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"There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

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Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#31

Post by aquateen »

Prrometheus wrote: post #17
david927 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of examples of poor people who are hard working and still poor, and lots of examples of wealthy people who fell into it. There is no moral value to wealth and to say so not only insults our intelligence but attempts to justify terrible injustices.

At the same time, many people (we'll call them "left-wing") claim that there is no agency behind wealth or poverty, and that therefore we should punish the "lucky" rich people to help the "unlucky" poor. This attitude is utterly simplistic and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (the left-wing tends to be extreme).

"punish the rich"... "the left-wing tends to be extreme"; this is just blatant partisanship. There is nothing to support, just opinion... what productive conversation could start this way?

This is why politics here is dangerous.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#32

Post by justindz »

Prrometheus wrote: post #17
david927 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of examples of poor people who are hard working and still poor, and lots of examples of wealthy people who fell into it. There is no moral value to wealth and to say so not only insults our intelligence but attempts to justify terrible injustices.

At the same time, many people (we'll call them "left-wing") claim that there is no agency behind wealth or poverty, and that therefore we should punish the "lucky" rich people to help the "unlucky" poor. This attitude is utterly simplistic and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (the left-wing tends to be extreme).

As a left-winger, here goes:

Yes, there are nut jobs. But, yes, you are engaged in a fallacious generalization. It's also called a prejudice. But here's a softer restatement of what you said for those of us who at least think we're not nut jobs:

"At the same time, many people (we'll call them "fellow humans") claim that there is sometimes wealth and poverty without agency and that those with means should help those without means, particularly in cases without agency or in cases with resistant intertia, because of the direct or indirect causal relationship between the source of the means and the reduced or diminished means of those living in or near poverty. This attitude is either selfish or altruistic on an individual level depending on the means of the proponent of this attitude and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (some fellow humans tend to be extreme when you largely ignore fellow humans who do not fit your definition of extreme)."

How was that? I don't assume that all "right-wingers" like you might be are extreme. I'm related to many of them, friends with many of them. They have good ideas and a different opinion on fairness and entitlement. It's possible that everyone's partially right and it's a good idea to mingle more often.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#33

Post by cstejerean »

Hexstream wrote: post #28
mattmaroon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it. Outlying cases are irrelevant. Of course people overcome the odds in both directions. But given equal driving ability, the Ferrari will always win the race, take the prize money, and buy their children a Ferrari. >>People who start out with wealth seldom cre…

">>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family." I'm pretty sure Bill Gates made more cash than he created wealth. Those are orthogonal concepts. It's possible to make cash without creating wealth or indeed, destroying it (ex: "successful" spammer that destroys the value of email). It's also possible to create lots of wealth…

About the only way to make money without creating wealth is to steal it from somebody else. Typically when somebody pays you for something you did, it's because they'd rather have your service or product than the cash they paid for it. Typically this means you created something valuable (or that the dollar is depreciating so quickly everyone's eager to get rid of it, but more on this later).

The spammer created value to the companies advertising and more importantly created a whole market for spam filtering solutions (the same way virus writers created a huge anti-virus market, to the extent that some wonder if a lot of viruses are not actually written the AV vendors themselves).

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#34

Post by emmett »

cstejerean wrote: post #33
Hexstream wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

">>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family." I'm pretty sure Bill Gates made more cash than he created wealth. Those are orthogonal concepts. It's possible to make cash without creating wealth or indeed, destroying it (ex: "successful" spammer that destroys the value of email). It's also possible to create lots of wealth…

About the only way to make money without creating wealth is to steal it from somebody else. Typically when somebody pays you for something you did, it's because they'd rather have your service or product than the cash they paid for it. Typically this means you created something valuable (or that the dollar is depreciating so quickly everyone's eager to get rid of it, but more on this later). The spammer created value…

This is the broken window fallacy. Making a "market" in window repairs by smashing windows doesn't create wealth.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#35

Post by noonespecial »

walterk wrote: post #29
noonespecial wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it. People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth. Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether…

>>You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it. I had a general idea of how many belong to the former and latter categories, so I'm not astonished. The statistical data supports my point. http://www.economicmobility.org/ >>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usua…

Sorry, I guess I took the slavery example to mean that this was a means to have the deck stacked financially against you in the context of rich vs. poor. Yes, being born a slave has historically been an insurmountable barrier to wealth.

It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it?

What I really wanted to drive home is that slaves are neither poor nor rich. These concepts are based on the ownership of property. Slaves are property and are forbidden to own property. Within the framework of the law, it is possible to escape poverty, not so with slavery. When politicians say that the poor are "slaves" to the rich or that poverty is a new kind of slavery, its a clean miss and usually indicates a rather ugly agenda hiding beneath.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#36

Post by sethg »

Retric wrote: post #24
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest we be careful with definitions here. Certainly certain policies impact certain jobs. My grandfather was a farmer. That is, until the economy changed. Then he wasn't a farmer any more.The policy may have had negative impacts on farmers, but it could only have a very limited impact on my grandfather. I would also distinguish between "making somebody poor" and "poverty", which is a state of existence. Li…

I create wealth by increasing efficiency and destroying jobs. I have made many people redundant and gotten them laid off. It's the name of the game hop from one useful skill to the next or become obsolete. I don't really care about these lost jobs but saying it's their fault that they become redundant is missing the point. Luck is a large factor in both the generation and retention of wealth. The risk of true poverty…

Yeah, skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems that they are classifying social-insurance programs like Social Security as "welfare", whereas most people would define "welfare" as programs that are specifically targeted to poor people.

