Frankly I'm surprised the effect was so small considering that the industries hit hardest by covid employ a heck of a lot of people who are near the poverty line to begin with. I would expect all those people to be pushed to the other side of the line resulting in a much more dramatic increase in the poverty rate.
Only because of the moratorium on evictions, which is deferring a lot of financial pain till later, and thereby making today's numbers look a lot better than they are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/u-s-house...
Those of us with stable housing take a lot of things for granted.
“I’ll just shower at the gym.” Turns a shower from a 20-minute operation to more than an hour.
Food storage and preparation.
Clothing storage, care, and maintenance.
Not to mention that getting homeless in the first place happens because of lack of resources (or poor allocation of barely sufficient resources).
Then on top of that, an eviction on your credit report makes it harder to find a new place.
And finding a place is hard and time-consuming. Not even taking into account the deposits and other costs.
Or you could end up homeless/couch surfing and that is also very difficult for staying employed.
While there will be companies that choose to "work American", I'm sure, much like the auto industry in the 70's and 80's moving manufacturing to Mexico and importing to America while maintaining the monichre of "an American company" like Ford and Chevrolet, shareholders will demand costs be kept down. There are no shipping costs on digital goods =/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
This is a gross oversimplification, but I think the takeaway is it's ok to have spaces for both discussions.
I'd also add that both discussions are happening concurrently. The race issue is big right now, but economic justice is still a central topic. Occupy was a good example even if not a well organized one.
My guess is that any attempt to reframe away from race, towards social class, would be strongly opposed by key interests. That makes it very difficult to get into the conversation, and creates infighting between marginalized groups.
So maybe it turns out this sociology/governance stuff is more complicated than my engineers bias wants to admit. How do you make a decision when the complexity makes prediction useless?
My suggestion is that you can start with what the demographic in question cares about. Then look sincerely at if what you're trying to do actually addresses those real, sincere, valid concerns in a way that's comprehensible to a relatively ignorant person who is perhaps justifiably suspicious of being tricked.
A genuine question of my own: what has planted this worry in your mind? What tenor do you speak of? The demographics of the US mean that any policy that POC want to enact has to also be supported by enormous numbers of white people; that POC-friendly policies have ever passed is evidence that working with white people is par for the course.
To attempt to answer your original question, it depends on what you mean by "join".
The simplest answer is to bring it back around to class and recognize the shared fight against intergenerational poverty: support social programs that disproportionately benefit the poor of all races e.g. a livable minimum wage, expanded worker protections, public healthcare, etc.
If what you mean instead is to start a conversation about the unique ways in which poor whites are disadvantaged, well that's fertile ground but it also requires acknowledging that whites and poor whites have schismed into, effectively, entirely different races (they don't intermarry, they don't socialize together, they hold different values, have different cultural touchstones, etc). That's a difficult conversation to have, and you're going to find a lot of resistance from plenty of poor whites who still want to associate their identities with a holistic "whiteness" that they still long to be a part of. But someone has to start the conversation, even if it's uncomfortable, because the alternative is that the powers-that-be continue to wield that longing as an instrument by which to motivate poor whites to vote against the social programs that would benefit them.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/03/best-whit...
* https://www.news24.com/news24/columnists/melanieverwoerd/mel...
* https://3downnation.com/2020/06/02/dear-white-people-its-tim...
* https://medium.com/i-taught-the-law/shut-up-white-people-950...
* https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-11/a-time-to-spea...
* https://select.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2020-06-09-dear-white-p...
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-long...
I'm not certain what you're asking or what you mean by "planted." The word "planted" implies that an idea with no basis in reality was put into this person's head. Seems like a strange way to word it if you're asking that question in good faith.
Anyway, I'm not speaking for the person you responded to, my point here is simply that there are people with loud enough voices saying "white people" should "shut up." That is what I see as part of the current tenor, which would mean that some white people aren't going to bother engaging in this.
"I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms."
It sounds like you have answered the above poster's question about how to join in: by "accept[ing] the existence of structural racism and its symptoms".
