Once poor, always poor?

If you've had direct experience with the poor, you know there is a non-trivial segment that have ZERO ability to plan and ZERO ability to defer gratification.

I've experience this in both the USA and overseas in the developing world over the last 30 years.

These are the ones who will be "once poor, always poor" because you can't unlearn the habits that cause these behaviors after adolescence and certainly never as an adult. Not everyone can ever be "saved".

Those without these behaviors/habits absolutely have a potential to raise themselves our of poverty - most of emerge from the developing world or poverty in the US will have the opposite of these destructive traits. But this latter group is small (it's easier NOT to learn the habits you must have especially if you are poor and struggling) and often the opportunities are not there. This is why the "conversion rate" from poverty to middle class or more is pretty low.

And if you've experienced the "once poor, always poor" directly, you will generally not want to have anything to do with them - they are highly parasitic and they never "learn" from their self-inflicted circumstances. They have a lot of traits like narcissists. Because they are often "hand-to-mouth" on everything in their lives.

One reasonable theory is that this group are on the low end of the IQ bell curve (yes, that's a real thing because all things tend to fall on a Gaussian). Just as the low end isn't even acceptable to the military, imagine what happens in civilian life: poverty and dysfunction.

But IQ does NOT explain everything: if the entire culture is impoverished, the habits becomes cultural and affects even those on the top end of IQ. IQ is affected by poverty (causally) and that can be an "infectious agent" for good or bad for the majority. It's this gap that makes most progressive policies, however well-intentioned, ineffective in practice. Only separating selected individuals from the culture can allow the adverse cultural effects to be overcome. This is the role of education because you can gauge who has potential and who does not, plus you can "goose" the process to push a few more into the "has potential" category. You also have to have a plan/opportunities for those who can't which is the other Epic Fail of most progressive efforts - everyone is NOT the same and you have to account for that fairly but appropriately.

I just brought up the uniforms point because:

A) It didn't solve the issue, people looked at other signifiers such as jewellery or shoes instead (or if the uniform required "a white polo" then they'd have a name brand polo instead).

B) It forced the parent to buy (in some cases) expensive Uniform(s) (because you can't have just 1 and kids grow quickly too).

For the second point I was fortunate enough to have really good grades when tested, so I was allowed to go to a more prestigious school that required a tie and blazer.

The total cost for everything was more than my Mum received in cash for an entire year. If it wasn't for my granddad stepping in I wouldn't have been able to go to the school on those grounds alone.

(EDIT: just so I'm clear, Mum got about 48~ gbp per week but rent was paid directly by the Government)

how might one fix all of the US workers “stuck” making $20k-$50k/yr? that’s the biggest form of “poverty” I have interaction with. they aren’t starving, but their quality of life stinks. especially mental health because you feel like a failure for not being able to figure out how to make “easy money” like tech, influencers, etc.

From the US and I've also taken exams when applying for all kinds of jobs. I applied to work in a convenience store and had to take a test on simple math and alphabetizing things. I applied to IBM and took a strange test full of math word problems (the IPATO test; I was amazed they still did that in ~2013). There are certain employers in the tech industry that are well known for their standardized exams, like Epic Healthcare. And that says nothing of the many, many low-wage jobs that require you to take a bogus personality test to prove you're an extrovert before they'll let you stock shelves.

> Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s.

A solid 31% of college graduates have no loans, and current graduates with loans average something like $30k in debt. With this in mind, it's perhaps worth pausing to consider why the sample that is your social circle suffers from decades of crushing debt. Perhaps your sample is not representative?

Or, more insidiously, perhaps debt levels tend to reflect class and class aspirations? Someone who attends a community college likely has little to no debts. Someone attending a local tier two or three public university probably has some modest debt, often below their yearly income after graduation. Someone who goes through a private post-grad program likely has six figures worth.

> Finally, that in of itself, ya know, maybe that's like the licks you gotta take when you're trying to rise up in the world, but the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves.

What do you imagine the outcome might be if student loans were voidable through bankruptcy? How do you think fresh graduates with loans and no assets would handle things?