38 ms·

We shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty

• awad21 5y ago
  [flagged]
• derbOac 5y ago
  Excellent piece. The subtext — why are our academic-political institutions treating the less fortunate as irrational — is just as important as the content.
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as those with money and connections. Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality. And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate. "Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      "The Bell Curve" is from 1994, a time when the importance of demand for education and skills as a driver for inequality was far less clear than it is today. The real focus of that book was not to drive any racist message, but simply to sound the alarm about how the already extant divergence in educational outcomes would only become more and more relevant in the future unless something radically effective was done to try and mitigate it. People really like to misrepresent that book for some reason, but if anything its real message has only become stronger and more relevant since then.
      • willis936 5y ago
        The bell curve is a scabrous piece of racial pornography. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwing-a-curve.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwi...
        • zozbot234 5y ago
          To be clear, I do of course agree that the book had plenty of major flaws, including in its statistical arguments about the importance of "I.Q." specifically (or of some entirely hypothetical "general factor", whatever that might mean - a "factor" being merely a way of summarizing correlations across measurements, as opposed to anything causally relevant in any underlying model) to outcomes, and even about its observed distribution across US conventional race groups. Much of it would not stand up to even the lightest scrutiny nowadays. But its more general argument about the emergence of a "cognitive elite" on one side, and a "custodial state" on the other, might as well be called conventional wisdom today. These simply were not commonly-acknowledged facts in the mid-1990s!
        • whatlolasdqwe 5y ago
      • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        I don't think this is an accurate depiction of the book (at the time or now). One of the core, repeated messages of the book is that there are no mitigations possible even in theory and we should stop wasting money on trying to educate poor people as there was no way that it would help.† This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists. †Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.
  • kstenerud 5y ago
    This kind of thing happens in any society with high inequality: The worse it gets, the more those on top feel the need to justify their position and downplay the rage of the underclass (traditionally, this continues until the underclass finally kills off the privileged class). It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the privileged in the USA.
    • math-dev 5y ago
      Agree
• vasco 5y ago
  > When studied experimentally, the tendency to prioritise rewards in the future rather than the present diminishes among those who feel low in power or perceive instability or uncertainty in their environment. The apparent failure of self-regulation – a trait admired in those who have it, and taught to those who don’t – is not a psychological impairment, but an adaptive response to having little actual control over one’s future. When I was poor, I never thought I didn't have control over my future, this is likely luck on my part. I think this feeling of lack of control is way more a product of your parents and upbringing than anything else. Everyone knows stories of emigrants that made it from nothing, meanwhile others in similar conditions don't. I know plenty of rich people that don't do anything with themselves and live depressed completely absorbed in a feeling of lack of control over future, "nothing matters" nihilist bullshit too. They just started at a higher absolute value in their bank account so they don't count for the statistics but they're an even bigger drag on society because not only they don't generate anything new, they deprive others of the assets they just have lying around. The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger than "just feel better" mindset coaching, and well, yeah - you can buy food with one and not with the other. But there's plenty of examples and literature as to why also just donating money doesn't solve the problem. I think what solves the problem is creating conditions for good stable parenting of children. The problem is there's plenty of fucked up rich parents, so unfortunately I don't think I have a solution, but I don't think it's either just mindset changes or free money, and there's aspects missing of having a loving family who also focuses on building your character through positive role models and safety to fail. These are easier if you're not struggling to pay the bills, but surely this isn't as easy as airdropping money on everyone. I'm still positive about testing UBI though, I think it could help over several generations.
  • Gualdrapo 5y ago
    > The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger than "just feel better" mindset coaching [...] But there's plenty of examples and literature as to why also just donating money doesn't solve the problem The article does not imply at any point that the "material solution" is the universal solution (not attempts to give one), rather than pointing the flaws of pushing those "just feel better/stop being poor" mindsets and indirectly blaming the poor for their condition.
• WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
• cryptica 5y ago
  This makes sense. It's immoral to promote the possibility and benefits of financial success to people who cannot reach it via legal means. All it will do is drive them into criminal activity because, without the right social connections, that's the only way they can get there. These days, there is tough competition even beyond the criminal line though (but still easier). It seems (based on articles I read) that even succeeding as a drug dealer or trafficker is difficult nowadays because of intense competition. I also know from anecdotal evidence that taboo areas like adult tech industry used to be easier for newcomers who didn't have the right social connections... Not sure if that's still true. I despise the mindset that many rich people have that "I only surround myself with positive people" - What that really means is "I only surround myself with lucky people who don't understand how the world works and charlatans who pretend not to." It's discriminatory and leads to massive blindspots and complete bifurcation of society with an elite class which is completely out of touch... History tells us quite clearly where this leads. I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of desperate people and social climbers into the industry who only got in for the money. I think this partly explains a lot of issues we're facing now with censorship, surveillance and other unethical conduct.
  • FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    > I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of desperate people There's a whole sad parallel universe of wannabe entrepreneurs who have zero sense of what might consititute a marketable product and who live off fantasies of validation by VCs. They seem almost exactly the same to me as the poor folks who get suckered into some Evangelical church with the Prosperity Gospel. Down to the regular social events and sermons. They go for years like this. I'm convinced the whole system feeds off and exacerbates mental illness.