> The word "planted" implies that an idea with no basis in reality was put into this person's head.
As I explain in my post, it cannot have basis in reality due to the provable existence of democratic decisions in favor of POC that have not merely included white voters, but often were comprised of a majority of white voters.
To say that someone is telling whites to "shut up" is to misrepresent your own cited headlines: "shut up and listen". If someone wants you to listen, it is self-evident that they want your help. You don't ask someone to listen if you don't care what they think or what they do. If someone in need asks another for help, the very first thing they will want to do is have the other person listen to what they need. And if someone is telling someone else to shut up so they can ask for help, that suggests that they think their cry for help is being drowned out.
If someone wants you to listen, it is self-evident that they want your help
Ah, if only it was actually about empathizing and showing respect. Wouldn't that be something.
My prejudices, if you insist on playing that card, come from listening carefully to exactly the people who demand I shut up and listen. I actually go to great lengths to understand their point of view. Before I judge them.
The whole idea of reframing around class is to say "I know you think race is the primary differentiator, but I really think it's class/money/power". That is a negation of BLM, whose purpose is to bring attention to black Americans' rate of being murdered by police.
Remember the response to "All Lives Matter"? (Putting aside the bad faith actors), a number of people think police violence in general should be the #1 priority. The responses are often, "yes, all lives matter - but right now we're talking about black lives." Remember the cancer-walk comparison? If you show up to a breast cancer walk, trying to talk about prostate cancer, you're being a jerk. (The analogy here would be to show up to the breast cancer walk talking about how it's not even about cancer - all diseases need more awareness.)
It's very complicated. Attention is a limited thing, and while it'd be great if we could care about BLM and poor whites and addicts and immigrants, that doesn't seem to be how the public's collection attention works. Reframing the problem might be a better solution, but I don't think progressives would be receptive towards the reframe.
Thanks for the thought provoking discussion. I personally agree with your statement that it's really about the "shared fight against intergenerational poverty", but I'm not brave enough to try and lead the reframe because I think both sides would reject it. I think this route would address many of the core issues that have led to the Trumpworld voters, who don't care what the stance is as long as someone is fighting for them.
'The narrative' doesn't unconditionally control what people do. There are also multiple narratives out there and people get to subscribe to the one they want. If someone builds up an income-based coalition then the idea of 'systemic racial injustice' will fade away in favour of looking for more money.
The template for a movement is out there, and we're not as divided as you think. Just ignore academics and journalists lol.
That said, I think your class-based paradigm is just as badly flawed.
I would instead blame all the elites that profit from the unfortunate but very real and universal human tendency towards racial prejudice. It is the oldest trick in the book, you identify some sub-group, preferably through something obvious like race, and you blame another groups woes on them. Politicians play that game, the news media plays that game and social networks accidentally machine learn it. It is all obvious and disgusting and treasonous.
Or maybe they just have different values than you want them to, and they aren't voting in terms of race?
Poor whites DO focus on economic issues. That's why Trump was able to promise bringing back manufacturing & coal jobs to win over a large segment of voters.
The problem is that all of the Democrat/liberal/left-wing (whichever label you prefer when discussing the core American political divide) completely denies the existence of poor whites and explicitly rejects helping them. For the past 50 years all of the focus on social justice and structural inequalities have been focused exclusively on the urban poor, racial or sexual minorities, etc.
If you're a poor white kid from a trailer park in West Virginia, you might face all the expected problems - poor education, widespread substance abuse, lack of role models, lack of resources... but there's no college scholarships for you, nobody trying to admit you to their university, nobody trying to hire you or promote you.
I spent 2 years as a social worker in West Virginia. The poor whites I worked with weren't racists and weren't stupid. They were just born into poverty and a system which pretends all whites are privileged oppressors.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/409615-you-are-kept-apart-t...
The upper class needs some way to turn the middle against the lower--otherwise how can they justify their share of the wealth? Currently that way has to do with melanin.
