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What really drives the poor

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Re: What really drives the poor

#71

Post by yummyfajitas »

chrismealy wrote: post #49

Mike Konczal: Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing t…

I wish the proponents of this theory would carry it to it's logical conclusion: we should tax the poor more heavily than the middle class. Sure, we might be imposing one extra screaming guy on them. But so what? The harm to them is minimal, only $0.01 of diminished utility.

This is the logical conclusion to Karelis' bee sting theory of poverty. Yet neither he nor any of his proponents are willing to follow their theory to it's logical conclusions. I wonder why?

Re: What really drives the poor

#72

Post by DenisM »

Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #51
mcantelon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It isn't about lack of opportunity. It's about wise choices. ...and knowing wise choices exist. If you're brought up to just get by and the people all around you have the same mentality knowing that there's a superior mentality requires looking outside the box. This is where mentorship and real education (beyond education that conditions you to just show up on time) are valuable.

Agree. Dow chemical had a program where they would employ people from welfare families. They had to explain to them telephones, teach them about being on time, teach them to file (sometimes the alphabet as well), etc. Most came in for a week and left. Working was such a foreign concept to them, their families, and community that it did not make any sense to them. It is similar to the fish in water analogy or a revers…

Do you have a link or a keyword to look for? thanks.

Re: What really drives the poor

#73

Post by [deleted] »

chrismealy wrote: post #49

Mike Konczal: Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing t…

[deleted]

Re: What really drives the poor

#74

Post by pfedor »

chrismealy wrote: post #49

Mike Konczal: Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing t…

It is a commonly used argument that the lives of poor people are very hard and unpleasant and that dealing with the hardships sucks out all their energy and brings down their spirits so they can't take advantage of all the opportunities that middle-class people have to improve their situation.

The problem I see with this reasoning is that if you consider the entire range of standards of living which people had throughout history and geography, with maybe middle-age European peasants on one end and say Larry Ellison on the other, then on this scale, the standard of living of contemporary American poor is very close to the standard of living of the reasonably well off. From the point of view say anyone in communist Poland, as well as at least a billion people living today, what you call poverty would seem like mind-blowing opulence. On the other hand, I rather suspect that for anyone featured in The Real Housewives of New York, the lot of doctors and software engineers and struggling janitors alike must seem like horrifying wage slavery.

So, to claim that there exists a standard of living threshold, and that below this threshold life is objectively hard, whereas above this threshold it's easy, and that it so happens that the line lies between the poor and the middle class in contemporary America, you have to believe that we're looking at a very unique time and place. Of all the possible values that the threshold could potentially have, what are the odds that it would actually fall within this narrow range you're looking at? A hundred or maybe even fifty years ago in the US (and much more recently in many countries around the world), almost everyone's standard of living was way below that of contemporary poor. Do you think all these people were equally as incapacitated by the harshness of their lives, unable to make rational decisions and work to improve their lives? If the civilization does not collapse for one reason or another, chances are in fifty years time even the poor will have the standard of living as good as wealthy people have now. Do you think the poor of the future will not suffer from this ten-people-in-a-room-screaming effect?

Re: What really drives the poor

#75

Post by Lost_BiomedE »

DenisM wrote: post #72
Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Dow chemical had a program where they would employ people from welfare families. They had to explain to them telephones, teach them about being on time, teach them to file (sometimes the alphabet as well), etc. Most came in for a week and left. Working was such a foreign concept to them, their families, and community that it did not make any sense to them. It is similar to the fish in water analogy or a revers…

Do you have a link or a keyword to look for? thanks.

Dow has changed a lot since then, and I am unsure if they have continued the program. This was at their Michigan plant in the 80s.

Now it looks like they have moved more to diversity, cultural, disability, and gender issues: http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm

Re: What really drives the poor

#76

Post by temphn »

tokenadult wrote: post #67
temphn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a modern reference on the heritability of intelligence, read Paul Thompson from UCLA: www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/HARDI-IQ/hardiIQ-PR.html He and his colleagues can predict IQ from a 3D brain scan, a concrete dataset of voxels; it is not just about correlations between relatives any more. Read his numerous papers and those of his peers; the heritability of intelligence is an empirical, easily verifiable f…

A press release? I'm a lot more familiar with the relevant peer-reviewed literature than that. The self-promoted study you kindly linked has many of the usual problems with study design http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html common in studies cited by the popular press about IQ. Try again when you can cite something meaningful, better peer-reviewed, and more on point to the subject of this thread (causes of poverty…

You paste that link over and over again. I do not think it means what you think it means. And if you look at Thompson's 200+ papers, including the linked one that is the subject of the press release, you might be enlightened.

