Poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

Whether that claim is accurate or not can be judged on data, no? Out of curiosity I googled "graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock" and this is the first result:

> Let politicians, (...) and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class. [0]

It's not saying anyone can get rich. It's not saying poor people are lazy. It's saying these 3 things will have a major, measurable impact on your future and your children's.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...

The average student loan debt in 2016 was $37,172. And while there are those that do take on significant amounts of debt, they typically are those seeking professional degrees, eg: M.D. or J.D. There are of course those who both take on large amounts of debt AND don't get a professional degree, and those people certainly made a mistake in their lives, but they are not your average graduating college student.

Additionally, those with even an associates degree can, on average, expect to make more than the typical high school graduate. An Associates will net you about $400M over your lifetime, a Bachelors about $1MM, and a doctoral or professional degree will be about $2MM more. Now of course these are averages, and there are certainly overlaps where a high school graduate will out earn someone with a professional degree, but that is not the common case and should be considered an outlier.

Taken even a step beyond that, if you fall into one of the top 10 occupations for a bachelor's degree, even in the worst case scenario, on average you will still make $400M more than your typical high school graduate.

https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg...

Its actually a quantitative result from the (left wing) Brookings Institute: Of the people who do all 3 of these things, 98% are not in poverty.

Well it can't be often if it's exceptional.

Grandparent's statement "there are such things as facts" seems to support the idea that the evidence provides unambiguous support for the author's thesis.

I think people discussing complex phenomena (like poverty) tend to overstate the power of their evidence; they overstate its ability to support the conclusions they want to draw from it.

This was illustrated in dramatic fashion when many/most of the most educated, "enlightened" people in the US had a reality check that their model was off last November. If there hadn't been an actual vote, people would probably still be insisting that Hillary Clinton would have won, had there been an actual vote on Nov 8.

And that was the simple question of "how many people will show up to a polling station and mark a box for HC vs DT"! And the evidence consisted of pollsters who were asking hundreds or thousands of people that precise question every day! That should have been much easier to model and predict than poverty! It didn't even get into the causes of why people think or vote in certain ways.

And yet still we have people looking at complex systems and problems like poverty and saying "it's not because of X, it's because of Y" with a feeling of certainty. And thinking that they are justified in their certainty because they claim this is what the "facts" say.

I think, first of all, that grandparent hasn't even accurately summarized their own link, which says "Children and eldery make up slightly more than half of the market poor." Their statement that "essentially" 80% of the poor are children and elderly has already caused a significant amount of the underlying data to be "lost in translation".

I think, second of all, that bucketing elderly, children, the disabled, etc into "vulnerable populations" and saying they comprise 80% of the poor doesn't really support the author's thesis at all.

No one blames a child for being poor. It is not a child's responsibility to support themselves. So saying children are poor doesn't really speak to whether poverty is a personal choice. Children are the responsibility of their parents, so it is the parents choices that would be relevant here.

Elderly people, on the other hand, generally spend their lives realizing they will be old someday, and therefore poverty of an elderly person does not necessarily say anything about whether poverty is a personal choice. It could be a lack of effort put into saving during their working years.

I want to be clear that I'm not against safety nets, or in favor of doling out blame and judgement towards poor people.

What I am against is the (to me) crazy amount of overconfidence many people (on the left especially) have in the ability of their data to "prove" their political positions and arguments.

And I'm not even against people's right to hold convictions that the evidence doesn't fully justify. What I am especially against is when people use those convictions to pass blame and judgment on others. The clear subtext of this article is that we are all guilty, as a society, for making poor people poor.