"If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come."
I know lots of people - the working poor - who are doing a hell of a lot more than nothing, and poverty still comes.
I know lots of people - the working poor - who are doing a hell of a lot more than nothing, and poverty still comes.
Just wondering--do you really know "lots of people" who are among the "working poor"?
I come from Appalachia and have known--genuinely, no bullshit here--lots of "working poor" and can't honestly say that there was some systematic conspiracy to hold them down, rough them up, prevent them from rising, etc.
Fact is: There are a lot of people living in the lap of luxury--luxury measured by creature comforts--who in any other age would be lucky, yes lucky, to spend 12 hours a day behind a horse's ass.
The real reason for people staying in the lower ranks is exactly what we already know: They have some dysfunction. Perhaps a lack of intelligence, or an excess of impulse, or simply a chronic inability to show up to work on time. The latter might suprise you, as it hardly matters if programmers get up at 8 or 9 or 10, but in low-end jobs, one of the big problems among "trouble employees" is simply their unwillingness to follow a schedule. Who's to blame?
This is why politics here is dangerous.
Yes, there are nut jobs. But, yes, you are engaged in a fallacious generalization. It's also called a prejudice. But here's a softer restatement of what you said for those of us who at least think we're not nut jobs:
"At the same time, many people (we'll call them "fellow humans") claim that there is sometimes wealth and poverty without agency and that those with means should help those without means, particularly in cases without agency or in cases with resistant intertia, because of the direct or indirect causal relationship between the source of the means and the reduced or diminished means of those living in or near poverty. This attitude is either selfish or altruistic on an individual level depending on the means of the proponent of this attitude and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (some fellow humans tend to be extreme when you largely ignore fellow humans who do not fit your definition of extreme)."
How was that? I don't assume that all "right-wingers" like you might be are extreme. I'm related to many of them, friends with many of them. They have good ideas and a different opinion on fairness and entitlement. It's possible that everyone's partially right and it's a good idea to mingle more often.
By the same token, dysfunctional rich kids into drugs and other methods of squandering wealth are so common that they're a cliche. Maybe their emotionally distant parents are to blame too.
Regardless of how they got there, at some point you have to just acknowledge that some people have useful survival skills for getting ahead in society, and some do not. Also, that virtually anyone who isn't actually mentally retarded has some ability to develop those skills if they want to strongly enough.
This leaves you the option of modeling these skills as obtainable, which means that you create incentives for people to get their sh*t together, and the option of modeling these skills as innate and beyond anyone's control, which means that you just support people who drew the short straw and don't bother with incentives.
I think it's pretty clear which of these models contributes to wealth gain over time and which contributes to welfare dependency.
It's one thing to say that "We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them." It's another thing entirely to deny that there are no structural, sociological barriers to escaping poverty.
People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth.
Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether. Equating them is usually rhetorical hyperbole and if taken seriously, leads to some very wrong conclusions.
Outlying cases are irrelevant. Of course people overcome the odds in both directions. But given equal driving ability, the Ferrari will always win the race, take the prize money, and buy their children a Ferrari.
>>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth.<<
What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family. Warren Buffet was born to a stockbroker-turned-Congressman, so definitely at least upper middle class. Carlos Slim Helu has been quoted saying "I came from a wealthy family. I have always had money."
Seems the top three wealth-generators in the world were born wealthy. They attended Harvard, Columbia, and the university consistently ranked the best in Latin America, respectively.
The only thing I'm astonished at is that there are people who have so little understanding of how the world works that they think poverty and wealth are not both self-perpetuating.
Wealth does tend to perpetuate itself, as in the above example, but this is hardly lamentable. And "poverty perpetuates itself" is basically a bombastic way of saying "lack of wealth doesn't, in and of itself, create more wealth", which is natural and could never be otherwise.
Of course, that's if we ignore the psychological component of it. But what can you do about that? Go into people's homes and tell them to stop being such feckless idiots?
What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family."
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates made more cash than he created wealth. Those are orthogonal concepts. It's possible to make cash without creating wealth or indeed, destroying it (ex: "successful" spammer that destroys the value of email). It's also possible to create lots of wealth without making money (the example is left as an exercise for the reader).
The spammer created value to the companies advertising and more importantly created a whole market for spam filtering solutions (the same way virus writers created a huge anti-virus market, to the extent that some wonder if a lot of viruses are not actually written the AV vendors themselves).
Well. Let's say you have a company M that creates X wealth and has a monopoly. And then you have companies A, B, C, D, E and F that create 7x wealth but are driven out of the market by M's monopolistic practices. M indeed creates wealth, but the market is actually getting less than it would without it. It might not be called stealing, but I feel robbed.
Similarly, I'm pretty sure the value the spammer is creating for the companies they advertise for is largely offset by the value it's destroying for the masses of people they advertise to. Besides, the kind of "products" sold by "companies" via spammers is not exactly friendly neighborhood or good quality (if there's even an actual product at all).
edit: "Typically when somebody pays you for something you did, it's because they'd rather have your service or product than the cash they paid for it."
Sure, but maybe there's another service/product that could give you much more for the same money but you don't know about it because of propaganda (marketing, FUD) or simply because the company has been driven out of the market unfairly, as I said earlier.
A better scenario is the "creative destruction" when one industry is displaced but society overall benefits, i.e. cars over horses, Wikipedia over Encarta over Britannica, etc.
I must have read wrong. You're saying spammers are not quite bad?...
"A better scenario is the "creative destruction" when one industry is displaced but society overall benefits, i.e. cars over horses, Wikipedia over Encarta over Britannica, etc."
The new industry replaces the old one because it creates more value than the old one, no? I think car factories create more value than stables...
Also, in the monopoly case it's a company that hampers global progress to protect its own interests. I like to seek win-win scenarios so that doesn't resonate well with me.
Habitat for Humanity comes to mind.
Love 'em or hate 'em, his company is one of the most significant of modern times. He generated lots of wealth.
I had a general idea of how many belong to the former and latter categories, so I'm not astonished. The statistical data supports my point.
http://www.economicmobility.org/
>>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth.
This isn't just about starting off with wealth. My Ferrari metaphor is more about having the repertoire of values and skills needed to become wealthy in a place like the U.S. rather than simply being endowed with money. You're vastly more likely to do well in life if you have parents who spend time with you teaching you to read, making sure you do your homework, provide emotional support, and instill values of hard work and success than you are if you have parents, a parent, or no parents who do none of those things.
The late John Ogbu studied why the children of affluent African American parents who went to excellent schools were much more likely to underperform academically relative to their peers, and discovered that parental disengagement was a major factor.
http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/38
Sometimes people manage to acquire the necessary values and thus the skills necessary to do well, despite starting off in adverse conditions. But they're the exceptions, and were psychologically and sociologically positioned to be that way. So unfortunately they can't be used as examples demonstrating that "anybody" can overcome adversity.
>>Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether. Equating them is usually rhetorical hyperbole and if taken seriously, leads to some very wrong conclusions.
It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it? And I never equated slavery and poverty[1]: I used slavery as an obvious example of how you can have the deck overwhelmingly stacked against you.
1. I'm resisting the urge to say, "Anyone who says or implies that I equated them is themselves engaging in rhetorical hyperbole." :)
It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it?
What I really wanted to drive home is that slaves are neither poor nor rich. These concepts are based on the ownership of property. Slaves are property and are forbidden to own property. Within the framework of the law, it is possible to escape poverty, not so with slavery. When politicians say that the poor are "slaves" to the rich or that poverty is a new kind of slavery, its a clean miss and usually indicates a rather ugly agenda hiding beneath.