The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Globalization is super nice when you're secure in your job, "hey everything is getting cheaper!" but when your job is the one in the crosshairs what you're feeling is a pressure that is pushing the living standard of the third world and yours together. That's why I find it so annoying that this board is usually against abundant H1B's but for factory outsourcing. It's completely hypocritical.
And before I get jumped on, no I'm not against all trade. What I'm for however is noting that people don't live in the long-term, economically we are firmly short-term creatures. Good policy won't give everything up for the long-term, it will also protect people in the short-term, we don't need an end to trade, we need a curtailing of some trade.
This forum is not composed of US users only. For example I live in one of those countries who benefited from opening up to foreign trade (I live in Eastern Europe) so it would be pretty hypocritical of me to complain about open markets.
As to factory outsourcing, I think it's overall a net gain for humanity. Long term there is a finite number of countries and barring societal collapse eventually they will all end up 'developed'. It simply exposes other problems in the US like our horrible social safety net and endemic corruption. So, a small ~2-5% import tax is probably a net gain for US society.
The system is almost designed intentionally to allow the abuse of workers.
At what point do you feel the USA will have enough immigrants? It's already a nation of immigrants!
Second we directly befit from a mix of immigrants from all nations.
When net migration into and out of the US approaches zero. Until that point it's about how fast we can acculturate newcomers, which judging from history is "pretty damn fast".
I believe that the best way to avoid war is to invite everyone to the table, help everyone get richer, do better, be more invested in a peaceful world. In the modern world, war is a nightmare solution.
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/wHXSXEN_EkCmuj8Jnb9I6EVD9g...
What does "enough immigrants" even mean?
The writing has been in the wall for anyone to see for decades in most of these industries. An American factory shuttering is a disappointment, but I doubt it's a surprise to anyone, including it's workers. We can make some long term sacrifices to slow the process, but to what end?
How slow is slow enough?
This is actually a problem in free countries. You do not have a cabal of elite on the throne who see themselves as the rulers forever. Consequently, long term planning is not as much of a concern. In this particular case the shareholders who pressured the CEO to move the labour overseas were only concerned with their short term gain. The politicians who might have endorsed it, were also thinking about their short term gain.
Nobody is thinking about the future until there is clear trouble on the horizon.
Globalization has very little to do with the plights of blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Old fashioned racism and a lack of jobs in sectors which aren't agriculture have a lot more to do with it.
Second, you could consider that Bubba has the ability to vote in US elections and Liu Chu doesn't. Making Liu Chu better off is a nice moral deed, making Bubba better off is not just a nice moral deed but also a political obligation.
It seems to me that if I have any obligation it would be to advocate for those that cannot advocate for themselves first.
This is the key point.
Because Bubba is a member of a lucky sperm club. It is neither good nor is it bad. It just is.
Completely open borders and completely open immigration policy result in everyone sinking to the lowest, not lowest getting to the highest.
Thinking about it we tax productive work more then capital investment, and I'm not sure if that isn't ass backwards.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-effect-low...
The problem of poverty is systemic - trying to link it to immigration confuses correlation with cause.
> Why are low-skilled immigrants a net drain on society, but not the low-skilled children or grandchildren of immigrants?
Because those children are a sunk cost: they’re already here. Why compound the problem? The demand to come to the US is far too high to simply accept anyone who can make it here. And the fact that a greater percentage of immigrants are accepting welfare vs “natives”[2] indicates that we really are compounding the problem. We should be going almost exclusively for skilled immigration, like Australia does.
1: http://www.exodus2013.co.uk/immigrants-who-returned-home/ 2: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/01/immigr...
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-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
If we want to create societies where Human Rights are respected, Free-market need to be operated under constraints. Yes, those constraints will slow growth and, maybe, some rich people will be less rich, but the other option is Neo-Feudalism and Barbarie.
So, the question is: how much injustice are we willing to tolerate for the sake of growth? Every society has a different answer, but you can easily see different models in Japan, US and Europe.
Yet in 2018, most diversity initiatives still focus on race regardless of socio-economic background.
when even rich white woman need a movement, and they do, you realize how behind schedule the US is.
