How America Manufactures Poverty
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Seems like an intentional “cooking the numbers to look as bad as possible” to me.
This is a good video response from Matt Bruenig that goes into these stats in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBdFHA8KvU
He also says health care doesn't count as bills so it shouldn't count.
I honestly can't tell if this guy is just so fucking rich he has no clue what's going on, or he's trolling.
I don't agree with Brueig here, but if his claims EITC, Medicaid, and CTC don't help alleviate poverty that's a damn strong argument he's making to eliminate them.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
Because we keep changing the measure for "poverty".
It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago. If you aren't that old, read a book about the time period. Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
Libertarians love that one. Get ready for the chart where TVs are cheaper.
I can understand the political differences, but there’s something else at play here. The American ethos of “anything is possible”, which is very much alive in the private sector, stands in stark contrast with the collective civic apathy. So if not for a lack of imagination and creativity, it must be something else. Bootstrapping myths? Unawareness of how bad these issues really are? Helping the poor means less money for oneself? The poor needs to be punished for being dumb? A need to feel better about oneself relative to the poor? Fear of socialism? Lack of trust in government? Exhaustion from a perpetual two-party stalemate?
The US is a country that I love dearly but keeps harming itself in ways I can’t understand.
so, poor people today don't do what my parents did, put the TV in hock for months at a time and borrow an old little one from their grandparents?
If poverty is defined as percentage of people in the bottom 20%, then this must always be fixed.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
And if there was something justice and fair treatment, it would be EVEN better. So that argument is worth exactly nothing.
Huh? Global income inequality has been falling for quite a few decades now.
A single line of average real wages wouldn't do much, and also doesn't actually show any decline.
There's an infamous chart that seems to show that real wages lag behind productivity. Alas, that chart uses different measures of inflation for the two lines in that chart. Thus it's completely useless.
You can have a look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG for the 'Share of Labour Compensation in GDP': if you are only interested in inequality, you don't need to worry about inflation, you can just divide total nominal labour income by total nominal gdp to cancel out the price level.
The labour share of GDP in the US has been remarkably stable. FRED has data since 1950, and the labour share has stayed between 58% to 65% in that time.
(If you want to dig deeper: the capital share of GDP has been mostly constant. It's the share that goes to land that has increased.)
In any case, as I said above, the average income from labour has done just fine. It's the difference between workers that might be interesting to look at: eg CEO vs burger flipper.
CEO vs burger flipper seems to be the lion’s share of the difference.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-...
To avoid paywalls:
the first one, the productivity and compensation is very misleading.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-m...
- (signed) A guy who, in the late 60's rode his bicycle from the "good" side of town across the RR tracks to the "bad" side of town to hold a part-time job at a grocery store that catered to and employed people of all races and creeds.
No I did not: I got a job ASAP and have worked ever since. You're the one who's spouting horseshit.
No we don't.
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
No it's not.
> Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
No it isn't.
Mr. Vibrating: Yes it is.
Man: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
Mr. Vibrating: No it isn't.
Man: It is!
Mr. Vibrating: It is not.
Man: Look, you just contradicted me.
Mr. Vibrating: I did not.
Man: Oh you did!!
Mr. Vibrating: No, no, no.
Man: You did just then.
Mr. Vibrating: Nonsense!
Man: Oh, this is futile!
There are many in poverty today who don't really have it better than 50 years ago. They're living under bridges, bouncing from shelter to shelter as they can, barely managing to get enough food to eat.
There are many others in poverty who do, indeed, have it "better" in some senses (for instance, they may have a smartphone—some of the time, in between times when it gets stolen, or broken, or they can't pay for the service), but who are still in desperate straits. They're living in their car, working three part-time jobs just to be able to continue to live in their car as opposed to on the street like the first category. Or they're couch surfing, relying on the patience of the last couple of friends who haven't already kicked them out while they apply to job after job after job and continually get ghosted even for fast-food positions.
Just because "poverty" in the 21st century doesn't look like the stereotypical Dickensian picture of starving children with nothing but a stick to play with doesn't mean it's not real poverty, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to end it.
What does the size of the US economy have to do with the rate of relative poverty?
The fact questions like this are asked - questions that compare two unrelated measures - makes me think the analysis isn't all that rigorous.
A larger economy roughly means that more value is created in that country. Combining that with a higher relative rate of poverty means that the extra value created is not captured in a similar proportion. How are those two unrelated metrics?
Then it adds India, a poor country where the poor are much worse off than in the US.
Then it compares the size of the economies of that mish-mash of countries to relative poverty in the US.
So what exactly am i supposed to draw from this comparison?
As a society we like to cast moral failures to circumstance. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the trailer trash and ignore the reasons why those folks are where they are.
Poverty isn't voluntary - it's violently enforced at the point of a gun.
> Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country?
to me, it seems like a question worth asking.
When >50% of people in a democratic country have their housing situation fixed, construction almost stops because it becomes a democratic will of the people, and for the rest, housing becomes unaffordable. It's incredibly hard to fix it in any way at all without destroying the very fabric of society.
This would answer your second issue; the voting one, by allowing those who cannot remain within an area they'd like to live in long enough to meaningfully vote in that area to vote in the general state-wide process specification level which would then have more local effects.
Experience in many parts of the world has shown that this is very much not true. A few examples:
- China: the history of the past few decades has very much been the history of demolishing slums because they're too dense and building much more expensive housing on top of it. You can make arguments about the housing bubble there, but slums are being demolished, not built, and affordability is still very much a dream (partly as a result of state policy, partly other factors)
- Singapore: as a city-state, city zoning policy is national zoning policy. The mandate is very much public and affordable housing for all, and local control over zoning is non-existent. The HDB's job has been pretty much demolishing slums and turning them into public housing.
- Malaysia (my home country): local municipalities have a small degree of control over zoning policy, subject to national control and state oversight. Same story here: there is a systematic effort to demolish slums and turn them into high-rise developments (partly because the zoning authorities have been captured by the developers). They reluctantly follow low-income housing quotas due to politics too complicated to explain here
- Japan: localities can only do so much, the story of Tokyo (same for Osaka and Nagoya) has pretty much been a story of top-down national control with the explicitly policy of managing urban density. Same story with a concerted effort of demolishing slums.
So your claim of either slums or high housing prices doesn't really happen in reality. If you have examples where this happened, please do share, but having lived in many Asian cities this doesn't bear out at all.
The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many?
Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries?
If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.
Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well.
I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people.
People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation.
America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.
Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.
One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand
But the comments on this are still pretty crazy and maybe miss the point. Even if the comparison isn't quite exact, wouldn't you expect the worlds richest country to do the best? Even the life expectancy is declining in the US. And even if COVID had an impact on life expectancy, again world's richest country.
Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.
The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.
Don't impugn my motives.
> People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar.
That's not representative of the whole.
Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves.
Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.
>That's not representative of the whole.
I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.
The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.
... but I bet you will never answer for that. Beggars SHOULD BE CHOOSERS.
If someone were to post “How McDonald’s makes their burgers” would it be a hot take because In-N-Out also makes burgers?
https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”
So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try...
"Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants"
See the difference?
AKA Click Bait.
Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.
I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.