The article doesn’t say much about what would help.
One thing that helps the poor a lot (everyone, but especially the poor) is functioning, competent institutions.
Things like effective policing and crime prevention, a functional healthcare system, competent teaching in schools, sufficient childcare options, little to no corruption, wide availability of credit, a good transportation network, zoning laws that permit cheap and sufficient housing, employment laws that don’t make low-value labour too expensive to employ, etc.
When these institutions are not working well, they represent a “drag coefficient” that well-off people can just pay their way out of (complicated tax forms? Pay an accountant $2k, solved) - but for poorer people these can represent existential hurdles.
Making institutions perform better (or offering entrepreneurial alternatives) is measurable, empirical, and does not rely on any psychosocial assumptions to produce an effect.
Example:
“How hard is it for someone who is barely literate and is working 50 hours per week to get and keep a driving license?” If the answer is “hard” that’s a big drag on poor people. If they could do minimal paperwork, do the test for free on nights or weekends in cheap rental cars close to where they live or work, etc. that is a massive boon to someone whose next step up the ladder is to get a driving job.
As an engineer, I have many privileges. Two that stand out here are salary, and the power dynamic I enjoy with my employer. I am well paid, enough said. I also am not beholden to the whims of my management. I can take time off, they need me to be happy, I can effect change on my management as they can effect change on their subordinates.
High pay is great, but to a point, I place a higher value on the dignity that I enjoy in my employment.
> Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states.
I can't say I have a better idea here, but the whole concept of a minimum wage seems like a problem. It strongly implies that there are a large class of jobs where the employer has all of the power, and does not have to compete to attract employees. Also strongly implied is that minimum wage workers do not have an alternative means of supporting themselves.
Practically speaking, raising minimum wage regularly should help keep workers out of poverty. Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.
>not have to compete to attract employees. Also strongly implied is that minimum wage workers do not have an alternative means of supporting themselves.
In practice, that's the case. I think that the idea that it isn't so, and people go to this or that employer out of "free choice", stems from a religious-like belief in "free market", than from real-life empirical evaluation of how desperate and poor people pick jobs - and what options are open to then.
>Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.
True. But at least they will make some more money will doing so - and might even afford to save a buck or too, and eventually look elsewhere.
Replace the minimum wage with an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.
It has the benefits of getting people enough money to live without significantly distorting the labor market. And it's more politically expedient than guaranteed minimum income.
> It strongly implies that there are a large class of jobs where the employer has all of the power, and does not have to compete to attract employees
That is even true in cases where there is even balanced employment-employer availability due to other factors. My country should be more civilized by my dad got 6 years of pension payment reduced because the employer "failed to pay" but on every balance sheet his pay was added because "automatic" and nobody warned him, just the employer. Afterwards the lawyers told him to take the "I'll pay one year" deal of the employer because of the likelyhood of getting nothing due to limited liability companies protection. And this in Europe, not even the US. The balance is so far off it's not even remotely fair game.
Your two points are so incredibly key. I've felt and known this for a long time.
The last 5-6 years has made me thing so much of _why_ this is the case is rooted in:
1. Race and how people are perceived--the rise of race issues in the referenced period is so confusing to me, as I thought we were getting past them, but it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US population is still have 19th century views on race.
2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled workers as machines to use up and throw away.
As for the "inflation-adjusted minimum wage" ... the argument used to be "small businesses will suffer" but strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW. It's so insane to me that we don't do this. Maybe that would give politicians an incentive to keep inflation low? (Because they want to keep the minimum wage as low as possible?)
> it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US population is still have 19th century views on race
I think it's clear that this is how it's portrayed. I'm not sure the portrayal is all that accurate, or even relevant in most of the cases being discussed.
The big problem with the minimum wage is that, if higher than the market-clearing price, it takes away the lowest rung of the opportunity ladder for the least skilled.
That's not true. Fact is, labor costs money for the laborer to exist and show up for work.
No matter what, that money is paid, or the labor does not exist and or show up for work.
Your argument is one of merit, skill and market value.
This is exactly the wrong way to look at things. If we start from the cost of labor, and it does have a cost as I put above, whether to fund the labor boils down to the value said labor has for others, and that value can be traded on accordingly.
Fact is we need basic labors. Anyone can do them. There should be no shame in this work, and it should be valued as the massive time and effort savings to others that it really is. And automation holds few answers right now, and I would argue for a considerable time yet. People will be doing those labors.
Question really is how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!
That difference in value can very easily fund labors then. It's a perfectly acceptable basis, and it means we value labor differently and it means we recognize that guy digging the ditch, or making our shit disappear, or any number of basic things has the same waking hours any of us do, same basic needs any of us do, and may have a family as any of us do.
This idea of people being inherently worthless is very highly toxic and is doing a great harm to all of us. It's completely unacceptable given the quite obvious value even basic labors actually do have for us overall.
> Fact is, labor costs money for the laborer to exist and show up for work.
Humans aren't like ec2 servers that can be spun down when they're needed. The cost for that person is paid whether or not he's employed. I agree there's an additional cost to show up to work, but that's nowhere near the minimum wage in most places.
The difference is an unemployed persons cost is not a subsidy for profit.
And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.
Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?
If they really cannot afford their labor, they are not a viable business.
Or, we all agree to not care, so we end all the fucking with people on assistance?
Which is it?
To be really clear, I'm OK either way here. What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance despite arguably too much labor otherwise.
> The difference is an unemployed persons cost is not a subsidy for profit.
I don't get it. Subsidizing someone's living is okay, but subsidizing someone's living, and then that person deciding to earn a little more money is not okay because profit is involved?
>And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.
Yes? If you don't want them to starve, then obviously somebody as to pay the cost to keep those people afloat.
>Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?
Would society be better off if those "Employed people, getting a subsidy" were unemployed instead? They'll still get the subsidy. If anything, they'll get more subsidy because welfare tends to be means tested. If anything the "for profit enterprise" has a negative effect on the amount of subsidy that needs to be paid.
> What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance
Underpaid? Maybe they're being paid fairly given the market conditions, and that prevailing wage isn't enough to sustain someone's first world existence so some sort of subsidy has to make up the rest.
> despite arguably too much labor otherwise.
can you reword this? I'm not understanding what you mean by this.
Employees are working yet still they need government assistance to offset the low wages. Walmart knows this and one might argue they incorporate in their business planning. Why pay employees to work full time, when you can pay them part time, reduce your labor costs and have the state pick up the rest of the expenses (i.e. medicare, Foodstamps)
Walmart executive's know this is a win/win for them, they get the labor they need and pay little for it. This is not something that just happened overnight. It's corporate greed on a massive scale that hurts everyone but no one cares because Wallstreet see's the profits rolling in.
Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all, and nothing is done about it. The tax breaks they receive are enabling this behavior.
>Employees are working yet still they need government assistance to offset the low wages.[...] Why pay employees to work full time, when you can pay them part time, reduce your labor costs and have the state pick up the rest of the expenses (i.e. medicare, Foodstamps)
but the thing is, that person is going to be around regardless of he's working at walmart or not. unless you're okay with the guy starving to death because he's unemployed, you'll still need to pay foodstamps or whatever to keep him alive. I'm not sure why that person deciding to voluntarily work at walmart, suddenly makes the entirety of his living expenses walmart's problem.
Put another way, suppose someone is unemployed and living off government assistance. I learn about his predicament, and offer to pay him $10 (or whatever) to mow my lawn. What you basically want is for this transaction to be stopped, on the grounds that $10 isn't enough to keep him alive, and therefore I'm exploiting him. You'd rather the person stay unemployed, and have me keep that $10, even though that's worse off for everyone involved.
>Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all
I fail to see how anyone is being deceived here. I can see why you might think this is bad, because walmart has a duty to their employees or whatever, but not really deception.
This seems to conflate moral worth and economic worth. People can have equal inherent moral value at the same time that some jobs have inherently disproportionate economic value.
What I did do is make an economic one, and suggest how we value things change. A whole bunch of Economics is rooted in a few basies that we all just take as givens. We don't have to.
I also didn't make an equal economic value argument, for that matter.
>"how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!"
What is the "expensive" assumption based on? Is it the opportunity cost? E.g., is the assumption that if I make $50/hr and I perform basic labor, I'm forgoing work that would otherwise be making money at that rate? Or is it that I don't have the skills for that basic labor and I would either have to get those skills or suffer the cost of doing the work unskillfully?
If it's the former, I think there's enough friction in markets to erode that argument. E.g., I can't just decide to get another $50 through my skilled labor once I hire someone to shovel snow in my driveway for an hour. If the latter case were true, it would be skilled labor by definition and generally command higher wages. Or is there another basis for the expense of performing basic labor that I'm not considering from your point?
> What is the "expensive" assumption based on? Is it the opportunity cost?
Yes, and the basic assumption of free markets that competition drives prices to the minimum sellers are willing to accept (equal to opportunity cost of the units actually traded), and that this value per unit increases, so that the next unit must have an opportunity cost to the seller higher than the average of the prior units.
Ok, say I can make $100 / hour or even $50, just for shits and giggles.
Our lives break down into thirds. One to work, one to sleep, one to do what we will and can as people.
If I must do those basic labors, they either consume my sleep or free time, and if not, carry an opportunity cost of $50 / hour.
My time is very valuable, both in a labor to income sense, and personally, in that I have plans for my time that must be balanced against basic labors being done.
Paying what it costs for laborers to exist and show up for work is a no brainer. Worth it to me, again based on my own costs.
There is "expensive"
We can always find cases where basic labors do not carry those costs, or are difficult to handle as a market. We do those ourselves.
However, making our own food, making our own shit and garbage dissappear, moving things, clean ups and all manner of basic labors combine to allow many of us the time freedom to earn more, do more.
The value in that is high enough to require enterprises fund their labor fully. This may mean their overall profit is less. It should be, they didn't earn it. They didn't fund the labor. We did!
Failure to do that comes with other costs, both real in the sense of the massive subsidies that end up unearned profit (our money goes into their bank account, funding labor they profit from on top of margin on goods and services rendered), and opportunity in that we see lower demand and that impacts many others who could earn more and or fund their labor as well.
Again, laborers have a cost to exist and show up for work, and when their labor does not pay enough for those things, someone else's labor does, or the labor does not exist and will not show up for work.
So which is it? Who pays and why?
How we value things can change those answers dramatically, which is the economic argument I made.
One last thing, and that is ignoring the cost of people for them to exist and show up for work, doesn't make those costs go away, it just hides them, and we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive. That's another way to look at this.
When a business does not make enough to fund its operation it closes, or dies in other words. The same is true for people. So not fully funding labor is expensive to literally everyone else except for the people not fully funding the labor they require.
>my sleep or free time, and if not, carry an opportunity cost of $50 / hour.
This is the part I disagree with. The only time that is rated at $50/hr is the time you are producing something of economic value. Sleep and leisure do not warrant a $50/hr price tag in-and-of-themselves. In part, because of what I already mentioned: market friction prevents me from giving a 1-to-1 trade for sleep/leisure time to production. Just because I decide to wake up an hour early doesn't automatically mean an extra $50 worth of work is ready and waiting for me.
>we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive.
I completely agree with this and think it's the governments job to ensure markets price these externalities appropriately.
You get to disagree. I personally value my time differently.
You are ignoring tons of labors saving you time and or providing a rich field in which to profit.
You are ignoring time value. I did not ever say 1:1 at whatever rate.
What I did, and continue to say is your work time would consume far more of your life sans basic labors you benefit from every day.
Cost it how you want, but when suddenly faced with half your personal time gone, having to choose less, or less sleep, or less income delivering work, and in all cases a lot more physical activity in your life will absolutely cost you far more than you are allowing for here.
I mean, the market is exactly how we price that time value. Whether I pay for basic labor or decide to do it myself is exactly based on the price I place on my free time minus how much I value learning something new minus the risk of a bad contractor. If you're not advocating the basic market pricing principles we already operate under, I'm not sure what you're advocating. Are you saying Tom Brady should pay his landscaper $175,000/hour simply because that's what the market has priced Tom Brady's personal economic differential value at?
I'd be curious how you'd expect that to happen in practice. Even though you don't come outright and say it, it's beginning to come across as a Marxist ideal of "to each according to his ability", which I'm sure you already understand all the problems that poses. In the end, all it seems like you're saying is to factor in the externalities to get at a fair market price. If that's the case, I already said we agree. But the same point can be said with a lot more brevity.
The "market" is skills value based, and concludes basic labors are near worthless due to near infinite supply, despite the value of that labor being considerably greater when valued in terms of its benefit to others. Put another way, "the market" in it's current form very seriously undervalues basic labors.
Making extreme claims does not bolster your points here.
Tom Brady can definitely pay their landscaper enough to exist and show up for work same as McDees can pay their people enough to exist and show up for work.
I made no Marxist argument.
I did argue we need to recognize the inherent cost of people and value labor in ways that account for those costs.
Or!
Say we don't. Then we accept a large number of us require assistance to make it, right?
Which is it?
And if we go the assistance route, then we also need to quit fucking with people simply doing as we compel them to do. Getting assistance while also laboring a reasonable time at a wage below what it costs to exist and show up for work should be an ordinary, accepted thing. No shame, no hassles, just ordinary and it's not.
What we currently do is push people off assistance hard, and frequently, while also underpaying them, expecting magic to happen and they suddenly are just doing OK when we know too many of them won't be.
We accept that some people are just not going to exist and or show up for work because they are not viable economically.
Which is it?
People laboring and getting enough to exist and show up for work can make skills and other arguments to further improve on their value, sell their labor, whatever.
This is about the nearly half of us who labor and do not receive enough to fund their labor, exist and show up for work basically.
I don't care how we solve this, and proposed one idea where we value things differently, change the basies the economy depends on. We could do that, it may be a great idea, and it would eliminate a big problem with the overly simple supply / demand theory of labor value in play today.
Say we do agree to a subsidy. Great! Then we also need to agree people need that and quit fucking with them about getting it too. No shame, etc... just an ordinary condition where we don't value their labor high enough, yet we need them economically viable, able to exist, show up for work, etc...
Re: Free time
Right now, one third of my life, approximately, coupled with another third for sleep, together provide for "my" remaining third which is the third where I get to do what I want.
I may invest some of that third. Did for many years, which made my labor third a hell of a lot more valuable. Not everyone can do this. We don't even have the jobs available if everyone were to do this!
I may fuck that third right off too. Rest, play, fuck, whatever right? No worries, as adults, it's our third! Yay!
Now, when I must eat into that third to exist and show up for work?
Nope. That's extremely high value time.
Here's one cost, investment. If one's labor does not fund existing and showing up for work, the solution is often more labor, right? Well, now that eats into either sleep, or our personal third of time. Often both.
That costs a person investment time! That investment time is extremely high value time. I would be worth one hell of a lot less had I repeated how I lived my life in the labor markets today. Seriously. Not sure I would make it in the same way. Some of my kids really struggle in ways I did not.
Same root cause: Labor failing to deliver enough income to exist and show up for work.
I tossed some dollar figure out there when I probably should not have. This is another way to get at that value.
And finally, food for thought:
What defines wealth?
The basic definition involves time. Wealthy people can self purpose far more of their time. This speaks right to what I'm getting at, and it's subtle!
A person making a ton of money, yet who is enslaved to it, unable to purpose their time, is as poor as someone laboring a ton, lacking income needed to even purpose their time. Both cannot make use of their time beyond labor, and or sleep.
A trust fund baby, or someone who just sold a company, having fuck you money is quite wealthy in the time sense. So is the person living lean, requiring very little to live and do what they will.
Hope this helps. I'm not going to respond on this further, and thanks to those of you being good discussion partners. I enjoyed this.
I'm not arguing against a living wage. Mine is more a practical discussion about how is that determined. I don't think there should be any room for the idea of "working poor." Your point seems to be rooted in the differential economic value of ones time as a means to alleviate that. Which means Tom Brady will pay much, much more for basic labor than I will because his differential economic value is higher. Here's my problem with that: it won't play out well for those who are in the lower economic strata. Brady can pay 10,000X what I can pay for basic labor, which means the labor will all funnel towards him. Leaving people in the lower end to perform basic labor themselves, eroding, you guessed it, their time. That will make things worse, not better.
>Which is it?
Right now, in the U.S., it's a mixture of the first two. We have a minimum wage covering #1 and a host of social safety nets that effectively subsidize living standards covering #2. There's certainly room to argue the best levels for each. Personally, I think there's room for improvement so taxpayers aren't essentially subsidizing the profits of companies who pay a wage low enough that require workers to rely on a safety net while the companies simultaneously post ever increasing profit margins.
>Personally, I think there's room for improvement so taxpayers aren't essentially subsidizing the profits of companies who pay a wage low enough that require workers to rely on a safety net while the companies simultaneously post ever increasing profit margins.
Yes. These companies are keeping too much for themselves. There isn't any nicer way to say it. At the same time, the labor creating all that wealth isn't able to keep enough of it to continue to exist and show up for work without someone, somewhere paying for those things to happen.
Re: The mix
#2 is a problem in that we don't just grant the subsidy. It comes with a lot of hassles, checks to limit qualifications, more checks to reduce it should the laborer make a little extra here and there, and of course, a LOT of blame and shame.
Somehow, we've arrived at a place where important, basic labor is seen as a negative, despite the fact that someone is definitely going to be doing it, and we need those people doing that work! This does not sit well with me at all.
Those people have families (well, large numbers of them do), needs, and are in general people same as any of us are, and should be doing that work with the basic dignity and respect any of us would expect when doing our work.
And there is the moral argument you suggested I was making, made here now.
I am making it now because it does tend to complicate the overall discussion. This negativity biases the value perception of both the work and the people doing it away from the objective value it clearly has when one views our society, sans that labor being done for hire. What does getting it done even look like?
We are still somewhere apart on the economic argument.
I said this basic labor could be valued differently, and suggested we value it in terms of what that work being done is worth to others who hold other stations in life, often at higher, can be very considerably higher income. Doing it that way does suggest Tom Brady could pay his basic labor at a very high rate, creating a basic problem you identified easily. Fair enough.
But that really was not my intent. After some thought, maybe this gets at my intent better:
Who pays for the laborer to exist and show up for work?
And by exist, I mean the laborer has a reasonable, though spartan place to live, can see the doctor, has food, and can afford to get to work somehow, and the amount of labor leaves them free to follow other pursuits as any of us may be inclined to do with our leisure time. Put simply, a modest, reasonable, respectable life. And we avoid the live to work, work to live case for the unreasonable life it is.
Having set that up, just because Brady could pay that amount does not mean he should. And that's not really inclusive. We all benefit from the basic labors being done all the time.
The value comes from the fact that when we do have people performing these labors, others do not have to do them, and given labor is valued in a way that provides for life to be broken down into thirds as I suggested earlier in the discussion, this dynamic allows for our leisure third to be ours, generally speaking.
