What your first-grade life says about the rest of it
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
What most interested me was this quote about white children. "These children did not inherit college expectations. But they inherited job networks." I can verify this phenomenon using anecdotal evidence, where poor white children are expected to learn their parents' (generally their father's) crafts but not expected to learn anything beyond that.
While my own college-educated parents passed down their respect and appreciation for learning to me, I saw some of my childhood friends' parents pass down their mistrust and apathy towards learning to my friends. I was not surprised when I came back from college one spring break and learned that one of my old friends (white, poor, no college, terrible home life) was currently on the lam for killing a teenager over a drug deal. I was shocked by the fact that I wasn't at all surprised.
What bothers me more is how I can't relate to how hard life must be for this old friend, and especially how hard it is for primarily black children who inherit little but discrimination, through anything but anecdotes. I think this is more "friend guilt" than "white guilt." No one wants to see people they care for, or once cared for, victimized by systems beyond their control.
Therefore, based again on my own anecdotal evidence, I'm glad this study continues to receive attention.
What a coincidence that I was just re-watching the second season of "The Wire", which focuses on the white side of Baltimore, albeit the low-privileged stevedores. From a scene:
http://www.siliconvalleyfrogs.com/thewire/ep20.html
SOBOTKA: Your son... The oldest one, he goes to what school?
DIBIAGO: Jason's at Princeton.
SOBOTKA: Princeton. And after he graduates he's gonna do, what?
DIBIAGO: Whatever he wants.
SOBOTKA: Right, you sent him to Princeton to do whatever the fuck he wants. You know, back when we was kids, Danny Hay's father stole a case of cognac off a ship. 'Cept when he gets it home, it ain't cognac, it's Tang.
DIBIAGO: Tang?
SOBOTKA: Just invented. TV was saying it's what the astronauts drank on their way to the moon. You drink it, well...
DIBIAGO: You could be an astronaut too.
SOBOTKA: All summer long, that shit was all the hare kids drank, Tang with breakfast, Tang with lunch, Tang when they woke up scared in the middle of the night. What do you think they grew up to be? Stevedores. What the fuck you think? Something tells me Jason Dibiago will grow up and squeeze a buck the way his old man did.
And also mistrust and apathy towards learning. Our societal problems transcend race because we have cultural problems at the lower end of income. Those cultural problems are self-perpetuating regardless of one's genetic make-up.
When you're poor, it's easy to be resentful of those who aren't; it's easy to pass resentment and mistrust on to your children; it's easy to just do whatever might make life a little less miserable at the moment (instead of thinking of long term consequences.) And any of us are susceptible to behaving this way if we become poor.
For those of us fortunate enough to leave that all behind and become successful, it's easy for us to forget how hard life once was and how to relate to those who are less fortunate.
Any of us would behave the same way if we were born and raised poor. But becoming poor is different. It doesn't strip away all the culture and education your family already possesses.
This happens all the time for immigrants. Plenty of families come to the US with almost zero assets. But the ones who have the benefit of education and a culture of aspiration don't stay poor, and their children vastly outperform the intergenerational poor.
To clarify, there can be legit reasons for that resentfulness they hold. I'd argue the current construct of society definitely gives the appearance(or just out-right, _is the fact_) of well-to-do people benefiting from the poor. The War on Drugs is at least one of those systems.
"For one thing, most of our very poor don't work, which makes it hard to exploit them." - Paul Krugman
It probably doesn't benefit "the rich" but it sure benefits those specific businesses relying on cheap labour with an interest in driving its cost down.
It also benefits those getting very rich indeed from the illegal drug trade, like JFK's Father did when alcohol was an illegal drug (which is what bootlegging is after all, drug running/pushing where the illegal drug was alcohol). Such people care little for the social consequences of gaining their wealth.
The illegal drug trade also entrenches corruption in politics and legal system. Such corruption and the acceptance of it does not work in favour of those without resources. Those with resources and flexible morals it does benefit.
Reduced supply raises prices. If more of the poor were in the labor force, employers would more easily find replacement workers.
I suppose you (and the other two commenters) are right that the war on drugs benefits a small number of wealthy people at the expense of the rest of them. But overall it's a negative sum game - bad for the rich and poor alike.
With respect, I'm sure you have that price pressure exactly backwards.
