4 ms·

I grew up poor among other poor people, and it never struck me that anyone was buying expensive stuff because they thought that's what would lead them to a bett

I grew up poor among other poor people, and it never struck me that anyone was buying expensive stuff because they thought that's what would lead them to a better job or some such. They were buying expensive stuff because they wanted it. There's this new feel-good ideal that it's not poor peoples' fault they're poor, but no one ever supplies data to back it up. Only well-written personal stories. I'm sure it's not a binary, but from personal experience where I grew up, the poor people in my family and around me were poor mostly because they were lazy, wanted expensive possessions, and refused to work the long-game to getting out of poverty. I'd love to see real data that points to this being the exception.

zfghjk 11y ago
There is a small irony in you asking other people for data to back up their arguments, and then making your argument "from personal experience".
- FeepingCreature 11y ago
  But note that a single counterexample disproves a general law.
  - Thimothy 11y ago
    Not in social sciences. When you are dealing with people and cultures, trying to find a "law" that applies uniformly to everyone is naive. BTW, if you are really interested, here is an article (with links to actual scientific studies) on why being poor is hard: http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-research/the-cognitive-burden-of-poverty/ http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-rese...
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    "Americans overestimate social class mobility" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000062 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115...
- MarkMc 11y ago
  Not really: I think AstroChimpHam made it clear that 'real data' trumps personal experience.
- AstroChimpHam 11y ago
  No. What I'm saying is people's decisions being one of the biggest determining factors of their fates is the null hypothesis. If you want to prove the alternative hypothesis-- that it's not generally poor people's decisions' fault they're poor, you're going to have to bring data to back-up your alternative hypothesis. I'd love to believe that alternative hypothesis, but that would be naive and irresponsible without data.
  - flycaliguy 11y ago
    I'll start with an angle that the decisions of one's guardians have a large impact on their ability to escape poverty. The sad thing about this view is that if you hop back a generation, it kind of loops into itself. Hop back some more generations and some of these descendants are chained up on a boat from Africa... "Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood." [1] "America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal insti- tutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream." [2] "By and large, this research supports the conclusion that family income has selective but, in some instances, quite substantial effects on child and adolescent well-being. Family income appears to be more strongly related to children’s ability and achievement than to their emotional outcomes. Children who live in extreme poverty or who live below the poverty line for multiple years appear, all other things being equal, to suffer the worst outcomes." [3] How exactly do people make their way out of poverty? Unless they win the lotto, employment is how it's done. Do rates of employment fluctuate along with rates of laziness and poor planning? Or does the Keynesian theory in which decreased demand for goods and services make more sense? Does the Monetarist approach that unemployment is caused by high inflation and decreased investment sound more likely? Either way, it would appear that for many, finding full time employment with which to escape poverty isn't always manageable. A lot of it comes down to business cycles and the mobility of one's skills as the economy evolves. Think of the regional structure of the economy. Sometimes an industry experiences a heavy downturn in an area in which it is highly saturated. Believe it or not, the personal losses that accompany it are not due to people getting lazier. Do you know how big of a problem poverty is? Did you know that in the last 20 years we in Canada finally dipped our poverty rate among single parent families below the 50% mark? That is a lot of kids growing up in a situation in which no matter how hard they work, there is a lot to overcome compared to the middle class. Can you see how some of the situational issues might prevent them from escaping poverty no matter how hard they try? What about other at-risk groups like people with work-related disability, recent immigrants and aboriginals? Do you think these people are just not trying hard enough? Your stance that poverty is the failure of the individual is a dangerous stereotype. It's a type of blame-oriented belief with a dark history. It actually dates back to religious attitudes in the 16th century, when the paupers in the workhouse were dismissed as sinners. Social Darwinism eventually took it's place, applying biological theories to social life and stating that the poor are simply biologically and/or socially inferior. That's your angle, correct? The great depression was nothing more than a mass bout of laziness? People are let go from jobs for reasons outside their control and many are unable to recover. People deal with issues outside of their control that are powerful enough to prevent them from escaping poverty. People below the poverty line tend to find themselves spending all their money and time attending to basic needs and are incapable of budgeting the time and money for learning new skills. Kids raised in poor families are not given a decent start in life. You say you would love to see the data but I wonder if you would love to see it enough to search it out yourself? Have you already reviewed these points and decided they are false? I’m just spitballin’ here a bit, there is plenty more proof that poverty creates poverty and that social darwinist theories applied to labour markets is absurd and dehumanizing. [1] Prison and the Poverty Trap http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-... [2] Incarceration & social inequality http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019 [3] The Effects of Poverty on Children https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/07_02_03.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs... TLDR: The opportunities people are given to build skills and an economy to support them dictates poverty.
eivarv 11y ago
Believing that it's poor people's fault that they're poor - speaking of things no one ever backs up with data - is uniquely naive (and an extremely simplistic attempt at an explanation). Also, note that having the quality of being "feel-good" does not invalidate an argument. When discussing this subject, I find that people mostly tend to really be arguing from how they make sense of the world (anecdotes, philosophy, political ideology, etc.) rather than saying anything useful about the world itself. For some reason, it also seems that this sort of thinking is especially prevalent (or at least visible) in the U.S., even though it compares poorly to other developed countries.
- AstroChimpHam 11y ago
  Believing it's most poor people's fault they're poor is the null hypothesis. We generally believe people's decisions matter. It's especially the null hypothesis for me, because this is what I grew up seeing with my own eyes, in my own family. It's even more so because the people I grew up with would have also said "it's not my fault I'm poor," even when I could clearly see them make bad decision after bad decision. Then there's the additional circumstantial evidence of seeing who invests in poor financial vehicles like lottery tickets and playing slot machines. Yes, I'd love to know these are all exceptions to the rule-- it would make me feel much better about the politics I'd like to believe, but the other camp is going to have to provide the data to back up their alternative hypothesis.
  - eivarv 11y ago
    That's arguable [0]. The null hypothesis might as well be defined as there being no causal relationship between people's actions and their economic status. We do generally believe that people's decisions matter, but we also generally believe that context matters. People don't make decisions in vacuums, nor do all decisions matter. What the null hypothesis is or isn't does not change in your case, nor does multiple anecdotes equal data. While making irrational decisions with regard to one's economic situation and laying blame elsewhere is hypocritical, it is not behavior exclusive to poor people, and neither is "investing" in gambling. There is also the fact that poor people are not proven to consistently make these sorts of irrational choices. Any camp making any sort of claim is going to have to provide data. All the while, we have merrily ignored any other potential contributing factors, which will change depending on how we define poverty (absolute/relative, local/global, etc.) [0], including (off the top of my head): - History (e.g. colonialism, exploitation); - Government policy (discrimination, segregation, ethnic policies, etc.) [1, 2]; - Social attitudes/culture (stigma, prejudice, etc.) [3] - Nation status (underdeveloped nations ravaged by war, for instance); - Social mobility (auto-bootstrap-pulling, singular data points aside) [4]; - Risk factors in early development (lack of nutrition, stimuli and resources) [5, 6]; - Dumb luck (born into wealth, stumbling over winning lottery ticket). [0]: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/poverty/ http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/theme... [1]: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/11/discrimination-inequality-and-poverty-human-rights-perspective http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/11/discrimination-inequality... [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/05/world/un-says-bad-government-is-often-the-cause-of-poverty.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/05/world/un-says-bad-governme... [3]: http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16324 http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16324 [4]: http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/issue_social_mobility.html http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/issue_social_mobility.ht... [5]: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-... [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

