9 ms·

Staying out of poverty is simple. By in large it takes three things: graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock. These

Staying out of poverty is simple. By in large it takes three things: graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock. These three things are important to remember whenever we're discussing social policy. Any policy that subsidizes or encourages people to not do those three things is a social policy that behaves like a poverty factory.

nikmobi 9y ago
does "out of wedlock" really matter? I think the benefit of marriage in that context, is that there are 2 income generators, instead of a single parent. Isn't that accomplishable without marriage? That said, I don't think you're wrong. Genuinely looking for thoughts on this.
- kiba 9y ago
  Maybe it's planned parenthood rather than having children that are not planned.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Deliberately vs Accidentally is how I'd phrase it.
sidlls 9y ago
That's just far too simplistic to be accurate. Poverty is a complex issue and avoiding it requires substantial luck that those who have managed to do so often don't seem to realize they've benefitted from.
- nandemo 9y ago
  Whether that claim is accurate or not can be judged on data, no? Out of curiosity I googled "graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock" and this is the first result: > Let politicians, (...) and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class. [0] It's not saying anyone can get rich. It's not saying poor people are lazy. It's saying these 3 things will have a major, measurable impact on your future and your children's. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
- Banthum 9y ago
  Its actually a quantitative result from the (left wing) Brookings Institute: Of the people who do all 3 of these things, 98% are not in poverty.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    That may be. The contentious part is how simple that is. It's simplistic to suggest that it's simple, in other words.
mikeash 9y ago
Just get a job! Brilliant! Why don't all these poor people think of that?
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  Sarcastic, but you willfully lack imagination. There are urchins who choose not to work and do just fine. It's fairly straightforward to scam Social Security Disability for main income and then collect EBT, food stamps, and get some housing in the projects. It's not a great life, but it's a living, and there's plenty more help to pay for phone and utilities. If one is wicked, then they can sprinkle in some identity theft or plain old theft to pay for luxuries like a car or the newest iphone! Work does suck, I can sympathize with wanting to avoid it. And if you're constantly told you'll never make anything of yourself and that you're a perpetual victim from childhood, well that'll beat you down too. I just don't buy the assumption that every impoverished soul is noble.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    What about all the poor people who want to work but can't find a job, or all the poor people who do work but just don't earn enough to stop being poor?
    - EdSharkey 9y ago
      I wasn't talking about those people, was that not clear? I wrote because you were being either sarcastic or snarky or chronically compassionate. There are scam artists that stitch the rich tapestry of welfare programs together to make a living. You might choose to look the other way, out of compassion, whereas I choose to look straight at it and call it theft, out of compassion. I am being compassionate (tough love). You are being compassionate (empathy). Both of our voices are important in this discussion. I actually don't believe you have to sacrifice your belief system to acknowledge there are fraudsters in the system who are a drain on society. Everything I have read about SSD says the fraudulent claims are anywhere between 1% and 25% of the total. I'm willing to accept that as few as 1% of claims are fraudulent, but even 1% would be 106000 out of 10.6 million (2011 numbers), and that's still a ton of fraud just in that one benefit.
pdfernhout 9y ago
As was noted more than a decade ago: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/ "Middle-class parents are stretched thin these days. Between health care costs, child care hassles, looking for a home in a good district, and paying for college, raising a child is becoming increasingly expensive. Little wonder, then, that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed. And the danger is growing worse by the year: In 2002 1.6 million people filed for bankruptcy, many of those middle-class parents. a record . As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now “the single best predictor” of bankruptcy.“" What kind of society have we made for ourselves in the USA where such a thing is true? Maybe that also helps explain why the US birth rate is below the replacement rate. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-ferti... It is worse in other countries like Italy though, where one woman has on average about 1.4 children, leading to about a 30% population reduction every generation. Some countries are looking out of desperation to pay people to have kids. Or, of course, increase immigration. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births-fertility-europe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births... Further, as economic trends change, marriage is becoming less feasible, with women seeing less and less value in a long-term relationship with a man (and vice versa). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are-so-many-millennials-having-children-out-of-wedlock/491753/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are... "The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. ... The researchers give this explanation: Men without well-paying jobs are not seen as marriage material." Most modern schools are essentially prisons: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids And they remain mental prisons even at the PhD and postdoc level: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy." Why should parents voluntarily send their children to prisons? Why should anyone want to live their lives in a prison if they have alternatives? As NYS Teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto put it: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-revolutions-become-one-undergroudhistory/ https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there." Many jobs are likely going away with increasing AI, robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, 3D printing, and so on. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ "Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order." While the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park "Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to them is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself." So, without necessarily disagreeing with you about the minimum needed for most people to not fall quickly into poverty right now, where do we go from here? Here are about fifty options to consider of all sorts (both good and bad) I collected about a decade ago (basic income being one of them, but there are many others): http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
soulbadguy 9y ago
Maybe so, but it doesn't answer the question on why some people make the right choices and some doesn't. It also doesn't address the interesting fact that making the right choice is strongly correlated with factor that are outside of one control (Socio-economical position, phyisical attractiveness race ) etc...
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Even assuming your assumptions are correct, none of these things are entirely within a person's control. Whether or not you graduate high school can depend as much on you as on your family, school, neighborhood, etc. Unemployment exists, and is not due merely to a lack of will on the part of the potentially employed, so that doesn't make sense either. And there are ways to become a single parent which don't involve intentionally having children out of wedlock. So it looks like you're 0 for 3 there.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  What does the degree of control a person has over those things have to do with whether social policy should encourage behavior known to increase poverty?
crpatino 9y ago
By the same logic, you could reach 100 years old by being scrupulous with your health, avoiding any mistakes while performing risky activities, and fleeing from any violence comming your way. It is kind of neat advice in retrospective, but it fails to address the fact that most people is unable to keep doing it flawlessly for decades.
jopsen 9y ago
That's far from enough... But regardless. The discussion of who is at fault for poverty is pointless. We should never tolerate poverty regardless of how it came to be. The discussion has to be: Can we afford to have poverty? We need people to be productive members of society. This can be achieved by making good choices easier to make. Making it easier to get back on your feet when you get down... Health care, mental health, social security are ways to help people become productive members of society. You can't afford not to help people! You can't afford to tolerate poverty!
- Can_Not 9y ago
  Every minute a poor person is using tax subsidized luxuries like iPhones or refrigerators is a minute they're not on the streets looking to rob me.