One third is for sleep. One third is for whatever labor we do for income and together that provides the machinery of society to exist and operate as it does today. The remaining third is our time. Family, hobbies, research, whatever we want to do, are inclined to do, and can afford to do.
At another point in the discussion, I also took a look at wealth:
Anthropologists define wealth in terms of time. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them, with slavery being an extreme example of profound poverty. Ordinary people of modest means generally live by the thirds I talked about here, and wealthy people can purpose the majority of their time as they please.
Someone can have a lot of money and it may occupy the majority of their time. The demands related to having or earning that large amount of money can be stiff, largely directing their time. Put simply, they do not purpose much of their time and are living in poverty, despite having considerable spending power.
The same thing is true for someone who makes so little that they basically work to live, and live to work. They purpose very little of their time as well.
An example of a wealthy person might be one who requires little, labors a little to meet those needs, and can purpose a majority of their time. Another example might be someone who has inherited income, or is in possession of a resource of some kind such that it takes very little of their time to labor, and they too can purpose a majority of their time how they please.
And just for shits and giggles, "labor" is generally time spent that is purposed by someone else other than the person doing labor.
People who love to work do present confusion, and that's related to the basic idea of loving what one does for work so that more of life is pleasurable, and or self purposable in that the labor is the purpose... I am just going to ignore this and keep to the basic definition of labor and leisure.
Leisure time is time one can purpose any way they want to. Hobbies, laying out in nature, art, whatever.
When we have many basic labors performed for us, our wealth as a people is very considerably improved! This is why there is wealth in numbers, generally speaking. As there are more of us, so can the basic labors needed to live a life and have a society be well distributed, creating more leisure time. Such an arrangement does provide for advancement in technology, the arts and more, due to some people choosing to invest their time in these ways.
And there is the value I suggested expressed in a way largely ignoring money.
To that end, what is required is basic labors yield enough economically to allow those performing basic labors to live a reasonable, modest life of thirds as I've defined above.
So, who pays?
We could continue subsidies. And if we took this route more formally, recognizing the value backing that idea as defined above, we should also then eliminate the blame and shame. Getting that subsidy should be a rather ordinary, common transaction and those doing the labor should feel no shame related to their contributions to society and the value those have.
Personally, I feel that's something like UBI, and I feel it could work, depending. I dislike the idea of the likes of Walmart and McDees banking billions when they could very clearly afford to pay their labor well enough to live that modest and reasonable life of thirds and still put billions in the bank, just fewer billions. And I would suggest, enough billions with obvious expansions and innovations able to increase the billions they find it possible to bank every year.
For anything like these kinds of value changes to really stick and transform market dynamics, we've got to use law. The likes of Dan Price can successfully model what things can look like, and that's great, but likely seen as a threat and expensive (to them) way to move the discussion forward.
Requiring employers fully fund their labor is an option.
Allowing for that mix, subsidy and employer wages.
We could require neither of those be true, and basically turn charity into a sort of tax with real teeth. (this would be undesirable state of affairs, if you ask me)
Or, nobody pays, and we accept that people will just cease to exist and or show up for work where the costs of doing that simply are not paid.
Who pays?
What basis do they use for understanding whether their people are able to make it?
Finally, I don't have complete answers here. Am just really trying to suggest how we value things could be done differently and provide a basis for ending poverty and or ending the negatives associated with it as we face it today.
Not really because piecework and off-the-books work exist. Plus in the USA there are entire classes of work for which the normal minimum wage does not apply.
I also doubt that empirical evidence supports that assertion. How many people are really being priced out of work because they are only worth $6/hr, not $7.25/hr? In my experience people on the low end are either worth at least what you're paying them, or they're basically not worth hiring at all, at any wage point, because they disrupt others in the work environment, cause accidents, are not amenable to working in groups nor amenable to working alone, report to work too unreliably to make effective use of, or whatever issue they have that makes them count among the ranks of the "least skilled."
Sure, your argument holds given some value of MW, $20/hr? $25/hr? But in real world practice I think the number of people harmed by living out of their car or in shelters @ $7.25/hr vastly exceeds the number of people who but for the minimum wage would easily find relaxing side work at $2/hr sweeping gutters.
And in theory the MW could be tailored to mitigate any adverse impact. It could be restricted to employers grossing over $1 million/yr or in excess of 10 employees. It could be augmented with an earned income tax credit, which has been done to considerable success. There could be a separate under-21 MW. Etc. In practice, though, movement seems to be going in the other direction: about half of US states have minimum wages higher than the Federal level, even places like Florida and Missouri which are not liberal strongholds.
> strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW.
This probably says more about the breadth of your sources than anything else. If you aren't hearing the case against a minimum wage (and it's a strong one) you aren't reading widely enough.
Wages are a key inflation driver; IAMW would be a perpetual motion inflation engine.
Long term, if you have MW as a key minimum support measure, you want it to keep pace or better with inflation, but over the short term you want it to be countercyclical with inflation, rising most rapidly when inflation is low, and least when it is high.
And this leaves out discussion of the problems of a minimum wage as a basic support mechanism, which are also significant.
We could plausibly tie it to targeted inflation (or just have it rise on a fixed schedule). We shouldn't tie it to measured or anticipated inflation, for the reasons you say.
The CPI is already corrupted and consistently below real COL increases because it’s tied to entitlements and taxes. It’s used as a tool to steal from the poor. Further tying it to minimum wage will only add more pressure to politicize and corrupt the CPI calculation. That is the failure point in all similar ideas.
>Further tying it to minimum wage will only add more pressure to politicize and corrupt the CPI calculation. That is the failure point in all similar ideas.
That's not much of an issue in practice: to even get a few those ideas implemented already requires voter vigilance and strong societal push.
If you have those then a reliable CPI is just another thing this vigilance/push should cover.
If you don't have them, you wont get far with those proposals either.
So it's not like we can get the proposals into laws, but the CPI will be the issue making them ineffective. It's all or nothing.
We can be certain the CPI has been corrupted since at least the Boskin commission in 1996. Taxes and entitlements are tied to inflation. The Boskin commission determined if they could find the CPI was over-stated by 1.1% they could save $1 Trillion over 10 years. Magically, with no new research, they came up with a justification to lower the CPI estimate by 1.1%.
Raising taxes and cutting Social Security without getting caught is the third rail of politics. The amount of pressure to find ways to do this is immense.
This is the level of corruption you are dealing with. We are not even on a path from "here" to a place where the CPI is an actual fair estimation of inflation. Most people don't even know this is a problem. It's too complicated for regular folks to even deal with and all the establishment political figures are in on it, so they obviously won't draw attention to it.
I’ve seen these ideas pitched on Hacker News but is there any examples of HN users:
1. Starting a business that generally pays minimum wage and attempting to pay their employees more
2. Buying property and renting it out at below market rates
3. Supporting, training or helping people who are unemployed.
4. Going to work as teachers in underserved school districts.
5. Offering university level education for free
6. Buying USA made only
Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world? I think everyone wants the things you mention but for some reason we are unable to execute on them and a convenient scape goat is that the government should solve it or that “the other party” is getting in the way. Where is the “You must be the change you seek” crowd these days?
Wouldn’t trying to make a small change in your community have more impact than all the comments posted in this thread?
There are a few forces that govern behavior, from Lessig:
Money, markets - the cost of things regulates behavior, more money = more permissive behavior
Physics - the rules of the world regulate behavior, and the better our understanding, the more lax this regulation is
Norms - mutually agreed upon and generally, widely enforced "rules" that are not laws, but do impose rewards and consequences for behavior.
Laws - like norms, but more formal, and with real teeth beyond being shunned or praised.
Norms and laws act post fact. They do not actually prevent behavior, but can reward for it, or punish for it.
Physics and markets, money do inhibit behaviors. The rules of the world are the rules. Violations = failure. Inability to bear costs = failure.
A few entities trying to set new norms, and play against the generally running market, can do that to some degree, but money and markets are very strong forces compared to norms. And what Dan Price is doing with his $70K minimum wage at Gravity Payments is an excellent example. Price is establishing a norm. Weak sauce in the scheme of what regulates behavior.
Law needs to bolster those ideas and it's law and norms that can change how we value things and with those changes come real market dynamic changes, IMHO.
And this is why "be the change you seek" has limited power and cred. In the niche Price is in, it's possible, and he's doing that and arguably doing it at what others who do not value things like he does, would say he's doing it at a very significant opportunity cost.
And given the current state of affairs, they are RIGHT!!
This does not invalidate an effort like Price is making, nor the ideas, nor the potential for things to operate differently and to a much different overall effect for the population and it's elite members. Not to mention Price himself valuing things in ways that clearly make it all worth it for him to operate how he is. He talks about this all the time too.
But, scope and motivation are sharply limited. It's hard advocacy, and again as the opponents of Price would argue, very, very expensive advocacy.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of at least (1), (2), (4), (6).
But "go it at alone, and hope it catches on" is not how this would (or should) work.
It should be made as automatic to do, as paying your taxes, getting police to arrest a thief, or passing a sanity inspection to open a restaurant.
That's how society progresses as a society, when it makes what it wants the future to be either law or an custom/ethical thing that doing otherwise is frowned upon.
Not when things are merely left up to each individual's goodwill to set an example.
Doing it the formal way also e.g. makes it easier for an employeer to pay a good minimum wage AND still compete with other businesses of the same sector: since they all have to pay the same, it's a cost of doing business for everybody, not just for the "good heart" that opted to enforce it on its own (and is driven out of business by others undercutting him and paying worse).
>Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world?
I don't know.
For example, from my understanding of Us history, it took a whole civil war, riots, and federal laws accompanied with police intervention to e.g. force the end of slavery and deseggregation. Some good white souls going out and doing it on their own didn't manage to get far...
2 through 4 is basically asking to be exploited and undervalued, and very few mentally-well people could keep it up for more than a couple of years.
Plenty of us probably doing 5 in some way (I personally designed low-cost electronics lab gear, I'm sure plenty of others make cheap/free online courses and tutorials of a high standard), but it doesn't matter because employers are only looking for the credentials. I'd even go so far to state that many degrees aren't actually indicators of a particular valuable skillset, but indicators of class.
6 doesn't make sense in the broader scope. If everyone in every country did this, it would hurt the global economy more than it helps it.
To expand on this, there are problems solved well by competitive markets and problems that are not. If the above were in the first category people would have solved them and we wouldn’t be talking about them.
What seems more effective in bringing about change to you: trying to teach others to not exploit the system by setting an example and hoping they emulate your behavior, or changing the system so that those behaviors are prohibited?
You can lay the blame on individuals all you want, but you're just going to be attacking symptoms, not the the problem.
I'm sick of this notion that having the government "step in" is a bad thing. There is no purpose to government if not to be used to act in public's benefit.
> Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust, like with any other cost of doing business.
How does this help, exactly? If the businesses who can't afford to pay at the standard you want go bust, you can't just assume there will be others who can. If the unit of labor a person can provide is worth less than its state mandated cost, that unit of labor will go unemployed. People don't buy things for more than their value to them.
Probably 90 percent of minimum wage jobs will still be around if they raise it 50 percent. That would mean a large increase in money going to the bottom of the economy. That should help a lot of things. What to do about the 10 percent that end up jobless I dont know.
The profession might not dissapear if you raise minimum wage, but the jobs sure will. People who are willing to pay for $10 big macs are far less than the people who are willing to pay for $5 big macs.
Maybe instead of doubling the price, McDonald's could cut their profits? I'm sure the shareholders would still do just fine with $3.75 billions per year instead of $7.5.
But the poor shareholders would be very sad with that, they don't deserve such a misfortune. It's better and easier to just underpay their employees, they don't need to make a living anyway.
I don't know what cartoonish depiction of shareholders you are alleging here but they probably wouldn't be very happy to have a sudden 50% drop in profits without any prior planning or intimation.
Yeah, I get it. The employees should be living paycheck to paycheck on the verge of poverty so the shareholders can rake in that extra 3.5bi.
These employees are such crybabies, they just need to budget better.
Who do you think the shareholders are? One unified group of cartoonishly evil mustache-twirling villains?
I'd be very pissed off if dividends or bond yields from across the industry dropped 50% overnight.
Of the largest shareholders of major corporations are mutual funds, pension funds and such that fund people who are completely dependent on investment income to live. A policy that causes a 50% change in profits would be a massive shock to those people.
it would be a large increase in money for the bottom, but at the same time you'll have more people living on minimum wage (say you raise the wage from 7 to 20, all that make 7-20 today will either be unemployed or living on minimum wage). But living on minimum wage sucks, no matter what the level is. Everything is instantly more expensive, especially the stuff that poor people spend most of their money on: groceries, fast food, gas
So weird to read that. You mean people making minimum wage are driving around over there?
In Brazil, there's successful people with years long career, making way above the minimum wage, who can't afford a car. Actually, the minimum wage is currently 1/4 to 1/5 of the expected cost of living in some large cities.
Of course! Americans like to complain a lot, but they are generally unaware how lucky they are. With 7.25 an hour you can easily make 1200 a month, which has almost zero taxes (maybe 5%?). You can easily buy a 1000 car with that. In practice, the de-facto minimum wage in most cities is much higher: 15-20 USD.
Maybe, but I doubt it as a quick google search shows that the EU countries without minimum wage have had consistently lower unemployment rates than ones with [0].
It goes without saying that if you remove the price floor for labor, the amount of labor consumed by the market goes up.
But is it good for the laborers themselves? Or for society at large?
Do minimum wage laws or lack thereof correlate with broader measures of wellness and prosperity? How do countries with and without minimum wages compare on life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity rates, cancer rates, median disposable income, median wealth or net worth, suicide rates, divorce rates, accident rates, vacation time or leisure time, levels of pollution? How about harder to quantify stuff such as happiness, contentment, and stress levels?
The market exists to serve human needs and wants. "GDP go up" is not the point of all this effort.
>Those people cost money to exist and show up for work. How are those costs being paid?
Same way farmers get paid. Why don't we worry about the price of corn going to $0 a bushel and nobody wanting to plant corn? The market will find a price point where supply meets demand.
Mere supply and demand fails to value basic labors in a way that makes them economically viable.
Which is it?
We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them
, or
We subsidize them?
If we agree to the latter, then we need to make sure all that makes sense and there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.
Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively, and we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.
>Mere supply and demand fails to value basic labors in a way that makes them economically viable.
>Which is it?
>We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them
>, or
>We subsidize them?
We're already doing the latter, because if it's really the case that they're not "economically viable", the people would have starved to death long time ago.
>there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.
>[...] we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.
I'm not against society subsidizing the lifestyle of people who are not productive enough to afford it, but judging by your other comments, you seem to be against companies hiring the very same people for extra money.
>Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively
that's not a contradiction. Civilization is "massively" dependent on clean drinking water, yet you can get it from the tap for pennies a gallon.
BTW: you totally sucked me back in. Great discussion partner. Normally, when I say I won't respond again, I don't. Never personal, just letting the other parties know intent. Giving consideration. Hoping to get it back and usually I do.
In your case, the great comments... ah well. Happens. Nicely done.
It's OK that they have an agenda. In fact, everyone does! Bias is everywhere. It's for sure present on the cable newscycle. To avoid it is very difficult, time consuming and expensive! It takes large numbers of us considerable periods of time to produce objective material, if it's possible to produce at all.
A lot of people tend to respond to entities with agendas they do not like, for whatever reason --does not matter why, by marginalizing them, or ignoring them, rebutting them (the best of poor options IMHO), and so on.
In most cases, those responses do more harm than good. What happens there is your own biases get amplified, or resonate in ways that you may also feel pretty good about, despite the harm being done; namely, the loss in your ability to make good use of the otherwise fairly high general information value out there being high on the list of subtle harms.
With me so far? Let's take it just a bit farther. Humor me for a moment please. It's worth it. Promise.
A much better response is to evaluate that agenda, or bias, as well as the overall clarity of the presentation.
Biases work two basic ways, one being the entity under examination is truthful, clear and accurate about their biases, whatever they may be. The other way is simply not accurate, or unclear. Bear in mind FOX took a case to court where they won a case where they forced journalists to basically lie. They could do the lie, keep their job, or take a walk. Simple as that. The big players do this. All of them do it. It's legal for them to do. Ethics? I sure don't find any of it ethical at all, but I'm not in charge, nor running a media giant either.
Clarity boils down to whether someone using the information can accurately and consistently and EASILY differentiate fact from opinion. This is the primary factor in play, and it is the one more people understand more poorly, or haven't considered it at all. The secondary way clarity works, and this is far more widely understood and is generally well considered, is whether the language conveys the ideas in high fidelity. Low clarity information generally is a mashup of fact and opinion that is difficult to sort out, and whether it's sorted or not, the whole thing is written with dubious language, making it difficult to understand on a basic level.
Rather than avoid bias, which is generally futile for reasons I've given above, embrace it! Bias is OK. Seriously!
It's also largely unavoidable, and it's only a core problem when it's unknown and or unclear, or deliberately misrepresented. Otherwise, that bias can help put whatever info you are considering into a greater context and that's a value add straight up. Worth it.
You are not wrong to be wary of the data!
I see your comment in grey, meaning some of us balked on the idea of that and who knows why? Maybe they think highly of Cato, or maybe they feel the whole statement is more judgement than value, whatever... It really doesn't matter much, beyond the reduction in value that happens on HN with that sort of thing going on.
But, I wrote this because you aren't wrong to be wary of that data, and some information on why that is has high value. In fact, you should be wary of most any data coming out of think tanks, fast news cycles, and in general anyone not working from original documents and or not linking to them for whatever reason. Sometimes those originals are unavailable, or paywalled, or obtuse, and other times it's nefarious, or low value, in that they are available, but it's simply not done.
Sorry, this ended up being a bit long. I didn't intend for that. Stuff happens. For what it's worth, I didn't just ramble. And I'm not judging or telling you what to do either. Just putting some perspective and my own hard won insight here for consideration.
There are other factors too, like disclosure and how it can hide important conflicts of interest. An easy example might be getting your facts on net neutrality and or opinion on policy about it from mainstream big company media owned by a handful of people. The conflict is easy and obvious, and we've all had great discussions about that topic here, which may get a few minutes when it's peak interest, and nothing at all otherwise. From their point of view, a neutral net carries with it costs and risks as well as enables competition those media giants have spent decades pushing away from their media empires right along with shutting down, owning, marginalizing indie shops all over the place, and I digress! Sorry about that.
Suffice it to say disclosure is a big deal, it's not being done to the degree it should and the problem is widespread and chronic. Conflicts of interest as well as understanding who might be a competing source are both problems we all deal with on a regular basis and there is very little discussion on it, certainly not discussion on par with the importance and scale of the problem.
I tend to lump all this under clarity, just to keep it all simple.
