An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
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One example that I've recently become frighteningly aware of is that I have a vastly different understanding of what 'property' means than those who came from middle class US cultures. It's taken many years for me to understand this because in fact I know and understand the English definition of property as well as my counterparts. But, there are subtle differences in meaning that fundamentally filter my perspective. For instance, I never understood why my college friends became upset when I borrowed things and never returned them, nor why they thought it bizzare that I'd tell them, of my stuff, to just keep it.
There are countless other examples. The article particularly makes me think of my adult friends and their relationships, in and out, rarely 'settling down' from an outsider view. But, just because they get divorced a lot and re-married, or cheat a lot, etc. It doesn't mean that their social conventions are any less valid than those of the middle class America. There are strong social consistencies and social language, unfortunately reinforcing.
My models are very different still, the semantics don't align right with my current environment, and today I have difficulty teaching my son the middle class way.
But, these types of programs supply the minimum requirements for a poor kid to be accepted to the party. For them to excel, they need integration. For instance, I owe a significant portion of my success to the various middle class connections that I've had along the way. Having friends in the middle class, and especially, having those friend's parents act as guides and mentors was incredibly helpful, looking back.
Now living in one of the richest counties in the US, I see a big risk in having this income segregation. Poor kids need to have an environment where they may learn the middle class ways. And, they can't do it easily by living only among the poor.
I've seen my parents make a climb in socioeconomic "position" similar to yours, and I've found that much as you found one of the fundamental things that separate the "classes" is awareness of taboos, and even more importantly, when taboos can be violated! My observations seem to indicate that the level of "taboo observance" is distributed in a bell curve over the incomes.
That brings up an interesting question: in historical terms, the subject of this story is quite well-off; he's not always physically at risk, he has ready access to probably non-toxic food, he has shelter, etc. Over a long enough timeline, his life is pretty good. Even his home situation--mom is a prostitute, but he can't tell anyone lest the authorities separate them--is in all likelihood less common than it might have been centuries ago.
So if these conditions are so awful that we can't possibly expect people to improve without fixing said conditions, how do we explain historical economic growth. We're descended from people who had really miserable lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than not, risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep, and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape. Beings that were physiologically human (basically us, but probably lactose intolerant) had to deal with all of those circumstances, and managed to bequeath to the next generation some slightly less miserable circumstances.
It comes back to the anthropic principle: if misery is a strong disincentive for progress, how did we progress to the point that we have leisure time to discuss this?
(I've asked the same question on Quora here: http://www.quora.com/How-do-adherents-to-the-bee-sting-theor... . I am very interested in the answers.)
This is pure conjecture.
risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep
Reasonable point, but nothing to hang your hat on - it's the same for many poor people today that have poor access to medicine
and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape.
And we're back to just making stuff up again to make it sound like people in poverty have it easy.
The poor black kid in the story doesn't have access to self-sufficiency that your hunter-gatherers had. Where are the animals he can hunt? Where is the food he can simply gather? He has markedly different restrictions on his life, but you're ignoring all that to try and paint him as wealthy compared to "ye olde ignorant savage"
>>>> lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough
>>>> food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than
>>>> not
>> This is pure conjecture.
When my grandmother was young, she ate 1 bowl of rice a day (max), and had to spend her entire salary on food. Though she did sometimes get a few drops of pig fat to eat with her rice. Her job was carrying sand and rocks away from where the hill was demolished.
When my mother was young, she ate 2 bowl of rice, and vegetables, plus chicken on chinese new years. Her job was nursing.
Today, I eat cereal in the morning, rice and meat and vegetables for lunch and dinner. I'm a student.
Anecdotes are anecdotes but it is not a pure conjecture.
Reversing your premise, if you were to take a population of ancestral humans and greatly reduce the stressors on the population (illness, malnutrition, war, etc.) then would you not expect that they would tend to improve their lives at a much faster rate then their contemporaries?
Ancient progress was agonizingly slow by modern standards. Perhaps the bee sting effect is part of the reason why.
Your paragraph is pure conjecture.
This is where I'm lost - isnt a "why bother?" attitute a textbook definition of lack of self-discipline?
I do agree with everything else in the article, especially with the idea of removing problems and roadblocks instead of simply throwing money at the issue.
So In my opinion there is a self discipline issue. Trouble is, the more you assist people in solving their problems, the more incline they will be to let their problems rot until you come and solve them again. The ultimate goal theere is to find a way to reliably restart the problem-solving circuit, once the people have been pulled back up to the surface.