Poor black people in the deep south and poor white people in the deep south still live different experiences even if they're both having a hard time. Rich african americans get treated differently from rich white people. This isn't a contest. We need to fix everything.
Isn't it though? I mean to a certain extent policy and even corporate 'diversity initiatives' are a matter of priority - first we even the ground for women, then minorities, then maybe gender id is next? I don't see the Ivy League rushing to ensure that their campus maintains wealth-diversity in the same way they ensure racial diversity. Maybe we really do need an Oppression Olympics, then we can sort out which group is most in need of help and prioritize them (I'm biased, I think it's going to be the poor.)
It's worthwhile to push your company (or university)'s race balance closer into alignment with the overall population's, and it's also worthwhile to try and strike a reasonable gender balance, in hopes that you're not locking people out of opportunities based on race or gender. It's also worthwhile to make sure there are opportunities for people from lower-income backgrounds.
The fact that some people are "losers" in this society (by modern capitalism's nature as a contest to see who can accumulate the most wealth at the expense of others) doesn't mean that diversity initiatives have to be a contest. You can run diversity initiatives with the goal of helping people who are otherwise excluded, and one of those can absolutely be aimed at helping people from low-income backgrounds.
Likewise, once someone is in the workplace, they might still need help. Maybe your standard pay scale isn't enough for a single parent with 4 kids, because he doesn't have affordable access to childcare services for his kids. Maybe one of your employees is wheelchair-bound and you could make it a lot easier for her to stay at your company if you adjusted the office floor-plan so it's easier for her to navigate.
Laws and regulations are (at least sometimes) built with this in mind, but the results will be way better if you tackle these issues directly instead of getting forced to do it by government decree.
I am neither a rich white male nor a rich black African American. Can you please elaborate on how they are treated differently?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/sport/lebron-james-racist-gra...
We saw it recently in Canada with the girl who supposedly had her hijab cut, but it ended up being a lie. Who knows why she lied, perhaps for attention, maybe her mother put her up to it.
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/29/461337958/ta-nehisi-coates-on...
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/6967/
The gist is that being a college educated, affluent son of a doctor wasn’t enough to avoid being seen as a dangerous criminal. That simply doesn’t happen to rich white men at anything like the same rates – the average mass shooter is arrested with more care than that!
Sometimes this is national news (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr...) but other times it’s just constant low-level stuff. As a white guy, I’ve never had a cab driver avoid picking me up; that’s very much not true for many black men even if they’re much better dressed.
Race correlates strongly with socioeconomic background. Insofar as diversity initiatives are actually attempting to improve the lives of disadvantaged people in this country, arguments like yours amount to relative privation.
Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background. And keeping it in economic terms has the additional plus of keeping the correlation consistent as times change.
> Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background.
This is a reasonable observation, but the ought that's implicit in it is not. Heart disease correlates more strongly with death than lung cancer; does that mean it's wrong in some sense to donate to lung cancer research over heart disease?
To make my opinion more material: individuals have the right to make independent decisions within a broad moral framework. It's not wrong for individuals to personalize the good they do (in this case, in the form of racial justice) so long as what they're doing really is good.
>> Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
> The difference is that face of diversity initiatives are zero sum.
No, they are not. Hiring someone from a disadvantaged group does not mean that you have to fire someone from a privileged group. That is what a zero-sum scenario would require.
Diversity initiatives level the playing field by increasing opportunities for one group relative to another. That doesn't necessarily mean that the disadvantaged group has more opportunities than the privileged group -- it only means that they have more than they did before.
No it requires not hiring the privileged group.
If you are hiring 1000 employees, and 10000 applied, and you've ranked them in some way, adding "diversity" to the equation means the ranking comes out different. Ranked potential employee 1307 using the pre-diversity standard, becomes employee 904 under the post-diversity standard.
But to move up that ranking, by definition, other people had to be moved out of the way. Maybe potential employee 1000, who only barely squeaked by, is now potential employee 1012, and so doesn't make the cut.
This is exactly what happens at universities.
Universities for example only have so many spots they can offer. So if a university keeps 10% of the spots for diversity candidates, then only 90% of the capacity is for diversity candidates.
