[HN Gopher] We shouldn't push a positive mindset on those in pov...
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We shouldn't push a positive mindset on those in poverty
Author : homarp
Score : 218 points
Date : 2022-02-19 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (psyche.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (psyche.co)
| asciimov wrote:
| Want to fight poverty? Two things would help:
|
| 1. Give them money.
|
| 2. Regulate the things that take their money.
|
| ---
|
| 1. I'm not sure how much that would be but people need to afford
| child care, transportation, housing, food, healthcare, and still
| have enough money for leisure.
|
| 2. Unregulated costs that hurt the poor. Unhinged cost of
| healthcare, all healthcare, including ears, eyes, nose, and
| mouth. Bank maintenance fees, like overdraft fees and checking
| account fees. Student loan interest rates. Child care. Housing.
| The judicial system, including things like income based fines
| (ie.. you make more you pay more).
| djrobstep wrote:
| The rise of "mindset" and "resilience" is just another chapter in
| the absurd poverty discourse.
|
| Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money. But
| rich people don't want that, so we can't do that, and it's
| largely taboo to even talk about it.
|
| So instead of the real solution, we have to talk about all the
| fake solutions - education, marriage, mindset, resilience,
| learning to code. Andrew Yang even said that web3 was the most
| powerful anti-poverty tool we had.
|
| Anybody who talks about any cure for poverty other than directly
| giving people in poverty more money is lying to you.
| Proven wrote:
| chii wrote:
| > Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money.
|
| yep - just let them have cake, surely that will fix it!
| newsclues wrote:
| If people live in poverty but have a job, poverty is solved
| by giving the poor workers a higher wage.
|
| We have billionaires and children who are homeless, that
| isn't a good thing.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| "We have billionaires and children who are homeless".
|
| Is there some evidence of homeless billionaires on the
| streets with their kids? Did you mean to say that there
| exist homeless kids and also there are billionaires?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why not both? Give people fish _and_ teach them to fish. Why
| does it have to be one or the other?
| djrobstep wrote:
| Because the first one is extremely simple and all that is
| needed. That doesn't mean that things like education aren't
| good - but they aren't required or effective for poverty
| reduction.
|
| The other fundamental issue is the poverty is most severe for
| households with non-earning or low earning dependents, such
| as children, elderly, sick, disabled, and caregivers - simply
| because the household income needs to be split more ways. No
| amount of teaching can fix that - only redistributive welfare
| can.
| csee wrote:
| You lost me when you said education isn't required and
| isn't effective for poverty reduction. If you have a
| society that isn't educated then you have no wealth to take
| in order to give.
| djrobstep wrote:
| Do you think that giving people money requires banning
| education? Education is good for many reasons, but it's
| not a cure for poverty.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not extremely simple. You have to make money before
| you can give it away - that's the hard part! (Even if you
| argue that rich people should be giving away some of their
| existing high incomes via taxes, that means that these
| taxes can't be used to fund other good things.) So you need
| both.
| kyle_martin1 wrote:
| nemo44x wrote:
| That's just not true. We've done this and it has led to the
| destruction of the family and further impoverishment of many
| people. We shouldn't continue doing things that have failed.
|
| The Moynihan Report explored this in the 1960's and has
| predicted where we are today. And although it was related to
| black Americans at the time it is very easily generalized to
| everyone.
|
| Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.
| djrobstep wrote:
| You've provided a perfect example for the kind of
| charlatanism I mentioned in the last paragraph - well done.
|
| In fact, welfare works great, both in the US, where Social
| Security has saved millions from poverty, and in many other
| countries.
|
| You'll find that in all of these countries, families continue
| to exist, so take your conservative talking points about
| destruction of the family are pure ideological nonsense.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Just because you say it doesn't make it true. We literally
| see the divergence in family stability and welfare
| adoption. From there we see the effects as it leads to
| generational poverty, crime, etc.
|
| The data and facts are simply not on your side.
| djrobstep wrote:
| Actually, they are. The more welfare, the less poverty -
| everywhere. Look it up.
| njacobs5074 wrote:
| > Just giving people money forever will only cause
| destruction.
|
| Would you agree that this is equally true for someone who
| comes from a wealthy family and has a trust fund that
| essentially guarantees that they will be "given money",
| usually in the form of capital gains, forever?
| nemo44x wrote:
| I would say that giving your kids a bag of money so they
| don't have to do anything wound generally be a bad idea. I
| think Bill Gates said he gives his kids enough money so
| that they don't have to do anything for money but that they
| do have to do something or something like that.
|
| In the end, people need to be meaningful participants in
| their own lives.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > That's just not true. We've done this
|
| I really have to disagree there. We have simply _never tried_
| to give people money in ways that, like UBI or the Negative
| Income Tax, carefully preserve good incentives and thus good
| overall outcomes while avoiding costly 'red tape' that only
| lets people fall through the cracks. What little research has
| been done on more effective arrangements for income
| redistribution _in developed countries_ has actually shown
| remarkably positive results. And the evidence in lower-income
| countries is even more remarkable.
| nemo44x wrote:
| We have too sone this with Welfare. It destroyed
| generations of people.
|
| The idea that when doing something harmful we should have
| done it bigger is absurd. People need meaningful lives.
| Giving them a bag of money doesn't do that and it makes
| them dependent.
|
| Give people skills and self empowerment. Not free money.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Making children live in deprivation because their parents
| had bad luck or made a mistake doesn't create meaning.
|
| It's kind of silly that there is so much discussion of
| giving away money when we can't even bother to structure
| healthcare provision in a way that makes sense (It
| shouldn't be hard to get Medicaid and there shouldn't be
| a cliff...).
| mrep wrote:
| The US is already sending out checks to all parents. How
| much more do you think it should be?
| maxerickson wrote:
| It clearly would have been good to keep the child tax
| credit expansion that expired in December in place. So at
| least that much more.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I know this from experience, I grew up in poverty and my
| parents died when I was young.
|
| Bad luck = Lack of moral character to so many people who
| haven't experienced need.
|
| It's the same Victorian England "just world" garbage that
| the fortunate have always embraced to prop up their own
| personal mythos.
|
| It's funny that many self identifying christians treat
| the poor the worst from a public policy perspective, when
| the whole point of old testament law around land
| ownership and jubilee years was to protect children from
| suffering as a result of unlucky/stupid parents and to
| generationally guarantee access to capital and
| production.
|
| The lack of a party equivalent to "christian socialists"
| (pro markets, pro capitalism, pro safety nets) in the USA
| really betrays the cruelty of americas faux christianity.
|
| We seem very eager to punish unlucky and low leverage
| individuals... and their children.
| nemo44x wrote:
| There's many ways to do this without incentivizing single
| motherhood. It's devastating for the children. It might
| make you feel high and moral but you're actively hurting
| people.
|
| Better solutions involve getting kids out of these homes
| for as much of the day as possible and surrounding them
| with positive role models from extremely early ages.
| Kinrany wrote:
| The Moynihan Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_
| Family%3A_The_Case_F...
|
| It seems to conflate changes in family structure with
| prosperity and is based on shaky assumptions about the
| relationship between them. It remains controversial.
|
| I don't see why it would generalize well.
| nemo44x wrote:
| That's what was said about it in the early 60's. The
| problem is we have 50+ years of evidence that shows it was
| right.
|
| The Moynihan Scissors is real.
| nemo44x wrote:
| This refutes your thoughts on the matter:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/was-the-moynihan-
| report...
| naasking wrote:
| No, we've done highly bureaucratic, dehumanizing but
| _targeted means-tested_ programs. Those are very different
| than just giving poor people money through progressive
| taxation or other means. Just giving cash has been tried only
| very recently, and with generally positive results so far.
| modshatereality wrote:
| goodpoint wrote:
| A lot of "positive thinking" is gaslighting.
|
| Blaming people in poverty for having the wrong mindset diverts
| the attention away from society.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Speaking as someone who's never -quite- been in poverty, but
| has been pretty close to the 'lowest tier' of financial status
| at least once.
|
| How close? A little over 10 years ago I had to move back in
| with my parents, owed a lot of folks money due to a separation
| (back rent the ex wouldn't pay, moving costs, etc) and it got
| to where a low-interest loan from my parents was the only thing
| that kept me solvent.
|
| I still wonder where I'd be right now if they said no, or
| didn't have the money, or didn't let me live there rent-free
| during that time.
|
| And I -remember- how hard it was, to do anything to improve the
| situation. I was being taken advantage of by a very toxic boss.
|
| Here's a scenario:
|
| - Your mom had a heart attack a week and a half ago
|
| - There were severe complications and she might not make it
| past 72 hours
|
| - Your boss tells you "Didn't I already give you a day off for
| that?" when you ask to see her.
|
| What _do_ you do? Staying 'positive' through a situation like
| that sounds a lot like other groups of people told to 'be happy
| with their lot'.
| csee wrote:
| There's a huge difference between an accurate descriptive
| explanation of _why_ someone is in poverty, and what mindset
| one ought to have if they are in poverty so as to maximize
| their chances of escaping it (or at least, of enduring it). The
| former should not inform the latter.
|
| I am skeptical that putting the locus of control outside of
| oneself - even if partly or largely true as a description of
| reality - is a good solution to the latter objective due to the
| learned helplessness and depression that may be magnified by
| doing that.
| bassetian wrote:
| rosenjcb wrote:
| It's a recipe for disaster. If you focus on what you can't
| control, you end up doing nothing. Focus on the actions that
| can best improve your life.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I am skeptical that putting the locus of control outside of
| oneself - even if partly or largely true as a description of
| reality - is a good solution
|
| On the contrary, understanding and acknowledging what is
| outside one's locus of control is a sign of mental health.
|
| > the learned helplessness and depression that may be
| magnified by doing that
|
| It's the opposite. The "you can achieve anything if you try
| hard enough" message common in "positive thinking" clashes
| with reality.
|
| The obvious implication is "it's my fault for not trying hard
| enough" which is a perfect example of learned helplessness.
| vasco wrote:
| > When studied experimentally, the tendency to prioritise rewards
| in the future rather than the present diminishes among those who
| feel low in power or perceive instability or uncertainty in their
| environment. The apparent failure of self-regulation - a trait
| admired in those who have it, and taught to those who don't - is
| not a psychological impairment, but an adaptive response to
| having little actual control over one's future.
|
| When I was poor, I never thought I didn't have control over my
| future, this is likely luck on my part. I think this feeling of
| lack of control is way more a product of your parents and
| upbringing than anything else. Everyone knows stories of
| emigrants that made it from nothing, meanwhile others in similar
| conditions don't. I know plenty of rich people that don't do
| anything with themselves and live depressed completely absorbed
| in a feeling of lack of control over future, "nothing matters"
| nihilist bullshit too. They just started at a higher absolute
| value in their bank account so they don't count for the
| statistics but they're an even bigger drag on society because not
| only they don't generate anything new, they deprive others of the
| assets they just have lying around.
|
| The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger
| than "just feel better" mindset coaching, and well, yeah - you
| can buy food with one and not with the other. But there's plenty
| of examples and literature as to why also just donating money
| doesn't solve the problem.
|
| I think what solves the problem is creating conditions for good
| stable parenting of children. The problem is there's plenty of
| fucked up rich parents, so unfortunately I don't think I have a
| solution, but I don't think it's either just mindset changes or
| free money, and there's aspects missing of having a loving family
| who also focuses on building your character through positive role
| models and safety to fail. These are easier if you're not
| struggling to pay the bills, but surely this isn't as easy as
| airdropping money on everyone. I'm still positive about testing
| UBI though, I think it could help over several generations.
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _When I was poor, I never thought I didn 't have control over
| my future, this is likely luck on my part. I think this feeling
| of lack of control is way more a product of your parents and
| upbringing than anything else._
|
| Yes, exactly what I am thinking (and much more succinct than my
| draft response).
|
| And it follows that, while an individual may not be able easily
| to change their mindset, helping children grow up with a sense
| of agency can reduce _intergenerational_ poverty.
| bradlys wrote:
| As the other commenter said - you need a sense of agency with
| the actual agency itself.
|
| Intergenerational poverty like mine was able to be overcome
| because I was given a full ride to college. I took that and
| rode it all the way to 7-figure jobs. But many in the US
| aren't given anywhere near what I was given even if they get
| assistance. (Tuition waived, monthly stipend, insurance.)
|
| I've already put someone else through college and can tell
| you that changing intergenerational poverty is an incredibly
| hard thing to overcome. If it wasn't for me working with my
| spouse so closely for years - there's no way she would've
| gotten anywhere near where she is now. That and I poured well
| north of $100k+ on her for it.
|
| I firmly believe the overwhelming majority of people need a
| strong positive influence in their life. Normally this would
| be the parents but poor parents typically ain't that. I'm an
| exception - someone who made it out without any positive
| influences. But I should be treated as that - an exception.
| (It's why when I tell my stories they seem unbelievable and
| unrelatable. It's just not like any kind of common narrative
| that exists.)
| yobbo wrote:
| > helping children grow up with a sense of agency can reduce
| intergenerational poverty.
|
| "Sense of agency" is tricky without actually having agency.
| Bad parents is part of it, whether rich or poor.
| drekipus wrote:
| > helping children grow up with a sense of agency can reduce
| intergenerational poverty.
|
| between this post and that "we banned lego bricks in school"
| posts, this needs to be a banner that remains at the top of
| the page
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger
| than "just feel better" mindset coaching [...] But there's
| plenty of examples and literature as to why also just donating
| money doesn't solve the problem
|
| The article does not imply at any point that the "material
| solution" is the universal solution (not attempts to give one),
| rather than pointing the flaws of pushing those "just feel
| better/stop being poor" mindsets and indirectly blaming the
| poor for their condition.
| vasco wrote:
| I didn't say they did, and I agree with your interpretation
| of the article. I was sharing my own experience and some
| follow ups to these thoughts regarding parenting and UBI.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| My father was career Air Force. The base commander came to him
| once, and told him that half of the privates on the base were
| having trouble paying their bills to the local merchants. The
| merchants complained to the commander, and one of the commander's
| jobs is to be a good neighbor in the community.
|
| The privates were all paid the same, and lived on base housing,
| with base furniture, etc., all supplied. Health care was free.
| Half would do fine, the other half ran out of money halfway
| between paychecks, and would resort to harassing others for
| loans, not pay back debts, etc/
|
| He ordered my father to help the half that could not manage their
| finances. So he'd bring them into the office, go over how they
| handled money, prepared budgets for them, etc. He was very
| frustrated because this was a complete failure. He was unable to
| help them.
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| awad21 wrote:
| rosenjcb wrote:
| Personal anecdote: I was raised in a poor single home family
| (father passed) and had very little going for me when I graduated
| college with an econ degree and an old Buick. After burning out
| at a gas station job, I just sold my car and moved to Seattle -
| telling myself I'd figure it out. 4 years later I'm making as
| much as my peers who went the CS route, lived in an urban area
| their whole life, had strong support systems (family), et cetera.
| I know of people in worse positions than I was, so I won't
| pretend that I had a bad upbringing: it just had its challenges.
|
| But what made me succeed was when I stopped making excuses and
| just put in the 6+ hours a day of coding at the cafe while I job
| searched. That combined with opportunity (someone took my
| resume), environment (Seattle is a great place to start your
| career), and a good support network (my girlfriend).
|
| Having a positive mindset is just one part of success, but it's
| necessary. I know of a lot of college friends from really well
| off families that work middling data entry jobs because they have
| zero drive in their career.
| awad21 wrote:
| giantg2 wrote:
| Should we be pushing a positive mindset for anyone? To push a
| positive mindset (repeatedly) is sort of like saying you know how
| the other person should feel even better than they do.
|
| I hate the constant positivity at work. You have to be positive
| or else you're "unengaged".
| zackmorris wrote:
| Poverty is caused by the wealthy not automating the tasks that
| the poor are forced to do to survive.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| awad21 wrote:
| cryptica wrote:
| This makes sense. It's immoral to promote the possibility and
| benefits of financial success to people who cannot reach it via
| legal means. All it will do is drive them into criminal activity
| because, without the right social connections, that's the only
| way they can get there. These days, there is tough competition
| even beyond the criminal line though (but still easier). It seems
| (based on articles I read) that even succeeding as a drug dealer
| or trafficker is difficult nowadays because of intense
| competition. I also know from anecdotal evidence that taboo areas
| like adult tech industry used to be easier for newcomers who
| didn't have the right social connections... Not sure if that's
| still true.
|
| I despise the mindset that many rich people have that "I only
| surround myself with positive people" - What that really means is
| "I only surround myself with lucky people who don't understand
| how the world works and charlatans who pretend not to." It's
| discriminatory and leads to massive blindspots and complete
| bifurcation of society with an elite class which is completely
| out of touch... History tells us quite clearly where this leads.
|
| I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup
| culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of
| desperate people and social climbers into the industry who only
| got in for the money. I think this partly explains a lot of
| issues we're facing now with censorship, surveillance and other
| unethical conduct.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| tldr: if someone's poor they won't form a "positive mindset" or
| "internal locus of control" because their life is objectively
| sucky and they objectively have little control over it. If
| someone struggles to afford basic necessities like food and rent,
| and there's simply no clear opportunity for them to not struggle
| without tremendous effort, they're not going to try.
|
| This is a well-written article but it seems to me as kind of
| obvious. Is there something here that i'm missing?
| csee wrote:
| I see it as a rather biased and unhelpful article.
|
| The author makes the strong claim that "mindsets are not free-
| floating" because they are shaped too strongly by a person's
| external social environment and circumstances. While this is
| largely true, it is false and harmful in its absoluteness.
|
| Interventions into thinking patterns such as CBT _work_ and are
| _effective_. They may be _less_ effective if the person has
| truly terrible circumstances, but poo pooing stuff that
| actually works just so she can advance her luxury beliefs is
| not good. People trapped in poverty need these cognitive tools
| more than anyone given how desperate their situation is.
| Poverty is every bit as traumatizing and difficult and
| impossible as she says it is, and such tools can help them
| avoid getting their spirit crushed under that hardship.
|
| I think that she's doing this because she feels that the
| narrative that poor people can simply change their mindset and
| become middle class to be undermining political momentum
| towards helping them. She may be right about that, but that is
| no reason to throw away a practically helpful intervention that
| can help these people in the meantime.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I look to the worst situations in humanity for thinking about
| this. Stockdale is well known for becoming a POW and using
| stoicism to survive it. And to teach others and lead them
| using this mindset. Mindset is everything for a human.
| Encouraging a positive one is not wrong. It is also not a
| panacea or anything.
| newsclues wrote:
| If you spend time on the wrong parts of social media you will
| find that there is an industry of people (billionaire lifestyle
| type influencers) who are exploiting people that can't grasp
| this.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| One thing that was always abundantly clear is that long-term
| thinking and discipline is something that you _are_ , it isn't
| particularly context dependent nor something you can teach beyond
| natural inclination. Virtually all of the poor people I grew up
| and lived around with these manifest traits got out of poverty
| eventually and never came back. For these people, a positive
| mindset may be helpful. That combination of long-term thinking
| and discipline are like compound interest, given enough time you
| can build substantial value on it no matter how little you start
| with.
|
| In this sense, poverty is a personality trait trap. If you don't
| have these traits and you find yourself in poverty, you are stuck
| because you'll never spontaneously develop these traits. All of
| which creates a selection bias where the population of people in
| poverty are naturally depleted of these helpful traits. Many
| people are born into this position.
|
| If you are in a middle-class situation and lack these traits, you
| can nonetheless afford some drag loss as a consequence of having
| excess income -- the median US household can afford to
| frivolously waste ~$12k/year without materially changing their
| position beyond lack of wealth accumulation. That is a large _de
| facto_ safety net for lack of long-term thinking or discipline.
| Poor people don 't have this. Being middle-class doesn't create
| long-term thinking or discipline, as is also amply evident, but
| you can afford to make more poor life choices.
|
| In a sense, I agree with the article that it won't materially
| change outcomes. Even if you can divide people in poverty by
| these traits, the people with them are likely to get out of
| poverty regardless, and it does nothing constructive for people
| without them.
| pc86 wrote:
| This doesn't seem particularly surprising to me. If you look at
| the ideologues, you have some people arguing that if you just
| bootstrap your bootstraps you can bootstrap your way out of
| poverty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people
| basically claiming that it's all random and you owe absolutely
| none of your success to your own abilities. The truth, as with
| all things, is somewhere in the middle. The truth being in the
| middle, it stands to reason there are certain intrinsic
| personality traits that would predispose someone to
| financial/material/commercial success. And if there are traits
| that would predispose someone to success it stands to reason
| there would be traits equally predisposing other people to
| failure.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| How do you know that these values can't be taught? It's not
| like it has been tried with any seriousness as of late. On the
| contrary, these values (literacy, education, strong self-
| discipline, public-mindedness) used to be rather widespread in
| the 19th century, pre WWI, and that seemed to help poor folks
| cope a lot better with their circumstances even in a society
| that was both much poorer as a whole and much more unequal!
