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What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

theguardian.com

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Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#71

Post by johnpmayer »

ctdonath wrote: post #52
darpa_escapee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predatory businesses are still exploitation. > Building such a business (and I assume running a 131 unit mobile home park) is absolutely work, the value of which is evident by the paying tenants. Running a sweatshop is still work, the value of which is evident by its customers. Just because someone needs to work or a place to live doesn't make it right or commendable.

OK, say those "exploitive" businesses didn't exist. That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). Is having no option better than having a bad option, when good options aren't available?

I mean, it's all about "for whom" in this question. What's better, widgets and a polluted stream, or no widgets? Depends on whether society values the fish.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#72

Post by tim333 »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #61
tim333 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably amongst the 50 volumes of Marx/Engels Collected Works he was right in some places and wrong in others.

Presumably, a better approach to downvoting would be to explore the works in context.

I didn't downvote myself and also have no intention to further explore the works - awful vague pompous stuff that they seem to be from the few pages I've read.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#73

Post by ubernostrum »

ctdonath wrote: post #52
darpa_escapee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predatory businesses are still exploitation. > Building such a business (and I assume running a 131 unit mobile home park) is absolutely work, the value of which is evident by the paying tenants. Running a sweatshop is still work, the value of which is evident by its customers. Just because someone needs to work or a place to live doesn't make it right or commendable.

OK, say those "exploitive" businesses didn't exist. That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). Is having no option better than having a bad option, when good options aren't available?

That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones).

The hidden assumption here is that producing the goods and services required to keep a single human being alive in relative comfort (fed, sheltered, educated, healthy) necessarily requires an expenditure of manual effort roughly equivalent to what that human being can do.

Or, in other words, the assumption is that it is not and never can be the case that N people can be provided for by the effort of K people, where K And yet that assumption is obviously false: we have, here and now, the ability to feed, shelter, educate and provide health care to every single human being on the planet, and the ability to do so without the need for many of them to work for it. In the western world this has manifested in the explosion of service-oriented industries and administrative roles, which are essentially make-work jobs to give society as a whole the feeling that people are "earning their keep". Even among these affluent, supposedly highly-skilled people, probably the majority of the jobs are simply unnecessary.

What's needed is a realignment of our mentality about work: now that we have the ability to provide for everyone, we should simply do it regardless of whether everyone works or not. Will there be free riders as a result? Sure, but they're not actually a problem, and become less of one with every passing day (since the system that produces the necessary goods and services continues to grow in efficiency), and we just need to get over our fear that someone, somewhere might manage to have their needs provided for without working for it (we're already content to do this when someone inherits sufficient wealth to live without working, so this would just be an extension of that attitude: people living now and in the future will "inherit" the wealth of the past of the human species and be provided for out of it).

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#74

Post by ultramancool »

stegosaurus wrote: post #67

The headline here is a bit odd - it seems self-evident. If we define the poor as a group which relies on regular labour to survive, and the wealthy as a group who does not, then many income sources of the wealthy dry up if the poor cease to exist. One fairly obvious example is renting. The existence of a rental market is not undesirable. People will always want to live in a place temporarily, as a trial, as a holiday…

Wealth inequality is good for all in a lot of ways, so I hate it when people talk about it like it's an inherently bad thing. If someone does something amazing and unique, they should be able to profit from it.

Think about a world with perfect wealth equality and you'd have the opposite sort of problems - like it or not, capitalism and yes, wealth inequality have brought more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of the planet. More of those poor people in 1st world countries are fighting to pay for high end smartphones than to pay for food these days. It's far from black and white, but China is an amazing recent example of this. Going from an agricultural nation of the dirt poor to a highly industrialized nation with a decent middle class in the span of a few decades.

http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#75

Post by apozem »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #2

Poverty is profitable to other people. People who are in poverty often have to depend on services that are overpriced and predatory. From check cashing services, and payday lenders, to not being able to go to a grocery store where prices are better, but instead depending on smaller stores of convenience where the prices are often higher. The lottery depends on those in poverty. Sometimes I think even the police and c…

People in city government absolutely depend on the poor and fine-based revenue. To use a recent example, the Department of Justice found the government of Ferguson colluded to give so many fines that they actually became a substantial and essential part of the city's budget.

"For years, Ferguson's police force has meted out brutality, violated civil rights, and helped Ferguson officials to leech off the black community as shamelessly as would mafia bosses...

