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Poverty is not a disease. It's not a malady that can be treated or cured. It is a consequence of many factors, but above all it is primarily a consequence, not

by User23 8y ago

Poverty is not a disease. It's not a malady that can be treated or cured. It is a consequence of many factors, but above all it is primarily a consequence, not a cause. What causes poverty? Well like any other widespread social phenomenon, the causes are varied. Crime is an obvious one. Poor decision making is another. For example, a seemingly absurd 70% of windfall recipients go broke[1]. It's evident that the majority of Americans cannot or will not manage their finances prudently. This is largely independent of income too. Plenty of people with relatively low incomes control their spending, save money, and even retire early. Meanwhile plenty of people with high incomes don't save at all and end up broke. Treating poverty as a disease to be palliated is an observable failure. The US alone has spent trillions of dollars since the won reducing poverty and all we have to show for it is a greater poverty rate than ever. I don't see how a free society can force its citizens to behave prudently, but I'd love to hear some ideas. For those who are inclined to knee-jerk disagree, please realize none of this means we shouldn't have a social safety net. Sometimes bad things happen, from involuntary unemployment, to disability, or natural disaster. Various forms of effective net cash-flow assistance can be a great help to everyone, financially prudent or not. Anyhow this problem is older than dirt, there's even an Aesop about it. Any successful approach is going to require a willingness to learn from failure. [1]https://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/01/why_do_70_percent_of_lottery_w.html https://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/01/why_do_...

umvi 8y ago
I generally agree with you, but I'm somewhat convinced windfalls are hard to manage for both rich and poor. This is because it has less to do with poor decision making and more to do with the new target on your back. You are now a wounded sheep with hungry predators all around you (in the form of family, friends, thieves, lawyers, etc). I first ran across this idea when I read a reddit thread mentioning Jack Whittaker [1]. Jack Whittaker was a rich dude who won the lottery (net worth $15M before winning). His life has been a trainwreck since. I don't know if he's lost it all yet - my main point is to suggest that the public nature of lottery sets you up for failure and has less to do with competence than you might guess. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
- coliveira 8y ago
  If you win a lot of money in the lottery, your best option is to run and resettle in another place where people don't know you.
- User23 8y ago
  There is a great post in that thread telling you exactly what to do. Step 1 is hire a partner level attorney in a major law firm who specializes in Trusts and Estates before you do anything else.
jhayward 8y ago
> above all it is primarily a consequence, not a cause It absolutely is a cause, of many things, including more poverty. In the US, the largest determiner of a child's future socioeconomic status is her parent's wealth. Whether a disease model is the best one to use is arguable, but blanket denial that poverty is a primary cause of much social disruption, dysfunction, and lack of economic achievement is just nonsense.
- User23 8y ago
  Poverty is observably the consequence of social disruption, dysfunction, and lack of economic achievement. Wet streets do not cause rain. Germany for example had rampant poverty in the late 1940s and 1950s. That poverty didn't cause the war, it was caused by it. The Marshall plan helped speed up the recovery, but the real factor was the lack of punitive reparations and the industry of the German people. The same occurred in Japan. I don't deny the possible existence of a negative feedback loop, but I don't consider it to be a settled matter either. It could be poverty causing more poverty, or it could just be that the original causes still obtain and thus poverty persists. As for parental wealth, well you'd be hard-pressed to find any trait in a child that isn't statistically more likely when their parents possess it. Are we to address poverty by forcing people to procreate by lottery?
  - jhayward 8y ago
    > As for parental wealth, well you'd be hard-pressed to find any trait in a child that isn't statistically more likely when their parents possess it. Are we to address poverty by forcing people to procreate by lottery? You are being disingenuous by trying to argue that wealth is a genetically heritable trait. I don't think you're actually even engaging in honest debate here, just doing the standard right-wing gish gallop of disinformation and distraction. This applies to all of your comment, not just the above. Noted and ignored.
    - User23 8y ago
      For the benefit of others who have adequate reading comprehension skills, I'd like to explicitly point out that I never wrote anything about genetically heritable traits. I chose my words carefully precisely to avoid this misunderstanding. To be clear, there are many traits that are not, as far as I can tell, genetically heritable, but still statistically more likely in children when their parents have them. Attending an Ivy League university, due to legacy admissions, is just one example. The rest of parent (and subsequent replies by same) is clearly undeserving of a response.
afpx 8y ago
This is a tough subject because it’s an emotional one, and lots of people do make knee jerk reactions. I know plenty of people who feel that they know the causes or consequences or solutions, but yet few of them seem to take a long, deep analysis. For example, the opinion that successful people make decisions X, Y, and Z and unsuccessful people don’t is a very attractive intuition. Yet, it’s very difficult to support without broad longitudinal data. And, even then, how do you control for the many other factors, especially ones that change over time? So, consider your observation that poor people are worse and rich people better (at making decisions). How do you know if there’s survivorship bias at work? That is, without taking a population at birth and requiring them to make ‘the good decisions’ throughout their lives, how do you actually know?
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >So, consider your observation that poor people are worse and rich people better (at making decisions). Did you read the part of the comment about people going broke who are high-income or receive windfalls? Poor money-management exists across all income bands and starting savings levels.
  - afpx 8y ago
    It’s not just about poor money management, but it’s too easy to reduce it to that. Here are a couple examples. Conventional wisdom 30 years ago said that a “good decision” was to graduate high school and get a manufacturing job. A “not so good decision” was to get a degree in computer science. There’s big a reason why ‘nerd’ back then was an offensive term. And, ‘only nerds’ went into compsci, and they didn’t even make much money (compared to, say, a business degree). But, look which decision was better after a few decades. Another example is education, in general. In 1990, everyone was saying that college was the best thing a kid could do to get into the upper middle class. Data showed that any degree would significantly increase wealth over a lifetime. But, yet, just 15 years later, that decision wasn’t so great.

