Actually, your statement is such a common (and cruel) myth that there's a there's a whole episode in the series debunking it. You should listen to it.
The poor choose not to work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/archive/a-prof... http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
Single motherhood is strongly correlated with poverty: http://www3.uakron.edu/schulze/401/readings/singleparfam.htm
The poor commit lots of crimes, including crimes with no economic motive (wife beating, rape): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
The poor also disproportionately do drugs: https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/2013MHDetTab...
Step 1 in making a methodological critique of a study is to actually read the study.
Survey does not mean what you think it means. If you read this they are going to defend the method as a means to track tends but not the actual numbers involved.
Surveys are a very useful tool, but because the heath care community and patient don't agree on definitions they don't represent absolute numbers well.
That doesn't imply choice. Their clearly can and is a positive correlation between working part time and being unable to find full time work.
The number which implies choice is actually in paragraph 1, however: only 35% of poor adults worked or looked for work for at least 27 weeks/year. The remainder chose to engage in other non-work activities.
... I see from another comment you've made that your actual point lies in the background information the BLS report mentions at the start (FFS, would it have killed you to say that at the outset?): 45.3M poor people, of whom only 10.5M are "working poor", from which you conclude that the others have chosen not to work. Well, let's take a look. About 14% of US senior citizens and 18% of US children are in poverty. That's about 14% of about 45M plus 18% of about 70M, or about 19M people. These are not people who have chosen not to work, but people not in a position to do so. So that leaves about 16M people of working age but not in the labour force. What else? There are about 10M people with disabilities in the US who are of working age but not in the labour force. I don't know what fraction of them are not in the labour force because their disability prevents them working, but let's suppose it's only half of those people. (I bet it's more.) That would leave 11M people in the US who are in poverty, of working age, not unable to work because of disability, and yet not in the labour force. Are all those people poor by choice? Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.) And let's suppose, optimistically given those working-poor statistics, that all of them could realistically get a job that would stop them being poor. (I bet at least half of those who could get a job couldn't get one that would actually lift them out of poverty.) That would mean that ~11M out of 45M poor people in the US are poor by choice. Less than a quarter of 'em. (My guess, as per my parenthetical comments above, is that the real figure is more like 2-3M out of 45M, but I'm being generous to you here.)
Yes, poor people commit more crimes than rich people, even crimes with no direct connection to money. May I suggest that you take five minutes and see what other explanations you can think of for that, besides "poor people are naturally bad people who do bad things"? I can think of several. Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized. If a rich person and a poor person do equal amounts of harm to others, the poor person is much more likely to go to jail.
Yes, poor people use illegal drugs more than rich people, and (you linked to a 577-page document and gave no indication of exactly what bit of it you had in mind) what may be more to the point is that when poor people use illegal drugs it's more likely to mess up their lives enough that it gets noticed. (Because the worse your situation is, the more likely it is that doing drugs makes it really bad.) Again: I suggest that you spend a few minutes really trying to think of explanations other than "poor people are stupid people who do stupid things"; I can think of several. Rather than suggesting some examples, I'll leave this one up to you completely.
None of this justifies the claim that poor people are generally poor because they choose not to do things that would stop them being poor. (It's evidence against a strawman theory that says poverty strikes completely at random and there's nothing at all anyone can do about it. I don't think anyone believes that, though.)
My guess, FWIW: There's a whole spectrum from "ample opportunity for a comfortable life, voluntarily did things that screwed that up and became poor as a result" through "difficult initial situation made it much harder to avoid poverty, failed to do so" and "became poor by whatever means, and the circumstances of poverty make it harder to make the sort of decisions that might get you out of it" to "terrible situation from the outset, never really had a chance", and there are people all along it; everyone's situation is the result of interaction between their character and their environment, and the two shape one another in any case; most comfortably off people, if suddenly made poor without other changes to their character and social networks and so forth, would get out of poverty; but most comfortably off people, if they had been dropped into a situation of poverty from childhood onward, would not have escaped; in any case, responding to poverty with "eh, it's their choice, no point trying to fix it" is not only callous and inhumane but also unlikely to be an effective way of reducing poverty.
I'm glad you could figure out this fact, stated in the first couple of paragraphs of the first study I cited, which I also explained in a comment 23 minutes before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659631
Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.)
I bet they could, even if no hablo ingles y no se permite trabajo.
Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized.
Yes, the laws against wife beating are made by people who are rich enough to afford a wife who isn't "asking for it". And I can totally see how I'd "get caught up in" raping people if I lived a stressful life of watching TV in a bad neighborhood while not working.
most comfortably off people, if suddenly made poor without other changes to their character and social networks and so forth, would get out of poverty; but most comfortably off people, if they had been dropped into a situation of poverty from childhood onward, would not have escaped;
I'm a bit confused. On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
It's evidence against a strawman theory that says poverty strikes completely at random and there's nothing at all anyone can do about it. I don't think anyone believes that, though.
That's not a straw man at all. Adriand discussed whether "anyone can go from "rags to riches"" and declared this "myth busted" based on the fact that most people don't. The only way the latter could imply the former is if all of them attempted to, but simply were unable to do so.
You are (I assume deliberately) missing my point, which is not that the law is too strict about misbehaviours characteristic of the poor but that it is too lenient about misbehaviours characteristic of the rich.
> On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
First: you might consider the possibility that I might agree with you about some things and not others. Second: there are at least two possible versions of a point similar to the one I am agreeing with. One (with which I very much do not agree) says: the reason these people are poor is because they are inferior people -- stupid, lazy, etc. -- and they neither deserve nor will profit from sympathy or financial help. The other (with which I agree, with reservations) says: for the most part, these people behave much as anyone else would if put in their circumstances from early in life; some of their troubles are caused in part by their behaviour, but that behaviour is in turn caused in part by their troubles, and by and large the troubles come first.
These two perspectives agree on at least one important point: The most effective ways of dealing with poverty will attack it systemically rather than by playing whack-a-mole with individual cases.
> Adriand discussed ...
You may not have noticed, but there were two people in that thread taking positions different from yours, and the one you were actually replying to was not adriand and wasn't making the exact same claims.
Anyway: when you say "anyone can do X", I suggest it means more than "it is not literally impossible for anyone to do X". If in one country 7% of people who start in the poorest quintile get into the richest quintile, and in another 13% do, then there is a difference between those countries in how true it is that "anyone can get rich".
Perhaps anyone can go from rags to riches, in the sense that it's not literally impossible for them to do so. But that's compatible with there being substantial obstacles in the way, and if the fraction of people who manage it is small that's evidence for (though not proof of) such obstacles.
Is 7% small enough to make it strong evidence? As it happens I'm inclined to think not; your reply to adriand wasn't the one I disagreed with and replied to. That was your reply to timr. And the claim you made there was this: It's a myth to say that it's a myth that social mobility in the US is low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
It doesn't seem to me that you've done a good job of defending that claim, which is more or less equivalent to the claim that social mobility in the US is in fact low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
If at some point you want to discuss this with attention to the actual points at issue rather than just engaging in snark and presupposing all your claims, do let me know.