Racism? It's Not How Good; It's Skin Color

This is what a guilt-ridden white leader sounds like

 

I think people are preconditioned to poverty by many factors. I think people living in poverty in a wealthy nation like the US often fall into a kind of despair that leads to negative behaviors. I think many people choose to anesthetize themselves rather than face pain and trauma. I am not sure if you are aware of the "rat park" studies on addiction.

In essence it is to suggest that addiction is a disease of social isolation rather than a moral or criminal phenom.

Some interesting findings on poverty in America:

https://www.usnews.com/news/healthi...a-new-census-data-paint-an-unpleasant-picture

Children who grow up in poverty are far more likely to live in poverty as adults and this demographic can be broken down by factors such as race and where you live:

"Persistently poor children are also less likely (by 37 percent) to be consistently employed as young adults than their ever-poor, nonpersistently poor counterparts. This finding is consistent with the lower educational achievement of the persistently poor and the fact that unemployment rates have historically been higher among lower-educated groups (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 2014). Two additional outcomes that can be a precursor to lower adult achievement are having a teen nonmarital birth (girls only) and involvement in the criminal justice system. Among ever-poor children, persistently poor children are not significantly more likely than nonpersistently poor children to have a teen nonmarital birth or be arrested by age 20. Looking at more specific breakdowns of childhood poverty duration, girls who are poor less than a quarter of their childhood are less likely to have a teen birth than girls who are poor more than a quarter of their childhood. This type of difference by poverty duration does not exist for arrest rates. Overall, these statistics show that children who have a long and persistent exposure to poverty are disadvantaged in their educational achievement and employment.

https://www.urban.org/sites/default...6/2000369-Child-Poverty-and-Adult-Success.pdf

To suggest that there is an even playing field between rich and poor especially considering the levels of inequality present in the US today is just to be in denial of the facts and is tantamount to blaming the poor for their own poverty.

"Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320 million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.”

After divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass incarceration, housing segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin writes."

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610/utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

By the statistics, and not some right-wing fantasy, it can be vanishingly hard to raise yourself out of poverty though some do. It is unfortunate that the argument is so focused on the lucky few who do it, and no one is taking anything away from these people, and not on the statistical probabilities which tell a far different story.

IMO, it depends on how resources are allocated in terms of human capital as to the kind of society you want to have.

 

Oh, there's a lot of math that I find challenging - but I kind of like a challenge. I have always found mathematics fun and interesting and at my 2nd year calc and stats level with some differential equation classes thrown in it is fairly easy though like anything else, it is a language and you have to work at it.

I've probably forgotten quite a bit but I still like to have the ability to use math in daily life.

The thing about math and related problems in physics, chemistry and such is that it is not only fun but an elegant and even beautiful way to describe the natural world - even if just theoretical. Is that weird, finding math beautiful? Maybe!

I find problem solving very satisfying. I think many kids are intimidated by mathematics and once they are intimidated they fall behind and give up which is very sad because in many ways it is like a language that can be learned with persistence. Teachers are sometimes to blame for this by focusing on the kids who find it easy and letting the others fall.

There are some kids just not able to get it though. I remember one kid I was tutoring who threatened to punch me out because I wanted him to write out his answers step by step, lol. And I'm a pretty big guy too. In the end he was able to pass grade 9 remedial math though so, imo, anyone can do it now matter how painful.

 

This is an old argument. In the trade, it's called the "culture of poverty" debate. Among people in education, it's the "cultural deficit" debate.

It's clearly possible to accumulate evidence for both sides. My best evidence is my own family -- who were dirt poor in the 30s (my mother picked cotton for 50 cents a bag). They all did pretty well, making available the avenues that were open to them after the war: the military, the WPA before the war, etc. Some of them were less provident than others, but they all ended up in the respectable working class. (They weren't middle class -- I was the first to go to college. ) All but one -- the black sheep of the family.

I won't go into his behavior, but if I did, I am sure you would agree that the relative poverty in which he lives now is due to his behavior, not the result of wicked capitalists trying to maintain a reserve pool of labor. And in his case, given that he was raised in the same environment as his successful siblings, I think it's fair to say his problems were caused by his unforced bad choices.

Which doesn't mean that all poor people are like my relative. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to blame, in some -- perhaps most --- case, the social environment in which they are raised. If you are 14 year old Black girl in a South Chicago housing project, who has never actually met anyone other than social workers and teachers who has a job ... it's reasonable to blame her toxic environment for any bad choices she makes.