zfghjk 11y ago

There is a small irony in you asking other people for data to back up their arguments, and then making your argument "from personal experience".

FeepingCreature 11y ago
But note that a single counterexample disproves a general law.
- Thimothy 11y ago
  Not in social sciences. When you are dealing with people and cultures, trying to find a "law" that applies uniformly to everyone is naive. BTW, if you are really interested, here is an article (with links to actual scientific studies) on why being poor is hard: http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-research/the-cognitive-burden-of-poverty/ http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-rese...
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  "Americans overestimate social class mobility" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000062 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115...
MarkMc 11y ago
Not really: I think AstroChimpHam made it clear that 'real data' trumps personal experience.
AstroChimpHam 11y ago
No. What I'm saying is people's decisions being one of the biggest determining factors of their fates is the null hypothesis. If you want to prove the alternative hypothesis-- that it's not generally poor people's decisions' fault they're poor, you're going to have to bring data to back-up your alternative hypothesis. I'd love to believe that alternative hypothesis, but that would be naive and irresponsible without data.
- flycaliguy 11y ago
  I'll start with an angle that the decisions of one's guardians have a large impact on their ability to escape poverty. The sad thing about this view is that if you hop back a generation, it kind of loops into itself. Hop back some more generations and some of these descendants are chained up on a boat from Africa... "Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood." [1] "America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal insti- tutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream." [2] "By and large, this research supports the conclusion that family income has selective but, in some instances, quite substantial effects on child and adolescent well-being. Family income appears to be more strongly related to children’s ability and achievement than to their emotional outcomes. Children who live in extreme poverty or who live below the poverty line for multiple years appear, all other things being equal, to suffer the worst outcomes." [3] How exactly do people make their way out of poverty? Unless they win the lotto, employment is how it's done. Do rates of employment fluctuate along with rates of laziness and poor planning? Or does the Keynesian theory in which decreased demand for goods and services make more sense? Does the Monetarist approach that unemployment is caused by high inflation and decreased investment sound more likely? Either way, it would appear that for many, finding full time employment with which to escape poverty isn't always manageable. A lot of it comes down to business cycles and the mobility of one's skills as the economy evolves. Think of the regional structure of the economy. Sometimes an industry experiences a heavy downturn in an area in which it is highly saturated. Believe it or not, the personal losses that accompany it are not due to people getting lazier. Do you know how big of a problem poverty is? Did you know that in the last 20 years we in Canada finally dipped our poverty rate among single parent families below the 50% mark? That is a lot of kids growing up in a situation in which no matter how hard they work, there is a lot to overcome compared to the middle class. Can you see how some of the situational issues might prevent them from escaping poverty no matter how hard they try? What about other at-risk groups like people with work-related disability, recent immigrants and aboriginals? Do you think these people are just not trying hard enough? Your stance that poverty is the failure of the individual is a dangerous stereotype. It's a type of blame-oriented belief with a dark history. It actually dates back to religious attitudes in the 16th century, when the paupers in the workhouse were dismissed as sinners. Social Darwinism eventually took it's place, applying biological theories to social life and stating that the poor are simply biologically and/or socially inferior. That's your angle, correct? The great depression was nothing more than a mass bout of laziness? People are let go from jobs for reasons outside their control and many are unable to recover. People deal with issues outside of their control that are powerful enough to prevent them from escaping poverty. People below the poverty line tend to find themselves spending all their money and time attending to basic needs and are incapable of budgeting the time and money for learning new skills. Kids raised in poor families are not given a decent start in life. You say you would love to see the data but I wonder if you would love to see it enough to search it out yourself? Have you already reviewed these points and decided they are false? I’m just spitballin’ here a bit, there is plenty more proof that poverty creates poverty and that social darwinist theories applied to labour markets is absurd and dehumanizing. [1] Prison and the Poverty Trap http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-... [2] Incarceration & social inequality http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019 [3] The Effects of Poverty on Children https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/07_02_03.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs... TLDR: The opportunities people are given to build skills and an economy to support them dictates poverty.