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| These aren't values, so you can't teach them as such. They
| are cognitive traits connected to biology and likely
| hereditary. It is like saying everyone can be equally good at
| spatial ability, which facilitates many concrete skills, with
| training, despite being robustly and strongly connected to
| genetics. If these could be addressed with training, we
| wouldn't need drugs to treat things like ADHD or depression.
|
| There is no evidence that people in the 19th century were
| more or less self-disciplined than they are today. Countless
| people from that era demonstrated a widely documented lack of
| discipline in all things. Human nature is what it is.
| stakkur wrote:
| There are other options besides 'positive' and 'negative'
| mindset. For everyone.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Are you poor because you depressed, or depressed because you are
| poor?
| lstodd wrote:
| Meaningless question. Am I rich because I'm depressed or am I
| depressed because I'm rich?
|
| That's two independent variables.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Are they independent though?
| tombh wrote:
| And that's a meaningless reframing. It is not a fundamental
| logical rule that you can change one side of a relationship
| in order to demonstrate its irrelevance. For example, "Did
| the chicken come before the egg?" can't be refuted as a
| useful thought experiment just by showing that "Did the
| monkey come before the egg?" is nonsense.
| naasking wrote:
| Poverty is a strange loop.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| We shouldn't _push_ a positive mindset on anyone - positivity is
| not the kind of thing that should be pushed on people in the
| first place. But this doesn 't mean that positive psychology has
| _nothing_ to say as to how to cope with poverty, and for that
| matter other adversities (such as social marginalization, which
| seems especially insidious and hard to address given the dearth
| of social-capital-enhancing grassroots institutions in modern
| societies).
|
| (The article also seems to weirdly conflate self-
| regulation/executive function and very-long-term time orientation
| then saying that the latter makes no sense in an overall risky
| environment, thus neither does the former. This hardly seems
| sensible. Just because not eating your marshmallow can be helpful
| to both, does not make them the same thing!)
| Aunche wrote:
| I agree that simply pushing a positive mindset is useless because
| that's not really something you can push unless if you're talking
| about a parent to your child. However, that isn't to say that a
| positive mindset is useless. I tutor poor kids and overall, there
| is definitely a difference between the attitudes of immigrant
| children and those born into intergenerational poverty.
| Immigrants tend to take their educational background seriously,
| where's an alarmingly high number of people born into
| intergenerational poverty accept the status quo that they're in.
| This is historically observable as well
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/upshot/immigration-
| americ...).
|
| Also, I disagree that the government actually is trying to foster
| a positive mindset to begin with. Welfare is systemically
| structured to award victimhood (e.g. welfare cliffs).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It's interesting that you seem to perceive this as a fault in
| those experiencing generational poverty, rather than one of its
| effects.
| Aunche wrote:
| It is both to a certain extent. Bad circumstances cause
| unhealthy mindsets, but it's undeniable that these unhealthy
| mindsets aren't making poverty worse. That doesn't mean I'm
| lecturing anyone about personal responsibility. The solution
| is to design policy that empowers people rather than treats
| them as victims. Unfortunately, it seems like every
| politician who supports the former (e.g universal healthcare)
| also supports the latter (e.g. student loan cancellation).
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Wait, why wouldn't student loan cancellation be an
| empowerment of the poor? I thought the poor
| disproportionately suffered from shackles of student loans
| + didn't finish degree, and the student loan payments are a
| major friction to breaking into middle class.
| Aunche wrote:
| Expanding public university funding so that more people
| attend colleges without debt is empowering. Student loan
| forgiveness only rewards those who were unable to get
| value out of college. It's the same problem as a benefits
| cliff.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Right yeah if you want to help people but also punish them
| for needing help you are going to run into impossible
| contradictions like that.
| Aunche wrote:
| It's interesting how you're framing not giving people
| something as a punishment.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| GP never said anything like that. They identified faults in
| _government_ arrangements as a contributing factor, they didn
| 't say the people themselves were at fault.
| rhacker wrote:
| There are 10 times more "second" non-rented houses in the United
| States than there are homeless people.
|
| That- right there - is the reason we have poor.
| lstodd wrote:
| We shouldn't push "a mindset" on anybody.
|
| The thought of someone feeling entitled enough to "push a
| mindset" is disgusting.
| caffeine wrote:
| Well it could also be called "teaching tools and tactics that
| research had shown work for other people"
|
| Usually it's not entitlement, it's an effort to help.
|
| The effort might be misguided, but assuming that the cause is
| entitlement rather than a genuine desire to improve outcomes is
| uncharitable.
| chmod600 wrote:
| A multi-generational outlook must be part of any solution to
| poverty. Maybe other things are important, too, but a multi-
| generational approach is required.
|
| It's really hard to get out of poverty without good parents. By
| "really hard" I mean that it doesn't happen very often.
| Government programs can help here a lot, but are not very
| sustainable because they need to keep solving the same poverty
| problems for every generation.
|
| Parents are self-replicating. And good parents replicate more
| good parents. That's a much more sustainable basis for societal
| improvement.
|
| Multi-generational improvement is not easy, but the gains last
| much longer. The benefits even last through major hardships that
| create temporary poverty, like war or economic collapse.
| blfr wrote:
| > Yet such efforts have been largely unsuccessful at reducing
| poverty and unemployment
|
| It's unfair to just pick this one intervention and point out it
| didn't reduce poverty or unemployment. They mostly don't. Whether
| it's positive mindset, growth mindset, head start early education
| programs, most psychiatric drugs (NNTs in the 20s)... But we are
| not coldhearted enough to do nothing so this is something.
|
| And occasionally it works. We treated iodine deficiency to great
| sometimes spectacular effects, we feed pretty much everyone in
| the west, not exactly well but to meet their caloric needs, we
| did win against smoking (don't know why OP derides that).
|
| > When I have simulated a mild version of this experience for
| middle-class people - using a household budgeting game on a
| computer where they're randomly assigned to be poor or
| financially comfortable - participants have found it to be
| profoundly disempowering. Those assigned to be poor reported a
| lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a
| freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were
| diminished by the mere momentary lived experience of trying to
| meet one's needs when one does not have enough.
|
| That sounds worryingly similar to priming.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > We treated iodine deficiency to great sometimes spectacular
| effects, we feed pretty much everyone in the west, not exactly
| well but to meet their caloric needs
|
| Micronutrient deficiency might turn out to be an enduring
| problem in the future given how common "food deserts" are in
| poor areas of the US. Along with countless other things (such
| as lead exposure, and even something as insidious as general
| stress and marginalization in early life) it should be
| addressed as a possible environmental cause of cognitive
| impairment that might correlate with poverty.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| wayanon wrote:
| My parents will die thinking people decide to be poor.
| derbOac wrote:
| Excellent piece. The subtext -- why _are_ our academic-political
| institutions treating the less fortunate as irrational -- is just
| as important as the content.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again
| and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of
| "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to
| explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as
| that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as
| those with money and connections.
|
| Clearly there must be some physical difference between the
| classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the
| rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich,
| despite the obvious objections raised by reality.
|
| And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think
| would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve,
| followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are
| also deserving of their fate.
|
| "Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work
| ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained
| strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class,
| whereas these same attributes have either weakened
| substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New
| Lower Class. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "The Bell Curve" is from 1994, a time when the importance of
| demand for education and skills as a driver for inequality
| was _far_ less clear than it is today. The real focus of that
| book was not to drive any racist message, but simply to sound
| the alarm about how the _already extant_ divergence in
| educational outcomes would only become more and more relevant
| in the future unless something radically effective was done
| to try and mitigate it. People really like to misrepresent
| that book for some reason, but if anything its real message
| has only become stronger and more relevant since then.
| willis936 wrote:
| The bell curve is a scabrous piece of racial pornography.
|
| https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-
| throwi...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| To be clear, I do of course agree that the book had
| plenty of major flaws, including in its statistical
| arguments about the importance of "I.Q." specifically (or
| of some entirely hypothetical "general factor", whatever
| that might mean - a "factor" being merely a way of
| _summarizing_ correlations across measurements, as
| opposed to anything causally relevant in any underlying
| model) to outcomes, and even about its observed
| distribution across US conventional race groups. Much of
| it would not stand up to even the lightest scrutiny
| nowadays. But its more general argument about the
| emergence of a "cognitive elite" on one side, and a
| "custodial state" on the other, might as well be called
| conventional wisdom today. These simply were not
| commonly-acknowledged facts in the mid-1990s!
| whatlolasdqwe wrote:
| kstenerud wrote:
| This kind of thing happens in any society with high inequality:
| The worse it gets, the more those on top feel the need to
| justify their position and downplay the rage of the underclass
| (traditionally, this continues until the underclass finally
| kills off the privileged class).
|
| It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and
| the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the
| privileged in the USA.
| math-dev wrote:
| Agree
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to
| perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and
| challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace?
|
| Since it's true? You try doing anything while believing you'll
| fail and can't achieve anything. Then try doing it while
| believing you're really good at it. The results are obvious.
|
| No shit you can't use a "proactive mindset" for a free "get out
| of poverty" card whenever you want. It just helps not to despair
| and make do with what you've got.
| darkerside wrote:
| > everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to
| the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did
| such a belief become commonplace?
|
| I'm struggling not to be offended by the idea that humans don't
| have the ability to choose their own mindset when I believe it's
| the only thing we can truly reliably choose.
|
| I just had a talk with my oldest child today about working hard
| because you don't know when you'll get your opportunity to shine,
| but you _need_ to be ready when (or if!) you get it. It was in
| the context of basketball, but I fully believe it applies to just
| about everything in life.
|
| I also disagree with the premise of the article in that just
| because the ranks of poverty are not subsiding doesn't mean
| _individuals_ aren't being helped by these programs.
| csydas wrote:
| I feel this article buries its focus in a lot of narrative, as
| the core point is very accurate I believe but you have 2400 words
| to try to explain
|
| "not everyone handles bad situations the same way"
|
| This is a really tough article for me as personally, I moved to
| Seattle with < $300 to my name and somehow made it work. For a
| few years, I lived on rice and eggs, going to concerts/shows was
| a treat, and free2play games took up my weekends.
|
| The article tries to convey how the mindset of being poor, not
| knowing if you'll have enough money for food or common (western)
| comforts each week wears on the mind, and I do think this is
| true. From a very privileged position, I have the opinion that a
| lot of "raise your status" schools are just garbage meant to
| fleece the appropriate amount of money from persons in need.
| (e.g., bootcamps or specialty IT schools. My personal take is
| they teach how to press buttons/write very narrow and specific
| code and how to raise support cases with vendors, not how to
| understand what you're working with)
|
| I do not even pretend to understand "real" poverty; I'm extremely
| lucky in that I had the option to leave the US and work abroad
| where the capacity to learn was a considered element of the
| position. Despite the experience I have in System Administration
| and Programming, I'd probably fail most US interviews simply
| because I lack the certifications to appease recruiters and I
| don't have the certification history to appease hiring managers.
|
| I find this article to be very US oriented (maybe UK? Not as
| clear for me), and the way the US treats the poor is abysmal.
| When I was still living in the US, I recall huge fees for medical
| procedures that the Doctors deemed seriously necessary (possible
| cancer), but insurance companies denied as the results were
| negative, and thus not necessary. Positions constantly asked for
| N years experience for technologies only around for (N-X) years,
| or expecting 5 technology stacks to work for 35k USD or less.
|
| Now that I work outside of such a system, I deal with the persons
| who __are__ hired for such positions, and naturally they lied
| from top to bottom on their CV to get the position; I don't blame
| them for lying their way into the position, but I do fault them
| for expecting others to fulfill each technology stack for them.
|
| The US has a huge issue with education and poverty in general,
| with education being so much for pay. I faced so much pushback
| for paying my student debt in advance and had a few months of
| argument with payment lenders when I paid my student debt a good
| number of months in advance, and I cannot see any justification
| for this. (It truly took 6 months to get a confirmation that my
| debt was paid in full)
|
| From my perspective, far too many systems in the US benefit from
| the poor having no other choice. I paid $3500 for a biopsy that
| by all means I feel should have been covered by my insurance.
| Four months into the event, I had already spent 80+ hours
| defending my position and _not_ paying prevented me from moving
| to a new apartment.
|
| Compared to moving to eastern Europe, the cost of the same
| procedures was $100 USD up front, no surprise bills later,
| insurance didn't bat an eye at this cost.
|
| The US is built on bilking the poor for every penny; there's no
| wonder that there is such a negative mindset on those who haven't
| lucked out on life.
|
| I am so happy I was able to find a way to get out of the US,
| despite all of my complaints about it. Hearing my friends and
| family tell me about "how great" it is, despite carrying $100K +
| in medical debt is just appalling. Every action of their life for
| programmers, nurses, doctors, and other such privileged positions
| is undermined by the fact that every system they rely on is
| designed to fleece them for as much money over their entire life
| as possible.
|
| It's a sick and disgusting system that seems resilient to change
| no matter how many people realize it's absolutely awful.
| mynameishere wrote:
| _far too many systems in the US benefit from the poor having no
| other choice. I paid $3500 for a biopsy_
|
| With some exceptions, here is the amount that the poor pay for
| biopsies in the United States: Zero dollars.
|
| _The US is built on bilking the poor for every penny_
|
| SNAP, section 8, Medicaid, TANF, SSDI, SSI, EIC, "Child Tax
| Credits", etc. That's mostly federal tax dollars. Once you get
| into state money and private charity, the reality is that there
| is a cornucopia of handouts for the "poor" in this country that
| is absolutely unheralded in history. Now it might all be too
| little--I won't say what the perfect system looks like. But
| don't act like the "system" is trying to hurt the poor. It is
| not.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > SNAP, section 8, Medicaid, TANF, SSDI, SSI, EIC, "Child Tax
| Credits", etc
|
| Have you actually attempted to take advantage of any of
| these? Some of them apply only to a small subset of people -
| SSDI AND SSI explicitly exclude able-bodied poor. One is
| available only to adults who have already worked 10 years,
| and one actively goes away if you ever even collect assets
| (or even marry!) this effectively keeping you in poverty. One
| you mentioned is a program that no longer exists. And SNAP is
| more or less generous depending on the state in which you
| live, fwiw.
| csydas wrote:
| While I am grateful you list the options for many, please
| understand I was in a position where I was too "rich" for all
| these options (more than 25k), but too poor for effective
| insurance ($45k+)
|
| I don't feel this is a trivial range, and yet, sub $65 seem
| to have special rules that add a ridiculous amount of stress.
|
| I din't want children because I didn't want to raise a child
| who had fight for basic comforts. I personally don't want a
| child for the purpose of qualifying for a break, and I've not
| felt the desire to raise a child on the "chance" that some
| payouts will work.
|
| Checking a few of the items you metnioned, I'm glad you did
| as they're not known tot me, but it seems risky, and the
| conditions that forbid me to qualify are too great/ambiguous.
|
| Again, I cannot stress how relaxing it is to be in Russia of
| all places and be told "MRI? 4000 rubles" _before_ I take the
| MRI, when the same MRI in the US has a variable cost only
| delivered _after_ the procedure. This stresses me out
| immensely.
|
| When I was last in the US temporarily, I had an ear
| infection, and since I had no insurance, medication cost me
| $450 for a week's worth of pills; abroad, this cost me $10
|
| I cannot stress enough that it's not about the potential to
| circumvent the systems that the US has, it's about the base
| out of pocket cost and how you are penalized for not
| participating in the US healthcare system. I grant there
| might bee another answer, but somehow the rest of the world
| uses the same machines/analyses and can charge far less. It's
| only the US where I was afraid to even go to the hospital
| _with insurance_ when I might have broken my ribs on the off-
| chance I'd be denied.
|
| yes, I could fight it, but after 10+ hours, this is almost a
| part-time/full-time job to get what I've already paid for. If
| I already paid, why do I have to spend my time to get what is
| rightfully mine?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Median US income is ~31k, the fact that this is right in
| the middle of where aid ends is, if not by design, is
| something that evolved out of wealthy self protection.
|
| The working poor are the most compliant workers with the
| least bargaining power.
|
| A person proves incontrovertibly that they are hard workers
| willing to contribute to society (and not lazy poor as the
| rhetoric so cruelly propagates) and we immediately cut off
| community aid and put them right back on the marginal
| bubble.
|
| It's helpful when your employees are kept on a treadmill
| that moves slightly faster than they can run.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Pervasive rent seeking and price gouging in the healthcare
| sector is a sad reality in the U.S., but it doesn't just hurt
| the poor. It's bad for everyone. People usually try to push for
| socialized medicine as some sort of panacea, but that doesn't
| help at all if the price gouging part is not addressed.
| collaborative wrote:
| In a democracy, helping poor people doesn't pay off. It will be
| critized both for being anti-progressive/paternalistic and
| "socialist"
| [deleted]
| caffeine wrote:
| The article doesn't say much about what would help.
|
| One thing that helps the poor a lot (everyone, but especially the
| poor) is functioning, competent institutions.
|
| Things like effective policing and crime prevention, a functional
| healthcare system, competent teaching in schools, sufficient
| childcare options, little to no corruption, wide availability of
| credit, a good transportation network, zoning laws that permit
| cheap and sufficient housing, employment laws that don't make
| low-value labour too expensive to employ, etc.
|
| When these institutions are not working well, they represent a
| "drag coefficient" that well-off people can just pay their way
| out of (complicated tax forms? Pay an accountant $2k, solved) -
| but for poorer people these can represent existential hurdles.
|
| Making institutions perform better (or offering entrepreneurial
| alternatives) is measurable, empirical, and does not rely on any
| psychosocial assumptions to produce an effect.
|
| Example:
|
| "How hard is it for someone who is barely literate and is working
| 50 hours per week to get and keep a driving license?" If the
| answer is "hard" that's a big drag on poor people. If they could
| do minimal paperwork, do the test for free on nights or weekends
| in cheap rental cars close to where they live or work, etc. that
| is a massive boon to someone whose next step up the ladder is to
| get a driving job.
| devmor wrote:
| Paying your way out of inconvenience is a huuuge privilege that
| some of us I think forget we have.
|
| I grew up extremely poor so I end up doing a lot of annoying
| things myself and a lot of my colleagues ask things like "why
| don't you just pay someone to fix your washing machine".
|
| Or like your example of driving tests. I let my license lapse
| when I first started working from home and had to retest to get
| it. If I hadn't been able to pay $300 for a private driving
| test I'd have had to take time off work to do it - and a poor
| person generally can't afford time off work, that goes unpaid
| for an hourly job.
| newbamboo wrote:
| American poor are still richer than the average person in many
| places. The cheapest housing in California is triple the median
| rent in many other states. Not everyone can relocate, many
| become poor instead. Competition creates poor and rich, and the
| system requires competition for growth.
| clairity wrote:
| it's magical thinking to believe that 'fixing' institutions
| will somehow fix society, especially for the poor. greater
| institutional efficiency will simply concentrate wealth faster.
| the same for UBI, which would lock in disparity rather than
| relieve it (by making extractive businesses more profitable,
| exacerbating inequalities).
|
| poverty isn't _simply_ about money or possessions, but rather
| is fundamentally about opportunity and esteem, to meaningful
| work and fair wages first and foremost. that means, most
| importantly, lower profits and a radically different economic
| dynamic that doesn 't place capital on a singular pinnacle.
|
| this is the elephant in the room that no politician really
| wants to address around poverty, because it'd directly oppose
| _all_ of their wealthy backers in one fell swoop. it 's exactly
| why we never get any movement, except hair-brained policies,
| like UBI, that are meant to surreptitiously funnel public funds
| into greedy private hands and make things _worse_ for the poor
| in the long run.
| mbrameld wrote:
| I think you misread. They're not saying that fixing
| institutions will fix poverty, how did you reach that
| conclusion? They're saying broken institutions impose a
| disproportionate burden on people living in poverty and
| potentially contribute to the perpetuation of poverty.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The US, and most first world nations, have very low poverty
| compared to other nations - and that poverty has decreased
| over time.
|
| > that means, most importantly, lower profits and a radically
| different economic dynamic that doesn't place capital on a
| singular pinnacle
|
| Capitalism has been the most effective vehicle to reduce
| poverty in the 20th and 21st century. Communism, socialism
| and most hybrid attempts have been outright failures in
| comparison.
|
| That politicians don't want to embrace some other economic
| model isn't some conspiracy. It's just plain sense.
| clairity wrote:
| 11% isn't 'low poverty', especially in the richest of
| nations. it's vulgar.
|
| capitalism isn't some miracle that created the current
| american politicoeconomic environment. the single biggest
| (but not sole) factor (i.e., luck) in that was geographic:
| it just so happened 2 huge oceans separated us from the
| biggest war in history.
|
| cheerleading for capitalism is at best a _non sequitur_.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 11% is amazingly low when huge parts of the world are at
| 50% [1]. Obviously we should strive to be better still,
| but let's not pretend that isn't a huge accomplishment
| that wasn't possible for the last several millenia of
| modern human existence.
|
| This isn't the case just for the US but also for the UK
| and our fellow Europeans who also practiced Capitalism -
| even the ones who had to endure the great wars.
|
| You are welcome to suggest an alternative but you will
| have to support it. The choice of Capitalism seems
| critically important, along with the choice of some sort
| of Democracy.
|
| [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/poverty-r...
| clairity wrote:
| i'm not interested in simplistic ideological battles, but
| note that the recovery of all those european economies,
| as well as japan's, were helped mightily by a relatively
| unscathed america, largely for ideological reasons to
| make your conclusion seem plausible.
|
| 11% is a fucking travesty for the richest nations in
| history whose overabundance is downright, shockingly
| monumental. we should have exactly zero people who don't
| have secure food, shelter, and a modicum of dignity.
| that's squarely on capitalism along with (republican[0])
| democracy.
|
| [0]: not the political party; republics centralize power
| in the hands of representative 'elites', because we all
| know the msases are too stupid to know what's good for
| them.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > Capitalism has been the most effective vehicle to reduce
| poverty in the 20th and 21st century. Communism, socialism
| and most hybrid attempts have been outright failures in
| comparison.
|
| This is false dogma. China has been UNARGUABLY a wild
| success. Now subtract every human life that ended
| prematurely or was lived in relative poverty because the
| USA funded terrorists and facist overthrow of their
| democratically elected socialist government
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| China had almost 90% of its population living in extreme
| poverty as recently as the 1980s. The tremendous
| reduction in that poverty rate (to less than 1% today) is
| attributable entirely to market-based reform.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, market-based reform, not capitalism per se.
| capitalism has no monopoly on markets, as markets predate
| all the -isms by many centuries. so that's not an
| argument for capitalism (for which capital is a central
| concern) but for decentralized, market-based systems, the
| fairer the better.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| To be more specific: it has been the result of a decrease
| in central planning, decollectivization, privatization of
| previously state-owned industries and private ownership
| of the means of production operated with profit as the
| motive.
| bumby wrote:
| > _wide availability of credit_
|
| I think I know the intent of why this is on your list, but,
| honestly, my family members who are in a cycle of poverty are
| there in no small part because of a cycle of debt. And I'm not
| talking about unavoidable debt like from a medical condition,
| but rather from debt from buying depreciating assets they
| cannot afford (cars, tvs, etc.) Widely available credit, IMO,
| makes the situation worse.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Cash. Cash helps.
