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I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor

by lemax 5y ago

I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.

scarby2 5y ago
> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design. We need people to feel pressured into doing shitty jobs, if the poor get less poor maybe they won't flip burgers for minimum wage.
- danhorner 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- solveit 5y ago
  Who is "We" and how do they coordinate this? Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy (Usually. Occasionally governments intentionally wage "war" on a group of people, but this is not the typical case.).
  - roughly 5y ago
    > Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy Except that when everyone knows what a poverty trap is, how they form, how to spot them, and what to do about them, and none of that gets done, we start to fall on the opposite side of Hanlon’s razor. It’s not like that scholarship is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem?
    - ctoth 5y ago
      Everyone knows what lightning is, when it forms, what to do about it (go inside), and why it's dangerous. Yet still, somehow, people get struck by lightning. It's not like this knowledge is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem? Does this clarify things a bit? I'd like to find a better rhetorical method than just swapping out terms, but it really does highlight the point here. Can we conclude that government is trying to kill people just because some people still get struck by lightning? Alternatively, what would the government need to do to prevent anyone from ever getting struck? Now consider all the different ways people can end up poor, and project this infrastructure out to ensuring that that can never, ever happen. Should we have better methods to handle it when it does? Probably! Does the fact that poverty traps exist mean that people explicitly set them up? Probably not!
      - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
        Many poverty traps exist because they can be a lucrative enterprise. People in poverty are generally the most vulnerable to begin with. Curbing people's ability to leverage poverty traps for profit in a capitalist system would reduce how many people get stuck in them. In general, government legislation can and does directly affect poverty rates as well as who is most likely to be affected. People will argue about the effectiveness and intent of government actions to ameliorate/impose poverty. Claiming that it is outside of a government's influence is nonsense.
- ctoth 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project? If the goal is find a way to ensure burgers are flipped and toilets cleaned, wouldn't the rational idea be to invest in robotics and involuntary birth control technology, not try to ride herd on a giant mob of poor people who might turn on their "masters'" at any point? For that matter, if you are one of the masters of the Universe, why do you even need the poor people who only interact with other poor people? If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today? Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear? It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
  - malka 5y ago
    Humans are cheaper than robots. You can make one run on about a bowl of rice per day.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project? It’s not super complicated, it’s just the natural consequence of an elite in power wanting to stay that way. You can see it as some kind of class behaviour. It has been going on since as far back as we can see, e.g. in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. People are being replaced by robots, as soon as it makes financial sense. This itself is really not new, and has caused issues since the start of the industrial revolution (see the various textile labourers strikes over the last 2 or 3 centuries). > If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today? It’s uncoordinated because it isn’t actually a large conspiracy by a couple of evil masters of the world. It’s a result of everyone in a position of power acting it their own self interest over time. > Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear? Mechanisation has been a more and more realistic strategy, but this is very recent. You still need people to make stuff. Also, “the underclass” is not going to disappear on its own. > It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with. Exactly. That, and the fact that some people’s hopes and dreams depend on them exploiting other people.
- simplestats 5y ago
  You need ID to get that job flipping burgers. Two forms of it for the I-9. Though not proof of residency perhaps. Once you have the job you can use the paycheck as proof of residency.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
Some people do not believe in "rising tides", if you believe it's a zero-sum game you will want to keep people poor to keep yourself wealthy.
sjtindell 5y ago
What’s happening with voter suppression in the US today is contrary to that. Many people are petty and callous. It’s reality. They literally want everyone they don’t like to leave.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Yes they’ve been using the phrase “ensuring voter quality” to justify measures which essentially restrict access to voting for the poor.
  - dijonman2 5y ago
    I can’t help but see this as some sort of propaganda. Where’s the evidence this is a concerted effort against poor people? You can’t do much in life without ID.
    - immibis 5y ago
      And yet, gun permits (photo-less) are valid voting ID, and university IDs (with photo) are not.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      "You can’t do much in life without ID." This is a common belief that, to me, displays a serious lack of knowledge of the breadth of human experience. It should not be hard to imagine how people who are some combination of very sick, old, lonely, disabled or poor can have their ID expire and then not get a new one for year after year. Yet people seem to constantly proclaim this as unthinkable or nonsensical, as if only their version of a lived life is believable.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Some countries make it work. The key is to make the mandatory IDs free and easy to obtain. It’s not that difficult. When I need to renew my ID here in <random European country> I need a 20 minutes appointment, any document can be printed there so there is no issue with pdf and no need to fake a mail. Nothing to pay as well. For the driver’s licence it was even easier, I just had to upload a photo and a pdf bill as a proof of address on a government web server, and I had it in the mail 3 weeks later. Voting is a fundamental right. If you are going to require IDs for it, it follows that IDs are a fundamental right, and making them arbitrarily difficult to obtain is capricious, discriminatory and should be considered unconstitutional in a sane democracy.