nikmobi 9y ago

does "out of wedlock" really matter? I think the benefit of marriage in that context, is that there are 2 income generators, instead of a single parent. Isn't that accomplishable without marriage? That said, I don't think you're wrong. Genuinely looking for thoughts on this.

kiba 9y ago
Maybe it's planned parenthood rather than having children that are not planned.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Deliberately vs Accidentally is how I'd phrase it.

sidlls 9y ago

That's just far too simplistic to be accurate. Poverty is a complex issue and avoiding it requires substantial luck that those who have managed to do so often don't seem to realize they've benefitted from.

nandemo 9y ago
Whether that claim is accurate or not can be judged on data, no? Out of curiosity I googled "graduate high school, maintain employment, and don't have children out of wedlock" and this is the first result: > Let politicians, (...) and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class. [0] It's not saying anyone can get rich. It's not saying poor people are lazy. It's saying these 3 things will have a major, measurable impact on your future and your children's. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...
Banthum 9y ago
Its actually a quantitative result from the (left wing) Brookings Institute: Of the people who do all 3 of these things, 98% are not in poverty.
- sidlls 9y ago
  That may be. The contentious part is how simple that is. It's simplistic to suggest that it's simple, in other words.

mikeash 9y ago

Just get a job! Brilliant! Why don't all these poor people think of that?