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Or how about infrastructure? The fact someone _needs_ a car is
| itself a failure.
| mehphp wrote:
| I mean, in highly populated/dense areas sure, but public
| transportation doesn't really work in rural America.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| While I haven't seen it work very well, it's not the case
| that it's impossible. My mother has been the superintendent
| at a number of places in the rural southwest. They manage
| to get the kids to school via bus.
|
| So it isn't the case that rural public transportation
| simply can't work.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Trains are super effective for rural areas. I'm more than
| happy to drive my beat up pickup, tractor, bike, walk or
| ride a horse down a rural road to the train station. Doing
| the same on the highway is stressful, as none of those mode
| of transports are safe at highway speeds. Modern roadways
| are an artificial monopoly that poor people can't
| participate in.
| DarylZero wrote:
| wpm wrote:
| Only 20% of America lives in a rural area, so odds are it's
| irrelevant to most struggling people.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The census definition of "urban" is kind of absurd. If
| I'm reading it right, living in a town of 2500 is
| "urban." If I'm reading it wrong, living in a town of
| 50,000 is "urban." Either way, you'd likely consider a
| lot of that 80% rural.
| asveikau wrote:
| I guess density is the real measure.
| ac29 wrote:
| Where is that definition from?
|
| The 2020 census proposes using "385 housing units per
| square mile as the primary criterion for determining
| whether a census block qualifies for inclusion in an
| urban area". Previously it was 1000 people per square
| mile (or equivalent to the above with 2.6 persons per
| household).
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/19/2021
| -03...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Note that's only in the "proposed changes section, and
| that there is still much more information in that
| document. That change seems to determining how much of a
| town is an urban tile, but is not the primary designation
| of urban.
| [deleted]
| settrans wrote:
| Got it. So how should people get to their jobs at the farms?
| Or the mines? Or the oil fields? Or the factories? Or the
| mills?
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >how should people get to their jobs at the farms? Or the
| mines? Or the oil fields? Or the factories? Or the mills
|
| Or how do astronauts get to the ISS? Checkmate.
| Transportation infrastructure bad.
| ajuc wrote:
| I mean factories and mines usually have A LOT of public
| transport options. That's a no-brainer, really. Guaranteed
| thousands of customers at guaranteed schedules.
| jmknoll wrote:
| For sure rural jobs aren't a great fit for public
| transportation. But _most_ people commuting to work by car
| are commuting to offices, retail stores, restaurants, and
| other places in semi-densely populated areas that could be
| better served by public transit.
| settrans wrote:
| OK, then how do people commute to their jobs
| (restaurants, shoe stores, or schools) in the small towns
| that support farms, mines, factories or mills?
| nanomonkey wrote:
| At human speeds: walk, bike, tractor, hitch a ride on a
| lorry (max speed 45mph), horse. Trains are useful for
| connecting longer distances at specific times of the day
| (commuting). Highways create an artificial monopoly on
| travel. You cannot easily travel along them, or cross
| them if you can't drive over 45mph. This speed is only
| getting higher.
|
| There are studies showing that travel has actually gone
| down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern
| Highways. The poor just can't participate.
| giardini wrote:
| nanomonkey says _> "There are studies showing that travel
| has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the
| addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't
| participate."<_
|
| More likely the poor used the highway _once_ - to get out
| of the country and to the city. It isn 't that they _"
| can't participate"_, it's that they are _gone_.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Okay? So keep the car-centered infrastructure where you
| genuinely need it, and you can still have the huge net
| benefit of reliable public transit for the other 80% of
| people.
|
| A solution doesn't need to be 100% perfect for every
| situation in order for it to still be worthwhile.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Poor people often receive an enormous amount of value from
| owning a car in the form of _optionality_ , which is why the
| vast majority own one. It is one of the only sources of
| economic optionality a poor person has.
|
| Even if they don't need a car, they often choose to own one
| (the cheapest one they can find that is vaguely reliable).
| mam4 wrote:
| rayiner wrote:
| That's an attempt to inject an urbanist hobby horse into a
| discussion of poverty. The vast majority of poor Americans
| have a car. It gives people tremendous flexibility in taking
| advantage of different employment and housing opportunities.
|
| If anything I'd argue that transit puts poor people at a
| disadvantage. My wife's family comes from rural poverty (like
| reliant on hunting for meat). Access to cars is never the
| problem. And cars mean that if someone loses their job or
| their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town
| where there might be opportunities.
|
| The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on
| what opportunities might exist near the transit lines. That
| also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central
| planners, who are often incompetent.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Car-centered suburban development puts anyone who is not a
| healthy financially stable adult at a huge disadvantage. It
| is terrible for not only the poor and working class, but
| also children, families with children, the elderly, the
| disabled, the sick, tourists arriving by
| plane/train/bus/boat, etc.
|
| And it is even terrible for well-off healthy adults
| whenever something happens to their car (say, engine
| trouble).
|
| Not to mention, car accidents are a significant cause of
| injury and death, and being habitually sedentary leaves a
| high proportion of people in horrible physical shape and is
| a leading cause of ballooning healthcare costs, poor
| quality of life, and preventable deaths.
|
| It is a tremendously exclusionary, resource inefficient,
| fragile, and environmentally destructive form of
| transportation and social organization.
| rayiner wrote:
| That explains why NYC is full of kids multigenerational
| families and suburban and rural America isn't, right?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Cars have a way of breaking down and causing unpredictable
| expenses that can push the poor into hardship. The choice
| between car culture and well-developed mass transit comes
| down to density. I might believe that even many "urban
| areas" in the US are still too sprawlish and low-density
| for mass transit to be genuinely effective, but this is not
| uniformly true.
| pandemicsoul wrote:
| You're right that public transit is inefficient for people
| living in rural areas, but 83% of the U.S. population lives
| in urban areas so to simply discount public transit as an
| "urbanist hobby horse" seems pretty hand-wavey.
|
| You only have to look to other developed countries to see
| how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a
| major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical
| part of the social safety net. Just because America's
| public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-
| industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for
| everyone's benefit.
| rayiner wrote:
| Go look at the Census definition of "urban." Sibley,
| Iowa, where my wife grew up, is classified as an "urban
| area." It's in the middle of nowhere surrounded by
| farmland.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Car ownership is highly correlated with income, people in
| the bottom 10%ile of income are much less likely to have a
| car than people of higher income. If you look at modeshare
| for people in the bottom 10% it's a much much larger share
| of biking, public transit, walking, and carpooling than
| others. Cars are one of the top sources of bankruptcy for
| people in the bottom 10% of income (car repairs, car
| accidents, making car payments). Car dependent life is a
| huge stressor to people in the bottom 10% of income
| kodah wrote:
| That is only in cities. Across the majority of the US
| your statement is not true. Poor people across the
| Midwest and South _need_ a car because walking, biking,
| bussing, and trains are not available to them.
| Retric wrote:
| Poor across the Midwest and south _want_ a car but often
| live without. The difference is simply how important
| people consider cars and how expensive they are to keep.
| Being able to park for free makes a huge difference at
| the edge.
| kodah wrote:
| That's not true to my experience at all. We usually
| budgeted for a car first and a house second. Mass transit
| in most forms isn't cost efficient below a certain
| density, so at most you'll have a light bus system or
| rail system available to you.
|
| In regards to your "often live without" statement, I met
| very few people in the South who didn't have cars. For
| the reasons I stated above, they're practically a
| necessity. Data also doesn't indicate that people are
| _often going without cars_ except in major, wealthy
| cities: https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-
| numbers-of-v...
| Retric wrote:
| From your 2015 data: Miami, Florida has 19.9% of
| households without cars, New Orleans, Louisiana at 18.8%.
| Even Birmingham, Alabama is at 15.8% and Atlanta, Georgia
| has 15.2% of households without cars.
|
| That's much higher than say Arlington, Virginia at 13.4%
| which is connected to one of the best public
| transportation networks in the US.
|
| A handful of places on that list sat at 2% without cars,
| but most of the south was over 5% without cars largely
| due to poverty.
|
| PS: Not that I think the data is very accurate Murrieta,
| California seemingly went from 3.5% (2015) down to 0.7%
| (2016) which seems extremely unlikely for a single year.
| The poor are often missed in official statistics like
| census unless significant effort is used to track them.
| kodah wrote:
| 20% of a city not having a car sounds pretty typical, and
| from that data looks average. The wealthiest cities seem
| to correlate to not having cars, with San Francisco
| leading. The smaller towns on that list, and especially
| the ones in the Midwest and South are anywhere from
| single digit to 20%, with Cleveland having the highest
| number. So what's your point?
|
| Edit: the whole point of my reply was to say that mass
| transit is effective in dense, wealthy cities. In the
| Midwest and South those same sentiments will not work
| because our highest density is in the middle of the city.
| The farther you go out is quickly drops off. Given that,
| it makes sense to make cars cheaper and easier to
| maintain for people there, while focusing on mass transit
| in areas where it will work. Unfortunately, in areas like
| SF (where I currently live) it's NIMBYs who get in the
| way and waste everyone's time while acting like they
| support mass transit expansion.
| [deleted]
| DarylZero wrote:
| The poorest people in the Midwest can be seen walking
| down the sides of busy highways that have no sidewalks,
| carrying large loads of groceries for miles at a time.
| kodah wrote:
| You're just echoing my point. This city centric view that
| "cars aren't needed", "cars are a failure" is not
| helpful. The Midwest and South do not have the density to
| support those statements, moreover, most folks end up
| having to budget for a car first, _then_ a home because
| of this.
|
| Making cars easier to afford and maintain would benefit
| the South and Midwest a lot more.
| hattmall wrote:
| Poor people without cars really aren't the issue, if you
| can't afford a car in America, you are extremely poor and
| really an outlier. Pretty much anyone working even
| minimum wage can afford a car. The problem is a
| ballooning costs of ownership and all the other systemic
| failures that keep the majority of lower income people
| ~60% of the US trapped in a situation where they can not
| accumulate any substantial savings, assets or wealth and
| are merely surviving.
| amrocha wrote:
| The reason they can't save is exactly that they're forced
| to buy a car. It costs several thousand per year for
| maintenance, insurance and gas. It's the second most
| expensive thing people spend money on. And all these
| things should cost even more money, the only reason they
| don't is government subsidies.
| rayiner wrote:
| It doesn't cost several thousand a year to insure and
| maintain a cheap old Japanese car, which poor parts of
| the country are full of.
| throwawaynay wrote:
| You must have never lived in a country with decent public
| transportation.
|
| There is a world outside the US you know.
|
| Here you can move just as far and just as fast for maybe
| 20%(tops) of the full cost of a car.(fuel, insurance,
| repairs, car itself, parking, license...) The only
| disadvantage is privacy/comfort.
|
| In my home country I could go anywhere in a 50km radius for
| 50$/month via public transportation.
|
| Anywhere in the country via high speed train for
| 100$/month.
|
| You just have to admit that the US infrastructure is
| garbage.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| You realize that New York to Los Angeles is like 4800km
| right?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Airplanes exist. The network of infrastructure in Europe
| isn't _just_ trains...
|
| Part of the problem in North America is that there's not
| adequate public transportation from airports to city
| centres (whether it's a train terminal or frequent
| buses), not enough trains from city centres to
| suburbs/outskirts and not enough buses in between or from
| town to town.
|
| I recently went from Paris -> Prague as an example. So I
| walked from the hotel in St. Germain to a metro station,
| took the metro to the airport, hopped on a plane, landed
| in Prague, then took a bus to a metro terminal and the
| metro to downtown Prague. That's what it looks like. You
| _could_ have the same in the US... I haven 't spend a ton
| of time there but the airport I'm familiar with in
| Canada, YYC (Calgary) has terrible access to/from the
| airport. The cab industry basically has convinced the
| city to not run a train line to the airport, nor to have
| a proper bus schedule. You _need_ a taxi or ride for no
| good reason.
| hattmall wrote:
| You can do that in the US, you can't do it everywhere,
| but for the cities on the level of Prague and Paris you
| certainly can. Most of the major cities on the east coast
| and West Coast that's applicable and for Chicago.
|
| Philly, DC, NYC, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, South Florida,
| LA, and the Bay area I've done entirely public transit
| trips many times to the major areas and that's covering a
| population larger than any EU country.
| throwawaynay wrote:
| That doesn't change the fact that trains and public
| transportation in the US are crap.
|
| In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at
| +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most
| cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train
| leaves btw, no waiting)
|
| It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US
| and we're like 40 different countries....
| giardini wrote:
| throwawaynay says > _" It's easier to travel through
| Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different
| countries...."_
|
| Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but
| there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only
| took _two world wars and innumerable smaller wars_ before
| that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h"
| trains.</sarcasm>
|
| BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in
| Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are
| 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on
| a bike.
|
| As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many
| European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly
| onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?).
| I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in
| Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch
| God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on
| the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility"
| comes to mind as a topic.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| A little bit of poo like that isn't going to hurt the
| environment to a degree at all comparable to the massive
| damage done by car pollution and tearing down forests and
| obliterating animal migration routes.
| dixie_land wrote:
| and we have 50 states?
| ac29 wrote:
| > In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing
| at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?
|
| No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form
| of travel that meets those criteria is high speed
| electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel
| usage in the electric grid. For various reasons,
| passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe
| (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).
|
| You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to
| nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite
| inexpensive.
| rayiner wrote:
| > You must have never lived in a country with decent
| public transportation.
|
| Like France, where transit lines work to confine
| immigrants to suburban ghettos with limited
| opportunities?
| triceratops wrote:
| Transit lines are doing that? How so? They can't move
| somewhere else and buy a car?
| rayiner wrote:
| Yes because the country favors transit and makes car
| ownership very expensive. So they're stuck with the
| limited opportunities and housing they can reach from the
| transit lines.
| [deleted]
| amrocha wrote:
| Which is very different from North America, where we use
| highways, red lining and housing prices to divide the
| poors and the not poors.
| throwawaynay wrote:
| First of all, there is ghettos INSIDE Paris too:18th,
| 19th, 20th districts....
|
| Transit lines are not used to confine them to the
| suburbs, they're the only thing allowing them to actually
| have any opportunities.
|
| As a poor student I lived in a rich Parisian neighborhood
| and I also lived in a very poor suburb. I definitely
| preferred living in comfortable housing with a 40min
| commute than in a closet with a 10min commute.
|
| There is some places where there is actually no
| opportunities because of the LACK of public
| transportation, like in some neighbors in the north of
| Marseille where there is 80% unemployment.
| zdragnar wrote:
| That level of public transportation in the US would be an
| ecological disaster.
| throwawaynay wrote:
| Are you joking?
|
| Cars and planes are an ecological disaster, I don't know
| a single place on earth where the ecological impact of
| public transportation is worse than the impact of cars
| and planes.
| amrocha wrote:
| Compared to the ecological marvel of everyone needing a
| car
| sli wrote:
| > The vast majority of poor Americans have a car.
|
| Because they have no choice, and are constantly forced to
| dump money into it to keep it on the road. This is
| absolutely pertinent to this discussion. Public transit
| systems are restricting _because_ they are so poorly
| implemented.
|
| I live in a small town, but when I was looking into taking
| the bus to work in the morning, it would have taken two
| hours each way, every day. That's extremely poor public
| transit and creates a huge amount of pressure to buy a car
| instead.
| coldtea wrote:
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| In some cases, it's _the hobby horse_ of people with
| barriers to driving who have studied the space and wish the
| US was more like it used to be and more like some other
| countries still are.
| rayiner wrote:
| Poor people in the country back then we're very bad off.
| The mobility from cars enabled real improvements for
| them.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm not claiming it didn't.
|
| Poor people historically were worse off in myriad ways.
| Wanting options for people is trying to throw out the
| bathwater, not the baby.
|
| I'm not looking to take cars away from anyone. I'm just
| looking to restore access to some essentials that I grew
| up with and that I know can be real, even with cars
| remaining popular and common.
|
| I'm not some extremist looking to eliminate cars. I'm not
| trying to insist that anyone who can drive and prefers to
| drive be denied that possibility.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, what are those countries which are geographically
| vast, diverse and rich and rely on transit system for
| daily commute needs?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I don't use public transit much -- I mostly walk
| everywhere -- and the OP only said _The fact someone
| needs a car is itself a failure._ There 's no mention of
| public transit as a proposed solution.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I mentioned infrastructure. Public transit is
| infrastructure. It's implied and should be obvious.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| At one time, I wanted to be an urban planner. Public
| transit is only one piece of infrastructure.
|
| Zoning and land use significantly impact how people and
| goods get around.
| geodel wrote:
| Well anything could be called failure if alternatives and
| their pros/cons not discussed.
|
| Good that you could walk everywhere. I can't, my knees
| hurt walking more than a mile or so. If I have no car and
| can't afford cab for everything, not sure how I would be
| better off.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm not asking you to give up your car. I'm only asking
| for a world that isn't so openly hostile to pedestrians
| and cyclists.
| hattmall wrote:
| Pedestrians are fine, cyclists have to admit they are
| doing it for their own personal pleasure at the time and
| expense of everyone else 99% of the time. I commuted by
| bicycle for many years because I lived somewhere that it
| was convenient and appropriate. I didn't impede traffic
| and delay other people.
|
| Cheap motorbikes need to be more widely available and
| utilized by any one who is cycling out of necessity in
| areas not intended for it.
|
| Bicycles should absolute be relegated to specialized
| infrastructure of which we should build more, but
| cyclists within regular vehicle traffic is mostly done
| for enjoyment and only inspires hatred and annoyance at
| bicycles in general which creates a feedback loop
| resulting in less support for bicycle infrastructure.
|
| Having to slow down traffic and wait to pass a bicycle
| only to have them filter back to the front at the next
| red light and make everyone slow down and pass them again
| repeatedly is a real contributor to gridlock.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A bicycle takes up a lot less road space than a car,
| especially when it can smoothly filter through lanes. You
| know what contributes to gridlock? Too many cars on the
| road, that's what. Bicycles are not making traffic any
| worse.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Sweden. I've never needed a car and live 50km from a
| city. The only people that need cars are those that
| literally live in the middle of the forest or need them
| for work.
| eckesicle wrote:
| That's certainly NOT generalisable to Sweden as a whole.
| Rural Sweden is definitely not accessible by public
| transport as a whole.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Has never been a problem in either Blekinge or Kalmar...
| almost every village has a bus line. I specifically
| excluded "literally living in the woods" though.
| ionicgiraffe wrote:
| But what about the time an planning of using public
| transport vs car?
| guerrilla wrote:
| A bus comes by my house every hour, sometimes more often.
| Why would you need more granularity than that? And if you
| really did, you could still rent a car, truck, hire a
| taxi or rideshare, or whatever...
| haliskerbas wrote:
| You have an appointment at 10:00am, it's 20mins away by
| car, 30mins away by bus and 90 minutes long.
|
| To take the bus you get ready and wait by 9am. Get to the
| place at 9:30am, wait until 10:00am for the appointment,
| and hopefully it doesn't run late and let's you take the
| 12:00pm bus to get home by 12:30. There goes 4 hours for
| a 90 minute appointment. With a car this same round trip
| could be done in 2.5hours ish, and you could make other
| stops along the way.
|
| Granularity is important, and some places are
| coincidentally structured to be more difficult to survive
| in, the poorer you are.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is very contrived. I've never in 20 years had such a
| problem. Don't make appointments for yourself that are
| extremely inconvenient... and of course you could do
| other things while you're in town.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I have had such problems, and I live in a village 10 km
| from Prague. Gaps in bus schedules can be very
| uncomfortable, and you often get no choice scheduling the
| important appointments such as a CT scan; you will be
| happy to get _any_ at all.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| geodel wrote:
| Well in New York people commute this much distance. And
| even I lived about 25-30 miles from Washington DC without
| car. Is it applicable to whole USA that's the point.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Sorry, when I said city, I meant one with 60,000 people.
| The nearest city of the kind you're thinking is 5-6 hours
| away.
| newbie789 wrote:
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| >The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent
| on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines
|
| Yes, they are, which is why you build _more_
| infrastructure...
| II2II wrote:
| I disagree with this necessarily being an attempt to inject
| an urban hobby horse into a discussion on poverty. I have
| lived in compact towns where the main reason to own a
| vehicle was to service neighbouring industries
| (agriculture, forestry, petrochemical). Everything within
| town was within walking distance. Contrast that to the
| suburbs of larger cities, where it may be difficult to find
| a single employer within walking distance.
|
| I recognize those towns are not universal. Then again, the
| situation of your wife's family is not universal either.
| Which is the crux of the problem with discussions such as
| this one: people like to reach for generalities that
| reflect their own life experiences or observations, when
| the reality is that those perspectives represents a narrow
| worldview. Heck, even the people who study poverty for a
| living cannot come up with a consistent narrative (as
| demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of the article)
| since it will be influenced by the questions they ask and
| how they conduct their research.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their
| housing, they can pick up and move to a different town
| where there might be opportunities.
|
| Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to
| another town or village if needed. In the case of a really
| rural community, they will have buses to the nearest train
| station.
|
| > That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city
| central planners, who are often incompetent.
|
| Aka America's self fulfilling destiny.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to
| another town or village if needed."
|
| Not completely true, there are many rural regions where
| the train or bus service is very irregular, if not
| discontinued outright.
|
| One of the reasons why the Yellow Vests in France were so
| forceful: French countryside is seriously underserved by
| public transport and living there without a car or with
| very expensive fuel is hard.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That might be true, in that they are underserved, but
| that is a huge difference from the USA's non-service. My
| experience is in (the French speaking part of)
| Switzerland, where to get to a remote mountain village
| you must go by postal bus from the train station. The
| postal bus only came once every 2 hours, which was a
| pain, but it was very viable.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The article doesn't say much about what would help._
|
| Jobs that pay well, and don't require the poor to fuck their
| work/life balance or drive them to neglect/feel their kids as a
| burden.
|
| Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all
| businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust, like
| with any other cost of doing business.
|
| Cheap rents and affordable housing.
|
| Protective nets for periods of illness/unemployment/etc.
|
| School districts equally equipped, with good teachers.
|
| Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college education if
| their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam.
|
| Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all
| businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust,
| like with any other cost of doing business."
|
| I have no problem with a higher minimum wage, but that's
| rather like giving someone who has lost a lot of blood, a
| blood transfusion. It's good, but it's a stopgap measure that
| is ignoring a more fundamental problem, and if you're not
| stitching up the wound you're not doing much good.
|
| If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower
| wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a
| higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a
| job. Higher minimum wage, ok, but it can't be done in
| isolation or you've replaced "low wages" with "no wages".
