

"Life at the Bottom" - or how the "shiftless poor" really do exist. - asciilifeform
http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/LifeAtTheBottom.htm

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frossie
For 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.

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thisrod
An 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_.

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ZeroGravitas
When 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.