eivarv 11y ago

Believing that it's poor people's fault that they're poor - speaking of things no one ever backs up with data - is uniquely naive (and an extremely simplistic attempt at an explanation). Also, note that having the quality of being "feel-good" does not invalidate an argument. When discussing this subject, I find that people mostly tend to really be arguing from how they make sense of the world (anecdotes, philosophy, political ideology, etc.) rather than saying anything useful about the world itself. For some reason, it also seems that this sort of thinking is especially prevalent (or at least visible) in the U.S., even though it compares poorly to other developed countries.

AstroChimpHam 11y ago
Believing it's most poor people's fault they're poor is the null hypothesis. We generally believe people's decisions matter. It's especially the null hypothesis for me, because this is what I grew up seeing with my own eyes, in my own family. It's even more so because the people I grew up with would have also said "it's not my fault I'm poor," even when I could clearly see them make bad decision after bad decision. Then there's the additional circumstantial evidence of seeing who invests in poor financial vehicles like lottery tickets and playing slot machines. Yes, I'd love to know these are all exceptions to the rule-- it would make me feel much better about the politics I'd like to believe, but the other camp is going to have to provide the data to back up their alternative hypothesis.
- eivarv 11y ago
  That's arguable [0]. The null hypothesis might as well be defined as there being no causal relationship between people's actions and their economic status. We do generally believe that people's decisions matter, but we also generally believe that context matters. People don't make decisions in vacuums, nor do all decisions matter. What the null hypothesis is or isn't does not change in your case, nor does multiple anecdotes equal data. While making irrational decisions with regard to one's economic situation and laying blame elsewhere is hypocritical, it is not behavior exclusive to poor people, and neither is "investing" in gambling. There is also the fact that poor people are not proven to consistently make these sorts of irrational choices. Any camp making any sort of claim is going to have to provide data. All the while, we have merrily ignored any other potential contributing factors, which will change depending on how we define poverty (absolute/relative, local/global, etc.) [0], including (off the top of my head): - History (e.g. colonialism, exploitation); - Government policy (discrimination, segregation, ethnic policies, etc.) [1, 2]; - Social attitudes/culture (stigma, prejudice, etc.) [3] - Nation status (underdeveloped nations ravaged by war, for instance); - Social mobility (auto-bootstrap-pulling, singular data points aside) [4]; - Risk factors in early development (lack of nutrition, stimuli and resources) [5, 6]; - Dumb luck (born into wealth, stumbling over winning lottery ticket). [0]: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/poverty/ http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/theme... [1]: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/11/discrimination-inequality-and-poverty-human-rights-perspective http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/11/discrimination-inequality... [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/05/world/un-says-bad-government-is-often-the-cause-of-poverty.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/05/world/un-says-bad-governme... [3]: http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16324 http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16324 [4]: http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/issue_social_mobility.html http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/issue_social_mobility.ht... [5]: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-... [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]