idiotsecant 5y ago
There is, on the other hand, a strong incentive to keep poor people from getting ID. If you don't have ID you can still mostly do the peasant work that is required for those in power to stay in power but you can't remove them from power by voting because those in power are increasingly linking the ability to vote with the ability to get documentation which they are continuously working to make it more difficult for poor people to get. Reap all the benefits of the slaves doing their work, avoid any of the downsides of having to actually listen to their needs.
- Scea91 5y ago
  How does this work? You don't just go to local city hall or similar office to get a free ID when you turn particular age (15 in my country)? What is required to get an ID?
- ctoth 5y ago
  Is this your true belief? Do you really 1: conceive of anyone without an ID as a "slave," and 2: believe that things like Real ID laws, which are broadly supported by 80% of citizens[0] are here just to keep the poor down? This seems utterly inflammatory, and somewhat divorced from reality. I absolutely understand systems thinking, and specifically can see the argument for posiwid here, but even then... This sort of conspiracy thinking strikes me as profoundly not useful. Before attributing laws requiring IDs to the evil evil overlords, first ask yourself why 80% of citizens approve of these laws? Is everybody just all working to keep a tiny group of people down? Might it instead be that complex systems have edge cases and people who are already on the margins of society hit these edge cases more? The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs, but obviously we can't fix a global conspiracy, so I'd really like to know which I'm dealing with. If it is a conspiracy this makes it seem like there's nothing I can do to solve the problem. [0]: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_062121/ https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthp...
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    Absolutely it's a sincere belief. "Slave" is hyperbole, but only just barely. The link you posted indicates that 80% of people think it's reasonable to show ID at a polling station. I think you'd find that's a pretty common opinion on it's face because it's perfectly reasonable to show ID to do things like vote or get social security benefits or register property you own or all those government-y things. The trouble comes when you hijack that perfectly reasonable expectation by then making ID preferentially difficult to get for certain classes of people. You don't need to trust that this is the case - it's apparent from the statistics. More than 10% of adult US citizens don't have ID. Why not? Because it takes time and money - you need to pay fees, you need to travel, you need underlying documents that can sometimes take hundreds of dollars of fees themselves to generate, etc. Politicians also can 'tune' what counts as ID to preselect the voters they want. TX for example, counts concealed carry cards as ID but does not count student IDs. In fact, in 2014 the GAO itself found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by at least 2-3 percentage points on average with significantly higher proportions in economically depressed and racially diverse areas, and it's well documented that the people impacted by that lower turnout are overwhelmingly members of specific demographics that tend to vote for specific policies. That's a pretty big incentive to marginalize these people if you don't agree with those policies. It's undeniable that for many of the most vulnerable and powerless members of society obtaining ID under the current regime is in direct conflict with simple survival, and is unlikely to be a priority. If we want to require ID for voting we should make the process of obtaining that ID require as little economic power as possible - a task that is easily within our grasp.
dillondoyle 5y ago
I would say in certain - often southern R states - this is done on purpose to make it harder to vote.
kingkawn 5y ago
The reason the poor are discriminated against is to keep them poor. It’s pretty straightforward and often so reflexively implemented that it leaves room for someone to falsely claim it’s an unintended consequence.
galdosdi 5y ago
> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper if their prospective employees are more desperate and thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective workers from saving enough to weather the risk of negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc. If you look at places that have policies that seem to keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least some clear correlation in terms of who the major employers with more influence in the state are -- those who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due to having higher profit margins or less of their costs come from commodity labor. Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey. Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of labor intensive services only wealthier people would have in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff that a middle class person in the US would need to ration a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there and eat out here and then.
VictorPath 5y ago
> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor That's not what Karl Marx said https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
Aloha 5y ago
People just don't believe me when I tell them how hard it is to get an ID. I can tell its all very well intentioned, I can understand how and why all the rules came to exist, it still has the net result of making the poor, poorer.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
You haven't looked at one of the major parties very closely, then. They've got a 50 year history of doing exactly what you claim there's no good reason to do.