What you want is to understand their biases, ownership, and how clear that all is. Ever wonder about the multiple talking heads deal done all the time, Sunday shows, prime time "news" and other productions being easy examples. They do this for a ton of reasons, but a big one is reduced clarity so that facts and opinion get mangled together leading people to conclusions they are likely to have not arrived at given a higher degree of clarity. These productions can be clear, and sometimes are. You can sort it out by asking yourself whether you found fact and opinion easy to differentiate.
Having thought about these things, sorting fact from opinion, biases become important as context and all that can be framed up and used more effectively in your own reasoning and potential communication!
You can then find other sources and or entertain discussion being far better informed and able to participate in those adding more value than you would generally add otherwise.
From there?
You come to your own conclusions. No joke.
At first, working through these things is a slog. Takes time, energy, isn't always compelling, and we all know the list of reasons why we might avoid doing those things.
...which comes down to trust. Just trusting is a lot easier, and it's why so many of us do that so often.
Your statement implied a low degree of trust related to Cato. Fair enough. I don't trust them either. But, whether we trust them or not isn't the point as much as WHO YOU / WE DO TRUST!
I suggest not doing that to the degree you probably are. Verify more, compare / contrast more. This too takes a bit of work at first, but if you do that work, soon it becomes just part of your process and you won't notice it, but you will notice your own clarity, ability to participate in discussions, and just understand and benefit from whatever information sources you prefer improves considerably.
To that end, humor me just a bit more please!
Let's talk about those sources you do trust. For whatever reason!
I want to challenge that and get you thinking a bit differently. For your benefit. Overall, mine and others too. Start looking for these two concepts:
"there is always two sides to every story."
Nope! There are the facts and there is opinion as to what we think those facts mean. Could be what others think they mean, what you think, me, anyone really. The most common abuse of this idea is to put a reputable source alongside a full bat shit one and then have a debate... That is more entertainment than it is informative.
High clarity sources make the facts easily differentiated from their own editorial / advocacy. They do this so you can take those facts, consider them yourself, consider what they want you to, and when using other sources, see the facts there, find missing ones and in general get informed to a degree beyond whatever intent may be at hand otherwise. Being informed means understanding the facts as well as the various schools of thought out there as to what those facts may mean.
When I was a kid in primary school, my school actually taught this stuff! Identifying bias, clarity, fact, opinion, and we were asked to collect sources, compare, contrast, and talk about what we learned and why it mattered.
This hasn't been done very well for most of us, and a whole lot of us simply do not even get introduced to the topic. My kids didn't see this kind of education, and my grandkids are not either. I've had to do it, and will be doing it again soon once my grandkids are ready for it.
"Always two sides to every story" is toxic.
There are facts, and there are a lot of opinions and frankly, the only reason we see two sides more than not is the media consolidation has also resulted in message consolidation and the highly polarized discussion centered on our two parties.
The other concept to be watching for is whether the bias is truthfully communicated or not.
FOX runs with "Fair and Balanced", or we see others like, "Lean Forward", "News You Can Trust", and so on. None of that crap actually means a damn thing, and it's focus grouped to the nines all intended to imply positives while not actually communicating bias in a concrete way. A great parallel to understand what I mean here is something like the Arco gas company "No Gas Gets Better Mileage" slogan. Of course! No other gas gets worse either, because we've regulated what gas actually is!
Cato sometimes produced great info. They will do it again. They often produce pieces that are clear and appear to have high information value. And they might, but there is usually some bit left out, or a dubious source, or whatever subtle device made sense to them at the time too.
Any of that seem familiar?
Well, we can have this same discussion about CNN, FOX, or MSNBC and arrive at very similar conclusions, and if we did that we would not be wrong about it! Just like bias is everywhere, these basic ideas are in play everywhere.
It's hard to trust right now.
Our mainstream media environment isn't all that reputable by time tested, global standards related to this kind of thing. And we aren't alone. Australia, Europe have similar struggles, and the one thing they have we don't is a multi-party government that makes it all a bit harder to pull off to the degree seen here. One thing that does stand out is media from other nations can often present the same stories with better clarity and a different take because their point of view, bias, is also different, given their position in the world overall forces that kind of thing. I found this out after travelling some to see the world. I was quite surprised to see our politics and news covered very well, while our news here rarely covers foreign news and politics to the same degree.
My advice?
Don't trust so much.
If you find yourself really invested in a narrative, or story, or even some facts, take a little time, seek original documents where you can, try a few different sources, and even a foreign one or two. Just doing that will broaden how you see media and improve your process and that's a big win.
None of us have this stuff right. We all have biases. We all have our faves in the media scene too. That's OK. One of our best tools is simple discussion among peers. Just put it out there and see what others think.
When we can talk among ourselves without judgement, without hating, and just exchange thoughts, we benefit.
If nothing else, that's why I wrote this. Ended up in a place where all this kind of bubbled up with unusual clarity. In my experience, that's always a good time to put down some words and get the value of it all out there for others to consider and benefit from. That's all this is.
Again, you aren't wrong. The why of it may not be as expected. No big deal there. Maybe this helps drag some of the subtle bits out into the light where you can take a look at it all and benefit. Hope so, and I hope you do.
A business that cannot fully fund it's labor is not a business. Who wants to pay a subsidy, which is exactly what happens when labor is underfunded, just so someone can mooch for profit? I don't.
The answer to your question is we simply do that labor ourselves.
Right. And businesses can always get creative by improving productivity (via automation) to survive with rising labor costs. Those that cannot simply cease to exist, entire industries die out all the time.
> And businesses can always get creative by improving productivity (via automation) to survive with rising labor costs. Those that cannot simply cease to exist, entire industries die out all the time.
This takes commerce as a given. Another outcome is that those that cannot cease to exist and are replaced by nothing, leading to more poverty. That has been a common failure mode of that policy.
Who said the business can't fully fund itself? If the worker isn't making enough to survive, they have no reason to take the job. So, the condition you're describing does not exist, at least not in such a simple form.
What happens when business operates on less income than it costs to operate?
It dies.
Same is true for people who are required to labor for more than it costs them to labor.
It just so happens we will fund people who cannot exist otherwise, right?
And there is the problem. We have many companies perfectly happy to underpay their labor, mooch off the public, and bank that for profit. The likes of McDees, Walmart and many others can and should be fully funding their labor and they don't.
The balance of power between labor and employers is different in those nations, which works to reduce the need for minimums. The ones I have looked at also have assistance / subsidy policy that is lower friction and generally not associated with the near constant blame and shame seen here. That's a big deal frankly. Having robust norms well aligned with human quality of life basics is necessary for the help to work as intended.
Labor law is a contributor to that balance of power too. "At will" type policies, "right to work for less" policies are examples where the lack of labor protections very significantly bias labor negotiation power toward employers, who tend to get a better deal. Implications here should be obvious.
I tend to use business and labor dying when they are not funded well enough to exist as a strong rhetorical tool. This meta discussion is one negative artifact of that. No easy answers, IMHO.
Arguably, if the value people will pay for something can't support the human dignity of the people who make them, then it's not worth subsidizing so that it is affordable. Do you have an counterexample?
There's an obvious problem with your argument: in order for wages to support the human dignity of workers, those workers must be able to actually buy things with their wages. The sectors that would have trouble increaing wages due to the limited amount people can pay for them include stuff like food. You're treating the workers producing the goods and the people buying the goods as two seperate groups when in fact they're broadly one and the same, which obscures the fact that the actual end result of your proposal is that people whose economic value falls below whatever minimum standard of permissible human dignity don't get to eat anymore.
Increased wages also drives more automation. For critical goods like food, that's what would replace those workers if their labour value is below minimum wage, and they would have to move into positions that can pay better. That's arguably better than leaving them in poverty working below a living wage.
If those people could move into positions that can pay better, they already would have done so, no? Eliminating their jobs through automation isn't going to get them promoted, it's going to get them fired and unemployed
> If those people could move into positions that can pay better, they already would have done so, no?
No, because those positions pay the same as what they're currently getting, but not how much they would pay with a higher minimum wage. The context is that a person's current position is unprofitable under a higher minimum wage, but other positions would not be, thus their wage ends up boosted even if it means getting a new position.
Furthermore, targeted automation has tended to increase employment in other industries, historically.
"Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust, like with any other cost of doing business."
I have no problem with a higher minimum wage, but that's rather like giving someone who has lost a lot of blood, a blood transfusion. It's good, but it's a stopgap measure that is ignoring a more fundamental problem, and if you're not stitching up the wound you're not doing much good.
If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a job. Higher minimum wage, ok, but it can't be done in isolation or you've replaced "low wages" with "no wages".
>If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a job.
As far as I know, the economic literature is pretty clear that this is not the case in the US. Even regional changes, where an employer can reasonably relocate outside the e.g. city boundary without much difficulty, don't show job losses.
A lot of manufacturing left the USA along time ago due so I’m not sure why the economics literature says it doesn’t matter? Yes, the service jobs that now dominate in the USA are largely unaffected, but that’s more due to survivor bias than any underlying economic mechanism.
Automation and self service (like in European cafeterias) is largely the response when services become too uneconomical to be done manually. Those elevator operators aren’t coming back to the USA.
But there's no evidence I'm aware of suggesting that minimum wages were the cause of deindustrialization in the US. I suspect most of those factory jobs were far above the minimum wage.
And people often wave the automation threat around - but why hasn't it happened yet? In concrete studies of minimum wage increases that actually occurred, we do not find job losses.
Minimum wage is, sure, not the cause of deindustrialization. Rather, it's what people tend to advocate as a cure for a large underclass stuck in poverty, but it's not addressing the core issue. We have a larger underclass stuck in poverty, because the kinds of jobs that historically allowed them a way out of it were sent to places with even poorer people, and the change that allowed that was a change in government policy (tariffs, etc.). So a minimum wage, like a blood transfusion, might help out for a bit, but it's not addressing the underlying issue, which was a (major, sustained) change in government policy.
Minimum wage in the USA has always been paltry, and increasingly irrelevant over time: very few work for it now. Labor costs rise because people at the low end get better options, not because of a gov mandated increase.
But this is just the government being conservative, actual significant increases that affect more than one percent of the population will have an affect.
There definitely are experiments with robotic cooks [0].
Not widespread yet, but neither were cars nor computers in their early days. The ratio of robots to humans in kitchens is likely to grow in the future. From its current very low value to something more meaningful.
Horn and Hardart closed in the 1970s because given the choice, people would rather not eat in automated restaurans. But, with wealth inequality as high as it is the "automated" restaurant may be making a comeback.
Just as income inequality is bringing a new wave of app-based delivery servants.
I can tell you absolutely that is my response. I'm not going to eat some automated thing that nobody's checking, or has poorly maintained for the least dollars.
Assuming an already expensive automation makes any kind of economic sense, it could. But right now for a vast majority of basic labors, automation remains out of reach being impractical economically, if not technically.
And robots don't need a good movie, a night out, a good meal, or any of those things, so whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.
And those people do have costs, unless we simply allow them to cease to exist and not show up for work anymore.
We might need some qualifiers to understand exactly what you mean. Most automation is readily within reach if the job is rote and the economic differential is there. (FWIW, I used to build and program assembly line robuts).
>whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.
I think this is the intent. Call it UBI, Freedom Dividend, or whatever, but the goal is to fund the societal base that has the actual need for whatever automation (or humans) will produce.
Those are not real answers in my view. How we value human labor is a real answer, and the fact is we need to start with the cost of existing and or showing up for work.
As for rote... look, automation is expensive to establish, adapt transport and maintain, and need infrastructure to support it all.
People, at their real cost, are a GREAT deal and that will be true for a very long time yet.
Go work through a few cases. I have experience in automation. It is the little things that cost a lot.
We are more likely to succeed with augmented labor, and already do. Better tools = labor multipliers.
Automation is expensive, but so is human labor. Once you cost in all the human costs, like paid time off, the variability in performance, administrative overhead, etc. it can be a lot cheaper to automate. Which is exactly why it's done. As for cases, I worked in automotive assembly line robots. Upfront costs are high, sure, but nothing compared to the legacy costs of the dozens of the unionized human labor they supplant. (I'm not against unionization btw, only bringing it up because it tends to - fairly IMO - sway the power to the worker in terms of higher wages). An automation tax would at least make up for some of the lost revenue that supports societal infrastructure. It would also sway the economics to extend the time horizon of when it usurps specific segments of the labor economy. Automation is never fully automated, so I would consider it all augmented. It just tends to shift the labor towards fewer and more skilled workers.
Yep. I am not anti automation. Cars, for example. Great use case, as you say.
Scale there, appetite for capital investment there, ability to weather high maintenance, change costs all there.
There is an opposite end of the scale, and it is that end we are a very long away from.
Also, the likes of FANUC do have dark running facilities that use robots to build robots.
I do have experience too. That stuff is expensive, complex, and very rigid. Not applicable, at this time, to the vast majority of basic labors we depend on every day.
Finally, one can automate workers away, or automation can free them to do more things.
The latter is a lot more sustainable, but a lot less sexy, and not so well aligned with the dominant business justifications used to sell initial automation.
This was my latter point. Automation is often augmented, to use your words. This is more true the higher you get in skills. A Da Vinci robot does not replace a surgeon. But lower level skills are where the difficulty is at. A fork-lift driver may be automated away completely by a parts-picking robot. This is where unions are beneficial in my view. They can ensure at least a relatively soft landing with retraining, replacement, etc.
Yeah, had to respond on this one. I think we largely see it the same way, and did a little feeling around to center on the core concept.
Amazon did find a niche, the package movement, where everything aligns nicely in a fashion not too unlike the cars. IMHO, the big difference is more dynamic decisions are needed for the packages, where the cars require more complexity, but are very consistent otherwise. Software innovation got Amazon where they wanted to be, and it's a good, genuine innovation that did expand the automation space.
Similar levels of effort are necessary for all those basic labors. This is why I maintain we just won't be there for a considerable time, despite successes like Amazon out there. Scale, and dynamic locations, terrain and decisions are huge barriers to entry. So many cases... and mechanisms / processes that can address them, and or minimize them.
Costs on all that are off the charts, as is maintenance, simple acquisition of the machinery.
More people centric augmentation will happen sooner. Mostly, this will preserve people from wearing out and or increase their throughput more than anything else. It may be we extend capabilities in a more transparent way too. That's going on now, of course, but maybe some of that will scale, get cheap, someone finds another niche...
All good stuff really.
But, "the robots are coming" really does not apply for a solid majority of the basic labors out there we depend on. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't be automating. We will, and it's a good thing regardless of how we sort out the humans economically, which was your point, and one I agree with.
No, I'm from another country. From my point of view it's more like stop wasting money for other useless purposes so we can grow. If we've been able to survive, no doubt the USA can thrive.
Not sure if you didn't understand or you're being deliberately obtuse to make another point. Of course the implication was that the USA can still thrive even spending that money, a pittance compared with public expenses in other areas.
I don't share all the points of the originator of the thread (was it coldtea?), you might find interesting which ones I didn't mention, but some of them are a good idea even from the point of view of more affluent people.
That’s an attempt to inject an urbanist hobby horse into a discussion of poverty. The vast majority of poor Americans have a car. It gives people tremendous flexibility in taking advantage of different employment and housing opportunities.
If anything I’d argue that transit puts poor people at a disadvantage. My wife’s family comes from rural poverty (like reliant on hunting for meat). Access to cars is never the problem. And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.
The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines. That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.
Car ownership is highly correlated with income, people in the bottom 10%ile of income are much less likely to have a car than people of higher income. If you look at modeshare for people in the bottom 10% it’s a much much larger share of biking, public transit, walking, and carpooling than others. Cars are one of the top sources of bankruptcy for people in the bottom 10% of income (car repairs, car accidents, making car payments). Car dependent life is a huge stressor to people in the bottom 10% of income
That is only in cities. Across the majority of the US your statement is not true. Poor people across the Midwest and South need a car because walking, biking, bussing, and trains are not available to them.
The poorest people in the Midwest can be seen walking down the sides of busy highways that have no sidewalks, carrying large loads of groceries for miles at a time.
You're just echoing my point. This city centric view that "cars aren't needed", "cars are a failure" is not helpful. The Midwest and South do not have the density to support those statements, moreover, most folks end up having to budget for a car first, then a home because of this.
Making cars easier to afford and maintain would benefit the South and Midwest a lot more.
Poor across the Midwest and south want a car but often live without. The difference is simply how important people consider cars and how expensive they are to keep. Being able to park for free makes a huge difference at the edge.
That's not true to my experience at all. We usually budgeted for a car first and a house second. Mass transit in most forms isn't cost efficient below a certain density, so at most you'll have a light bus system or rail system available to you.
In regards to your "often live without" statement, I met very few people in the South who didn't have cars. For the reasons I stated above, they're practically a necessity. Data also doesn't indicate that people are often going without cars except in major, wealthy cities: https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...
From your 2015 data: Miami, Florida has 19.9% of households without cars, New Orleans, Louisiana at 18.8%. Even Birmingham, Alabama is at 15.8% and Atlanta, Georgia has 15.2% of households without cars.
That’s much higher than say Arlington, Virginia at 13.4% which is connected to one of the best public transportation networks in the US.
A handful of places on that list sat at 2% without cars, but most of the south was over 5% without cars largely due to poverty.
PS: Not that I think the data is very accurate Murrieta, California seemingly went from 3.5% (2015) down to 0.7% (2016) which seems extremely unlikely for a single year. The poor are often missed in official statistics like census unless significant effort is used to track them.
20% of a city not having a car sounds pretty typical, and from that data looks average. The wealthiest cities seem to correlate to not having cars, with San Francisco leading. The smaller towns on that list, and especially the ones in the Midwest and South are anywhere from single digit to 20%, with Cleveland having the highest number. So what's your point?
Edit: the whole point of my reply was to say that mass transit is effective in dense, wealthy cities. In the Midwest and South those same sentiments will not work because our highest density is in the middle of the city. The farther you go out is quickly drops off. Given that, it makes sense to make cars cheaper and easier to maintain for people there, while focusing on mass transit in areas where it will work. Unfortunately, in areas like SF (where I currently live) it's NIMBYs who get in the way and waste everyone's time while acting like they support mass transit expansion.
New Orleans, Louisiana where 18.8% of households live without cars has a 23.7% poverty rate and a median income of $41,604, that’s well below the national average.
Dallas Texas where 10.2% of households live without cars has a 18.9% poverty rate, median income of $52,580, so it’s larger, wealthier, and denser yet has significantly more cars.
Also, 20% is unusually high. Nationwide it’s about 8.7% and that’s heavily influenced by NYC. Excluding just NYC and that number falls closer to 7%.
