8 ms·

Everyone should read this link by John Scalzi, as well, as a companion to this article. Being Poor: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://w

by earl 17y ago

Everyone should read this link by John Scalzi, as well, as a companion to this article. Being Poor: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

noonespecial 17y ago
That's fantastic. They're all brilliant but, "Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.", just gives me chills.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  Search for Ilkka Kokkarinen's comment.
  - earl 17y ago
    Gah. People who think that the poor are lazy and shiftless are scum. Some of the poor maybe be lazy and shiftless, but having middle class / wealthy parents doesn't just give you money and education and health -- it also gives you the very habits and abilities (saving, studying, deferring rewards, working hard, etc) that keep people from being poor or staying poor. Even things like applying to college are different if you have parents who can help guide you through the process -- I read a heartrending account of a (poor) child who got a scholarship to go to a private high school but his parents couldn't afford the transportation and he didn't have the institutional knowledge to know that if they'd told the school that, the school would have helped. So he declined a great education for the lack of $400. Growing up middle or upper class also gives you all the social markers people look for -- whether it's straight, clean teeth, the ability (and skill) to dress appropriately for a variety of social situations, the proper manners to eat in a range of restaurants from a greasy spoon to a 3 star Michelin, a good suit to go to interviews, acne medication so you don't have acne scars, the ability to make small conversation about art, etc. If you read the literature, most Americans drastically overestimate the social mobility of America and are shocked when they hear how very heritable wealth is.
    - jerf 17y ago
      You sort of contradict yourself there. You decry people who think the poor are "lazy and shiftless", then go on to explain why the poor are shiftless. Explaining why someone is shiftless doesn't make them not shiftless. It may help you figure out a better way to address the problem, but merely explaining the problem doesn't change it. Note I dropped the "lazy" qualifier. I'm not convinced that doesn't cut across social classes pretty freely, nor did you talk about it at all. I do broadly agree, though. Many programs to "help the poor" amount to throwing money at them, but that doesn't strike at the root causes at all, which I think you're largely correct about. Pouring water into a leaky bucket doesn't help; you need to fix the leaks.
      - ahoyhere 17y ago
        Shiftless? The story about the kid? The kid is not shiftless. Were his parents shiftless? Possibly, but there's nothing in the story to indicate that they were anything but ignorant (e.g. didn't know there might be help available).
        jerf 17y ago
        How hard exactly did you search for the exact sentence out of that post that, if I was solely responding to that, would invalidate my point? You have to do your part when reading other people's arguments and at least try to find out why they might have a point, instead of searching for the exact angle that doesn't make sense. That pessimizes the information content you can get from someone; there's always an angle where it's wrong, no matter how you have to torture the English to get there, but because that's always true, that's information-free. Incidentally, make sure you know what the term means, I had to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't misusing it: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless
        ahoyhere 17y ago
        It took about 10 seconds, because that was my immediate reaction and I didn't see anything else in your post to contradict it. And I did look up shiftless beforehand. Maybe you should consider that your arguments aren't half as clear as you think they are?
- earl 17y ago
  Yeah. That reality is a major reason for my progressive politics. Plus the fact that my parents both grew up poor, obviously through no fault of their own, and I think a rich nation should do more to help it's poorest.
  - run4yourlives 17y ago
    It should do more to help its poorest succeed, but I draw the line at "handouts" in the strictest sense. I'm from Canada, so you can guess that my politics are probably a little further down the progression line than most Americans. It's important though that we teach people to fish along with simply feeding them.
