I've thought this for a long time.
It's not the haves vs. the have-nots. It's the connecteds vs. the connected-nots.
What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#72Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never unders…
People develop those bad attitudes, viewpoints, or whatever, in large part because they are poor. The contagion aspect, if it exists, is secondary. You are simply advocating the preservation of the elite by gating access to it. Of course if everyone had access to the same networks there would be no elite anymore. If it raises the prospects of the vast majority of Americans by, say, 5%, that would actually be great fo…
"People develop those bad attitudes, viewpoints, or whatever, in large part because they are poor. The contagion aspect, if it exists, is secondary."
I think this is the official leftist dogma, but I actually fail to see any obvious causality.
I think it assumes that structural lack of opportunity (ie you qualified to be a surgeon, but the y only job you can get is shoeshine boy because you are black) leads to resentment leads to bad behavior. And that there is no feedback from bad behavior to lack of opportunity. And that cultural diffusion just doesn't exist or doesn't matter.
Am I getting this right? Not a sarcastic question, I think there are massive amounts of assumption that creep in unnoticed in all these discussions, by me as much as anyone.
And just for the record, (1) I didn't downvote you, even though I think you are wrong, and wrong in a way that is holding the USA back, and (2) I would consider myself a socialist.
I just think socialism should get away from "fight the rich! bad rich people!" to working on how to enculturate and change the poor so the rich just go poof and disappear; OF COURSE there is the danger we go too far in this, and there is also the fact that we need to make careful and tentative value judgements about good versus bad behavior, something the left is, reasonably given history, loathe to do. (ramble, ramble, ... sorry...)
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#73I know a homeless person who says that he would not work for less than x money/day, where x is more than what the average person earns here in Hungary. (He used to earn a lot. He used to be a baker.)
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#74I think there's a similar mechanism by which geeks end up "too geeky".
http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend...
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#75Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#76Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.
This I think is the wisest comment I've read here. We live in an age where many people earnestly believe they can reengineer society. They identify aspects of human nature which they don't like and think it's open to reeducation. There is such a thing as human nature. Tabula rasa is a myth.
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#77Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never unders…
May I respectfully suggest that there are very different kinds of poverty, and that not all kinds of poverty are due to cultural choices. I came to the conclusion many years ago that in America poverty is a contagious mindset, nothing more. You are making very, very broad generalizations and stereotyping an entire socio-economic category of people. My parents grew up in rural Minnesota in absolute poverty. My father…
Life is hard to live in a place where life is hard to live.
There is some push to discuss "food deserts" as a social problem subject to sociopolitical solutions. Thing is, a desert is what it is because there is little there to sustain life - and the prime way to deal with that, short of either imposing expensive infrastructure or accepting grinding bare-sustenance living, is MOVE: don't be there. Ditto these urban "food deserts" (or "banking deserts", or ...): the solution isn't trying to impose an infrastructure on a system which has a natural resistance thereto, and will require enormous costs with little payback, the solution is to recognize "this is a bad place to exist in" and get out. Yes, it can be hard to move for many reasons; which is cumulatively harder - leaving, or staying?
If you're going to commute 2 hours every day, you've already proven you can move. And people do! There are plenty of towns and cities (Detroit a good current example) where people finally realized "this isn't working, I'm outta here" and left, leaving the systemic structural problems behind.
My recurring conclusion on the issue: the problem isn't opportunity, the problem is people not acting on opportunity. You can't force them to, and if they won't then nothing will change for them.
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#78Having been poor (U.S. standard) during much of my elementary and middle school years, and then escaped to a relative level of upper middle class comfort...there is one defining characteristic between my peers from back then who made it out of that situation, and those who are still there decades later: a broken decision making process best and the inability to plan exemplified in the famous Marshmallow test. http://…
Great point. But if this is true the implication is that we are already limited by our natural ability to delay gratification? Furthermore, will we inherit this ability on our children. So they will be constrained too?
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#79I think I'm going to be the only person commenting here who's going to cop to getting jobs all the time based on nothing but middle class social connections. I've gotten jobs through uncle's girlfriends/father's frat brothers/my drinking buddies. Honestly, most people I come in contact with know somebody with or have the ability to give me work, and I have the ability to get some of them work just by being a piece of…
Somewhat less cynical advice that I'll give to young people: Go to college, at least for a little while, and get a part-time job or an internship. Companies will hire a college student with little to no experience, but not a college graduate with little to no experience.
Many people only figure this out when it's too late.
Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
#80So can we change this? I think we can. It starts with recognizing the problem for what it is and doing what we can to teach kids from impoverished backgrounds not just how to read and write but how to become upwardly mobile in their networking
I'm pretty sure the problem is more complex than just lack of awareness of the importance of a certain approach to networking... and I'm someone who has been down this path - having grown up "dirt poor" in rural southeast NC, and having escaped to a solidly middle-class lifestyle. But I absolutely agree that this is one component of helping people escape poverty, and I'd definitely like to see (and perhaps participate in) some sort of initiative to help raise awareness of this point, especially among younger folks.
Some sort of program, directed at high-school kids, that teaches skills specifically related to networking, economics, entrepreneurship, and all the "stuff" needed to advance economically, would be - IMO - tremendously beneficial.
That said, I believe the point that solson made about mindsets does stand. I grew up with plenty of people who were as poor as I was, and I was willing to make certain sacrifices, and commit to doing things in order to raise my standard of living... many of my peers weren't, and they still live in the sticks and they're still poor. And I honestly don't believe that I'm necessarily (smarter|more talented|more insightful|whatever) than most of them. But I had a different attitude and different ambitions, and - to my mind - that was the single biggest difference.
Edit:
As an aside, though, I'll throw this out... some of my friends who are still "poorer" than me in the financial sense, may actually be happier. I, for example, have never married or had kids, because I was too busy working and trying to make a better life for myself. And now that I'm working on a startup, I work more than ever and have basically quit worrying about dating or anything for a while... OTOH, my friends back home have wives and kids to come home to, play with, go out with, etc. But I have more money. So who's really better off? I would say that's a real grey area.