• zozbot234 5y ago
  We shouldn't push a positive mindset on anyone - positivity is not the kind of thing that should be pushed on people in the first place. But this doesn't mean that positive psychology has nothing to say as to how to cope with poverty, and for that matter other adversities (such as social marginalization, which seems especially insidious and hard to address given the dearth of social-capital-enhancing grassroots institutions in modern societies). (The article also seems to weirdly conflate self-regulation/executive function and very-long-term time orientation then saying that the latter makes no sense in an overall risky environment, thus neither does the former. This hardly seems sensible. Just because not eating your marshmallow can be helpful to both, does not make them the same thing!)
• djrobstep 5y ago
  The rise of "mindset" and "resilience" is just another chapter in the absurd poverty discourse. Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money. But rich people don't want that, so we can't do that, and it's largely taboo to even talk about it. So instead of the real solution, we have to talk about all the fake solutions - education, marriage, mindset, resilience, learning to code. Andrew Yang even said that web3 was the most powerful anti-poverty tool we had. Anybody who talks about any cure for poverty other than directly giving people in poverty more money is lying to you.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Why not both? Give people fish and teach them to fish. Why does it have to be one or the other?
    • djrobstep 5y ago
      Because the first one is extremely simple and all that is needed. That doesn't mean that things like education aren't good - but they aren't required or effective for poverty reduction. The other fundamental issue is the poverty is most severe for households with non-earning or low earning dependents, such as children, elderly, sick, disabled, and caregivers - simply because the household income needs to be split more ways. No amount of teaching can fix that - only redistributive welfare can.
      • zozbot234 5y ago
        It's not extremely simple. You have to make money before you can give it away - that's the hard part! (Even if you argue that rich people should be giving away some of their existing high incomes via taxes, that means that these taxes can't be used to fund other good things.) So you need both.
        • djrobstep 5y ago
          What's hard about it? There's plenty of money to go around already.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Barrin92 5y ago
  >Despite decades of explanations and interventions, these efforts have fallen short in one important way: what I call the assumption of free-floating mindsets. This assumption is not only held by researchers but also policymakers and charity workers engaged in well-meaning efforts to tackle poverty in rich countries Not sure we need to invent new phrases here, what's being debated is idealism and materialism. Thinking of individual 'minds' as primary actors is popular because as a society we're still stuck in some sort of Enlightenment/Christian mix where we assume 'success' is the result of moral virtue, good works, reason and so on. People are allergic to material, systemic, biological explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.
  • classified 5y ago
    "I'm rich because I deserve it" feels a lot better than "I'm rich because I happened to win some unfair lottery". The latter will always be a tough sell. And the brand of Christianity prevalent in the U.S. is especially prone to the former.
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      > The latter will always be a tough sell. And the brand of Christianity prevalent in the U.S. is especially prone to the former. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology And then there's the Book of Job: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job
    • BobbyJo 5y ago
      The most important part of any system is how people feel about it. If people feel it's just and good, and that good for others begets good for them, then they are more likely to be and do good. No law, no tax, no specific policy, will ever have as much power over how well things are going for everyone as the zeitgeist itself does. It's better for all of us if we believe people get rich because they deserve it, and if we don't believe it, we need to do what we need to do to get us back to feeling that way.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  A lot of "positive thinking" is gaslighting. Blaming people in poverty for having the wrong mindset diverts the attention away from society.
  • to11mtm 5y ago
    Speaking as someone who's never -quite- been in poverty, but has been pretty close to the 'lowest tier' of financial status at least once. How close? A little over 10 years ago I had to move back in with my parents, owed a lot of folks money due to a separation (back rent the ex wouldn't pay, moving costs, etc) and it got to where a low-interest loan from my parents was the only thing that kept me solvent. I still wonder where I'd be right now if they said no, or didn't have the money, or didn't let me live there rent-free during that time. And I -remember- how hard it was, to do anything to improve the situation. I was being taken advantage of by a very toxic boss. Here's a scenario: - Your mom had a heart attack a week and a half ago - There were severe complications and she might not make it past 72 hours - Your boss tells you "Didn't I already give you a day off for that?" when you ask to see her. What do you do? Staying 'positive' through a situation like that sounds a lot like other groups of people told to 'be happy with their lot'.
  • csee 5y ago
    There's a huge difference between an accurate descriptive explanation of why someone is in poverty, and what mindset one ought to have if they are in poverty so as to maximize their chances of escaping it (or at least, of enduring it). The former should not inform the latter. I am skeptical that putting the locus of control outside of oneself - even if partly or largely true as a description of reality - is a good solution to the latter objective due to the learned helplessness and depression that may be magnified by doing that.
    • bassetian 5y ago
    • rosenjcb 5y ago
      It's a recipe for disaster. If you focus on what you can't control, you end up doing nothing. Focus on the actions that can best improve your life.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  tldr: if someone’s poor they won’t form a “positive mindset” or “internal locus of control” because their life is objectively sucky and they objectively have little control over it. If someone struggles to afford basic necessities like food and rent, and there’s simply no clear opportunity for them to not struggle without tremendous effort, they’re not going to try. This is a well-written article but it seems to me as kind of obvious. Is there something here that i’m missing?