    - j_baker 17y ago
      Believe me, the poor in the US don't get "handouts." To get foodstamps or other welfare, the poor usually have to work ridiculous hours. And the money you get from being on welfare just isn't enough. I'd rather see more legislation to ensure that people get paid enough money to survive a normal life than more handouts that just make them more dependent on the government.
      - run4yourlives 17y ago
        Oh I'm not suggesting they do, far from it. I wanted to temper my comment though because the situation in Canada is much different. I think we do a pretty good job up here of making sure most people don't fall through the cracks. Most of our poor are addicted to something, or native (let's not go there). It's easier to break the cycle in this country, although that isn't saying that it is easy. Life is a lot rougher in the US if you're poor, and I realize that.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    I think a rich nation should do more to help it's poorest I'm trying not to sound flip, but I challenge you to a thought experiment -- perhaps with real money, if you like. Take some of your own money. Go find a poor person. Use your money to make them less poor. It's easy, really. If the nation can do it, surely you or I could do it as well, right? The goal of this experiment is to take away lofty ideals and ask practical questions: just what are we supposed to do that is going to help? Just what really helps and does not hurt poor people? So pick a strategy and pay for it. Let's agree to come back in three years and see how they are doing. You'll find that there are only three cases: 1) the person is poor because they continue to make poor choices, perhaps due to addiction, mental capacity, or emotional issues, 2) the person is temporarily poor due to circumstances outside of their control and is quite able to get ahead in the world if given time and left alone, 3) the person is somehow trapped by circumstances outside of their control which will not go away: medical bills, bad spouse, etc. #1 and #3 aren't going anywhere -- by definition they have chronic issues which money will not fix. No amount of mental therapy is going to make a drug addict into a banker: recidivism for drug addiction is around 95%. No amount of money is going to take the wife of a crack addict wife-beater and turn her family into Oprah's. For #2, those guys are going to do well anyway. Sure, if you want to lend a helping hand to make yourself feel better, go for it. But don't kid yourself that you're the one making the difference. The difference comes from inside, not from outside. I'm not saying don't help people. I'm saying that lofty, praiseworthy feel-good rhetoric does not fix a damn thing. Instead everybody just smiles and nods and agrees to spend money. If you or I have a hell of a time fixing one poor person, with direct one-on-one involvement, it is completely ludicrous to expect an impersonal government to do it for us. It's also a lazy man's morality -- I'd like to help people today, but I'd rather write a check (or even better, make the rich guy down the street write a huge check) and just go take care of it, okay?
- whacked_new 17y ago
  It's scary, but despite being written down for ages, and having parents and elders who have some sort of duty in imparting their "wisdom," people still make stupid choices for one reason or another, and commonly excusing themselves with "because they were young." It's not just scary on an individual level; it's scary on an organism level; it's scary how so many humans can be so resistant to self evolution: who is responsible for this? The other scary thing is, poverty in an unequal society is a downward spiral, despite all the pop meritocratic sentiment that is especially rampant in the USA. Rich people are more educated, healthier, more emotionally stable, and... generally more attractive. This becomes a positive feedback loop down the generations. The sickness is the widespread misattribution of the sum of all of these traits as the result of effort, rather than what is very largely a product of chance: you have no control over what environment you are born into. Essentially, people are credit hogs.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    Actually, the majority of millionaires in the US are self-made, first-generation wealth. We have very high economic mobility here, which seems to invalidate your theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility
    - perneto 17y ago
