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Sometimes it seems to me that histories like this put the weight of leaving poverty in the individuals himselves rather than the government social services, enf

Sometimes it seems to me that histories like this put the weight of leaving poverty in the individuals himselves rather than the government social services, enforcing the myth that poor people is people that chooses to.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
You don't think personal change represents any elevation from poverty? I think we certainly agree it can play a major role into poverty descent.
- BluishLight 9y ago
  I agree, but after reading articles like this I always leave with the impression that the personal change doesn't need to be encouraged by the society, and must come solely from the individual. Like other commenter said in the post, some people like the mentally unstable can't change without a lot of outside help.
- jordache 9y ago
  do you athleticism at the pro level is achieved by personal abilities alone? what if you grew up in a society that doesn't value basketball for example, you will never have opportunities and support to develop a physical ability to reach pro level status. Societal conditions play a critical role in my example
- glogla 9y ago
  Not really, no. In the US, it's mostly about your family, although there are exceptions of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... > The correlation between parents' income and their children's income in the United States is estimated between .4 and .6. > If a parent's income had no effect on a child's opportunity for future upward mobility, approximately 20% of poor children who started in the bottom quintile (in the bottom 20% of the US range of incomes) would remain there as poor adults. At the other end of income spectrum, if children were born into wealthy families in the top 20%, only 20% would stay in that top income category if their mobility opportunities were equal to every other child's in the country. > But long-term income statistics show this isn't happening. Mobility opportunities are different for poor and wealthy children in the US. Parental incomes and parental choices of home locations while raising children appear to be major factors in that difference. According to a 2012 Pew Economic Mobility Project study 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults. Similarly, 40% of children raised in the top quintile (top 20%) will remain there as adults. Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults. Around twice as many (8%) of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom. 37% of children born into the top quintile will fall below the middle. These findings have led researchers to conclude that "opportunity structures create and determine future generations' chances for success. Hence, our lot in life is at least partially determined by where we grow up, and this is partially determined by where our parents grew up, and so on."
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    That is a correlation, not causal. Maybe (just throwing something out there) poor parent's children continue to be poor because the poor parents can't teach their children the appropriate life skills to save and earn enough money?
    - foldr 9y ago
      But that would be a causal influence.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  It's dangerous to cast blanket statements like that. Some people end up in poverty by bad choices, sure. I don't think it's safe to assume that most "deserve" to be in poverty because of their choices. I think the more common scenario is mental illness develops > bad events happen due to mental illness and lack of treatment > job loss > more bad events/choices made out of desperation > repeat
  - kefka 9y ago
    And add in the fact, that until recently, insurance was available for only specific destitute or employees whom worked at jobs that provided insurance. And we have a party that wants to dismantle everything, including Social Security.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - weirdstuff 9y ago
      As far as I'm concerned, both parties are mutually destructive. (Destructive competition.) Two peas in a pod since the 90s.
- nickthemagicman 9y ago
  I like to tell this to all the billions of people starving on the street around the world. Poverty is not structural. It's the individual's responsibility. Poor people just need some change from within to elevate themselves out the favelas of Rio, the Dharavi in India, the west side of Chicago. The cancer they get from drinking polluted water, the failure of their body after being exposed to the elements, their family member getting murdered, dismembered, and hung from a bridge by cartels....could have been prevented if they had only just elevated themselves. Poverty is the individuals fault. </s>