PS: It’s really region specific but in general the wealthy are more likely to own a car in their area but different areas don’t have anything close to the same breakdown. https://slate.com/business/2019/05/maps-car-ownership-income.... Just look at El Paso vs San Jose on the bottom graph.
>New Orleans, Louisiana where 18.8% of households live without cars has a 23.7% poverty rate and a median income of $41,604, that’s well below the national average.
Dallas Texas where 10.2% of households live without cars has a 18.9% poverty rate, median income of $52,580, so it’s larger, wealthier, and denser yet has significantly more cars.
Are you suggesting that when poor people get cars, they are better able to drive to work, then make more money? Because that is my take-away from this
No, for one thing many of these people are retired. Anyway, a few poor people making marginally more money isn’t going to move median income, it’s going to show up at the 5th and 10th percentile but largely disappear past the 25th.
So, I am suggesting a car is considered a luxury or unaffordable by large segments of the poor population outside of the largest and richest cities.
Right, which circles back to my main point that the people who are making comments like "cars are a failure", who are usually arguing for mass transit, are not being helpful. What would help the poor in the Midwest and South is cheaper and easier to maintain cars.
That’s well outside of what we where talking about but I think two points are reasonable here.
Poor people who can’t currently afford a car are hardly going to buy a new one, so at best you might start to change things for them a decade from now. Improving transit doesn’t have that delay or all the knock on affects around new car regulations.
Mass transit meanwhile can actually solve the root problem even in rural areas. Hell, America already has mass transit driving past almost every home in America 2 or more commonly 4 times every weekday day for most of the year, their called school busses and they don’t charge their users or cost that much to operate. I am not suggesting we should have free public transit to every home, but it does suggest far more is possible than is currently being done.
Poor people without cars really aren't the issue, if you can't afford a car in America, you are extremely poor and really an outlier. Pretty much anyone working even minimum wage can afford a car. The problem is a ballooning costs of ownership and all the other systemic failures that keep the majority of lower income people ~60% of the US trapped in a situation where they can not accumulate any substantial savings, assets or wealth and are merely surviving.
The reason they can't save is exactly that they're forced to buy a car. It costs several thousand per year for maintenance, insurance and gas. It's the second most expensive thing people spend money on. And all these things should cost even more money, the only reason they don't is government subsidies.
It very much does cost several thousand. My insurance alone was almost $1K per year. Gas was about $100 per week, but, in rural areas, that's probably $50 per week. That's about $2,500 per year.
In addition, most poor families have ONE, and only one, car. Putting it in for maintenance not only costs money for the maintenance but also money for alternate transportation.
I had a 20 year old Honda and a 20 year old Pontiac. It cost me about $2K per year for maintenance on each (I calculated that if it reached $5K per year it was time to get a new car). However, because I had two, I could put one in the shop and use the other without thinking. This is a luxury that the poor do not have.
Car-centered suburban development puts anyone who is not a healthy financially stable adult at a huge disadvantage. It is terrible for not only the poor and working class, but also children, families with children, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, tourists arriving by plane/train/bus/boat, etc.
And it is even terrible for well-off healthy adults whenever something happens to their car (say, engine trouble).
Not to mention, car accidents are a significant cause of injury and death, and being habitually sedentary leaves a high proportion of people in horrible physical shape and is a leading cause of ballooning healthcare costs, poor quality of life, and preventable deaths.
It is a tremendously exclusionary, resource inefficient, fragile, and environmentally destructive form of transportation and social organization.
Anecdotally, both cities and rural areas are full of kids of multigenerational households (I’m having trouble tracking down a good data source; maybe you have data?). But that generally has more to do with poverty than love for a particular place. It is also more common among immigrant and minority groups.
My impression is that car-centric suburbs full of wealthy white people have the fewest multigenerational households.
The elderly are much less independent in a car-centric society, which makes them more likely to end up spending longer in an assisted living facility where families can afford it.
But the immigrants and minorities want to get out of there. I have had several members of my extended family who have lived in NYC after immigrating from Bangladesh. They do it because there’s a large Bangladeshi community and lots of support for new immigrants. But invariably they move out to Long Island as soon as they’re able to do so. The most recent wave is going straight to places like Texas. My FB feed is full of pictures of 3BR houses in the exurbs with pools.
If living in a transit-dependent city with kids and elderly people was so convenient, the immigration pipeline wouldn’t involve people moving to Texas as soon as they can. But that’s exactly what happens. New York City has a huge internal out migration—it would be shrinking without international immigration.
As an aside, most suburbs aren’t full of “wealthy white people.” In the DC area, the places where you’re most likely to encounter multigenerational households is the Virginia suburbs where there are lots of Hispanics and Muslims. DC itself has some of the lowest fertility rates in the country, for both white people and Black people.
People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.
Land is certainly much cheaper though, and a lot of the material waste involved is subsidized by the federal government or borrowed from future local taxpayers, and there is no price put on a wide range of negative externalities. Sustainably and accurately pricing the full range of costs and harms from suburbia would render it unaffordable for most.
Unfortunately national, state, and local policy in the USA is substantially organized around entrenching and extending car dependency. The places where people can easily live without cars tend to have high housing prices and generally higher cost of living. In other parts of the world, there is not such a steep price premium for housing density and walkable neighborhoods.
> People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.
LOL. My kid was incredibly isolated when we lived in DC because there were no other families.
I disagree with this necessarily being an attempt to inject an urban hobby horse into a discussion on poverty. I have lived in compact towns where the main reason to own a vehicle was to service neighbouring industries (agriculture, forestry, petrochemical). Everything within town was within walking distance. Contrast that to the suburbs of larger cities, where it may be difficult to find a single employer within walking distance.
I recognize those towns are not universal. Then again, the situation of your wife's family is not universal either. Which is the crux of the problem with discussions such as this one: people like to reach for generalities that reflect their own life experiences or observations, when the reality is that those perspectives represents a narrow worldview. Heck, even the people who study poverty for a living cannot come up with a consistent narrative (as demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of the article) since it will be influenced by the questions they ask and how they conduct their research.
In some cases, it's the hobby horse of people with barriers to driving who have studied the space and wish the US was more like it used to be and more like some other countries still are.
Sweden. I've never needed a car and live 50km from a city. The only people that need cars are those that literally live in the middle of the forest or need them for work.
Has never been a problem in either Blekinge or Kalmar... almost every village has a bus line. I specifically excluded "literally living in the woods" though.
A bus comes by my house every hour, sometimes more often. Why would you need more granularity than that? And if you really did, you could still rent a car, truck, hire a taxi or rideshare, or whatever...
You have an appointment at 10:00am, it’s 20mins away by car, 30mins away by bus and 90 minutes long.
To take the bus you get ready and wait by 9am. Get to the place at 9:30am, wait until 10:00am for the appointment, and hopefully it doesn’t run late and let’s you take the 12:00pm bus to get home by 12:30. There goes 4 hours for a 90 minute appointment. With a car this same round trip could be done in 2.5hours ish, and you could make other stops along the way.
Granularity is important, and some places are coincidentally structured to be more difficult to survive in, the poorer you are.
This is very contrived. I've never in 20 years had such a problem. Don't make appointments for yourself that are extremely inconvenient... and of course you could do other things while you're in town.
I have had such problems, and I live in a village 10 km from Prague. Gaps in bus schedules can be very uncomfortable, and you often get no choice scheduling the important appointments such as a CT scan; you will be happy to get any at all.
What? When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment... It is unavoidable, and even more, the lower in the food chain you are the less control you have over it: you cannot call a more expensive but more convenient service, you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff. Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.
> When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment...
I can. I'm not sure why you can't. Maybe because you're not in Sweden? If it's not an emergency, you have a choice of times. If it's an emergency, you can just go now. The only difficult case is with rare specialists which have a first-come-first-serve queue system, but you can still either let them know when you're available or just wait longer. It's trivial and free to reschedule.
> you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff
I've never needed a private doctor for anything, but this was never a problem for the private dentist or optometrist that I use. It's pretty affordable and flexible here, even for the poorest. If you really cant't afford it and could prove that, the kommun ("county") would just give you money to cover it anyway, including your moving expensive if you need to move for some reason.
> Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.
Grew up poor in the US and am currently in the second to lowest income bracket here due to disability.
Maybe you just aren't aware of how much better things can be.
I was talking of a bracket of poverty you only need 300km south of Sweden to experience. That is, still, not real poverty. And I mean countries with a good safety net and infrastructure even if not as good as in Sweden
Well in New York people commute this much distance. And even I lived about 25-30 miles from Washington DC without car. Is it applicable to whole USA that's the point.
I don't use public transit much -- I mostly walk everywhere -- and the OP only said The fact someone needs a car is itself a failure. There's no mention of public transit as a proposed solution.
Well anything could be called failure if alternatives and their pros/cons not discussed.
Good that you could walk everywhere. I can't, my knees hurt walking more than a mile or so. If I have no car and can't afford cab for everything, not sure how I would be better off.
Pedestrians are fine, cyclists have to admit they are doing it for their own personal pleasure at the time and expense of everyone else 99% of the time. I commuted by bicycle for many years because I lived somewhere that it was convenient and appropriate. I didn't impede traffic and delay other people.
Cheap motorbikes need to be more widely available and utilized by any one who is cycling out of necessity in areas not intended for it.
Bicycles should absolute be relegated to specialized infrastructure of which we should build more, but cyclists within regular vehicle traffic is mostly done for enjoyment and only inspires hatred and annoyance at bicycles in general which creates a feedback loop resulting in less support for bicycle infrastructure.
Having to slow down traffic and wait to pass a bicycle only to have them filter back to the front at the next red light and make everyone slow down and pass them again repeatedly is a real contributor to gridlock.
A bicycle takes up a lot less road space than a car, especially when it can smoothly filter through lanes. You know what contributes to gridlock? Too many cars on the road, that's what. Bicycles are not making traffic any worse.
Poor people historically were worse off in myriad ways. Wanting options for people is trying to throw out the bathwater, not the baby.
I'm not looking to take cars away from anyone. I'm just looking to restore access to some essentials that I grew up with and that I know can be real, even with cars remaining popular and common.
I'm not some extremist looking to eliminate cars. I'm not trying to insist that anyone who can drive and prefers to drive be denied that possibility.
You're right that public transit is inefficient for people living in rural areas, but 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas so to simply discount public transit as an "urbanist hobby horse" seems pretty hand-wavey.
You only have to look to other developed countries to see how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical part of the social safety net. Just because America's public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for everyone's benefit.
Go look at the Census definition of “urban.” Sibley, Iowa, where my wife grew up, is classified as an “urban area.” It’s in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmland.
Cars have a way of breaking down and causing unpredictable expenses that can push the poor into hardship. The choice between car culture and well-developed mass transit comes down to density. I might believe that even many "urban areas" in the US are still too sprawlish and low-density for mass transit to be genuinely effective, but this is not uniformly true.
> And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.
Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed. In the case of a really rural community, they will have buses to the nearest train station.
> That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.
"Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed."
Not completely true, there are many rural regions where the train or bus service is very irregular, if not discontinued outright.
One of the reasons why the Yellow Vests in France were so forceful: French countryside is seriously underserved by public transport and living there without a car or with very expensive fuel is hard.
That might be true, in that they are underserved, but that is a huge difference from the USA’s non-service. My experience is in (the French speaking part of) Switzerland, where to get to a remote mountain village you must go by postal bus from the train station. The postal bus only came once every 2 hours, which was a pain, but it was very viable.
Because they have no choice, and are constantly forced to dump money into it to keep it on the road. This is absolutely pertinent to this discussion. Public transit systems are restricting because they are so poorly implemented.
I live in a small town, but when I was looking into taking the bus to work in the morning, it would have taken two hours each way, every day. That's extremely poor public transit and creates a huge amount of pressure to buy a car instead.
Flamewar (such as nationalistic flamewar) is not ok here, and neither is crossing into personal attack. We ban accounts that post like this, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
Since we already asked you more than once to stop posting flamewar comments, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Yes because the country favors transit and makes car ownership very expensive. So they’re stuck with the limited opportunities and housing they can reach from the transit lines.
First off, car ownership is already quite expensive, even in the US. Even a paid-off $2000 beater will cost at least $250/month in registration, maintenance, gas, and insurance to operate. Probably more, if there's a long commute or paid parking. That's way more than any transit pass I know of and it's the absolute best case. A more typical case is needing to make car payments, which means paying interest and higher insurance rates, and tying up a significant portion of one's net worth and monthly cash flow in a depreciating asset (current used car market aside). I don't see how that's good for anyone's finances, let alone poor people. I own a car, but I still know it's a net negative in financial terms.
> makes car ownership very expensive
How much more expensive are we talking? If we say it's say $600/month to operate a beater, shouldn't the better job opportunities that are now available compensate for that? And if they don't - I mean, it's only $450/month more - how much better are these jobs anyway?
But hey, I don't know, maybe you're an expert on immigrant urban issues in France. Maybe you have in-depth knowledge that tells you that it's solely the availability of transit, and absolutely nothing else whatsoever, that has led to the current state of things.
$250/mo is about what I pay driving a paid off beater 100mi/day. And I pay "you have a dick and live in a shitty zip code" insurance rates.
A payment on a random economy subcompact that gets 40mpg would probably be cheaper because I only get ~22mpg.
>That's way more than any transit pass I know of
You are unaware of the cost of the various commuter rail passes that anyone not already living in the "inner ring" well served by bus any or subway needs to use to get into that inner ring.
It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail (and take longer too). I used to pay it when I worked downtown. The prices don't go down that much for living farther in.
> $250/mo is about what I pay driving a paid off beater 100mi/day. I only get ~22mpg.
Your numbers simply don't add up. Assuming a 5-day work week, 48 weeks of work/year, and $2.50/gal gas (pretty cheap), you're spending $227/mo just on gas. You really only spend $23/mo on insurance, oil changes, brake pads and everything else?
I think you're seriously underestimating how much your car actually costs you.
And again, the paid-off beater is the absolute best case scenario. A financed new or new-ish used car (which is the more typical case) has additional insurance, registration, interest, and depreciation costs.
I'm not anti-car. I own a car and I think cars are great, for a wide range of use cases. I am anti-"favoring transit over cars hurts poor people" lies. Because they are lies.
For someone who claims to drive 100 miles/day? Impossible.
Also, $30/mo just on insurance (which, again, to me is not credible) is way more than $23/mo on insurance, registration, and maintenance. Registration is usually $5-10/mo. Maintenance on a car driven 2x the national average is going cost a pretty penny.
Caltrain's most expensive pass, which covers 6 zones, is $400. But at a minimum that's a commute from Morgan Hill to San Bruno, which is a 120-mile round trip. It's going to cost at least $20/day to drive that commute.
> It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail...when I worked downtown
Was parking free in downtown?
> and take longer too
If it was both more expensive, and took longer, why didn't you drive? Why take public transit at all? My guess is that it was still cheaper than driving, after considering all the costs.
First of all, there is ghettos INSIDE Paris too:18th, 19th, 20th districts....
Transit lines are not used to confine them to the suburbs, they're the only thing allowing them to actually have any opportunities.
As a poor student I lived in a rich Parisian neighborhood and I also lived in a very poor suburb. I definitely preferred living in comfortable housing with a 40min commute than in a closet with a 10min commute.
There is some places where there is actually no opportunities because of the LACK of public transportation, like in some neighbors in the north of Marseille where there is 80% unemployment.
Airplanes exist. The network of infrastructure in Europe isn't just trains...
Part of the problem in North America is that there's not adequate public transportation from airports to city centres (whether it's a train terminal or frequent buses), not enough trains from city centres to suburbs/outskirts and not enough buses in between or from town to town.
I recently went from Paris -> Prague as an example. So I walked from the hotel in St. Germain to a metro station, took the metro to the airport, hopped on a plane, landed in Prague, then took a bus to a metro terminal and the metro to downtown Prague. That's what it looks like. You could have the same in the US... I haven't spend a ton of time there but the airport I'm familiar with in Canada, YYC (Calgary) has terrible access to/from the airport. The cab industry basically has convinced the city to not run a train line to the airport, nor to have a proper bus schedule. You need a taxi or ride for no good reason.
You can do that in the US, you can't do it everywhere, but for the cities on the level of Prague and Paris you certainly can. Most of the major cities on the east coast and West Coast that's applicable and for Chicago.
Philly, DC, NYC, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, South Florida, LA, and the Bay area I've done entirely public transit trips many times to the major areas and that's covering a population larger than any EU country.
That doesn't change the fact that trains and public transportation in the US are crap.
In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train leaves btw, no waiting)
It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries....
> In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?
No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form of travel that meets those criteria is high speed electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. For various reasons, passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).
You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite inexpensive.
throwawaynay says >"It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries...."
Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only took two world wars and innumerable smaller wars before that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h" trains.</sarcasm>
BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on a bike.
As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?). I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility" comes to mind as a topic.
A little bit of poo like that isn’t going to hurt the environment to a degree at all comparable to the massive damage done by car pollution and tearing down forests and obliterating animal migration routes.
Given that we already have roads to every residence, the amount of earth moved, steel smelted for tracks laid and additional fuel to run throughout the country, I dont see trains everywhere being a net positive.
Through some dense urban states, yes, but most of the sparsely populated rural states would see them barely used and lots of additional habitat disruption.
We have industrial train tracks near us. Literally noone is clamoring for residential trains here. Even within the nearest city, a 20 minute drive from one popular destination to another becomes an hour and a half excursion if you wanted to take light rail instead.
Cars and planes are an ecological disaster, I don't know a single place on earth where the ecological impact of public transportation is worse than the impact of cars and planes.
And yet, we already have them. Smelting enough steel and moving earth (and forests, and wetland, and prairie, etc) to also add passenger rail to anywhere you could want to go in the sparsely populated rural states would not be a net positive. There are a dozen or so villages within an hour drive of me that each have less than 1000 people living in them. The damage of adding roads and cars is already done. What good would connecting and powering light rail trains between these villages do?
>The damage of adding roads and cars is already done.
No.
We build millions of cars every year, they still consume fuel everyday, they still have to be repaired, they still crash and kill a lot more often than any mean of public transportation.
A few farmers using cars is not a problem, but cities like Austin needing that many cars is outrageous.
> In my home country I could go anywhere in a 50km radius for 50$/month via public transportation.
> Anywhere in the country via high speed train for 100$/month.
That literally isn't feasible to do with a low impact unless your definition of "anywhere" is a handful of major cities, especially since cars aren't going away.
New York City has a population density of 27,000 people per square mile. Statewide is 420, though NYC metro brings that up. Austin is 3,000.
If you want "anywhere", you also need to think about places like Montana, with a population density of less than 7 people per square mile.
Trains make sense for metro areas, not rural areas, and there is a lot of rural area to cover.
