Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 632 posts

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

#551

Post by ahakki »

anovikov wrote: post #280
jmickey wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me your policy would lead to the creation of permanent two-class society, where moving between the classes is difficult. Besides, do you really want to live in a fortress segregated from the rest of the society? Why not invest money in education, training and a social security net that gives poorer individuals the means and space to catapult themselves into wealth?

Education - sure. The only purpose these masses can serve is acting as genetic pool for picking the best and uplift them through education. A permanent caste-like system is doomed as next generation of it won't be as performing as the previous one. But we have to understand that only a small majority - a few percent - of the poor will be uplifted. The rest has to be kept at bay in one way or the other. As for fortres…

> The only purpose these masses can serve is acting as genetic pool for picking the best and uplift them through education.

This is just social darwinism. Not rly a recipe for sucess I can tell ya.

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

#552

Post by kart23 »

acchow wrote: post #43
tosser00001 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pew Reasearch puts the number at 3.5%, which I think is quite high enough to impact growth. But downward wage pressure at the lowest sectors comes from both legal and illegal immigration. It would be interesting to see what at short term lowering of immigration would have on wage growth.

Aren't a lot of these immigrants doing highly skilled and highly paid labor? They don't depress wage growth for low paying jobs. And they actually increase demand for their products.

Not illegals. You realize that as an illegal you cannot legally work in the states right? You have no documentation, so anywhere paying decent wages would never hire you, because it's illegal and would open them up to fines and other legal issues. The only places that are going to hire you are going to do it under the table, pay you extremely low wages, and basically take advantage of you because you have no power.

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

#553

Post by kart23 »

anovikov wrote: post #92

Why is this a problem? I just can't see any indication of problem here, this is just supply vs demand: world is globalized now and most of what uneducated people could do can be imported from much cheaper places. If we started to look hard for 'fixes' for this we'd end up just breaking the economy. Force businesses to pay them more and even more of these job will evaporate, because there will be no point any longer.…

You just described every dystopian sci-fi film ever. And I think you can figure out what happens in the end.

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

#554

Post by citation_please »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #414
citation_please wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably heavily affected by at least two things: 1. increase in healthcare costs and how health insurance is bound to employment 2. increase in wealth concentration and a shift from cash compensation to asset compensation (Bezos is only absurdly rich if he liquidates his Amazon holding instantly) So, I would say your portrayal of hourly compensation is disingenuous as well. All of these statistics probably n…

I agree averages can be misleading. As the joke goes when Bill Gates walks into a bar suddenly everybody's a billionaire, on average! At the same time medians can also be misleading. We have 50 people earning $10, 1 earning $100, and 50 earning $200. We swap to a system where we have 50 people earning $90, 1 earning $100, and 50 earning $300. There would have been a major shift upward with nearly everybody seeing maj…

This is a very challenging view-point, and I appreciate the effort you've put into backing it up. I think my biggest hesitation of accepting its results is the difference between annual income and wealth. By this study's standard, I'm nearly upper-middle-class, but I have a negative net-worth due to student loans. If my employment status came into question, I would be very quickly impoverished, and would have to rely on many social and governmental safety nets. Can this really be considered rich?

Maybe I'm an outlier as an individual in my mid-20s, but it's enough to make me question the definition of class on annual income.

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

#555

Post by kart23 »

skookumchuck wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

That last point really hits home with me. Everyone keeps saying the american dream is bullshit, but I know many people who lived it, including my own parents. I know people that came here on a boat with nothing, and now living in 10 million dollar homes. America is the only country where one can experience both extremes in one lifetime.

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

#556

Post by nickthemagicman »

toofy wrote: post #194
DrJones1098 wrote: post #15

The big questions is automation/A.I. What about when jobs become more and more automated? What about when 2 million truck drivers are put out of work due to self-driving vehicles? Food preparation, Cleaning, Driving, Construction, Science...all of these fields are threatened by automation. Sure there will always be a few jobs to run the machines but what happens as A.I. and Automation take over and we have 80% unempl…

> What's the next stage of society? Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, duh.

Sign me up! I'm a male lesbian so that sounds like heaven!

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

#557

Post by Faark »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #535
DiffEq wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can escape poverty by working harder; it is just that working harder will not always work. It needs to be coupled with other virtues; of course the solution is not just simply to work harder, but to suggest that working harder is not a great deal part of the solution is false by every measure. Lets say this, you are born into a poor family - you still get to go to school that likely has a great library - the scho…

I'm not actually poor and I don't make my bed. My house is cluttered, mostly because I'm frugal and we live in a house that is a bit too small for our hobbies (art for me, music for the spouse, though we both dabble in the other). I have more money this way. I'm lazy. And honeslty, the only time I've really gotten crap for this type of thing is when I'm poor and honestly too freaking tired to do any of this stuff. TH…

> I'm lazy.

I am as well. And have parents enabling this behavior, with an career outcome as bad as you could expect. I can totally understand that part of the political spectrum doesn't want to encourage this at all (favorable interpretation of them), even though they IMO often overshoot that goal and advance less optimal outcomes.

> I will also assume you are talking about older children. Most 13-year olds just don't have a lot of maturity for what you describe.

Your phrasing makes this seem like a natural fact. Finding ways to deeply engrave important values (work hard, strive for greatness, delayed gratification, stuff like that) into future generations seems like a real challenge right now. And what makes stories like [0] so interesting. Evolution doesn't take care of that job for us anymore in a "work or starve" way. Religious "work or go to hell" probably did an ok job for a while, but comes with a lot of other baggage. A very capitalistic "work if you want a decent live" society over many generations leads to increasingly unequal starting conditions for offspring and thus seems especially incompatible with democracy, since it will lead to "the system is rigged, lets burn it down" votes, as recently observed all over the western world.

So what's next? As mentioned in my prior anecdote, mostly letting your children do what they want, thinking this will naturally make them strive for greatness, will probably not work. What are the necessary environmental factors parents and society should provide to shape future humans into productive members of society? I'm sure with all our knowledge, mankind can do better than the earlier simple carrot & stick systems.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905657

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

#558

Post by sharemywin »

YinglingLight wrote: post #519
sharemywin wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone has to invest in you besides just you. could be parents, government, mentor, investor, teacher.

Do you suggest that 'delayed gratification' is a nature/nurture trait?

As far As I've seen, all traits are a combination of nature/nurture.

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

#560

Post by zaarn »

darawk wrote: post #548
zaarn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there was America's gilden age, which was also present in wide areas of Europe; Factory Owners would get all of the money and the workers got almost nothing. In Germany this was so bad that children over the age of about 12 generally worked in the factory along with the entire family to be able to affort a 10sqm single room housing in the city with 2 meals a day. The factory owners largely didn't care and cause…

Yep, that's true. Unfettered capitalism is not without its flaws. But it's still the only thing that has ever lifted large numbers of people from poverty in the entirety of human history.

It also kept large numbers of people on the verge of starving while working themselves to death.
Post reply on HN