  - matt_wulfeck 9y ago
    Who's saying it's their fault? The only thing I'm saying is that both descent into poverty and ascension from it can be due to personal action. Why do we have to choose 100% one cause or the other?
    - nickthemagicman 9y ago
      Your argument highlights a sensational occurrence to disparage an large group of people. It's like saying all Muslims are terrorists, or all people on food stamps are lazy... It's not an overtly lie, but taken statistically... it's definitely a lie....and false and misleading. Poverty is without a doubt structurally caused around the world. There are obscure cases of people who cause themselves to be in poverty but most people do everything in their power not to be in poverty...and are in poverty because they don't have opportunities...
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Just because it correlates with family doesn't mean personal change mythology isn't central. Different families have different mythologies. The family stat is worthwhile to indicate that individual differentiation isn't a good explanatory factor, which is important to note. To me the takeaway is that personal and family level interventions will be inadequate and neighborhood-level coordination is a good place to start. Neighborhood mythology around personal change could very well be an important tool, I don't know.
- droopyEyelids 9y ago
  In 2014, "Vulnerable Populations" made up 80% of the poor in the USA. That essentially means children and the elderly. On top of that, it's like another 7% of people that are in poverty that are fully employed! http://www.demos.org/blog/10/23/15/2014-vulnerable-populations-made-80-poor http://www.demos.org/blog/10/23/15/2014-vulnerable-populatio...
- gnaritas 9y ago
  You live in a class based society, poor people are poor because they were generally born into it and denied the privileged of the education necessary to escape it. Stop victim blaming.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Absolutely. Financial success requires determination, natural ability, and luck. But the popular narrative discards the last two and says that anyone can escape poverty--or be the next Bill Gates--if they just put their mind to it. Ergo, anyone who isn't successful is just lazy and deserves no help. Still, it is nice to see people escape bad circumstances on their own, as long as we don't turn it into justification for selfishness.
austenallred 9y ago
What a negative way to view this. It's an incredible story, not a condemning of everyone who doesn't do something amazing.
cbanek 9y ago
I don't believe that people "choose" to be poor, and there is an overwhelming societal component at play. But I can't say that the individual and their choices don't matter. He admits he had problems with drugs, and that his life spiraled out of control. Do I think we should have treatment programs so it doesn't get this bad? Yes, of course. But some people don't think there's a problem, or need help until they hit bottom. It's part of their problem. Many times you can't commit someone to treatment against their will, at least in the US. In this complicated world, where we view everything through our own subjective lens (consciousness), we have to admit that the individual has a role to play. How do they frame their reality? Are they giving up? Do they just feel "down on their luck"? Do they have that will? Why do some people fail in the face of adversity and others succeed? Are they just having "a good time" (with drugs)? Is there a mental illness at play? Understanding the problem is key to solving it. If someone has completely given up on making their life better, then they are basically choosing to be poor, because their mind has accepted there is no other choice (no matter how slim the chance of success). They may not have any other choice but to be poor, but to stop improving basically ensures it. Some people lose the will to live, while others do not. (This isn't just people in extreme poverty either, but poor people marginalized by society, or people that become poor after being rich) Let me just run a parallel to another public health crisis - obesity. I'm fat. Always have been. But the big difference to me is consciously making the choice I'm going to do what it takes to get rid of it. We all know that exercising and eating are in our control, they are choices we make. They might be painful choices, but we have them. But when we convince ourselves it's not possible ("it's genetic", "i'll never be thin", "i lack the strength", etc), we do give up, and that's basically losing the battle before you start. Sure, we could blame everyone who's putting bad things in food, and selling us french fries, but we also know that they wouldn't be selling