by lemax 5y ago

I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.

scarby2 5y ago

> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design. We need people to feel pressured into doing shitty jobs, if the poor get less poor maybe they won't flip burgers for minimum wage.

danhorner 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
solveit 5y ago
Who is "We" and how do they coordinate this? Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy (Usually. Occasionally governments intentionally wage "war" on a group of people, but this is not the typical case.).
- roughly 5y ago
  > Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy Except that when everyone knows what a poverty trap is, how they form, how to spot them, and what to do about them, and none of that gets done, we start to fall on the opposite side of Hanlon’s razor. It’s not like that scholarship is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem?
  - ctoth 5y ago
    Everyone knows what lightning is, when it forms, what to do about it (go inside), and why it's dangerous. Yet still, somehow, people get struck by lightning. It's not like this knowledge is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem? Does this clarify things a bit? I'd like to find a better rhetorical method than just swapping out terms, but it really does highlight the point here. Can we conclude that government is trying to kill people just because some people still get struck by lightning? Alternatively, what would the government need to do to prevent anyone from ever getting struck? Now consider all the different ways people can end up poor, and project this infrastructure out to ensuring that that can never, ever happen. Should we have better methods to handle it when it does? Probably! Does the fact that poverty traps exist mean that people explicitly set them up? Probably not!
    - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
      Many poverty traps exist because they can be a lucrative enterprise. People in poverty are generally the most vulnerable to begin with. Curbing people's ability to leverage poverty traps for profit in a capitalist system would reduce how many people get stuck in them. In general, government legislation can and does directly affect poverty rates as well as who is most likely to be affected. People will argue about the effectiveness and intent of government actions to ameliorate/impose poverty. Claiming that it is outside of a government's influence is nonsense.
ctoth 5y ago
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project? If the goal is find a way to ensure burgers are flipped and toilets cleaned, wouldn't the rational idea be to invest in robotics and involuntary birth control technology, not try to ride herd on a giant mob of poor people who might turn on their "masters'" at any point? For that matter, if you are one of the masters of the Universe, why do you even need the poor people who only interact with other poor people? If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today? Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear? It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
- malka 5y ago
  Humans are cheaper than robots. You can make one run on about a bowl of rice per day.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project? It’s not super complicated, it’s just the natural consequence of an elite in power wanting to stay that way. You can see it as some kind of class behaviour. It has been going on since as far back as we can see, e.g. in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. People are being replaced by robots, as soon as it makes financial sense. This itself is really not new, and has caused issues since the start of the industrial revolution (see the various textile labourers strikes over the last 2 or 3 centuries). > If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today? It’s uncoordinated because it isn’t actually a large conspiracy by a couple of evil masters of the world. It’s a result of everyone in a position of power acting it their own self interest over time. > Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear? Mechanisation has been a more and more realistic strategy, but this is very recent. You still need people to make stuff. Also, “the underclass” is not going to disappear on its own. > It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with. Exactly. That, and the fact that some people’s hopes and dreams depend on them exploiting other people.
simplestats 5y ago
You need ID to get that job flipping burgers. Two forms of it for the I-9. Though not proof of residency perhaps. Once you have the job you can use the paycheck as proof of residency.

Griffinsauce 5y ago

Some people do not believe in "rising tides", if you believe it's a zero-sum game you will want to keep people poor to keep yourself wealthy.

sjtindell 5y ago

What’s happening with voter suppression in the US today is contrary to that. Many people are petty and callous. It’s reality. They literally want everyone they don’t like to leave.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Yes they’ve been using the phrase “ensuring voter quality” to justify measures which essentially restrict access to voting for the poor.
- dijonman2 5y ago
  I can’t help but see this as some sort of propaganda. Where’s the evidence this is a concerted effort against poor people? You can’t do much in life without ID.
  - immibis 5y ago
    And yet, gun permits (photo-less) are valid voting ID, and university IDs (with photo) are not.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    "You can’t do much in life without ID." This is a common belief that, to me, displays a serious lack of knowledge of the breadth of human experience. It should not be hard to imagine how people who are some combination of very sick, old, lonely, disabled or poor can have their ID expire and then not get a new one for year after year. Yet people seem to constantly proclaim this as unthinkable or nonsensical, as if only their version of a lived life is believable.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Some countries make it work. The key is to make the mandatory IDs free and easy to obtain. It’s not that difficult. When I need to renew my ID here in <random European country> I need a 20 minutes appointment, any document can be printed there so there is no issue with pdf and no need to fake a mail. Nothing to pay as well. For the driver’s licence it was even easier, I just had to upload a photo and a pdf bill as a proof of address on a government web server, and I had it in the mail 3 weeks later. Voting is a fundamental right. If you are going to require IDs for it, it follows that IDs are a fundamental right, and making them arbitrarily difficult to obtain is capricious, discriminatory and should be considered unconstitutional in a sane democracy.