AFAIK, no one has found a reliable way yet and unfortunately there is not much of a proposal in the article either.
I disagree, most people given a chance will try to improve their condition.
But unlike the rich, working for money does not improve consumption significantly for the poor. Therefore, the poor choose not to work.
http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work
Note that this explanation doesn't require complicated utility functions, it merely requires that the utility function be nondecreasing.
Your caricature of a person with a "really" miserable life crucially forgets that in many ways this person might have had a much more rich than someone living in poverty in the inner city. Namely, in terms of freedom, in terms of connection to his family and community, and in terms of his independence. People (not just the impoverished) living in cities with high population density have a fairly unique set of psychological stresses, historically speaking. This set of stresses seems to be particularly crushing, for whatever reason.
I mean, what I really don't understand about your comment is the tone of it. That somehow this child has all of these benefits, but still fails? What are you proposing? Can you really not see that the child must ALSO have some deficits that cause him to fail? Are you proposing that he's a bad person? I just really don't get it. What's your answer? What's your idea? That he's just not "trying" hard enough? What's the difference between a person who tries hard enough and one who doesn't?
It feels to me that underlying your comment is a deep blindness to crucial elements of human psychology. You somehow draw an equivalence between humans existing in superficially similar circumstances and then throw your hands up in the air and say "I don't get it!"
Being an aspiring entrepreneur, I tend to look to others that have made it, and see what I can learn from them. I became fascinated with biographies autobiographies of everyone from Richard Branson and Steve Jobs to Lance Armstrong to Anthony Kedis (red hot chili peppers). The single best one of them I've read is "From Pieces to Weight" by 50 cent. It written so well that you don't just understand why he made the decisions he did (becoming a drug dealer) you understand that you would have very likely make the same decisions, should you have been in his shoes. It really opens up another perspective on an individuals behavior, and has made me that much less quick to judge.
I inferred that a lack of hope and knowledge of an achievable future, is one of the primary causes of lower performing low income students.
what?
> hasty generalization
there are no generalizations here. the article says that the author of the forbes article (as well as you), as a person or privilege, does not understand poverty and thus has no idea how to solve the problem. if anyone is making "hasty generalizations", its the author of the forbes article, who thinks that poor kids simply aren't trying hard enough.
> the use an outlier scenario
how do you know this is an outlier scenario?
> having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator
i doubt anyone would disagree with this statement, but it's irrelevant.
the original forbes article suggests that having goals and determination are sufficient for escaping poverty. this article makes the argument that even with goals and determination, escaping poverty is still extremely difficult; furthermore, the very condition of poverty undermines the ability to develop goals and determination.
I acted out in primary school. I did it because I was an asshole who didn't respect education. I suspect my peers were the same.
"a primarily low-income, high-minority middle school serving sixth- through eighth-graders"?
However, I find it very hard to believe that any school in the world can attribute most of it's student unruliness to children trying to get kicked out so that their mothers cannot be prostitutes.
Hasty generalization is much the same, by weighting the effect of an outlier in an effort to substantiate an argument or counter. I was not using that phrase in literal. It is a type of logical fallacy. I was simply observing that the use of an outlier argument does not negate the position of the OP.
I conceded that the original article was naive. Meaning that it did not provide enough scope to truly address the issue, but the importance of having vision in an environment that allows little is very important.
If the article is saying this, we can safely reject it as being a pointless ad-hominem attack.
I've been poor and still kind of am, but I've never known real poverty. I've seen real poverty in others and there's no way in hell I'd want to start from there. The biggest hurdle to escaping endemic poverty is even knowing that there's a way out in the first place.
Internet has mostly taken care of access to education. That leaves only living conditions and motivation as precursors to success.
Boredom counter clicks like hell when near any education system featuring grades.
From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
How can we fix this? The problem is that no matter how much our teachers may push students to do better and work harder in school, their home life may work against it.
It's one of the side-effects of freedom. To some degree, there will never be a way to fix it. Unless we can control what happens when they get home.
Why do you think that the lack of a "decent Social Benefits system" is the reason why they do prostitution, drugs, drinking?
To put it another way, you seem to be assuming that someone drinks because they're poor. Could it be (for some/many) that they're poor because they drink?
You can give people all of the healthcare and the free money that you want, but it still won't automatically create a productive member of society.
This will only create generations of people that are dependent on the welfare system and can't actually go out and get a job.
As long as you aren't mentally or physically challenged, you should be able to work.