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Once poor, always poor?

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Re: Once poor, always poor?

#311

Post by everybodyknows »

vpilcx wrote: post #160
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through." There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless. "the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves." I'm not in the US, but isn't the…

> There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless. It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that. > I'm not in the…

> reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy

At face value, yes, but in the real world if you're not earning enough after 10 years to pay it down, it was a bad investment. Allowing bankruptcy after the passing of a few year's time is a way of notifying lenders, who should be the more sophisticated party to the transaction, that if the career investment fails to pan out, they take a loss.

That would work, except that politics become involved, so it doesn't.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#312

Post by sokoloff »

dijit wrote: post #195
pjerem wrote: post #188

That’s where I can see the efficiency of free education. I live in France and I come from about the median class. I didn’t struggle in my education. But while I was a student, I saw quite a lot of people, who came from poor family being able to catch the opportunity to leave this poverty. Of course they still struggled more than me to pay their day to day expenses while I had the chance to be backed by my parents. So…

This is a harder problem than just "Free Education". I grew up in the UK (in "deprived" areas, to a single parent with no income other than jobseekers allowance and some childcare from the state) and I can formerly attest that my "free education" was atrocious. I am not sure if there was a negative feedback loop involved: School funding was determined by efficacy. How do you measure efficacy of a school? Well, test r…

> I do not miss free school. I strongly resent that it was ever forced on me.

What’s the better alternative? No schooling seems like it would be wildly worse for all of students, families, and society.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#313

Post by eadmund »

drdec wrote: post #267
eadmund wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through. In the U.S., this is due to the fact tha…

> In the U.S., this is due to the fact that employers practically may not use proficiency exams What do you mean here? I'm a life-long US resident and I've never heard such a thing. I've also taken exams when applying to jobs. There is also the civil service exam which is a prerequisite for many government jobs. Jobs like the police and military have exams, both written and physical. I can't square my experience and…

> What do you mean here?

Griggs v. Duke Power held that if a test has a disparate impact on ethnic minorities, then the burden of proof is on employers to demonstrate that the test is reasonably related to the job. The practical effect is that private employers are highly unlikely to use these tests, since doing so opens themselves up to liability, particularly since due to socioeconomic factors any fair test will have a disparate impact. For example, the tests in the particular case were a general IQ test and a mechanical aptitude test.

> I can't square my experience and your statement.

Every particular instance you gave was of a public employer, but I was careful to note that employers practically may not use proficiency exams. It's not directly illegal, and some employers might use them because either they do not realise how much liability they are exposed to, or because they have been very careful to justify them.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#314

Post by throwaway55421 »

angrais wrote: post #241
throwaway55421 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not saying that he was poor. They're saying that he didn't start a billionaire. He multiplied his wealth by a factor of a thousand or more.

Yes, but the point is that they started with wealth. Multiplying 1 mil to 1 billion is more reasonable possible than 1k to 1 mil. Simply because if you've such wealth already you're most likely in a position to take risks, etc.

I don't think that's true at all really, there are like 500,000 millionaires in my town alone.

A billion is actually just a lot of money, there's a much more finite amount of room at the top.

All you need to do to make a million quid in the UK is get a 75th percentile job and save half of it. After a few decades you are now a millionaire. I mean, everyone can't do it, but it's not some unfathomable task.

In the US I imagine it's even easier. Your median income is lower but the top end is insane.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#315

Post by ivanmontillam »

drdec wrote: post #277
ivanmontillam wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen societies going down for this, but it's easy to see a well-positioned families have one child and financially poor families have 5 or more children. Source: mere observation.

You should extrapolate that out a couple of hundred years and see what happens. Might make a good movie.

It's already made: "Soylent Green" (1973)

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#316

Post by WalterBright »

dredmorbius wrote: post #207
WalterBright wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quoted what I was responding to. That's why I quoted it. It's the point of quoting. And my response was clearly to what I quoted.

Be that as it is, it remains a minimisation of a rather larger and more complex problem, and a minimisation which largely begins with your own contribution to this thread. Which you still seem to be striving to neither acknowledge nor address.

I'll address what I please.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#317

Post by kingcharles »

dijit wrote: post #294
digianarchist wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree with the uniforms point. If uniforms are replaced with a student's own clothes they will be bullied relentlessly for not sporting the latest fashion. This happens today because shoes and bags aren’t part of the uniform. Other than the colour requirements. That was a source of bullying for myself and others.