Compounded with non diversity candidates applying in a disproportionately high number to diversity. And the population of non diverse having a better education. You end up making it harder for non diverse candidates and raising their bar.
You're right but that's fine. The argument though is that society has already imposed a 'higher bar' on "diverse candidates" (let's just be honest and call them minorities and the poor.) Think of it like this. A poor black girl named Keycia lives at home with her single mother and three siblings. She's studious but attends a bad public school, she works after school to help out at home, she takes care of her little brothers and sisters. Now compare to Chad, a white boy from an upper middle class family. He's also studious and also attends a public school but a good one with AP/IB classes, dual credit and so on. He doesn't work but he does play on one of the best lacrosse teams in the state and also swims.
All of which is to say it's two kids both working hard. Now, even with diversity initiatives, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford? Hell who's got a better chance of getting into Iowa State? Or even being able to attend? Diversity initiatives exist to put these two kids on even ground. That's what equality of opportunity means.
Now, with diversity initiatives that are geared against Chad and in Keycia's favour, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford?
Most diversity initiatives aren't about equal opportunities but rather equal outcomes.
Between race and socio-economic status, the later has a stronger correlation to health and so it should be used as the main indicator directing where/how to spend those healthcare dollars.
When it comes to people's health, these dollars need to be blind, or we are needlessly throwing some number of lives away each year.
Here in NL we have some homeless, but also lots of government systems in place to offer housing and incentives to possibly work or get schooling.
In the end this is actually cheaper, as to prevent crime and what not. Not sure how this would work in the US.
A slightly larger number get healthcare from Medicaid.
The assistance is not a large amount per month, but it is there.
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/distribution-of...
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spendi...
Much of the spending is on the elderly and disabled (which both group tend to have above average medical needs).
1. https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
1. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-count-2...
Maybe not even/just poor, but excluded from local economy/politics due to race, gender, ethnicity, not being a member of the old boys' club, etc.
> "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", etc.
The Republican controlled cities are giving huddled masses to the people who accept that immigration logic.
Not at all. The US has a big problem with homelessness, and for a long time we've been sticking our head in the sand.
Cities like SF have been trying to do something about it for a while, but I don't believe any city can solve the problem. This issue is greater than one city or one state. It's a national problem that requires national solutions.
It worked for SLC because SLC is isolated and expensive to travel to. In the tightly packed, interconnected megalopolises of the Bay Area, LA, and the Northeast, good luck getting anything to work long-term at just the municipal level.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Unless of course the so called progressive population does not actually care that the middle of downtown Berkeley looks like a third world country.
https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Clerk/City_Council/2015/05_M...
2017 homeless number is about 1000:
http://www.dailycal.org/2017/05/29/berkeleys-homeless-popula...
If every one of them is provided a $3k/mo apartment, it would increase the budget by 36 million.
Berkeley population is estimated at 121k
http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/berkeley-ca-popul...
20% of berkeley population lives below powerty level. So lets say it is 100k that are left.
36M/100k is what? $360 per person? There, I just solved Berkeley homeless problem at a price of less than 5 bottles of Napa Valley Cab per person who screamed at the sky in the city of Berkeley the day Trump became President Elect.
While I don't think it's an adequate idea, as it undersells the value of clannism, it's pretty easy to think of other interesting purposes for this comparison other than moral shaming. Perhaps this might've been a starting point for discussing the harms to the moral thinking which doesn't erect and police boundaries to "we".
A lot of moral discussion, in real life, on Reddit, or on HN, more or less of the same quality (as opposed to other discussions on HN) go nowhere. There is utility to discussing an objective moral calculus that multitudes can observe and negotiate.
Santa Monica seems to have successfully exported their problem to neighboring cities since then. In general, things seem to be substantially worse now.
I tried to track down this factoid. First I went to the world bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?locations=U...
which does show 1% for the US. In the notes it says " Data for high-income economies are from the Luxembourg Income Study database." My next stop was there. From http://www.lisdatacenter.org/frontend#/home I found that the source of their data was Current Population Survey (CPS) - Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) (United States). The Current Population survey has a table creator here: https://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html
Although there is nothing that quite matches the 3.2 million figure cited, the LIS did some harmonization so the most likely ultimate source is the 3.446 million people living in households that were categorized as having "no income" in 2013. This is separate from the 2.775 million people that were categorized as living in households that have "$1 to $2,499 or loss" in income.