idiotsecant 5y ago

There is, on the other hand, a strong incentive to keep poor people from getting ID. If you don't have ID you can still mostly do the peasant work that is required for those in power to stay in power but you can't remove them from power by voting because those in power are increasingly linking the ability to vote with the ability to get documentation which they are continuously working to make it more difficult for poor people to get. Reap all the benefits of the slaves doing their work, avoid any of the downsides of having to actually listen to their needs.

Scea91 5y ago
How does this work? You don't just go to local city hall or similar office to get a free ID when you turn particular age (15 in my country)? What is required to get an ID?
ctoth 5y ago
Is this your true belief? Do you really 1: conceive of anyone without an ID as a "slave," and 2: believe that things like Real ID laws, which are broadly supported by 80% of citizens[0] are here just to keep the poor down? This seems utterly inflammatory, and somewhat divorced from reality. I absolutely understand systems thinking, and specifically can see the argument for posiwid here, but even then... This sort of conspiracy thinking strikes me as profoundly not useful. Before attributing laws requiring IDs to the evil evil overlords, first ask yourself why 80% of citizens approve of these laws? Is everybody just all working to keep a tiny group of people down? Might it instead be that complex systems have edge cases and people who are already on the margins of society hit these edge cases more? The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs, but obviously we can't fix a global conspiracy, so I'd really like to know which I'm dealing with. If it is a conspiracy this makes it seem like there's nothing I can do to solve the problem. [0]: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_062121/ https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthp...
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Absolutely it's a sincere belief. "Slave" is hyperbole, but only just barely. The link you posted indicates that 80% of people think it's reasonable to show ID at a polling station. I think you'd find that's a pretty common opinion on it's face because it's perfectly reasonable to show ID to do things like vote or get social security benefits or register property you own or all those government-y things. The trouble comes when you hijack that perfectly reasonable expectation by then making ID preferentially difficult to get for certain classes of people. You don't need to trust that this is the case - it's apparent from the statistics. More than 10% of adult US citizens don't have ID. Why not? Because it takes time and money - you need to pay fees, you need to travel, you need underlying documents that can sometimes take hundreds of dollars of fees themselves to generate, etc. Politicians also can 'tune' what counts as ID to preselect the voters they want. TX for example, counts concealed carry cards as ID but does not count student IDs. In fact, in 2014 the GAO itself found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by at least 2-3 percentage points on average with significantly higher proportions in economically depressed and racially diverse areas, and it's well documented that the people impacted by that lower turnout are overwhelmingly members of specific demographics that tend to vote for specific policies. That's a pretty big incentive to marginalize these people if you don't agree with those policies. It's undeniable that for many of the most vulnerable and powerless members of society obtaining ID under the current regime is in direct conflict with simple survival, and is unlikely to be a priority. If we want to require ID for voting we should make the process of obtaining that ID require as little economic power as possible - a task that is easily within our grasp.

dillondoyle 5y ago

I would say in certain - often southern R states - this is done on purpose to make it harder to vote.

kingkawn 5y ago

The reason the poor are discriminated against is to keep them poor. It’s pretty straightforward and often so reflexively implemented that it leaves room for someone to falsely claim it’s an unintended consequence.

galdosdi 5y ago

> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper if their prospective employees are more desperate and thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective workers from saving enough to weather the risk of negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc. If you look at places that have policies that seem to keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least some clear correlation in terms of who the major employers with more influence in the state are -- those who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due to having higher profit margins or less of their costs come from commodity labor. Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey. Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of labor intensive services only wealthier people would have in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff that a middle class person in the US would need to ration a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there and eat out here and then.

VictorPath 5y ago

> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor That's not what Karl Marx said https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

Aloha 5y ago

People just don't believe me when I tell them how hard it is to get an ID. I can tell its all very well intentioned, I can understand how and why all the rules came to exist, it still has the net result of making the poor, poorer.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

You haven't looked at one of the major parties very closely, then. They've got a 50 year history of doing exactly what you claim there's no good reason to do.