There are urchins who choose not to work and do just fine. It's fairly straightforward to scam Social Security Disability for main income and then collect EBT, food stamps, and get some housing in the projects.
It's not a great life, but it's a living, and there's plenty more help to pay for phone and utilities. If one is wicked, then they can sprinkle in some identity theft or plain old theft to pay for luxuries like a car or the newest iphone!
Work does suck, I can sympathize with wanting to avoid it. And if you're constantly told you'll never make anything of yourself and that you're a perpetual victim from childhood, well that'll beat you down too. I just don't buy the assumption that every impoverished soul is noble.
There are scam artists that stitch the rich tapestry of welfare programs together to make a living. You might choose to look the other way, out of compassion, whereas I choose to look straight at it and call it theft, out of compassion. I am being compassionate (tough love). You are being compassionate (empathy). Both of our voices are important in this discussion.
I actually don't believe you have to sacrifice your belief system to acknowledge there are fraudsters in the system who are a drain on society. Everything I have read about SSD says the fraudulent claims are anywhere between 1% and 25% of the total. I'm willing to accept that as few as 1% of claims are fraudulent, but even 1% would be 106000 out of 10.6 million (2011 numbers), and that's still a ton of fraud just in that one benefit.
I was being sarcastic because I was replying to a person who said that avoiding poverty was simple, all you have to do is get a job.
I don't see what any of your comment has to do with this.
Thus my sarcasm. Escape poverty by making money. It's a miracle!
By the way, your 98% figure is incorrect. The study says that 2% of all Americans who did these three things are in poverty. The vast majority of those people were never in poverty to begin with, so didn't escape it.
70% of Americans who are born poor will die poor. I can't find solid number for how many non-poor Americans will become poor, but given that the poverty rate is about 15%, and 70% of that 15% was born into poverty, we can straightforwardly estimate that about 6% of non-poor Americans become poor.
In other words, the chances of any random poor American escaping poverty are about 30%, while the chances of any random non-poor American avoiding poverty are about 94%.
With 94% of non-poor Americans avoiding poverty, saying that 98% of Americans who do X, Y, and Z escape or avoid poverty is not terribly compelling.
I'm sure that obtaining and maintaining full-time employment really helps people escape from poverty. My point is just that this is not really useful to say, because it's fairly obvious, and because the difficult part is having jobs for poor people to work. Saying that we should help poor people escape poverty by ensuring they can work full-time jobs is like saying we should help put people on the moon by giving them altitude. Yes, it's true, but not really helpful advice.
So much social policy already revolves around jobs that I just don't see why you act like this is some revolutionary idea. The question is not whether we should help poor people work. The question is how.
>The question is not whether we should help poor people work.
You keep repeatedly and intentionally dodging the fact that all three things I listed are symbiotic of one another. Single motherhood is one of the largest contributors to poverty, and it tends to be cyclical/generational as single mothers tend to have children who have children out of wedlock, are more likely to drop out of high school, and as a result have a harder time maintaining employment. And no, I'm not picking on the mothers here, because it takes two people to make a single mother.
>The question is how.
We can stop by not subsidizing poverty producing behaviors while continuing to subsidize or change policy to further subsidize behaviors that don't increase poverty. Increase funding for birth control, decrease funding/subsidies/tax breaks for having children, change middle and high school curriculum to include sociology/life skills for avoiding poverty producing behavior. Determine the efficacy of stricter divorce laws and potentially apply reasonable measures to encourage people to stay married.
Do you have a source for that? As I mentioned, the number I found was 30%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty >For example, one study finds that in a sixteen-year period (1975 to 1991 in the U.S.) only 5% of those in the lower fifth of the income level were still at that level, while 95% transitioned to a higher income category.
Ultimately, I read your point here as poor people can't find work. My immediate counter-argument is that there are tons of high paying jobs in the trades that don't require an advanced degree. So getting a living wage is possible even for poor people.
I know there's a pivot point right here in this counter-argument that we will probably disagree on and that I'd like to explore. You might say, "it takes knowledge and connections and money to get those kinds of jobs". To which I will respond, "there are charities and government retraining and corporate sponsorships for journeymen all begging for solid people to apply themselves and land great jobs". To which you might respond, "these people are shut out, institutional barriers".
So, here's the pivot point I see, and we can go two ways here. This may be too crude and you can refine this, but I frame your "poor people can't find work" argument in a belief system that says there exist class hierarchies in the U.S. that are structured to keep poor people poor and generally keep people from rising. And, also too crude, but I frame my "but there are jobs, and they're well-paying" argument under a world view wherein people don't rise because of a culture of victimhood where they will settle into an impoverished state and accept welfare to get by.
I can't deny the fact that uninformed people won't have the innate ability to identify opportunities, and by-and-large there isn't any cultural crossover between classes any more to help spread the knowledge of opportunities more widely. (See Coming Apart by Charles Murray for a deep study on this.)