Of course anecdotes aren't data, but they're very useful to get an insight that surveys by naive well-meaning academics don't always give us: ("Do you want to get a job and work hard, or do you prefer to do a bit of drug dealing, some casual labor, impregnate girls and then walk away?" )

So let's agree -- if we can -- that among the 'poor' there is a spectrum with my deadbeat relative at one end, and at the other someone who is keen to get all the education they can and then go out and get the best job they can, always turning up to work on time, saving what money they can, not getting pregmant out of wedlock, but who, for reasons beyond their control, remains poor. Our disagreement is on the distribution of the poor along that spectrum. And I'm willing to stipulae, as the lawyers say, that most of the people along that spectrum might not have been there, had they been raised in a different social environment.

I'm personally in favor of action by the state to help people pull themselves out of poverty. I don't believe that the evidence shows that a reasonable minimum wage kills jobs, for example. I would favor certain kinds of government jobs programs. (The devil is in the details here.) I believe that globalization is having a negative impact on the American working class by destroying traditional working class blue collar jobs. (Charles Murray has documented this pretty well in Coming Apart.) (What to do about this is another matter, though.)

However, I wouldn't be very optimistic in the short run about the impact any such measures would have on the behavior of the underclass. I would start as young as possible, and would try to implement something like the Harlem Learning Zone or Michaela School. I wouldn't expect to transform the lives of a large proportion of such young people, however. My aim would be to connect with parents who want to escape their situation, or want their children to.

So rather than argue about whose fault irresponsible behavior is, let me ask you a question:
Suppose you had an effectively unlimited budget to spend as you wish, to do away with poverty in the US. What would you do with it?

 

Yes ... and even when I can't solve some hard problem (hard for me) and finally have to see the solution, there is usually a burst of pleasure, especially if it's an elegant solution. And of course there is beauty in mathematics, and especially the mathematics that describes the real world. It's beyond my understanding, but I found it astonishing that some results about symmetry in abstract algebra worked out a century ago by Emmy Noether imply the conservation of energy.

None of this manages to penetrate the official syllabus here in the UK, I'm sorry to say. I take to heart Lockhart's Lament.

 

Agree 100%. Well said.

 

I'm not sure why a sole parent can't do the same thing as two parents, at least in terms of education. I know a woman who had no education and was earning minimum wage, who raised four kids alone. They went on to: veterinarian, international airline pilot, teacher, and physiotherapist. None did drugs or crime or needed welfare. It wasn't easy, but she made it her life's work to ensure they were capable of providing for themselves and were decent and hard working citizens. She didn't even think about her own 'personal life', and instead dedicated every spare minute of her free time to them. I honestly can't say she would have done any differently had the husband/father stayed around (he bolted to Europe when the kids were tiny, avoiding maintainence payments). These things are very much a choice. Few of us in the First World have it so bad we can't spare an hour or two a day to focus on our children. I know women who do it by sacrificing sleep, because they work so many hours. Choices.

 

What a load of smelly old tripe, with respect

 

Come on .. we're not that naive, are we?

 

We ARE that naive, it seems.

No one in America is POOR. The poorest person in America is still richer (by far) than a slightly poor person in the Third World. More importantly though, you cannot fix those who refuse to do what is needed to stay out of 'poverty' by throwing money at them. They remain in poverty because they don't want money in the first place. You will need to find a way to reconcile that unpleasant truth, instead of opting for platitudes which you think have the appearance of compassion.

 

What a terrific, well, thought out post. I would certainly agree that there is a spectrum among the poor which is why taking individual cases such as that of your family can be so misleading - not to take anything away from them because that is a great story of accomplishment and they do happen. The trouble is in taking the exception and making it a rule, no? And I'm sure your deadbeat relative has his story as well.

But lets not forget, they were able to take advantage of many of the programs that came out of the New Deal and probably the greatest era of human prosperity in history that followed. The last of the New Deal programs was effectively destroyed along with the labour movement starting in the late 70's to the point they are non-existent except in the most skeletal forms today.

Another point I always try to make is that marginalized communities often turn to criminality as sometimes the only opportunity open to them. This was as true in the Warsaw ghetto as it is in inner city Detroit or Chicago. And then these communities are in turn overpoliced and under protected as course of policy. If you take into account the number of black males incarcerated under tough on crime and war on drugs policy and then who are forced to spend years in cages often for non-violent drug crimes, well, you can see how a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, lack of community and violence become the norm.