them if they weren't so good. And that we all have a choice of how many times we eat them. Even if we only made healthy food, some people would still eat too much. There's always personal choice at play. If anything, society is the culmination of people's personal choices on a macro scale. Do I think we need to help the poor and provide services? Of course. But we also need to give them hope. A lot of people don't know the government services that could help them, because they aren't looking, or have given up. Just getting services to people is a challenge, and relies on people wanting to accept help, and being able to accept those services to help get them back on their feet, and giving them the tools to stay on the up and up.
zem 9y ago
yes, seriously. happy for him, but fuck the whole "instead of begging" narrative :(
- Mz 9y ago
  Um, no, let's not fuck that. The way to help people get off the street is to help them access paid work instead of begging and instead of charity. Charity does not buy one a middle class lifestyle. You get that by working for it. Why is this so very hard for so many people to comprehend?
  - zem 9y ago
    i believe the narrative that everyone has to work for a living, and that the way to help everyone obtain the basic necessities of life is to somehow create jobs for them, is an increasingly dangerous fallacy. there is simply less and less need for everyone to be working in order to produce enough to support everyone, and the ideal producer/consumer ratio is only falling with every increase in automation. if we weren't trying to cling so desperately to this sort of capitalist setup, we'd all be better off. it's just that the incentives for it aren't yet aligned with the immediate interests of whoever has the power to make changes. as someone working and leading a middle class lifestyle, i'd be even happier, and feel a lot more productive, if i thought my work was helping other people lead the same lifestyle sans working (or even better, by working on whatever they felt like, without having to care about whether someone valued it enough to pay for it).
    - Mz 9y ago
      I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for all people. But we all still need access to the option to work. Accepting that jobs will simply vanish and those who don't already have massive amounts of wealth will just get a UBI is a horrendous dystopian nightmare. If we can all work 20 hours a week and adequately support ourselves, awesome. But the current position is that the 99 percent have no inherent right to access the means to create wealth. They are merely mouths to feed, consumers who can add nothing. This is incredibly problematic and I dearly hope we get a clue before natural consequences inform us catastrophically that this simply does not work.
wutbrodo 9y ago
It's really odd to me that people read an article like this and jump to the assumption that the article is putting the responsibility for alleviating poverty solely on the poor. When you actually read the article, it doesn't imply anything of the sort (the closest I can come is the fact that the title has "instead of begging" at the end, but even that is stretching a bit). Particularly when the source is an organization whose About page says things like "Helping secure legislation in the US, Canada and EU on transparency in the extractives sector to help fight corruption and ensure more money from oil and gas revenues in Africa is used to fight poverty." and "Successfully advocating for official development assistance, which has increased globally by $35.7 billion between 2005 and 2014." It's pretty hard to draw the conclusion that they're some kind of bootstraps-only ideologues. Every time I see someone make a claim that an article about someone getting themselves out of poverty somehow implies that society doesn't owe the poor anything, I can't help but think it says more about the person making the complaint than it does about the article.
- BluishLight 9y ago
  Probably it's me, because as you said there is nothing in the article that suggest a general idea like the one I exposed; probably I'm too pesimmistic. It's always nice (and interesting) to see how different people interpret and feel histories differently.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I see it as somewhere in-between. There's probably some kind of ideal form of government intervention that will take the most out of poverty; and then there's probably some form of minimalistic form of humane intervention for the hopeless.
NumberCruncher 9y ago
>> the myth that poor people is people that chooses to [live in poverty] Don't forget the myth that they could be mentally ill or just dumb having IQ below 70. Because bad things does not happen to good people.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

