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Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

nytimes.com

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Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#311

Post by cyborgx7 »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #299
drdaeman wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data. Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything . It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.…

I'll call you inhumane then. Despite record employment levels and rising average net worth in the USA, millions of people are still starving and struggling with drug addictions and so on. Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".

There was a time (or at least so I'm told) when having a job meant you could build a living, own a house, support a family. So we the started looking at employment percentages as a measure for the quality of the economy.

This incentivizes increasing employment percentage. An easy way to do that is by decreasing the value of a job. Suddenly it doesn't ensure you can build a living, own a home, support a family anymore. But it is still used as a primary measure of the wellbeing of the economy.

This is why you need individual stories to interrogate the quality of your data. Afterwards, you obviously need to come up with new measures that more accurately reflect how well the economy is working for the people in it. But the interrogation will have to work on the basis of anecdotes.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#312

Post by campbellmorgan »

Tommek wrote: post #214

Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.

I stopped my subscription to the New Yorker because I got fed up with exactly this. Although, as others here have commented, it may more emotionally resonant to hear one person's story, it also reinforces a very American view of history that all changes good and bad are forged by individuals, not by motivated groups of people or larger stochastic events / underlying structural changes.

Repeated enough, it can create a narrative that the wider groups don't matter as long as you support the few exceptionals. This seems to play out across all sides of US society both in justice (think "headline" prosecution of corrupt individuals in finance etc) and in social welfare. This is not to say that exceptional individuals do not have a disproportionate role in society. They unquestionably do. However I can't think of any of those individuals who has not been enabled by dozens if not thousands of talented others.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#313

Post by cyborgx7 »

drdaeman wrote: post #307
anoncoward111 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll call you inhumane then. Despite record employment levels and rising average net worth in the USA, millions of people are still starving and struggling with drug addictions and so on. Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".

> Despite record employment levels That's also a single aggregated number. Until the data doesn't cover those millions dire situation, it's a bad data. Emotionless analogy: like a green status page when some percentile of requests is failing. See, you've mentioned "millions" rather than some "that person.". That's exactly what I mean.

All data is always incomplete. And we can only find this out by looking at the individual case to interrogate the data.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#314

Post by drdaeman »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #302
drdaeman wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data. Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything . It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.…

I'm not talking about "drawing conclusions from a single point of data". I'm talking about using single points of data to interrogate the completeness and correctness of your data.

The problem I see is that a lot (I believe) of people still do this, even if you and I don't.

I guess I'll contradict myself with the anecdote (I recognize this is totally not representative). I've heard a lot of stories about how "they do this and that, somewhere" based on a news about some single case. Some make sense, but also lots of variants of vaccines and autism stories (mostly, regarding modern politics, so I don't want to describe anything in particular).

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#315

Post by michaelmrose »

skookumchuck wrote: post #298
michaelmrose wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most ridiculous proof that America is the land of opportunity I can imagine. From https://www.wola.org/analysis/fact-sheet-united-states-immig... "While the total number of migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border is near its lowest level since the early 1970s, the number of apprehended unaccompanied children and families is again on the rise after a dramatic drop in the months following Trump’s ina…

"The United States has been the top destination for international migrants since at least 1960, with one-fifth of the world's migrants living there as of 2017." That doesn't make much sense if the US is a hell-hole of capitalism grinding people into poverty (as immigrants usually have little). In 2016, 1.49 million immigrants came to the US. The median age is 44, so they're hardly all children. Meanwhile, an awful lo…

People aren't rational you can't prove anything about anything by supposing that people make sense.

A lot of the planet is just terrible. Of the places that aren't terrible many wont let you just sneak in and make a living if you live a cash and carry lifestyle.

At best you can prove that the US is viewed as better than their current abode by people that don't live here.

This is the definition of damning with faint praise.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#316

Post by ejstronge »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #262
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #170

America is a country of huge wealth. Wealthy in natural resources, capital equipment, labor ... fucking everything. And yet we have such terrible poverty. When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simple…

Unable to afford stuff is not poverty. It's a symptom of poverty. Poverty is the inability to know how or be able to survive at a minimum comfortable level in our society. The causes are many, such as lack of education, addiction, early parenthood, good role models, lack of good health and many more I can't even begin to imagine. So giving people stuff and housing is only a temporary solution. The solution is so much…

> Look at Venezuela, they tried to solve their poverty problem very simply by basically giving people food and shelter without fixing the fundamental problem of lack of knowledge and the other problems that cause poverty and now they are in worst trouble than ever

I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer being on my phone.

But, Venezuela’s current crisis has about as little to do with commoners working as you could find in a modern-day country. As a small example, how would the arrival of a new president fit into your (kind of derogatory) theory? What evidence do you have for your assertion?

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#317

Post by michaelmrose »

bildung wrote: post #308
throwaway8879 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to make a point or rallying against anything. I'm simply saying that I work hard to acquire resources for myself and will never give them away. We can all make moral/ethical/humane arguments about equality and fairness but I simply don't care. If that makes me unintelligent, then I suppose that's just something I'll have to accept.

Are you really working hard, or are you working in IT, in a first world country?

Probably working more intelligently but less hard than the average person at Walmart.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#318

Post by spython »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #268
throwaway77384 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not sharing them doesn't either. You still haven't made a point. Is the intelligent action the action that is most likely to benefit the group? Is a group of 20 fed dogs stronger than a group of 20 dogs where one goes hungry and becomes a weak or unstable element? Seems like you're just trying to somehow rally against equality and/or sharing, by associating them with naivité, like you have some knowledge others d…

I'm not trying to make a point or rallying against anything. I'm simply saying that I work hard to acquire resources for myself and will never give them away. We can all make moral/ethical/humane arguments about equality and fairness but I simply don't care. If that makes me unintelligent, then I suppose that's just something I'll have to accept.

You seem to overlook a wide range of resources - trust, admiration and friendship of others are also resources. So is a society in which people don't let each other live in poverty. The willingness of others to work with you is a resource, which you acknowledge by using a throwaway.

You don't 'give away' resources, they are transformed into other resources. Would you give up the ability to own seven cars for the knowledge that you'll never live under a bridge, no matter what? Many people would.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#319

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #258
Tommek wrote: post #214

Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.

That is what people are taught good journalism is. I agree, it's annoying and time consuming. It is disrespectful of my time as a reader.

You're not the only reader.

Most humans remember personal narratives far more efficiently than they parse data tables. Humans who don't operate like this are very much an exception.

So this is a communication technique - part of rhetoric, in fact. And communicating with median readers is what journalists are paid to do.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#320

Post by bacro »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #268
throwaway77384 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not sharing them doesn't either. You still haven't made a point. Is the intelligent action the action that is most likely to benefit the group? Is a group of 20 fed dogs stronger than a group of 20 dogs where one goes hungry and becomes a weak or unstable element? Seems like you're just trying to somehow rally against equality and/or sharing, by associating them with naivité, like you have some knowledge others d…

I'm not trying to make a point or rallying against anything. I'm simply saying that I work hard to acquire resources for myself and will never give them away. We can all make moral/ethical/humane arguments about equality and fairness but I simply don't care. If that makes me unintelligent, then I suppose that's just something I'll have to accept.

Wow, how bright you are sir... If everybody thought like you, we would have a wonderful world, I am sure!
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