Trains are super effective for rural areas. I'm more than happy to drive my beat up pickup, tractor, bike, walk or ride a horse down a rural road to the train station. Doing the same on the highway is stressful, as none of those mode of transports are safe at highway speeds. Modern roadways are an artificial monopoly that poor people can't participate in.
The census definition of "urban" is kind of absurd. If I'm reading it right, living in a town of 2500 is "urban." If I'm reading it wrong, living in a town of 50,000 is "urban." Either way, you'd likely consider a lot of that 80% rural.
The 2020 census proposes using "385 housing units per square mile as the primary criterion for determining whether a census block qualifies for inclusion in an urban area". Previously it was 1000 people per square mile (or equivalent to the above with 2.6 persons per household).
Note that's only in the "proposed changes section, and that there is still much more information in that document. That change seems to determining how much of a town is an urban tile, but is not the primary designation of urban.
While I haven't seen it work very well, it's not the case that it's impossible. My mother has been the superintendent at a number of places in the rural southwest. They manage to get the kids to school via bus.
So it isn't the case that rural public transportation simply can't work.
Poor people often receive an enormous amount of value from owning a car in the form of optionality, which is why the vast majority own one. It is one of the only sources of economic optionality a poor person has.
Even if they don't need a car, they often choose to own one (the cheapest one they can find that is vaguely reliable).
For sure rural jobs aren’t a great fit for public transportation. But most people commuting to work by car are commuting to offices, retail stores, restaurants, and other places in semi-densely populated areas that could be better served by public transit.
I didn't mention small towns. My concern is primarily with the large cities in the United States that have functionally useless or second-class public transportation systems. Places like Phoenix, Houston, and Los Angeles that collectively house tens of millions of people in sufficient density for public transit, but lack effective systems due to poor planning, corruption, and lack of creative problem solving.
Of course there are use-cases for cars, nobody suggested that there aren't. The problem is that the United States in particular has assumed that every transportation issue is best solved with cars.
At human speeds: walk, bike, tractor, hitch a ride on a lorry (max speed 45mph), horse. Trains are useful for connecting longer distances at specific times of the day (commuting). Highways create an artificial monopoly on travel. You cannot easily travel along them, or cross them if you can't drive over 45mph. This speed is only getting higher.
There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate.
nanomonkey says>"There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate."<
More likely the poor used the highway once - to get out of the country and to the city. It isn't that they "can't participate", it's that they are gone.
Okay? So keep the car-centered infrastructure where you genuinely need it, and you can still have the huge net benefit of reliable public transit for the other 80% of people.
A solution doesn't need to be 100% perfect for every situation in order for it to still be worthwhile.
I mean factories and mines usually have A LOT of public transport options. That's a no-brainer, really. Guaranteed thousands of customers at guaranteed schedules.
In a system with so many failing institutions, universal basic income would not only fail to achieve the desired results but would be an economic disaster. You can't fix what ails the US by generically throwing money at it.
If the people are being poorly educated, poorly trained, poorly policed, and the culture is rotting, and then you dump an enormous amount of loose money on that garbage fire, what do you expect to get as a return result? It's exceptionally obvious what would happen.
For example the biggest problem the US has in healthcare (and education) is cost, not lack of spending. If our costs were more in line with other affluent nations, you could expand Medicaid to cover 40-45% of the population with little additional expenditure. Nobody with a prominent position is brave enough to say it much less attempt to do anything about it (which would involve smashing incomes and jobs in the healthcare field). Some pretend we can spend our way to universal healthcare, ignoring the $1.2+ trillion in costs that have to be slashed before it can be implemented (which is why California can't implement it, they can't come close to affording it without cutting healthcare costs first). That's typical of what goes on in the US, it's a hyper irrational nation, incapable of even basic reasoning + action when it comes to solving big problems.
Start by fixing the broken, corrupt institutions. But that's a super hard problem that will take two generations of grinding persistent effort, whereas printing money is easy, which is why so many people love the fantasy of universal basic income.
I never said UBI was the only thing that needed to be fixed. But it this basic effort to show we actually care about other people's suffering. Next Universal Healthcare (get rid of the insurers to lower costs)...etc etc...
I don't think so. It was once thought that student loans would be some panacea lifting poor people out of poverty by giving them access to education and the end result is lots of people overburdened by debt while waiting tables because so many people have degrees that a degree isn't remotely some kind of reasonable assurance that you can get a job in a particular field.
UBI is not a loan. Student loans have to be paid back and they also only resulted sun universities rising tuition. Education does not fix poverty. Money fixes poverty.
There are lots of large-scale income redistributions that have been adopted in the US (including EITC, which, while not a UBI, was directly inspired by Negative Income Tax, and earlier name for a policy exactly equivalent to UBI), and the American political landscape changes over time, largely through activism; civil rights, or even abolition, were once things with “no realistic probability of adoption in the American political landscape”, too.
The EITC is a $70-75bn program in the context of a $1.5tn income tax - it is not, as such, the kind of large-scale redistribution that we're talking about for a UBI.
I also would characterize it as the absolute opposite of a UBI: it is paid only to people who are working; and is more rooted in the history of offsetting increasing FICA taxes for low-income households than in the NIT experiments.
Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future, but right now the "more left" of the parties with credible possibilities of election success in the U.S. has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI on that basis.
> Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future, but right now the "more left" of the parties with credible possibilities of election success in the U.S. has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI on that basis.
$200/month UBI, while obviously not a full, mature UBI, would approximately equal the maximum benefit of general assistance (means tested welfare for adults without dependents) in most of the US, and could probably be done with net tax increases in only that range (though the increases would need to go beyond just “regular” income tax and also include things like ending the favorable tax treatment of capital over labor income.)
But, in any case, there is very likely a sea change coming in the Democratic Party, which is currently led by Boomers (and some Silents) who came into their political prime during and before the 1990s neoliberal consensus; the Boomer demographic wave is crashing and the Millennials (Gen X is both smaller and more Republican than the Millenials, so less relevant to the future direction of the Democrats) have a rather different understanding of political possibility not grounded in nostalgia for a bipartisan era that has long passed.
We find that increases in institution-specific subsidized (unsubsidized) loan maximums lead to a sticker- price increase of about 60 (40) cents on the dollar.
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It is basic supply and demand. How could universities charge so much if no one could pay for it? They would have to lower prices.
Correlation does not mean causation. Tuition prices were already on their way up before 2007 (as the paper targets). I suspect that this is because in the 80s and 90s the data showed that a 4-year degrees increased income substantially, and tons of people applied for colleges.
I swear, the "facts" that are flatly asserted on this site, with zero questioning or critical thought, seem roughly equivalent to the "election was stolen!" facts that you find in other echo chambers.
The problem is Clinton making student loans undischargeable via bankruptcy. That meant it was risk free for lenders to give student loans. That meant institutions could double or triple tuition without any fears because everyone could get an easy loan.
The entire system is predatory and cancelling student debt is not the solution because it just means the lenders make all their profits off the backs of taxpayers. The real solution is to make student loans dischargable and for lenders to bear the risk of debt again. Then the markets will return back to normal.
I’m seeing 1976 as the date student loans became non-dischargeable [0] via amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965. I think I know why you’re confused though because the Wikipedia entry on the Higher Education Act doesn’t include a section on the ‘76 amendments and instead skips straight to the ‘92 amendments (which would have been HW, not Clinton). Still, it looks like the parent poster is right that Clinton did make some questionable additions to the Act during his tenure in 1998 [1].
So unsecured personal loans? Those depend on your credit which most students don't have much/any and your debt-to-income which is normally infinite for students because they don't work. You would massively screw over kids whose parents cannot pay/co-sign a normal loan as it would force them to work and study.
Also, you normally cannot get very much with such low income and cherry on top, they have awful interest rates which range from about 6% to 36%. The APR on loans for borrowers with excellent credit is around 12%; it's about 29% for bad credit borrowers which students with no credit are likely to be.
Edit: If you work at target for 2 8 hour days on the weekend making 15 an hour and with a 36% debt-to-income ratio limit, you could afford a payment of $374.4 a month. $15,000 punched in a 30 year repayment at 29% interest rate equals a $362.57 payment with $0.07 interest. So you might be able to do it but it would hate to be working every single day between weekend work and weekly school.
> The problem is Clinton making student loans undischargeable via bankruptcy.
Bill Clinton’s first federal office was the Presidency, and he was sworn in in 1993.
The federal law that made student loans non- (well, actually, less) dischargeable was passed in 1976, 17 years before that, while he was running what would become his first successful electoral campaign, for Attorney-General of Arkansas.
That because you don’t understand the law. What Clinton did was make it practically impossible to discharge the debt. You can still discharge the debt today but it’s incredibly difficult and very rare. What Bill Clinton did was turn it practically impossible which is the problem.
What I don't get is why more people trapped by student loans don't just leave the country and set up life elsewhere. Debt is country specific. If you're in debt in country A, you can move to country B and start anew.
Undischargeable debt is only an encumbrance on income earned in the country in which you owe the debt.
First, it’s a lot to ask of someone to leave the country where their friends and family live. Many aren’t interested in doing that.
Immigrating elsewhere is also not easy if you’re in a less in demand profession. Of course these are the ones where it’s most likely to have unsupportable amounts of debt.
If you’re a US citizen, you are still required to pay taxes on your global income no matter where you live in the world. If you ever get a tax refund, it can be garnished for federal student loans that are in default.
A vast majority of people are simply not "trapped" to that extent. They're better off staying and paying down their debt with the increased incomes they can earn in the U.S. The unavailability of bankruptcy is only ever an issue for a small fraction of basically non-traditional students, either at for-profit colleges or pursuing some sort of professional education that ends up not recouping the expenses involved.
A significant, maybe half, Ill have to look of student loan debt is held by people who didn't graduate and thus gained no economical advantage from the debt.
And then the top 20 schools will only end up taking rich kids whose parents can pay/co-sign as I highly doubt they would massively cut costs and perceptibly decrease their rankings to make it cheap enough that lenders would risk giving loans to poor kids.
So I calculate da possible total cost that could be done in [0]. University of Chicago has an average cost of tuition after aid at $27,315 and that does not even include housing or food! 1-(15000/(27,315*4)) = a 86% reduction in costs and then you have to use the $665.6 of your weekend target money for food and shelter. They wouldn't even try.
Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water.
[*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an absolute level -- but only in theory.
Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category that does not exist.
UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of starvation itself.
Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's no question about whether it would work. The remaining question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a negative incentive much like it depends on prison.
You explained why UBI wouldn't work in your own answer!
"Money is just a relative advantage in the market."
If everybody has $x, then competitive products/services will increase by $x in cost! (By "competitive" I mean those than cannot be easily scaled, like housing, education, medicine.)
All of those can be easily scaled though. They are all simply protected industries with entrenched incumbents weilding political power to maintain their status quo at the expense of everyone else. We could easily have 10x more doctors, houses, and quality educators if the artificial barriers to entry were lowered or removed.
That's irrelevant to the matter at hand. Scaling them has nothing to do with implementing UBI, and would be a good idea whether or not UBI is implemented. UBI simply does not solve the problem of poverty, or the poor having access to those goods and services.
Scaling them does have to do with UBI, because the argument above is that UBI would not work because the price of some goods and services will rise to compensate because they don't scale. If supply for these critical goods and services is instead increased alongside a progressive UBI deployment, then this wouldn't happen and we'd presumably in a better position afterwards.
> Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water.
Not true. Every single software team I have worked on wanted to hire more workers but when they are paying me $350K a year, it limits how many people they can hire. If you doubled the supply of SWEs, you'd probably have 2 175k jobs instead of the one.
You can't double the supply by giving people more money for education. You still have the same number of people being bid for, no matter how many people get educational funding.
But there are poor people who work and have money already, most of them in fact. I am for UBI, but it's nothing like food to the starving. It's a safety net.
Poverty is literally defined as a lack of (low level of) income. You don't ever have poor people who have above-poverty income. That would be like having short people who have above-average height.
Not if you have a land-value tax, where landlords are literally paying for UBI, and even tying UBI amounts paid out to the amount of LVT raised, the higher the rent the more they pay in taxes, therefore the less they charge for rent the more they keep and it balances out...
I see it quite often but anyone against Ubi for reasons... usually stops responding when it does actually come up because it's an actual solution that might work and they don't want to even entertain the thought that it could be done... it they're rent seekers and would be hurt by it themselves...
It might. I am generally skeptical towards UBI being touted as a social panacea [0] [1], but I would be open towards trying to pull it off in combination with Georgist LTV.
[0] My main reason: there are countries such as Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms where the citizens get free money or a least well paid jobs-just-in-name that someone else is actually doing, but there wasn't any explosion of personal freedom, social progress or artistic creativity there; a lot of the free money is sunk into drugs and conspicuous consumption.
[1] My next reason: you would have to exclude freshly arrived people, because if any place in the world becomes known for giving significant money to anyone for free, it will become a target of worldwide UBI tourism on an unsustainable scale. Already the people smugglers in Libya etc. are very good at presenting themselves as the "bridges" towards life in the richest parts of Europe.
one other idea I had was making a total new currency where citizens could only have one account, think - one bank account, that account then has a limit on how much total it could hold, therefore billionaires can't even exist in the system.
The coin would use smart contracts to tax all transactions but the tax rate is less for those who hodl less money (have less in savings) and for those who spend more per month (basically giving a leg up to those who spend like the poor, i.e. spend most of their money monthly...
if you combined this w/ govt georgist LVTs I think a fair system could be devised that still has people who are wealthy, but maybe 50 million is the cap, and maybe it goes up to 60 million when the average amount of monthly carryover in accounts is 10k, or something...encouraging more money to flow down, so the caps can go up... Something like this would need to figure out something else for business accounts to get ecommerce flowing and moving in/out of the system, since businesses can easily spend a billion a day or bring more than that in...
Haven't thought that far ahead. I'm also not a blockchain dev...so outside my wheelhouse..
Absolutely. We'd be so much better off by semi copying Germany's culture of vocational training. And it wouldn't be expensive to do compared to the rather crazy sums we presently throw at higher education. Plus we very much need the skilled labor in a vast array of fields.
Fix K12 education first - that's where the highest plausible effects are. Vocational education can be a part of the picture, but it's actually really hard to do well.
You also have to fix the vocations themselves with better workplace safety laws, non-discrimination, health care, retirement, safety net, unions. A trades person is exposed to high risk if something happens to their bodies and prevents them from working a full career, or there's a cyclic downturn in something like construction.
I think it starts with a return to a progressive tax system with higher tax rates on upper incomes. In today's political climate, UBI would be dead on arrival.
Unpopular opinion: what the U.S. tax system needs is more progressivity at the middle class level. The U.S. has married couples with joint income over $100,000 per year paying a marginal Federal tax rate of at most 12%.
That's unfortunately the only solution. The wealth gap between poor and billionaires is irrelevant. What actually creates inequality is the difference between $150k and 60k.
I pay enough tax. I should not have to continue to pay more to make up for the frivolous government spending on "social justice programs", wars, more police, and bailouts for campaign donating companies.
More tax doesn't fix widespread, rampant, government corruption. The US takes in enough tax to have plenty of nice things. For citizens to see any benefit the military industrial complex needs to be defanged with prejudice, the US needs to pull out of all foreign police actions, etc.
The highways and roads I drive on are terrible. Let's start there. Why is that in such a poor state with me paying 35% marginal tax? Where is my money going? Yep that's right, "social justice consultants" and the military industrial complex.
On the UBI note it would never work out anyway. Yang's numbers were several order of magnitudes off similar to Bernie's healthcare numbers. We'd have to collect far more money than we could even with a progressive tax system and that's if we only offered it to actual naturalized citizens. If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers. These programs work in countries with defined borders, strong citizenship laws, homogenous cultures, and populations 1/10th the size of America. We are different. We need different solutions.
Absolutely agree about the tremendous amount of money wasted on the military and policing, but not sure why you’re putting “social justice consultants” in that same category, when they have many orders of magnitude less impact on the budget.
If we raised separate tax on land (that isn't a primary residence) and luxury property (aircraft, yachts, - anything exceeding 500k)...
Say you have a home you live in that's 300k. You also have a guest house you airbnb and make 50k/year on. There's considered 0 'value' in a primary residence, however you're making 50k/year value off your additional rent. So you'd pay tax on that, above and beyond any other tax.
If you have commercial or other real estate rentals you'd pay as well. The key is that you'd need to somehow peg the tax rate with inflation, and housing prices, etc...to basically make it a self-organized check-system to keep rents from rising, because rising rents means higher taxes.
Perhaps you actually tie the LVT to census data on homeless in a region, less homeless = less taxes, therefore creating solutions to that problem actually is a win:win...
> If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers.
I don't see why. You just appropriately set the amount paid out and the tax tier at which you cross into the red and are paying back into it. Are you suggesting that this threshold is barely above the poverty line? Because that's the only way it wouldn't actually work.
My marginal tax rate is already 50%. Why in God’s name do people think that the government deserves more of my earnings than I do? Every additional dollar I make busting my ass results in the government taking more than me. That’s sick.
I’m all for a flat tax with no tax loopholes but to increase my taxes more than I’m already paying is something I will never vote for.
Most people busting their ass working are the poor. Despite how they often present themselves, no CEO is working as hard as an Amazon delivery worker or warehouse supplier by any meaningful metric. The working poor of America are almost universally working more than 9-5 jobs to try to eke out a living, usually in high-stress critical work that is chronically undervalued (warehousing, delivery, EMT, nurses and orderlies, food preparation and serving, etc).
Not to mention, there is no way in which a worker can make a contribution to society that is literally billions of times greater than another. So, the fact the someone like Jeff Bezos can literally earn billions while others make pennies needs to be corrected theough a progressive tax rate - probably close to 95 cents on the dollar for every dollar over a few tens of million per year, like it used to be in America's golden age.
> Third, the point of taxes is not to change people’s income to better match the magnitude of their contribution to society.
The point of taxes is to provide a society where the guillotine doesn't come out. When it does it won't be the Musks and Bezos' of the world that the masses stop at.
This is a popular idea, but guillotine-heavy revolutions were pretty rare in the Western world, and modern revolutions in general, successful or not, were often a consequence of a lost war, not of usual misery in peace. Losing a war is dangerous for survival of any regime.
Peasants' revolts are another story, but too far back in history to be an useful analogy for today. They were also beaten to bloody pulp most of the time.
This person is ultra high income if their marginal tax rates are 50%. They didnt give numbers but using an online calculator [0] and assuming a high tax state (CA), you need to be above $500k a year income to hit 50% marginal rates. That is also assuming you are single, a married person would need a combined income nearly twice that to hit 50%.
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought I had a reasonable strategy to simply calculate it. I can't do it for America, because I'm not sufficiently familiar with what data you have available and am instead going to do the analysis for Sweden.
