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It's important to note that the "couple dozen very healthy guys in the middle of any given workday" that you are seeing are almost certainly not receiving welfa

It's important to note that the "couple dozen very healthy guys in the middle of any given workday" that you are seeing are almost certainly not receiving welfare in the form of cash payments - (cash payments are generally how welfare is defined in the US). Since the 1996 welfare reform act, people who receive welfare benefits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) need to be either working or in a job training program or they will lose benefits after a maximum of two years. Welfare reform addresses the problem that you describe, but the work requirements also create other social problems. For instance, single mothers who might previously have been able to stay home with young children now need to work long hours at low-wage jobs. It's also important to realize that there are other factors besides the welfare trap that keep otherwise healthy men unemployed. As you pointed out, one is a lack of education that may only qualify them for low-skilled jobs. Also consider that if you've been to prison it's incredibly difficult to get a job at all. Also remember that when you're driving through these neighborhoods you're not seeing the people who are working. When discussing how the unemployed "drag down entire sections of cities", you should consider the causative arrow. Are these neighborhoods in trouble because of unemployment and idleness or do the chronically unemployed happen to congregate in these neighborhoods? Consider the effects of decades of disinvestment in minority neighborhoods and of white flight. Banks spent decades refusing to provide mortgages and small business loans in minority neighborhoods ("redlining"). Desegregation busing and the movement of minorities into traditionally-white working and middle class neighborhoods often triggered wholesale abandonment of the inner cities by these white families. When middle class white families abandoned the public school systems after desegregation policies were implemented, many inner city school systems ended up as warehouses for the poorest, least prepared students, greatly degrading the systems' capabilities to provide an education. Similarly, when middle class white families moved out of inner city neighborhoods these neighborhoods decayed. Systemic poverty and unemployment are complex problems with many causes and cannot be blamed entirely on some culture of idleness.

