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3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and yo

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either. I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I just mean to say that you can't discount the importance of hard work and good judgement. The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

relaxing 6y ago
Living with anyone beats being out on the street. And probably beat being in the foster system.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  > Living with anyone beats being out on the street a lot of folks on the street disagree
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Some have left unsustainable situations, but some were the a-hole of the situations.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. I think everyone is deserving of not living in poverty. Even "lazy" people.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  For some definition of "deserving", I would agree. Certainly, everyone should have the tools and opportunities they need to build the life they want. Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Half of all private wealth is inherited, not earned through work, by the wealthiest 5% of households. In that context, why focus on giving small portions of wealth to those in poverty (even if they aren't working as hard as you think they ought to)?
    - criticaljudge 6y ago
      The notion that children don't deserve the spoils of their parents is really crazy to me. Parents work so that they can give their children a better life. Heck, they even choose their partners to maximize odds for a better life for their offspring (wealth, good genes, and so on - it does not even depend on capitalism). To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich? Yeah, I disagree. We're talking about on the order of tens of millions of dollars or more being passed from one parent to one child.
        dahfizz 6y ago
        You're right. We should kick that kid out on the street, sell all his belongings, and write a check to ever american for a fat 10 cents. Problem solved. > So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich? This is such a twisting of my words I am not even sure how to respond. Are you saying the only way out of poverty is to steal everything you want from the rich?
        criticaljudge 6y ago
        Why don't parents who work hard to give their children a good live deserve to do so? It is not their fault if other people have children while they are poor. Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Probably also a fallacy that it would take infinite amounts of money to alleviate poverty (:
    - criticaljudge 6y ago
      Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        > Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.
        criticaljudge 6y ago
        The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support. Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  I think most people here are guily of double-think. Either you believe in capital punishment, or you believe in universal income, the third option is hypocracy. If you don't believe in state sanctioned murder, then we have to clothe and feed and house people that commited horrible crimes. Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? Being useless is not a crime. Also i dispute this qualification as lazy - some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.
  - covidthrow 6y ago
    > Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? The State actively deprived the rapist of their ability to act autonomously to care for themselves, so they are obligated to do so on their behalf. The State (typically) does not actively deprive an innocent person who can't find a job of their autonomy. (There are some arguable scenarios in which they do, however, such as excessive fines, but obligation to pay those are dependent on ability, and feeding ones-self supercedes that in most jurisdictions.) > some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what. It is ethical to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. It's not as clearly ethical to force someone else to care for those who are unable to care for themselves.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not. Calling the unemployed lazy is a lie untill you offered them a job and they refused.
      - dahfizz 6y ago
        > The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not. And you would be okay with that? You're advocating for actual slavery of inmates?
- hcurtiss 6y ago
  I disagree, and I think most people disagree. This is the ant and the grasshopper, man. Most people are not inclined to enslave the ant for the benefit of the grasshopper.
varjag 6y ago
I think the point is, with a middle-class (let alone wealthy) background few of those poor decisions in the youth spiral out into lifetime handicaps.
lc9er 6y ago
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves Who do you think wakes up and thinks, "I love poverty. This life is so easy"?
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Lots of people wake up and never evaluate their life at all. People win the lottery and end up homeless with a drug addiction. If millions of dollars can't help them, do you think the government should keep writing those people checks?
  - thebradbain 6y ago
    This is a strawman argument, because this is in no way representative of the many people who live in poverty, but I’ll address it because it doesn’t change my final opinion: Yes, because obviously what someone who won (and lost) millions of dollars needs is not money, but help and support. Not to mention, by the construction of your own strawman, if they’ve won such a jackpot they’ve probably also then paid millions in taxes.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      I don't see how this is a strawman. My argument is an existence proof. There exists people who cannot be lifted out of poverty by giving them money. I can trivially prove my claim by giving examples of such people[1]. I never claimed that all or most people are like this. But its undeniable that some people are simply irresponsible / lazy. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-winner-turned-coke-dealer-turned-inmate-says-im-a-lot-happier-now.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-...
      - thebradbain 6y ago
