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Comment by funkythingsss | Hacker News Reader

Why is this surprising? Most anti-poverty measures are ineffective. The "war on poverty" has not worked in a single metric. Affirmative action hasn't changed a thing. The only thing that can get you out of poverty is a good family structure, a culture built on performance (Chinese, Indian culture takes this waaaay to far, but it's a start).

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Social Security is an anti-poverty measure, and it's the most successful thing the US government has ever done. Turns out that giving people money is a great way to solve the problem of not having enough money.

It helps old people who otherwise had nothing. But we're also giving money to a lot of people who don't strictly need it, or who had the means to save for their own retirements.

You'll need a lot of citation for that. Also, Affirmative Action is decidedly not an anti-poverty program. It's an anti-bias program. And the comparison to China and India is apples and oranges. Aside from the fact that both countries have hundreds of millions of people in poverty, their success has been in industrializing agrarian societies. America is pretty far past that point. Our levels of absolute poverty (penury) are already near zero.

Giving someone a 200+ point advantage on their SATs based solely on the color of their skin is an anti-bias program now?

That's not really how it works, but I also didn't comment on it's effectiveness, just that it's not anti-poverty. If you're rich and a minority you get the same advantage. The test for eligibility isn't means-based. Hence, not anti-poverty. The intent is to get more minorities into colleges and into jobs. You can argue whether or not that's fair, but it probably works pretty well as intended.

> Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmativ...

Maybe it works as intended as long as you're trying to maximize enrollment in "any colleges", not "best colleges".

It looks like this account is using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, as I've explained at length here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402618

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062

... and plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it.

Would you please (re-)read the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended—that means for intellectual curiosity—from now on?

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