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This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem. In fact, the material outcome

This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem. In fact, the material outcome is just the end-result of the real underlying causes: poor education, broken families, and other cultural dysfunction. There's obviously a feedback loop between material poverty and cultural problems, but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people. We can't forget about historical injustices such as slavery and Jim Crow. The nation has a moral duty to especially help those communities. But what we're doing now, spending billions of dollars on dozens of anti-poverty handouts, is clearly not working. I agree that the politics of victimhood is especially damaging. It robs the poor of their agency and sells them the lie that the only thing between them and prosperity is oppression by the rich. It's a politics of helplessness and envy. A man who does not believe that he is master of his own destiny cannot thrive. When he is sold a life of dependence, he is made a serf.

gozo 11y ago
"This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem." While I'm sure the left is different in the US, that seems backwards on a global level. It's generally the left that emphasizes immaterial things like education, maternity leave, kindergarten etc. while the right focuses on economic measures like lower taxes. "you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people" Throwing money at people seems like a very effective way to limit the bad effects of poor people. Drug addicts with money tend to do drugs, while drug addicts without money tend to do robberies, burglaries, go to prison etc. "believe that he is master of his own destiny" The mindset that you should fend for yourself and don't be a burden is much more prevalent among the poor. More prosperous families tend to try to give their kids all the advantages they can. If anything the poor needs to adopt a culture of entitlement.
legulere 11y ago
> but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people. At least for those where money is currently the hindering factor you actually can. Financing students for example. You also reduce the feedback loop to which you alluded. There are lots of factors where it might not be that obvious that it exists. Stress factors like poverty can greatly reduce mental capabilities for instance. And in the end you make the lives of the poor people suck less with that money.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Financing students is a great example of how government ends up getting it wrong. In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Flush with public money, colleges have become wasteful bureaucracies that are unaccountable to their customers, students and parents. But once an entitlement exists, it's almost impossible to take it away. As Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth is a government program". So it just becomes a permanent structural deficiency of our society.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Increasing price (outside of aid) isn't actually the opposite of the effect aid is intended to have -- subsidies always increase the cost before subsidy; the intent is that they will decrease the cost after subsidy for those receiving the subsidy since, under most reasonable supply/demand conditions, the amount of increase will be less than the amount of the subsidy. And this would probably work fine for grants taken alone, but we can't really isolate the impacts. Loans, however, aren't subsidies, they are cost-deferment measures. They aren't meant to make college more affordable (in terms of lower net cost after the policy) for those who get them, they are meant to allow people who could not afford college up-front but who would benefit economically from college so that college would be affordable if it could be paid for on a deferred basis can afford it. College loans, however, are problematic because humans (in general, and those younger than mid-20s in particular) tend to be irrational and to -- as has, I believe, been shown in numerous studies -- overly discount deferred costs, so that loans have the effect of subsidies on near-term costs while at the same time just being deferred costs. So they increase the pre-policy cost without actually being a subsidy to those who qualify for them.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      Subsidized loans are subsidies, in the form of 0% interest when you're in school and very low interest rates after. Those both cost the government a lot of money that the borrower would otherwise pay.

gozo 11y ago

"This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem." While I'm sure the left is different in the US, that seems backwards on a global level. It's generally the left that emphasizes immaterial things like education, maternity leave, kindergarten etc. while the right focuses on economic measures like lower taxes. "you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people" Throwing money at people seems like a very effective way to limit the bad effects of poor people. Drug addicts with money tend to do drugs, while drug addicts without money tend to do robberies, burglaries, go to prison etc. "believe that he is master of his own destiny" The mindset that you should fend for yourself and don't be a burden is much more prevalent among the poor. More prosperous families tend to try to give their kids all the advantages they can. If anything the poor needs to adopt a culture of entitlement.

legulere 11y ago

> but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people. At least for those where money is currently the hindering factor you actually can. Financing students for example. You also reduce the feedback loop to which you alluded. There are lots of factors where it might not be that obvious that it exists. Stress factors like poverty can greatly reduce mental capabilities for instance. And in the end you make the lives of the poor people suck less with that money.

marcoperaza 11y ago
Financing students is a great example of how government ends up getting it wrong. In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Flush with public money, colleges have become wasteful bureaucracies that are unaccountable to their customers, students and parents. But once an entitlement exists, it's almost impossible to take it away. As Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth is a government program". So it just becomes a permanent structural deficiency of our society.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Increasing price (outside of aid) isn't actually the opposite of the effect aid is intended to have -- subsidies always increase the cost before subsidy; the intent is that they will decrease the cost after subsidy for those receiving the subsidy since, under most reasonable supply/demand conditions, the amount of increase will be less than the amount of the subsidy. And this would probably work fine for grants taken alone, but we can't really isolate the impacts. Loans, however, aren't subsidies, they are cost-deferment measures. They aren't meant to make college more affordable (in terms of lower net cost after the policy) for those who get them, they are meant to allow people who could not afford college up-front but who would benefit economically from college so that college would be affordable if it could be paid for on a deferred basis can afford it. College loans, however, are problematic because humans (in general, and those younger than mid-20s in particular) tend to be irrational and to -- as has, I believe, been shown in numerous studies -- overly discount deferred costs, so that loans have the effect of subsidies on near-term costs while at the same time just being deferred costs. So they increase the pre-policy cost without actually being a subsidy to those who qualify for them.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Subsidized loans are subsidies, in the form of 0% interest when you're in school and very low interest rates after. Those both cost the government a lot of money that the borrower would otherwise pay.