But it also cannot be denied that unprotected sex leads to babies, and that condoms are free for the taking, and the pill is basically free if you're poor. Noone can claim ignorance to the fact that sex often leads to babies and babies cost money. So, there must be some culture issue with the lower class as @Consultant32452 was alluding to where poverty is allowed to become multi-generational.
Please don't break off here and zero in on one thing that bugs you about a response. Right now I'd ask you to go back and address @Consultant32452's point that I think was, at its root, a criticism of culture:
> You keep repeatedly and intentionally dodging the fact that all three things I listed are symbiotic of one another. Single motherhood is one of the largest contributors to poverty, and it tends to be cyclical/generational as single mothers tend to have children who have children out of wedlock, are more likely to drop out of high school, and as a result have a harder time maintaining employment. And no, I'm not picking on the mothers here, because it takes two people to make a single mother.
I think @Consultant32452 addressed your open ended "The question is how" directly from his world view. His response might not be sufficient or relevant to you (I don't know, you didn't respond.) Would you please do the same with @Consultant32452's point about single motherhood, and from your world view? I want to understand where your head is at on that.
The discussion of who is at fault for poverty is pointless. We should never tolerate poverty regardless of how it came to be.
The discussion has to be: Can we afford to have poverty?
We need people to be productive members of society. This can be achieved by making good choices easier to make. Making it easier to get back on your feet when you get down...
Health care, mental health, social security are ways to help people become productive members of society.
You can't afford not to help people! You can't afford to tolerate poverty!
> Let politicians, (...) and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class. [0]
It's not saying anyone can get rich. It's not saying poor people are lazy. It's saying these 3 things will have a major, measurable impact on your future and your children's.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
That said, I don't think you're wrong.
Genuinely looking for thoughts on this.
What kind of society have we made for ourselves in the USA where such a thing is true?
Maybe that also helps explain why the US birth rate is below the replacement rate. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-ferti...
It is worse in other countries like Italy though, where one woman has on average about 1.4 children, leading to about a 30% population reduction every generation. Some countries are looking out of desperation to pay people to have kids. Or, of course, increase immigration. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births...
Further, as economic trends change, marriage is becoming less feasible, with women seeing less and less value in a long-term relationship with a man (and vice versa). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are... "The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. ... The researchers give this explanation: Men without well-paying jobs are not seen as marriage material."
Most modern schools are essentially prisons: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids
And they remain mental prisons even at the PhD and postdoc level: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
Why should parents voluntarily send their children to prisons? Why should anyone want to live their lives in a prison if they have alternatives? As NYS Teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto put it: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Many jobs are likely going away with increasing AI, robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, 3D printing, and so on. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ "Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order."
While the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park "Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to them is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself."
So, without necessarily disagreeing with you about the minimum needed for most people to not fall quickly into poverty right now, where do we go from here?
Here are about fifty options to consider of all sorts (both good and bad) I collected about a decade ago (basic income being one of them, but there are many others): http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
It's getting exhausting.
From the Amazon blurb: "Comparing the United States with other market democracies and one state with another, this book offers irrefutable evidence that unequal societies create poor health, more social conflict, and more violence. Richard Wilkinson, a pioneering social scientist, addresses the growing feeling — so common in the United States — that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives. Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, stress creates sickness on the individual and mass level, and overall society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. The evidence he presents is incontrovertible: social and political equality are essential to improve life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference—for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations."
See also: "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal" by Moshe Adler.
From that blurb: "At a time when growing numbers of people are deeply anxious about the workings of our economy—and when our very future as a society is up for grabs—economist Moshe Adler offers a lively and accessible debunking of two elements that make economics the science” of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined"
The only evolutionary justification I can see is that some people who have accumulated assets of some sort (or wannabees of that sort) expect themselves or their children to be sexually advantaged by making everyone else suffer, as a form of amplified Social Darwinism. See for example: "The Mythology of Wealth" https://web.archive.org/web/20101028013317/http://conceptual... "The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" https://web.archive.org/web/20081223191749/http://conceptual...
So, in that sense, perhaps it is meant to be exhausting? As financier Jay Gould is claimed to have said in 1886: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jay_Gould "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
Today, he might say: "I can always hire half of the working class to misinform the other half through social media, schooling, and the press."
Even if such an advantage was even true in the past (ignoring that egalitarian hunter/gatherer tribes had numerous ways of dealing with that issue), in a world of nukes, designer plagues, and autonomous drones (which could get unleashed as society breaks down), such an approach to try to increase relative personal fecundity seems like a very a risky proposition.
Some ideas from the past include reverse dominance by teasing, shunning, and ridicule, encouraging play, and permissive/trusting child rearing. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/ho...