Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not.
It changes your perspective 1000%.
I am well aware that I would not be able to support children in my current situation if I were paid minimum wage.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
561–570 of 632 posts
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#562I broke out of poverty. Why can't they do it too? It was a simple thing for me, a combination of studying hard, focusing on my future and the death of my father. You see, my parents were both fishermen. It's a grueling, painful job that can destroy your body as you age leaving you with back problems and forcing you to retire early. It also paid poorly and had a lot of risks. Which unfortunately for us, resulted in th…
Breaking out of poverty requires a mindset that not everyone can acquire. Given the opportunities that the U.S. has you would think that there would be NO poverty. Yet there is. At a very simple level, you would think that working hard and saving your money would get you to a higher economic plane. But to get to that point you need to be able to learn how it's done and not lock yourself into situations that that will…
I agree. If you look around at the role models presented today to young people you'll notice a lot of poor role models, many of them not even grounded in reality.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more complicated than that though. In Denmark where I live, we have trouble staffing certain industry jobs. Jobs like gutting, freezing and packing fish or general slaughter houses. It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in…
> Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect. I think this is an important point that many people seem to gloss over when discussing what humans _deserve_ to be paid. Many believe the uniqueness of a skill set or how much physical stress is inherent to a position should be the o…
I have to disagree here. If a job causes soul crushing misery, it just shouldn't be allowed, period. If the people of Denmark can't stomach slaughtering animals for a living without being coerced into it then the people of Denmark should be vegetarians. Meat and fish should simply stop being sold or produced.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is only a problem with the West. The East does not have a culture of laziness. They will simply take the mantel if we falter.
Just because the West is no longer hungry doesn’t mean that nobody is.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
While not totally free (access costs) a vast majority of the knowlage I've learned and use for my job has been from free resources online. Realistically, I've probably spent under $500 in 10 years on educational materials (excluding buying my first non-work-sponsored laptop) and am now "Senior" level in my field. Plus almost all that was in more recent years as I'm trying learn more theoretical / academic application…
Time is money, as the saying goes. When you're working a double shift to put food on the table, it's really hard to learn an extra skill set (e.g. programming) and make time to build up a resume on github (or whatever). The cost isn't really located in the act of "buying" education.
Most people, even poor people, aren't working 2 jobs.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People choose to acquire skills, or not. > It's the whole point of all the education available to Americans, most of it free. Choose it, or not. Heck, you can even get an MIT education for free over the internet. It's up to you. It's only free if your time is worthless. Else you have opportunity costs. Which are not just monetary (e.g. needing to work long hours to put food on the table) but human too (e.g. tending…
>>It's only free if your time is worthless. If a person is poor, and they still think sparing an hour watching a Ivy League university lecture(that can vastly increase their opportunity range) isn't worth your time, they have far bigger problems related to entitlement. >>Else you have opportunity costs. And there they have a choice. Which opportunity is more important to one's life? >>and even following that free edu…
>If a person is poor, and they still think sparing an hour watching a Ivy League university lecture(that can vastly increase their opportunity range) isn't worth your time, they have far bigger problems related to entitlement.
Compared to working to put food on the table?
Not to mention that after back-to-back shifts, your ability to take in a Ivy League university lecture diminishes compared to somebody whose parents pay for their college...
And that's assuming you even have the necessary background in your underfunded school district and impoverished childhood to seek it and understand it in the first place....
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#567If there are only 19 bones for every 20 dogs, then it doesn't matter how good a bone hunter they all are there will always be one dog disappointed and the other 19 will be grateful for the bone no matter how thin and weedy it is. Systemically the 'interest rate targeting' approach starts to tighten up policy when unemployment gets below 5% - which they consider 'full employment' even though 1 in 20 haven't got jobs.…
> If there are only 19 bones for every 20 dogs, then it doesn't matter how good a bone hunter they all are there will always be one dog disappointed and the other 19 will be grateful for the bone no matter how thin and weedy it is. The example I've come across was of musical chairs. If there are 3 seats and 10 people, no matter what, some people will be out of luck. I find it strange reading all the "get an education…
The world is not zero sum.
If everyone had PhDs then those PhDs would be able to produce many more goods and services than exist now.
If everyone was doctors, then healthcare would be plentiful, and nobody would suffer from not having access to healthcare.
If the world was full of software engineers, then we would have a plentiful amount of software.
This is easier to consider by thinking about the opposite situation.
Imagine if we got rid of all of the doctors, software engineers, and farmers? What would happen?
We would quickly lose access to all of our healthcare, new software and then all of our food.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The correct approach is to develop as much high end housing as possible which pushes all other houses down the depth chart. We want the poor living in houses that the rich used to own - not shittier houses." This entire statement just blows my mind. Getting people to build enough expensive homes for rich people seems to be an already solved problems. People already build homes as expensive as the market will bear an…
You're too focused on money and you may be misunderstanding my point. Price is always based on supply and demand so the nicest house is going to command the same price on the open market regardless how nice it is. The same is true for low end housing. Keep in mind its production which improves peoples life. Money is just a tool to help an economy function. Think of it like a hockey team. If your 4th line Center isn't…
Price is determined by more than just supply and demand. The price demanded is determined partially by scarcity and partially by the wealth required to create a good.
The math says you fix housing affordability by building more mansions. Poor people can't afford them and the actual price change is so small for the massive investment that its insane.
Building enough to push 250k houses to 200k would cost more money than the entire GDP and poor people still couldn't make the down payment.
Increasing the housing supply by 1% once again would imply building 7 million homes. Your top end homes cost 2-5 million. This is once again trillions of dollars.
Your post is like saying that in order to ensure everyone can afford groceries we ought to build more 5 star restaurants instead of giving out food stamps.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard for me to say what would've happened as we drift further and further off into a pretty different hypothetical life but for reference it took me quite a long time post-grad to find a software job. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of looking, but rather that I lived in an area without many opportunities which meant that I would need to be relocated in order to kickstart my career. Eventually I landed on a gr…
Ya, but my point though is that if you were willing to, you absolutely could have worked hard and achieved all that you have. Yes, the chunk of money you received helped - but it didn't enable . You did what you did on your own, and you would have and probably would have done it with or without that money.
[not OP]
I believe that without proper financial aid, it may not be possible for everyone to pursue further education.
It's possible to do this, in fact, this is what I did; however, there is a lot more to a college degree than just the loans. You still need to be able to afford college living, food, expenses, etc., and anything which is not covered by loans each semester (which sometimes can be put on a private loan if you're fortunate enough to be able to get someone to cosign for you). I worked all throughout college and still barely made the cut. I had to stop going one year due to financial pressure but was fortunate enough to be hired for a paid co-op internship. This allowed me to save more and continue/finish my degree.
Just offering my perspective, you may or may not already see this.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#570It'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…
Attributing outcomes to inherent properties, instead of systems and interactions, seems to be a fundamental mental error that is manifested in language, at least in English. We say that a blanket or jacket "is warm", even though all it's doing is trapping heat that we produce. We say a task "is difficult", even though we are the ones who are having the difficulty in completing it. We say an apple "is red" even if we…
It is easier now than ever, though, when we can point to countless examples of class mobility in modern times, both upwards and downwards; and it helps that those are stories people love to tell.