We accept that because, for the most part, it's true.
A poor person isn't responsible for the hollowing out of the economy through increased productivity, and the switch to lower paid service jobs over well paying service and industrial jobs. There's only so much adapting you can do to this, and how much your own power to change the world exists.
And to be honest, a lot of people here really coasted on their parent's wealth and social capital to get where they are. If you are poor here, it was more in the ways an english lord can be poor; they have plenty of capital, connections, and a stable life, they just made mistakes with money. If you don't have any of that, it's another world entirely.
There but for the grace of god go I.
If everyone treated everyone else in this way, the world and especially this country (USA) would be a better place.
I've been reasonably successful in life. I chose solid parents (race, economic class, locale), an unexceptional gender and sexual orientation, a high functioning brain, a performant body, a fully paid-for education at a top institution.
Yes, that's sarcasm. I feel I just got really f'ing lucky. My luck didn't end in school. I managed to build and sell several technology ventures in several industries. I picked lucky friends with good connections. I have seen much better ideas than the ones I built fail, and also seen much worse ideas make vastly more than I ever have.
I have attributed almost all of my success to the luck of my circumstances. Yes, I'm sure I have worked to influence this in many ways, but the outcomes were not predictable and indeed in several cases were not even predicted by me when I was working toward them! There are many people I can and have named who have contributed to my success, but my having found them and my path does not smack of precognition but really of a lucky drunken walk.
I always try to remember that, "There but for the grace of god go I." (I'm an atheist, sorry if I offend with the capitalization.) This is reflected in my behavior in numerous ways. I am a progressive liberal. I give outsize tips, especially to service personnel who make my life nicer (e.g., the dinner delivery person on a cold, rainy night). I always try to have a smile for people who have to deal with customers (like the airline agent after your flight is cancelled). I participate in civic programs to help transport people who need medical treatment. I vote for politicians who will help everyone regardless of their ability or willingness to help themselves, even at the cost of higher taxes.
We have a quite unequal economy. We have poorly educated fellow citizens and humans. We have many challenges facing us as a society. The USA is the richest country in the history of the world (I think). I can't believe we still allow these things to exist, when it would take so little (relatively speaking) from so few (relatively speaking) to make things so tangibly better for so many.
A family member of mine lived a fairly poor life, and both of his parents passed away by the time he was 15, leaving him to take care of his three younger siblings while living with an uncle that could be outright emotionally abusive. He did good in high school in hopes that an opportunity would present itself, cashed in on his good GPA/ACT score, and pursued a growing field where he knew the pay was survivable (major in computer science). His backup plan was an apprenticeship with the IBEW (linemen eat good in our area), but it never came down to it. He was self-supporting by the time he was 19, and pulling $22 an hour by the time he was 20 doing full time embedded development.
I have other friends who have had to do the same. It takes a lot to be entirely, completely, and totally without options. Whether or not you like your options, or think you're above them, is a different story.
You are more likely to be poor as an adult if you grew up in a poor household.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poo...
"You are more likely to be poor as an adult if you grew up in a poor household."
How can you also agree with:
"the only thing standing between a poor person and the life of their dreams is their own decisions, their own choices, and their own failures."
Clearly personal responsibility plays a role, but to deny outside influence and put the entire burden of poverty on choice is a bit much.
I think that the article actually brings up one of the largest points - being poor is expensive. It's hard to move when you don't have the money to put down a deposit, even if that is the long term cheaper option. Being poor can force your hand into a lot of economically bad decisions.
Because IQ is largely heritable, and the best indicator of your income and health later in life is your IQ. It's not that growing up in a poor household makes you poor - it's that you're going to be poor for the same reason your parents were poor.