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower
| wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a
| higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a
| job.
|
| As far as I know, the economic literature is pretty clear
| that this is not the case in the US. Even regional changes,
| where an employer can reasonably relocate outside the e.g.
| city boundary without much difficulty, don't show job
| losses.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A lot of manufacturing left the USA along time ago due so
| I'm not sure why the economics literature says it doesn't
| matter? Yes, the service jobs that now dominate in the
| USA are largely unaffected, but that's more due to
| survivor bias than any underlying economic mechanism.
|
| Automation and self service (like in European cafeterias)
| is largely the response when services become too
| uneconomical to be done manually. Those elevator
| operators aren't coming back to the USA.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| But there's no evidence I'm aware of suggesting that
| minimum wages were the cause of deindustrialization in
| the US. I suspect most of those factory jobs were far
| above the minimum wage.
|
| And people often wave the automation threat around - but
| why hasn't it happened yet? In concrete studies of
| minimum wage increases that actually occurred, we do not
| find job losses.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Minimum wage in the USA has always been paltry, and
| increasingly irrelevant over time: very few work for it
| now. Labor costs rise because people at the low end get
| better options, not because of a gov mandated increase.
|
| But this is just the government being conservative,
| actual significant increases that affect more than one
| percent of the population will have an affect.
| ddingus wrote:
| A ton of minimum wage jobs simply cannot be exported or
| automated at this time.
| pydry wrote:
| Basically all jobs left. Your McDonalds Big Mac isnt
| getting grilled in the Phillipines.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There definitely are experiments with robotic cooks [0].
|
| Not widespread yet, but neither were cars nor computers
| in their early days. The ratio of robots to humans in
| kitchens is likely to grow in the future. From its
| current very low value to something more meaningful.
|
| [0] https://singularityhub.com/2020/11/06/flippy-the-
| fast-food-r...
| pydry wrote:
| Horn and Hardart closed in the 1970s because given the
| choice, people would rather not eat in automated
| restaurans. But, with wealth inequality as high as it is
| the "automated" restaurant may be making a comeback.
|
| Just as income inequality is bringing a new wave of app-
| based delivery servants.
| ddingus wrote:
| Or people will simply prepare their own food.
|
| I can tell you absolutely that is my response. I'm not
| going to eat some automated thing that nobody's checking,
| or has poorly maintained for the least dollars.
| ddingus wrote:
| It will be a long while.
|
| Besides, nothing about that automation actually changes
| the funding labor problem.
|
| I have always found it tough to sell a robot a good meal
| too.
|
| There will be basic labors we need doing and a lot of
| people doing them for the foreseeable future.
| bumby wrote:
| Wouldn't an automation tax change the funding labor
| problem?
| ddingus wrote:
| Assuming an already expensive automation makes any kind
| of economic sense, it could. But right now for a vast
| majority of basic labors, automation remains out of reach
| being impractical economically, if not technically.
|
| And robots don't need a good movie, a night out, a good
| meal, or any of those things, so whatever taxes has to
| find their way to the people who do present real demand
| for those things.
|
| And those people do have costs, unless we simply allow
| them to cease to exist and not show up for work anymore.
| bumby wrote:
| > _vast majority of basic labors_
|
| We might need some qualifiers to understand exactly what
| you mean. Most automation is readily within reach if the
| job is rote and the economic differential is there.
| (FWIW, I used to build and program assembly line robuts).
|
| > _whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who
| do present real demand for those things._
|
| I think this is the intent. Call it UBI, Freedom
| Dividend, or whatever, but the goal is to fund the
| societal base that has the actual need for whatever
| automation (or humans) will produce.
| ddingus wrote:
| Those are not real answers in my view. How we value human
| labor is a real answer, and the fact is we need to start
| with the cost of existing and or showing up for work.
|
| As for rote... look, automation is expensive to
| establish, adapt transport and maintain, and need
| infrastructure to support it all.
|
| People, at their real cost, are a GREAT deal and that
| will be true for a very long time yet.
|
| Go work through a few cases. I have experience in
| automation. It is the little things that cost a lot.
|
| We are more likely to succeed with augmented labor, and
| already do. Better tools = labor multipliers.
| ddingus wrote:
| Exactly! And tons of those jobs are paying less than it
| costs laborers to work them too.
|
| That is a raw subsidy, and it's US paying so big players
| get a bigger profit.
|
| We should not pay a dime, and they make a smaller one,
| but they also earned it fair and square too, not mooching
| on the public dime.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| As an engineer, I have many privileges. Two that stand out
| here are salary, and the power dynamic I enjoy with my
| employer. I am well paid, enough said. I also am not beholden
| to the whims of my management. I can take time off, they need
| me to be happy, I can effect change on my management as they
| can effect change on their subordinates.
|
| High pay is great, but to a point, I place a higher value on
| the dignity that I enjoy in my employment.
|
| > Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all
| businesses/states.
|
| I can't say I have a better idea here, but the whole concept
| of a minimum wage seems like a problem. It strongly implies
| that there are a large class of jobs where the employer has
| all of the power, and does not have to compete to attract
| employees. Also strongly implied is that minimum wage workers
| do not have an alternative means of supporting themselves.
|
| Practically speaking, raising minimum wage regularly should
| help keep workers out of poverty. Still, these people will
| still have to contend with employers that treat them like
| commodities, with no real alternative way to support
| themselves.
| consp wrote:
| > It strongly implies that there are a large class of jobs
| where the employer has all of the power, and does not have
| to compete to attract employees
|
| That is even true in cases where there is even balanced
| employment-employer availability due to other factors. My
| country should be more civilized by my dad got 6 years of
| pension payment reduced because the employer "failed to
| pay" but on every balance sheet his pay was added because
| "automatic" and nobody warned him, just the employer.
| Afterwards the lawyers told him to take the "I'll pay one
| year" deal of the employer because of the likelyhood of
| getting nothing due to limited liability companies
| protection. And this in Europe, not even the US. The
| balance is so far off it's not even remotely fair game.
| e40 wrote:
| Your two points are so incredibly key. I've felt and known
| this for a long time.
|
| The last 5-6 years has made me thing so much of _why_ this
| is the case is rooted in:
|
| 1. Race and how people are perceived--the rise of race
| issues in the referenced period is so confusing to me, as I
| thought we were getting past them, but it is very clear
| that a huge percentage of the US population is still have
| 19th century views on race.
|
| 2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled
| workers as machines to use up and throw away.
|
| As for the "inflation-adjusted minimum wage" ... the
| argument used to be "small businesses will suffer" but
| strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I
| don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW. It's so insane
| to me that we don't do this. Maybe that would give
| politicians an incentive to keep inflation low? (Because
| they want to keep the minimum wage as low as possible?)
| xhevahir wrote:
| We don't do that because business lobbies have managed to
| prevent it.
| pirate787 wrote:
| The big problem with the minimum wage is that, if higher
| than the market-clearing price, it takes away the lowest
| rung of the opportunity ladder for the least skilled.
| zuminator wrote:
| Not really because piecework and off-the-books work
| exist. Plus in the USA there are entire classes of work
| for which the normal minimum wage does not apply.
|
| I also doubt that empirical evidence supports that
| assertion. How many people are really being priced out of
| work because they are only worth $6/hr, not $7.25/hr? In
| my experience people on the low end are either worth at
| least what you're paying them, or they're basically not
| worth hiring at all, at any wage point, because they
| disrupt others in the work environment, cause accidents,
| are not amenable to working in groups nor amenable to
| working alone, report to work too unreliably to make
| effective use of, or whatever issue they have that makes
| them count among the ranks of the "least skilled."
|
| Sure, your argument holds given some value of MW, $20/hr?
| $25/hr? But in real world practice I think the number of
| people harmed by living out of their car or in shelters @
| $7.25/hr vastly exceeds the number of people who but for
| the minimum wage would easily find relaxing side work at
| $2/hr sweeping gutters.
|
| And in theory the MW could be tailored to mitigate any
| adverse impact. It could be restricted to employers
| grossing over $1 million/yr or in excess of 10 employees.
| It could be augmented with an earned income tax credit,
| which has been done to considerable success. There could
| be a separate under-21 MW. Etc. In practice, though,
| movement seems to be going in the other direction: about
| half of US states have minimum wages higher than the
| Federal level, even places like Florida and Missouri
| which are not liberal strongholds.
| ddingus wrote:
| That's not true. Fact is, labor costs money for the
| laborer to exist and show up for work.
|
| No matter what, that money is paid, or the labor does not
| exist and or show up for work.
|
| Your argument is one of merit, skill and market value.
|
| This is exactly the wrong way to look at things. If we
| start from the cost of labor, and it does have a cost as
| I put above, whether to fund the labor boils down to the
| value said labor has for others, and that value can be
| traded on accordingly.
|
| Fact is we need basic labors. Anyone can do them. There
| should be no shame in this work, and it should be valued
| as the massive time and effort savings to others that it
| really is. And automation holds few answers right now,
| and I would argue for a considerable time yet. People
| will be doing those labors.
|
| Question really is how much does it cost people, who hold
| other positions in life, to perform basic labors
| themselves? And the answer is expensive!!
|
| That difference in value can very easily fund labors
| then. It's a perfectly acceptable basis, and it means we
| value labor differently and it means we recognize that
| guy digging the ditch, or making our shit disappear, or
| any number of basic things has the same waking hours any
| of us do, same basic needs any of us do, and may have a
| family as any of us do.
|
| This idea of people being inherently worthless is very
| highly toxic and is doing a great harm to all of us. It's
| completely unacceptable given the quite obvious value
| even basic labors actually do have for us overall.
| bumby wrote:
| This seems to conflate moral worth and economic worth.
| People can have equal inherent moral value at the same
| time that some jobs have inherently disproportionate
| economic value.
| ddingus wrote:
| I didn't make a moral argument.
|
| What I did do is make an economic one, and suggest how we
| value things change. A whole bunch of Economics is rooted
| in a few basies that we all just take as givens. We don't
| have to.
|
| I also didn't make an equal economic value argument, for
| that matter.
| bumby wrote:
| Sorry, maybe I misinterpreted your point.
|
| >" _how much does it cost people, who hold other
| positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves?
| And the answer is expensive!!_ "
|
| What is the "expensive" assumption based on? Is it the
| opportunity cost? E.g., is the assumption that if I make
| $50/hr and I perform basic labor, I'm forgoing work that
| would otherwise be making money at that rate? Or is it
| that I don't have the skills for that basic labor and I
| would either have to get those skills or suffer the cost
| of doing the work unskillfully?
|
| If it's the former, I think there's enough friction in
| markets to erode that argument. E.g., I can't just decide
| to get another $50 through my skilled labor once I hire
| someone to shovel snow in my driveway for an hour. If the
| latter case were true, it would be skilled labor by
| definition and generally command higher wages. Or is
| there another basis for the expense of performing basic
| labor that I'm not considering from your point?
| ddingus wrote:
| Ok, say I can make $100 / hour or even $50, just for
| shits and giggles.
|
| Our lives break down into thirds. One to work, one to
| sleep, one to do what we will and can as people.
|
| If I must do those basic labors, they either consume my
| sleep or free time, and if not, carry an opportunity cost
| of $50 / hour.
|
| My time is very valuable, both in a labor to income
| sense, and personally, in that I have plans for my time
| that must be balanced against basic labors being done.
|
| Paying what it costs for laborers to exist and show up
| for work is a no brainer. Worth it to me, again based on
| my own costs.
|
| There is "expensive"
|
| We can always find cases where basic labors do not carry
| those costs, or are difficult to handle as a market. We
| do those ourselves.
|
| However, making our own food, making our own shit and
| garbage dissappear, moving things, clean ups and all
| manner of basic labors combine to allow many of us the
| time freedom to earn more, do more.
|
| The value in that is high enough to require enterprises
| fund their labor fully. This may mean their overall
| profit is less. It should be, they didn't earn it. They
| didn't fund the labor. We did!
|
| Failure to do that comes with other costs, both real in
| the sense of the massive subsidies that end up unearned
| profit (our money goes into their bank account, funding
| labor they profit from on top of margin on goods and
| services rendered), and opportunity in that we see lower
| demand and that impacts many others who could earn more
| and or fund their labor as well.
|
| Again, laborers have a cost to exist and show up for
| work, and when their labor does not pay enough for those
| things, someone else's labor does, or the labor does not
| exist and will not show up for work.
|
| So which is it? Who pays and why?
|
| How we value things can change those answers
| dramatically, which is the economic argument I made.
|
| One last thing, and that is ignoring the cost of people
| for them to exist and show up for work, doesn't make
| those costs go away, it just hides them, and we end up
| paying them in all sorts of other ways that are
| expensive. That's another way to look at this.
|
| When a business does not make enough to fund its
| operation it closes, or dies in other words. The same is
| true for people. So not fully funding labor is expensive
| to literally everyone else except for the people not
| fully funding the labor they require.
| bumby wrote:
| > _my sleep or free time, and if not, carry an
| opportunity cost of $50 / hour._
|
| This is the part I disagree with. The only time that is
| rated at $50/hr is the time you are producing something
| of economic value. Sleep and leisure do not warrant a
| $50/hr price tag in-and-of-themselves. In part, because
| of what I already mentioned: market friction prevents me
| from giving a 1-to-1 trade for sleep/leisure time to
| production. Just because I decide to wake up an hour
| early doesn't automatically mean an extra $50 worth of
| work is ready and waiting for me.
|
| > _we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that
| are expensive._
|
| I completely agree with this and think it's the
| governments job to ensure markets price these
| externalities appropriately.
| ddingus wrote:
| You get to disagree. I personally value my time
| differently.
|
| You are ignoring tons of labors saving you time and or
| providing a rich field in which to profit.
|
| You are ignoring time value. I did not ever say 1:1 at
| whatever rate.
|
| What I did, and continue to say is your work time would
| consume far more of your life sans basic labors you
| benefit from every day.
|
| Cost it how you want, but when suddenly faced with half
| your personal time gone, having to choose less, or less
| sleep, or less income delivering work, and in all cases a
| lot more physical activity in your life will absolutely
| cost you far more than you are allowing for here.
| naasking wrote:
| > it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US
| population is still have 19th century views on race
|
| I think it's clear that this is how it's portrayed. I'm
| not sure the portrayal is all that accurate, or even
| relevant in most of the cases being discussed.
| faangiq wrote:
| > 2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled
| workers as machines to use up and throw away.
|
| Don't worry, these companies view high-skilled workers
| the same way.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yes, but they get a lot more out of this...
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The CPI is already corrupted and consistently below real
| COL increases because it's tied to entitlements and taxes.
| It's used as a tool to steal from the poor. Further tying
| it to minimum wage will only add more pressure to
| politicize and corrupt the CPI calculation. That is the
| failure point in all similar ideas.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Further tying it to minimum wage will only add more
| pressure to politicize and corrupt the CPI calculation.
| That is the failure point in all similar ideas._
|
| That's not much of an issue in practice: to even get a
| few those ideas implemented already requires voter
| vigilance and strong societal push.
|
| If you have those then a reliable CPI is just another
| thing this vigilance/push should cover.
|
| If you don't have them, you wont get far with those
| proposals either.
|
| So it's not like we can get the proposals into laws, but
| the CPI will be the issue making them ineffective. It's
| all or nothing.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _not have to compete to attract employees. Also strongly
| implied is that minimum wage workers do not have an
| alternative means of supporting themselves._
|
| In practice, that's the case. I think that the idea that it
| isn't so, and people go to this or that employer out of
| "free choice", stems from a religious-like belief in "free
| market", than from real-life empirical evaluation of how
| desperate and poor people pick jobs - and what options are
| open to then.
|
| > _Still, these people will still have to contend with
| employers that treat them like commodities, with no real
| alternative way to support themselves._
|
| True. But at least they will make some more money will
| doing so - and might even afford to save a buck or too, and
| eventually look elsewhere.
| truted2 wrote:
| I've seen these ideas pitched on Hacker News but is there any
| examples of HN users:
|
| 1. Starting a business that generally pays minimum wage and
| attempting to pay their employees more
|
| 2. Buying property and renting it out at below market rates
|
| 3. Supporting, training or helping people who are unemployed.
|
| 4. Going to work as teachers in underserved school districts.
|
| 5. Offering university level education for free
|
| 6. Buying USA made only
|
| Hasn't this traditionally been the American way? People going
| out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish
| to see in the world? I think everyone wants the things you
| mention but for some reason we are unable to execute on them
| and a convenient scape goat is that the government should
| solve it or that "the other party" is getting in the way.
| Where is the "You must be the change you seek" crowd these
| days?
|
| Wouldn't trying to make a small change in your community have
| more impact than all the comments posted in this thread?
| coldtea wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there are examples of at least (1), (2),
| (4), (6).
|
| But "go it at alone, and hope it catches on" is not how
| this would (or should) work.
|
| It should be made as automatic to do, as paying your taxes,
| getting police to arrest a thief, or passing a sanity
| inspection to open a restaurant.
|
| That's how society progresses as a society, when it makes
| what it wants the future to be either law or an
| custom/ethical thing that doing otherwise is frowned upon.
|
| Not when things are merely left up to each individual's
| goodwill to set an example.
|
| Doing it the formal way also e.g. makes it easier for an
| employeer to pay a good minimum wage AND still compete with
| other businesses of the same sector: since they all have to
| pay the same, it's a cost of doing business for everybody,
| not just for the "good heart" that opted to enforce it on
| its own (and is driven out of business by others
| undercutting him and paying worse).
|
| > _Hasn't this traditionally been the American way? People
| going out and trying to experiment and build the things
| they wish to see in the world?_
|
| I don't know.
|
| For example, from my understanding of Us history, it took a
| whole civil war, riots, and federal laws accompanied with
| police intervention to e.g. force the end of slavery and
| deseggregation. Some good white souls going out and doing
| it on their own didn't manage to get far...