The war on drugs is an absolutely unmitigated disaster on a global scale from start to finish. The sooner it is ended the better. Those with vested interests in the current normal practice of the political system will perceive any change to how things are done in Washington or wherever as a threat. Scare campaigns seem to get you elected, opposing them seems to ensure you won't get elected. Running on a "stop this utter insanity making us weak and vulnerable" campaign of ending the war on drugs will likely get an almighty scare campaign run against them (think of the children!) Many vested interests eg lobbyists will support that campaign to keep the political status quo as stable as possible. (Some individuals will always do what they actually think is right, even when it is against their interests). I hope to see that scare campaign fail one day. Maybe some cracks are showing?
Past a certain level of wealth more money has no meaning at all, Soros, Koch, Gates, Buffet and a large number more people have more money than they can ever spend. More power and influence does have meaning to them, be it altruistic or ego driven or whatever.
The labor force is people who are working or seeking work (the BLS can give you a precise definition). Most of the poor do not fall into this category (see another reply of mine in this thread for data).
Everything you describe is what would happen if the poor were willing to compete on price for work. The fact that they are not doing so is what pushes wages up.
What about people in upper-middle-class office jobs who spend the vast majority of every day in their office browsing Reddit?
What about people who do work, but who go into their workplace with a terrible attitude and end up failing to provide the service customers pay for?
These are three types of people that you can also observe, if you look hard enough, and they are not always destitute. They also (arguably) don't work - just having a job or money in the bank doesn't mean you contribute your fair share to society. Granted these observations alone, which are just as hard to quantify as the Krugman quote above, it's hard to say that the war on drugs (or the war to put poor people into prison, whichever name you prefer) does not exploit lower-class people. If there are always people who don't work as much as others would like them to, there's nothing theoretically different about people born into different social strata.
So, the Krugman quote above is almost reprehensible, and I also don't believe it's backed by data. For instance, a full-time federal minimum wage worker makes $15,080 a year. This is enough to live above the poverty line if you only support yourself, but not even close to enough to support a spouse and even one child (http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full...). How can you possibly say that people who try and support their families on a minimum wage salary are mostly lazy bums who don't work?
I would like to see how Krugman backs up his argument. Data is always welcome.
That would indeed be a silly thing to say.
Data is always welcome.
Work habits: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2012.pdf
Disposable income: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs...
Consumption: http://www.bls.gov/cex/22013/midyear/income.pdf
Now, I really don't know a whole lot about these subjects, but it strikes me that a basic income system would serve society as whole very well here.
In fact, I've always had a theory that the best way to do things would be what I call a "relaxed meritocracy." Basically: everyone has access to housing, food, medical care, and education at a decent standard -- the bare minimums for life, plus a little bit on top so that it's not horrible. (Like living at a dorm room in university.) Then, capitalism on top. Incentive to do well, and the freedom to experiment with stuff that may just crash-and-burn. And nobody is ever well-and-truly left behind.
Can someone please poke holes in why this would be a bad idea?
They think that if someone is not just like them, it must be because of some grievous personal fault.
If you want to see what giving people just enough money to live on looks like, check out our remote Aboriginal communities where the government hands out enough money to live (mediocrely) on to everybody, so what's their incentive to get a job? What's their incentive to do anything?
The results? Well the worst one is massive substance abuse problems. If they can't get booze, they sniff petrol. Actually for the most part they sniff petrol and drink booze.
Highly educated creative-class people are the minority who can deal with free money without getting sapped of initiative, because (a) we tend to get satisfaction from work and (b) we can earn substantially more by working than by not working.
But for someone at the bottom end of society who couldn't earn more than minimum wage anyway, granting them minimum wage for doing nothing is probably the worst possible thing you can do to them. Even if some choose a life of honest toil for slightly more money, vast numbers will choose a life of idleness and substance abuse.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-ho...
It all comes down to people thinking they know what is best for other people. You can't force other people to contribute to your idea of society. If you want something big, find a group of people that believe the same and do it. Don't force others into your idea of how life should be.
Somebody has to make the petrol and booze. If you say the people making these products should give them to the non-workers against their will, you're telling them to live their lives how you want them to, not how they want to.
If we wished to accomplish the basic income purely through income taxation, all we would need is some function f mapping pre-tax to post-tax income such that over the whole population, income and f(income) have the same average [for convenience, I am separating out for now all other income taxation we may wish to engage in; consider it to be applied before or after this tax], while f is everywhere increasing (so there is always an incentive to work) and f(0) is the basic income we seek. We likely would also want our taxation to be progressive (as in the current system); this amounts to asking for the differential of f to be decreasing. Within these constraints, there are a multitude of choices we can make.
(Yes, this is simply a form of redistribution. And why not, to the extent we can afford it? As already argued, this particular form of redistribution could unleash a host of societal benefits.)