EdSharkey 9y ago
Sarcastic, but you willfully lack imagination. There are urchins who choose not to work and do just fine. It's fairly straightforward to scam Social Security Disability for main income and then collect EBT, food stamps, and get some housing in the projects. It's not a great life, but it's a living, and there's plenty more help to pay for phone and utilities. If one is wicked, then they can sprinkle in some identity theft or plain old theft to pay for luxuries like a car or the newest iphone! Work does suck, I can sympathize with wanting to avoid it. And if you're constantly told you'll never make anything of yourself and that you're a perpetual victim from childhood, well that'll beat you down too. I just don't buy the assumption that every impoverished soul is noble.
- mikeash 9y ago
  What about all the poor people who want to work but can't find a job, or all the poor people who do work but just don't earn enough to stop being poor?
  - EdSharkey 9y ago
    I wasn't talking about those people, was that not clear? I wrote because you were being either sarcastic or snarky or chronically compassionate. There are scam artists that stitch the rich tapestry of welfare programs together to make a living. You might choose to look the other way, out of compassion, whereas I choose to look straight at it and call it theft, out of compassion. I am being compassionate (tough love). You are being compassionate (empathy). Both of our voices are important in this discussion. I actually don't believe you have to sacrifice your belief system to acknowledge there are fraudsters in the system who are a drain on society. Everything I have read about SSD says the fraudulent claims are anywhere between 1% and 25% of the total. I'm willing to accept that as few as 1% of claims are fraudulent, but even 1% would be 106000 out of 10.6 million (2011 numbers), and that's still a ton of fraud just in that one benefit.

pdfernhout 9y ago

As was noted more than a decade ago: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/ "Middle-class parents are stretched thin these days. Between health care costs, child care hassles, looking for a home in a good district, and paying for college, raising a child is becoming increasingly expensive. Little wonder, then, that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed. And the danger is growing worse by the year: In 2002 1.6 million people filed for bankruptcy, many of those middle-class parents. a record . As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now “the single best predictor” of bankruptcy.“" What kind of society have we made for ourselves in the USA where such a thing is true? Maybe that also helps explain why the US birth rate is below the replacement rate. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-ferti... It is worse in other countries like Italy though, where one woman has on average about 1.4 children, leading to about a 30% population reduction every generation. Some countries are looking out of desperation to pay people to have kids. Or, of course, increase immigration. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births-fertility-europe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births... Further, as economic trends change, marriage is becoming less feasible, with women seeing less and less value in a long-term relationship with a man (and vice versa). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are-so-many-millennials-having-children-out-of-wedlock/491753/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are... "The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. ... The researchers give this explanation: Men without well-paying jobs are not seen as marriage material." Most modern schools are essentially prisons: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids And they remain mental prisons even at the PhD and postdoc level: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy." Why should parents voluntarily send their children to prisons? Why should anyone want to live their lives in a prison if they have alternatives? As NYS Teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto put it: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-revolutions-become-one-undergroudhistory/ https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there." Many jobs are likely going away with increasing AI, robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, 3D printing, and so on. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ "Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order." While the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park "Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to them is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself." So, without necessarily disagreeing with you about the minimum needed for most people to not fall quickly into poverty right now, where do we go from here? Here are about fifty options to consider of all sorts (both good and bad) I collected about a decade ago (basic income being one of them, but there are many others): http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

soulbadguy 9y ago

Maybe so, but it doesn't answer the question on why some people make the right choices and some doesn't. It also doesn't address the interesting fact that making the right choice is strongly correlated with factor that are outside of one control (Socio-economical position, phyisical attractiveness race ) etc...

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Even assuming your assumptions are correct, none of these things are entirely within a person's control. Whether or not you graduate high school can depend as much on you as on your family, school, neighborhood, etc. Unemployment exists, and is not due merely to a lack of will on the part of the potentially employed, so that doesn't make sense either. And there are ways to become a single parent which don't involve intentionally having children out of wedlock. So it looks like you're 0 for 3 there.

Consultant32452 9y ago
What does the degree of control a person has over those things have to do with whether social policy should encourage behavior known to increase poverty?

crpatino 9y ago

By the same logic, you could reach 100 years old by being scrupulous with your health, avoiding any mistakes while performing risky activities, and fleeing from any violence comming your way. It is kind of neat advice in retrospective, but it fails to address the fact that most people is unable to keep doing it flawlessly for decades.

jopsen 9y ago

That's far from enough... But regardless. The discussion of who is at fault for poverty is pointless. We should never tolerate poverty regardless of how it came to be. The discussion has to be: Can we afford to have poverty? We need people to be productive members of society. This can be achieved by making good choices easier to make. Making it easier to get back on your feet when you get down... Health care, mental health, social security are ways to help people become productive members of society. You can't afford not to help people! You can't afford to tolerate poverty!

Can_Not 9y ago
Every minute a poor person is using tax subsidized luxuries like iPhones or refrigerators is a minute they're not on the streets looking to rob me.