How would you live if you received $735 a month to cover rent, food, clothing, transportation, prescriptions, etc.? I can tell you from seeing it thousands of times; you would have a few clothes and by that I mean two to three outfits, likely no winter coat, one set of shoes, you would have a few personal luxuries (likely books or the truly lucky a DVD). You would have a toothbrush but probably cannot afford toothpaste, you eat the cheapest food around, you have furniture that is given to you and likely in shambles, you buy only generic stuff and you water down your shampoo, soap to make it last longer. You wash your clothes only after wearing them 2 times. You are virtually a prisoner in your home because you cannot afford bus fare to go anywhere and you have nowhere to go because you have no real friends. You never celebrate a birthday or Christmas because it is just another depressing day in a lonely existence. Your money, what little you have, is stolen from you either outright or you are talked into "helping" someone whose sole intent is to get your money and run.
Get the picture.....people who have very low IQs and have a birth injury have zero chances of a good life and yes, they are poor. They are dirt poor. The very few who still have involved family have parents who are stressed beyond what anybody should be because they have no idea what will happen to their child when they die. Who will house them, prepare their food and in some cases feed them, ensure they take a bath, have clothes to wear, pay the utilities, etc.? Talk to a parent and I assure you it'll be a common expression that their greatest prayer is that they outlive their child even though no parent should have to bury a child. They know that their child is going to be relegated to a group home with no sense of individuality and likely become a victim of abuse.
Just saying, there are more than 1.5 million people in the US alone with a diagnosis of mental retardation. These people are destined to be poor forever because in order to get their $735 they can never have assets over $2,000. With no job and no hope of one, families cannot even gift a loved on with MR anything that would put them at risk of losing the health benefits they receive along with their $735. While a portion would gladly forgo the $735, they cannot do so because their loved one would have zero health insurance.
For example, an acquaintance of mine got a pay increase by getting a new three month contract job (in the $30,000 a year range, no heath insurance included). Before starting work, she traded in her car for a new Toyota Camery on a five year loan with 7% interest.
This was a terrible decision. She's taking home less now money now then she was with a lower paying job. She can barely make the payments. If she sells the car, she loses thousands of dollars - if she could even sell it. And if this job doesn't renew, then she's really sunk.
Importantly, it doesn't matter at if her parents were rich or poor. There were plenty of other options. If you can learn about the other options, and spend wisely, you do better.
You guys are trying to separate out these decisions you make from your upbringing, which is impossible. The decisions you have made, good and bad, were in some way influenced by your upbringing. Maybe you had a poorer education because your parents couldn't cherry pick a neighborhood with great schools. Maybe you had bad influences in the poor neighborhood because of the higher crime. These decisions aren't made in a vacuum, and pretending that your upbringing has no influence over your choices is just wrong.
We need to focus on education and adjustment, and not on any outside influence. Frankly, I do believe that life can really make things hard, but by focusing on things within our control we can make progress rather than repeating the cycle.
I can make lousy economic decisions because I'm not poor. When I mess up, I can say "oops", and not worry much about the money.
Poor people don't have that luxury. Sure, some also make lousy decisions. But most have to be very careful with their money, because they don't have much.
For example, is it more worthwhile to fix the car, get dental work done, or feed the children?
That's the sort of calculation I never want to worry about, but which poor people have to consider all the time.
There are also plenty of decisions that seem harmless enough(everyone else is doing them) that carry life long consequences.
And choosing the wrong role models at certain points in your life can have life long consequences.
Except those decisions have been influenced by you growing up in poverty, which you've already pointed out.
It is raining outside. I go outside without a coat and get wet. I tell you its ok to go outside without a coat, so you come outside without wearing a coat. Is it my fault that you are wet, or your own?
I would say that you made the decision, even if it was influenced by me. Do you not agree?
How is any of this your fault? You're still never going to get out of debt. The American system is rigged so that you can make all the right moves and still lose. That's the problem with the system. Not that it's unfair, or that someone doesn't have the same opportunities.
I'm a perfect example of someone who came from nothing and has worked myself into wealth (or at least into a life where I'm not struggling). I made most of the right choices, but it still required immense amounts of luck and hard work. All the hard work does is set you up to be able to take advantage of the hard work.