spc476 13y ago
I just finished reading _Life at the Bottom_ by Theodore Dalrymple. He's a medical doctor in England who works with the lower class (mainly those on the dole). Overall, those on the dole have little incentive to improve their lot in life yet have a large sense of entitlement. And those very few that strive to improve themselves are punished for it (not by being thrown in jail or losing their benefits outright, but mainly through inattention or indifference by the government). And this is England, you know, land of free education and health care.
- smcl 13y ago
  England has fee-paying (higher) education and is moving towards privatisation of the NHS. North of the border is where you find the "free" (i.e. tuition paid by the scottish government) tuition and healthcare.
  - gaius 13y ago
    By the English taxpayer. Carrying Scotland (the Barnett Formula) is why England is having to scrimp and save.
bane 13y ago
I grew up pretty poor, at one stage my family was homeless for a few months -- I've eaten out of food pantries and soup kitchens and grew up knowing where all the major food manufacturers had day-old surplus stores, I've exhausted lots of electrons on that story here on HN. I have unbelievable levels of sympathy for the working poor and for making sure that food and housing are affordable and that work is available to anybody who needs it and that it's decent honest work with proper benefits, child care and all that. I want to make an important note that I'm consciously not attributing any specific race or ethnic group to this issue as over the years I've seen the same thing cuts across all of those kinds of barriers. I've seen just as many idle groups of white men just the same as black. I'm also specifically not talking about people with very severe mental health or physical issues that prevent them from working. I don't think we as a society do enough to help these people live stable, reasonable lives and I think we do a disservice grouping them in with able-bodied people simply based on income metrics. I'm specifically talking about otherwise healthy able-bodied people only. Despite being poor (or perhaps we were poor due to), my parents owned a small business that I grew up with. Because of the nature of the business, employee pay was generally not great, and was staffed at first by refugees and then later almost entirely by ex-cons - most of whom had past issues with homelessness, drug addiction and the like. I grew up in that kind of environment and knew hundreds of these guys over the years and saw exactly how they became successful and what choices they made that caused them to fail and go back to being homeless or in prison. Millions of man hours have been spent looking at "this problem" insisting that it's complex, and difficult and such and such. It all boils down to the question "how do you motivate people who aren't working, to get to work in an economy where plenty jobs are available?" I think "the problem" that everybody's tried to solve is the wrong problem to solve. I think we've made it very complicated because we're uncomfortable with the harsh reality. Most of these same idle people would do unbelievable amounts of work if it meant the alternative was starving to death. But it's impolite and immoral and makes us very uncomfortable having people starving to death so we assure them some kind of food access and then kill endless supplies of ink and electrons figuring out how to get them productive once this is solved. The simple fact is people aren't motivated to work once their bellies are full and with all that spare time on their hands they'll find something, probably not socially beneficial, to fill it with. So I'm going to say something that's very unpopular and is going to upset loads of people here who've never had to face these issues directly: The idleness and urban blight is just a common symptom of what I think is fairly simple problem that's been solved successfully in the last few decades by gentrification of urban cores. More than welfare reform, or other grand social experiments, cleaning up broken parts of town has done more to solve these problems then just about anything else. Inside of cities, blighted areas are cleaned up, policed and developed. Concentrations of idle hands have no choice but to get out and dilute. Not a single person my parents ever hired lived in a concentrated urban center, they all lived outside of those areas. Far enough away that the broken self-organized support systems that keep groups of young, otherwise healthy men, milling about together doing nothing much are inconvenient to get to. The concentrations of able-bodies supporting each other is "the problem". Dilution where they are 1 in a group of tens of thousands of productive people and away from their broken support system provides them with motivation to work...or go hungry. There were two outcomes 100% of the time. 1) These guys would enjoy the improved standard of living that good wages and a good job provided (increasing every year with seniority) and they'd knuckle down and work their tails off. Often outgrowing the level of work my parent's business could provide and eventually moving on to senior positions with bigger companies. A few of them starting their own businesses. My parents get many very moving Christmas cards every year. 2) They'd get troubled by the lack of the kind of support system they remembered, because working through life on your own is hard. And they'd "go back to the city to visit my cousin" one weekend and end up fired a few weeks later for coming to work high, or drunk or they'd simply stop coming to work at all and we'd find out that they'd moved back to the urban core or got themselves arrested in a PCP induced assault or some such. Making it on their own was a stress they couldn't handle and the psychological crutch they received from being in their comfort zone was preferable for them even if it wasn't as comfortable. Gentrification removes #2 as an option as that comfortable support system is shattered and spread all over creation. The culture of poverty is very real and it's paradoxically very self-reinforcing. I've also spilled lots of electrons on HN discussing what it's like to be poor, and the vicious cycle that's much easier to stay trapped in than to get out of. But it's not theory for me, I got out of being poor, and I watched dozens of other people who worked for my parents escape it as well and watched dozens more fail to escape it. There are surprising support systems that exist and can only really be felt and understood when you are poor. But the nature of these systems is not to support somebody up and out, they work more like a fragile and very sticky web, they need each person to continue to contribute to that support system, the same one which ultimately traps them there. Breaking the web is a forcing function that forces people to tap into the normal, upwardly moving parts of the economy and society and it's the only thing I've ever seen that has any kind of success rate at all.

spc476 13y ago

I just finished reading _Life at the Bottom_ by Theodore Dalrymple. He's a medical doctor in England who works with the lower class (mainly those on the dole). Overall, those on the dole have little incentive to improve their lot in life yet have a large sense of entitlement. And those very few that strive to improve themselves are punished for it (not by being thrown in jail or losing their benefits outright, but mainly through inattention or indifference by the government). And this is England, you know, land of free education and health care.

smcl 13y ago
England has fee-paying (higher) education and is moving towards privatisation of the NHS. North of the border is where you find the "free" (i.e. tuition paid by the scottish government) tuition and healthcare.
- gaius 13y ago
  By the English taxpayer. Carrying Scotland (the Barnett Formula) is why England is having to scrimp and save.