You don't think personal change represents any elevation from poverty? I think we certainly agree it can play a major role into poverty descent.

BluishLight 9y ago
I agree, but after reading articles like this I always leave with the impression that the personal change doesn't need to be encouraged by the society, and must come solely from the individual. Like other commenter said in the post, some people like the mentally unstable can't change without a lot of outside help.
jordache 9y ago
do you athleticism at the pro level is achieved by personal abilities alone? what if you grew up in a society that doesn't value basketball for example, you will never have opportunities and support to develop a physical ability to reach pro level status. Societal conditions play a critical role in my example
glogla 9y ago
Not really, no. In the US, it's mostly about your family, although there are exceptions of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... > The correlation between parents' income and their children's income in the United States is estimated between .4 and .6. > If a parent's income had no effect on a child's opportunity for future upward mobility, approximately 20% of poor children who started in the bottom quintile (in the bottom 20% of the US range of incomes) would remain there as poor adults. At the other end of income spectrum, if children were born into wealthy families in the top 20%, only 20% would stay in that top income category if their mobility opportunities were equal to every other child's in the country. > But long-term income statistics show this isn't happening. Mobility opportunities are different for poor and wealthy children in the US. Parental incomes and parental choices of home locations while raising children appear to be major factors in that difference. According to a 2012 Pew Economic Mobility Project study 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults. Similarly, 40% of children raised in the top quintile (top 20%) will remain there as adults. Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults. Around twice as many (8%) of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom. 37% of children born into the top quintile will fall below the middle. These findings have led researchers to conclude that "opportunity structures create and determine future generations' chances for success. Hence, our lot in life is at least partially determined by where we grow up, and this is partially determined by where our parents grew up, and so on."
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  That is a correlation, not causal. Maybe (just throwing something out there) poor parent's children continue to be poor because the poor parents can't teach their children the appropriate life skills to save and earn enough money?
  - foldr 9y ago
    But that would be a causal influence.
nxsynonym 9y ago
It's dangerous to cast blanket statements like that. Some people end up in poverty by bad choices, sure. I don't think it's safe to assume that most "deserve" to be in poverty because of their choices. I think the more common scenario is mental illness develops > bad events happen due to mental illness and lack of treatment > job loss > more bad events/choices made out of desperation > repeat
- kefka 9y ago
  And add in the fact, that until recently, insurance was available for only specific destitute or employees whom worked at jobs that provided insurance. And we have a party that wants to dismantle everything, including Social Security.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - weirdstuff 9y ago
    As far as I'm concerned, both parties are mutually destructive. (Destructive competition.) Two peas in a pod since the 90s.
nickthemagicman 9y ago
I like to tell this to all the billions of people starving on the street around the world. Poverty is not structural. It's the individual's responsibility. Poor people just need some change from within to elevate themselves out the favelas of Rio, the Dharavi in India, the west side of Chicago. The cancer they get from drinking polluted water, the failure of their body after being exposed to the elements, their family member getting murdered, dismembered, and hung from a bridge by cartels....could have been prevented if they had only just elevated themselves. Poverty is the individuals fault. </s>
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  Who's saying it's their fault? The only thing I'm saying is that both descent into poverty and ascension from it can be due to personal action. Why do we have to choose 100% one cause or the other?
  - nickthemagicman 9y ago
    Your argument highlights a sensational occurrence to disparage an large group of people. It's like saying all Muslims are terrorists, or all people on food stamps are lazy... It's not an overtly lie, but taken statistically... it's definitely a lie....and false and misleading. Poverty is without a doubt structurally caused around the world. There are obscure cases of people who cause themselves to be in poverty but most people do everything in their power not to be in poverty...and are in poverty because they don't have opportunities...
erikpukinskis 9y ago
Just because it correlates with family doesn't mean personal change mythology isn't central. Different families have different mythologies. The family stat is worthwhile to indicate that individual differentiation isn't a good explanatory factor, which is important to note. To me the takeaway is that personal and family level interventions will be inadequate and neighborhood-level coordination is a good place to start. Neighborhood mythology around personal change could very well be an important tool, I don't know.
droopyEyelids 9y ago
In 2014, "Vulnerable Populations" made up 80% of the poor in the USA. That essentially means children and the elderly. On top of that, it's like another 7% of people that are in poverty that are fully employed! http://www.demos.org/blog/10/23/15/2014-vulnerable-populations-made-80-poor http://www.demos.org/blog/10/23/15/2014-vulnerable-populatio...
gnaritas 9y ago
You live in a class based society, poor people are poor because they were generally born into it and denied the privileged of the education necessary to escape it. Stop victim blaming.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

Absolutely. Financial success requires determination, natural ability, and luck. But the popular narrative discards the last two and says that anyone can escape poverty--or be the next Bill Gates--if they just put their mind to it. Ergo, anyone who isn't successful is just lazy and deserves no help. Still, it is nice to see people escape bad circumstances on their own, as long as we don't turn it into justification for selfishness.

austenallred 9y ago

What a negative way to view this. It's an incredible story, not a condemning of everyone who doesn't do something amazing.