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >but is there any examples of HN users:
|
| Probably plenty doing 1. I do this.
|
| 2 through 4 is basically asking to be exploited and
| undervalued, and very few mentally-well people could keep
| it up for more than a couple of years.
|
| Plenty of us probably doing 5 in some way (I personally
| designed low-cost electronics lab gear, I'm sure plenty of
| others make cheap/free online courses and tutorials of a
| high standard), but it doesn't matter because employers are
| only looking for the credentials. I'd even go so far to
| state that many degrees aren't actually indicators of a
| particular valuable skillset, but indicators of class.
|
| 6 doesn't make sense in the broader scope. If everyone in
| every country did this, it would hurt the global economy
| more than it helps it.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Wouldn't trying to make a small change in your community
| have more impact than all the comments posted in this
| thread?
|
| No.
|
| Some problems are rightly solved at the government level
| and anything that serves to distract from that is
| propaganda.
| bo1024 wrote:
| To expand on this, there are problems solved well by
| competitive markets and problems that are not. If the
| above were in the first category people would have solved
| them and we wouldn't be talking about them.
| [deleted]
| ddingus wrote:
| There are a few forces that govern behavior, from Lessig:
|
| Money, markets - the cost of things regulates behavior,
| more money = more permissive behavior
|
| Physics - the rules of the world regulate behavior, and the
| better our understanding, the more lax this regulation is
|
| Norms - mutually agreed upon and generally, widely enforced
| "rules" that are not laws, but do impose rewards and
| consequences for behavior.
|
| Laws - like norms, but more formal, and with real teeth
| beyond being shunned or praised.
|
| Norms and laws act post fact. They do not actually prevent
| behavior, but can reward for it, or punish for it.
|
| Physics and markets, money do inhibit behaviors. The rules
| of the world are the rules. Violations = failure. Inability
| to bear costs = failure.
|
| A few entities trying to set new norms, and play against
| the generally running market, can do that to some degree,
| but money and markets are very strong forces compared to
| norms. And what Dan Price is doing with his $70K minimum
| wage at Gravity Payments is an excellent example. Price is
| establishing a norm. Weak sauce in the scheme of what
| regulates behavior.
|
| Law needs to bolster those ideas and it's law and norms
| that can change how we value things and with those changes
| come real market dynamic changes, IMHO.
|
| And this is why "be the change you seek" has limited power
| and cred. In the niche Price is in, it's possible, and he's
| doing that and arguably doing it at what others who do not
| value things like he does, would say he's doing it at a
| very significant opportunity cost.
|
| And given the current state of affairs, they are RIGHT!!
|
| This does not invalidate an effort like Price is making,
| nor the ideas, nor the potential for things to operate
| differently and to a much different overall effect for the
| population and it's elite members. Not to mention Price
| himself valuing things in ways that clearly make it all
| worth it for him to operate how he is. He talks about this
| all the time too.
|
| But, scope and motivation are sharply limited. It's hard
| advocacy, and again as the opponents of Price would argue,
| very, very expensive advocacy.
| darawk wrote:
| > Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all
| businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust,
| like with any other cost of doing business.
|
| How does this help, exactly? If the businesses who can't
| afford to pay at the standard you want go bust, you can't
| just assume there will be others who can. If the unit of
| labor a person can provide is worth less than its state
| mandated cost, that unit of labor will go unemployed. People
| don't buy things for more than their value to them.
| ddingus wrote:
| People cost money to exist and show up for work.
|
| A business that cannot fully fund it's labor is not a
| business. Who wants to pay a subsidy, which is exactly what
| happens when labor is underfunded, just so someone can
| mooch for profit? I don't.
|
| The answer to your question is we simply do that labor
| ourselves.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Right. And businesses can always get creative by
| improving productivity (via automation) to survive with
| rising labor costs. Those that cannot simply cease to
| exist, entire industries die out all the time.
| phkahler wrote:
| Probably 90 percent of minimum wage jobs will still be
| around if they raise it 50 percent. That would mean a large
| increase in money going to the bottom of the economy. That
| should help a lot of things. What to do about the 10
| percent that end up jobless I dont know.
| ddingus wrote:
| Maybe they just use services more. Frankly, the math
| probably pans out. Let them.
| mrep wrote:
| Maybe, but I doubt it as a quick google search shows that
| the EU countries without minimum wage have had
| consistently lower unemployment rates than ones with [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.cato.org/commentary/let-data-speak-
| truth-behind-...
| ddingus wrote:
| Unemployment is not the metric I would use here.
|
| Those people cost money to exist and show up for work.
| How are those costs being paid?
| triceratops wrote:
| It goes without saying that if you remove the price floor
| for labor, the amount of labor consumed by the market
| goes up.
|
| But is it good for the laborers themselves? Or for
| society at large?
|
| Do minimum wage laws or lack thereof correlate with
| broader measures of wellness and prosperity? How do
| countries with and without minimum wages compare on life
| expectancy, infant mortality, obesity rates, cancer
| rates, median disposable income, median wealth or net
| worth, suicide rates, divorce rates, accident rates,
| vacation time or leisure time, levels of pollution? How
| about harder to quantify stuff such as happiness,
| contentment, and stress levels?
|
| The market exists to serve human needs and wants. "GDP go
| up" is not the point of all this effort.
| naasking wrote:
| Arguably, if the value people will pay for something can't
| support the human dignity of the people who make them, then
| it's not worth subsidizing so that it is affordable. Do you
| have an counterexample?
| makomk wrote:
| There's an obvious problem with your argument: _in order
| for wages to support the human dignity of workers, those
| workers must be able to actually buy things with their
| wages_. The sectors that would have trouble increaing
| wages due to the limited amount people can pay for them
| include stuff like food. You 're treating the workers
| producing the goods and the people buying the goods as
| two seperate groups when in fact they're broadly one and
| the same, which obscures the fact that the actual end
| result of your proposal is that people whose economic
| value falls below whatever minimum standard of
| permissible human dignity don't get to eat anymore.
| naasking wrote:
| Increased wages also drives more automation. For critical
| goods like food, that's what would replace those workers
| if their labour value is below minimum wage, and they
| would have to move into positions that can pay better.
| That's arguably better than leaving them in poverty
| working below a living wage.
| nyhc99 wrote:
| If those people could move into positions that can pay
| better, they already would have done so, no? Eliminating
| their jobs through automation isn't going to get them
| promoted, it's going to get them fired and unemployed
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| So who exactly is going to pay for all this?
| triceratops wrote:
| The ever-increasing productivity of society.
| narag wrote:
| _So who exactly is going to pay for all this?_
|
| Let's see (only what I have answers to):
|
| _Cheap rents and affordable housing._
|
| Allow more vertical building.
|
| _Protective nets for periods of illness
| /unemployment/etc._
|
| I and my employers pay a fund that covers it.
|
| _School districts equally equipped, with good teachers._
|
| From the taxes, it's not so expensive.
|
| _Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college
| education if their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam._
|
| From the taxes, it's not so expensive if you only pay the
| smartest ones.
|
| _Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country._
|
| Well, that's income, but I disagree. Just forbid making any
| business with tyrants. I know, I know...
| deeg wrote:
| > Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.
|
| I disagree here. Global poverty is at its lowest point in
| human history, in large part due to jobs being exported to
| poor countries.
| hattmall wrote:
| I basically agree with you, but if the businesses go bust
| then there's no jobs at all...
| sfblah wrote:
| I don't fully understand why so many people can't accept the
| notion that people have different levels of capability to
| succeed. Maybe most folks who are poor just don't have the
| mental capacity to do much more than they're doing. If that's
| true, then definitionally nothing will really "help" short of
| something like UBI. And even that might fail since recipients
| will get swindled out of the money.
|
| To me, it's unfortunate that the notion of different levels of
| capability has been transmuted into some kind of social ill
| that "must" be solved. It'd be like reading articles about why
| not everyone can run a 5 minute mile and what can be done about
| it. Not everyone can run a 5 minute mile! It's not fixable!
| fartboi wrote:
| amrocha wrote:
| This is a straw man. Nobody is saying everyone should be
| genius Olympian.
|
| The argument is that the janitor, the fast food worker, the
| cashier deserve a livable wage. They don't deserve to have
| decades slashed off their life expectancy because they're
| poor. They shouldn't have to ration insulin because they're
| poor. They shouldn't have to commute for 2 hours because
| they're poor.
| sfblah wrote:
| It's not at all a straw man. Large swaths of the political
| spectrum in the US now reject the notion that there are
| different levels of intellectual capability.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > deserve a livable wage
|
| Is a "market wage", supplemented by payments from public
| money to reach decent living standards, acceptable? That's
| what UBI would be, in theory at least.
| amrocha wrote:
| A better solution imo would be a society where
| necessities are free, and people can work for anything
| above that. But really, anything other than what we have
| right now would be an improvement.
| caffeine wrote:
| I actually don't think UBI will help much either.
|
| Minimum wage hikes are counterproductive - it's a ban on jobs
| for people whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage,
| which are the poorest people who need the jobs most.
|
| It's a terrible thing to say to someone - "The best you can
| do is $6/hr, so we as a society have decided you're not
| allowed to work to support or feed yourself."
|
| But we can make our society more functional to penalise poor
| people less. The people who can only run a 10 minute mile
| shouldn't be forced to do it with a weighted vest. The people
| who can only run a 15 minute mile shouldn't be banned from
| running at all.
| [deleted]
| rini17 wrote:
| Is it actually possible to support and feed oneself for
| $5/hr and less? If it's too hard, plus considering people
| unable to do better jobs also have harder time saving money
| - why would you want to inflict that to anyone?
| sfblah wrote:
| It probably isn't possible, but maybe if you combined
| that wage with various assistance programs, it could
| provide a path out of poverty for those who want to try.
| I'd much rather be able to get a job and start my journey
| than be prohibited from working.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| This is a good point that isn't given enough attention by
| either side.
|
| I grew up in poverty and faced homelessness many times, and my
| experience anytime a public/government program was offered to
| help people like me specifically, it only made things worse,
| either directly or indirectly. Every single time.
|
| Extra policing meant more poor people pulled over in their
| raggedy cars and ticketed for vain things. Food assistance
| meant lots of forms being filled out, and the risk that your
| inconsistent income might go just above the threshold next
| month and kick you off for the whole year when your income
| drops immediately thereafter. Healthcare assistance meant even
| more forms, confusing jargon, and always started with "don't
| worry, we'll take care of it" and ended with "you now owe
| $5000". I could write posts full of examples.
|
| Even worse, once I identified this, I could then be labeled
| "too stupid to know what was best for me" or "just sticking up
| for the rich" when I expressed my concern for this around
| (mostly more privileged) friends.
|
| Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on
| things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think
| food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be
| helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference
| if done in the right balance and the right way.
|
| But given the realities of how these things work, and have
| worked my entire life, the institutions creating and promoting
| these things are either incompetent or corrupt, or both. If all
| of these caring researchers and think tanks put more effort
| into retrospectively finding out what is going wrong with these
| programs as they exist today, and found a way to restore
| competence and trust to the programs and the institutions
| behind them -- if everyone could be honest about the actual
| results of their efforts rather than just patting themselves on
| the back for doing what felt good while ignoring the people
| they caused to suffer -- then I'd likely feel differently.
|
| It makes me wonder if my problem growing up weren't the
| supposed "safety nets" that blew up in my face each time, but
| rather the institutions behind them, and that they should be
| the first problem solved before we move on to the assistance
| itself.
| afpx wrote:
| Disagree completely. I too was in poverty and homelessness
| between the ages of 4 and 16. Those government programs (no
| matter how poorly managed) were critical to my survival. The
| whole reason why I support government programs today is
| because those programs helped me so much.
| benwerd wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that in the US, the same program
| can be applied really well in one location and poorly in
| another place. This doesn't mean that these programs are
| inherently bad - but does mean a lot of work needs to be
| done to reform how government delivers programs in places
| where they don't perform well.
|
| There's a lot of scope for service design in government,
| and human-centered design. Of course, there are also
| lobbyists at every turn trying to hobble the process
| because there are profits to be made.
|
| It would be amazing to see an America where its culture of
| innovation was laser focused on making life better for
| everyone. I wish we were there today.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| I have no doubt that they have helped some people, and I'm
| genuinely glad they helped you.
|
| They unequivocally made my life worse off than without
| them, and I know I'm not alone.
|
| Us both being willing to accept that our respective
| experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth
| consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are
| so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of
| supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting
| it.
|
| Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar
| that you're supporting today can't also harm others.
| Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't
| mean I should be closed off to the notion that something
| similar could help others.
|
| If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of
| opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual
| experiences of otherwise similar things can be very
| different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental
| and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is the real argument for things like UBI and simple tax
| credits, that often goes unnoticed. Giving poor people money
| doesn't need to have outstanding effects to be worthwhile, it
| just needs to be better than the existing mess of overlapping
| institutional red tape. This goes for healthcare too. Get rid
| of complex government assistance, and put money in Singapore-
| style health savings accounts, that people can draw from for
| insurance payments or simple "cash" expenses. One of the
| things that are most clearly needed in the healthcare sector
| is direct consumer discipline, and HSAs provide that.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| I think this actually points out a great common ground
| between the two notions this article is comparing.
|
| If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other
| aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the
| education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving
| assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while
| still empowering the recipient to make her own choices
| (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great
| melding of solutions.
| ModernMech wrote:
| My favorite example of the safety net not working is when my
| wife applied for unemployment, she was told she didn't make
| enough while she was employed to qualify for assistance.
| That's right, she was too poor to qualify for help.
|
| Their solution? Go get a job and make more money, then she
| could qualify for unemployment. Gee thanks, I wish I had
| thought of that plan.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| another lovely one is COBRA health insurance coverage after
| losing your job; you gain the privilege of both being out
| of work AND paying for health insurance out of your own
| pocket
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is not a fault with COBRA. Would you rather be out
| of work _and_ have to negotiate new insurance as an
| individual? You 're just paying the insurance premiums
| that used to be covered by your employer.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Hasn't COBRA more-or-less been obviated by the ACA rules
| on pre-existing conditions anyway? The only people I know
| who used COBRA in the past did so because there was a
| family member who was essentially uninsurable on an
| individual basis.
| jrgoff wrote:
| The ACA plans I had available were only slightly less
| expensive than my COBRA, but there was not a single ACA
| plan available that would cover any out of network
| expense like my COBRA plan did. I did switch to an ACA
| plan after COBRA expired and it was fine, but I slightly
| preferred my COBRA plan.
| whatlolasdqwe wrote:
| It may not be the same in every state but when I compared
| my COBRA offering (pretty good healthcare) to a matching
| plan on the ACA the COBRA program was almost $500 cheaper
| per month. I was on exchange insurance between jobs as a
| consultant and I paid $750/mo for bronze tier "only if
| you're dying" insurance.
| SilasX wrote:
| No? The healthcare.gov options with similar benefits to
| an employer plan are more expensive than what the
| employer was paying, so it often makes sense to keep the
| COBRA option.
|
| Source: Did.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's a shit solution to a monumental problem
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on
| things like this now as a result, but not because I don't
| think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs
| could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge
| difference if done in the right balance and the right way.
|
| They _can_ be done the right way, but aren 't because
| politicians deliberately sabotage them. Every confusing and
| unnecessary form that is put in the way of getting assistance
| is put there deliberately to make the institution less
| effective and punish the people who need it. This is not an
| accident or some emergent, inevitable quality of government.
| It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent
| or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by
| elected officials who oppose helping poor people. We DO have
| a handful of institutions that are still competent and
| effective. This also is not an accident--they're the ones not
| being deliberately hamstrung by Congress.
|
| The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare
| "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The
| solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is
| to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like
| these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk
| about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based
| solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)".
| Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this
| team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting
| for politicians who are against the very things that would
| help them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's not that the government just happens to hire
| incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is
| sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor
| people.
|
| That's the fun thing, it doesn't have to be one or the
| other. It can be both! And I would moreover argue that if a
| government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first
| place, the government scheme is itself at fault given its
| obviously lacking transparency, and a "libertarian"
| response is all the more appropriate.
| copo233 wrote:
| > I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can
| be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government
| scheme is itself at fault [...]
|
| This is the weirdest argument. I mean, you seem to be
| arguing for some kind of government that's not answerable
| to elected leaders or voters? I mean, how else would you
| be able to run a program that couldn't be shut down by
| the leadership of an organization - public or private?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Shutting a program down is transparent. What GP said was
| that _ineffective_ government programs, and red tape more
| generally, are uniformly due to some sort of devious
| intentional sabotage by the other side. My argument was a
| response to that.
| copo233 wrote:
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| > The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare
| "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The
| solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life
| is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not
| like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly
| talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting
| market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging
| institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor
| tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably)
| knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the
| very things that would help them.
|
| This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned
| receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up.
| Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to
| only know what they knew about poverty and assistance
| programs from magazines, research journals and politicians
| selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who
| experienced the consequences of what they were advocating
| for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which
| to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing
| what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.
|
| If it's true that these programs _can_ be done the right
| way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend
| to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just
| the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I
| know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of
| these initiatives in my life have come directly from
| undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us
| that "we can't afford _not_ to go all in ".
|
| But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung
| programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended
| consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off
| than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make
| it through via unchallenged bills or executive action,
| somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being
| "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to
| double down."
|
| Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other
| politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it
| always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know
| what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these
| things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work
| ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame
| the victim, if you know how to spot it.
|
| I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the
| assertion that many of these institutions are designed to
| fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually
| solving problems, that taking honest account of how these
| institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money
| and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.
|
| Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the
| results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians
| who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when
| their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that
| means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the
| "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond
| words.
|
| Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting
| the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or
| deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine
| personal experience that you may not have had. That those
| people, still in need of solutions not being provided by
| either team, are turning to the devil they know and can
| manage, rather than the one they cannot.
|
| The good news is that these first steps are unifying and
| results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people
| to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually
| exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them
| into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It
| likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so
| much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides
| is harder than it seems.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist for
| government aid with NO means-testing. If a government program
| only exists to support the poor, it will be birocratized,
| sacrificed whenever budget cuts are needed, demonized and so
| on.
|
| Successful social programs help everyone, and let the poor
| benefit implicitly more. All old people benefit from the
| existence of Medicare for example, even if they are
| personally wealthy enough to afford alternatives, so Medicare
| is relatively simple to access and almost universally loved.
| No one is going to win elections campaigning on slashing
| medicare, and no one is in danger of losing their Medicare
| status if they fill out a form wrong.
| tlear wrote:
| It is not means testing it is complete and total lack of
| any kindof of responsibility or accountability.
|
| Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as
| an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program
| 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow
| your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are
| an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job.
| Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely
| ignored.
|
| There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| One of my examples related to means testing. I have many
| more not related at all to means testing.
|
| Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all
| of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the
| program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe
| money and penalties now".
|
| Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very
| consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to
| do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses
| with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while
| the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working
| for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put
| in situations in which they cannot.
|
| Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or
| appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs,
| aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold
| on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense
| of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to
| situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to
| facing homelessness multiple times.
|
| If I gave the impression that means testing was the core
| impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.
|
| That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to
| the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I
| don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty
| on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social
| behavior manipulation as well.
|
| To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove
| ALL means testing.
| tomp wrote:
| > Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist
| for government aid with NO means-testing.
|
| This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have
| 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for
| healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.
|
| That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose
| nationalized medicine.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| >The article doesn't say much about what would help.
|
| A Universal Basic Income would be a good start.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| People keep talking about UBI, but I've never seen a) who
| will pay for it and b) who will do the work if you don't need
| to.
|
| Are you able to point to some sources for both answers? From
| an economics PoV I'm genuinely interested, yet haven't seen
| any resources take those two problems together seriously.
|
| e.g. "our oil industry will pay for it", but then who would
| work the oil rigs?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| a) Who pays for the unnecessary structural costs that add
| friction to the economic system today?
|
| b) Who pays for the jobs that are entirely parasitic and
| remove value - and add friction - today?
|
| I don't think UBI implements a particularly good safety net
| without other measures - at the very least open education
| at all levels, open healthcare, open culture, open media,
| and open democracy.
|
| But if you're implying that money exists to _force people
| to work_ I 'd consider the possibility that you're
| describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at
| least extreme political control.
|
| It stops being slavery when people are free to choose what
| to do with their talents, abilities, ambitions, and
| interests, and when job markets value that contribution
| instead of - quite literally - attempting to minimise its
| value.
|
| The fundamental difference is between finding and promoting
| people who are good at inventing and organising the future,
| and finding and promoting people who are good at
| controlling everyone else's time for their own personal
| benefit.
|
| The latter is what we have now, and it's showing very clear
| signs of making far less sense as a stable system with a
| future than some UBI-adjacent scheme would be.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > But if you're implying that money exists to force
| people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're
| describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at
| least extreme political control.
|
| Bingo. Many people do =not realize that calling money for
| labor "wage slavery" was a term used in the 1700's and
| was common even into the 1940's. It was even uttered by
| Hiddy in the 1940's movie "His Girl Friday".
|
| -- Hildy Johnson : The next time you see me, I shall be
| riding in a Rolls Royce giving interviews on success.
|
| Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger ,
| Endicott : Goodbye.
|
| Hildy Johnson : So long, you wage slaves.
|
| Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger ,
| Endicott : Bye.
|
| Hildy Johnson : Well, when you're climbing up fire
| escapes and getting kicked out of front doors and eating
| Christmas dinners at one-arm joints - don't forget your
| pal, Hildy Johnson. --
|
| So are people who do not want UBI are pro slavery? That
| is a good question. If you think about the one common
| complaint that UBI will mean people will not work, just
| this about that in the terms of a plantation owner
| talking about his slaves.
|
| https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid
| =2&...
|
| "Because slaves had no direct incentive to work hard,
| slaveowners combined harsh penalties with positive
| incentives. Some masters denied passes to disobedient
| slaves. Others confined recalcitrant slaves to private
| jails."
|
| They even tried instilling a "positive mindset" in the
| slave!
