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

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

#191

Post by dlp211 »

throwaway76543 wrote: post #45
dlp211 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Addition…

"The average student loan debt in 2016 was $37,172" To be clear, the opportunity costs of unearned and non-debt payments generally would be in north of 150k range. Assume 30k/year income 4x years is 120k, plus the 37k debt, plus non-debt spending. " An Associates will net you about $400M over your lifetime, a Bachelors about $1MM," And the same monetary investment in a fund earning 7% interest will be worth more than…

Did you just claim a 20x return on investment wasn't good? A 7% investment adjust for inflation will return about 4x over the same time period (40 years). I have no clue what the hell you are talking about.

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

#192

Post by TheCoelacanth »

throwaway76543 wrote: post #45
dlp211 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Addition…

"The average student loan debt in 2016 was $37,172" To be clear, the opportunity costs of unearned and non-debt payments generally would be in north of 150k range. Assume 30k/year income 4x years is 120k, plus the 37k debt, plus non-debt spending. " An Associates will net you about $400M over your lifetime, a Bachelors about $1MM," And the same monetary investment in a fund earning 7% interest will be worth more than…

Good luck finding a bank that will let an 18 year old with no assets make a leveraged investment in stocks.

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

#193

Post by mikeash »

EdSharkey wrote: post #181
mikeash wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about those people. Was that not clear? I was being sarcastic because I was replying to a person who said that avoiding poverty was simple, all you have to do is get a job. I don't see what any of your comment has to do with this.

You appreciate only your side of this debate. Whereas I appreciate both. My comment has to do with one-sidedness.

This is an interesting tactic: try to forcibly shift the conversation in a completely different direction, and then criticize the other person when they don't follow. I can't say it's working, but it's not a bad attempt.

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

#194

Post by imaginenore »

watwut wrote: post #61
imaginenore wrote: post #3

As a really poor immigrant to the US who succeeded financially, I can tell you with absolute certainty, poverty in the US (barring mental illness cases or health issues) is the result of poor choices. Most of it stems from society's lack of planning for the future of the young people. Young people are consistently being told lies like "you can be anything you want", forgetting to tell them that most of the fun choice…

Majority of students go for practical degrees - business and such. They follow market. Non practical students (gender studies, history of art) tend to be clustered in top schools and students tend to be from wealthy families. Blaming population of young students for economy is worst then red herring.

By what metric is the US economy bad? I didn't win a lottery, I just finished the state college, then went on to work. I'm making great money. Anybody willing to do that can do it.

My home country doesn't have that option, the salaries are 1/20th of what the US has to offer.

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

#195

Post by function_seven »

haberman wrote: post #176
function_seven wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different pundits had different odds on that race. No matter which one you go with, what makes you think those odds weren’t true facts? Remember, n=1 in this scenario.

You can look at: 1. the specific circumstances of the outcome. Hillary Clinton didn't lose just barely, she lost by a lot. And she lost states like Wisconsin, which wasn't even supposed to be in play. 2. the fact that predictions like HuffPo's were far off from more credible pundits like 538. 3. the fact that HuffPo so aggressively mocked anyone who took a more measured view. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/whats…

Drilling down to the state level is a good way to really trash those "predictions" from HuffPo. 538 really did get it right. They constantly noted the high correlation among related states, saying that if the polls are wrong in MI, they'd probably be wrong by the same amount in WI and PA. And that's exactly what happened.

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

#196

Post by wyager »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #132
wyager wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived all over the US, I believe that small homogenous rural towns are the most empathetic/friendly places available. The human brain didn't evolved to form strong, productive social bonds in the presence of millions of people. It seems to wear on people after a while. Whenever I visit little towns in ID/MT/WY/TX I always smile at how nice people are. Unfortunately, those small towns are intellectually underst…

Small, homogenous rural towns aren't so bad if you fit into the culture that is there. You'll always be an outsider, but it'll go well enough. It'll be a bit harder if you seem like an outsider, but if you are normal enough, this'll pass. Lots of folks will act friendly to you in the meantime. However, if you are weird or alternative enough? Perhaps you aren't keen on religion? Or something similar? Yeah, these place…

This is true, but what has the higher net social utility: a system that treats the 1% of social deviants equally at the expense of a loss of social cohesion, or a system that treats the 1% of social deviants poorly while maintaining a friendly social environment for the 99%? The answer isn't immediately obvious, and depends on what degree of deviance the local culture will tolerate, so I could see it going either way.

