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Once poor, always poor?

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Re: Once poor, always poor?

#151

Post by dan-robertson »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #34
ivanmontillam wrote: post #24

It's true that culture can make you poor, by the means of setting your mindset. I've seen people in the towns of South America (i.e. not the main cities) whose family traditions set them on a path of "wait to be given" instead of "go and get it" mentality. Of course, this never materializes, and the person lives their life impoverished. Money is such a taboo in these families, that you end up thinking it's dirty unti…

> if you're a teenage girl, depending on your culture, your family seems to be peer pressuring you to be a mother Ironically, societies that do not steer girls to parenthood are subject to extinction. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's just the law of nature.

It’s generally true that as people become richer and better educated, fertility goes down. In the US, I think it’s also true that women have fewer children than they would like (common reason being that it is expensive in absolute terms and opportunity cost) so another question is whether the state should do things to allow people to do the things that both they and the state want.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#152

Post by hellbannedguy »

algo646464 wrote: post #102
duxup wrote: post #14

> Cultural norms can also encourage poverty cycles. I often wonder about these. Growing up I watched friends whose families had what you might describe as a cultural distrust of institutions, including schools, or even anyone who seemed to “think they’re better than us” (translation anyone who did well in school or a career). They constantly made self defeating choices and seemed destined to have the same problems/ p…

I sometimes think, one way to break this cycle is to send the all the kids to boarding school or military school. It could put them in an environment free from their background circumstances. It is of course a harsh thing to do, but I think maybe it could work.

No post body was provided.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#153

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

vpilcx wrote: post #141
duxup wrote: post #14

> Cultural norms can also encourage poverty cycles. I often wonder about these. Growing up I watched friends whose families had what you might describe as a cultural distrust of institutions, including schools, or even anyone who seemed to “think they’re better than us” (translation anyone who did well in school or a career). They constantly made self defeating choices and seemed destined to have the same problems/ p…

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdl…

"In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through."

There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless.

"the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves."

I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#154

Post by fallingknife »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #130
duxup wrote: post #14

> Cultural norms can also encourage poverty cycles. I often wonder about these. Growing up I watched friends whose families had what you might describe as a cultural distrust of institutions, including schools, or even anyone who seemed to “think they’re better than us” (translation anyone who did well in school or a career). They constantly made self defeating choices and seemed destined to have the same problems/ p…

That was sort of my experience. I grew up in poverty and stayed in poverty until I was almost 25 years old because I didn't know any better. My parents didn't distrust institutions. Instead, they mocked things they couldn't afford, so I grew up thinking college was a "stupid waste of time and money" and unimportant. For me, the things that broke me out of my family's cycle of poverty were a public library, a love of…

College is a stupid waste of time and money. Unfortunately, it's usually not unimportant.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#155

Post by vpilcx »

bko wrote: post #150
vpilcx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdl…

> My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. Can't you just hack this by going to school for pretty much anything you're interested in and being able to work in an unrelated field? > my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings You've established that education is a good investment. So why not find an affordable college? It's not a…

> You've established that education is a good investment.

My friend often comes to me and says, "Hey, man, how come you don't invest your money in ?" Because I'm living in poverty. People who live in poverty don't have money to invest.

> So why not find an affordable college?

So I did a quick calculation. Affordable, meaning junior college and public state college, would come out to roughly $23k for a bachelor. Maybe round it to $30k. When I was paying off my car, which only come out to about a little over $10k. Two years of having to work JUST to pay that off felt really, really uncomfortable. A college infused starting salary would probably only pay about 1 and 1/2 times more than what I was making then and the idea of having to do that for even longer without being able to absolve myself of it through bankruptcy is not something I want to do.

> Can't you just hack this by going to school for pretty much anything you're interested in and being able to work in an unrelated field?

That particular situation doesn't apply to every job. It seems like its mainly tech jobs I see that in and I'm not 100% certain I'd want to work to be forced into a tech job.