But in answer to your question what would I do given an unlimited budget. Funny, I am currently writing a paper on Universal Basic Income (UBI) here in Canada for a local paper and what it would cost compared to the patchwork of social services across provinces we have today.

By my calculation, it would cost the federal government 44 billion a year to put in place either a negative tax or direct payment system of UBI when you eliminate the 30 billion in various social services it funds now. When you further eliminate costs in policing poverty and front line health care for such issues and mental health, you could drop it down to 20 billion a year.

This does not take into account economic growth from giving everyone an income that allows them to purchase goods and services that support local business and increase GDP.

So, before you gasp that this is socialism, consider that automation and robotics are set to transform the nature of work within decades and the trend that globalization of the workforce started is just the first shock in an economic system that is proving unable to adapt to changing conditions as the rates of inequality and poverty are showing. So governments are genuinely exploring and starting pilot project to study the feasibility of this.

In fact, the state of Alaska already has in place a form of negative tax UBI called the Permanent Fund which it funds with oil revenue and in the past such raving socialists as ex-treasury secretaries, Baker and hank Paulson have seriously proposed taking a program like this national.

I tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum so a proposal like this makes sense to me and the economics are more than feasible. The US is spending in excess of 370 billion on military alone. It is a matter of political will and getting over ideology is all.

 

Can you provide any convincing evidence that people are choosing to be poor?

 

No one in America is poor? It is not naive to study the facts.

How much does food and housing cost in America compared to third world countries? It is relative right? And there is third world poverty and people living on less than 2 dollars a day right there in the land of the free in places like Camden or Detroit.

According to the US Census Bureau:

"According to Census Bureau Data, a larger percentage of children younger than 18 live in deep poverty than adults in any other age group. In 2016, nearly 8.2 percent of all children lived in deep poverty. For comparison, only 3.3 percent of those over the age of 65 live in deep poverty.

In terms of race and Hispanic origin, Census Bureau data show that those who are Black or Hispanic are most likely to be in deep poverty, with poverty rates of 10.8 and 7.6 percent, respectively. Those who are White and not Hispanic or Asian are least likely to live in deep poverty, with poverty rates of 4.1 and 5.2 percent.

The Census Bureau uses several alternative methods to calculate the poverty indices, including the American Community Survey (ACS), which details a substantial increase in the number of Americans in poverty – from 46.2 million in 2010 to 48.5 million in 2011. In 2010, the Census Bureau introduced the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to reflect long-term changes in government policies that altered disposable income available to families and therefore their poverty status. However, the official rate is still based on data from the Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC).

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has the highest poverty rate among the world’s developed countries. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranks the United States second behind Romania on a scale of what economists call “relative child poverty” when measured against 35 of the world’s richest nations."



https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-deep-poverty

https://www.povertyusa.org/facts

https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty.html

Yeah, those 16 million children are choosing to live in poverty all right and that is what their parents want for them too. And why does the poverty rate drop to 3.3 % in those over 65?

Because of social security programs like old age benefits? But we don't want anymore of those programs do we

Socialism!!!!!

 

Thank you for the kind compliment. The appreciation is mutual.
I think our differences come down to this: I am not nearly so optimistic as you appear to be, with respect to the personal character of the people who, in the US today, remain poor, generation after generation. Of course no mother wants her child to be poor ... but some mothers would rather spend their welfare money on cocaine than on baby food.
I personally prefer the approach outlined by the (liberal) Robert Cherry, in his book Welfare Transformed. Here's a quote from the publisher's blurb:

It's a bit dated now -- he has written other things since that book -- but I believe that this is the right approach: not giving people more welfare money, but implementing policies that encourage them to get off welfare, along with possibility of acquiring the skills, both social and technical, that allows them to do so. And focus on the children.

I don't care whether or not this is called 'socialism', a word that has been drained of all content. (I personally use the word to mean a collectivized, planned economy, something which almost no one even tries to defend anymore, in light of its manifest failure in country after country. ) Its other use is to mean "government spending of which I disapprove", which usually excludes the US Marine Corps and Yellowstone National Park.

As for a Universal Basic Income. If the robots take away all jobs that can be done by anyone with an IQ below 120, before our research has allowed us to raise a new generation with an IQ floor of 140, we're going to be in trouble. Maybe a UBI will be the only solution, but if so, I don't expect most people to spend their leisure time learning how to play the violin. I would rather predict something like you read in one of the dystopian sci-fi novels. Much better to distribute this income via a greatly-expanded public labor service, although it will be rife with corruption.

