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In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful. I don't see a f
by cactus2093 6y ago
In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful.
I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves.
To be clear I'm not saying there is no poverty feedback loop, just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way. We can improve our systems to make it easier for people to escape poverty. But this doesn't really have anything to do with billionaires. Many of the issues in these systems are not even for lack of funding, but inefficiently spent funding or other poorly designed incentives or bureaucratic rules that make things more difficult for poor people.
- ardy42 6y ago> Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. Ideally, but in reality public education is not an equalizer like that. Wealthy parents give their students advantages that school can't provide in our society: e.g. upper class culture and habits, resources for extra education, connections, etc. Even the institutional bits aren't equal: local property tax based funding mechanisms mean richer people live in better-resourced school districts than poorer people, with better educational opportunities.
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- lilcorey10 6y agoWhat are examples of upper class culture or habits?
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- vondur 6y agoWhen children have a rough family/home life growing up, that can create some big obstacles to overcome later in life. If their parents don't see a value in education, then the children tend to inherit that outlook took, thus continuing the cycle. Of course, some will work there way out of it, but I'd imagine that number is small compared to those who get stuck in it.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago> I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty Really? You’re 16 years old, you’ve a high IQ and a passion for programming. Your parents are alcoholics. You don’t have nice clothes. You don’t have perfect manners because it’s just not the world you live in. How do you get to the university admissions interview in the next town? How will you compete against the mannerly, well turned out student with no record of truancy. All you have is a high IQ and a passion. Will that cut it? > incentives Actors are sometimes irrational, you can’t rely on incentives.
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- bumby 6y agoBill Gates has openly admitted how much his environment helped. Being genetically gifted as he is is only part of the equation. He also grew up in an affluent enough area to have early to computers as well as the time and supportive environment to pursue it. I wonder if people who claim environment doesnt matter have spent any appreciable time in poor neighborhoods. The absolute best will usually find their way out. I think a society should optimize for beyond those who are just in the vanishing tail of the curve
- webmaven 6y ago> Bill Gates has openly admitted how much his environment helped. Being genetically gifted as he is is only part of the equation. He also grew up in an affluent enough area to have early to computers as well as the time and supportive environment to pursue it. Not to mention the role his familial connections had in his landing that sweetheart deal with IBM.
- dralley 6y agoFor the unaware, his mom was an acquaintance of the IBM CEO by virtue of both serving on the board of United Way, and Microsoft came up in conversation between them. A few weeks later IBM contracted Microsoft to write the operating system for the first IBM "personal computer".
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago> Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. > just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way You're not wrong, but funding education is _expensive_, and education is only part of the puzzle, access is another large part of it, and so are the social norms you develop. My family and I grew up in "poverty-lite", and while I did manage to get into a great college, the adjustment was quite difficult. In high school I would show up to regional science fairs, and would often come in 2nd or 3rd place, and would lose to kids who used their high school's teacher's Masters thesis as a science project (for reference, in my school nobody even had a Masters degree.) Socially, I grew up very different from them. Where I grew up, you kept your head down and got in line. Disputes were aired out publicly, and often descended to fistfights if you were under 21. Textbooks were expensive, and my school often couldn't afford enough for everyone. I was constantly begging the librarian to borrow math books, but I never could because we didn't even have enough copies for the students in the actual class, let alone me, an interested kid. For my college peers money was never an issue. I used my good grades to become a TA as soon as I could, and I worked as many hours as I could so I could pay rent and make expenses while my friends seemed to have endless amounts of time to go to social hangouts and parties, which certainly blocked the connections I could make. Over the years I've made a handful of friends in tech who grew up in a similar income bracket as mine, and they remain comforting to me because even now, I have a hard time relating to the average Silicon Valley tech worker whose life started in upper-middle class gated suburbs.