No Money, No Time

Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.

Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.

I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.

Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.

But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.

It would be cheaper to just give everyone free money. In fact, that's the basis of the the various Guaranteed Minimum Income ideas that have been floating around for the past 45 years or so.

Every meal involves a multi-hour line. Every shelter bed too. Every free clinic, etc etc, you get the point.

The net effect is, despite having well-funded charities providing for their basic needs, they have neither the time nor the bandwidth to make any substantial improvement in the long run.

Contrast this situation to transitional homes, where once admitted people are guaranteed shelter, clothing, and food for a period of time, where (basically) the same services are provided but without the daily time sink, and the success rates are much higher (this of course, should account for the fact that transitional homes mostly exclude those who still have major mental health or substance abuse problems).

Both institutions are a source of "free money", but one works a hell of a lot better, largely because it frees them up for higher-order goals.