  • newsclues 5y ago
    If you spend time on the wrong parts of social media you will find that there is an industry of people (billionaire lifestyle type influencers) who are exploiting people that can’t grasp this.
  • csee 5y ago
    I see it as a rather biased and unhelpful article. The author makes the strong claim that "mindsets are not free-floating" because they are shaped too strongly by a person's external social environment and circumstances. While this is largely true, it is false and harmful in its absoluteness. Interventions into thinking patterns such as CBT work and are effective. They may be less effective if the person has truly terrible circumstances, but poo pooing stuff that actually works just so she can advance her luxury beliefs is not good. People trapped in poverty need these cognitive tools more than anyone given how desperate their situation is. Poverty is every bit as traumatizing and difficult and impossible as she says it is, and such tools can help them avoid getting their spirit crushed under that hardship. I think that she's doing this because she feels that the narrative that poor people can simply change their mindset and become middle class to be undermining political momentum towards helping them. She may be right about that, but that is no reason to throw away a practically helpful intervention that can help these people in the meantime.
    • bitexploder 5y ago
      I look to the worst situations in humanity for thinking about this. Stockdale is well known for becoming a POW and using stoicism to survive it. And to teach others and lead them using this mindset. Mindset is everything for a human. Encouraging a positive one is not wrong. It is also not a panacea or anything.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  Are you poor because you depressed, or depressed because you are poor?
  • lstodd 5y ago
    Meaningless question. Am I rich because I'm depressed or am I depressed because I'm rich? That's two independent variables.
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
      Are they independent though?
    • tombh 5y ago
      And that's a meaningless reframing. It is not a fundamental logical rule that you can change one side of a relationship in order to demonstrate its irrelevance. For example, "Did the chicken come before the egg?" can't be refuted as a useful thought experiment just by showing that "Did the monkey come before the egg?" is nonsense.
  • naasking 5y ago
    Poverty is a strange loop.
• slibhb 5y ago
  The article is reiterating a dictum of Marx: being determines consciousness. Your mental state is determined by your physical being (generally your economic circumstances) and therefore cannot be responsible for your physical being. I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's not easy for the poor to simply adopt "healthy mindsets" and behavior patterns. I also doubt giving people money is going to be much help. We don't have good strategies to help people out of "intergenerational poverty traps". Also, I find the argument against "victim blaming" silly. Whether or not your the circumstances of your life are your fault, they are your repsonsibility. Who else should be responsible for your life?
  • multjoy 5y ago
    >I also doubt giving people money is going to be much help. Except the research shows that this is the easiest and quickest way to alleviate poverty.
    • slibhb 5y ago
      If you measure poverty by "how much money someone has," this is obviously true. I'm not convinced giving people money alleviates "intergenerational poverty traps". I'm not against welfare. Giving people money alleviates their suffering, I just don't think it will solve the fundamental problem.
      • quacked 5y ago
        I believe you are completely correct; one often remarked-upon example is lottery winners, who receive a massive lump sum and often end up broke anyway. This is not due to the nature of the lottery cash, but the nature of the people who buy lottery tickets. I don't know what the parent commenter's life is like so I hesitate to cast too much doubt, but I have found that people who mentally model "the poor" as "essentially like the rich, but without access to resources" have never spent a great deal of time interacting with or relying on poor people (or rich people, for that matter.) [1] In general, there is a far greater poverty of culture and spirit among the "wealthy-country poor" than any middle-class or rich person who hasn't experienced it can imagine. These are people whose great-grandparents were robbed of societal status through offshoring or legal mayhem, and whose subsequent offspring lived in derelict, unprincipled circumstances for decades as the country crumbled around them, and that doesn't even touch the trouble of drugs. There are many poor people for whom hard cash would transform their lives and the lives of future generations, but by and large these are not the poor people committing the majority of crime and decay visible to the upper classes. For the majority of the "troublesome poor", you could stick them in mansions with bank accounts stocked for six generations, and in two years you'd still have trashed, overgrown real estate and overdraft fees. [2] [1] = This is specifically restricted to the poor in wealthy nations; poverty in the form of "living poor in the wild country of my ancestors" is different than poverty in the form of "living poor in a wealthy city", which is why dirt-poor immigrants to the US often succeed immediately--their principles and convictions are set up for success, they just needed access to easy money. [2] = The analogy I most like to use is the bathrooms at my old high school; due to a series of naive clerical decisions, the advanced classes took place on the highest floor of the school, and the basic, remedial classes on the ground floor of the school. The bathrooms on the third floor were mostly clean and working, while the bathrooms on the first floor were perpetually filthy, broken, and covered in graffiti. They were each cleaned at the same rate, but the users of the first floor bathrooms grew up with expectations of trash and graffiti, and thus perpetuated their own dispiriting environment. Money or access to cleaner bathrooms wouldn't have changed their behavior; only a deliberate and manual restructuring of their value systems would, and that is not a hands-off task.