In a way, that's what the American military is: a way up and out of a bad background for young people. One of the reasons I hate the Left is that they try to close this escape-avenue off, by, for instance, forbidding the military to recruit in the high schools they control. (My closest childhood friend, at 17, found himself in front of a judge who gave him the option of five years in state prison, or five years in the Marine Corps. He chose the latter and it was the making of him.)

I believe that half the terrible decisions that people make stem from our assumption that other people are like us. This is true with respect to biological fundamentals, but not otherwise. Surely the Iraqis would be overcome with gratitude when we toppled their brutal dictator? Surely welfare mothers given a big increase in welfare payments would use it to hire a tutor for their children, or to put a downpayment on a house?

 

Ignore this follow-up post.

 

Yes. Take a 20 year old Bangladeshi slum dweller or a very poor rural Chinese with no education and plant him/her in America. I can just about guarantee that his/her eventual children won't live in poverty.

And here's your second proof: Does any one of your 'involuntarily poor' own a smart phone? buy fast food? own a big tv? do cigarettes, alcohol or drugs? eat out? buy new clothes? get their hair done? have tattoos? Are they fat? If you answered 'yes' to any of these, that person is voluntarily poor.

 

The poorest person in America is richer than every poor person in the Third World. You have NO concept of what poverty is, if you think it involves iphones and fast food. Poverty is a cardboard box and starvation.

 

Lick road clean wit tongue!

 

Luxury!

 

I was actually thinking of that when I typed my post. Even thunk it in the right accent

 

Well capped!
And if you tell the kids of today......

 

no shoeboxes int middle of road for them ...

 

This is your impression only with no proof to back it up. In fact immigrants and their children make up a large number of working poor in America and poverty is generational. I am not sure if you are getting your information from the Brookings Inst. report that appeared in Forbes but that was full of fallacious information and outdated.

No that is your definition of voluntarily poor. Not all the poor have these things and if they do, much of it comes through the underground economy. I'll try again with some facts to see if they can break through. I'll do quotes as I don't think you will read the links.

You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.

The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.

Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-states.html

After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin, whose deep examination of her subjects’ lives has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones), teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor. The two made a surprising discovery: the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children.

But the fuller story remained to be told. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? What do they do to survive? In search of answers, Edin and Shaefer traveled across the country to speak with families living in this extreme poverty. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. Not just a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.
WASHINGTON, D.C. / GENEVA (15 December 2017) – The United States, one of the world’s richest nations and the “land of opportunity”, is fast becoming a champion of inequality, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston.

http://www.twodollarsaday.com/

Entrenched poverty will be made far worse by policies being proposed by the Trump Administration, warned Philip Alston in a statement after a two-week fact-finding mission to California, Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., as well as Puerto Rico.

“The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the United States now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries,” said the independent human rights expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to look at poverty and human rights in countries around the world.

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22546&LangID=E

First of all, homeless people don't have TVs, get their hair done, except by volunteers or go out for dinner except perhaps McDonalds. And even families who have acquired these things often get them second hand or given through charity.

Second of all, you have shown no evidence that people actually choose to be poor. This is just the usual attempt to blame people for their own poverty. You are basically using the welfare queen driving a Cadillac argument that was shown to be completely fallacious years ago.

And third of all, the cost of living is far higher in America than it is in third world countries and even so, in parts of America, poverty can be compared to those countries as shown in the links above.

 

Absolutely not true. Over 18 million Americans live on less than $2 a day which is the global standard. I have a very good concept of what poverty is and have written on poverty and inequality in the US. Poverty does not involve iphones and fast food. It is true that standard of living might be higher in the higher categories of poverty in the US but when taking into consideration the cost of living in the US compared to say Bangladesh.

Though many are malnourished and live on cardboard boxes even in the US, that is not the definition of poverty. It is a threshold of income compared to expenses and this is as true in Bangladesh as it is in Camden, NJ.

If a family pays $5 dollars in a third world country for housing while pulling in $10 dollars a month, how is that different than a family in Camden paying $500 and making only 1,200?

You are trying to blame the poor for poverty by trying to make it sound like a choice they make themselves without taking into account any of the other factors such as race, gender demographics, education, employment opportunities, disabilities or socio-economic status.

 

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