        "Some people" is not "all people" and certainly not "almost all" people or even "most people". I'm curious to know your position on those who are homeless -- as if mental illness, systemic neglect, and abuse combined with skyrocketing housing costs such that even otherwise-able people are just a few missed paychecks away from foreclosure) are incidental, and it's really a result of being "lazy".
heurist 6y ago
You'd throw impoverished and depressed people under the bus because they can't muster the energy to "better" themselves?
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  Why is it "throw under the bus" or help them?
renewiltord 6y ago
The way I see it is that we should optimize less for the theory of pure agency. It's like the Polgar sisters - bootstrapping with structure yields benefits. So it's less about "refuse to work to better themselves" and more about correctly placing incentives on the growth path for individuals so that they become the kind of people who want to "better themselves". Of course there are those who, provided any amount of support, will not become productive individuals and it makes sense to continuously evaluate for growth. But it is beneficial to society and to each participant to offer a minimum childhood to adulthood transition experience that optimizes for productive adults. Of course, this is usually only important for the poor because most wealthier people are better at bringing up children.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
I think the ones you are thinking of are those that specifically called out as being made as a child or only just out of childhood. Yes people who work hard in school or university should be rewarded (both in principle and because, as a practical matter, they make a financially greater contribution to society). But the converse to that doesn't fully hold: people that make bad decisions as a child should still be given a chance to redeem themselves, somehow, later in life.
nemothekid 6y ago
>"OP made good decisions and worked hard" On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves". It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick. Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Thank you for this analogy. Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.
- playingchanges 6y ago
  I like your analogy but I’m not sure it’s perfect. In the finance world I don’t think anyone would presume to say more work === more success. There is a talent component that is not perfectly replicable across hedge funds. BUT in real life more work very often does equal more success because so many careers really do not require a high level of ‘talent’.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    Your counter argument seems to imply that people who work in finance don't share the same reality as the rest of us. I think that plays into a fundamental human error; for some reason when looking at individual industries we can see that the people can put in more or less the same amount of effort and get different results, but on a national scale we attribute effort much more highly, to the point we call losers lazy. To be clear I'm not saying there isn't a level of difference in talent or work ethic; what I'm arguing is that viewing the world that way makes for terrible government policy. When someone says something like "welfare makes people lazy", they are making the mistake you are. Somehow the imaginary "real life work" is directly correlated with effort, but actual finance jobs are not.
zouhair 6y ago
> "OP made good decisions and worked hard" OP could as easily "made the wrong decisions", it's literally a crapshoot.
jasonlotito 6y ago
3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to being able to make the right decision because of outside factors. In this case, the aunt. Without that single person, I imagine things might have been different. > The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. 3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..." The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."
nindalf 6y ago
> 3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard" One of those "decisions" was avoiding prison. OP says people call him privileged, so he probably didn't belong to a race that is jailed disproportionately for crimes that white people are let off for.
ska 6y ago
> of hard work and good judgement. The common mistake here, which I think you mostly avoided but didn't make explicit, is to believe that if someone didn't make it they didn't work hard or have good judgment. It's also problematic how little good judgment we require of young people coming from most backgrounds, compared to underprivileged ones. There is also a common and mostly false trope that many/most poor people are lazy and that is why they are poor. The truth is at minimum more nuanced than that.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  I agree with you, and I appreciate that you have extended a bit of generosity. Currently, hard work is a prequisite. In order to achieve equility of opportunity, which would allow anyone to succeed, we need to provide for the "unlucky" scenarios people fall into. Access to childcare and education are two big things in particular that should be improved.
charlesu 6y ago
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?
whack 6y ago
There's an extra layer of nuance missing in your reply. 3 of the 5 factors boil down to "op made good decisions and worked hard" AS A TEENAGER. OP's formula won't work for a 30-year old who is trying to work equally hard and making equally good decisions... if they are saddled with poor educational qualifications, kids to take care of, and/or a criminal history. At which point, we as a society are faced with 2 options: 1. We can tell them it's their own fault for not making great decisions when they were teenagers, and therefore, they deserve to remain stuck in a poverty trap for the rest of their lives 2. Or, we can acknowledge that they are now in a situation where hard work alone is unlikely to solve their problems. And we can provide them with the tools they need to help themselves, and also become more valuable assets to society. For example, subsidized/free college or job training. Free/subsidized childcare. Safe living environments. Better access to healthcare. Better public transit so they can actually get to work. Etc

relaxing 6y ago

Living with anyone beats being out on the street. And probably beat being in the foster system.

