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Comment by djrobstep | Hacker News Reader

The rise of "mindset" and "resilience" is just another chapter in the absurd poverty discourse.

Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money. But rich people don't want that, so we can't do that, and it's largely taboo to even talk about it.

So instead of the real solution, we have to talk about all the fake solutions - education, marriage, mindset, resilience, learning to code. Andrew Yang even said that web3 was the most powerful anti-poverty tool we had.

Anybody who talks about any cure for poverty other than directly giving people in poverty more money is lying to you.

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Why not both? Give people fish and teach them to fish. Why does it have to be one or the other?

Because the first one is extremely simple and all that is needed. That doesn't mean that things like education aren't good - but they aren't required or effective for poverty reduction.

The other fundamental issue is the poverty is most severe for households with non-earning or low earning dependents, such as children, elderly, sick, disabled, and caregivers - simply because the household income needs to be split more ways. No amount of teaching can fix that - only redistributive welfare can.

It's not extremely simple. You have to make money before you can give it away - that's the hard part! (Even if you argue that rich people should be giving away some of their existing high incomes via taxes, that means that these taxes can't be used to fund other good things.) So you need both.

What's hard about it? There's plenty of money to go around already.

You lost me when you said education isn't required and isn't effective for poverty reduction. If you have a society that isn't educated then you have no wealth to take in order to give.

Do you think that giving people money requires banning education? Education is good for many reasons, but it’s not a cure for poverty.

That’s just not true. We’ve done this and it has led to the destruction of the family and further impoverishment of many people. We shouldn’t continue doing things that have failed.

The Moynihan Report explored this in the 1960’s and has predicted where we are today. And although it was related to black Americans at the time it is very easily generalized to everyone.

Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.

> That's just not true. We've done this

I really have to disagree there. We have simply never tried to give people money in ways that, like UBI or the Negative Income Tax, carefully preserve good incentives and thus good overall outcomes while avoiding costly 'red tape' that only lets people fall through the cracks. What little research has been done on more effective arrangements for income redistribution in developed countries has actually shown remarkably positive results. And the evidence in lower-income countries is even more remarkable.

We have too sone this with Welfare. It destroyed generations of people.

The idea that when doing something harmful we should have done it bigger is absurd. People need meaningful lives. Giving them a bag of money doesn’t do that and it makes them dependent.

Give people skills and self empowerment. Not free money.

Making children live in deprivation because their parents had bad luck or made a mistake doesn't create meaning.

It's kind of silly that there is so much discussion of giving away money when we can't even bother to structure healthcare provision in a way that makes sense (It shouldn't be hard to get Medicaid and there shouldn't be a cliff...).

I know this from experience, I grew up in poverty and my parents died when I was young.

Bad luck = Lack of moral character to so many people who haven't experienced need.

It's the same Victorian England "just world" garbage that the fortunate have always embraced to prop up their own personal mythos.

It's funny that many self identifying christians treat the poor the worst from a public policy perspective, when the whole point of old testament law around land ownership and jubilee years was to protect children from suffering as a result of unlucky/stupid parents and to generationally guarantee access to capital and production.

The lack of a party equivalent to "christian socialists" (pro markets, pro capitalism, pro safety nets) in the USA really betrays the cruelty of americas faux christianity.

We seem very eager to punish unlucky and low leverage individuals... and their children.

There’s many ways to do this without incentivizing single motherhood. It’s devastating for the children. It might make you feel high and moral but you’re actively hurting people.

Better solutions involve getting kids out of these homes for as much of the day as possible and surrounding them with positive role models from extremely early ages.

Now we’re getting to the root of the issue - you think single mothers are evil and deserve to be punished with poverty, along with their children.

I don’t think it’s evil. I think it doesn’t work. We have all the evidence in the world that proves this. Children need 2 parents that are involved.

While single parents continue to exist, should poverty be forcibly inflicted on them by lack of welfare state, or not?

The US is already sending out checks to all parents. How much more do you think it should be?

It clearly would have been good to keep the child tax credit expansion that expired in December in place. So at least that much more.

> Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.

Would you agree that this is equally true for someone who comes from a wealthy family and has a trust fund that essentially guarantees that they will be "given money", usually in the form of capital gains, forever?

I would say that giving your kids a bag of money so they don’t have to do anything wound generally be a bad idea. I think Bill Gates said he gives his kids enough money so that they don’t have to do anything for money but that they do have to do something or something like that.

In the end, people need to be meaningful participants in their own lives.

Have you ever seen a UBI proposal that would give people so much money that they don't have to do anything? We would never be able to come up with that much money to give out.

It's more like giving them even less money than Bill Gates gives his kids, so they still have to work, but they "don’t have to do anything for money but that they do have to do something" as you put it.

Right but it’s about the values put into you as you’re raised. There’s a big difference there.

No, we've done highly bureaucratic, dehumanizing but targeted means-tested programs. Those are very different than just giving poor people money through progressive taxation or other means. Just giving cash has been tried only very recently, and with generally positive results so far.

The Moynihan Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family%3A_The_Case_F...

It seems to conflate changes in family structure with prosperity and is based on shaky assumptions about the relationship between them. It remains controversial.

I don't see why it would generalize well.

That’s what was said about it in the early 60’s. The problem is we have 50+ years of evidence that shows it was right.

The Moynihan Scissors is real.

This refutes your thoughts on the matter:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/was-the-moynihan-report...

"criminal laws that disproportionately penalized black males, sent them to jail for long periods of time and hurt their potential to find jobs, earn money, and support their families when released"

You've provided a perfect example for the kind of charlatanism I mentioned in the last paragraph - well done.

In fact, welfare works great, both in the US, where Social Security has saved millions from poverty, and in many other countries.

You'll find that in all of these countries, families continue to exist, so take your conservative talking points about destruction of the family are pure ideological nonsense.

Just because you say it doesn’t make it true. We literally see the divergence in family stability and welfare adoption. From there we see the effects as it leads to generational poverty, crime, etc.

The data and facts are simply not on your side.

Actually, they are. The more welfare, the less poverty - everywhere. Look it up.

> Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money.

yep - just let them have cake, surely that will fix it!

If people live in poverty but have a job, poverty is solved by giving the poor workers a higher wage.

We have billionaires and children who are homeless, that isn’t a good thing.

"We have billionaires and children who are homeless".

Is there some evidence of homeless billionaires on the streets with their kids? Did you mean to say that there exist homeless kids and also there are billionaires?

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