by User23 8y ago

umvi 8y ago

I generally agree with you, but I'm somewhat convinced windfalls are hard to manage for both rich and poor. This is because it has less to do with poor decision making and more to do with the new target on your back. You are now a wounded sheep with hungry predators all around you (in the form of family, friends, thieves, lawyers, etc). I first ran across this idea when I read a reddit thread mentioning Jack Whittaker [1]. Jack Whittaker was a rich dude who won the lottery (net worth $15M before winning). His life has been a trainwreck since. I don't know if he's lost it all yet - my main point is to suggest that the public nature of lottery sets you up for failure and has less to do with competence than you might guess. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...

coliveira 8y ago
If you win a lot of money in the lottery, your best option is to run and resettle in another place where people don't know you.
User23 8y ago
There is a great post in that thread telling you exactly what to do. Step 1 is hire a partner level attorney in a major law firm who specializes in Trusts and Estates before you do anything else.

jhayward 8y ago

> above all it is primarily a consequence, not a cause It absolutely is a cause, of many things, including more poverty. In the US, the largest determiner of a child's future socioeconomic status is her parent's wealth. Whether a disease model is the best one to use is arguable, but blanket denial that poverty is a primary cause of much social disruption, dysfunction, and lack of economic achievement is just nonsense.

User23 8y ago
Poverty is observably the consequence of social disruption, dysfunction, and lack of economic achievement. Wet streets do not cause rain. Germany for example had rampant poverty in the late 1940s and 1950s. That poverty didn't cause the war, it was caused by it. The Marshall plan helped speed up the recovery, but the real factor was the lack of punitive reparations and the industry of the German people. The same occurred in Japan. I don't deny the possible existence of a negative feedback loop, but I don't consider it to be a settled matter either. It could be poverty causing more poverty, or it could just be that the original causes still obtain and thus poverty persists. As for parental wealth, well you'd be hard-pressed to find any trait in a child that isn't statistically more likely when their parents possess it. Are we to address poverty by forcing people to procreate by lottery?
- jhayward 8y ago
  > As for parental wealth, well you'd be hard-pressed to find any trait in a child that isn't statistically more likely when their parents possess it. Are we to address poverty by forcing people to procreate by lottery? You are being disingenuous by trying to argue that wealth is a genetically heritable trait. I don't think you're actually even engaging in honest debate here, just doing the standard right-wing gish gallop of disinformation and distraction. This applies to all of your comment, not just the above. Noted and ignored.
  - User23 8y ago
    For the benefit of others who have adequate reading comprehension skills, I'd like to explicitly point out that I never wrote anything about genetically heritable traits. I chose my words carefully precisely to avoid this misunderstanding. To be clear, there are many traits that are not, as far as I can tell, genetically heritable, but still statistically more likely in children when their parents have them. Attending an Ivy League university, due to legacy admissions, is just one example. The rest of parent (and subsequent replies by same) is clearly undeserving of a response.

afpx 8y ago

This is a tough subject because it’s an emotional one, and lots of people do make knee jerk reactions. I know plenty of people who feel that they know the causes or consequences or solutions, but yet few of them seem to take a long, deep analysis. For example, the opinion that successful people make decisions X, Y, and Z and unsuccessful people don’t is a very attractive intuition. Yet, it’s very difficult to support without broad longitudinal data. And, even then, how do you control for the many other factors, especially ones that change over time? So, consider your observation that poor people are worse and rich people better (at making decisions). How do you know if there’s survivorship bias at work? That is, without taking a population at birth and requiring them to make ‘the good decisions’ throughout their lives, how do you actually know?

pathseeker 8y ago
>So, consider your observation that poor people are worse and rich people better (at making decisions). Did you read the part of the comment about people going broke who are high-income or receive windfalls? Poor money-management exists across all income bands and starting savings levels.
- afpx 8y ago
  It’s not just about poor money management, but it’s too easy to reduce it to that. Here are a couple examples. Conventional wisdom 30 years ago said that a “good decision” was to graduate high school and get a manufacturing job. A “not so good decision” was to get a degree in computer science. There’s big a reason why ‘nerd’ back then was an offensive term. And, ‘only nerds’ went into compsci, and they didn’t even make much money (compared to, say, a business degree). But, look which decision was better after a few decades. Another example is education, in general. In 1990, everyone was saying that college was the best thing a kid could do to get into the upper middle class. Data showed that any degree would significantly increase wealth over a lifetime. But, yet, just 15 years later, that decision wasn’t so great.