So I'm trying to think of the best way to explain this because I feel like I'm going in different directions but it seems like there's two paths:

1) go to college, accrue debt to get a job then work at your job for 5-10 years to pay that debt off

Barring someone making sure I have the proper technical bonafides, I'm philosophically opposed to getting a piece of paper for a job that I could do just as easily without a college education as I could with one. I also feel really uncomfortable with debt in general, especially debt that I cannot choose to have absolved through bankruptcy.

2) live at the lowest possible means necessary and eke out a living as best you can

As it stands now, my current expenses are no more than $500 a month (including rent). My biggest challenge, currently, to maintaining that type of lifestyle is getting remote work that I can do on an ad-hoc basis that will allow me to stay under the income necessary for government subsidies.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#156

Post by AussieWog93 »

fhe wrote: post #80
duxup wrote: post #14

> Cultural norms can also encourage poverty cycles. I often wonder about these. Growing up I watched friends whose families had what you might describe as a cultural distrust of institutions, including schools, or even anyone who seemed to “think they’re better than us” (translation anyone who did well in school or a career). They constantly made self defeating choices and seemed destined to have the same problems/ p…

Have you seen people manage to breakout from the poverty cycle? I have lived long enough to actually see a handful of people doing just that, and I often wondered what made them different. One trait I often observed is risk-taking. The ones that broke free from their upbringing always seemed to have high tolerance for risks. So maybe it's simply statistics -- if you have a group of people taking a lot of risks, some…

I'm only in my 20s, but know three people quite well, all from diverse backgrounds, who have escaped the poverty trap. The traits I would note is that they were reasonably intelligent, actually made changes in their lives in order to achieve financial success (ie played the game to win), and were somewhat "interesting" socially.

The last one may be selection bias, but I'm not so sure. I remember listening to an interview with Grant Petty (Co-Founder/CEO of Blackmagic Design, grew up in public housing in Shepparton, would be worth $100m+ overnight if they IPO'd) saying that he was basically too Autistic to pick up on social cues from others informing him that he was white trash and had no future.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#157

Post by MomoXenosaga »

anovikov wrote: post #122
vladvasiliu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP did say "all the kids", so maybe they actually meant all the kids, as in rich, poor, in-between. So that it wouldn't be based on family income or school sector or what-have-you. Of course, this could be construed as "discrimination" against the better off, since they have to go through what seems like a tough time "just because of the poor people".

Oh well this is a terrible idea beyond imagination. Even just simply "solving" poverty by the means of good old segregation, delimiting poor places with barbed wire, sounds better to me.

America is actually surprisingly socialist. Children from all backgrounds go to the same school.

In my country the middle class guards their children from the deplorables. Education is no longer equal for all.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#158

Post by jokoon »

I just have the belief that civilization is a system that tames people into obedience.

Very obedient/normed people who adheres to a culture or lifestyle habits, will often acquire a high social status because they can get access to the benefits of a group.

You don't escape poverty through merit or effort, you just "belong" with people of a certain social status that identify with cultures and habits.

That's how civilized humans behave, and that's the role of government and modern society to mitigate those ingroup behaviors. That's the whole point of the job interview, to test if a person fits as a feeling of belonging to a certain group, not as a matter of skill or competence.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#159

Post by metadata »

cm2012 wrote: post #66
sh4un wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best example ever is Haiti.

Yeah, Haiti and Dominican Republic are on the same island and started in the same place 50 years ago. They're now on wildly different projectories.

I think parent might be referring to the Red Cross scandal.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#160

Post by vpilcx »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #153
vpilcx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdl…

"In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through." There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless. "the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves." I'm not in the US, but isn't the…

> There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless.

It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that.

> I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.

One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy.

I mean, I could put it on credit cards or take a personal loan, but that just increases the financial burden (via the interest rate), and if I'm not going to do that for the explicit purpose of purposely declaring bankruptcy, it seems unnecessary.

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