sigstoat 6y ago
> Living with anyone beats being out on the street a lot of folks on the street disagree
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Some have left unsustainable situations, but some were the a-hole of the situations.

whimsicalism 6y ago

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. I think everyone is deserving of not living in poverty. Even "lazy" people.

dahfizz 6y ago
For some definition of "deserving", I would agree. Certainly, everyone should have the tools and opportunities they need to build the life they want. Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Half of all private wealth is inherited, not earned through work, by the wealthiest 5% of households. In that context, why focus on giving small portions of wealth to those in poverty (even if they aren't working as hard as you think they ought to)?
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    The notion that children don't deserve the spoils of their parents is really crazy to me. Parents work so that they can give their children a better life. Heck, they even choose their partners to maximize odds for a better life for their offspring (wealth, good genes, and so on - it does not even depend on capitalism). To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich? Yeah, I disagree. We're talking about on the order of tens of millions of dollars or more being passed from one parent to one child.
      - dahfizz 6y ago
        You're right. We should kick that kid out on the street, sell all his belongings, and write a check to ever american for a fat 10 cents. Problem solved. > So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich? This is such a twisting of my words I am not even sure how to respond. Are you saying the only way out of poverty is to steal everything you want from the rich?
      - criticaljudge 6y ago
        Why don't parents who work hard to give their children a good live deserve to do so? It is not their fault if other people have children while they are poor. Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?
criticaljudge 6y ago
I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Probably also a fallacy that it would take infinite amounts of money to alleviate poverty (:
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      > Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.
      - criticaljudge 6y ago
        The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.
- dv_dt 6y ago
  I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support. Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
I think most people here are guily of double-think. Either you believe in capital punishment, or you believe in universal income, the third option is hypocracy. If you don't believe in state sanctioned murder, then we have to clothe and feed and house people that commited horrible crimes. Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? Being useless is not a crime. Also i dispute this qualification as lazy - some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.
- covidthrow 6y ago
  > Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? The State actively deprived the rapist of their ability to act autonomously to care for themselves, so they are obligated to do so on their behalf. The State (typically) does not actively deprive an innocent person who can't find a job of their autonomy. (There are some arguable scenarios in which they do, however, such as excessive fines, but obligation to pay those are dependent on ability, and feeding ones-self supercedes that in most jurisdictions.) > some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what. It is ethical to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. It's not as clearly ethical to force someone else to care for those who are unable to care for themselves.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not. Calling the unemployed lazy is a lie untill you offered them a job and they refused.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      > The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not. And you would be okay with that? You're advocating for actual slavery of inmates?
hcurtiss 6y ago
I disagree, and I think most people disagree. This is the ant and the grasshopper, man. Most people are not inclined to enslave the ant for the benefit of the grasshopper.

varjag 6y ago

I think the point is, with a middle-class (let alone wealthy) background few of those poor decisions in the youth spiral out into lifetime handicaps.

lc9er 6y ago

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves Who do you think wakes up and thinks, "I love poverty. This life is so easy"?

dahfizz 6y ago
Lots of people wake up and never evaluate their life at all. People win the lottery and end up homeless with a drug addiction. If millions of dollars can't help them, do you think the government should keep writing those people checks?
- thebradbain 6y ago
  This is a strawman argument, because this is in no way representative of the many people who live in poverty, but I’ll address it because it doesn’t change my final opinion: Yes, because obviously what someone who won (and lost) millions of dollars needs is not money, but help and support. Not to mention, by the construction of your own strawman, if they’ve won such a jackpot they’ve probably also then paid millions in taxes.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    I don't see how this is a strawman. My argument is an existence proof. There exists people who cannot be lifted out of poverty by giving them money. I can trivially prove my claim by giving examples of such people[1]. I never claimed that all or most people are like this. But its undeniable that some people are simply irresponsible / lazy. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-winner-turned-coke-dealer-turned-inmate-says-im-a-lot-happier-now.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-...
    - thebradbain 6y ago
      "Some people" is not "all people" and certainly not "almost all" people or even "most people". I'm curious to know your position on those who are homeless -- as if mental illness, systemic neglect, and abuse combined with skyrocketing housing costs such that even otherwise-able people are just a few missed paychecks away from foreclosure) are incidental, and it's really a result of being "lazy".

heurist 6y ago

You'd throw impoverished and depressed people under the bus because they can't muster the energy to "better" themselves?