• lstodd 5y ago
  We shouldn't push "a mindset" on anybody. The thought of someone feeling entitled enough to "push a mindset" is disgusting.
  • caffeine 5y ago
    Well it could also be called “teaching tools and tactics that research had shown work for other people” Usually it’s not entitlement, it’s an effort to help. The effort might be misguided, but assuming that the cause is entitlement rather than a genuine desire to improve outcomes is uncharitable.
    • lstodd 5y ago
      I'm not in a charitable mood when the actual outcome is in fact pure and simple oppression. Whoever does that can shove their genuine desires wherever. They should have thought the whole thing out before acting.
• blfr 5y ago
  > Yet such efforts have been largely unsuccessful at reducing poverty and unemployment It's unfair to just pick this one intervention and point out it didn't reduce poverty or unemployment. They mostly don't. Whether it's positive mindset, growth mindset, head start early education programs, most psychiatric drugs (NNTs in the 20s)... But we are not coldhearted enough to do nothing so this is something. And occasionally it works. We treated iodine deficiency to great sometimes spectacular effects, we feed pretty much everyone in the west, not exactly well but to meet their caloric needs, we did win against smoking (don't know why OP derides that). > When I have simulated a mild version of this experience for middle-class people – using a household budgeting game on a computer where they’re randomly assigned to be poor or financially comfortable – participants have found it to be profoundly disempowering. Those assigned to be poor reported a lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were diminished by the mere momentary lived experience of trying to meet one’s needs when one does not have enough. That sounds worryingly similar to priming.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > We treated iodine deficiency to great sometimes spectacular effects, we feed pretty much everyone in the west, not exactly well but to meet their caloric needs Micronutrient deficiency might turn out to be an enduring problem in the future given how common "food deserts" are in poor areas of the US. Along with countless other things (such as lead exposure, and even something as insidious as general stress and marginalization in early life) it should be addressed as a possible environmental cause of cognitive impairment that might correlate with poverty.
    • alisonkisk 5y ago
• myfavoritedog 5y ago
• wayanon 5y ago
  My parents will die thinking people decide to be poor.
• csydas 5y ago
  I feel this article buries its focus in a lot of narrative, as the core point is very accurate I believe but you have 2400 words to try to explain "not everyone handles bad situations the same way" This is a really tough article for me as personally, I moved to Seattle with < $300 to my name and somehow made it work. For a few years, I lived on rice and eggs, going to concerts/shows was a treat, and free2play games took up my weekends. The article tries to convey how the mindset of being poor, not knowing if you'll have enough money for food or common (western) comforts each week wears on the mind, and I do think this is true. From a very privileged position, I have the opinion that a lot of "raise your status" schools are just garbage meant to fleece the appropriate amount of money from persons in need. (e.g., bootcamps or specialty IT schools. My personal take is they teach how to press buttons/write very narrow and specific code and how to raise support cases with vendors, not how to understand what you're working with) I do not even pretend to understand "real" poverty; I'm extremely lucky in that I had the option to leave the US and work abroad where the capacity to learn was a considered element of the position. Despite the experience I have in System Administration and Programming, I'd probably fail most US interviews simply because I lack the certifications to appease recruiters and I don't have the certification history to appease hiring managers. I find this article to be very US oriented (maybe UK? Not as clear for me), and the way the US treats the poor is abysmal. When I was still living in the US, I recall huge fees for medical procedures that the Doctors deemed seriously necessary (possible cancer), but insurance companies denied as the results were negative, and thus not necessary. Positions constantly asked for N years experience for technologies only around for (N-X) years, or expecting 5 technology stacks to work for 35k USD or less. Now that I work outside of such a system, I deal with the persons who __are__ hired for such positions, and naturally they lied from top to bottom on their CV to get the position; I don't blame them for lying their way into the position, but I do fault them for expecting others to fulfill each technology stack for them. The US has a huge issue with education and poverty in general, with education being so much for pay. I faced so much pushback for paying my student debt in advance and had a few months of argument with payment lenders when I paid my student debt a good number of months in advance, and I cannot see any justification for this. (It truly took 6 months to get a confirmation that my debt was paid in full) From my perspective, far too many systems in the US benefit from the poor having no other choice. I paid $3500 for a biopsy that by all means I feel should have been covered by my insurance. Four months into the event, I had already spent 80+ hours defending my position and _not_ paying prevented me from moving to a new apartment. Compared to moving to eastern Europe, the cost of the same procedures was $100 USD up front, no surprise bills later, insurance didn't bat an eye at this cost. The US is built on bilking the poor for every penny; there's no wonder that there is such a negative mindset on those who haven't lucked out on life. I am so happy I was able to find a way to get out of the US, despite all of my complaints about it. Hearing my friends and family tell me about "how great" it is, despite carrying $100K + in medical debt is just appalling. Every action of their life for programmers, nurses, doctors, and other such privileged positions is undermined by the fact that every system they rely on is designed to fleece them for as much money over their entire life as possible. It's a sick and disgusting system that seems resilient to change no matter how many people realize it's absolutely awful.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• caffeine 5y ago
  The article doesn’t say much about what would help. One thing that helps the poor a lot (everyone, but especially the poor) is functioning, competent institutions. Things like effective policing and crime prevention, a functional healthcare system, competent teaching in schools, sufficient childcare options, little to no corruption, wide availability of credit, a good transportation network, zoning laws that permit cheap and sufficient housing, employment laws that don’t make low-value labour too expensive to employ, etc. When these institutions are not working well, they represent a “drag coefficient” that well-off people can just pay their way out of (complicated tax forms? Pay an accountant $2k, solved) - but for poorer people these can represent existential hurdles. Making institutions perform better (or offering entrepreneurial alternatives) is measurable, empirical, and does not rely on any psychosocial assumptions to produce an effect. Example: “How hard is it for someone who is barely literate and is working 50 hours per week to get and keep a driving license?” If the answer is “hard” that’s a big drag on poor people. If they could do minimal paperwork, do the test for free on nights or weekends in cheap rental cars close to where they live or work, etc. that is a massive boon to someone whose next step up the ladder is to get a driving job.