For whatever ideological reason you've convinced yourself that genes have nothing to do with brains, intelligence, or wealth.

Re: What really drives the poor

#77

Post by cdavid »

tokenadult wrote: post #67
temphn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a modern reference on the heritability of intelligence, read Paul Thompson from UCLA: www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/HARDI-IQ/hardiIQ-PR.html He and his colleagues can predict IQ from a 3D brain scan, a concrete dataset of voxels; it is not just about correlations between relatives any more. Read his numerous papers and those of his peers; the heritability of intelligence is an empirical, easily verifiable f…

A press release? I'm a lot more familiar with the relevant peer-reviewed literature than that. The self-promoted study you kindly linked has many of the usual problems with study design http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html common in studies cited by the popular press about IQ. Try again when you can cite something meaningful, better peer-reviewed, and more on point to the subject of this thread (causes of poverty…

Thompson's work is peer-reviewed. Of course, that does not mean it does not fall into some of the experimental issues pointed out by Norvig. His works certainly has no link with poverty.

Re: What really drives the poor

#78

Post by cdavid »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #70
paganel wrote: post #38

I barely made it half-way through the article, it sounded like an United Colors of Benetton add adapted into a Nobel-winning Economics paper. Just a couple of gems that made me skip it: """ they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside """ So, supposedly, us, the rich people, live in the "real" world, why them , the poors, live in a world from which they cann…

...the rich people, live in the "real" world, why them , the poors, live in a world from which they cannot see "outside"...lesser world The value judgments ("real world", "lesser world") are your own invention. They do not exist in the article. Information deprivation is a real issue for the poor in many places. For example, before mobile phones, farmers were unable to deliver their crops to the location with the hig…

This is all the more puzzling because their work contributed to significant and practical solutions against poverty (http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_...). There is nothing condescendant in their approach (randomized experiments). On the contrary, it goes against the usual "big plan, big project" idea so common in aid policies.

There are arguments against the approach (Chris Blattman sometimes write on his blog about them). But in any case, they advanced the debate.

Re: What really drives the poor

#79

Post by derleth »

delinka wrote: post #68
daniel-cussen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do…

It's also not cheaper to buy brown bread and raw carrots. It's less expensive to buy the "tasty" higher-sodium canned foods. Eating healthy is not inexpensive. Add to that that raw foods in quantity go bad sooner than cheap canned items and the cost of raw and healthy give up because of the extra waste. As for entertainment, the more wealthy enjoying turning off their brains as well. But they spend money on going to…

> It's also not cheaper to buy brown bread and raw carrots. It's less expensive to buy the "tasty" higher-sodium canned foods. Eating healthy is not inexpensive.

Also, you have to factor in how much it costs in terms of time to prepare a meal from fresh, more-or-less whole ingredients compared to throwing something prepared into the microwave or onto the stove. If you have the time to cook after your job, wouldn't you be tempted to get a second job instead of cooking, if only to make your constant, grinding debt go away faster?

Then you get into 'cultural poverty', where someone flatly doesn't know how to cook because their parents never cooked and only ate at cheap restaurants (which isn't cheap) and used prepared food. You might say 'oh, just get a cookbook', but I know first-hand how much implied knowledge you have to have to get much out of a cookbook. Implied knowledge has to come from somewhere; if you didn't get it from your parents, you likely don't have it.

Re: What really drives the poor

#80

Post by wisty »

ebiester wrote: post #28
temphn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism reduced the poverty of Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Chile, and Estonia (to name a few). What country was built from foreign aid?

South Korea was build heavily from foreign aid, both military and otherwise. How about Japan and the Marshall plan?

Japan was quite rich before the war. They were powerful enough to take on the US in the sea and air, and China on the ground, at once; and bounced back after the bombs stopped falling.
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