However, I do think the concern is a bit overstated; especially in northern towns, the primary cultural identity shared by the inhabitants would most accurately be described as "outdoorsman" rather than any religious or ethnic affiliation. There's more to it than that, but overall it was pretty accessible as long as you were willing to adapt.

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

#197

Post by EdSharkey »

mikeash wrote: post #193
EdSharkey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appreciate only your side of this debate. Whereas I appreciate both. My comment has to do with one-sidedness.

This is an interesting tactic: try to forcibly shift the conversation in a completely different direction, and then criticize the other person when they don't follow. I can't say it's working, but it's not a bad attempt.

Tactic, pfft. I never downvoted you even though you started out with useless sarcasm. You didn't launch with name calling as your peers so often do. But now you're skating on thin ice with this useless negativity. Can't we have a conversation anymore?

Try getting involved by making an argument next time and bolster your philosophy rather than throwing shade on others.

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

#198

Post by throwaway76543 »

dlp211 wrote: post #191
throwaway76543 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The average student loan debt in 2016 was $37,172" To be clear, the opportunity costs of unearned and non-debt payments generally would be in north of 150k range. Assume 30k/year income 4x years is 120k, plus the 37k debt, plus non-debt spending. " An Associates will net you about $400M over your lifetime, a Bachelors about $1MM," And the same monetary investment in a fund earning 7% interest will be worth more than…

Did you just claim a 20x return on investment wasn't good? A 7% investment adjust for inflation will return about 4x over the same time period (40 years). I have no clue what the hell you are talking about.

Saying "20x" return is meaningless without considering time. 1% growth will have a "20x return" if you're willing to wait 300 years. So no, a "20x return" is not necessarily good.

What I've said is that the return from a degree program is less than half of a moderate investment return in the stock market. It's a very simple point I'm making here.

You don't need to get confused with inflation - it applies similarly to both scenarios and drops out of the equation.

Turning $150k into $3m over 45 years could be described as "average market performance." Turning $150k into $1m over 45 years using a degree could be accurately described as "a below average performing investment."

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

#199

Post by Godel_unicode »

RobertoG wrote: post #65
Godel_unicode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anecdotally know far more people who coast and don't do well than I know who either coast and do well or don't coast and don't do well. I think part of the problem is a combination of a bias against impugning others effort because "you don't know their struggle" and just enough counter examples (where hard work doesn't pay off) to feed confirmation bias. The question that I have is this: is the growing narrative ab…

I think you are complicated the issue too much. Who cares if a society it's a meritocracy or not? The point, it seems to me, is, is it a meritocracy that work for most of the people? Because what is the point of a society that doesn't work for most of the people? I know that if I train hard every day I could improve my 100m sprinter time. I also know that never mind what I do, not in a million years I could beat Usai…

> never mind what I do, not in a million years I could beat Usain Bolt

Maybe this is just a bad analogy, but if you're objectively worse than Usain Bolt then in a meritocracy you should justifiably be worse off. That's a bad expectation anyway, at a population level 0% of people are Usain Bolt. This ultimately leads to a question I've been thinking about a lot; should we as a society be okay with a hard working naturally gifted person being higher paid than an equally hard working non-gifted person.

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

#200

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

EdSharkey wrote: post #182
humanrebar wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergency rooms and insurance makes a ton of sense for heart attacks. They makes little sense for routine things like cholesterol tests. Some things are very expensive but also predictable. Like giving birth. Or reparative plastic surgery. Or non-emergency heart surgery. People would shop around for those things as appropriate.

Our adversaries in this debate see government as a hyper-competent, wise dispenser of justice that is nearly akin to an invisible benevolent god and savior. I don't think your rational arguments will make a dent against their fervor.

There is no need to have faith in anything special. As I said in my original post, it's just a matter of looking at healthcare systems in most of the developed world. The healthcare systems that work best, in any published study and metric, have much more public involvement that the US system.

"Fervor" is what it takes to believe in utopian solutions that go exactly in the opposite direction to the success stories, and with no evidence whatsoever that they work in the real world.

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