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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> The popular notion of poverty is that it is a deficit, a state of not having enough material goods nor the means to acquire them. Yet scholars of development have identified for us that poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon.

How lucky we are that "scholars have identified for us" what poverty is, so that we don't have to think about it for ourselves, not the lack of money, which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor, but rather a "multi-dimensional phenomenon", which can only mean that it requires more scholarship to address.

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OTOH, poverty is multidimensional in a way that simply giving money to the poor will not (because it cannot) solve. Which is not an argument against giving money to the poor, of course. My point is only that real scholarship on poverty and its many effects actually is useful for more than just academics’ job security. What the article said about identity and aspirational aspects of poverty rang absolutely true to me (aside from what I think was a too ham-handed attempt to shoehorn it under SIL’s language preservation stuff). Source: teacher in urban Title I public school. Indeed, I had some ninth graders identifying pieces of those very issues in a reflection thing I had them write that I just graded (e.g., one girl writing about seeing a connection between slavery and jokes/tropes that you often hear among black kids today about darker versus lighter skinned folks; like, yeah, those are rooted ultimately in theories and perceptions of the majority white society (beginning in the 1600s) about darkness of skin indexing mental and physical abilities in a fairly straightforward (if absurdly crude) way. And it gets filtered through and rooted in perceptions of fucking 14 year olds in this Year of Our Lord 2023 (though, again, not in some linear way; we’re talking about large-scale social and cultural conceptualizations that work themselves out over generational time-scales)).

Yes, to what you stated. I teach middle school title one, as well. My students express the same perceptions about dark and light skin as indexes for mental and physical abilities in their jokes and language, as you described.

I’m going to give your words some thought as I move forward in my curriculum. Thank you for these insights.

Nice to see a fellow teacher hanging out in these parts!

> which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor

Nope. What good is money if everyone has it? If you give everyone one million dollars, all you've done is turn one million dollars into the new one dollar bill. And that's being generous, it will probably be worth even less.

I have no idea why people think the government is some evil entity which refuses to give money to the poor out of spite. That's not how an economy works. Even worse is the fact people who believe this get to vote into power politicians who put it into practice. It's literally happening in my country right now and the economic distortions are already observable. It can only be sustained if you subtract money from others via taxes. That money's gonna run out eventually because why be productive when you can apply for government benefits? There are little cities in my country where almost everyone is sustained by this.

Rich people needn't exist.

In a post-scarcity society? Sure. Gotta achieve one first though.

We don't have scarcity… what we have is uneven distribution of resources.

The only reason resouces have to be "allocated" to begin with is because of scarcity. There's not enough for everybody. That's what economies are: a system to decide who gets access to scarce resources. Were it not for scarcity, there would be no need to economize.

I oppose fundamentally dystopian stuff like artificial scarcity. Completely made up stuff like intellectual property doesn't belong in the 21st century. However, the same logic cannot be applied to the physical world where everything is finite and therefore truly scarce. That will continue to be true until someone invents Star Trek replicators.

For example, the catholic church in italy owns 14% of the buildings on the free market.

Do they actually need that? They don't… most are empty and unused.

So you can oppose all you want, doesn't make it any less true.

So what? Are you proposing people rob the church of their property? Ridiculous. Why stop at the church? Why stop at you?

This stuff isn't based on "need". That's a socialist idea. Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?

> So what? Are you proposing people rob the church of their property?

"rob", lol :D

> Why stop at you?

I do think that ownership taxes should go up exponentially… so almost nothing for your home, but if you have 6-5 it should be considerable. The church doesn't even pay any ownership taxes, so in fact it is them who are robbing me.

> Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?

Right to education? Right to healthcare? Right to have a home? Which of these is exactly making you so angry?

That's a lotta rights you got there. I wonder who pays for them.

Me? And I'd have more with exponential taxation of buildings :)

Nor does completely made up stuff like economics.

The real economy is function of ecosystem, raw materials, energy availability, and collective intelligence.

That's the economy we live in.

But the economy we're told we live in is a fiction designed exclusively for the perpetual growth of hierarchy and privilege.

I don't think anyone knows what would be possible in a reality-based economy.

But it's hard to belive that much broader access to health and education, better social protections, tamed monopolies, plural distributed media, and support for original invention and research, would be less stable and successful than the suicidally short-sighted manic depressive business cycles we have now.

I agree, the economy we live in is a made up one. It's basically fake. It's not based on any of the things you mentioned though. It's based on credit. I've argued against credit here on HN a few times but in hindsight it should have been obvious to me such views would not be accepted in a startup friendly forum. After all, startups are a low interest rate phenomenon.

Still, the concept of an economy is not made up at all. Economies arise naturally wherever there is scarcity and people gotta figure out who gets the limited amount of resources available. Some metric is going to be used to decide that.

I believe you may be using a vernacular definition where others are using a technical definition from economics.

In this context "scarcity" does not mean "There is not enough stuff", though that can be implied. It means there is a fundamentally limited amount of stuff and the aggregate demand is greater than the aggregate supply.

Given that the demand for resources is functionally infinite, I think this is basically accurate. Your objection to the existence of rich people is an objection to part of the aggregate demand, rather than to the description of resources as scarce.

But in that sense, post-scarcity can't exist… so it can't be in that sense.

I suspect this is why "post-scarcity" is generally used to describe a state of affairs that does not currently exist, such as the idyllic Federation in Star Trek. In this context it was used to describe a society fundamentally different in significant ways from any past or present human one.

I don't know if I agree that post-scarcity cannot exist. I know that imagining a way to get there is very challenging. Knowing that scarcity is real certainly informs my politics, though.

Bell curves exist in nature. Not that natural == good. But “need” and “nature” hang together.

Industries, computers, surgeons, books… all things that don't exist in nature. Your point?

I’ll bite: some people want to save more, other people want to spend more. To remove inequality from humanity is to remove human nature itself. Whether or not that’s a good thing is totally besides the point. The premise requires a lack of historical understanding. Maybe we could also end prostitution and violent crime. “If only some politician would make a law… “

This a classic is-ought fallacy, and I'm trying to be generous.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Oh I see, you’re saying we can simply eradicate human life! I didn’t consider that was what the parent was suggesting, but it is true I suppose, in a logical if pedantic sort of way.

If you don't think in terms of money, but rather in terms of stuff, it becomes clear. You can print all the money you want, and the only thing that there's more of is money. There aren't any more houses, or food, or cars. There's just more money.

On the other hand, we can try to move it around some, so that the poor have access to somewhat more of the stuff, even if that means that the well-off have less. But the well-off have to have less for this to work - "we'll help the poor, but it won't cost you" is a lie.

On the other other hand... just giving them stuff isn't likely to change things for many poor people in the way that they really need things to change. (Which is back to the point of the article.)

If you have all the dimensions figured out I recommend you write up a white paper of the solution so humanity can get started with enthusiastic implementation.

Who said you don’t have to think about it yourself?

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