If we can figure out how to leave racism behind, and I surely hope we can, they'll have to find a new way to divide us. I wonder what it'll be.
Upper-class whites are obsessed with race, especially in the last few years.
Every news story - and the news comes from the upper whites - gets twisted into something about race, as in this case. Every tech company, every Hollywood studio, every academic institution are vibrating with energy to find and fight racism; overflowing with programs and policies about race. Hell, even the Oscars can't be won by white guys making movies about white guys any more - it's in the rules!
Here's the evidence https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
To say it's the poor whites who are "thinking in terms of race" too much is utterly absurd. Where's the evidence that they're thinking in terms of race more than the academics or NYT? You'll hear way more about race in a random sample of discussions at the NYT than you possibly could at a NASCAR event.
The people thinking too much in terms of race are the upper-class whites, and they do this to justify their superiority over the lower whites by borrowing morality points from the (in this narrative) victimized non-whites.
The obsession with race by the political class gets lower class whites to lose focus on real reform that would benefit everyone. So instead of saying why can’t poor people afford justice they have their attention shifted on the crimes committed by POC and the need for more cops and harsh penalties and whatnot. Instead of saying we need better pay, better health and child care the focus is on welfare deadbeats. This list goes on.
The focus on a large numbers of issues in the U.S. is about race rather than about class. News media and whatnot fuel this because fear sells. It’s gets more viewers to talk about out of control black kids terrorizing whites than it is to talk about school reform, prison reform, culture reform, etc.
COPS isn't even on the air any more, you know.
These days it's pretty much wall-to-wall "out of control white cops terrorizing black kids". There was a big thing about it last year, as you recall.
Before that there was a thing about "out of control white kids terrorizing a native elder" which turned out to be a total lie as well.
Trying to think of any major news story about "out of control black kids terrorizing whites" in any recent decade. Last I know is the Central Park jogger case from the 1980's.
Edit: Since this got downvoted already, I'll try to clarify? I'm confused by what appears to be the opinion of the poster and asking for clarification so that I can better understand them. If you're going to downvote me, at least be helpful and provide some sort of answer to the question.
Edit: Changed the word agenda to "view of the problem", since it's possible that was being interpreted in a way it wasn't meant.
However, I think the definition of "systemic racism" has changed to mean the existence of a demographic skew in the bottom and top economic quartiles. In other words, as long as "whites" don't makeup an proportionate percentage of the lowest quartile, and "blacks" don't make up a proportionate percentage of the highest quartile, that is, by definition, systemic racism.
In essence, the term no longer represents a critique on equality, but rather a critique on equity of outcomes.
The history of the US is far more rasist then it is classist; and there has been far more social movements along racial lines then class lines.
While we have had (successful) class based movements in the past, there is no class based analog in US history to the civil rights movement, or abolition. Even school children understand what Martin Luther King day is about; most American's couldn't tell you what Labor Day is about.
When there was a global movement for class based solidarity, the US found itself on the other side of the fight. (I'm referring to cold war era communism).
Even if a class based approach makes more sense now; there is a lot of institutional and cultural inertia behind a race based approach.
- Race is immutable, and can't be faked
- Race is linked to genetics (ingroup preference increases YOUR genetic proliferation)
- For millions of years, we've done it this way (there were no class problems in prehistoric times)
The problems associated with poverty and economic affect both minorities and whites. However, racism adds an extra layer of difficulties on top of the more general problems---and poor whites are some of the strongest supporters of this extra layer. Further, racism has been a problem longer than (the current wave of) poverty and economic inequality. (See, for example, the 1950s and 60s when inequality was lower but racism was much stronger.)
Edit: A corollary of this: the "problems associated with poverty and economic affect both minorities and whites" can be seen as a way to distract attention from the very real problems of racism.
Poverty and economic disadvantage of POC are an obvious affect of 100s of years of oppression and has kept generations of Americans in poverty.
POC are more likely to be poor, far less social mobility, less housing opportunities (loan access as an example), hurt by gentrification, lacking quality education and so much more. Over policing + horrendous and an unfair criminal 'justice' system locking up black and brown kids (this chart is so disgusting [1]) and that's if they don't get shot during a traffic stop or selling lose cigarettes.