In Sweden the labour share of GDP is 55%, however taxes on wages are 60% of the total government income, and a large remaining fraction of the taxes on work income. Another 30% is from VAT. Let's assume arbitrarily that half the VAT is paid by workers and not with income from capital.
Under this assumption, workers receive 55% of GDP in compensation before taxes, but pay 70% of all taxes.
If taxes on income were the same for workers as for capital then workers would pay 55% instead of 70%, so taxes would be 18% lower than they are now.
Its difficult to define terms like ultra rich and middle income earner, but my guess is that if you increased the top marginal tax rates such that rate on the "ultra rich" was something like 70% (including capital gains, etc), you could completely eliminate taxes for the bottom 50%.
The top 1% earners earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes [0]. I would guess going from 50% to 70% would increase that share to would increase that percentage to 58%.
Old comment here, but I was assuming not just income tax to increase, but also to have capital gains, dividends, etc to be taxed at 70%. Current cap there is 20%, per my understanding, and a substantial amount of wealthy person's income is taxed at these favorable rates.
There was no such thing as income taxes until world war 1. So taxes increased ridiculously for 50 years and have been decreasing, as it should, ever since. I believe in paying taxes but not to my own detriment. I pay more than my fair share.
> Every additional dollar I make busting my ass results in the government taking more than me
Maybe don't think of it as "the government" getting your money, rather that you're investing into a fund of your nation's future. The key is making sure that investment is well utilized, and that requires us to all be properly invested.
Even assuming you live in a very high tax State like California, 50% marginal tax rate put you in, or close to the highest possible tax bracket. I live in a high tax state and earned above median income and my taxes (federal, state, medicare, and SS combined) was about 25% last year.
I think most people who advocate for flat tax advocate for a single bracket: a flat percentage with a single income deduction, which is asymptotically flat. So e.g. take 15% of (your income - 40k). This would not hurt the poor.
I am always amazed by such statements. Are you sure you have thought this through? What do mean with “asymptotically flat”?
As with the poorly understood correlation/causation relationship in statistics, there are many common misconceptions about how absolute and relative amounts influence the result of mathematical calculations.
The following example may highlight this:
Let’s say a person’s minimum financial need to simply stay alive and sane is $X. Now, take two almost identical people that only differ in their income: A’s income is bigger than B’s.
If you tax them both at a flat 15% (or any other rate), the richer will always benefit more from this than the poorer! The reason is because living, eating, and taking part in a society do not come for free.
Surprisingly, this is commonly not well understood and it also seems there are proclivities by some fellow rich and comfortable folk to intentionally avoid understanding this.
Proof by example:
Let’s see what their effective tax is after all the cost to stay alive has been deducted.
Excess Income = Income * (1 - 15%) - X
Let’s say A’s income is $150k and B’s is $40k, and the minimum amount X required to simply stay alive (not being homeless and having health insurance included) would be $25k. These figures are obviously simplified but anyone can feel free to use their own numbers and repeat the calculation. The general result will remain similar.
Then, A’s excess income will be $102.5k and B’s $9k. Relatively speaking, A will have made almost 11.5 times the amount of excess income than B, despite making not even four times as much as B (3.75 to be exact).
Excess income will be the only thing both of them can use to save and invest, purchase a house, or use it for all kinds of safety-net building and stress-reducing things.
What about a flat tax, where everyone is required to pay 15%...however everyone is guaranteed a minimum of 50k per year income, so if you earned 40k, you'd get a 10k credit.... which would likely offset all the taxes you did pay.
I think CEO pay should be pegged to average salaries too, and their tax bracket pegged to the differential between average salary in their company and some universally accepted "happiness" wage ...(like 70k I heard a few years back, but is probably closer to 80k now)..
If the average salary in your company is 50k, then you need to pay 30% extra in taxes. There also should be some sort of conversion from stocks to assumed 'income', so that the rich can't just use stocks to subvert paying taxes...
Everything you wrote is mathematically true no matter how you arrange your tax brackets unless you want brackets with negative marginal post tax income. So what is your point?
The point is (also mathematically speaking) that a flat tax is less fair to the poor than having a progressive tax with a zero marginal tax for incomes below what’s required for merely surviving (i.e. no tax for people without any excess income that can be saved). So there would be room for improvement but, as well-intended as it might be, a flat tax is not making things better for the poor.
You're changing the statement and also using bad logic. The statement was "does not hurt the poor [relative to the current situation]", not "make things better for the poor", or any standard of fairness you've arbitrarily picked. Moreover your logic is flawed, because, doing things one way or the other with taxation of the rich a priori has no effect on the poor, unless you are taking into account secondary effects like price inflation, but if you are I got news for you the government is fucking the poor in those sorts of metrics in far far worse ways than marginal effects downstream of tax policy.
If you're advocating a policy of "screw the rich to help the poor", you've probably never been poor. I have and let me tell you the least of my concerns was what rich people in general were up to with their money (except for the specific rich people that were keeping me employed)
Not sure I follow. I get the first order effects, but I'm hesitant to agree without an explanation of the second-order and systemic-level effects of such a policy.
There are other first order effects that government does (e.g
Inflation, arraignments for infractions, vehicle infraction revenue cutting) that drown out those second order effects. Fix those first.
You suggested them. The only real one I can think of is price inflation, and that's like nothing next to the destructiveness of the fed.
If you don't understand why arraignments for minor violations are awful for the working poor, you've probably never been poor. When I was poor I was lucky enough to not be hurt by arraignments (flexible work hours), but boy did I have sympathy for those people who were relentlessly fucked by that system. There was always at least one of them whenever I had to show up at court, and it wasn't hard to figure out how they got into those situations.
Only for those so poor that they aren't really paying any taxes. It's been estimated that if there were a flat tax that it would only need to be 10% of all corporate and personal income to be effective. Most working class folks pay well over that in the US.
I think "all corporate income" is doing some heavy lifting in that description. It would be a hell of a trick to pass a bill that made business expenses taxable.
You mean like the US? The top 1% earn 21% of all income and pay around 40% of all taxes. Or do do you mean it should be even more "progressive"? Might higher income people change behavior e.g. work less at the margins if that happens? Does that affect the total amount of tax income generated?
The top 1% don't work for income. They aren't going to do an extra 10 hours this week because they need to save for a new boiler, so why would restoring tax rates to Reagan era rates result in less work being done?
The poster means the top 1% of income tax payers. Also: you pay income tax on income whether you work for it or not. Try leaving your 1099-DIVs out of your income tax return and see how that works out.
The top 1% take out of the economy a LOT more than they put in. Anything that limits their ability to "earn" is benefiting the rest of society. It is also benefiting the environment & future generations' resource availability.
doubtful, it would just capture more surplus from those who are fortunate enough to have jobs and redirect it to people who could not find work, thereby making them dependent on UBI, worsening the problem.
People keep talking about UBI, but I've never seen a) who will pay for it and b) who will do the work if you don't need to.
Are you able to point to some sources for both answers? From an economics PoV I'm genuinely interested, yet haven't seen any resources take those two problems together seriously.
e.g. "our oil industry will pay for it", but then who would work the oil rigs?
a) Who would pay for it? We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars propping up businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will pay for it". We have the money and should think of it as an investment. So who would pay for it? We all would. Why? Because it is worth it and it is compassionate and it will make this country (U.S.) a better, happier place.
b) Who will do the work? All the automation will do the work. They have kiosks up in McDonalds right now that mean they only need one person needs to be at a register. But as far as it disincentivizes work..nit has been show it does not, but still people cannot believe this.
"Overall, the programs analyzed suggest either no effect on labor market supply or a slight reduction in work and earnings. The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large."
>We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars propping up businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will pay for it". We have the money and should think of it as an investment.
We did that on a one-off basis responding to an unprecedented-within-generations public health emergency. No-one is seriously talking about that as investment; most every source that I have read suggests that the spending was poorly and indiscriminately targeted because it was done in such a headlong rush.
Nor do we "have the money". Deficit spending tripled from 2019 to 2020 and was only down from that level by 12% into 2021. This is the definition of "not having the money".
>The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large.
Even a "large" transfer in this s context is not nearly as much as UBI. The Alaska oil dividend was less than $1000 last year. The Gulf oil nations are the only ones that give enough free money for citizens to live off of, and in these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor.
> these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor
They are not "dependent" on cheap labor. They can afford to buy cheap labor with no sacrifice to their own people. This is a benefit of UBI in a world that does not have universal UBI.
They have slavery conditions worse than the American south, more similar to Guano mine slaves. They are entirely expendable, undocumented, locked into the worksites and subjugated by a state supported market. They are viewed as religious subhumans and treated as such, should they attempt anything by way of escape or complaining that can be cast into a religious based debtors prison for an indefinite amount of time with no trial.
Saudi Arabia literally butchered a major journalist. They have frequent public beatings and executions if actual citizens for minor infractions.
The modern Arab world's treatment of their imported SE Asian workforce is absolutely horrendous.
The official figure is that 6500 workers have died building the Qatar world cup stadiums. Applying a 10x multiple to that may still be low balling.
> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash
Ok, that's fair. So the average income earner won't stop working. But what about the bottom end of the spectrum i.e someone just above UBI but who has to get up early and travel two hours each way to get to work, or who is just working to put food on the table - with UBI they now have a great reason to stay home.
So... what happens if a good chunk of people earning just above UBI rates just stops working because it's just not worth the ROI. You've ended up creating a vacuum which has to be filled. And how do you fill it? Traditionally you either import cheap labor or raise pay to incentivise applicants. Congratulations, you've just started the inflation engine.
There's no such thing as "just above" with UBI; the whole point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction of whatever you earn, no matter what. It only makes it easier for folks to join and stay in the workforce, even if all they can get is a marginal job.
> the whole point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction of whatever you earn
Australia already has this - you can earn up to (somewhere around) $18k per year and you won't get taxed. This applies to everyone. Is this what you're talking about? Because as far as I can see, there are still people under the poverty line here.
But if you're not talking about that, and you're saying that ALL should get $18k (for example) no questions asked, when someone earned $19k before UBI, do they now do the same hours for $1k, or do they keep their whole $19k? If the former, why bother working, but if the latter, you've now just given them $36k not $18k.
Perhaps the person who has to travel 2 hours to get to work would be able to afford to earn lower wages at a closer job. And then perhaps someone that lives closer to the job site would take the other persons original job.
> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force
That's for the average worker. Show me what happens at the lower scale. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 25 page report right now, but as this does interest me, I am going to put this in my TOREAD list - genuinely, thanks for the link.
Edit: if you want evidence of disincentivising workers when there's no-questions-asked government handouts, look at food aid programs in Africa. There's no point to be a farmer when Free is your competition.
a) Who pays for the unnecessary structural costs that add friction to the economic system today?
b) Who pays for the jobs that are entirely parasitic and remove value - and add friction - today?
I don't think UBI implements a particularly good safety net without other measures - at the very least open education at all levels, open healthcare, open culture, open media, and open democracy.
But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.
It stops being slavery when people are free to choose what to do with their talents, abilities, ambitions, and interests, and when job markets value that contribution instead of - quite literally - attempting to minimise its value.
The fundamental difference is between finding and promoting people who are good at inventing and organising the future, and finding and promoting people who are good at controlling everyone else's time for their own personal benefit.
The latter is what we have now, and it's showing very clear signs of making far less sense as a stable system with a future than some UBI-adjacent scheme would be.
> But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.
Bingo. Many people do =not realize that calling money for labor "wage slavery" was a term used in the 1700's and was common even into the 1940's. It was even uttered by Hiddy in the 1940's movie "His Girl Friday".
--
Hildy Johnson : The next time you see me, I shall be riding in a Rolls Royce giving interviews on success.
Hildy Johnson : Well, when you're climbing up fire escapes and getting kicked out of front doors and eating Christmas dinners at one-arm joints - don't forget your pal, Hildy Johnson.
--
So are people who do not want UBI are pro slavery? That is a good question. If you think about the one common complaint that UBI will mean people will not work, just this about that in the terms of a plantation owner talking about his slaves.
"Because slaves had no direct incentive to work hard, slaveowners combined harsh penalties with positive incentives. Some masters denied passes to disobedient slaves. Others confined recalcitrant slaves to private jails."
They even tried instilling a "positive mindset" in the slave!
Every action that I'm denied due to the inability to pay represents a curtailment of my freedom to take that action. I mean this in the most radical and all-encompassing way as possible.
A system is a function of its output. If the the enforcement of law represent the denial of physical access under threat of violence, markets represent the denial of economic access under threat of labor. In some ways this is more insidious, but less overtly violent and many parallel constructions hold. The simultaneous creation of race, and the theological justification for chattel slavery mirrors the creation of capital and the economic justification for wage slavery. The supporters of each alienate their involvement and perpetuation as "the natural order" when in fact it is a social system constantly recreated and socially reproduced.
You can start to see the same patterns play out in the digital space. Human agency is exported to computers in a way that builds systems that re-enforce this dynamic. "Computer says, 'No'"[1], is a perfect summation of this disavowment of human agency and human empaty from the systems we build.
I used to believe that UBI was a solution and even donated to Andrew Yang. After seeing the results of the pandemic and all the free money, I have changed my mind. I think UBI did everything that the critics thought it would, namely massive inflation because no one wanted to work and prices had to rise and now everyone is suffering from out of control inflation.
The current rise of inflation is unlikely to be caused by the meager 2k checks that people got during the pandemic. It is much more likely to be a product of the supply chain crisis, which in turn was caused to a great extent by the known failure mode of just-in-time inventory management.
Also, the massive death toll of the pandemic, combined with singinificant behavior changes caused by fear of the same death toll, have left many industries reeling and redistributed wealth allocations in many people's budgets (away from dining out and tourism and into other places like gaming or real-estate), which had hard to measure outcomes.
Not to mention, prices for most goods are currently controlled by a handful of companies like Amazon and Walmart, who are in a perfect position to silently collaborate on increasing prices instead of taking a hit on profits like they would normally be forced to if they were in tight competition.
It was more than 2K. States tapped into the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which added up to 600/week to existing unemployment rates, as long as your job loss was 'covid related'. In PA, for example, many were receiving over $1000/week. While that certainly doesn't make you rich, it's a strong incentive to not seek out other employment if your regular job only pays around that amount or less.
I think I know the intent of why this is on your list, but, honestly, my family members who are in a cycle of poverty are there in no small part because of a cycle of debt. And I'm not talking about unavoidable debt like from a medical condition, but rather from debt from buying depreciating assets they cannot afford (cars, tvs, etc.) Widely available credit, IMO, makes the situation worse.
Paying your way out of inconvenience is a huuuge privilege that some of us I think forget we have.
I grew up extremely poor so I end up doing a lot of annoying things myself and a lot of my colleagues ask things like "why don't you just pay someone to fix your washing machine".
Or like your example of driving tests. I let my license lapse when I first started working from home and had to retest to get it. If I hadn't been able to pay $300 for a private driving test I'd have had to take time off work to do it - and a poor person generally can't afford time off work, that goes unpaid for an hourly job.
This is a good point that isn't given enough attention by either side.
I grew up in poverty and faced homelessness many times, and my experience anytime a public/government program was offered to help people like me specifically, it only made things worse, either directly or indirectly. Every single time.
Extra policing meant more poor people pulled over in their raggedy cars and ticketed for vain things. Food assistance meant lots of forms being filled out, and the risk that your inconsistent income might go just above the threshold next month and kick you off for the whole year when your income drops immediately thereafter. Healthcare assistance meant even more forms, confusing jargon, and always started with "don't worry, we'll take care of it" and ended with "you now owe $5000". I could write posts full of examples.
Even worse, once I identified this, I could then be labeled "too stupid to know what was best for me" or "just sticking up for the rich" when I expressed my concern for this around (mostly more privileged) friends.
Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference if done in the right balance and the right way.
But given the realities of how these things work, and have worked my entire life, the institutions creating and promoting these things are either incompetent or corrupt, or both. If all of these caring researchers and think tanks put more effort into retrospectively finding out what is going wrong with these programs as they exist today, and found a way to restore competence and trust to the programs and the institutions behind them -- if everyone could be honest about the actual results of their efforts rather than just patting themselves on the back for doing what felt good while ignoring the people they caused to suffer -- then I'd likely feel differently.
It makes me wonder if my problem growing up weren't the supposed "safety nets" that blew up in my face each time, but rather the institutions behind them, and that they should be the first problem solved before we move on to the assistance itself.
Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist for government aid with NO means-testing. If a government program only exists to support the poor, it will be birocratized, sacrificed whenever budget cuts are needed, demonized and so on.
Successful social programs help everyone, and let the poor benefit implicitly more. All old people benefit from the existence of Medicare for example, even if they are personally wealthy enough to afford alternatives, so Medicare is relatively simple to access and almost universally loved. No one is going to win elections campaigning on slashing medicare, and no one is in danger of losing their Medicare status if they fill out a form wrong.
One of my examples related to means testing. I have many more not related at all to means testing.
Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".
Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.
Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.
If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.
That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.
To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.
It is not means testing it is complete and total lack of any kindof of responsibility or accountability.
Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job. Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely ignored.
There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.
> Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist for government aid with NO means-testing.
This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.
That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose nationalized medicine.
Coming from a country surrounded by other countries, all with national healthcare institutions, I can assure you that healthcare discrimination is unthinkable once you have universal healthcare rights.
This is the real argument for things like UBI and simple tax credits, that often goes unnoticed. Giving poor people money doesn't need to have outstanding effects to be worthwhile, it just needs to be better than the existing mess of overlapping institutional red tape. This goes for healthcare too. Get rid of complex government assistance, and put money in Singapore-style health savings accounts, that people can draw from for insurance payments or simple "cash" expenses. One of the things that are most clearly needed in the healthcare sector is direct consumer discipline, and HSAs provide that.
I think this actually points out a great common ground between the two notions this article is comparing.
If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while still empowering the recipient to make her own choices (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great melding of solutions.
Disagree completely. I too was in poverty and homelessness between the ages of 4 and 16. Those government programs (no matter how poorly managed) were critical to my survival. The whole reason why I support government programs today is because those programs helped me so much.
I have no doubt that they have helped some people, and I'm genuinely glad they helped you.
They unequivocally made my life worse off than without them, and I know I'm not alone.
Us both being willing to accept that our respective experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting it.
Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar that you're supporting today can't also harm others. Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't mean I should be closed off to the notion that something similar could help others.
If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual experiences of otherwise similar things can be very different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.
Sorry if I seemed to suggest that your perspective wasn't valid. I think your experience is a common one, and a lot of people agree with you. The tide is in your favor, in fact. I just hope people "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater".
I think that most pragmatic people understand that they have to do something to help the poor. Even the most callous people still understand that doing nothing may affect them negatively (unless, perhaps, they're rich enough to flee to New Zealand). The thing at issue is how much to give to the poor and how best to administer it.