  • FollowingTheDao 5y ago
    >The article doesn’t say much about what would help. A Universal Basic Income would be a good start.
    • DoreenMichele 5y ago
      I don't think so. It was once thought that student loans would be some panacea lifting poor people out of poverty by giving them access to education and the end result is lots of people overburdened by debt while waiting tables because so many people have degrees that a degree isn't remotely some kind of reasonable assurance that you can get a job in a particular field.
      • adventured 5y ago
        Absolutely. We'd be so much better off by semi copying Germany's culture of vocational training. And it wouldn't be expensive to do compared to the rather crazy sums we presently throw at higher education. Plus we very much need the skilled labor in a vast array of fields.
• verisimi 5y ago
  Should anyone push any mindset on anyone else? What basis is acceptable for pushers of mindset? Are charisma, money, spirituality, power a good basis?
• BirAdam 5y ago
  I live in the US South. There are many misconceptions about the South, and there is a lot of prejudice in American society toward the South, toward “trailer trash,” and toward “rednecks” and “hillbillies.” This is going to build hatred and resentment for “the wealthy” that cannot be overcome by a mindset change. They are hated and despised and therefore they hate right back. Beyond this, there are people who are viewed as poor, dysfunctional, and “degenerate” even by the standards of the hated groups mentioned above. Funny thing is, these hated people are the very people societies cannot live without. Some are the bus drivers, the line cooks, the truck drivers, the sanitation workers, the veterans, and on and on. These people do actual work so that everyone else can get on pushing paper and making new digital b.s. These are also people who’ve been underserved by the digital transformation because they are hated. Why did it take reaching 2020 for someone to make PayPal that works for truckers?
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  It's more complicated than this. There is some truth to both sides of the equation and it is true that we currently overwhelmingly blame poor individuals for their problems and largely fail to recognize that there just isn't enough to go around of some things. We need to do a better job of putting in a floor for all people such that there are limits to how low you can fall even if everything goes wrong and we need to do a better job of lowering barriers to moving between classes. It's currently too easy to fall in the US and too hard to get back up. The right mental models, attitudes, etc can be helpful in problem solving. Some problems are intractable (hard to make progress against and require many years to solve) even if you do everything right. Some kinds of resources are in limited supply such that, yes, some lucky few can readily get out but some will not even if they "do everything right." The best thing we can do as a society is focus on solving that last one: Try to make more resources available of certain kinds such that there is enough to go around to establish a floor from which people have some reasonable hope of being able to be self determining.
  • k__ 5y ago
    That floor is always an issue, even in countries with a better than average social system. Here in Germany, they will cut your financial aid if you aren't willing to take every shitty job you get offered. This leads to companies who prey on the poorest, because they know they have to take their crappy jobs.
    • Tiny-rolleyes 5y ago
    • pc86 5y ago
      There's a somewhat prevalent mindset here in the US that it's better to have a lot of honestly down-on-their-luck, "not-their-fault" poor and impoverished people struggle in order to avoid buying one meal or one nice jacket for the freeloader who simply doesn't feel like getting a job. I imagine even in countries with good social safety nets that you have a certain contingent of people who feel the same way.
    • 5y ago
• collaborative 5y ago
  In a democracy, helping poor people doesn't pay off. It will be critized both for being anti-progressive/paternalistic and "socialist"
• Aunche 5y ago
  I agree that simply pushing a positive mindset is useless because that's not really something you can push unless if you're talking about a parent to your child. However, that isn't to say that a positive mindset is useless. I tutor poor kids and overall, there is definitely a difference between the attitudes of immigrant children and those born into intergenerational poverty. Immigrants tend to take their educational background seriously, where's an alarmingly high number of people born into intergenerational poverty accept the status quo that they're in. This is historically observable as well (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/upshot/immigration-america-rise-poor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/upshot/immigration-americ...). Also, I disagree that the government actually is trying to foster a positive mindset to begin with. Welfare is systemically structured to award victimhood (e.g. welfare cliffs).
