What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#121

Post by EdwardDiego » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 12:24 PM UTC

notdrunkatall wrote: post #75

rauljara wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out poor white people in your discussion. While white people do have a lower rate of poverty than blacks or latinos, they actually make up a very large majority (68.5% as of 2009) of the people living under the poverty line in the United States. [1] "... let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here." "Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a f…

Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comp…

> It's much higher than it is or other races. When you dig into the data, it usually turns out that stereotypes exist for a reason

You'll find blacks and latinos are overrepresented in all negative socioeconomic indicators. But I'm sure that they're all deliberately choosing to have die younger and spend more time in prison.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#122

Post by kabouseng » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 12:25 PM UTC

nhaehnle wrote: post #109

kabouseng wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative example to what happens when you give the poor a stipend, have a look at the government grant system employed in South Africa, and the absolute misuse and abuse that system is under. I believe the South African example is a closer approximation to what a society would look like with a basic guaranteed income.

Do you have some links to sources?

I'll have to go search for some, I've only got my own experience :D. Give me a day or two, I don't mind getting some for you.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#123

Post by kabouseng » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 12:27 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116

kabouseng wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative example to what happens when you give the poor a stipend, have a look at the government grant system employed in South Africa, and the absolute misuse and abuse that system is under. I believe the South African example is a closer approximation to what a society would look like with a basic guaranteed income.

South Africa is a very close approximation of what happens when you impose decades of apartheid and then let a small elite class of blacks in on the fun without actually dismantling the inegalitarian economic system itself.

:) And how would you go about dismantling the inegalitarian economic system?

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#124

Post by fuckpig » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

Another cherry-picked study that will be refuted in the coming years.

What happens when you distribute money: it dissipates and poverty for all results.

But don't take it from me, Comrades!

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#125

Post by kiddz » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

I read through a lot of the comments so far and they expectedly turned into a stream of educated opining for and against the validity of stipends for the poor. Although many points are well said, do they really matter? Seems like the fundamental point is the ongoing lack of experimentation around poverty alleviation that leads to a Duke researcher only having a small Indian community that she has been studying who then gets a casino to be the only opportunity to see potentially innovative policy initiatives.

I'd love to see block grants distributed to states for a competitive process of poverty reduction (or pick any another long term social cost) where such experimentation could become institutionalized and there'd be a lot more to talk about.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#126

Post by unclebucknasty » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

goggles99 wrote: post #110

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #34

The researcher supposed that the reduced stressors in poor parents' lives allowed them to be more nurturing, resulting in reduced problems with their children. Seems like a no-brainer to do, considering this analysis: "Bearing that in mind, Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long ru…

Id be interested to see if even better effects would be realized if television was cut off from a group like this for a generation or two. Why did the parents of these poor kids do a terrible job of parenting before the stipend? They were drunk half of the time (literally 10-12 hours per day). They drank mostly because they felt sorry for themselves. Why? they felt disadvantaged and envious, they were basically pouti…

>Self pity is the biggest enemy of the minority. Nothing does more to promote this than the visual media

Politicians who seek to exploit racial groups by scapegoating them and promulgating stereotypes do a pretty good job too.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#127

Post by unclebucknasty » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

notdrunkatall wrote: post #75

rauljara wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out poor white people in your discussion. While white people do have a lower rate of poverty than blacks or latinos, they actually make up a very large majority (68.5% as of 2009) of the people living under the poverty line in the United States. [1] "... let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here." "Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a f…

Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comp…

>if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse.

Alternatively, rather than attempting to convince them, we could educate them.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#128

Post by nahname » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 1:44 PM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #60

notdrunkatall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: this is what happens when poor Cherokee receive a stipend, but let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here. There are differences between the subcultures, and those differences almost certainly extend to how they treat money. Furthermore, the psychological and social difference between receiving money from a source which a population would consider to be 'theirs' cannot be ov…

> Correction: this is what happens when poor Cherokee receive a stipend, but let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here. [...] Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a few times would [...] I can't be sure what you intended to say here, but the message it sounds to me like you are implying sounds quite racist to me. I DO care about poor Cherokee -- a…

>every one of the "racial differences" (especially the mental ones) that have been claimed have turned out to be baseless and untrue.

You should re-phrase that to point at racist claims. There are quite a few differences between the races. Bone density is one example.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1863580/

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#129

Post by quinnchr » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:00 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #112

quinnchr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I didn't miss that part. Like I said religious charities devoted to human services are counted towards human services in the source I posted. My source counts charities as religious if they identify their cause as being for "Religious Activities" or "Religous Media and Broadcasting" I'm not trolling. I think religous charities do a lot of good, but I think they also can do a lot of harm. I think it's ridiculous to…

Your not trolling but you have a fixation that religious organizations are bad and therefor anything they do must be discounted. For what its worth, not supporting is not always the same as opposing. Religious charities have stepped in in many cases well before any government agency has and they usually offer their help without "clauses" and "rules" that come with other forms of assistance.

Did you read my post at all? I'm pretty explicitly not talking about all religious organizations, but rather religious charities, and like I already pointed out:

'My source counts charities as religious if they identify their cause as being for "Religious Activities" or "Religious Media and Broadcasting"' A small fraction of that would be the 400 million dollars spent lobbying by religious groups every year, you know lobbying to restrict women's rights and against same sex marriage.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#130

Post by nickthemagicman » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:06 PM UTC

kiddz wrote: post #125

I read through a lot of the comments so far and they expectedly turned into a stream of educated opining for and against the validity of stipends for the poor. Although many points are well said, do they really matter? Seems like the fundamental point is the ongoing lack of experimentation around poverty alleviation that leads to a Duke researcher only having a small Indian community that she has been studying who th…

This. Every libertarian has some anecdote about a lazy poor person driving a lincoln navigator on food stamps and every democrat has an anecdote about some old lady shivering at a bus stop with starving kids.

What we need here is science! We're in the stone ages stil.