I'm very skeptical that this is an appropriate use of this data. The world bank poverty number is supposed to be about consumption--it has to do with people consuming very little in the way of goods and services. But no one at all can live on no goods and services. They'd die of hunger and thirst in far less than a year. It could in theory be the case that millions of Americans were living on less than $1.90/day in consumption but it cannot possibly be the case that millions of Americans are living on $0/day.
To the extent that the figure cited for "no income" means anything (and isn't just noise in the data), it doesn't mean what the world bank means when it says living on $1.90/day.
So point is, maybe dollars aren't tracking what we think they're tracking?
I understand that the US isn't the primary focus of the project, nor should it be, but in the absence of good data it would be better to put N/A as it did for several other countries, rather than a misleading statistic.
There's some good information on measuring consumption starting on page 91 here: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/452741468778781879...
Well things are pretty violent already, with the deadly class war the police is fighting against the population (~1k in 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...) plus the countless arrests, macing, tasering and other violent actions of police against peaceful demonstrators, plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism). Add in the huge number of weapons circulating in the US... when the poor people (or the armed rednecks) finally feel desperate enough that will be quite a bloodbath.
If you want another comparaison, look up dog shooting in the US and in Europe, unless you really believe dogs are somewhat more dangerous in the US, the inescapable conclusion is that American cops enjoy the power trip of gunning down living creatures...
And why shouldn't they, it's almost risk free for them, which is the root of the issue.
There's two problems with this.
1) if you define "justified use of force" like Americans do, then yeah, of course it's justified, a guy pulling up his pants while being dragged on the ground is now "reaching for a weapon" so an officer is fully justified to shoot him dead. He was practically asking for it, and it shows up as such in all official statistics.
2) It doesn't explain how is it that other countries can get through the entire year without police murdering a single person, despite having the same or worse crime rates as US.
But definitely way, way more likely than in any other civilized country in the world, and that's the problem.
plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism)
"all of the violence", you listed one death. One death is a tragedy, but it's not a massively systematic problem unless we act like it is and turn it into one. You also act like there isn't such a thing as left-wing domestic terrorism. That terrorism killed more people in a single event, 7/7/16, than that nutjob running someone over did. What about the mob of nazis and anti-facists getting into fights in Berkeley? If you're not committed to one of those groups, it's just as bad. It's mob violence either way.
Nazis suck, but please try to be objective. When you frame the argument as you are, you are setting up flamebait. Some nazi will use your exaggerations against you.
It is a systematic problem. 150 incidents between 1993 and 2017, an average of 6 terrorist incidents a year or once every two months. 255 people died, 603 people were injured. Source: https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/dark-constan...
Note: this is just the violence that got counted as terrorist violence, not your ordinary Nazi running around and slapping PoC.
ordinary Nazi running around and slapping PoC
There are a lot of bigots and racists doing thaT, but unless we're being really loose with the term nazi, we don't actually have that many nazis running around.
Their worst acts were in the mid 1990s (OKC). Hell, in 1999 in Jasper, some racists lynched a man. 1999! Those people have always been around, they always will be around. There's always going to be some number of incidents. That does not mean they have real power nor should people act like they do.
This is a decent read:
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533255619/fact-check-is-left-...
I would also posit the majority of recent political violence is from the Antifa folks who believe they can shutdown their opponents through pure and simple violence.
In fact there was one act of violence attributed to all the "tea party" protests during the Obama era and that was instigated by an anti-tea party person.
For two generations political protests were virtually 100% violence-free until the current crop of kids took to the streets with their anti- trump activities.
Makes me sad really...
Meanwhile the next town over is being raped and pillaged by bears, lions, pirates and wildfires.
Two generations? So 60 years? Political protests were virtually 100% violence free? [1][2][3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Conve...
Hell, even trying to call the OKC bombing "right wing" might be a stretch. They were anti govt separatists!
