> 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 cha

> 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.