LGBTQ face similar hurdles, triple down Trans POC who are killed at a shocking rate with no repercussions most people don't care they are disposable in their eyes.
To your example of poor whites supporting this oppression I don't have data but I have seen this in part of my extended family who live in the south. Systemically poor, no social mobility. Despite being dependent on the social safety net they are hardcore MAGA and overtly blame POC and immigrants as the reason they are poor. One uncle (long story family problem trying to get him housed) refuses to live near black people...
You might say that income inequality contributes to disparities in political influence which may cause more longterm poverty, but that link has far too many steps in it (political corruption for example) to say the two are now directly linked
I am living very comfortably but never got a mobile data plan. I find them too expensive for what they are. YMMV.
This is a global phenomenon too (and even more so in other countries).
Uber Driver Instacart Shopper TaskRabbit Redfin sales agent DoorDasher
If someone falls below the point where they can afford the requirements for typical jobs, then they may enter into a spiral where there is no path out of poverty.
There was a great moment of irony in my early career where lacking a job post-college ('08 reccession) I was unable to pay my student loans. 6 months after graduating I received an offer from Sallie Mae to work as an engineer, however due to corporate policy a sallie mae will not employ anyone who is arrears on their student debt.
At this point, owing approximately $2000 and only had $250 to my name which was required for rent, food, and the 18 year old ford escort that I needed to drive to work.
I was able to arrange the money, but ultimately I was within a day of being put out of work for lack of ability to pay a debt. Had this occurred I likely would not have been able to work in software, and in all likelihood the bank may never have gotten their money back on the student loans.
That is a trip straight to the Middle Ages. Look at the following videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7WHKU_UoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Men6iwpLjno
Eastern Europe has some really bad places. IDK if USA is worse, but it would have to try.
Their condition doesn't really depend on the poverty level of the country they live in, but other factors such as cultural and integration issues, not always caused by them.
In short, not a really good example of poverty.
I would argue that multigenerational poverty in contemporary West has always something to do with cultural and integration issues. Plenty of refugees who came with a small bags of personal items have built middle class lives in a generation, even though they were foreign, did not know the language and faced crude racism from primitives.
This might be true if you consider being holed up with your family for the entirety of winter as "free time." Also, these studies always neglect the amount of random work that needed to be done before technology (e.g. fetching water from a well, chopping firewood, weaving baskets, etc).
Unless "centuries ago" means several centuries, in which case maybe it's murkier, the pre-industrial world was different. IIRC hours worked increased in the pre-industrial build-up to the revolution -- perhaps because there was more to buy, and people adjusted to try to buy things, rather than stopping when they had enough to eat.
What is bad is extreme inequality where a lot of people are in poverty. I think most people would agree that poverty is a bad thing that we should try to reduce.
It's quite possible for poverty to decrease and inequality to increase at the same time. The old "a rising tide lifts all boats" analogy. It just means everyone is doing better but the wealthy are seeing more relative gains. If the whole pie is growing, it's easy to see how everyone could get more pie even if it's not distributed equally.
edit If you disagree please state why. Drive by downvotes do not convince me that I'm mistaken, they just lower my opinion of the average HN user.
Now, if you suddenly have a lot more than me, say you have enough to provide for other people in a meaningful way, I start to get concerned. Why? Because you don't just have more than me, you start having power over me. And if I don't stop inequality increasing, that could quickly get to the point that I can't do anything about it. Your power can become absolute, for all practical purposes.
I think humanity has learned culturally, if not genetically, that really bad situations arise if someone has way more than you. Power corrupts and all that, and gross inequality becomes power.
Of course, these days, it might not be "real", meaningful inequality (Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it is wealth tied up in Amazon, mostly, and the US Government has far, far more wealth), but the perception is there, and the perception is enough to trigger concern.