Simply apply this old quote whenever you hear an "alt-righter", a "white nationalist" or a "teabagger" talking, and replace "duck" with "nazi": "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."
It's not exaggerated rhetoric when you call out that the core ideals of these groups equate those of Nazism (or fascism, but the distinction is really nitpicking). It's simply new words for old hate. These groups and their friends and supporters are as dangerous as Hitler was before rising to power!
Third parties don’t thrive in countries with first-past-the-post voting and without a tradition of coalition-making. In order for the USA to reach a point where it could have more than a two-party system, it would have to completely remake its governmental structure, and “very interesting” is an appropriate euphemism for what things would be like if it ever came to that.
This is just an symptom of economic inequality. If you do not belong to the same economic class anymore, then what might make the country better for you, might make the country worst for the other person. There is no way to avoid this.
It's one of the things that has befallen SF, where an industry funded by the city to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars a year, fails to keep a few thousand people off the street.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/06/27/despite-241-mill...
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/City-audit-finds-...
http://www.sfchronicle.com/aboutsfgate/article/Despite-money...
He didn't have valid ID and without an address it was difficult for him to get ID, without which the places he could possibly live were inaccessible.
Last fall he finally found a group home, but it was temporary, and he's back on the street again.
The system, as it's designed, is complex and requires mental resources that people living on the street just don't have.
But, the good news is that he ended up walking to the DMV (3+ miles from where I would see him) and he did get his ID. That's why he was able to get into that temporary home last year. It was a huge hurdle for him to get that ID. I can only imagine that anything that requires a lot more effort than that would be beyond his abilities.
I will say, too, that what drew me to him was that he seemed to never ask for money from anyone, but he was often present on the same block when I would walk to/from work. I started up a conversation with him and over time we became friendly, and I would buy him food when he said he needed it. It was clear there were other people helping him (much more than I was), so he often didn't have immediate needs for food. Shelter, though, that's the big issue and when I did Google searches for local shelters it was really hard to find anything I could take to him.
Work is difficult to find or even to seek if you're homeless. It's a bit of a catch-22.
If you don't have a permanent address, up to date ID, and a bank account, and a job, many of these programs may not be available to you.
But I believe these counts do not include welfare programs other than those that give you cash (like Social Security benefits including disability). Other programs offer services or restricted forms of payment, which cannot be used for saving, for purchasing other things you might need like gas or transportation, and so on.
but too little to get Obamacare subsidies
In states which haven't, you can make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to qualify for Obamacare subsidies: http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/21/news/economy/obamacare-medic...
This happened because the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn't be compelled to expand Medicaid to cover the gap, which the original legislation had depended on to make the plan work. So states which did not expand Medicaid have an income range in which you can't get Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies.
Another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231191 tried to even find the source of the number, more or less unsuccessfully. The purported origin of the statistic is the Current Population Survey, which has the following comments on "Income": "Data on consumer income collected in the CPS by the Census Bureau cover money income received (exclusive of certain money receipts such as capital gains) before payments for personal income taxes, Social Security, union dues, Medicare deductions, etc. Also, money income does not reflect the fact that some households receive part of their income in the form of non-money transfers such as food stamps, health benefits, subsidized housing, and energy assistance; that many farm households receive non-money income in the form of rent free housing and goods produced and consumed on the farm; or that non-money income is received by some nonfarm residents that often takes the form of the use of business transportation and facilities, or full or partial contributions for retirement programs, medical and educational expenses, etc. These elements should be considered when com-paring income levels. Moreover, readers should be aware that for many different reasons there is a tendency in household surveys for respondents to under report their income. From an analysis of independently derived income estimates, it has been determined that wages and salaries tend to be much better reported than such income types as public assistance, Social Security, and net income from interest, dividends, rents, etc."
The Census Bureau excludes capital gains/losses, noncash benefits, and tax credits in its usual measures of poverty: https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/guidanc...
If we had a Universal Basic Income in the United States delivered through the IRS, the Census Bureau and its poverty rate might not notice.
I wish we had more science here. The linked research points to the 1995 welfare reforms as causing a change. The way to prove effectiveness is with a well run trial - one that changes in federal policy make impossible.