In the U.S. we have a deep-rooted sense of mistrust about government. We're inconsistent about where/how we place that trust, and it can manifest itself in strange ways, but there it is. A Department of Minimal Living Standards would probably be a disaster.
That's not to say we can't make improvements to our existing social safety nets. Just that here, given the population and the culture, a government-provided guaranteed wage is not likely to succeed.
I think it's a great idea, but for the sake of argument:
One of the more convincing arguments I've heard against a basic income system is that it would end up driving up housing costs: since everybody now has $N money for existing, rents would increase by almost $N.
I would argue that such a unilateral increase belies the nature of a free market: if housing became overpriced, others would show up and undercut those who are asking too much. However, having recently relocated to the bay area, I'm less convinced that would necessarily be true...
Some would say that a UBI is a "half measure", and that to really make it work you have to go all the way and provide free government-owned housing for anybody who wants it. But of course, that would come with its own host of problems...
> Then, capitalism on top. Incentive to do well, and the freedom to experiment with stuff that may just crash-and-burn. And nobody is ever well-and-truly left behind.
To me, this is the really big part of this that a lot of people against the idea of basic income miss: almost all of our current assistance programs phase themselves out as you make more money; they serve to discourage people from working.
Providing the benefit to everybody makes the whole thing much more fair: if you want more money, go make more money, and you don't lose any of the money you're already getting.
I keep hearing that the bay area is that way because of stupid zoning rules (artificially limited supply) that can't be fixed given screwed up local politics.
Some would say that a UBI is a "half measure", and that to really make it work you have to go all the way and provide free government-owned housing for anybody who wants it.
Nah, just make sure it's enough to cover minimal health insurance (and then stop using tax incentives to tie that to employment!!) and living within public-transit distance of an average middle-of-the-pack university. No sense in paying extra to some people just because they'd prefer to live in a place with bad zoning laws.
To me, this is the really big part of this that a lot of people against the idea of basic income miss: almost all of our current assistance programs phase themselves out as you make more money; they serve to discourage people from working.
Providing the benefit to everybody makes the whole thing much more fair: if you want more money, go make more money, and you don't lose any of the money you're already getting.
Yep. Plus, appearance matters.
(a) Your BI goes down by 1/3 the amount of your other income, and once it's gone income taxes kick in at 33% of whatever you make beyond 3x BI.
(b) Your BI never goes away, but you're taxed 33% of income starting at dollar one.
Somehow, (b) seems to sound better even tho they work out the same.
Implied in your suggestion is that poverty, and poverty alone is responsible for the ills. Solve the poverty, solve the problems, right?
But it's not so clear that this is at all true. For example nowhere in that article did I find a mention of IQ. Did they test it? Don't know, maybe someone can check.
Despite the distaste, the reality is that people have different IQ levels, IQ is inherited, and that lower IQ means being worse off in life.
Or perhaps the problem is culture as taught by the parents? A disregard for authority and education for example. Or a lack of stable family unit. Those too will cause someone to end up worse off.
Or maybe something else. I don't know. But you better, or else you will solve the wrong problem.
That would be about 9 individuals in the sample size of 790. During the period of the study mortality would have been a little higher, since life expectancy has increased about 6 years since the early 1980s.
But the study counted 26 deaths (that they knew about). Being poor's a killer.
Looking back to my High School days, I see friends that didn't grow up with these family expectations and see that their life-path has been more difficult than mine. I recall difficult times in my own college days when I pondered dropping out to take a blue-collar job, but I knew what my family expectations were. I continued on when others with different expectations would have quit and ended up with the menial job I considered taking myself. I'm not sure how the schools can raise expectations of these kids when they have some many negative role-models around. It's a tough problem.
From what I've seen personally, there are a real lot of factors that keep the poor poor. Probably too many to count. College education in and of itself isn't remotely enough. There's also "life skills" (for lack of a better word) that are not emphasized.
I grew up poor and I now work in an office with people who grew up middle class. I sometimes find it difficult to relate to them.
The most revelatory statement was the inherited job networks that that the disadvantaged white males had over the other children.
Just sayin, without varying something there's no pinning a date on it. "Fix this by 1st grade or its too late" is what it sounds like.
Books don't get much more powerful or moving than this.