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/2716797
|
| How is this that much different than our current system?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Every action that I'm denied due to the inability to pay
| represents a curtailment of my freedom to take that
| action. I mean this in the most radical and all-
| encompassing way as possible.
|
| A system is a function of its output. If the the
| enforcement of law represent the denial of physical
| access under threat of violence, markets represent the
| denial of economic access under threat of labor. In some
| ways this is more insidious, but less overtly violent and
| many parallel constructions hold. The simultaneous
| creation of race, and the theological justification for
| chattel slavery mirrors the creation of capital and the
| economic justification for wage slavery. The supporters
| of each alienate their involvement and perpetuation as
| "the natural order" when in fact it is a social system
| constantly recreated and socially reproduced.
|
| You can start to see the same patterns play out in the
| digital space. Human agency is exported to computers in a
| way that builds systems that re-enforce this dynamic.
| "Computer says, 'No'"[1], is a perfect summation of this
| disavowment of human agency and human empaty from the
| systems we build.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFl6p4D59AA
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| a) Who would pay for it? We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars
| propping up businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will
| pay for it". We have the money and should think of it as an
| investment. So who would pay for it? We all would. Why?
| Because it is worth it and it is compassionate and it will
| make this country (U.S.) a better, happier place.
|
| https://www.covidmoneytracker.org
|
| b) Who will do the work? All the automation will do the
| work. They have kiosks up in McDonalds right now that mean
| they only need one person needs to be at a register. But as
| far as it disincentivizes work..nit has been show it does
| not, but still people cannot believe this.
|
| https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/no-strings-
| attac...
|
| "Overall, the programs analyzed suggest either no effect on
| labor market supply or a slight reduction in work and
| earnings. The evidence does not suggest an average worker
| will drop out of the labor force when provided with
| unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large."
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > The evidence does not suggest an average worker will
| drop out of the labor force when provided with
| unconditional cash
|
| Ok, that's fair. So the average income earner won't stop
| working. But what about the bottom end of the spectrum
| i.e someone just above UBI but who has to get up early
| and travel two hours each way to get to work, or who is
| just working to put food on the table - with UBI they now
| have a great reason to stay home.
|
| So... what happens if a good chunk of people earning just
| above UBI rates just stops working because it's just not
| worth the ROI. You've ended up creating a vacuum which
| has to be filled. And how do you fill it? Traditionally
| you either import cheap labor or raise pay to incentivise
| applicants. Congratulations, you've just started the
| inflation engine.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Where is your evidence for all of this? I showed you
| mine. Your turn.
|
| These are all just talking points.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I showed you mine
|
| > The evidence does not suggest an average worker will
| drop out of the labor force
|
| That's for the average worker. Show me what happens at
| the lower scale. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 25 page
| report right now, but as this does interest me, I am
| going to put this in my TOREAD list - genuinely, thanks
| for the link.
|
| Edit: if you want evidence of disincentivising workers
| when there's no-questions-asked government handouts, look
| at food aid programs in Africa. There's no point to be a
| farmer when Free is your competition.
|
| https://cals.arizona.edu/classes/arec514/groupproject/doe
| s%2...
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Perhaps the person who has to travel 2 hours to get to
| work would be able to afford to earn lower wages at a
| closer job. And then perhaps someone that lives closer to
| the job site would take the other persons original job.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's no such thing as "just above" with UBI; the whole
| point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction
| of _whatever_ you earn, no matter what. It only makes it
| _easier_ for folks to join and stay in the workforce,
| even if all they can get is a marginal job.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > the whole point is that you get to keep a non-
| negligible fraction of whatever you earn
|
| Australia already has this - you can earn up to
| (somewhere around) $18k per year and you won't get taxed.
| This applies to everyone. Is this what you're talking
| about? Because as far as I can see, there are still
| people under the poverty line here.
|
| But if you're not talking about that, and you're saying
| that ALL should get $18k (for example) no questions
| asked, when someone earned $19k before UBI, do they now
| do the same hours for $1k, or do they keep their whole
| $19k? If the former, why bother working, but if the
| latter, you've now just given them $36k not $18k.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars propping up
| businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will pay for
| it". We have the money and should think of it as an
| investment._
|
| We did that on a one-off basis responding to an
| unprecedented-within-generations public health emergency.
| No-one is seriously talking about that as investment;
| most every source that I have read suggests that the
| spending was poorly and indiscriminately targeted because
| it was done in such a headlong rush.
|
| Nor do we "have the money". Deficit spending _tripled_
| from 2019 to 2020 and was only down from that level by
| 12% into 2021. This is the definition of "not having the
| money".
| Aunche wrote:
| >The evidence does not suggest an average worker will
| drop out of the labor force when provided with
| unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large.
|
| Even a "large" transfer in this s context is not nearly
| as much as UBI. The Alaska oil dividend was less than
| $1000 last year. The Gulf oil nations are the only ones
| that give enough free money for citizens to live off of,
| and in these countries are extremely dependent on cheap
| foreign labor.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > these countries are extremely dependent on cheap
| foreign labor
|
| They are not "dependent" on cheap labor. They can afford
| to buy cheap labor with no sacrifice to their own people.
| This is a benefit of UBI in a world that does not have
| universal UBI.
| Aunche wrote:
| The sacrifice is that their people's livelyhoods
| completely depend on the price of the sludge beneath
| their feet.
| hattmall wrote:
| They have slavery conditions worse than the American
| south, more similar to Guano mine slaves. They are
| entirely expendable, undocumented, locked into the
| worksites and subjugated by a state supported market.
| They are viewed as religious subhumans and treated as
| such, should they attempt anything by way of escape or
| complaining that can be cast into a religious based
| debtors prison for an indefinite amount of time with no
| trial.
|
| Saudi Arabia literally butchered a major journalist. They
| have frequent public beatings and executions if actual
| citizens for minor infractions.
|
| The modern Arab world's treatment of their imported SE
| Asian workforce is absolutely horrendous.
|
| The official figure is that 6500 workers have died
| building the Qatar world cup stadiums. Applying a 10x
| multiple to that may still be low balling.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| doubtful, it would just capture more surplus from those who
| are fortunate enough to have jobs and redirect it to people
| who could not find work, thereby making them dependent on
| UBI, worsening the problem.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I don't think so. It was once thought that student loans
| would be some panacea lifting poor people out of poverty by
| giving them access to education and the end result is lots of
| people overburdened by debt while waiting tables because so
| many people have degrees that a degree isn't remotely some
| kind of reasonable assurance that you can get a job in a
| particular field.
| farmerstan wrote:
| The problem is Clinton making student loans undischargeable
| via bankruptcy. That meant it was risk free for lenders to
| give student loans. That meant institutions could double or
| triple tuition without any fears because everyone could get
| an easy loan.
|
| The entire system is predatory and cancelling student debt
| is not the solution because it just means the lenders make
| all their profits off the backs of taxpayers. The real
| solution is to make student loans dischargable and for
| lenders to bear the risk of debt again. Then the markets
| will return back to normal.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The problem is Clinton making student loans
| undischargeable via bankruptcy.
|
| Bill Clinton's first federal office was the Presidency,
| and he was sworn in in 1993.
|
| The federal law that made student loans non- (well,
| actually, less) dischargeable was passed in 1976, 17
| years before that, while he was running what would become
| his first successful electoral campaign, for Attorney-
| General of Arkansas.
| mrep wrote:
| And then the top 20 schools will only end up taking rich
| kids whose parents can pay/co-sign as I highly doubt they
| would massively cut costs and perceptibly decrease their
| rankings to make it cheap enough that lenders would risk
| giving loans to poor kids.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I'm seeing 1976 as the date student loans became non-
| dischargeable [0] via amendments to the Higher Education
| Act of 1965. I think I know why you're confused though
| because the Wikipedia entry on the Higher Education Act
| doesn't include a section on the '76 amendments and
| instead skips straight to the '92 amendments (which would
| have been HW, not Clinton). Still, it looks like the
| parent poster is right that Clinton did make some
| questionable additions to the Act during his tenure in
| 1998 [1].
|
| [0] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-
| bankruptcy-law-hi....
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_Act_
| of_1965
| malandrew wrote:
| > undischargeable via bankruptcy
|
| What I don't get is why more people trapped by student
| loans don't just leave the country and set up life
| elsewhere. Debt is country specific. If you're in debt in
| country A, you can move to country B and start anew.
|
| Undischargeable debt is only an encumbrance on income
| earned in the country in which you owe the debt.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| First, it's a lot to ask of someone to leave the country
| where their friends and family live. Many aren't
| interested in doing that.
|
| Immigrating elsewhere is also not easy if you're in a
| less in demand profession. Of course these are the ones
| where it's most likely to have unsupportable amounts of
| debt.
|
| If you're a US citizen, you are still required to pay
| taxes on your global income no matter where you live in
| the world. If you ever get a tax refund, it can be
| garnished for federal student loans that are in default.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "If you're a US citizen, you are still required to pay
| taxes on your global income no matter where you live in
| the world."
|
| The first 108 000 dollars that you make elsewhere are
| exempt. You can live quite comfortably in most of Europe
| on 108 000 dollars brutto.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A vast majority of people are simply not "trapped" to
| that extent. They're better off staying and paying down
| their debt with the increased incomes they can earn in
| the U.S. The unavailability of bankruptcy is only ever an
| issue for a small fraction of basically non-traditional
| students, either at for-profit colleges or pursuing some
| sort of professional education that ends up not recouping
| the expenses involved.
| hattmall wrote:
| A significant, maybe half, Ill have to look of student
| loan debt is held by people who didn't graduate and thus
| gained no economical advantage from the debt.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Agreed. This is what is called "Socialism for the Rich".
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| UBI is not a loan. Student loans have to be paid back and
| they also only resulted sun universities rising tuition.
| Education does not fix poverty. Money fixes poverty.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > UBI is not a loan
|
| Right: UBI together with any reasonable funding mechanism
| is a structural force working against economic
| inequality.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| In other words: a large-scale income redistribution that
| has no realistic probability of adoption in the American
| political landscape.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There are lots of large-scale income redistributions that
| have been adopted in the US (including EITC, which, while
| _not_ a UBI, was directly inspired by Negative Income
| Tax, and earlier name for a policy exactly equivalent to
| UBI), and the American political landscape changes over
| time, largely through activism; civil rights, or even
| abolition, were once things with "no realistic
| probability of adoption in the American political
| landscape", too.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The EITC is a $70-75bn program in the context of a $1.5tn
| income tax - it is not, as such, the kind of large-scale
| redistribution that we're talking about for a UBI.
|
| I also would characterize it as the absolute opposite of
| a UBI: it is paid _only_ to people who are working; and
| is more rooted in the history of offsetting increasing
| FICA taxes for low-income households than in the NIT
| experiments.
|
| Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future,
| but right now the "more left" of the parties with
| credible possibilities of election success in the U.S.
| has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes
| can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI
| on that basis.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future,
| but right now the "more left" of the parties with
| credible possibilities of election success in the U.S.
| has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes
| can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI
| on that basis.
|
| $200/month UBI, while obviously not a full, mature UBI,
| would approximately equal the maximum benefit of general
| assistance (means tested welfare for adults without
| dependents) in most of the US, and could probably be done
| with net tax increases in only that range (though the
| increases would need to go beyond just "regular" income
| tax and also include things like ending the favorable tax
| treatment of capital over labor income.)
|
| But, in any case, there is very likely a sea change
| coming in the Democratic Party, which is currently led by
| Boomers (and some Silents) who came into their political
| prime during and before the 1990s neoliberal consensus;
| the Boomer demographic wave is crashing and the
| Millennials (Gen X is both smaller and more Republican
| than the Millenials, so less relevant to the future
| direction of the Democrats) have a rather different
| understanding of political possibility not grounded in
| nostalgia for a bipartisan era that has long passed.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| There is no evidence that student loans led to colleges
| raising tuition, as opposed to other causes.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| No evidence?
|
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/st
| aff...
|
| We find that increases in institution-specific subsidized
| (unsubsidized) loan maximums lead to a sticker- price
| increase of about 60 (40) cents on the dollar.
|
| ---
|
| It is basic supply and demand. How could universities
| charge so much if no one could pay for it? They would
| have to lower prices.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I swear, the "facts" that are flatly asserted on this
| site, with zero questioning or critical thought, seem
| roughly equivalent to the "election was stolen!" facts
| that you find in other echo chambers.
| afpx wrote:
| Correlation does not mean causation. Tuition prices were
| already on their way up before 2007 (as the paper
| targets). I suspect that this is because in the 80s and
| 90s the data showed that a 4-year degrees increased
| income substantially, and tons of people applied for
| colleges.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Did tons of people apply for colleges because they heard
| about the data?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Student loans and grants existed before 2007.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Education does not fix poverty."
|
| What the OP said was that _education was once thought to
| be the magic bullet against poverty_ , much like UBI is
| now.
|
| People always dream of solving complicated problems with
| "one weird trick". If it fails, another one will appear.
| adventured wrote:
| Absolutely. We'd be so much better off by semi copying
| Germany's culture of vocational training. And it wouldn't
| be expensive to do compared to the rather crazy sums we
| presently throw at higher education. Plus we very much need
| the skilled labor in a vast array of fields.
| analog31 wrote:
| You also have to fix the vocations themselves with better
| workplace safety laws, non-discrimination, health care,
| retirement, safety net, unions. A trades person is
| exposed to high risk if something happens to their bodies
| and prevents them from working a full career, or there's
| a cyclic downturn in something like construction.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Fix K12 education first - that's where the highest
| plausible effects are. Vocational education can be a part
| of the picture, but it's actually really hard to do well.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift
| them out of poverty, because education is just a relative
| advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift
| any boat's level relative to the water.
|
| [*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an
| absolute level -- but only in theory.
|
| Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself
| a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no
| longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer
| have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category
| that does not exist.
|
| UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly
| cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of
| starvation itself.
|
| Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's
| no question about whether it would work. The remaining
| question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a
| negative incentive much like it depends on prison.
| mrep wrote:
| > Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't
| lift them out of poverty, because education is just a
| relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does
| not lift any boat's level relative to the water.
|
| Not true. Every single software team I have worked on
| wanted to hire more workers but when they are paying me
| $350K a year, it limits how many people they can hire. If
| you doubled the supply of SWEs, you'd probably have 2
| 175k jobs instead of the one.
| hattmall wrote:
| But there are poor people who work and have money
| already, most of them in fact. I am for UBI, but it's
| nothing like food to the starving. It's a safety net.
| tomp wrote:
| You explained why UBI wouldn't work _in your own answer!_
|
| "Money is just a relative advantage in the market."
|
| If everybody has $x, then competitive products/services
| will increase by $x in cost! (By "competitive" I mean
| those than cannot be easily scaled, like housing,
| education, medicine.)
| hattmall wrote:
| All of those can be easily scaled though. They are all
| simply protected industries with entrenched incumbents
| weilding political power to maintain their status quo at
| the expense of everyone else. We could easily have 10x
| more doctors, houses, and quality educators if the
| artificial barriers to entry were lowered or removed.
| endominus wrote:
| That's irrelevant to the matter at hand. Scaling them has
| nothing to do with implementing UBI, and would be a good
| idea whether or not UBI is implemented. UBI simply does
| not solve the problem of poverty, or the poor having
| access to those goods and services.
| naasking wrote:
| Scaling them does have to do with UBI, because the
| argument above is that UBI would not work because the
| price of some goods and services will rise to compensate
| because they don't scale. If supply for these critical
| goods and services is instead increased alongside a
| progressive UBI deployment, then this wouldn't happen and
| we'd presumably in a better position afterwards.
| tomp wrote:
| When those are scaled, I'll gladly support UBI.
|
| But then UBI won't be needed, as all these will be dirt
| cheap, like phones ($50 Motorola, not $1500 iPhone).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Only if price levels stay the same. If they don't, now
| you have 1000 dollars every month of UBI, but perhaps
| rent has jumped to 3000 dollars.
|
| UBI would work _ceteris paribus_ , but I am with Georgism
| on this one: the entire UBI would be eaten by landlords.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Not if you have a land-value tax, where landlords are
| literally paying for UBI, and even tying UBI amounts paid
| out to the amount of LVT raised, the higher the rent the
| more they pay in taxes, therefore the less they charge
| for rent the more they keep and it balances out...
|
| This is literally part of Georgism philosophy.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| farmerstan wrote:
| I used to believe that UBI was a solution and even donated to
| Andrew Yang. After seeing the results of the pandemic and all
| the free money, I have changed my mind. I think UBI did
| everything that the critics thought it would, namely massive
| inflation because no one wanted to work and prices had to
| rise and now everyone is suffering from out of control
| inflation.
|
| UBI is dead in the water.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The current rise of inflation is unlikely to be caused by
| the meager 2k checks that people got during the pandemic.
| It is much more likely to be a product of the supply chain
| crisis, which in turn was caused to a great extent by the
| known failure mode of just-in-time inventory management.
|
| Also, the massive death toll of the pandemic, combined with
| singinificant behavior changes caused by fear of the same
| death toll, have left many industries reeling and
| redistributed wealth allocations in many people's budgets
| (away from dining out and tourism and into other places
| like gaming or real-estate), which had hard to measure
| outcomes.
|
| Not to mention, prices for most goods are currently
| controlled by a handful of companies like Amazon and
| Walmart, who are in a perfect position to silently
| collaborate on increasing prices instead of taking a hit on
| profits like they would normally be forced to if they were
| in tight competition.
| briHass wrote:
| It was more than 2K. States tapped into the Pandemic
| Unemployment Assistance program, which added up to
| 600/week to existing unemployment rates, as long as your
| job loss was 'covid related'. In PA, for example, many
| were receiving over $1000/week. While that certainly
| doesn't make you rich, it's a strong incentive to not
| seek out other employment if your regular job only pays
| around that amount or less.
| adventured wrote:
| In a system with so many failing institutions, universal
| basic income would not only fail to achieve the desired
| results but would be an economic disaster. You can't fix what
| ails the US by generically throwing money at it.
|
| If the people are being poorly educated, poorly trained,
| poorly policed, and the culture is rotting, and then you dump
| an enormous amount of loose money on that garbage fire, what
| do you expect to get as a return result? It's exceptionally
| obvious what would happen.
|
| For example the biggest problem the US has in healthcare (and
| education) is cost, not lack of spending. If our costs were
| more in line with other affluent nations, you could expand
| Medicaid to cover 40-45% of the population with little
| additional expenditure. Nobody with a prominent position is
| brave enough to say it much less attempt to do anything about
| it (which would involve smashing incomes and jobs in the
| healthcare field). Some pretend we can spend our way to
| universal healthcare, ignoring the $1.2+ trillion in costs
| that have to be slashed before it can be implemented (which
| is why California can't implement it, they can't come close
| to affording it without cutting healthcare costs first).
| That's typical of what goes on in the US, it's a hyper
| irrational nation, incapable of even basic reasoning + action
| when it comes to solving big problems.
|
| Start by fixing the broken, corrupt institutions. But that's
| a super hard problem that will take two generations of
| grinding persistent effort, whereas printing money is easy,
| which is why so many people love the fantasy of universal
| basic income.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I never said UBI was the only thing that needed to be
| fixed. But it this basic effort to show we actually care
| about other people's suffering. Next Universal Healthcare
| (get rid of the insurers to lower costs)...etc etc...
| hattmall wrote:
| Artificial barriers to entry are the problem 100%.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| No it would be better to have cities employ these people as
| gardeners in the park department. Or have them plant trees or
| work to restore habitat.
| gnz11 wrote:
| I think it starts with a return to a progressive tax system
| with higher tax rates on upper incomes. In today's political
| climate, UBI would be dead on arrival.
| whatlolasdqwe wrote:
| I pay enough tax. I should not have to continue to pay more
| to make up for the frivolous government spending on "social
| justice programs", wars, more police, and bailouts for
| campaign donating companies.
|
| More tax doesn't fix widespread, rampant, government
| corruption. The US takes in enough tax to have plenty of
| nice things. For citizens to see any benefit the military
| industrial complex needs to be defanged with prejudice, the
| US needs to pull out of all foreign police actions, etc.
|
| The highways and roads I drive on are terrible. Let's start
| there. Why is that in such a poor state with me paying 35%
| marginal tax? Where is my money going? Yep that's right,
| "social justice consultants" and the military industrial
| complex.
|
| On the UBI note it would never work out anyway. Yang's
| numbers were several order of magnitudes off similar to
| Bernie's healthcare numbers. We'd have to collect far more
| money than we could even with a progressive tax system and
| that's if we only offered it to actual naturalized
| citizens. If we offered to everyone who exists in America
| there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the
| numbers. These programs work in countries with defined
| borders, strong citizenship laws, homogenous cultures, and
| populations 1/10th the size of America. We are different.
| We need different solutions.
| naasking wrote:
| > If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's
| absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers.
|
| I don't see why. You just appropriately set the amount
| paid out and the tax tier at which you cross into the red
| and are paying back into it. Are you suggesting that this
| threshold is barely above the poverty line? Because
| that's the only way it wouldn't actually work.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| If we raised separate tax on land (that isn't a primary
| residence) and luxury property (aircraft, yachts, -
| anything exceeding 500k)...
