were higher during segregation, we are more integrated than we were in the past and the culture rot is even worse. Your narrative that race and separation has everything to do with it is incorrect.

Any citation on poor people being poor because they have "defective characteristics"? That is a little unsettling, especially if you start to explore the demographics of poverty...

My perspective: I moved to the States from an Eastern European country in the early 90's. We lived in a public housing project for about two years, before my parents saved enough money to move to the suburbs. What I remember: there was constant fighting, drug dealing, and public alcohol consumption; our apartment was broken into twice, my father was mugged once; there was trash and filth everywhere and people blasted music well into the night; very few people, sans my parents and other immigrants like them, had actual wage-paying jobs. There was just a general and very palpable feeling of social and moral decay.

The behaviors that I witnessed, that my parents witnessed, cannot be explained economically, because the immigrant families that lived there (Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and some Russians) simply didn't exhibit these same "defective characteristics" or behaviors, even though we were just as poor (and learning a new language) - it was almost exclusively from the native population that had lived there before we arrived.

This indicates that the problem is either cultural, or something else. How do you fix the culture? That I don't know.

That's because the words "uncivilized" and "defective characteristics" are words tied to cultural, social, and moral norms that vary from person to person, so it's hard to have a quality discussion along those lines. In my book there are "uncivilized" and "defective characteristic" people among all sorts of income lines (and vice versa), up to and including the very rich.

I will say that I do kind of get what you mean (in that there may be unique problems with concentrated poverty that hinder mobility -- as a theoretical, for instance, if crime was a much bigger problem in impoverished areas, that definitely would be of concern). But too much of the low quality articles written on poverty have a high tendency to fall back on stereotype... we must be careful to be more data oriented.

Personally, I don't think this story was one of those political type stories you often see on this type of subject that fall back on well-worn tropes. This was a study that simply tried to examine whether subsidized housing helps out future household earnings. For many groups, it did. For a few groups, it didn't. In light of the issues with social mobility in America at present, I didn't consider the article that low quality personally.

The original study probably would have been a fair bit more enlightening and hopefully had a much more thorough analysis: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

But unfortunately it's behind a paywall. :|

I would guess they mean rule following, being considerate of others, self control, the sorts of things that can help you succeed in society.

But yeah, specific meaning varies from person to person, and culture to culture.

Thats because there is nothing to be honest about. The obvious question become what reason are you talking about. How do you objectively define defective characteristics which cant be referensed to culture, upbringing etc without being able to point to some sort of mental illnes?

You don't think: laziness, anger management problems, party culture, pump & dumping women, being chronically late, not taking care of your kids, beating women and children, being on welfare with 3 kids and having a front yard full of trash, not caring about grades or good behavior. You don't think those things are defective characteristics? If you live a nice neighborhood most of your life you might not get it. When you mix with these people, work with them like I have you start to realize why they are where they are in life.

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