Economic growth (or stagnation) is also crucial here to lower poverty rates. But all of macroeconomics suffers from the same basic measurement problem. Restated: what anti poverty program did hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese families since 1995 participate in?
You can't outsource your home to China.
Globalization does not make every day cheaper it just provides more choices and will in aggregate always increase the cost of living.
So as long as your job/income is on the right side of the rise of the cost of living you are fine but if you are on the other side with either no job or poorly paid job or as a freelancer (with no healthcare) then you are in trouble no matter how cheap flatscreen TV become.
Just saying poverty is the cop out here trying to qualify what drives this problem offers at least a way to look at the problem that doesn't end in tax the rich as that will not solve the deep poverty problem.
Even in countries like Denmark (which is where I am originally from) and who have high taxes and a high degree of redistribution of wealth, you will find people who are poor and homeless.
Add to that the discussion about relative poverty and you will have a problem that can never be solved unless you give everyone one exactly the same.
It worked pretty good even when they've been in the open. Recently we had a topic here where people were reporting about homeless people being carried out of the cities.
It seems to me that the U.S. got quite comfortable with their poor. Probably even working as an negative incentive for the (still) employed. Don't forget the American Dream too. I mean according to that: it's just their fault...they COULD have been rich!
"The U.S." in this case is not the government or institutions, but rather the people who are willing and able to help others, and how the traditional "help poor countries" wisdom should be revisited and perhaps changed to "help poor people".
Additionally low-skill people are hurting here as well and the government makes the issue worse by allowing mass immigration of low skill labor: in 2017 alone 88'000 immigrants from EU-17 countries (a record low figure) arrived, 80% of them are low skill workers. There are many more frontier commuters. Switzerland has 8mio inhabitants out of which 25% are immigrants that have not yet been naturalized. So yeah, for low skill citizens the real wages have not kept up with cost of living (obviously rent prices go up with mass immigration since government doesn't make it easy to build upwards or outwards) and in quite a few places taxes had to be increased to pay welfare for jobless migrants which has lead to quite a bit of discontent among low skill citizens. Saddest thing about this whole thing is probably the mainstream left-wing reaction to the whole issue: they want to increase or keep the current levels of low-skill immigration and at the same time tell low-skill citizens that they're voting against their own interests by voting for a right-wing anti-low-skill immigration party.
Sources: Been to Germany many times and live in Switzerland. I see them at least 5 days a week. 39k figure http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-10/deutsc... 335k figure http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sozialstatistik-immer-mehr-obd... 550k figure https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/16/homeless-cou... 88k figure https://www.sem.admin.ch/dam/data/sem/publiservice/statistik... 80% are low skill figure https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/studie-zum-arbeitsmarkt-vier-von-...
And then they're not critical about their methodology when it consistently shows that warmer countries have a larger chunk of the population that is very poor.
Perhaps it's easier to live on $4 in Spain than it is in Denmark. And perhaps it's easier to live on $4 in California than it is in Michigan...
When it comes to extreme poverty anyway, we're looking at the very tail of the bell curves, so the stats are somewhat shady there. It's not very clean to compare tail stats between countries.
The thing that can be compared is the evolution of these numbers over time. If in the US more and more people are living with less than $4 a day, that is concerning.
In all honesty, though, I'd love to hear some stories from any social workers here as to their beliefs are regarding the extreme lows of poverty and maybe fix it.
I think we've all heard that we should change drug policy, expand government service for mental health and treatment, but does anyone have any other we don't normally hear about?
Sure there is a reason, it is called hyperinflation.
Poverty is a stable, default state, everything else requires constant effort and standing the competition.
I'm not sure what you meant by standing, but while competition may be a requirement for generating and amassing greater wealth, it's not a requirement to keep people from poverty.
We get our wealth by standing on the shoulders of giants. The poor deserve the fruits of the labors of those giants just as much as the rest of us do.
Who's stopping them?
I think a lot of Star Trek fans share this fantasy... but what makes it impossible?
This is a silly line of reasoning. As more people grow wealthy, we find more ways to systematically mistreat those who have not. It's not just that the poor started poor and stayed that way, it's that the rest of us find ways to make things even harder for them as our comparative wealth grows. Being poor is most definitely a bad thing.