The premise is simple--Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon (who's lately been earning acclaim as the driving force behind HBO's "The Wire" which takes place in the same area)and Ed Burns spent a year living on or around one of the busiest drug markets in Baltimore and reports what he learned. In doing so, he tells the stories of the people who inhabit this world: street pushers, kids trying (although often not that hard) to stay straight and the parents who worry about them, when they're not too busy trying to score their next fix. The stories are harrowing--from people who spend their days cashing in scrap metal for cash to get hooked up, to families sharing one small bedroom in a shooting gallery. Pretty much everybody is hoping for a change in fortunes, but the book offers few happy endings. In spite of this, its a fascinating glimpse of a world where most of Simon's readers will never go.
The narrative is occasionally broken up by Simon and Burns' musings about the war on drugs. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, its hard to disagree with Simon's belief that the war has failed, at least in his little corner of the world. There's a particularly powerful passage near the end where Simon flat out shatters the Horatio Alger myths that many middle-class suburbanites cling to, particularly the idea that should they find themselves in that situation, they'd simply apply a little Puritan gumption and work their way out their unfortunate circumstances. In the end, he doesn't offer any solutions and precious little hope.
Yet, the people who live there are more than mindless junkies. They're human, with hopes and dreams and stories to tell. Perhaps Simon's greatest achievement is the way in which he employs his sharp eye and powers of observation to paint a wholly three-dimensional and, given the circumstances, refreshingly non-judgmental picture of a community in deep decline.
In the end, its an amazing powerful read, one that will leave readers deeply affected and likely having shed at least a couple of tears along the way. (2)
After reading the Washington Post article, I wondered about DeAndre McCullough, one of the teens described in The Corner who seemed like he had a chance to get out despite some terrible family problems -- what had happened to him? Sadly, DeAndre died at age 35. David Simon wrote a touching obituary here (3)
1. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/23/reviews/971123.23mosle...
2. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/17690092?book_show_act...
Who knew there's a vibrant ubran culture devoted to riding wheelies on motorcycles down major avenues, with crowds gathered on the sidewalk and all waiting for the police chase to begin? I recommend the movie reviewed below. Still not sure what it says about poverty and race in the US.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/movies/12-oclock-boys-docu...
It's clear that the lower classes are doing a terrible job of raising their own children, despite the best efforts of the rest of society to educate them, they can't escape the terrible values and role models imparted to them by their parents. And yet...
>Before they turned 18, 40 percent of the black girls from low-income homes had given birth to their own babies
i don't know where you get your ideas but they do not jive with many more learned observations than yours.
http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2012/03000/Compre... Comprehensive Sex Education for Teens Is More Effective than Abstinence
http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Feature.showFeatu... National Data Shows Comprehensive Sex Education Better at Reducing Teen Pregnancy than Abstinence-Only Programs
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250073 The Effects of Sex Education on Teen Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080319151225.ht... Comprehensive Sex Education Might Reduce Teen Pregnancies, Study Suggests
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/ Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the U.S Kathrin F. Stanger-Hall, David W. Hall PLoS One. 2011; 6(10): e24658. Published online 2011 October 14. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024658
related: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/abstinence-only-educati... Abstinence-only education does not lead to abstinent behavior, UGA researchers find
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/11/30/uga-study-... UGA study: Higher pregnancy and birth rates in states with abstinence-only sex ed programs in schools
Quote from one of the authors of a study cited in the second article:
> "The wider that gap is [to the next socioeconomic rung of the ladder] the more likely these young girls are to think, 'You know what? It's so unlikely that I'm going to get there, even if I play by the rules and stay in school,'" said Kearney. "There's less return to making that investment in education, in delaying motherhood. If you're on this low economic trajectory, there's not much cost in having a teen birth. You didn't anticipate going to college or getting married anyway.
Compulsory abortion is a contentious issue, but at the very least I think it should be compulsory for anyone getting pregnant under the age of eighteen. If we have the legal fiction that <18 year olds are too immature even to be able to consent to sexual intercourse, I have no idea why we're okay with them actually having children of their own.
In the old days we used to adopt them out, but adoption has its own drawbacks. Now we as a society have become comfortable with the idea of abortion as not-murder I see no reason not to use it in cases like this.
At the same time, I know how hard a baby can be. I am nearly 30 and having a child has been almost devastatingly difficult. So on one hand, I agree with you that < 18 year olds should not be having children. But to force a mother to abort her baby? Do you have any idea what you are proposing?? To me, it is beyond awful.
Maybe, instead, we should work to become a society where having a child at 17 doesn't cripple you for the rest of your life. That is the real problem, isn't it?
Edited to add: Of course, sex education should be a large part of the equation, as well as easy and preferably free access to birth control.
The age of consent isn't 18 in most places either.