No Money, No Time

I'm not sure I would quite take the matching approach you propose, but I've often thought that a better contracting service like fiverr (where people could make money quickly for the skills they truly excel at) could change the world by giving people alternatives to things like credit cards and payday loans. But there needs to be no little or no friction to make it feasible. Right now it's a PITA to make money through most of the online freelance sites because it's too hands-on, and technology doesn't do nearly enough.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi because this is something that I would like to work on also.

I guess a sort-of defense of myself (and perhaps others) is that I'm not saying that "all poor people deserve to be poor" or "all people on welfare are worthless shitbags who abuse it" or "no welfare goes to deserving people at all".

In fact, that was the VERY FIRST THING that I wrote in my first comment: "The problem is that while there are a great many deserving people who wouldn't abuse the system, there are also plenty who would."

I do understand that it's not a 100% black and white issue, not all welfare is bad! But on the flip side, not all welfare is good either.

One of the big problems is that it's incredibly difficult to know what the good/bad ratio is because the agencies who distribute the money have the wrong incentives. Because it's very difficult to really know (or measure) if someone NEEDS assistance versus WANTS assistance they instead ensure adherence to things which ARE measurable. Like correctly filling out forms. Which, all other things being equal, will tend to favor the repeat applicants, those who have friends/relatives who have already applied and successfully received assistance, and things of that nature.

Furthermore if you're trying to make a career in public service you want to always have a bigger budget and more staff so there's no incentive for management to try and prevent abuse; so long as the abuser does a good enough job on the paperwork management or staff can always plead ignorance if they are ever questioned.

The incentive for an abuser to abuse is that it's easier to not work and collect money than to work and perhaps collect less money, or the same amount of money, or perhaps only slightly more money. If you believe or figure out that your labor will never be worth more than $9/hr and that caps your income at $1440 a month before taxes and substantially less after. Even if you have less income from welfare, food stamps, housing, etc it might make sense to do because of the increased free time you would have and thus the better lifestyle. It also gives you opportunities to work under the table and make far more than you could if you had a regular hourly job if you've got some ambition.

Okay so we've established that there's motive for people to abuse and motive for those responsible for preventing it to look the other way. Why is it so hard to imagine that it does in fact happen and that it might not be a trivially small percentage? I honestly don't know what it is, might be 10% or it might be 50% but I'd need to see some large scale, serious investigation of a scientific nature with outside observers (not self-reporting) to be convinced it's only 2%.

Sorry, my analogy is perfectly apt. Your argument was that the fact that there were survivors means there is mobility, but in no way is that reasoning sound. You must compare the number who thrive to the number who don't, or else your methodology is terribly compromised.

Of course, now (but not before) you've started to do that, albeit in the rather unscientific method of, people who know who fit your judgment of certain criteria. There are various other cognitive biases at play here, e.g. fundamental attribution error.

But even if we were to pretend that you, unlike anyone else, could somehow accurately judge the reality of the situation based on your childhood memories, take a look at the criteria you mentioned. You had to include "were lucky enough to stay in decent health" - as if health was merely determined by luck, and not wealth! Access to doctors, medicine, and quality food are not distributed evenly in society.

You, just like me and everyone else, don't have anywhere near the ability to draw reasonable conclusions about class mobility (or lack thereof) as methodological research. But please don't go promoting fallacious thinking by saying things like "the fact that you survived means we have mobility." It means no such thing.

Absolutely. My wife works across the economic range, and there are opportunities everywhere. I've given talks at her school career days about software development, but that's certainly not the right fit for everyone (though perhaps everyone should at least try a little.) I do think that online forums open up worlds of experience and ideas that weren't as accessible in the past - like a vast library, perhaps a bit poorly edited. I think there's a key place for - coaches/mentors/counselors/teachers/friends - I don't know the best term - to help people adapt knowledge and ideas to their own interests, experiences and ambitions. I suspect the really great relationships like this don't scale. Someone might say 'Khan Academy', but I think the best situations are probably more like Y Combinator, and that looks more like a traditional classroom than it does an app. I say let 1000 flowers bloom... any attempt to lend a hand up to someone is to be valued.