This is clearly wrong.
On the question of why some flourish and others do not, I think you're just echoing the point that has persisted through this entire thread.
This is your entire statement. If you're wondering why some are able to flourish while others aren't, getting hung up on the technicalities of a pointless statement is a poor start. We know that people are born under various circumstances ranging from remarkably poor to exceptionally rich, and we know that's the best indicator of future wealth. Yes, they have to inherit the money at some point, but they grow up experiencing the benefits (and drawbacks) of that wealth - whether or not it's in their names.
Health of mother - Advantage. Mother being able to take care of child in the early years - Advantage. Dad present - Advantage. Encouraging, safe home environment - Advantage. Parents that expect and encourage excellence (sports, academic) - Advantage. Never going hungry - Advantage. Going to schools with resources and good teachers - Advantage. Going to good college - Advantage. Parents connections (business and academic) - Advantage.
These advantages compound.
There will be outliers with none or only some of this who still happen to make it. They are not common, and not proof that the system works as intended.
Not even close to true... Simply look at socioeconomic status across generations.
I don't think the distinction of "babies have $0" is relevant when considering all the other potential advantages. What are you getting at with that claim? I don't think it's particularly clear, judging by the other replies.
It’s crazy how many think they have a monopoly on intelligence by virtue of being able to tell the machine what to do.
A logical statement in isolation is seen as sufficient to win arguments (like “babies have no money at birth”).
Wow, thanks Socrates, now I see the light. The scales have fallen from my eyes.
EDIT:
Furthermore, originally you stated:
> The fact remains that everyone starts with nothing
It's already been illustrated this is false. If you believe quality of life at birth is different, then by definition, everyone does not start off with nothing, or zero. People start off with the qualities possessed at birth.
Technically, I made the point. I'm not sure how I can miss my own point? Granted, I may have poorly phrased it leading to others missing the point, which is my bad, but if you're not going to try and let me clarify, I'm not sure what we're doing here?
> The point is that the quality of life upon birth is different.
Sure. I cannot disagree with that, but it's miles away from this conversation.
> It's already been illustrated this is false.
I'm afraid I still don't see it. That point was made in reference to earlier discussion specifically about wealth (again, something you measure on a balance sheet, not factors like fetal health). Their parents might have wealth that can be transferred to the child, but that is not the same as starting with wealth.
We (as a society) have hospitals available which greatly decrease infant mortality. We have widely available nutrition that keeps people from starving. These are steps that we, as a society, have taken to improve upon the default state (having nothing) of humans--including fetal health. Perhaps rather than focusing on how to make people in poverty more comfortable, we should focus on how to get them out of poverty.
That's not the same as claiming all people start on a level playing field.
Why do people insist on believing nonsense?
> Why do people insist on believing nonsense?
Why are people trying to twist this discussion into things it never was?
What you should not say is that "they both start off with nothing". Wealth is more than money. In fact, wealth literally just means an abundance of possessions; prosperity. What dictionary are you using that says wealth is only measured by dollars in a bank account?
By the way, the article specifically mentions health, so...
But wealth isn't an amount in a bank account? Given the earlier context of this thread, I felt my comment should have been clear enough, but granted textual communication can be difficult (especially for emotional topics where many have their response composed well in advance) and clearly I failed. I tried to clarify it on several other occasions before you commented, so any errors in conveying my original message should have been resolved before you posted yours, no?
> Wealth is more than money
Money being only a tool of measurement, I think that is a given. But that is like saying that the weather is more than temperature. Sure, but what are we supposed to take from that?
The claim is societal. We (as humans) started out with nothing. Over thousands of years, we built religions, governments, businesses, laws, science, and everything else, which ultimately resulted in a lot of us having a lot better quality of life. But our default state (as humans) is to have nothing. That some people are still in poverty shouldn't be seen like a disease to be treated--it should be seen as a condition all humans effectively default to. They just haven't benefited from all the systems and processes we've built that the rest of us have, and we should figure out how to get them to (or modify our systems so they do).
Again: This is in no way claiming each person starts on a level playing field.