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    It's interesting that you seem to perceive this as a fault in those experiencing generational poverty, rather than one of its effects.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      GP never said anything like that. They identified faults in government arrangements as a contributing factor, they didn't say the people themselves were at fault.
    • Aunche 5y ago
      It is both to a certain extent. Bad circumstances cause unhealthy mindsets, but it's undeniable that these unhealthy mindsets aren't making poverty worse. That doesn't mean I'm lecturing anyone about personal responsibility. The solution is to design policy that empowers people rather than treats them as victims. Unfortunately, it seems like every politician who supports the former (e.g universal healthcare) also supports the latter (e.g. student loan cancellation).
      • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        Wait, why wouldn’t student loan cancellation be an empowerment of the poor? I thought the poor disproportionately suffered from shackles of student loans + didn’t finish degree, and the student loan payments are a major friction to breaking into middle class.
• jspash 5y ago
  What was the purpose of removing the leading "why" from the headline? It sounds more click-baity when stated as a fact. Keeping the full correct title with the "why" sounds more open and allows for nuance and discussion.
• atdrummond 5y ago
  You know what would really help the poor? Not putting up job apps that have zero intention of ever getting back to applicants. The single most frustrating thing during my current job hunt has been applying to hundreds of jobs and hearing back from maybe 5% of them. I have zero issue with a rejection. I understand the law of large numbers. Where I get frustrated is spending hours on applications to firms and they can't be bothered to spend 5 seconds letting unsuccessful applicants know that the position as been filled. (I definitely have plenty of other complaints but this is the one that is presently dragging me down mentally.)
  • nuclearnice1 5y ago
    I hear you. There is an asymmetry. You need a job. It’s your only job. They get hundreds of applications. One adjustment I recommend is calibrating the amount of time you spend on an application. You shouldn’t be spending hours on a single cold application. Write your resume. See or hear of an opportunity. Send your standard resume and standard introduction. Hours of upfront work, but only a few minutes per application. Focus on finding warming connections. The strength is in weak ties. Tell your family, friend, former coworker and update your linkedin. Technical people are in huge demand. Given your skills you should have plenty of offers without much anxiety. You’ll get lots of non response. So it goes. Good luck
    • atdrummond 5y ago
      I don't mind getting a "no" and I do feel I've gotten the right ratio of effort per application nailed after some time. I just hate that most employers can't seem to bother to close applications in a timely manner or message candidates when they've chosen someone for the role. I hate twiddling my thumbs wondering if I am going to receive any further communication or not.
      • wy50guy 5y ago
        I think it shows a lack of compassion from employers en masse. There are few negative ramifications to them never acknowledging you submitted your resume. I also submit many applications and I feel like a ghost.
• awad21 5y ago
• awad21 5y ago
  [flagged]
• zackmorris 5y ago
  Poverty is caused by the wealthy not automating the tasks that the poor are forced to do to survive.
• hsn915 5y ago
  > It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace? I'm reading a few books on Adlerian psychology (albeit in Japanese: 「嫌われる勇気」、「劣等感と人間関係」、「勇気づけの方法」) and this pragraph strikes me as very characteristics of Adlerian psychology. > There’s one problem: mindsets are not free-floating. They are neither optional strategies that everyone can freely adopt nor value-neutral ways of enhancing wellbeing. Instead, they are embedded in life conditions that have material, social and ideological dimensions, and this is just as true for those of us living in poverty as it is for the rest of us living in financial comfort. This is not a helpful mindset. "My situation sucks". ok, maybe. But you should not be searching for external causes. You should be thinking about what you can do with what you have. As far as I could gather, Adlerian therapy focuses on "encouragement" in the form of getting you to be comfortable with yourself ("like" and "accept" yourself) and cultivating a sense of "contribution" to others. Having a positive self worth makes a huge difference in how you respond to situations. > (will your child need a new school uniform, or will your car need repairs?). This strikes me as very strange. You have children, and you have a car, but you are "at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder"?
• stakkur 5y ago
  There are other options besides 'positive' and 'negative' mindset. For everyone.
• dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  > It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace? Since it's true? You try doing anything while believing you'll fail and can't achieve anything. Then try doing it while believing you're really good at it. The results are obvious. No shit you can't use a "proactive mindset" for a free "get out of poverty" card whenever you want. It just helps not to despair and make do with what you've got.
• jandrewrogers 5y ago
  One thing that was always abundantly clear is that long-term thinking and discipline is something that you are, it isn't particularly context dependent nor something you can teach beyond natural inclination. Virtually all of the poor people I grew up and lived around with these manifest traits got out of poverty eventually and never came back. For these people, a positive mindset may be helpful. That combination of long-term thinking and discipline are like compound interest, given enough time you can build substantial value on it no matter how little you start with. In this sense, poverty is a personality trait trap. If you don't have these traits and you find yourself in poverty, you are stuck because you'll never spontaneously develop these traits. All of which creates a selection bias where the population of people in poverty are naturally depleted of these helpful traits. Many people are born into this position. If you are in a middle-class situation and lack these traits, you can nonetheless afford some drag loss as a consequence of having excess income -- the median US household can afford to frivolously waste ~$12k/year without materially changing their position beyond lack of wealth accumulation. That is a large de facto safety net for lack of long-term thinking or discipline. Poor people don't have this. Being middle-class doesn't create long-term thinking or discipline, as is also amply evident, but you can afford to make more poor life choices. In a sense, I agree with the article that it won't materially change outcomes. Even if you can divide people in poverty by these traits, the people with them are likely to get out of poverty regardless, and it does nothing constructive for people without them.