|
| Say you have a home you live in that's 300k. You also
| have a guest house you airbnb and make 50k/year on.
| There's considered 0 'value' in a primary residence,
| however you're making 50k/year value off your additional
| rent. So you'd pay tax on that, above and beyond any
| other tax.
|
| If you have commercial or other real estate rentals you'd
| pay as well. The key is that you'd need to somehow peg
| the tax rate with inflation, and housing prices, etc...to
| basically make it a self-organized check-system to keep
| rents from rising, because rising rents means higher
| taxes.
|
| Perhaps you actually tie the LVT to census data on
| homeless in a region, less homeless = less taxes,
| therefore creating solutions to that problem actually is
| a win:win...
| MattRix wrote:
| Absolutely agree about the tremendous amount of money
| wasted on the military and policing, but not sure why
| you're putting "social justice consultants" in that same
| category, when they have many orders of magnitude less
| impact on the budget.
| farmerstan wrote:
| My marginal tax rate is already 50%. Why in God's name do
| people think that the government deserves more of my
| earnings than I do? Every additional dollar I make busting
| my ass results in the government taking more than me.
| That's sick.
|
| I'm all for a flat tax with no tax loopholes but to
| increase my taxes more than I'm already paying is something
| I will never vote for.
| ac29 wrote:
| Even assuming you live in a very high tax State like
| California, 50% marginal tax rate put you in, or close to
| the highest possible tax bracket. I live in a high tax
| state and earned above median income and my taxes
| (federal, state, medicare, and SS combined) was about 25%
| last year.
| naasking wrote:
| > Every additional dollar I make busting my ass results
| in the government taking more than me
|
| Maybe don't think of it as "the government" getting your
| money, rather that you're investing in your nation's
| future. The key is making sure that investment is well
| utilized, and that requires us to all be properly
| invested.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Most people busting their ass working are the poor.
| Despite how they often present themselves, no CEO is
| working as hard as an Amazon delivery worker or warehouse
| supplier by any meaningful metric. The working poor of
| America are almost universally working more than 9-5 jobs
| to try to eke out a living, usually in high-stress
| critical work that is chronically undervalued
| (warehousing, delivery, EMT, nurses and orderlies, food
| preparation and serving, etc).
|
| Not to mention, there is no way in which a worker can
| make a contribution to society that is literally billions
| of times greater than another. So, the fact the someone
| like Jeff Bezos can literally earn billions while others
| make pennies needs to be corrected theough a progressive
| tax rate - probably close to 95 cents on the dollar for
| every dollar over a few tens of million per year, like it
| used to be in America's golden age.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > there is no way in which a worker can make a
| contribution to society that is literally billions of
| times greater than another.
|
| First of all, nobody makes billions of times more than
| anybody else. Bezos doesn't even make a million times
| more than the average earner.
|
| Second, sure it's possible for one person's impact to be
| thousands or tens of thousands of times higher than
| someone else's.
|
| Third, the point of taxes is not to change people's
| income to better match the magnitude of their
| contribution to society.
| iso1210 wrote:
| > Third, the point of taxes is not to change people's
| income to better match the magnitude of their
| contribution to society.
|
| The point of taxes is to provide a society where the
| guillotine doesn't come out. When it does it won't be the
| Musks and Bezos' of the world that the masses stop at.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is a popular idea, but guillotine-heavy revolutions
| were pretty rare in the Western world, and modern
| revolutions in general, successful or not, were often a
| consequence of _a lost war_ , not of usual misery in
| peace. Losing a war is dangerous for survival of any
| regime.
|
| Peasants' revolts are another story, but too far back in
| history to be an useful analogy for today. They were also
| beaten to bloody pulp most of the time.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| A flat tax with no loopholes hurts the poor more than it
| would hurt you, so I think advocating for it is
| antithetical to the goal of helping the poor.
| dnautics wrote:
| I think most people who advocate for flat tax advocate
| for a single bracket: a flat percentage with a single
| income deduction, which is asymptotically flat. So e.g.
| take 15% of (your income - 40k). This would not hurt the
| poor.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > This would not hurt the poor.
|
| Not sure I follow. I get the first order effects, but I'm
| hesitant to agree without an explanation of the second-
| order and systemic-level effects of such a policy.
| massinstall wrote:
| > This would not hurt the poor.
|
| I am always amazed by such statements. Are you sure you
| have thought this through? What do mean with
| "asymptotically flat"?
|
| As with the poorly understood correlation/causation
| relationship in statistics, there are many common
| misconceptions about how absolute and relative amounts
| influence the result of mathematical calculations.
|
| The following example may highlight this: Let's say a
| person's minimum financial need to simply stay alive and
| sane is $X. Now, take two almost identical people that
| only differ in their income: A's income is bigger than
| B's.
|
| If you tax them both at a flat 15% (or any other rate),
| the richer will always benefit more from this than the
| poorer! The reason is because living, eating, and taking
| part in a society do not come for free.
|
| Surprisingly, this is commonly not well understood and it
| also seems there are proclivities by some fellow rich and
| comfortable folk to intentionally avoid understanding
| this.
|
| Proof by example: Let's see what their effective tax is
| after all the cost to stay alive has been deducted.
|
| Excess Income = Income * (1 - 15%) - X
|
| Let's say A's income is $150k and B's is $40k, and the
| minimum amount X required to simply stay alive (not being
| homeless and having health insurance included) would be
| $25k. These figures are obviously simplified but anyone
| can feel free to use their own numbers and repeat the
| calculation. The general result will remain similar.
|
| Then, A's excess income will be $102.5k and B's $9k.
| Relatively speaking, A will have made almost 11.5 times
| the amount of excess income than B, despite making not
| even four times as much as B (3.75 to be exact).
|
| Excess income will be the only thing both of them can use
| to save and invest, purchase a house, or use it for all
| kinds of safety-net building and stress-reducing things.
| dnautics wrote:
| Everything you wrote is literally true no matter how you
| arrange your tax brackets unless you want brackets with
| negative marginal post tax income. So what is your point?
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| What about a flat tax, where everyone is required to pay
| 15%...however everyone is guaranteed a minimum of 50k per
| year income, so if you earned 40k, you'd get a 10k
| credit.... which would likely offset all the taxes you
| did pay.
|
| I think CEO pay should be pegged to average salaries too,
| and their tax bracket pegged to the differential between
| average salary in their company and some universally
| accepted "happiness" wage ...(like 70k I heard a few
| years back, but is probably closer to 80k now)..
|
| If the average salary in your company is 50k, then you
| need to pay 30% extra in taxes. There also should be some
| sort of conversion from stocks to assumed 'income', so
| that the rich can't just use stocks to subvert paying
| taxes...
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Only for those so poor that they aren't really paying any
| taxes. It's been estimated that if there were a flat tax
| that it would only need to be 10% of all corporate and
| personal income to be effective. Most working class folks
| pay well over that in the US.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I think "all corporate income" is doing some heavy
| lifting in that description. It would be a hell of a
| trick to pass a bill that made business expenses taxable.
| hattmall wrote:
| Expenses aren't income... But a VAT is basically a tax on
| business revenue.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| The reason you are paying such high taxes is because the
| taxes on the ultra wealthy are so low. They have been
| constantly decreasing since the 70s.
|
| No flat tax, but a simplified progressive tax would do
| great things for the country.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Nobody who claims this ever gives concrete numbers.
|
| How much do you think we could reduce taxes on middle and
| upper middle earners by increasing taxes on the ultra-
| rich?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought I had
| a reasonable strategy to simply calculate it. I can't do
| it for America, because I'm not sufficiently familiar
| with what data you have available and am instead going to
| do the analysis for Sweden.
|
| In Sweden the labour share of GDP is 55%, however taxes
| on wages are 60% of the total government income, and a
| large remaining fraction of the taxes on work income.
| Another 30% is from VAT. Let's assume arbitrarily that
| half the VAT is paid by workers and not with income from
| capital.
|
| Under this assumption, workers receive 55% of GDP in
| compensation before taxes, but pay 70% of all taxes.
|
| If taxes on income were the same for workers as for
| capital then workers would pay 55% instead of 70%, so
| taxes would be 18% lower than they are now.
| ac29 wrote:
| Its difficult to define terms like ultra rich and middle
| income earner, but my guess is that if you increased the
| top marginal tax rates such that rate on the "ultra rich"
| was something like 70% (including capital gains, etc),
| you could completely eliminate taxes for the bottom 50%.
| mrep wrote:
| The top 1% earners earned 21% of all U.S. income while
| paying 40% of all federal income taxes [0]. I would guess
| going from 50% to 70% would increase that share to would
| increase that percentage to 58%.
|
| [0]: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-
| how-much-t...
| farmerstan wrote:
| There was no such thing as income taxes until world war
| 1. So taxes increased ridiculously for 50 years and have
| been decreasing, as it should, ever since. I believe in
| paying taxes but not to my own detriment. I pay more than
| my fair share.
| ac29 wrote:
| > There was no such thing as income taxes until world war
| 1
|
| Federal income tax goes back at least as far as 1861:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861
| ac29 wrote:
| This person _is_ ultra high income if their marginal tax
| rates are 50%. They didnt give numbers but using an
| online calculator [0] and assuming a high tax state (CA),
| you need to be above $500k a year income to hit 50%
| marginal rates. That is also assuming you are single, a
| married person would need a combined income nearly twice
| that to hit 50%.
|
| [0] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| You mean like the US? The top 1% earn 21% of all income and
| pay around 40% of all taxes. Or do do you mean it should be
| even _more_ "progressive"? Might higher income people
| change behavior e.g. work less at the margins if that
| happens? Does that affect the total amount of tax income
| generated?
|
| https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-
| much-t...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
| DarylZero wrote:
| LOL "earn"
|
| The top 1% take out of the economy a LOT more than they
| put in. Anything that limits their ability to "earn" is
| benefiting the rest of society. It is also benefiting the
| environment & future generations' resource availability.
| iso1210 wrote:
| The top 1% don't work for income. They aren't going to do
| an extra 10 hours this week because they need to save for
| a new boiler, so why would restoring tax rates to Reagan
| era rates result in less work being done?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The poster means the top 1% of income tax payers. Also:
| you pay income tax on income whether you work for it or
| not. Try leaving your 1099-DIVs out of your income tax
| return and see how that works out.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: what the U.S. tax system needs is more
| progressivity at the _middle class_ level. The U.S. has
| married couples with joint income over $100,000 per year
| paying a marginal Federal tax rate of at most 12%.
| hattmall wrote:
| That's unfortunately the only solution. The wealth gap
| between poor and billionaires is irrelevant. What
| actually creates inequality is the difference between
| $150k and 60k.
| jspash wrote:
| What was the purpose of removing the leading "why" from the
| headline?
|
| It sounds more click-baity when stated as a fact. Keeping the
| full correct title with the "why" sounds more open and allows for
| nuance and discussion.
| verisimi wrote:
| Should anyone push any mindset on anyone else?
|
| What basis is acceptable for pushers of mindset? Are charisma,
| money, spirituality, power a good basis?
| BirAdam wrote:
| I live in the US South. There are many misconceptions about the
| South, and there is a lot of prejudice in American society toward
| the South, toward "trailer trash," and toward "rednecks" and
| "hillbillies." This is going to build hatred and resentment for
| "the wealthy" that cannot be overcome by a mindset change. They
| are hated and despised and therefore they hate right back.
|
| Beyond this, there are people who are viewed as poor,
| dysfunctional, and "degenerate" even by the standards of the
| hated groups mentioned above.
|
| Funny thing is, these hated people are the very people societies
| cannot live without. Some are the bus drivers, the line cooks,
| the truck drivers, the sanitation workers, the veterans, and on
| and on. These people do actual work so that everyone else can get
| on pushing paper and making new digital b.s. These are also
| people who've been underserved by the digital transformation
| because they are hated.
|
| Why did it take reaching 2020 for someone to make PayPal that
| works for truckers?
| atdrummond wrote:
| You know what would really help the poor? Not putting up job apps
| that have zero intention of ever getting back to applicants. The
| single most frustrating thing during my current job hunt has been
| applying to hundreds of jobs and hearing back from maybe 5% of
| them.
|
| I have zero issue with a rejection. I understand the law of large
| numbers. Where I get frustrated is spending hours on applications
| to firms and they can't be bothered to spend 5 seconds letting
| unsuccessful applicants know that the position as been filled.
|
| (I definitely have plenty of other complaints but this is the one
| that is presently dragging me down mentally.)
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| I hear you.
|
| There is an asymmetry. You need a job. It's your only job. They
| get hundreds of applications.
|
| One adjustment I recommend is calibrating the amount of time
| you spend on an application. You shouldn't be spending hours on
| a single cold application. Write your resume. See or hear of an
| opportunity. Send your standard resume and standard
| introduction. Hours of upfront work, but only a few minutes per
| application.
|
| Focus on finding warming connections. The strength is in weak
| ties. Tell your family, friend, former coworker and update your
| linkedin.
|
| Technical people are in huge demand. Given your skills you
| should have plenty of offers without much anxiety. You'll get
| lots of non response. So it goes.
|
| Good luck
| atdrummond wrote:
| I don't mind getting a "no" and I do feel I've gotten the
| right ratio of effort per application nailed after some time.
| I just hate that most employers can't seem to bother to close
| applications in a timely manner or message candidates when
| they've chosen someone for the role. I hate twiddling my
| thumbs wondering if I am going to receive any further
| communication or not.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _Despite decades of explanations and interventions, these
| efforts have fallen short in one important way: what I call the
| assumption of free-floating mindsets. This assumption is not only
| held by researchers but also policymakers and charity workers
| engaged in well-meaning efforts to tackle poverty in rich
| countries_
|
| Not sure we need to invent new phrases here, what's being debated
| is idealism and materialism. Thinking of individual 'minds' as
| primary actors is popular because as a society we're still stuck
| in some sort of Enlightenment/Christian mix where we assume
| 'success' is the result of moral virtue, good works, reason and
| so on.
|
| People are allergic to material, systemic, biological
| explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral
| assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.
| vt85 wrote:
| calibas wrote:
| There's also the contradictory belief that there's something
| "holy" about poverty and something "evil" about material
| wealth.
|
| Taking contradictory positions means you cover all bases, and
| can argue either point when convenient, though it creates some
| hellish cognitive dissonance for the people trying to make
| sense of it...
| classified wrote:
| "I'm rich because I deserve it" feels a lot better than "I'm
| rich because I happened to win some unfair lottery". The latter
| will always be a tough sell. And the brand of Christianity
| prevalent in the U.S. is especially prone to the former.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The most important part of any system is how people feel
| about it.
|
| If people _feel_ it 's just and good, and that good for
| others begets good for them, then they are more likely to be
| and do good.
|
| No law, no tax, no specific policy, will ever have as much
| power over how well things are going for everyone as the
| zeitgeist itself does.
|
| It's better for all of us if we believe people get rich
| because they deserve it, and if we don't believe it, we need
| to do what we need to do to get us back to feeling that way.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Suppose some rich people actually got rich by dishonesty,
| exploitation and selfishness. Believing that rich people
| get rich because they deserve it will then mean either (1)
| believing that dishonesty, exploitation and selfishness are
| good or (2) believing a bunch of falsehoods about how those
| rich people got rich.
|
| #1 is clearly harmful, to the individuals involved and to
| society as a whole. #2 is probably also harmful, not so
| much because it matters what everyone thinks about how
| particular rich people got that way as because believing
| _those_ falsehoods probably means believing a bunch of
| _other_ falsehoods about, e.g., how business and society
| actually work, and it 's probably bad if everyone believes
| a lot of false things about that.
|
| Suppose some rich people actually got rich mostly by good
| luck. Believing that rich people get rich because they
| deserve it will then mean overlooking the importance of
| luck, and believing that people who _don 't_ get rich
| deserve not to be, and probably to believing that people
| who are poor deserve to be poor.
|
| That's harmful because it begets a lack of sympathy towards
| others in need.
|
| There are no doubt positive effects too; e.g., if you think
| that hard work reliably makes people rich then you may be
| more likely to work hard, and maybe it's good for society
| if everyone is willing to work hard. (Though I have my
| doubts about how well that sort of self-deception can
| actually be expected to work.) But it's _not at all
| obvious_ , at least to me, that the overall effects are
| good, because of harms like the ones I described above.
|
| (... Maybe you were being sarcastic, in which case I
| apologize for missing your point. But it looks to me as if
| you meant what you wrote.)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > It's better for all of us if we believe people get rich
| because they deserve it, and if we don't believe it, we
| need to do what we need to do to get us back to feeling
| that way.
|
| If you mean that in a sense where we should be doing all in
| our power to make sure that only those deserving enough get
| rich (comabtting corruption, stripping people of ill-gotten
| fortunes, preventing trust building and unfair competition,
| removing money from politics, stopping government welfare
| for the rich, etc) so that the ideal is closer to reality,
| than I agree.
|
| However, most people supporting this world view want to do
| just the opposite: take it as a given that rich people are
| deserving of their wealth, and so using all of societies
| resources to help the rich to get richer, since by
| definition they are most worthy. This is a deeply dangerous
| and disgusting tactic that has been causing significant
| harm to societies all over the world.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > If you mean that in a sense where we should be doing
| all in our power to make sure that only those deserving
| enough get rich (comabtting corruption, stripping people
| of ill-gotten fortunes, preventing trust building and
| unfair competition, removing money from politics,
| stopping government welfare for the rich, etc) so that
| the ideal is closer to reality, than I agree.
|
| That's what I was getting at yes.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The latter will always be a tough sell. And the brand of
| Christianity prevalent in the U.S. is especially prone to the
| former._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
|
| And then there's the Book of Job:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job
| hackernewds wrote:
| > biological explanations of poverty
|
| That's brave territory. But nonetheless, we shouldn't be
| prevented from discussing, let alone researching it.
|
| Naval Ravikant talks about this quite a bit, - universities
| escalated to establish themselves to higher levels of truth-
| authority since the 50s given the objectiveness and fruits of
| hard sciences, (physics, biology, chemistry, microeconomics).
| However, now soft social "sciences" such as Gender studies and
| macroeconomics (you know it's not a hard science because it
| says Science behind it) have bullied their way to the front.
| Wherein, the hard sciences are being displaced yet cemented
| with the same aforementioned authority - but with the
| reluctance, or even sabotage to objectively discuss, let alone
| research dissenting ideas.
|
| Especially under duress is Evolutionary Biology, here is a
| prime example -
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...
| rilezg wrote:
| Regarding the linked article, I feel it is important to
| clarify that the field under duress is 'Behavioral Genetics',
| not 'Evolutionary Biology' (the former may be considered a
| sub-field of the latter, but I think it is important to be
| clear as much of the controversy lies in attempts to use DNA
| to explain/predict the personality/behavior of a modern
| individual).
|
| I am also curious why you consider microeconomics is a 'hard'
| science? As someone with a BA in economics (truly the
| pinnacle of academic understanding), I would not consider it
| any less wishy-washy than macroeconomics (both of which are
| 'soft social sciences', in my view).
|
| I can appreciate that social sciences are often vague and
| messy and never seem to offer universal truths, but, when
| trying to understand human behavior, I also feel it is
| important to say that we live in a society. At least for me,
| I truly believe much of my behavior and habits are dictated
| by what I learned from the people around me and the stories I
| have been exposed to throughout life. And then some academic
| comes along and claims to understand who I am and who I will
| be and that it is all encoded in my DNA? It will take a lot
| more than wishy-washy social-science statistical analysis to
| convince me of that. Sure, there could be a discussion about
| fate and free will, but I do not see much use in that, I
| certainly do not see the need to bring DNA into the
| conversation, and I definitely do not want the government
| looking to genetics for solutions.
| slibhb wrote:
| ...or we just assume that, on average, good works, reason, and
| virtue are a good strategy in the long run whether or not they
| necessarily lead to success (or are a prerequisite for it).
|
| > People are allergic to material, systemic, biological
| explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral
| assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.
|
| Really? Because I hear a lot of people talking about systemic
| explanations for everything. Doesn't seem to help anyone. Score
| one for the Christians as far as I'm concerned.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > I hear a lot of people talking about systemic explanations
| for everything
|
| I agree. All anyone does is talk. So many YouTubes and
| Podcasts talking but nothing changing. The time for talking
| is over.
|
| And I agree, Christians are one group of people who tend to
| act instead of talk. The Franciscans are a good example.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| [deleted]
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I have no idea how to parse "score one for the Christians"
| Christians are a large group that cover a lot of mutually
| exclusive beliefs. Heck, some Christian sects believe that
| material prosperity is a direct reflection of how good you
| are, and others that voluntary poverty is the highest virtue.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| > I hear a lot of people talking about systemic explanations
| for everything. Doesn't seem to help anyone.
|
| Those supporting a systematic approach raised the child tax
| credit in the US, lifting over 3 million children out of
| poverty last year. It helped them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That's just a fine example of trying to get the best bang
| for the buck. Thinking you can even _have_ a "systematic
| approach" to either explaining or mitigating something as
| complex as poverty, deprivation and marginalization can
| only be described as the highest sort of arrogance.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > something as complex as poverty
|
| What is complex about poverty? They just need money. Just
| give them money and there is no more poverty. What is
| holding us back from doing this? Is it fear that people
| will become lazy and just "take" from others and
| contribute nothing?
|
| Most of you have not idea what it is like living in
| Poverty. Real poverty. The depression and lack of
| motivation comes from people not caring about you. You
| have no idea the energy you get when you feel like a
| society cares about you.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You
| directly give everyone the base resources necessary to
| lead a dignified life. Some people instead prefer to
| create narrowly-targeted means-tested programs
| incentivizing hypothesized third-order economic effects
| to improve some abstract wellness metric twenty years in
| the future. The reason why they do this is because it's
| cheaper, of course, but someone trying to change the
| course of a stream with the perfectly-placed stone will
| always believe the task is impossibly complicated.
| coolso wrote:
| > Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You
| directly give everyone the base resources necessary to
| lead a dignified life.
|
| I guess even the most complex, difficult things can be
| accomplished, if only we just do them. Becoming a
| millionaire is simple, just have someone give you a
| million dollars. Being a CEO is quite simple, just get
| hired as one and make smart decisions that are good for
| the company.
|
| I mean there's a lot more involved, not just in robbing
| the non-poor to give freebies to the poor, but also all
| of the societal and economical and all sorts of other
| consequences they could have that, non-real-world studies
| that prove nothing aside (countless times we are told
| something will be so, but then it's not - we do, however,
| have centuries of failed socialist and communist history
| giving us red flags), are quite likely to happen.
| geodel wrote:
| Agreed. I now have clear path in front of me to be
| neurosurgeon, mathematicians, astronaut and so on.
| ahelwer wrote:
| There were 37.2 million people living below the poverty
| line in the USA in 2020[1]. The 2021 budget for the US
| military was 705.4 billion dollars[2]. Let's be
| anomalously generous to the military industrial complex
| and only cut that in half, to $352.7 billion dollars -
| about matching the combined military spending of both
| China and Russia (combined population 1.5 billion
| people). We can direct the other $352.7 billion dollars
| toward those people in poverty, giving them around
| $10k/person/year every year.
|
| I challenge you to come up with a reason not to do this
| that is not psychopathic.