      A lot of people in the US seem to believe this - it's the essence of the American dream after all. But if you actually take a look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see this: "France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility [1]" [1] http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%2... It's still possible that the majority of millionaires in the US be self-made (although I'd argue that a middle-class born Web entrepreneur cashing out is far from self-made - see other comments about the importance of a middle-class upbringing). But that doesn't necessarily give the US a very high economic mobility: here, like often, it's easy to only look at a few extreme cases and forget the averages. The way I see it, the American dream is but a myth perpetuated by the wealthiest: if I believe I'll strike it rich someday, I won't want more high-income taxation or estate taxes... even though there's actually very little chance it'll happen.
- run4yourlives 17y ago
  I think that's a little extreme, although I understand the points of the articles and acknowledge the problem. You can recover from your choices at any time in life, although it certainly gets harder the older you get, whether or not you realize it. The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    "The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday." More blame-the-victim rethoric. Suppose what you did yesterday was give away all your belongings save what you wear, erase all higher education and job experience from your brain, and teleported you and your family to a city where you don't know anyone. You are now in an equivalent situation to many poor people. Now tell me with a straight face that what you do tomorrow would be unaffected.
    - run4yourlives 17y ago
      I'm not blaming the victim, I'm recognizing the only real solution. I never said it would be easy, as it certainly wasn't for me. It is however the only method of success, period.
      - lutorm 17y ago
        I think we should focus more on why people end up in poverty than trying to "make them not poor". Prevention is likely to be more effective than correction. Things like living wages and abandoning local funding of schools would probably help.
  - socjus 17y ago
    The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday. Only if you don't believe in causality.
- patio11 17y ago
  Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old. Let's not mumble-mumble "choices" -- that makes it sound like you could be doomed forever if, in a fit of adolescent stupidity, you went out with friends instead of studying for a geometry test. Here are the durable wreck-your-life decisions you can make at age 14: 1) Dropping out of high school, at age 14. 2) Getting thrown in jail for crimes you committed, at age 14. 3) Getting pregnant, at age 14. They don't seem all that hard to avoid now, do they? And they don't look all that hidden now, do they? Its not like rich people get together and say "Psssst, pssst: having a baby at age 14 will wreck your life. Pass it on but don't tell the poor people!"
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    When I was 14, I thought that sex in a pool was a contraceptive method because "the chlorine would kill the sperm". 14 year olds can be monumentally ignorant about very important things. How many geometry tests do you have to skip before its one too many?
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    I know a bunch of people that dropped out of high school (usually later, at 16 or 17, since you can't at 14 in MA) and several of them have done quite well for themselves. As in gotten into Smith, MIT, or Wellesley. Many of the better colleges don't care about that high school diploma if you can demonstrate that you can do college-level work. My list of "things that will really wreck your life" includes: 1) Getting killed. 2) Getting addicted. 3) Getting pregnant. 4) Getting convicted. In roughly that order of precedence. Also, many of my friends that actually did have babies as teenagers wouldn't actually say it "wrecked their life" - rather, it just meant that their expectations for what their life would hold became dramatically different than what they initially expected.
  - krschultz 17y ago
    Not even necessarily #2, our valevictorian in high school went to Harvard - and at age 14 was arrested, convicted, and went to juvie for a few days for shop lifting. You have to commit a violent crime to really screw up your life because everything else gets erased.
jodrellblank 17y ago
Everyone should read that link to learn how nobody but poor and ex-poor people are allowed to comment on poverty.