If you change "nothing", with "no possessions, talents, abilities, or skills", which is the same thing, then you'll see why what you're saying is illogical.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Have you read a history book? At one point humans were in caves, with effectively no possessions and terrible lives. That was poverty, and it affected everyone. Whether or not one cave man was born smarter than the other is irrelevant.
Over time, we developed all of these systems that made life better for the vast majority of us, yet some of us still live in poverty, because the default human state is to have nothing. That in no way implies a level playing field among two different people born today.
> If you change "nothing", with "no possessions, talents, abilities, or skills", which is the same thing, then you'll see why what you're saying is illogical.
You're still missing the point. I don't know how I can rephrase this in a way that won't be intentionally misinterpreted.
I can’t imagine how much worse the people in the articles have it at 1/10th the income in a harsher climate.
Let's go one step further and declare that being dead is the default state. The time when we live is so short compared to the time we are not born yet or dead that it is insignificant.
"You" are not dead. It's not an active state, it's not something that happens to you, or an experience you have.
/Death/ as a transition happens to you, as a momentary thing, then you cease to be.
"They died" is OK. "They are dead" implies a continuing presence and continuing experience which isn't precise.
Dead is not the default state, because it's not a state of you, because there's no you for it to be a state of.
Edit: or dead. Recent example: http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/23/homeless-man-died-days-council...
Maybe the worst part of it is that those very people don't even understand that they are doing any of that because they have been manipulated and lied to about both the causes and solutions as they have ever increasingly been drawn into a cult in which up is down, left is right, and only the con job leaders benefit from it. When you have fixed, preconceived notions about outcomes, don't be surprised that you cannot achieve them with the existing variables. You end up having to bend and manipulate and rig and patch things ever increasingly and more bizarrely in order to maintain the desired end state or outcome that the system becomes ever more unstable and fragile. See the mid aughts housing fraud, aka, housing bubble for reference. The conclusion was that house prices can only go up, so everything was subsequently rigged through self-perpetuating incentives to support that fixed assumed outcome. Precisely what keeps us repeatedly doing the things that have no effect on the desired outcome. But at least it supports a huge non-profit industry complex that perpetuates itself under the guise of "helping" .... itself to your money.
It's quite frustrating that in spite of the truth and solution being right before our eyes, because truth and reality is too inconvenient and difficult and uncomfortable because it does not fit with preconceived conclusions and assumptions, we simply want to ignore reality and substituted our own. And so goes the perpetual poverty "problem" that we are seeking "solutions" for. Organizations can't even move away from Microsoft products simply because they get money from the Gates foundation ... and we want to solve poverty? It's a bad joke.
As someone has said, our "help" and development money is taking money from poor American children, in order to give it to rich Africans ... who then scurry it away into offshore bank accounts.
I know this may make some arteries pop, but the President of Uganda puts it well: http://thehill.com/policy/international/370435-ugandan-presi...
Why in the face of globalization (and now increased automation) the U.S. continues to have an effectively open-door policy to low-skill workers makes no sense at all.
As a U.S. citizen, I'd like to see a return to the temporary moratorium that existed until the mid 1960s (say 10 to 15 years) on most immigration beyond high-skill (however that is defined) and an end to "chain migration" in which entire families are allowed to immigrate regardless of most other factors.
> Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
> The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
> Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
I think it would be hypocritical at best, given America's history and current position to take such a stance. Surely the right thing to do is not to be scared of the immigration bogeyman and take some concrete steps towards the future, rather than closing the door and pretending things will get better by itself. It won't.
If you want to comfort yourself in a nice blanket of blame, go ahead and blame the immigrants rather than the people in power who have actually caused this.
Mass immigration made sense when the U.S. was a manufacturing colossus, no longer. Immigration should be targeted and far lower than it is now.
It's kind of sad to see a nation built by, from and for poor immigrants completely forget their origins.
But times also change. What may have made sense in 1903 may be detrimental to the descendants of those immigrants today. I believe we should have a sharp but temporary reduction in most immigration today to see if it benefits the lowest wage earners in the U.S. It's an easy policy to reverse if it doesn't.
This implies that the U.S. is a victim, and not an active participant and benefiter of this system (globalization and increased automation).