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo
| /p60-27...
|
| [2] https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/FY2021-Defense-
| Budget/
| carapace wrote:
| The word you're looking for is _hubris_.
|
| The systematic mind looks for the systematic approach. It
| doesn't help to fault them (policy-makers and their
| constituents) for it, at least if you're trying to bring
| them to Jesus. They're going to pull on the levers they
| can reach, eh?
| gjm11 wrote:
| Somewhere in this subthread, confusion has arisen between
| "systemic" (arising from, or affecting, a system as a
| whole) and "systematic" (methodical, using a fixed
| procedure, consistent).
|
| Saying that the causes of poverty are _systemic_ (i.e.,
| it 's not so much that some people have character or
| habits or whatever that make them poor, as that our
| society is structured in a way that ensures that a lot of
| people will be poor) has nothing to do with saying that
| it should be attacked in a _systematic_ way (i.e., that
| we should apply some consistent procedure to deal with
| poverty when we find it).
| carapace wrote:
| I think we all meant "systemic" (I know I did, I just
| didn't want to switch back because I thought it might add
| to the confusion) but I'm glad you brought it up and
| clarified the point.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Well, if zozbot234 meant "systemic" then I have no idea
| how
|
| > Thinking you can even have a "systematic approach" to
| either explaining or mitigating something as complex as
| poverty, deprivation and marginalization can only be
| described as the highest sort of arrogance.
|
| makes sense; I can understand how someone might think
| that looking for a _systematic_ approach to something
| very complex is arrogant, but not how they would think
| the same about a _systemic_ approach.
|
| I'll gladly take your word for it that you did mean
| "systemic" but I confess that I'm then not sure what a
| "systemic mind" would be that "takes a [systemic]
| approach".
|
| (My guess, for what it's worth, had been that
| fineIllregister probably _meant_ "systemic" even though
| they _wrote_ "systematic", that zozbot234 followed
| fineIllregister in writing "systematic" but also _meant_
| "systematic", and that since you were responding to
| zozbot234 you probably meant "systematic" too.)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| For the record, I fully agree that a lot of poverty out
| there is _systemic_. Look at North Korea, maybe contrast
| it to South Korea then try to tell me that they don 't
| have widespread systemic poverty. Look at the latest
| garden-variety tin-pot dictatorship in Africa or
| elsewhere and try to tell me the same thing. The
| individual alone explains pretty much zilch; every single
| one of us in the developed West is living in an
| incredibly complex society featuring a huge variety of
| institutional arrangements of all kinds.
|
| There's no reason to think that these institutional
| factors don't affect social and economic outcomes;
| indeed, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary! (And
| it would be just as arrogant to think that the
| institutional arrangements prevailing in a random Western
| country as of 02022 are already "optimized" in any sense.
| So yes, there is room for some meaningful improvement.)
| aunty_helen wrote:
| I think you've misinterpreted what the author meant by a free-
| floating midset.
|
| If I said to you, you'll be more successful if adopt
| materialism and you go and do it without relation to your
| environment as a budist monk, that would be an example of a
| free-floating mindset.
|
| The point the author is trying to raise, is that you can't just
| tell someone to adapt an entreprenurial go-getter mindset
| because the environment they're in isn't well suited to that.
| Effectively, they are saying the poor are well adapted and it's
| our point of view of the poor which is wrong.
|
| To better help people in these situations we need to change
| tact from the "I'm sucessful, be like me" approach.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It's more complicated than this. There is some truth to both
| sides of the equation and it is true that we currently
| overwhelmingly blame poor individuals for their problems and
| largely fail to recognize that there just isn't enough to go
| around of some things.
|
| We need to do a better job of putting in a floor for all people
| such that there are limits to how low you can fall even if
| everything goes wrong and we need to do a better job of lowering
| barriers to moving between classes. It's currently too easy to
| fall in the US and too hard to get back up.
|
| The right mental models, attitudes, etc can be helpful in problem
| solving. Some problems are intractable (hard to make progress
| against and require many years to solve) even if you do
| everything right. Some kinds of resources are in limited supply
| such that, yes, some lucky few can readily get out but some will
| not even if they "do everything right."
|
| The best thing we can do as a society is focus on solving that
| last one: Try to make more resources available of certain kinds
| such that there is enough to go around to establish a floor from
| which people have some reasonable hope of being able to be self
| determining.
| k__ wrote:
| That floor is always an issue, even in countries with a better
| than average social system.
|
| Here in Germany, they will cut your financial aid if you aren't
| willing to take every shitty job you get offered. This leads to
| companies who prey on the poorest, because they know they have
| to take their crappy jobs.
| efdee wrote:
| If there is a job you are physically and mentally capable of
| doing, why should you not be forced into doing it instead of
| just sitting at home and expecting 'the system' to pay for
| you?
|
| Wouldn't the correct answer to your problem be laws that put
| lower limits on what acceptable jobs are, rather than not
| expecting people to take whatever job there is for them if
| they can't find anything better?
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > If there is a job you are physically and mentally capable
| of doing, why should you not be forced into doing it
| instead of just sitting at home and expecting 'the system'
| to pay for you?
|
| Yours is an entirely ideological point of view. There is no
| reason to believe people would just sit at home and wait
| for the system to pay them. Even if someone did just sit at
| home, you have to prove that that would be worse overall
| than having many others' needs ignored.
|
| We already have a class of people who "sit" expecting the
| system to pay them: it's the rich. We already practice
| socialism for the rich, giving incredible amounts of public
| money to companies in tax cuts and subsidies, it's time we
| do socialism for the poor as well.
| efdee wrote:
| I'm not sure your "we" is the same as my "we". I live in
| an European "socialist" country with a well functioning
| healthcare and welfare system. I have lots of sympathy
| for people who are experiencing some downtime in their
| life. I understand that might not have been obvious from
| my comment.
|
| I'm not sure I understand you when you say there is no
| reason to believe people are sitting at home waiting for
| the system to pay them. Considering we are talking about
| people who are unable to find a job and not willing to do
| the jobs that are available, who are healthy and not at
| home because of some condition - who exactly are we
| talking about?
|
| Your last paragraph sounds very worrisome but not
| something I feel my "we" are experiencing. We do a lot of
| socialism for the poor and we tax our rich quite heavily.
| Not saying it couldn't be better, but I feel you're
| approaching this from a very US-centric point of view.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| I tend to think internationally, so when I refer to "we"
| I mean pretty much everyone. I'm Italian anyway so I also
| live in the "socialist" Europe, nevertheless this year we
| gave away EUR50B in companies' subsidies and less than
| EUR10B in subsidies to citizens. At the same time the
| class divide grows wider, while most people this year
| struggle to even pay the bills. Perhaps you live in
| northern Europe, in that case your country definitely has
| higher standards of life, but I don't think north Europe
| is really representative of the world's situation.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Because that's slavery.
| pc86 wrote:
| There's a somewhat prevalent mindset here in the US that it's
| better to have a lot of honestly down-on-their-luck, "not-
| their-fault" poor and impoverished people struggle in order
| to avoid buying one meal or one nice jacket for the
| freeloader who simply doesn't feel like getting a job. I
| imagine even in countries with good social safety nets that
| you have a certain contingent of people who feel the same
| way.
| Tiny-rolleyes wrote:
| nickdothutton wrote:
| There's no better time in history to be poor, at least in a
| functioning society. You get police, fire service, in many
| European countries a health service, relatively inexpensive
| telecommunications, and a device in your pocket... or smart TV
| with access to most of the sum of knowledge of mankind for you to
| use to improve your life. Not only this but in with west... the
| absence of war.
| tombh wrote:
| Poverty is not an unfortunate side effect of civilisation.
| Indeed, economic gradient is the fundamental _basis_ of
| civilisation.
|
| I've been reading a lot about World Systems Theory (inspired
| almost entirely by books from r/AskHistorians). Particularly at
| the moment, Ian Morris' "Why the West Rules, for Now". It's
| abundantly clear that at least on the macro level, classes,
| countries and civilisations escape poverty all the time. See
| civil wars, revolutions and the beneficiaries of collapsed
| empires for example. The simple fact is that poverty is escaped
| by sheer brute force, not by virtue.
|
| In the archetypical confrontation between Malcolm X and Martin
| Luther King, I side with X. The idea that poverty can be managed
| from within society's formal power structures is an eternal
| carrot of carefully calibrated false hope. The idea that we can
| fix poverty is itself what perpetuates it. The idea of the
| possibility of overcoming poverty serves more as a means to
| ignore the fact that civilisation is fundamentally dependent on
| economic gradients.
|
| The West embraced economic gradient and lifted itself out of
| poverty with the brute forces of colonialism. China is now doing
| the same and will most likely overtake the West. We all know this
| hard truth about escaping poverty, let's not pretend otherwise.
| slibhb wrote:
| The article is reiterating a dictum of Marx: being determines
| consciousness. Your mental state is determined by your physical
| being (generally your economic circumstances) and therefore
| cannot be responsible for your physical being.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's not easy for the poor
| to simply adopt "healthy mindsets" and behavior patterns. I also
| doubt giving people money is going to be much help. We don't have
| good strategies to help people out of "intergenerational poverty
| traps".
|
| Also, I find the argument against "victim blaming" silly. Whether
| or not your the circumstances of your life are your fault, they
| are your repsonsibility. Who else should be responsible for your
| life?
| sethammons wrote:
| > Also, I find the argument against "victim blaming" silly.
| Whether or not your the circumstances of your life are your
| fault, they are your repsonsibility. Who else should be
| responsible for your life?
|
| This stands out to me too. I've always told my kids that they
| are responsible for everything that happens to them, including
| by chance.
|
| I get downvotes for that view a lot. It baffles me.
| gjm11 wrote:
| What exactly does it mean, for you, to say that a person is
| responsible for a thing?
|
| To me it means things like: you can reasonably be blamed if
| it's bad and praised if it's good; you have/had the ability
| to influence it a lot; someone wanting it changed would be
| well advised to go to you for help; it's the way you wanted
| things to be, or at least a predictable consequence of the
| way you wanted things to be.
|
| If something happens to me _by chance_ then by definition I
| didn 't have the power to make it different, there's no point
| praising or blaming me for it; it has nothing to do with what
| I wanted.
|
| (There are intermediate cases. Suppose I deliberately created
| a situation where a particular thing was more likely to
| happen, and it happened. Even if the processes leading to the
| thing happening were random, I could still be somewhat
| responsible for it. That's why there are laws around things
| like recklessness and negligence.)
|
| If you reckon that _everything_ that happens to you is your
| responsibility, it sounds as if you mean something very
| different by "responsible". But what?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| How are they responsible for what happens by chance? Do you
| worry your kids will grow up to idolize lottery winners? How
| do you think this attitude helps them?
| NateEag wrote:
| It teaches them independence and agency.
|
| As far as I can tell, my choices for dealing with
| injustices and terrible coincidences in life are:
|
| 1) to assume someone else is responsible to solve the
| problems for me, or
|
| 2) to assume I am responsible to solve my problems.
|
| The former winds up leaving me bitter and angry with others
| in my life for not doing their job and taking care of my
| problems.
|
| The latter helps me develop a sense of agency and helps me
| cope better with injustices and uncontrollable hardships in
| my life.
|
| In this perspective, "fault" means "who caused this
| problem?", while "responsibility" means "who should try to
| solve the problem?"
|
| Thus, taking responsibility for your problems doesn't mean
| assuming guilt for their existence.
|
| This also applies in an inverse way to fortunate
| coincidences - in your lottery example, this mindset would
| say "I did not earn this money, so I'm not going to take
| pride in having won it, but I am responsible to use this
| money well."
|
| This attitude also doesn't mean absolving wrongdoers of the
| harm they've done. Taking responsibility for healing the
| hurts others have done you may often include telling third
| parties about the harm and seeking help in repairing the
| injustice and preventing similar ones for potential future
| victims.
|
| As that implies, "taking responsibility" for your problems
| also doesn't mean solving your problems solo. If help is
| offered, take it! If you need help, ask for it!
|
| Just don't sit around waiting for someone else to deal with
| the hardships and problems for you, because that leads to
| despondency, disempowerment, and hopelessness.
|
| That's how this has worked in my life, anyway. I really
| wish I'd been raised with this idea - I didn't encounter it
| until my mid-thirties, and it was a significant discovery
| for me.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I've grown very suspicious of utilitarian mindsets which
| essentially function by deluding yourself into something
| useful rather than truth being the motivating factor.
| Some people are actually disempowered and hopeless and
| delusions of agency are going to just inflict psychic
| harm upon them. I've seen severely disabled people take
| care of from cradle to grave for instance, trying to get
| them to take responsibility when bad things happened to
| them was just cruel typically.
|
| I've been in situations in my own life where my situation
| was literally hopeless and I had to simply wait to get
| beaten badly enough that the authorities around me
| couldn't ignore it. There was no third party to consult,
| no future victims to prevent (terrible burden to put on
| people by the way), no help to be had, I really had no
| real options. Sometimes all you can do is bide your time
| and taking responsibility is a stamina sapping waste of
| energy.
|
| Agency isn't simply a thought exercise and it's not
| productive to simply just imagine that you have it.
| Taking the bitterness and anger you have at others not
| doing their jobs and directing those impulses inwards is
| hazardous and should be approached with caution.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > dictum of Marx
|
| Marx's studies show that the existence of unemployment in those
| not disabled was a category created when the capitalist ruling
| class displaced the feudal ruling class (
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). One
| purpose of it is as a wedge in the "lutte" of a worker creating
| wealth - between the worker keeping the wealth they created in
| wages, or it being sent as a dividend of profit to an heir.
|
| More importantly, Marx noted what is quite obvious, but not in
| the quotidian hegemonic discourse - that the idea that a mine
| worker is poor as he does not own the mine he creates wealth
| in, whereas the heir is rich, as he does own the mine the
| worker creates wealth in, is fetishism. The focus on ownership
| of objects as opposed to human relationships is fetishism.
| There is a _relationship_ between the worker and the heir,
| there is an expropriation of the surplus labor time of the
| worker by the heir. This focus on various objects is fetishism.
| It begins to reach its zenith in the modern age with concepts
| like intellectual property.
|
| So this discussion is in this context. There are those in the
| poverty class, and those in the class of heirs, and a
| professional/managerial class and a semi-skilled working class,
| and these classes have relations to one another. The class
| mindset of the various classes flows from their relationship to
| one another in the context of the means of production.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Money is practically the only thing that does help, not that
| people won't find some way to reallocate that money into their
| own pockets in a hurry. Most poverty reduction schemes are a
| way for the privileged to put themselves inbetween the poor and
| the money on the grounds that the poor would spend all their
| money on drugs or something.
| multjoy wrote:
| >I also doubt giving people money is going to be much help.
|
| Except the research shows that this is the easiest and quickest
| way to alleviate poverty.
| slibhb wrote:
| If you measure poverty by "how much money someone has," this
| is obviously true. I'm not convinced giving people money
| alleviates "intergenerational poverty traps". I'm not against
| welfare. Giving people money alleviates their suffering, I
| just don't think it will solve the fundamental problem.
| quacked wrote:
| I believe you are completely correct; one often remarked-
| upon example is lottery winners, who receive a massive lump
| sum and often end up broke anyway. This is not due to the
| nature of the lottery cash, but the nature of the people
| who buy lottery tickets.
|
| I don't know what the parent commenter's life is like so I
| hesitate to cast too much doubt, but I have found that
| people who mentally model "the poor" as "essentially like
| the rich, but without access to resources" have never spent
| a great deal of time interacting with or relying on poor
| people (or rich people, for that matter.) [1] In general,
| there is a far greater poverty of culture and spirit among
| the "wealthy-country poor" than any middle-class or rich
| person who hasn't experienced it can imagine. These are
| people whose great-grandparents were robbed of societal
| status through offshoring or legal mayhem, and whose
| subsequent offspring lived in derelict, unprincipled
| circumstances for decades as the country crumbled around
| them, and that doesn't even touch the trouble of drugs.
|
| There are many poor people for whom hard cash would
| transform their lives and the lives of future generations,
| but by and large these are not the poor people committing
| the majority of crime and decay visible to the upper
| classes. For the majority of the "troublesome poor", you
| could stick them in mansions with bank accounts stocked for
| six generations, and in two years you'd still have trashed,
| overgrown real estate and overdraft fees. [2]
|
| [1] = This is specifically restricted to the poor in
| wealthy nations; poverty in the form of "living poor in the
| wild country of my ancestors" is different than poverty in
| the form of "living poor in a wealthy city", which is why
| dirt-poor immigrants to the US often succeed immediately--
| their principles and convictions are set up for success,
| they just needed access to easy money.
|
| [2] = The analogy I most like to use is the bathrooms at my
| old high school; due to a series of naive clerical
| decisions, the advanced classes took place on the highest
| floor of the school, and the basic, remedial classes on the
| ground floor of the school. The bathrooms on the third
| floor were mostly clean and working, while the bathrooms on
| the first floor were perpetually filthy, broken, and
| covered in graffiti. They were each cleaned at the same
| rate, but the users of the first floor bathrooms grew up
| with expectations of trash and graffiti, and thus
| perpetuated their own dispiriting environment. Money or
| access to cleaner bathrooms wouldn't have changed their
| behavior; only a deliberate and manual restructuring of
| their value systems would, and that is not a hands-off
| task.
| multjoy wrote:
| This is possibly the most condescending piece of nonsense
| I've ever read on HN, and that's saying something.
| bassetian wrote:
| hsn915 wrote:
| > It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to
| perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and
| challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace?
|
| I'm reading a few books on Adlerian psychology (albeit in
| Japanese: [Xian wareruYong Qi ] , [Lie Deng Gan toRen Jian Guan
| Xi ] , [Yong Qi dukenoFang Fa ] ) and this pragraph strikes me as
| very characteristics of Adlerian psychology.
|
| > There's one problem: mindsets are not free-floating. They are
| neither optional strategies that everyone can freely adopt nor
| value-neutral ways of enhancing wellbeing. Instead, they are
| embedded in life conditions that have material, social and
| ideological dimensions, and this is just as true for those of us
| living in poverty as it is for the rest of us living in financial
| comfort.
|
| This is not a helpful mindset. "My situation sucks". ok, maybe.
| But you should not be searching for external causes. You should
| be thinking about what you can do with what you have.
|
| As far as I could gather, Adlerian therapy focuses on
| "encouragement" in the form of getting you to be comfortable with
| yourself ("like" and "accept" yourself) and cultivating a sense
| of "contribution" to others. Having a positive self worth makes a
| huge difference in how you respond to situations.
|
| > (will your child need a new school uniform, or will your car
| need repairs?).
|
| This strikes me as _very_ strange. You have children, and you
| have a car, but you are "at the bottom of the socioeconomic
| ladder"?
| whack wrote:
| It's odd that the article depicts poverty as an inescapable trap,
| when this is empirically false. There are countless examples of
| people who have transcended poverty to either achieve tremendous
| success, or more realistically, middle-class status. People who
| have a great deal in common, and took specific steps motivated by
| specific ways of thinking, which led to their success. Why would
| you not want to share these recipes with others who could benefit
| from them? If you're a school teacher, why on earth would you not
| want to tell your students to study hard so they can go to
| University or trade school and build a good life for themselves?
|
| I agree with the author that children living in poverty deserve a
| better social safety net, lower crime, and better public
| schooling. We need to improve our system to better serve those in
| need. But this doesn't mean we can't also teach kids the existing
| demonstrable pathways that can lead them to success.
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