"Ferguson officials repeatedly behaved as if their priority is not improving public safety or protecting the rights of residents, but maximizing the revenue that flows into city coffers, sometimes going so far as to anticipate decreasing sales tax revenues and urging the police force to make up for the shortfall by ticketing more people. Often, those tickets for minor offenses then turned into arrest warrants."

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/ferguson...

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#76

Post by unclebucknasty »

OJFord wrote: post #63
unclebucknasty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'd love to make nicer places and charge higher rents with higher margins, but they can't, because that's all these people can pay Nicer places require larger capital outlays. The landlords chose their market, not the other way around.

> The landlords chose their market, not the other way > around. That goes against.. almost all economic thought. You don't choose to make umbrellas for the umbrella market, and just keep churning out umbrellas, perpetually disappointed by the fine weather. This market is profitable, but if it were wealthier, it would be more profitable. There's no incentive for a business-owner in such a place to somehow keep the loc…

>You don't choose to make umbrellas for the umbrella market, and just keep churning out umbrellas, perpetually disappointed by the fine weather.

You do if people keep buying them, irrespective of the weather.

You've misread my comment. I'm not saying that the landlords create the market; simply that the landlords chose a market that requires less capital outlay, and also with full knowledge that the market is not typically upwardly mobile.

In other words, it's fairly rare that landlords buy mobile parks with the intent of later upgrading their customers to upscale condominiums.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#77

Post by jdietrich »

The thesis is transparently false. While the deprivations of poverty may be exacerbated by exploitative business practices, they are self-evidently caused by a lack of income. Software developers in San Francisco or lawyers in NYC may complain about high rents, but they are not impoverished by those rents. Someone living on $733/mo of SSI remains poor even if their rent is free.

The author mentions a significant root cause in the first paragraph - de-industrialisation. Like so many other American cities, Milwaukee was relatively prosperous before the collapse of the manufacturing industry.

Improved regulation of the rental market would be a minor improvement at best. It's wishful thinking to imagine that poverty could be fixed quickly and at negligible cost to the taxpayer. The problems of poverty are systemic and so are the solutions - better welfare provision, better education, better support for job creation. If we wish to see an end to poverty, we must be willing to pay for it.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#78

Post by danharaj »

CydeWeys wrote: post #64
OJFord wrote: post #51

Everything is profitable to other people. > makes $400k a year renting out 131 trailers So, just over $3kpa each. Not a lot. It only sounds like he's profiting a lot because nobody would do that unless at scale - i.e. have 131 of them. At those margins (I don't know what the costs are, but with that little annual profit per trailer it really doesn't matter) there would be no reason to not want the poverty-stricken to…

With 131 properties she probably also has an employee or two to help her manage and repair them. My main problem is I just don't see what the alternative is. Any rental housing needs to be minimally profitable or no one will bother providing it. That applies at all ends of the pricing spectrum. So if a profit can't even be made, what is the alternative? Millions of people homeless because there are no properties rent…

You don't see any alternatives because you are not challenging the premise of private property enforced by a state. That is a very strong assumption that precludes most possibilities. And state property is just a degenerate form of private property where one entity owns everything.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#79

Post by CydeWeys »

danharaj wrote: post #78
CydeWeys wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 131 properties she probably also has an employee or two to help her manage and repair them. My main problem is I just don't see what the alternative is. Any rental housing needs to be minimally profitable or no one will bother providing it. That applies at all ends of the pricing spectrum. So if a profit can't even be made, what is the alternative? Millions of people homeless because there are no properties rent…

You don't see any alternatives because you are not challenging the premise of private property enforced by a state. That is a very strong assumption that precludes most possibilities. And state property is just a degenerate form of private property where one entity owns everything.

So what exactly are you proposing then? If no one can own anything then the best available will be little more than tents; think nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#80

Post by herbetdangerbri »

zw123456 wrote: post #59

There is an old saying that "if you took all the money away from all the rich people, and spread it around evenly to everyone else, within 2 or 3 years, all the formerly rich would be rich again having taken advantage of the poor who don't know how to make and keep money". This adage, although heartless to be sure, has some degree of truth to it in my view. The problem is twofold, 1) a lot of people become rich not b…

> they feel no remorse for taking advantage of someone else

I don't understand what it means 'to take advantage of someone else' in the context of this thread.

Is Starbucks taking advantage of me when I want a coffee by selling me a coffee?

Is Elton John taking advantage of my desire to see him play live at my party and the fact that there is only one of him by charging me a million dollars to appear?

Are the bus companies taking advantage of my need to get to work when they sell me a ticket?

I don't get where normal economic transactions and supply and demand becoming 'taking advantage' or 'exploitation'.

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