Because I'm a success story, I will continue to support the programs that supported me. However, I would gladly welcome improvements that make those programs more effective and efficient.
I think it’s fair to say that in the US, the same program can be applied really well in one location and poorly in another place. This doesn’t mean that these programs are inherently bad - but does mean a lot of work needs to be done to reform how government delivers programs in places where they don’t perform well.
There’s a lot of scope for service design in government, and human-centered design. Of course, there are also lobbyists at every turn trying to hobble the process because there are profits to be made.
It would be amazing to see an America where its culture of innovation was laser focused on making life better for everyone. I wish we were there today.
My favorite example of the safety net not working is when my wife applied for unemployment, she was told she didn't make enough while she was employed to qualify for assistance. That's right, she was too poor to qualify for help.
Their solution? Go get a job and make more money, then she could qualify for unemployment. Gee thanks, I wish I had thought of that plan.
another lovely one is COBRA health insurance coverage after losing your job; you gain the privilege of both being out of work AND paying for health insurance out of your own pocket
This is not a fault with COBRA. Would you rather be out of work and have to negotiate new insurance as an individual? You're just paying the insurance premiums that used to be covered by your employer.
Hasn't COBRA more-or-less been obviated by the ACA rules on pre-existing conditions anyway? The only people I know who used COBRA in the past did so because there was a family member who was essentially uninsurable on an individual basis.
No? The healthcare.gov options with similar benefits to an employer plan are more expensive than what the employer was paying, so it often makes sense to keep the COBRA option.
It may not be the same in every state but when I compared my COBRA offering (pretty good healthcare) to a matching plan on the ACA the COBRA program was almost $500 cheaper per month. I was on exchange insurance between jobs as a consultant and I paid $750/mo for bronze tier "only if you're dying" insurance.
The ACA plans I had available were only slightly less expensive than my COBRA, but there was not a single ACA plan available that would cover any out of network expense like my COBRA plan did. I did switch to an ACA plan after COBRA expired and it was fine, but I slightly preferred my COBRA plan.
> Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference if done in the right balance and the right way.
They can be done the right way, but aren't because politicians deliberately sabotage them. Every confusing and unnecessary form that is put in the way of getting assistance is put there deliberately to make the institution less effective and punish the people who need it. This is not an accident or some emergent, inevitable quality of government. It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor people. We DO have a handful of institutions that are still competent and effective. This also is not an accident--they're the ones not being deliberately hamstrung by Congress.
The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.
> It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor people.
That's the fun thing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both! And I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault given its obviously lacking transparency, and a "libertarian" response is all the more appropriate.
> I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault [...]
This is the weirdest argument. I mean, you seem to be arguing for some kind of government that's not answerable to elected leaders or voters? I mean, how else would you be able to run a program that couldn't be shut down by the leadership of an organization - public or private?
Shutting a program down is transparent. What GP said was that ineffective government programs, and red tape more generally, are uniformly due to some sort of devious intentional sabotage by the other side. My argument was a response to that.
> The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.
This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up. Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to only know what they knew about poverty and assistance programs from magazines, research journals and politicians selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who experienced the consequences of what they were advocating for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.
If it's true that these programs can be done the right way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of these initiatives in my life have come directly from undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us that "we can't afford not to go all in".
But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make it through via unchallenged bills or executive action, somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to double down."
Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame the victim, if you know how to spot it.
I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the assertion that many of these institutions are designed to fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually solving problems, that taking honest account of how these institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.
Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond words.
Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine personal experience that you may not have had. That those people, still in need of solutions not being provided by either team, are turning to the devil they know and can manage, rather than the one they cannot.
The good news is that these first steps are unifying and results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides is harder than it seems.
I don't fully understand why so many people can't accept the notion that people have different levels of capability to succeed. Maybe most folks who are poor just don't have the mental capacity to do much more than they're doing. If that's true, then definitionally nothing will really "help" short of something like UBI. And even that might fail since recipients will get swindled out of the money.
To me, it's unfortunate that the notion of different levels of capability has been transmuted into some kind of social ill that "must" be solved. It'd be like reading articles about why not everyone can run a 5 minute mile and what can be done about it. Not everyone can run a 5 minute mile! It's not fixable!
Minimum wage hikes are counterproductive - it’s a ban on jobs for people whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage, which are the poorest people who need the jobs most.
It’s a terrible thing to say to someone - “The best you can do is $6/hr, so we as a society have decided you’re not allowed to work to support or feed yourself.”
But we can make our society more functional to penalise poor people less. The people who can only run a 10 minute mile shouldn’t be forced to do it with a weighted vest. The people who can only run a 15 minute mile shouldn’t be banned from running at all.
Is it actually possible to support and feed oneself for $5/hr and less? If it's too hard, plus considering people unable to do better jobs also have harder time saving money - why would you want to inflict that to anyone?
It probably isn't possible, but maybe if you combined that wage with various assistance programs, it could provide a path out of poverty for those who want to try. I'd much rather be able to get a job and start my journey than be prohibited from working.
If a job is worth $10/hr to get done, nobody will ever pay anyone $15 to do it. They will just not do it at all - so that’s 10/hr somebody could’ve earned that is just burned.
You have to think of it like that: congressman standing in front of poor single mother, telling her “you’re not allowed to have this job, it’s for your own good”, and then lighting 60% of her desired salary on fire as she looks on in dismay.
Eventually somebody will invent a robot or outsourcing solution that gets the job done for $10/hr.
At no point was any of this ever helpful to that person who was willing to do the job.
Why must we paint everythign in terms of "evil politicians want to forbid people doing things"? You deny there's some underlying logic why democracies
decided to implement minimal wages, why?
So you assert labor demand is completely inflexible. Is this supported by evidence? Perhaps $15 is really too much, I don't know, but to help decide by now we should have hundred year worth of data no?
We should want mothers to have some time and energy left to care for children when they come home. Are there any such $5-$10/hour jobs?
This is a straw man. Nobody is saying everyone should be genius Olympian.
The argument is that the janitor, the fast food worker, the cashier deserve a livable wage. They don't deserve to have decades slashed off their life expectancy because they're poor. They shouldn't have to ration insulin because they're poor. They shouldn't have to commute for 2 hours because they're poor.
It's not at all a straw man. Large swaths of the political spectrum in the US now reject the notion that there are different levels of intellectual capability.
Nah dude, almost nobody thinks that. You're letting your biases cloud your judgement. You see one person saying some stupid thing and you assume that's representative of a larger group. It's not.
Is a "market wage", supplemented by payments from public money to reach decent living standards, acceptable? That's what UBI would be, in theory at least.
A better solution imo would be a society where necessities are free, and people can work for anything above that. But really, anything other than what we have right now would be an improvement.
I live in San Francisco, and while I largely agree with you, one of the larger challenges is the lack of accountability for the organisations and the staff that provide services to the poor and homeless. It seems they spend more money doing a lousy job than providing the services to a higher standard so more of the poorer people can get the assistance they need and find good, stable jobs.
American poor are still richer than the average person in many places. The cheapest housing in California is triple the median rent in many other states. Not everyone can relocate, many become poor instead. Competition creates poor and rich, and the system requires competition for growth.
it's magical thinking to believe that 'fixing' institutions will somehow fix society, especially for the poor. greater institutional efficiency will simply concentrate wealth faster. the same for UBI, which would lock in disparity rather than relieve it (by making extractive businesses more profitable, exacerbating inequalities).
poverty isn't simply about money or possessions, but rather is fundamentally about opportunity and esteem, to meaningful work and fair wages first and foremost. that means, most importantly, lower profits and a radically different economic dynamic that doesn't place capital on a singular pinnacle.
this is the elephant in the room that no politician really wants to address around poverty, because it'd directly oppose all of their wealthy backers in one fell swoop. it's exactly why we never get any movement, except hair-brained policies, like UBI, that are meant to surreptitiously funnel public funds into greedy private hands and make things worse for the poor in the long run.
I think you misread. They're not saying that fixing institutions will fix poverty, how did you reach that conclusion? They're saying broken institutions impose a disproportionate burden on people living in poverty and potentially contribute to the perpetuation of poverty.
The US, and most first world nations, have very low poverty compared to other nations - and that poverty has decreased over time.
> that means, most importantly, lower profits and a radically different economic dynamic that doesn't place capital on a singular pinnacle
Capitalism has been the most effective vehicle to reduce poverty in the 20th and 21st century. Communism, socialism and most hybrid attempts have been outright failures in comparison.
That politicians don't want to embrace some other economic model isn't some conspiracy. It's just plain sense.
11% isn't 'low poverty', especially in the richest of nations. it's vulgar.
capitalism isn't some miracle that created the current american politicoeconomic environment. the single biggest (but not sole) factor (i.e., luck) in that was geographic: it just so happened 2 huge oceans separated us from the biggest war in history.
cheerleading for capitalism is at best a non sequitur.
11% is amazingly low when huge parts of the world are at 50% [1]. Obviously we should strive to be better still, but let's not pretend that isn't a huge accomplishment that wasn't possible for the last several millenia of modern human existence.
This isn't the case just for the US but also for the UK and our fellow Europeans who also practiced Capitalism - even the ones who had to endure the great wars.
You are welcome to suggest an alternative but you will have to support it. The choice of Capitalism seems critically important, along with the choice of some sort of Democracy.
i'm not interested in simplistic ideological battles, but note that the recovery of all those european economies, as well as japan's, were helped mightily by a relatively unscathed america, largely for ideological reasons to make your conclusion seem plausible.
11% is a fucking travesty for the richest nations in history whose overabundance is downright, shockingly monumental. we should have exactly zero people who don't have secure food, shelter, and a modicum of dignity. that's squarely on capitalism along with (republican[0]) democracy.
[0]: not the political party; republics centralize power in the hands of representative 'elites', because we all know the msases are too stupid to know what's good for them.
I mean it's great to stand on mountains and tell everyone they're doing it wrong - but talk is free. You want to do better than 11%? Do it.
You don't even need to get on a plane. Go talk to your local homeless community. Share your ideas about how you're going to put them all in homes. You can make sandwiches and distribute them if nothing else.
Form a Non-Profit. Hire people. Make it happen. Prove us, the collective masses, too stupid to know what's good for us.
> Capitalism has been the most effective vehicle to reduce poverty in the 20th and 21st century. Communism, socialism and most hybrid attempts have been outright failures in comparison.
This is false dogma. China has been UNARGUABLY a wild success. Now subtract every human life that ended prematurely or was lived in relative poverty because the USA funded terrorists and facist overthrow of their democratically elected socialist government
China had almost 90% of its population living in extreme poverty as recently as the 1980s. The tremendous reduction in that poverty rate (to less than 1% today) is attributable entirely to market-based reform.
yes, market-based reform, not capitalism per se. capitalism has no monopoly on markets, as markets predate all the -isms by many centuries. so that's not an argument for capitalism (for which capital is a central concern) but for decentralized, market-based systems, the fairer the better.
To be more specific: it has been the result of a decrease in central planning, decollectivization, privatization of previously state-owned industries and private ownership of the means of production operated with profit as the motive.
>Despite decades of explanations and interventions, these efforts have fallen short in one important way: what I call the assumption of free-floating mindsets. This assumption is not only held by researchers but also policymakers and charity workers engaged in well-meaning efforts to tackle poverty in rich countries
Not sure we need to invent new phrases here, what's being debated is idealism and materialism. Thinking of individual 'minds' as primary actors is popular because as a society we're still stuck in some sort of Enlightenment/Christian mix where we assume 'success' is the result of moral virtue, good works, reason and so on.
People are allergic to material, systemic, biological explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.
I think you've misinterpreted what the author meant by a free-floating midset.
If I said to you, you'll be more successful if adopt materialism and you go and do it without relation to your environment as a budist monk, that would be an example of a free-floating mindset.
The point the author is trying to raise, is that you can't just tell someone to adapt an entreprenurial go-getter mindset because the environment they're in isn't well suited to that.
Effectively, they are saying the poor are well adapted and it's our point of view of the poor which is wrong.
To better help people in these situations we need to change tact from the "I'm sucessful, be like me" approach.
...or we just assume that, on average, good works, reason, and virtue are a good strategy in the long run whether or not they necessarily lead to success (or are a prerequisite for it).
> People are allergic to material, systemic, biological explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.
Really? Because I hear a lot of people talking about systemic explanations for everything. Doesn't seem to help anyone. Score one for the Christians as far as I'm concerned.
> I hear a lot of people talking about systemic explanations for everything. Doesn't seem to help anyone.
Those supporting a systematic approach raised the child tax credit in the US, lifting over 3 million children out of poverty last year. It helped them.
That's just a fine example of trying to get the best bang for the buck. Thinking you can even have a "systematic approach" to either explaining or mitigating something as complex as poverty, deprivation and marginalization can only be described as the highest sort of arrogance.
What is complex about poverty? They just need money. Just give them money and there is no more poverty. What is holding us back from doing this? Is it fear that people will become lazy and just "take" from others and contribute nothing?
Most of you have not idea what it is like living in Poverty. Real poverty. The depression and lack of motivation comes from people not caring about you. You have no idea the energy you get when you feel like a society cares about you.
Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You directly give everyone the base resources necessary to lead a dignified life. Some people instead prefer to create narrowly-targeted means-tested programs incentivizing hypothesized third-order economic effects to improve some abstract wellness metric twenty years in the future. The reason why they do this is because it’s cheaper, of course, but someone trying to change the course of a stream with the perfectly-placed stone will always believe the task is impossibly complicated.
> Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You directly give everyone the base resources necessary to lead a dignified life.
I guess even the most complex, difficult things can be accomplished, if only we just do them. Becoming a millionaire is simple, just have someone give you a million dollars. Being a CEO is quite simple, just get hired as one and make smart decisions that are good for the company.
I mean there’s a lot more involved, not just in robbing the non-poor to give freebies to the poor, but also all of the societal and economical and all sorts of other consequences they could have that, non-real-world studies that prove nothing aside (countless times we are told something will be so, but then it’s not - we do, however, have centuries of failed socialist and communist history giving us red flags), are quite likely to happen.
There were 37.2 million people living below the poverty line in the USA in 2020[1]. The 2021 budget for the US military was 705.4 billion dollars[2]. Let's be anomalously generous to the military industrial complex and only cut that in half, to $352.7 billion dollars - about matching the combined military spending of both China and Russia (combined population 1.5 billion people). We can direct the other $352.7 billion dollars toward those people in poverty, giving them around $10k/person/year every year.
I challenge you to come up with a reason not to do this that is not psychopathic.
The systematic mind looks for the systematic approach. It doesn't help to fault them (policy-makers and their constituents) for it, at least if you're trying to bring them to Jesus. They're going to pull on the levers they can reach, eh?
Somewhere in this subthread, confusion has arisen between "systemic" (arising from, or affecting, a system as a whole) and "systematic" (methodical, using a fixed procedure, consistent).
Saying that the causes of poverty are systemic (i.e., it's not so much that some people have character or habits or whatever that make them poor, as that our society is structured in a way that ensures that a lot of people will be poor) has nothing to do with saying that it should be attacked in a systematic way (i.e., that we should apply some consistent procedure to deal with poverty when we find it).
I think we all meant "systemic" (I know I did, I just didn't want to switch back because I thought it might add to the confusion) but I'm glad you brought it up and clarified the point.
Well, if zozbot234 meant "systemic" then I have no idea how
> Thinking you can even have a "systematic approach" to either explaining or mitigating something as complex as poverty, deprivation and marginalization can only be described as the highest sort of arrogance.
makes sense; I can understand how someone might think that looking for a systematic approach to something very complex is arrogant, but not how they would think the same about a systemic approach.
I'll gladly take your word for it that you did mean "systemic" but I confess that I'm then not sure what a "systemic mind" would be that "takes a [systemic] approach".
(My guess, for what it's worth, had been that fineIllregister probably meant "systemic" even though they wrote "systematic", that zozbot234 followed fineIllregister in writing "systematic" but also meant "systematic", and that since you were responding to zozbot234 you probably meant "systematic" too.)
For the record, I fully agree that a lot of poverty out there is systemic. Look at North Korea, maybe contrast it to South Korea then try to tell me that they don't have widespread systemic poverty. Look at the latest garden-variety tin-pot dictatorship in Africa or elsewhere and try to tell me the same thing. The individual alone explains pretty much zilch; every single one of us in the developed West is living in an incredibly complex society featuring a huge variety of institutional arrangements of all kinds.
There's no reason to think that these institutional factors don't affect social and economic outcomes; indeed, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary! (And it would be just as arrogant to think that the institutional arrangements prevailing in a random Western country as of 02022 are already "optimized" in any sense. So yes, there is room for some meaningful improvement.)
I have no idea how to parse "score one for the Christians" Christians are a large group that cover a lot of mutually exclusive beliefs. Heck, some Christian sects believe that material prosperity is a direct reflection of how good you are, and others that voluntary poverty is the highest virtue.
There's also the contradictory belief that there's something "holy" about poverty and something "evil" about material wealth.
Taking contradictory positions means you cover all bases, and can argue either point when convenient, though it creates some hellish cognitive dissonance for the people trying to make sense of it...
That's brave territory. But nonetheless, we shouldn't be prevented from discussing, let alone researching it.
Naval Ravikant talks about this quite a bit, - universities escalated to establish themselves to higher levels of truth-authority since the 50s given the objectiveness and fruits of hard sciences, (physics, biology, chemistry, microeconomics). However, now soft social "sciences" such as Gender studies and macroeconomics (you know it's not a hard science because it says Science behind it) have bullied their way to the front. Wherein, the hard sciences are being displaced yet cemented with the same aforementioned authority - but with the reluctance, or even sabotage to objectively discuss, let alone research dissenting ideas.
Especially under duress is Evolutionary Biology, here is a prime example -
Regarding the linked article, I feel it is important to clarify that the field under duress is 'Behavioral Genetics', not 'Evolutionary Biology' (the former may be considered a sub-field of the latter, but I think it is important to be clear as much of the controversy lies in attempts to use DNA to explain/predict the personality/behavior of a modern individual).
I am also curious why you consider microeconomics is a 'hard' science? As someone with a BA in economics (truly the pinnacle of academic understanding), I would not consider it any less wishy-washy than macroeconomics (both of which are 'soft social sciences', in my view).
I can appreciate that social sciences are often vague and messy and never seem to offer universal truths, but, when trying to understand human behavior, I also feel it is important to say that we live in a society. At least for me, I truly believe much of my behavior and habits are dictated by what I learned from the people around me and the stories I have been exposed to throughout life.
And then some academic comes along and claims to understand who I am and who I will be and that it is all encoded in my DNA? It will take a lot more than wishy-washy social-science statistical analysis to convince me of that. Sure, there could be a discussion about fate and free will, but I do not see much use in that, I certainly do not see the need to bring DNA into the conversation, and I definitely do not want the government looking to genetics for solutions.