And one of the reasons Social Security is so politically secure--even at the height of the Dubya Administration's influence, a proposal to privatize it went down in flames--is that middle-class as well as poor voters expect to benefit from it.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#37

Post by wumi »

1gor wrote: post #26

The question is not what creates wealth but what keeps it unevenly distributed. There have been experiments (computer simulations) that tried to explain 'Pareto distribution' -- a power law distribution of wealth leading to 20 percent of population having 80% of the wealth. I refer to 1996 Axtell and Epstein book (google for Sugarcape). Basically, they created a number of software 'agents' and placed them on a landsc…

"The best and the brightest will stay poor unless they stumble on a resource which is not taken. (A new internet business idea for example)."

Where does this data include for the fact that resources have been forcefully extracted from certain people groups for centuries?

Need not look further than look at Central and South America, and the entire sub-Saharan African continent. (Also of course, several areas in Asia)

it is no surprise then, that the wealthiest nations and societies are those who extracted the resources (in this case ranging from gold, diamonds, oil, rubber, ivory, even crops such as fruit, coffee beans, and cocoa beans) by means of blatant corruption, deceit, and thievery.

Secondly, many have remarked on this site that ideas in and of themselves don't have much value -- it is the execution on the idea that makes it powerful.

That being re-hashed constantly on this site, how then does a new internet idea count as a resource? Without the ability, or the actual resources to execute on the idea then there is absolutely no value of that idea to the person. (say, if a poor person has little or no access to a computer or the internet, it seems a bit ludicrous a new internet business idea is a resource)

"First generation agent might have stumbled on a resource nearby by accident. It has improved its fitness function and he was able to successfully compete on the next round."

Not by accident, but by intent.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#38

Post by pchristensen »

phaedrus wrote: post #2

"If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come." I know lots of people - the working poor - who are doing a hell of a lot more than nothing, and poverty still comes.

I'm surprised that in a group as logical as YCNews, no one called him on this. Just because doing nothing leads to poverty doesn't mean it's the only way to get to poverty, or that doing something will get you out of it. It's just one path that doesn't imply anything about the other paths. All the talk of bricks and Ferrari's are arguments about a point that wasn't made.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#39

Post by pchristensen »

meat-eater wrote: post #30

In some situations and places, wealth can be harder to create. On the individual level, it would be hard to refute the fact that somebody with an Ivy League college education has more wealth creation opportunities than a farmer from a 3rd world country. Same thing also applies to poor countries and rich countries. So even though poverty is the rest state, it really doesn't help that some people are taking advantage o…

This just shows that there are forms of societal wealth, without which there is just another form of poverty. Things like a legal system, low crime, enforceable contracts, public safety, etc are all forms of wealth that enable new investments and more wealth. Falls in the same category as seaports, natural resources, an educated populace, etc.

Re: "There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..."

#40

Post by wanorris »

dataangel wrote: post #14
mynameishere wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of people Just wondering--do you really know "lots of people" who are among the "working poor"? I come from Appalachia and have known--genuinely, no bullshit here--lots of "working poor" and can't honestly say that there was some systematic conspiracy to hold them down, rough them up, prevent them from rising, etc. Fact is: There are a lot of people living in the lap of luxury--luxury measured by creature…

You can start off in the world in circumstances that make you much less likely to succeed later, circumstances that are totally outside your control. If you acquire an early aversion to people or a mental illness due to childhood rape, I'd have to be pretty dense to say your lack of productivity is your fault. If you didn't get into as good a college as the kid who's parents could afford after school SAT prep classes…

Of course people's parents can do all sorts of things to create a poor environment for a child to grow up in. Maybe their parents did the same thing. But at some point, regardless of what your parents did, you have to take responsibility for your own actions and try to make something of your life -- or not.

By the same token, dysfunctional rich kids into drugs and other methods of squandering wealth are so common that they're a cliche. Maybe their emotionally distant parents are to blame too.

Regardless of how they got there, at some point you have to just acknowledge that some people have useful survival skills for getting ahead in society, and some do not. Also, that virtually anyone who isn't actually mentally retarded has some ability to develop those skills if they want to strongly enough.

This leaves you the option of modeling these skills as obtainable, which means that you create incentives for people to get their sh*t together, and the option of modeling these skills as innate and beyond anyone's control, which means that you just support people who drew the short straw and don't bother with incentives.

I think it's pretty clear which of these models contributes to wealth gain over time and which contributes to welfare dependency.

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