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"Life at the Bottom" - or how the "shiftless poor" really do exist.
- frossie 17y agoFor the unitiated, Theodore Dalrymple (a pen name) is a passionate and lucid writer and I don't deny his is worth reading. He is also politically strongly conservative, and this understandably colours his view of the world. The "England in terminal moral and social decline" meme is these days a popular theme in the media, but reality is a lot greyer than that. For example, it is all very well to criticise social services for failing to protect certain children in danger (as he does with the Climbie case - tragically neither the first nor last time such a thing has happened) but I personally find it strange to hear criticism from a person that supports a party that historically has not supported, and often decimated, the social services sector. The truth is that the social underclass is a problem that nobody has a real answer for, never mind their party and never mind the country. Some problems are hard, maybe too hard to solve.
- thisrod 17y agoAn alternative explanation than "people choose to fail", and maybe a more plausible one, can be found in Martin Seligman's Helplessness: on Depression, Development and Death.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoWhen you see how easy it is for people to label, classify and de-humanize the poor that are, apart from poverty, indistinguishable from them you no longer wonder at how easily people discriminate against those with different skin color, languages, religion or cultures.