You could probably go further and tie some of that discomfort into competition for mates. If my neighbor had more than me, I might start to worry that he will outcompete me in the market for a mate. I'm not sure this matters as much today - but one can imagine it did for most of human history when communities were much smaller and the majority of men died without leaving offspring behind.
It's an interesting idea, I don't know if there is something to it or not. It's hard to discuss anything involving gender roles these days.
The danger on one side is falling into a sort of hedonic treadmill issue where the poverty level defines a standard of living that is so generous that it ceases to be a measurement of hardship. The danger on the other side is fixing the poverty level at some static level that doesn't take into consideration inflation and other changes to the environment that people actually live their lives in.
It is possible for the people at the bottom to have better housing, better food, better education, and better health, while the people at the top still enjoy a vastly disproportionately greater increase in income and wealth.
With disproportionate gains and different spending priorities, you won't see consistent inflation across all kinds of goods. Because the inflation is concentrated at the top, the people at the bottom won't get priced out of the things they need. They're not getting priced out of anything they couldn't have afforded 20 years ago.
A nice house that cost $100k in 1999 costs $200k today.
A fabulous house that cost $500k in 1999 costs $5,000k today.
My parents bought a home in 1988 for $100k and sold it six years later for $120k. Zillow says it’s worth $590k now. They bought their next home in 1994 for $180k, and it’s now appraised at $650k. This is Sacramento, CA.
By the way, they pay about $3k/year in property taxes, while a new homeowner pays about triple that. If property taxes weren’t kept so artificially low for long time homeowners, I don’t think property prices would have gone up so much.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
Because it's pretty well established that outside of the most abject poverty, relative deprivation is a more significant factor driving experienced disutility than absolute material condition, contrary to the naive assumptions many people make that increasing individual absolute material condition increases individual utility independent of external context.
There are, of course, people who don't believe it works that way, people who don't want it to work that way, and people who don't want other people to believe it works that way because such belief threatens their own advantaged position.
However, it does seem to me that that you still haven't addressed one of the main points you're responding to, that we can have perfect equality where everyone lives as the average person below poverty line today. Would that be a better society considering your arguments?
Well, no, we probably can't. Inequality can be mitigated, but it can’t be eliminated, especially durably.
> Would that be a better society considering your arguments?
That's really an objectively unanswerable question for many reasons. You can't really measure, on more than an ordinal scale, individual utility, or aggregate it, except by interposing non-objective judgements. Would it be better for lots of people currently above the poverty line? Maybe, depends how far below the poverty line the equal society was.
Which data are you talking about? Because on the one hand, yes. On the other hand most of the data I'm aware of is very context- (especially social-situation-) specific. I don't think there is evidence that the simple existence somewhere out there of very wealthy people is upsetting.
It's not over yet! And won't be for a long time. There are a lot of people just scrapping by right now. All it will take is one big financial hit to knock them down into true poverty.
In reality, there are a lot more people than this who are just on the edge of scraping by. Some of their own volition (some people on the edge make $200k+ and it's because of a series of poor decisions), but even more people because the poverty line doesn't even pay for their studio apartment (I see you, California!), much less food or anything else.
However there are also less obvious results given the time domain involved. The problems have followed those retiring out of California's market as other regions follow in the same footsteps.
As an example; the greater Seattle / Puget Sound metro area reached a combination of sprawl / urban growth boundary / natural features (mountains, lakes, the sound) at about the same time that the 2008 recession killed what little development was still occurring.
The price of a very cramped, noisy (poor insulation) apartment in the city without even a parking spot to store the vehicle for anything you're doing outside of the city (E.G. visiting family on a weekend, going hiking, etc) was easily at least 3K (offhand, the last time I looked), and similar units in the suburbs quite far out, if available, were about 1.5K per month.
There might be more rural areas, but those were excluded from my search as the last time I looked they failed even the FCC's definition of broadband (25mbit down, 3mbit up). I suspect any areas out that far with good Internet would still have bad prices.
Failure, yes. Market, no. Local governments will point guns at you if you try to build more housing.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about.