by earl 17y ago

Everyone should read this link by John Scalzi, as well, as a companion to this article. Being Poor: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

noonespecial 17y ago

That's fantastic. They're all brilliant but, "Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.", just gives me chills.

asciilifeform 17y ago
Search for Ilkka Kokkarinen's comment.
- earl 17y ago
  Gah. People who think that the poor are lazy and shiftless are scum. Some of the poor maybe be lazy and shiftless, but having middle class / wealthy parents doesn't just give you money and education and health -- it also gives you the very habits and abilities (saving, studying, deferring rewards, working hard, etc) that keep people from being poor or staying poor. Even things like applying to college are different if you have parents who can help guide you through the process -- I read a heartrending account of a (poor) child who got a scholarship to go to a private high school but his parents couldn't afford the transportation and he didn't have the institutional knowledge to know that if they'd told the school that, the school would have helped. So he declined a great education for the lack of $400. Growing up middle or upper class also gives you all the social markers people look for -- whether it's straight, clean teeth, the ability (and skill) to dress appropriately for a variety of social situations, the proper manners to eat in a range of restaurants from a greasy spoon to a 3 star Michelin, a good suit to go to interviews, acne medication so you don't have acne scars, the ability to make small conversation about art, etc. If you read the literature, most Americans drastically overestimate the social mobility of America and are shocked when they hear how very heritable wealth is.
  - jerf 17y ago
    You sort of contradict yourself there. You decry people who think the poor are "lazy and shiftless", then go on to explain why the poor are shiftless. Explaining why someone is shiftless doesn't make them not shiftless. It may help you figure out a better way to address the problem, but merely explaining the problem doesn't change it. Note I dropped the "lazy" qualifier. I'm not convinced that doesn't cut across social classes pretty freely, nor did you talk about it at all. I do broadly agree, though. Many programs to "help the poor" amount to throwing money at them, but that doesn't strike at the root causes at all, which I think you're largely correct about. Pouring water into a leaky bucket doesn't help; you need to fix the leaks.
    - ahoyhere 17y ago
      Shiftless? The story about the kid? The kid is not shiftless. Were his parents shiftless? Possibly, but there's nothing in the story to indicate that they were anything but ignorant (e.g. didn't know there might be help available).
      - jerf 17y ago
        How hard exactly did you search for the exact sentence out of that post that, if I was solely responding to that, would invalidate my point? You have to do your part when reading other people's arguments and at least try to find out why they might have a point, instead of searching for the exact angle that doesn't make sense. That pessimizes the information content you can get from someone; there's always an angle where it's wrong, no matter how you have to torture the English to get there, but because that's always true, that's information-free. Incidentally, make sure you know what the term means, I had to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't misusing it: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless
        ahoyhere 17y ago
        It took about 10 seconds, because that was my immediate reaction and I didn't see anything else in your post to contradict it. And I did look up shiftless beforehand. Maybe you should consider that your arguments aren't half as clear as you think they are?
earl 17y ago
Yeah. That reality is a major reason for my progressive politics. Plus the fact that my parents both grew up poor, obviously through no fault of their own, and I think a rich nation should do more to help it's poorest.
- run4yourlives 17y ago
  It should do more to help its poorest succeed, but I draw the line at "handouts" in the strictest sense. I'm from Canada, so you can guess that my politics are probably a little further down the progression line than most Americans. It's important though that we teach people to fish along with simply feeding them.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    Believe me, the poor in the US don't get "handouts." To get foodstamps or other welfare, the poor usually have to work ridiculous hours. And the money you get from being on welfare just isn't enough. I'd rather see more legislation to ensure that people get paid enough money to survive a normal life than more handouts that just make them more dependent on the government.
    - run4yourlives 17y ago
      Oh I'm not suggesting they do, far from it. I wanted to temper my comment though because the situation in Canada is much different. I think we do a pretty good job up here of making sure most people don't fall through the cracks. Most of our poor are addicted to something, or native (let's not go there). It's easier to break the cycle in this country, although that isn't saying that it is easy. Life is a lot rougher in the US if you're poor, and I realize that.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I think a rich nation should do more to help it's poorest I'm trying not to sound flip, but I challenge you to a thought experiment -- perhaps with real money, if you like. Take some of your own money. Go find a poor person. Use your money to make them less poor. It's easy, really. If the nation can do it, surely you or I could do it as well, right? The goal of this experiment is to take away lofty ideals and ask practical questions: just what are we supposed to do that is going to help? Just what really helps and does not hurt poor people? So pick a strategy and pay for it. Let's agree to come back in three years and see how they are doing. You'll find that there are only three cases: 1) the person is poor because they continue to make poor choices, perhaps due to addiction, mental capacity, or emotional issues, 2) the person is temporarily poor due to circumstances outside of their control and is quite able to get ahead in the world if given time and left alone, 3) the person is somehow trapped by circumstances outside of their control which will not go away: medical bills, bad spouse, etc. #1 and #3 aren't going anywhere -- by definition they have chronic issues which money will not fix. No amount of mental therapy is going to make a drug addict into a banker: recidivism for drug addiction is around 95%. No amount of money is going to take the wife of a crack addict wife-beater and turn her family into Oprah's. For #2, those guys are going to do well anyway. Sure, if you want to lend a helping hand to make yourself feel better, go for it. But don't kid yourself that you're the one making the difference. The difference comes from inside, not from outside. I'm not saying don't help people. I'm saying that lofty, praiseworthy feel-good rhetoric does not fix a damn thing. Instead everybody just smiles and nods and agrees to spend money. If you or I have a hell of a time fixing one poor person, with direct one-on-one involvement, it is completely ludicrous to expect an impersonal government to do it for us. It's also a lazy man's morality -- I'd like to help people today, but I'd rather write a check (or even better, make the rich guy down the street write a huge check) and just go take care of it, okay?
