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Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

nytimes.com

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Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#281

Post by sheepmullet »

blub wrote: post #93
skookumchuck wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the meritocratic myth I've been around to see people over decades, and how their decisions affect their lives. Meritocracy is not a myth. Where people wind up is very much a consequence of their choices. This isn't the Soviet Union where one is assigned a career, a job and an apartment. I've seen immigrants arrive here with nothing and become millionaires. That's why everyone wants to come to America. The opportuni…

What you've seen is irrelevant, when on the whole the lower and middle classes suffer due to lack of a social safety net and an extreme form of capitalism. There's a large amount of news articles which describe the situation of labour in the US. If things keep going like this, those millionares will soon have to build their own fortress cities to keep all the undesirable and disgruntled poor people away. The fact tha…

> when on the whole the lower and middle classes suffer due to lack of a social safety net and an extreme form of capitalism.

Which policies hurt the poor and middle class the most?

Our housing policies, our immigration policies, our trade policies, and our anti-family policies.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#282

Post by mick87 »

sheepmullet wrote: post #246
sintaxi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why hasn't the market solved this problem? The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support. > Believe it or not, its not impossible to manufacture a living space in a factory and assemble it on site in a day, to provide extremely well made and affordable housing structures. The soviets tried this approach…

> The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support. Good point. In my birth country you must support your elderly parents by law. Even without the law 99% of families would. The idea that the government should do it seems crazy. The government only needs to step in where the elderly have no family, are unabl…

From my point of view, that you have to support your elderly sounds crazy.

Here most elderly either gets support in their own home by professionals (by the local government) or at a home with professional care (run by the local government).

I'd rather spend time with my family on our own terms and not because I have to support them.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#283

Post by [deleted] »

dgudkov wrote: post #238
noobermin wrote: post #18

It's not like meritocracy is completely unrelated to real life, it matters in a certain regime. However, if like Vanessa, you're born to lesser circumstances, you just cannot escape poverty by just working harder. Similarly, if you are born to very well off standards, even if you're a dope and spend money from Dad's inheritance on cocaine, sure, you won't be successful but you'll still have a net of some kind. You ca…

>you just cannot escape poverty by just working harder. This is a traditional, stereotypical belief that in order to escape poverty you have to work harder. This is old understanding of meritocracy and it's no longer valid. The new meritocracy is that you have to learn harder. And now, given all the learning resources available for free on the internet (which is also very accessible nowadays) it's probably the best t…

[deleted]

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#284

Post by ensiferum »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #170

America is a country of huge wealth. Wealthy in natural resources, capital equipment, labor ... fucking everything. And yet we have such terrible poverty. When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simple…

Because the market doesn't try to solve this problem

You have to keep in mind that everything in the US (health care, education, food industry (which causes the health problem)) is harnessed just for one single purpose: Make money for the share holders. Subsequently the US goverment doesn't serve the people and their interest, it serves the interest of these big companies.

This whole system is optimized for making money for the select few, not to cater for the society by and large. Therefore it creates these unfortunate side effects.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#285

Post by drdaeman »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #271
Tommek wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point.

If you only look at numbers and not individual stories, you miss the blind-spots of your data.

This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data.

Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything. It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.

To remove the emotional part, just think of something from IT, like response times or test coverages. See, a story of an obscenely long API response (out of thousands) doesn't make much sense anymore. Debugging individual cases may even lead you on a completely wrong track. Unless you want to merely resolve that particular single request.

I'm sorry about the tone. Stories about others make humans relate (which is good), but they also have such undesirable effects (hype over facts, extrapolating, etc).

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#286

Post by jfsid »

kingofhdds wrote: post #233
pwm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with the idea of sharing?

Nothing, unless you force a dog which hunted its bone to share it with one who slept the whole day, and call it "equality".

Sleeping the whole day is an interesting metaphor for living off of charity or being homeless, two demographics notorious for being unhappier than the working population on average. Did you choose it because spending whole days in bed is a classic symptom of depression,the illness that makes one unhappier than the average employee? I'm not sure transfering money from the later to the former would correct the inequality between their respective qualities of life, so I wouldn't call that equality, no.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#288

Post by fzeroracer »

leaveyou wrote: post #279
jlawson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your story seems to indicate that studying hard and focusing on the future are necessary but not sufficient conditions to enter the middle class. I think the formula is that you need all three: -Relatively consistent work ethic -Decent decision-making -Some minimal opportunity Often the argument seems to swing between these absurd positions that it's all about just one of these and the others don't matter. Of course…

What I find amazing is that so few people here notice the consequences of working hard in a field that is not worth it anymore. His entire family should have slowly "pivoted" away from fishing long long time ago (the first/second year with a low ROI for the risk). The same applies to IT or any other sector. When the prospective ROI turns negative (subtract the total costs of your job(time/health/opportunity) from the…

Let's say for example Software as a whole suddenly crashed. It's now one of the worst paying jobs you can possibly get, while being a coal miner jumps up as one of the most profitable jobs. Would you immediately sign up and start working in the mines? Would you be physically fit enough for it?

There are large amounts of cultural and career inertia that you have to overcome to 'pivot' your career towards something wildly different. Not everyone can pivot towards something better especially as times change, education changes and people change. My father never graduated highschool and for him, fishing paid better than other opportunities. It was the same for my step-father.

It was also all that they knew how to do. There were few retraining programs (that they couldn't afford even if they could) and to them, their career was their life. Their friends did it, their parents did it. It was their entire identity.

What I'm doing is effectively the pivot away from the family career. It doesn't change the fact that it left a generation in the dust.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#289

Post by nindalf »

Tommek wrote: post #214

Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.

This difference you've pointed out is starkest here, in 2 articles about the travel ban.

1. Trump’s Travel Ban, Aimed at Terrorists, Has Blocked Doctors - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/health/trump-travel-ban-d...

2. Trump’s Immigration Order Could Make It Harder To Find A Psychiatrist Or Pediatrician - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-immigration-orde...

Both of these are reports on exactly the same issue, but different techniques.

The NYTimes prefers to use pictures of a doctor, along with quotes from various doctors and medical students. "We need him desperately", says someone about an oncologist. "I love this country", says a Syrian doctor about America.

Fivethirtyeight tells the story with statistics. How many doctors are there in America? How many of those are immigrants? How many from these countries? All told in one image. Which specialties do these doctors practice? In which counties do they practice in? No human interest, just the facts.

Me personally, I prefer FiveThirtyEight's style. I read their article and that one image helped me realise what a grave issue it was. They get straight to the point, no fluff. But I totally understand how others might connect more with the NYTimes article. Seeing the story from the perspective of a real, breathing human. Hearing them talk about love, about sacrifice, about family. It humanises the issue and they understand it better. Different strokes.

Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

#290

Post by anoncoward111 »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #271
Tommek wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point.

If you only look at numbers and not individual stories, you miss the blind-spots of your data.

Completely agree. Additionally, data segmentation is important. For example, if you segment employment data by college degree, you would see that overall employment has not risen at all for those without a college degree.

It's like saying the average net worth of Jeff Bezos and 99 homeless people is 1 billion USD, etc etc

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