  • pc86 5y ago
    This doesn't seem particularly surprising to me. If you look at the ideologues, you have some people arguing that if you just bootstrap your bootstraps you can bootstrap your way out of poverty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people basically claiming that it's all random and you owe absolutely none of your success to your own abilities. The truth, as with all things, is somewhere in the middle. The truth being in the middle, it stands to reason there are certain intrinsic personality traits that would predispose someone to financial/material/commercial success. And if there are traits that would predispose someone to success it stands to reason there would be traits equally predisposing other people to failure.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
• giantg2 5y ago
  Should we be pushing a positive mindset for anyone? To push a positive mindset (repeatedly) is sort of like saying you know how the other person should feel even better than they do. I hate the constant positivity at work. You have to be positive or else you're "unengaged".
• chmod600 5y ago
  A multi-generational outlook must be part of any solution to poverty. Maybe other things are important, too, but a multi-generational approach is required. It's really hard to get out of poverty without good parents. By "really hard" I mean that it doesn't happen very often. Government programs can help here a lot, but are not very sustainable because they need to keep solving the same poverty problems for every generation. Parents are self-replicating. And good parents replicate more good parents. That's a much more sustainable basis for societal improvement. Multi-generational improvement is not easy, but the gains last much longer. The benefits even last through major hardships that create temporary poverty, like war or economic collapse.
• modshatereality 5y ago
• whack 5y ago
  It's odd that the article depicts poverty as an inescapable trap, when this is empirically false. There are countless examples of people who have transcended poverty to either achieve tremendous success, or more realistically, middle-class status. People who have a great deal in common, and took specific steps motivated by specific ways of thinking, which led to their success. Why would you not want to share these recipes with others who could benefit from them? If you're a school teacher, why on earth would you not want to tell your students to study hard so they can go to University or trade school and build a good life for themselves? I agree with the author that children living in poverty deserve a better social safety net, lower crime, and better public schooling. We need to improve our system to better serve those in need. But this doesn't mean we can't also teach kids the existing demonstrable pathways that can lead them to success.
• asciimov 5y ago
  Want to fight poverty? Two things would help: 1. Give them money. 2. Regulate the things that take their money. --- 1. I'm not sure how much that would be but people need to afford child care, transportation, housing, food, healthcare, and still have enough money for leisure. 2. Unregulated costs that hurt the poor. Unhinged cost of healthcare, all healthcare, including ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. Bank maintenance fees, like overdraft fees and checking account fees. Student loan interest rates. Child care. Housing. The judicial system, including things like income based fines (ie.. you make more you pay more).
• rosenjcb 5y ago
  Personal anecdote: I was raised in a poor single home family (father passed) and had very little going for me when I graduated college with an econ degree and an old Buick. After burning out at a gas station job, I just sold my car and moved to Seattle - telling myself I'd figure it out. 4 years later I'm making as much as my peers who went the CS route, lived in an urban area their whole life, had strong support systems (family), et cetera. I know of people in worse positions than I was, so I won't pretend that I had a bad upbringing: it just had its challenges. But what made me succeed was when I stopped making excuses and just put in the 6+ hours a day of coding at the cafe while I job searched. That combined with opportunity (someone took my resume), environment (Seattle is a great place to start your career), and a good support network (my girlfriend). Having a positive mindset is just one part of success, but it's necessary. I know of a lot of college friends from really well off families that work middling data entry jobs because they have zero drive in their career.
• tombh 5y ago
  Poverty is not an unfortunate side effect of civilisation. Indeed, economic gradient is the fundamental _basis_ of civilisation. I've been reading a lot about World Systems Theory (inspired almost entirely by books from r/AskHistorians). Particularly at the moment, Ian Morris' "Why the West Rules, for Now". It's abundantly clear that at least on the macro level, classes, countries and civilisations escape poverty all the time. See civil wars, revolutions and the beneficiaries of collapsed empires for example. The simple fact is that poverty is escaped by sheer brute force, not by virtue. In the archetypical confrontation between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, I side with X. The idea that poverty can be managed from within society's formal power structures is an eternal carrot of carefully calibrated false hope. The idea that we can fix poverty is itself what perpetuates it. The idea of the possibility of overcoming poverty serves more as a means to ignore the fact that civilisation is fundamentally dependent on economic gradients. The West embraced economic gradient and lifted itself out of poverty with the brute forces of colonialism. China is now doing the same and will most likely overtake the West. We all know this hard truth about escaping poverty, let's not pretend otherwise.