whacked_new 17y ago
It's scary, but despite being written down for ages, and having parents and elders who have some sort of duty in imparting their "wisdom," people still make stupid choices for one reason or another, and commonly excusing themselves with "because they were young." It's not just scary on an individual level; it's scary on an organism level; it's scary how so many humans can be so resistant to self evolution: who is responsible for this? The other scary thing is, poverty in an unequal society is a downward spiral, despite all the pop meritocratic sentiment that is especially rampant in the USA. Rich people are more educated, healthier, more emotionally stable, and... generally more attractive. This becomes a positive feedback loop down the generations. The sickness is the widespread misattribution of the sum of all of these traits as the result of effort, rather than what is very largely a product of chance: you have no control over what environment you are born into. Essentially, people are credit hogs.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Actually, the majority of millionaires in the US are self-made, first-generation wealth. We have very high economic mobility here, which seems to invalidate your theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility
  - perneto 17y ago
    A lot of people in the US seem to believe this - it's the essence of the American dream after all. But if you actually take a look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see this: "France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility [1]" [1] http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%2... It's still possible that the majority of millionaires in the US be self-made (although I'd argue that a middle-class born Web entrepreneur cashing out is far from self-made - see other comments about the importance of a middle-class upbringing). But that doesn't necessarily give the US a very high economic mobility: here, like often, it's easy to only look at a few extreme cases and forget the averages. The way I see it, the American dream is but a myth perpetuated by the wealthiest: if I believe I'll strike it rich someday, I won't want more high-income taxation or estate taxes... even though there's actually very little chance it'll happen.
run4yourlives 17y ago
I think that's a little extreme, although I understand the points of the articles and acknowledge the problem. You can recover from your choices at any time in life, although it certainly gets harder the older you get, whether or not you realize it. The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday.
- lutorm 17y ago
  "The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday." More blame-the-victim rethoric. Suppose what you did yesterday was give away all your belongings save what you wear, erase all higher education and job experience from your brain, and teleported you and your family to a city where you don't know anyone. You are now in an equivalent situation to many poor people. Now tell me with a straight face that what you do tomorrow would be unaffected.
  - run4yourlives 17y ago
    I'm not blaming the victim, I'm recognizing the only real solution. I never said it would be easy, as it certainly wasn't for me. It is however the only method of success, period.
    - lutorm 17y ago
      I think we should focus more on why people end up in poverty than trying to "make them not poor". Prevention is likely to be more effective than correction. Things like living wages and abandoning local funding of schools would probably help.
- socjus 17y ago
  The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday. Only if you don't believe in causality.
patio11 17y ago
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old. Let's not mumble-mumble "choices" -- that makes it sound like you could be doomed forever if, in a fit of adolescent stupidity, you went out with friends instead of studying for a geometry test. Here are the durable wreck-your-life decisions you can make at age 14: 1) Dropping out of high school, at age 14. 2) Getting thrown in jail for crimes you committed, at age 14. 3) Getting pregnant, at age 14. They don't seem all that hard to avoid now, do they? And they don't look all that hidden now, do they? Its not like rich people get together and say "Psssst, pssst: having a baby at age 14 will wreck your life. Pass it on but don't tell the poor people!"
- noonespecial 17y ago
  When I was 14, I thought that sex in a pool was a contraceptive method because "the chlorine would kill the sperm". 14 year olds can be monumentally ignorant about very important things. How many geometry tests do you have to skip before its one too many?
- nostrademons 17y ago
  I know a bunch of people that dropped out of high school (usually later, at 16 or 17, since you can't at 14 in MA) and several of them have done quite well for themselves. As in gotten into Smith, MIT, or Wellesley. Many of the better colleges don't care about that high school diploma if you can demonstrate that you can do college-level work. My list of "things that will really wreck your life" includes: 1) Getting killed. 2) Getting addicted. 3) Getting pregnant. 4) Getting convicted. In roughly that order of precedence. Also, many of my friends that actually did have babies as teenagers wouldn't actually say it "wrecked their life" - rather, it just meant that their expectations for what their life would hold became dramatically different than what they initially expected.
- krschultz 17y ago
  Not even necessarily #2, our valevictorian in high school went to Harvard - and at age 14 was arrested, convicted, and went to juvie for a few days for shop lifting. You have to commit a violent crime to really screw up your life because everything else gets erased.

jodrellblank 17y ago

Everyone should read that link to learn how nobody but poor and ex-poor people are allowed to comment on poverty.