bane 13y ago

I grew up pretty poor, at one stage my family was homeless for a few months -- I've eaten out of food pantries and soup kitchens and grew up knowing where all the major food manufacturers had day-old surplus stores, I've exhausted lots of electrons on that story here on HN. I have unbelievable levels of sympathy for the working poor and for making sure that food and housing are affordable and that work is available to anybody who needs it and that it's decent honest work with proper benefits, child care and all that. I want to make an important note that I'm consciously not attributing any specific race or ethnic group to this issue as over the years I've seen the same thing cuts across all of those kinds of barriers. I've seen just as many idle groups of white men just the same as black. I'm also specifically not talking about people with very severe mental health or physical issues that prevent them from working. I don't think we as a society do enough to help these people live stable, reasonable lives and I think we do a disservice grouping them in with able-bodied people simply based on income metrics. I'm specifically talking about otherwise healthy able-bodied people only. Despite being poor (or perhaps we were poor due to), my parents owned a small business that I grew up with. Because of the nature of the business, employee pay was generally not great, and was staffed at first by refugees and then later almost entirely by ex-cons - most of whom had past issues with homelessness, drug addiction and the like. I grew up in that kind of environment and knew hundreds of these guys over the years and saw exactly how they became successful and what choices they made that caused them to fail and go back to being homeless or in prison. Millions of man hours have been spent looking at "this problem" insisting that it's complex, and difficult and such and such. It all boils down to the question "how do you motivate people who aren't working, to get to work in an economy where plenty jobs are available?" I think "the problem" that everybody's tried to solve is the wrong problem to solve. I think we've made it very complicated because we're uncomfortable with the harsh reality. Most of these same idle people would do unbelievable amounts of work if it meant the alternative was starving to death. But it's impolite and immoral and makes us very uncomfortable having people starving to death so we assure them some kind of food access and then kill endless supplies of ink and electrons figuring out how to get them productive once this is solved. The simple fact is people aren't motivated to work once their bellies are full and with all that spare time on their hands they'll find something, probably not socially beneficial, to fill it with. So I'm going to say something that's very unpopular and is going to upset loads of people here who've never had to face these issues directly: The idleness and urban blight is just a common symptom of what I think is fairly simple problem that's been solved successfully in the last few decades by gentrification of urban cores. More than welfare reform, or other grand social experiments, cleaning up broken parts of town has done more to solve these problems then just about anything else. Inside of cities, blighted areas are cleaned up, policed and developed. Concentrations of idle hands have no choice but to get out and dilute. Not a single person my parents ever hired lived in a concentrated urban center, they all lived outside of those areas. Far enough away that the broken self-organized support systems that keep groups of young, otherwise healthy men, milling about together doing nothing much are inconvenient to get to. The concentrations of able-bodies supporting each other is "the problem". Dilution where they are 1 in a group of tens of thousands of productive people and away from their broken support system provides them with motivation to work...or go hungry. There were two outcomes 100% of the time. 1) These guys would enjoy the improved standard of living that good wages and a good job provided (increasing every year with seniority) and they'd knuckle down and work their tails off. Often outgrowing the level of work my parent's business could provide and eventually moving on to senior positions with bigger companies. A few of them starting their own businesses. My parents get many very moving Christmas cards every year. 2) They'd get troubled by the lack of the kind of support system they remembered, because working through life on your own is hard. And they'd "go back to the city to visit my cousin" one weekend and end up fired a few weeks later for coming to work high, or drunk or they'd simply stop coming to work at all and we'd find out that they'd moved back to the urban core or got themselves arrested in a PCP induced assault or some such. Making it on their own was a stress they couldn't handle and the psychological crutch they received from being in their comfort zone was preferable for them even if it wasn't as comfortable. Gentrification removes #2 as an option as that comfortable support system is shattered and spread all over creation. The culture of poverty is very real and it's paradoxically very self-reinforcing. I've also spilled lots of electrons on HN discussing what it's like to be poor, and the vicious cycle that's much easier to stay trapped in than to get out of. But it's not theory for me, I got out of being poor, and I watched dozens of other people who worked for my parents escape it as well and watched dozens more fail to escape it. There are surprising support systems that exist and can only really be felt and understood when you are poor. But the nature of these systems is not to support somebody up and out, they work more like a fragile and very sticky web, they need each person to continue to contribute to that support system, the same one which ultimately traps them there. Breaking the web is a forcing function that forces people to tap into the normal, upwardly moving parts of the economy and society and it's the only thing I've ever seen that has any kind of success rate at all.