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That experience is not restricted to "3rd world". I think what you describe could be simply called "class differences". Even what we now call 1st world countri

That experience is not restricted to "3rd world". I think what you describe could be simply called "class differences". Even what we now call 1st world countries had incredible poverty some 60 years back and it's not so long back, even if the face of poverty has recently changed from lack of opportunity to lack of achievement. Up to 1980's, in the Finnish welfare state where I grew up, you would see men who slept in trash boxes through the -30°C winter nights. Men broken by war, alcohol and unemployment. Some women, too. With the minds, bodies and experiences they had, they did not have opportunity for anything better.

pavlov 8y ago
I’m Finnish too. My entirely anecdotal experience of both Finland and USA is that America is about 40 years behind in responding to poverty. To see men sleeping in trash boxes in freezing weather, you only need to walk a few blocks around midtown Manhattan in the winter.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem. Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on. Let's not assume things without proper analysis.
  - ptaipale 8y ago
    That is true as well, including things like slavery, historical and recent immigration waves, and generally a rather different approach to social security, and much much more diversity.
  - bodas 8y ago
    Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs. When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Not all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general. Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.
    - giggles_giggles 8y ago
      Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.
      - thatcat 8y ago
        Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?
      - bodas 8y ago
        Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage. Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.
        atmosx 8y ago
        Funny thing though: if you default on your mortgage bank gets your home, you become homeless. What happens when bank defaults? You become homeless! It’s a win-win (for the bank). On a more serious note: a society which has homeless ppl, in 2018, cannot be considered “civilized”.
- ad_hominem 8y ago
  The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college. To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas. But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.
    - sologoub 8y ago
      You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it. To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make. The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though. Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> could be simply called "class differences" Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that the police could follow. I'm doing OK for myself now, but I grew up at the end of a dead-end dirt road that was connected by another dirt road to the actual paved roads. There's poor everywhere.
- ptaipale 8y ago
  True enough, but having a history doesn't make one "high-class". I do know part of my genealogy up to a landed gentry nobleman who wreaked havoc in Germany and Prague in the 30-year war on behalf of the Swedish king, but still my father was born to a tenant farmer family. But you may have a point that apparently the social differences are smaller small countries and communities where genealogy is better known. To take an example, in Iceland, there is extremely good genealogical data about everyone for over a millennium. Social differences are not very big and were not that big even before the adoption of modern welfare state.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    Actually it probably does a "poor" kid from the right back ground (minor nobility landed gentry or even middle class ) will find it easier to get into Oxbridge / Harvard and also grok the social aspects as your parents told you how it works - Boris Johnson is a good example originally not rich but had a lot of connections. For example know why not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship.
    - biztos 8y ago
      What's the issue with brown shoes?
      - 8y ago
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
I'm a Caucasian American whose family has no records of where we came from, not even where in the US my ancestors lived before they moved to the farm in middle of no where. My parents grew up on farms where the food they grew was the food they ate, and while my own childhood wasn't improvised (probably upper working class, if that's a thing), a lot of OP's post resonates with me. For example the following feels like it was describing my own childhood. >Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
marnett 8y ago
When one focuses all their efforts in and before college in the sciences, neglecting a rounded, liberal education in the process, I am not all surprised by the lack of class knowledge.

pavlov 8y ago

I’m Finnish too. My entirely anecdotal experience of both Finland and USA is that America is about 40 years behind in responding to poverty. To see men sleeping in trash boxes in freezing weather, you only need to walk a few blocks around midtown Manhattan in the winter.

TomMarius 8y ago
Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem. Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on. Let's not assume things without proper analysis.
- ptaipale 8y ago
  That is true as well, including things like slavery, historical and recent immigration waves, and generally a rather different approach to social security, and much much more diversity.
- bodas 8y ago
  Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs. When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Not all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general. Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.
  - giggles_giggles 8y ago
    Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.
    - thatcat 8y ago
      Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?
    - bodas 8y ago
      Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage. Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.
      - atmosx 8y ago
        Funny thing though: if you default on your mortgage bank gets your home, you become homeless. What happens when bank defaults? You become homeless! It’s a win-win (for the bank). On a more serious note: a society which has homeless ppl, in 2018, cannot be considered “civilized”.
ad_hominem 8y ago
The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college. To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas. But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.
  - sologoub 8y ago
    You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it. To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make. The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though. Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.

commandlinefan 8y ago

> could be simply called "class differences" Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that the police could follow. I'm doing OK for myself now, but I grew up at the end of a dead-end dirt road that was connected by another dirt road to the actual paved roads. There's poor everywhere.

ptaipale 8y ago
True enough, but having a history doesn't make one "high-class". I do know part of my genealogy up to a landed gentry nobleman who wreaked havoc in Germany and Prague in the 30-year war on behalf of the Swedish king, but still my father was born to a tenant farmer family. But you may have a point that apparently the social differences are smaller small countries and communities where genealogy is better known. To take an example, in Iceland, there is extremely good genealogical data about everyone for over a millennium. Social differences are not very big and were not that big even before the adoption of modern welfare state.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Actually it probably does a "poor" kid from the right back ground (minor nobility landed gentry or even middle class ) will find it easier to get into Oxbridge / Harvard and also grok the social aspects as your parents told you how it works - Boris Johnson is a good example originally not rich but had a lot of connections. For example know why not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship.
  - biztos 8y ago
    What's the issue with brown shoes?
    - 8y ago

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

I'm a Caucasian American whose family has no records of where we came from, not even where in the US my ancestors lived before they moved to the farm in middle of no where. My parents grew up on farms where the food they grew was the food they ate, and while my own childhood wasn't improvised (probably upper working class, if that's a thing), a lot of OP's post resonates with me. For example the following feels like it was describing my own childhood. >Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

marnett 8y ago

When one focuses all their efforts in and before college in the sciences, neglecting a rounded, liberal education in the process, I am not all surprised by the lack of class knowledge.