• darkerside 5y ago
  > everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace? I'm struggling not to be offended by the idea that humans don't have the ability to choose their own mindset when I believe it's the only thing we can truly reliably choose. I just had a talk with my oldest child today about working hard because you don't know when you'll get your opportunity to shine, but you need to be ready when (or if!) you get it. It was in the context of basketball, but I fully believe it applies to just about everything in life. I also disagree with the premise of the article in that just because the ranks of poverty are not subsiding doesn't mean _individuals_ aren't being helped by these programs.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  My father was career Air Force. The base commander came to him once, and told him that half of the privates on the base were having trouble paying their bills to the local merchants. The merchants complained to the commander, and one of the commander's jobs is to be a good neighbor in the community. The privates were all paid the same, and lived on base housing, with base furniture, etc., all supplied. Health care was free. Half would do fine, the other half ran out of money halfway between paychecks, and would resort to harassing others for loans, not pay back debts, etc/ He ordered my father to help the half that could not manage their finances. So he'd bring them into the office, go over how they handled money, prepared budgets for them, etc. He was very frustrated because this was a complete failure. He was unable to help them.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  There’s no better time in history to be poor, at least in a functioning society. You get police, fire service, in many European countries a health service, relatively inexpensive telecommunications, and a device in your pocket… or smart TV with access to most of the sum of knowledge of mankind for you to use to improve your life. Not only this but in with west… the absence of war.
• rhacker 5y ago
  There are 10 times more "second" non-rented houses in the United States than there are homeless people. That- right there - is the reason we have poor.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Changing one's mindset doesn't work unless it is followed up by taking action.
• chernevik 5y ago
  We refuse to talk about obvious contributors to poverty like out-of-wedlock births, and then we wonder why we have so much difficulty understanding the problem. A healthy culture fosters those attitudes and outlooks that enable people to take care of themselves. Simple stuff like "don't have sex until married", "take care of your kids", "go to school", "work hard", "mind your money" are for many people bedrock values that serve them well. Instead we have subcultures that celebrate promiscuity, materialism and sexism, encourage drug use and dealing, and actively discourage positive behaviors. And we wonder why those in those subcultures do poorly? But we cannot criticize them because that would be insensitive or judgmental or -- worst -- racist. When someone is making a mistake it is no help to overlook the mistake. Abandoning helpful mindsets because they are hard to build is no solution. Of course being poor wears down positivity and agency, we've always known this. That shouldn't mean we give up on trying to help people adopt the approaches that will help them. I don't have the solution to poverty, it is a very complicated and self-sustaining problem whose solutions are going to involve changes in many areas. But we're never going to solve it until we have a better conversation about what causes it.
  • pastacacioepepe 5y ago
    You mistake the cause for the effect. The "cultural issues" you mention are the effect of generational poverty, not the cause. If you want healthy culture, ensure that everyone gets good schools, housing and healthcare. As long as people get completely different education depending on their class, the situation can't improve.
    • chernevik 5y ago
      What's causing what is the whole debate -- and we currently forbid a huge list of potential causes from it.
      • pastacacioepepe 5y ago
        The causes have been extremely clear for the past century at least. It's relatively simple to identify them if you don't approach the issue ideologically.
• blindmute 5y ago
  Poverty is just a Darwinian sort of culling. Those with drive and intelligence will improve their position, and the rest will just not make it. The best way to deal with poverty is to stop funding so many benefits, and to simply let the failures fail. That's how humanity has functioned and evolved for thousands of years.
  • effingwewt 5y ago
    This is utter bullshit, and you may want to brush up on your history. Throughout history humans have exploited the bottom rungs to service the top, and always once the imbalance becomes too great, we see revolts. If anything all we see is that repeatedly it's not drive nor intelligence but lottery by birth. Your comment reeks of so much privilege it's making my eyes water.
    • blindmute 5y ago
      You misunderstand. I am completely in favor of revolts.
• SarikayaKomzin 5y ago
  Aristotle had this figured out thousands of year ago https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ > At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess others goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. And one's happiness is endangered if one is severely lacking in certain advantages—if, for example, one is extremely ugly, or has lost children or good friends through death (1099a31–b6). But why so? If one's ultimate end should simply be virtuous activity, then why should it make any difference to one's happiness whether one has or lacks these other types of good? Aristotle's reply is that one's virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other goods (1153b17–19). Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues. Even the Buddha was a prince before he was enlightened! With all that said, while I agree with the basic premise of this article, a good mental framework IS an important part of becoming a fulfilled person regardless of economic status. Money doesn't correlate directly with happiness, but it does make it a lot easier to pursue happiness when you don't have to worry about it.
• imtringued 5y ago
  Imagine a scifi future where we have free cryochambers for the poor. Every time the rich decide to not spend their money we just throw a poor person into the cryo chamber until the rich person decides to spend their money. This saves food and shelter costs. Oh right, there is no such thing as a free cryochamber, it will require maintenance and it has to be built in the first place. It is cheaper to leave the poor on the street and keep the money at no cost. For this system to work the poor would have to earn the cryochamber fees by working dead end jobs for little pay. Because money has no storage costs, poor people are stuck with the cost of storing their own body to be available to those with money.