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 g…

What's funny is how niche it got. At my school with uniforms which dictated the type of shoe you had to wear, the "cool" kids would steal these tags off the laces of the shoes in the stores in town. The coolest kids had the most tags hanging off their shoelaces O_O

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#318

Post by rbanffy »

User23 wrote: post #309
rbanffy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Economic success is a decent proxy for social success By that logic, Jeff Bezos would be an amazing human being. I believe we can agree he isn't. > Not to mention donating to the school is charitable, which is another nice trait for people to have. Donating to the school in your catchment area will increase the sale value of your property, and improve the school for your kids and your neighbors. That's not charitab…

> By that logic, Jeff Bezos would be an amazing human being. I believe we can agree he isn't. You know what a proxy is. Please don't straw-man it's against the guidelines and not very interesting besides. One can always pick out individual exceptions. "My grandfather smoked two packs a day his whole life and never got lung cancer," doesn't refute that smoking is correlated with lung cancer. > That's not charitable Yo…

> Your highest obligations of charity are to yourself, your spouse, and your children.

That’s not charity. That’s self interest, specially if I can save on taxes while I increase the value of my property.

> It's observably true that poor school quality in the USA isn't due to a lack of funding. California's school system is proof.

There’s a multitude of reasons for school failure that are unrelated to funding - violence, poverty, discrimination, etc. Supporting those in need is always more important than supporting those who don’t need support.

> Equality of opportunity is impossible because in large part one's opportunities are the result of the decisions one's parents made,

And we should work towards not allowing that to reduce the opportunities for those who lack that privilege.

> beginning with choosing to procreate together.

I don’t see how genetics are involved here. It’s been proven many times it has little relation with academic success. Growing up in a favourable environment to learning is a much more powerful predictor.

> As for a society being more or less democratic, that's a grave oversimplification.

When you have people who can fund successful electoral campaigns you get people who effectively can vote multiple times, by convincing more people to vote for their candidates. You also get people who can influence the elected officials because they know that, if they don’t favour the people who got them elected, they’ll make someone else be elected.

One important role of public universal schooling is to form an informed electorate that can operate a democracy. If the last few years didn’t teach us we have been failing at that, I can’t imagine what will.

> Second, the extent to which democratic decision making is beneficial is very much a consequence of scale and locality.

I’m not sure why you brought this up. There are local authorities at various levels, but that has no impact on the argument I was making. All levels can be influenced with the right amount of money.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#319

Post by tdeck »

eadmund wrote: post #313
drdec wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the U.S., this is due to the fact that employers practically may not use proficiency exams What do you mean here? I'm a life-long US resident and I've never heard such a thing. I've also taken exams when applying to jobs. There is also the civil service exam which is a prerequisite for many government jobs. Jobs like the police and military have exams, both written and physical. I can't square my experience and…

> What do you mean here? Griggs v. Duke Power held that if a test has a disparate impact on ethnic minorities, then the burden of proof is on employers to demonstrate that the test is reasonably related to the job. The practical effect is that private employers are highly unlikely to use these tests, since doing so opens themselves up to liability, particularly since due to socioeconomic factors any fair test will ha…

Not the op, but I'm still having a hard time buying this argument that assessment tests "practically" may not be used when Walmart, Home Depot, IBM, and Epic use them, and countless companies required me to fill out their questionable Unicru personality assessments in the 2010s when applying for a summer job. And those are just the big names that folks here might have heard of and that I knew from memory. Clearly this particular decision hasn't been a big barrier to implementing various kinds of pre-employment tests in the US.

Re: Once poor, always poor?

#320

Post by imtringued »

nivenkos wrote: post #193
pjerem wrote: post #188

That’s where I can see the efficiency of free education. I live in France and I come from about the median class. I didn’t struggle in my education. But while I was a student, I saw quite a lot of people, who came from poor family being able to catch the opportunity to leave this poverty. Of course they still struggled more than me to pay their day to day expenses while I had the chance to be backed by my parents. So…

I agree, but housing is the real kicker in Europe. Lower wages and higher taxes on working people (income and sales tax are way higher than property, inheritance and capital gains taxes (if they even exist!)) make it almost impossible to save up a reasonable deposit. Meanwhile house prices have gone to the moon. 30% rise in Stockholm in the last year alone for example, a 100+% rise in most of southern England since 2…

Well, that's what you get for using income taxes to improve the value of privately owned land.
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