EvilEy3 6y ago
Why is it "throw under the bus" or help them?

renewiltord 6y ago

The way I see it is that we should optimize less for the theory of pure agency. It's like the Polgar sisters - bootstrapping with structure yields benefits. So it's less about "refuse to work to better themselves" and more about correctly placing incentives on the growth path for individuals so that they become the kind of people who want to "better themselves". Of course there are those who, provided any amount of support, will not become productive individuals and it makes sense to continuously evaluate for growth. But it is beneficial to society and to each participant to offer a minimum childhood to adulthood transition experience that optimizes for productive adults. Of course, this is usually only important for the poor because most wealthier people are better at bringing up children.

quietbritishjim 6y ago

I think the ones you are thinking of are those that specifically called out as being made as a child or only just out of childhood. Yes people who work hard in school or university should be rewarded (both in principle and because, as a practical matter, they make a financially greater contribution to society). But the converse to that doesn't fully hold: people that make bad decisions as a child should still be given a chance to redeem themselves, somehow, later in life.

nemothekid 6y ago

>"OP made good decisions and worked hard" On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves". It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick. Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.

lostcolony 6y ago
Thank you for this analogy. Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.
playingchanges 6y ago
I like your analogy but I’m not sure it’s perfect. In the finance world I don’t think anyone would presume to say more work === more success. There is a talent component that is not perfectly replicable across hedge funds. BUT in real life more work very often does equal more success because so many careers really do not require a high level of ‘talent’.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  Your counter argument seems to imply that people who work in finance don't share the same reality as the rest of us. I think that plays into a fundamental human error; for some reason when looking at individual industries we can see that the people can put in more or less the same amount of effort and get different results, but on a national scale we attribute effort much more highly, to the point we call losers lazy. To be clear I'm not saying there isn't a level of difference in talent or work ethic; what I'm arguing is that viewing the world that way makes for terrible government policy. When someone says something like "welfare makes people lazy", they are making the mistake you are. Somehow the imaginary "real life work" is directly correlated with effort, but actual finance jobs are not.

zouhair 6y ago

> "OP made good decisions and worked hard" OP could as easily "made the wrong decisions", it's literally a crapshoot.

jasonlotito 6y ago

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to being able to make the right decision because of outside factors. In this case, the aunt. Without that single person, I imagine things might have been different. > The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. 3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..." The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."

nindalf 6y ago

> 3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard" One of those "decisions" was avoiding prison. OP says people call him privileged, so he probably didn't belong to a race that is jailed disproportionately for crimes that white people are let off for.

ska 6y ago

> of hard work and good judgement. The common mistake here, which I think you mostly avoided but didn't make explicit, is to believe that if someone didn't make it they didn't work hard or have good judgment. It's also problematic how little good judgment we require of young people coming from most backgrounds, compared to underprivileged ones. There is also a common and mostly false trope that many/most poor people are lazy and that is why they are poor. The truth is at minimum more nuanced than that.

dahfizz 6y ago
I agree with you, and I appreciate that you have extended a bit of generosity. Currently, hard work is a prequisite. In order to achieve equility of opportunity, which would allow anyone to succeed, we need to provide for the "unlucky" scenarios people fall into. Access to childcare and education are two big things in particular that should be improved.

charlesu 6y ago

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?

whack 6y ago

There's an extra layer of nuance missing in your reply. 3 of the 5 factors boil down to "op made good decisions and worked hard" AS A TEENAGER. OP's formula won't work for a 30-year old who is trying to work equally hard and making equally good decisions... if they are saddled with poor educational qualifications, kids to take care of, and/or a criminal history. At which point, we as a society are faced with 2 options: 1. We can tell them it's their own fault for not making great decisions when they were teenagers, and therefore, they deserve to remain stuck in a poverty trap for the rest of their lives 2. Or, we can acknowledge that they are now in a situation where hard work alone is unlikely to solve their problems. And we can provide them with the tools they need to help themselves, and also become more valuable assets to society. For example, subsidized/free college or job training. Free/subsidized childcare. Safe living environments. Better access to healthcare. Better public transit so they can actually get to work. Etc