If we really want to solve the problem of poverty without disincentivizing or punishing hard work it will require that it's easier to climb financial classes. What we have in place now only benefits those at the top and essentially pulls all the ladders up from the bottom. Our system is broken and there isn't a simple solution. It requires community reinvestment, appropriately funded community initiatives, and excellent leadership both at the state and federal levels.
Here's an explanation from Terry Pratchett:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Rubbish. Whoever thinks that Good Leather Boots Last Years and Years never wore leather boots for years and years.
Rich also have access to time saving measures poor can only dream of... (unless they somehow cooperate, and that gets harder every day they are poor and cannot afford time or money to establish connections.)
First of all, what if you were to tell a young child the same thing, who is at fault now?
Let's say you have a father who doesn't value education at all. By the time you're in middle school you've already been conditioned to think education is unimportant and a waste of time. That's the type of influence I'm talking about, and it's not as simple as walking away from that.
Being conditioned to believe something is not the same as being unable to form your own conclusions. Yes I agree parents have a huge influence on their children's values. However, at some point an adult must take ownership of their own life and their own values.
- as a consequence of suburbanization and racial practices like redlining, poor people live in poor neighborhoods. In many places, schools are funded by local taxes, so poor neighborhoods get less school funding, resulting in a poorer education
- those racial practices kept many black families from access to federally backed mortgages and access to properties in more prosperous neighborhoods. This made housing more expensive for black families, and reduced equity buildup that could be used to help the next generation. This, on top of earlier Jim Crow restrictions and long-term general discrimination against blacks, has reduced the upward economic mobility of poor black families.
- racism embedded in the legal system has resulted in a higher relative percentage of black men in jail, relative to white. As one example, the War on Drugs was started in part because blacks and hippies used heroin and marijuana, respectively, and Nixon considered them his enemies. This is part of the long-term change, called the Southern Strategy, for Republicans to gain support from those who didn't like the social changes, including the Civil Rights movement.
- the owners of capital have made it increasingly hard for workers to make a good living. This includes passing laws like so-called "right to work" (for less) which make it harder to unionize and exercise the collective bargaining power that would be possible in a free labor market. As Piketty argued in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability." A consequence of this is that the poor stay poor.
- A family which has little money may not have a long-term stability in housing or food. For example, children may have to rotate among friends and family for a place to stay, or may not have enough food to eat. Long-term stress has a negative effect on one's life.
Much has been written on this topic, with a large number of studies. Since you apparently don't seem to know much of the topic to give even a hint of a counter-argument, perhaps you don't know enough to simply write "it's true".
The problem isn't that I haven't looked at these explanations. It's that they're more ideological than factual in nature, wouldn't explain intergenerational poverty, or (as in the case of incarceration) just plain wrong. What you perceive as ignorance on my part is simply a reflection of things you "know" that aren't true.
My point about the lack of equity comes from Richard Rothstein's “The Color of Law”, concerning how the systemic discrimination against black people in housing before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 contributes to the continued lack of wealth among black people today. How is his thesis incorrect?
Here's part of the argument, quoted from http://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-... :
> Today African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of average white incomes. But African-American wealth is about 5 percent of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a 60 percent income ratio and a 5 percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.
> African-American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and '50s and even into the '60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained. So ... the Daly City development south of San Francisco or Levittown or any of the others in between across the country, those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with an FHA or VA mortgage. African-Americans were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. Today those homes sell for $300,000 [or] $400,000 at the minimum, six, eight times national median income. ...
> So in 1968 we passed the Fair Housing Act that said, in effect, "OK, African-Americans, you're now free to buy homes in Daly City or Levittown" ... but it's an empty promise because those homes are no longer affordable to the families that could've afforded them when whites were buying into those suburbs and gaining the equity and the wealth that followed from that.
> The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children. They're able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African-Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.
My smartest choice was giving computer science a second chance after shortly "following my dreams" and signing up for anthropology one semester. But even that was luck, because no one was advising me on the impact it would have on my life.
I wonder what the data would look like for the various strata in the American society.