cbanek 9y ago

I don't believe that people "choose" to be poor, and there is an overwhelming societal component at play. But I can't say that the individual and their choices don't matter. He admits he had problems with drugs, and that his life spiraled out of control. Do I think we should have treatment programs so it doesn't get this bad? Yes, of course. But some people don't think there's a problem, or need help until they hit bottom. It's part of their problem. Many times you can't commit someone to treatment against their will, at least in the US. In this complicated world, where we view everything through our own subjective lens (consciousness), we have to admit that the individual has a role to play. How do they frame their reality? Are they giving up? Do they just feel "down on their luck"? Do they have that will? Why do some people fail in the face of adversity and others succeed? Are they just having "a good time" (with drugs)? Is there a mental illness at play? Understanding the problem is key to solving it. If someone has completely given up on making their life better, then they are basically choosing to be poor, because their mind has accepted there is no other choice (no matter how slim the chance of success). They may not have any other choice but to be poor, but to stop improving basically ensures it. Some people lose the will to live, while others do not. (This isn't just people in extreme poverty either, but poor people marginalized by society, or people that become poor after being rich) Let me just run a parallel to another public health crisis - obesity. I'm fat. Always have been. But the big difference to me is consciously making the choice I'm going to do what it takes to get rid of it. We all know that exercising and eating are in our control, they are choices we make. They might be painful choices, but we have them. But when we convince ourselves it's not possible ("it's genetic", "i'll never be thin", "i lack the strength", etc), we do give up, and that's basically losing the battle before you start. Sure, we could blame everyone who's putting bad things in food, and selling us french fries, but we also know that they wouldn't be selling them if they weren't so good. And that we all have a choice of how many times we eat them. Even if we only made healthy food, some people would still eat too much. There's always personal choice at play. If anything, society is the culmination of people's personal choices on a macro scale. Do I think we need to help the poor and provide services? Of course. But we also need to give them hope. A lot of people don't know the government services that could help them, because they aren't looking, or have given up. Just getting services to people is a challenge, and relies on people wanting to accept help, and being able to accept those services to help get them back on their feet, and giving them the tools to stay on the up and up.

zem 9y ago

yes, seriously. happy for him, but fuck the whole "instead of begging" narrative :(

Mz 9y ago
Um, no, let's not fuck that. The way to help people get off the street is to help them access paid work instead of begging and instead of charity. Charity does not buy one a middle class lifestyle. You get that by working for it. Why is this so very hard for so many people to comprehend?
- zem 9y ago
  i believe the narrative that everyone has to work for a living, and that the way to help everyone obtain the basic necessities of life is to somehow create jobs for them, is an increasingly dangerous fallacy. there is simply less and less need for everyone to be working in order to produce enough to support everyone, and the ideal producer/consumer ratio is only falling with every increase in automation. if we weren't trying to cling so desperately to this sort of capitalist setup, we'd all be better off. it's just that the incentives for it aren't yet aligned with the immediate interests of whoever has the power to make changes. as someone working and leading a middle class lifestyle, i'd be even happier, and feel a lot more productive, if i thought my work was helping other people lead the same lifestyle sans working (or even better, by working on whatever they felt like, without having to care about whether someone valued it enough to pay for it).
  - Mz 9y ago
    I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for all people. But we all still need access to the option to work. Accepting that jobs will simply vanish and those who don't already have massive amounts of wealth will just get a UBI is a horrendous dystopian nightmare. If we can all work 20 hours a week and adequately support ourselves, awesome. But the current position is that the 99 percent have no inherent right to access the means to create wealth. They are merely mouths to feed, consumers who can add nothing. This is incredibly problematic and I dearly hope we get a clue before natural consequences inform us catastrophically that this simply does not work.

wutbrodo 9y ago

It's really odd to me that people read an article like this and jump to the assumption that the article is putting the responsibility for alleviating poverty solely on the poor. When you actually read the article, it doesn't imply anything of the sort (the closest I can come is the fact that the title has "instead of begging" at the end, but even that is stretching a bit). Particularly when the source is an organization whose About page says things like "Helping secure legislation in the US, Canada and EU on transparency in the extractives sector to help fight corruption and ensure more money from oil and gas revenues in Africa is used to fight poverty." and "Successfully advocating for official development assistance, which has increased globally by $35.7 billion between 2005 and 2014." It's pretty hard to draw the conclusion that they're some kind of bootstraps-only ideologues. Every time I see someone make a claim that an article about someone getting themselves out of poverty somehow implies that society doesn't owe the poor anything, I can't help but think it says more about the person making the complaint than it does about the article.

BluishLight 9y ago
Probably it's me, because as you said there is nothing in the article that suggest a general idea like the one I exposed; probably I'm too pesimmistic. It's always nice (and interesting) to see how different people interpret and feel histories differently.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I see it as somewhere in-between. There's probably some kind of ideal form of government intervention that will take the most out of poverty; and then there's probably some form of minimalistic form of humane intervention for the hopeless.

NumberCruncher 9y ago

>> the myth that poor people is people that chooses to [live in poverty] Don't forget the myth that they could be mentally ill or just dumb having IQ below 70. Because bad things does not happen to good people.