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I looked through the 16-page BLS report and 20-page USCB report you linked but didn't see where either said that "the poor choose not to work" I'm glad you cou

I looked through the 16-page BLS report and 20-page USCB report you linked but didn't see where either said that "the poor choose not to work" 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 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.

gjm11 10y ago
> Yes, laws against wife beating are made ... 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.
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gjm11 10y ago

> Yes, laws against wife beating are made ... 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.

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