> Especially under duress is Evolutionary Biology, here is a prime example
The article kind of said nothing, it just had the flashy headline:
> Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?
>
>The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
Then never mentioned that topic again.
It looks like you're trying to misrepresent "the left doesn't believe in old debunked claims about race and IQ" as some kind opposition to actual genetic research.
"I'm rich because I deserve it" feels a lot better than "I'm rich because I happened to win some unfair lottery". The latter will always be a tough sell. And the brand of Christianity prevalent in the U.S. is especially prone to the former.
The most important part of any system is how people feel about it.
If people feel it's just and good, and that good for others begets good for them, then they are more likely to be and do good.
No law, no tax, no specific policy, will ever have as much power over how well things are going for everyone as the zeitgeist itself does.
It's better for all of us if we believe people get rich because they deserve it, and if we don't believe it, we need to do what we need to do to get us back to feeling that way.
Suppose some rich people actually got rich by dishonesty, exploitation and selfishness. Believing that rich people get rich because they deserve it will then mean either (1) believing that dishonesty, exploitation and selfishness are good or (2) believing a bunch of falsehoods about how those rich people got rich.
#1 is clearly harmful, to the individuals involved and to society as a whole. #2 is probably also harmful, not so much because it matters what everyone thinks about how particular rich people got that way as because believing those falsehoods probably means believing a bunch of other falsehoods about, e.g., how business and society actually work, and it's probably bad if everyone believes a lot of false things about that.
Suppose some rich people actually got rich mostly by good luck. Believing that rich people get rich because they deserve it will then mean overlooking the importance of luck, and believing that people who don't get rich deserve not to be, and probably to believing that people who are poor deserve to be poor.
That's harmful because it begets a lack of sympathy towards others in need.
There are no doubt positive effects too; e.g., if you think that hard work reliably makes people rich then you may be more likely to work hard, and maybe it's good for society if everyone is willing to work hard. (Though I have my doubts about how well that sort of self-deception can actually be expected to work.) But it's not at all obvious, at least to me, that the overall effects are good, because of harms like the ones I described above.
(... Maybe you were being sarcastic, in which case I apologize for missing your point. But it looks to me as if you meant what you wrote.)
> It's better for all of us if we believe people get rich because they deserve it, and if we don't believe it, we need to do what we need to do to get us back to feeling that way.
If you mean that in a sense where we should be doing all in our power to make sure that only those deserving enough get rich (comabtting corruption, stripping people of ill-gotten fortunes, preventing trust building and unfair competition, removing money from politics, stopping government welfare for the rich, etc) so that the ideal is closer to reality, than I agree.
However, most people supporting this world view want to do just the opposite: take it as a given that rich people are deserving of their wealth, and so using all of societies resources to help the rich to get richer, since by definition they are most worthy. This is a deeply dangerous and disgusting tactic that has been causing significant harm to societies all over the world.
> If you mean that in a sense where we should be doing all in our power to make sure that only those deserving enough get rich (comabtting corruption, stripping people of ill-gotten fortunes, preventing trust building and unfair competition, removing money from politics, stopping government welfare for the rich, etc) so that the ideal is closer to reality, than I agree.
We shouldn't push a positive mindset on anyone - positivity is not the kind of thing that should be pushed on people in the first place. But this doesn't mean that positive psychology has nothing to say as to how to cope with poverty, and for that matter other adversities (such as social marginalization, which seems especially insidious and hard to address given the dearth of social-capital-enhancing grassroots institutions in modern societies).
(The article also seems to weirdly conflate self-regulation/executive function and very-long-term time orientation then saying that the latter makes no sense in an overall risky environment, thus neither does the former. This hardly seems sensible. Just because not eating your marshmallow can be helpful to both, does not make them the same thing!)
It's more complicated than this. There is some truth to both sides of the equation and it is true that we currently overwhelmingly blame poor individuals for their problems and largely fail to recognize that there just isn't enough to go around of some things.
We need to do a better job of putting in a floor for all people such that there are limits to how low you can fall even if everything goes wrong and we need to do a better job of lowering barriers to moving between classes. It's currently too easy to fall in the US and too hard to get back up.
The right mental models, attitudes, etc can be helpful in problem solving. Some problems are intractable (hard to make progress against and require many years to solve) even if you do everything right. Some kinds of resources are in limited supply such that, yes, some lucky few can readily get out but some will not even if they "do everything right."
The best thing we can do as a society is focus on solving that last one: Try to make more resources available of certain kinds such that there is enough to go around to establish a floor from which people have some reasonable hope of being able to be self determining.
That floor is always an issue, even in countries with a better than average social system.
Here in Germany, they will cut your financial aid if you aren't willing to take every shitty job you get offered. This leads to companies who prey on the poorest, because they know they have to take their crappy jobs.
There's a somewhat prevalent mindset here in the US that it's better to have a lot of honestly down-on-their-luck, "not-their-fault" poor and impoverished people struggle in order to avoid buying one meal or one nice jacket for the freeloader who simply doesn't feel like getting a job. I imagine even in countries with good social safety nets that you have a certain contingent of people who feel the same way.
If there is a job you are physically and mentally capable of doing, why should you not be forced into doing it instead of just sitting at home and expecting 'the system' to pay for you?
Wouldn't the correct answer to your problem be laws that put lower limits on what acceptable jobs are, rather than not expecting people to take whatever job there is for them if they can't find anything better?
> If there is a job you are physically and mentally capable of doing, why should you not be forced into doing it instead of just sitting at home and expecting 'the system' to pay for you?
Yours is an entirely ideological point of view. There is no reason to believe people would just sit at home and wait for the system to pay them. Even if someone did just sit at home, you have to prove that that would be worse overall than having many others' needs ignored.
We already have a class of people who "sit" expecting the system to pay them: it's the rich. We already practice socialism for the rich, giving incredible amounts of public money to companies in tax cuts and subsidies, it's time we do socialism for the poor as well.
I'm not sure your "we" is the same as my "we". I live in an European "socialist" country with a well functioning healthcare and welfare system. I have lots of sympathy for people who are experiencing some downtime in their life. I understand that might not have been obvious from my comment.
I'm not sure I understand you when you say there is no reason to believe people are sitting at home waiting for the system to pay them. Considering we are talking about people who are unable to find a job and not willing to do the jobs that are available, who are healthy and not at home because of some condition - who exactly are we talking about?
Your last paragraph sounds very worrisome but not something I feel my "we" are experiencing. We do a lot of socialism for the poor and we tax our rich quite heavily. Not saying it couldn't be better, but I feel you're approaching this from a very US-centric point of view.
I tend to think internationally, so when I refer to "we" I mean pretty much everyone. I'm Italian anyway so I also live in the "socialist" Europe, nevertheless this year we gave away €50B in companies' subsidies and less than €10B in subsidies to citizens. At the same time the class divide grows wider, while most people this year struggle to even pay the bills. Perhaps you live in northern Europe, in that case your country definitely has higher standards of life, but I don't think north Europe is really representative of the world's situation.
> Obviously 'forced' here means 'take the job or lose your unemployment benefits, not 'take the job or be arrested/die/...'. Nothing like slavery.
Yeah, fortunately, we live in a system where the necessities of life are provided universally free of charge or condition, so that losing one’s income stream has no impact on access to those necessities.
You know what would really help the poor? Not putting up job apps that have zero intention of ever getting back to applicants. The single most frustrating thing during my current job hunt has been applying to hundreds of jobs and hearing back from maybe 5% of them.
I have zero issue with a rejection. I understand the law of large numbers. Where I get frustrated is spending hours on applications to firms and they can't be bothered to spend 5 seconds letting unsuccessful applicants know that the position as been filled.
(I definitely have plenty of other complaints but this is the one that is presently dragging me down mentally.)
There is an asymmetry. You need a job. It’s your only job. They get hundreds of applications.
One adjustment I recommend is calibrating the amount of time you spend on an application. You shouldn’t be spending hours on a single cold application. Write your resume. See or hear of an opportunity. Send your standard resume and standard introduction. Hours of upfront work, but only a few minutes per application.
Focus on finding warming connections. The strength is in weak ties. Tell your family, friend, former coworker and update your linkedin.
Technical people are in huge demand. Given your skills you should have plenty of offers without much anxiety. You’ll get lots of non response. So it goes.
I don't mind getting a "no" and I do feel I've gotten the right ratio of effort per application nailed after some time. I just hate that most employers can't seem to bother to close applications in a timely manner or message candidates when they've chosen someone for the role. I hate twiddling my thumbs wondering if I am going to receive any further communication or not.
I think it shows a lack of compassion from employers en masse. There are few negative ramifications to them never acknowledging you submitted your resume. I also submit many applications and I feel like a ghost.
> When studied experimentally, the tendency to prioritise rewards in the future rather than the present diminishes among those who feel low in power or perceive instability or uncertainty in their environment. The apparent failure of self-regulation – a trait admired in those who have it, and taught to those who don’t – is not a psychological impairment, but an adaptive response to having little actual control over one’s future.
When I was poor, I never thought I didn't have control over my future, this is likely luck on my part. I think this feeling of lack of control is way more a product of your parents and upbringing than anything else. Everyone knows stories of emigrants that made it from nothing, meanwhile others in similar conditions don't. I know plenty of rich people that don't do anything with themselves and live depressed completely absorbed in a feeling of lack of control over future, "nothing matters" nihilist bullshit too. They just started at a higher absolute value in their bank account so they don't count for the statistics but they're an even bigger drag on society because not only they don't generate anything new, they deprive others of the assets they just have lying around.
The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger than "just feel better" mindset coaching, and well, yeah - you can buy food with one and not with the other. But there's plenty of examples and literature as to why also just donating money doesn't solve the problem.
I think what solves the problem is creating conditions for good stable parenting of children. The problem is there's plenty of fucked up rich parents, so unfortunately I don't think I have a solution, but I don't think it's either just mindset changes or free money, and there's aspects missing of having a loving family who also focuses on building your character through positive role models and safety to fail. These are easier if you're not struggling to pay the bills, but surely this isn't as easy as airdropping money on everyone. I'm still positive about testing UBI though, I think it could help over several generations.
> The article goes on to say that material help is way stronger than "just feel better" mindset coaching [...] But there's plenty of examples and literature as to why also just donating money doesn't solve the problem
The article does not imply at any point that the "material solution" is the universal solution (not attempts to give one), rather than pointing the flaws of pushing those "just feel better/stop being poor" mindsets and indirectly blaming the poor for their condition.
I didn't say they did, and I agree with your interpretation of the article. I was sharing my own experience and some follow ups to these thoughts regarding parenting and UBI.
> When I was poor, I never thought I didn't have control over my future, this is likely luck on my part. I think this feeling of lack of control is way more a product of your parents and upbringing than anything else.
Yes, exactly what I am thinking (and much more succinct than my draft response).
And it follows that, while an individual may not be able easily to change their mindset, helping children grow up with a sense of agency can reduce intergenerational poverty.
As the other commenter said - you need a sense of agency with the actual agency itself.
Intergenerational poverty like mine was able to be overcome because I was given a full ride to college. I took that and rode it all the way to 7-figure jobs. But many in the US aren’t given anywhere near what I was given even if they get assistance. (Tuition waived, monthly stipend, insurance.)
I’ve already put someone else through college and can tell you that changing intergenerational poverty is an incredibly hard thing to overcome. If it wasn’t for me working with my spouse so closely for years - there’s no way she would’ve gotten anywhere near where she is now. That and I poured well north of $100k+ on her for it.
I firmly believe the overwhelming majority of people need a strong positive influence in their life. Normally this would be the parents but poor parents typically ain’t that. I’m an exception - someone who made it out without any positive influences. But I should be treated as that - an exception. (It’s why when I tell my stories they seem unbelievable and unrelatable. It’s just not like any kind of common narrative that exists.)
All demographic categories are catching up quickly to that number. The social connections between people and families are breaking, although to the least extent among the upper classes.
It would be great if we would invest in restoring communities and families but it seems there isn’t much interest in that.
> We might have to rethink the sexual revolution, but I don't expect there will be much enthusiasm for that.
This is hardly the issue... If the upper class part not being as affected by this didn't make it obvious - it's money that is the issue. And - trust me - the upper class are not prudes.
It's hardly a reach to say that the upper class has tools, among them money, that enable behaviors that are disastrous for those without those tools.
There is a bad habit among the upper class to say "we should normalize X because it's harmless" because X is harmless for _them_, and terribly dangerous for others not so fortunate.
I agree with you, except this part: "assets they just have lying around". Assets never lie around, except when you buy an apartment, don't live in it and don't even rent it. Usually the money is in investments (that make money by definition), stocks, bank accounts. All of these generate further value.
So while it is unfair that some people get a huge head start in life, it's not wasted potential for the most part.
Growing older I realized a life that is unfair but you get equal rights is actually better than trying to live in a fair society, like communism, which causes more issues than it solves. Plus, you can never be 100% fair, e.g. when do I get my check for being "less beautiful than my peers". Being at the bottom at the ladder looks-wise made it harder for me than anything else.
My father was career Air Force. The base commander came to him once, and told him that half of the privates on the base were having trouble paying their bills to the local merchants. The merchants complained to the commander, and one of the commander's jobs is to be a good neighbor in the community.
The privates were all paid the same, and lived on base housing, with base furniture, etc., all supplied. Health care was free. Half would do fine, the other half ran out of money halfway between paychecks, and would resort to harassing others for loans, not pay back debts, etc/
He ordered my father to help the half that could not manage their finances. So he'd bring them into the office, go over how they handled money, prepared budgets for them, etc. He was very frustrated because this was a complete failure. He was unable to help them.
This makes sense. It's immoral to promote the possibility and benefits of financial success to people who cannot reach it via legal means. All it will do is drive them into criminal activity because, without the right social connections, that's the only way they can get there. These days, there is tough competition even beyond the criminal line though (but still easier). It seems (based on articles I read) that even succeeding as a drug dealer or trafficker is difficult nowadays because of intense competition. I also know from anecdotal evidence that taboo areas like adult tech industry used to be easier for newcomers who didn't have the right social connections... Not sure if that's still true.
I despise the mindset that many rich people have that "I only surround myself with positive people" - What that really means is "I only surround myself with lucky people who don't understand how the world works and charlatans who pretend not to." It's discriminatory and leads to massive blindspots and complete bifurcation of society with an elite class which is completely out of touch... History tells us quite clearly where this leads.
I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of desperate people and social climbers into the industry who only got in for the money. I think this partly explains a lot of issues we're facing now with censorship, surveillance and other unethical conduct.
> I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of desperate people
There's a whole sad parallel universe of wannabe entrepreneurs who have zero sense of what might consititute a marketable product and who live off fantasies of validation by VCs. They seem almost exactly the same to me as the poor folks who get suckered into some Evangelical church with the Prosperity Gospel. Down to the regular social events and sermons.
They go for years like this. I'm convinced the whole system feeds off and exacerbates mental illness.
> Yet such efforts have been largely unsuccessful at reducing poverty and unemployment
It's unfair to just pick this one intervention and point out it didn't reduce poverty or unemployment. They mostly don't. Whether it's positive mindset, growth mindset, head start early education programs, most psychiatric drugs (NNTs in the 20s)... But we are not coldhearted enough to do nothing so this is something.
And occasionally it works. We treated iodine deficiency to great sometimes spectacular effects, we feed pretty much everyone in the west, not exactly well but to meet their caloric needs, we did win against smoking (don't know why OP derides that).
> When I have simulated a mild version of this experience for middle-class people – using a household budgeting game on a computer where they’re randomly assigned to be poor or financially comfortable – participants have found it to be profoundly disempowering. Those assigned to be poor reported a lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were diminished by the mere momentary lived experience of trying to meet one’s needs when one does not have enough.
> We treated iodine deficiency to great sometimes spectacular effects, we feed pretty much everyone in the west, not exactly well but to meet their caloric needs
Micronutrient deficiency might turn out to be an enduring problem in the future given how common "food deserts" are in poor areas of the US. Along with countless other things (such as lead exposure, and even something as insidious as general stress and marginalization in early life) it should be addressed as a possible environmental cause of cognitive impairment that might correlate with poverty.
Excellent piece. The subtext — why are our academic-political institutions treating the less fortunate as irrational — is just as important as the content.
This kind of thing happens in any society with high inequality: The worse it gets, the more those on top feel the need to justify their position and downplay the rage of the underclass (traditionally, this continues until the underclass finally kills off the privileged class).
It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the privileged in the USA.
It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as those with money and connections.
Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality.
And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate.
"Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. "
"The Bell Curve" is from 1994, a time when the importance of demand for education and skills as a driver for inequality was far less clear than it is today. The real focus of that book was not to drive any racist message, but simply to sound the alarm about how the already extant divergence in educational outcomes would only become more and more relevant in the future unless something radically effective was done to try and mitigate it. People really like to misrepresent that book for some reason, but if anything its real message has only become stronger and more relevant since then.
To be clear, I do of course agree that the book had plenty of major flaws, including in its statistical arguments about the importance of "I.Q." specifically (or of some entirely hypothetical "general factor", whatever that might mean - a "factor" being merely a way of summarizing correlations across measurements, as opposed to anything causally relevant in any underlying model) to outcomes, and even about its observed distribution across US conventional race groups. Much of it would not stand up to even the lightest scrutiny nowadays. But its more general argument about the emergence of a "cognitive elite" on one side, and a "custodial state" on the other, might as well be called conventional wisdom today. These simply were not commonly-acknowledged facts in the mid-1990s!
I don't think this is an accurate depiction of the book (at the time or now). One of the core, repeated messages of the book is that there are no mitigations possible even in theory and we should stop wasting money on trying to educate poor people as there was no way that it would help.†
This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists.
†Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.
One thing that was always abundantly clear is that long-term thinking and discipline is something that you are, it isn't particularly context dependent nor something you can teach beyond natural inclination. Virtually all of the poor people I grew up and lived around with these manifest traits got out of poverty eventually and never came back. For these people, a positive mindset may be helpful. That combination of long-term thinking and discipline are like compound interest, given enough time you can build substantial value on it no matter how little you start with.
In this sense, poverty is a personality trait trap. If you don't have these traits and you find yourself in poverty, you are stuck because you'll never spontaneously develop these traits. All of which creates a selection bias where the population of people in poverty are naturally depleted of these helpful traits. Many people are born into this position.
If you are in a middle-class situation and lack these traits, you can nonetheless afford some drag loss as a consequence of having excess income -- the median US household can afford to frivolously waste ~$12k/year without materially changing their position beyond lack of wealth accumulation. That is a large de facto safety net for lack of long-term thinking or discipline. Poor people don't have this. Being middle-class doesn't create long-term thinking or discipline, as is also amply evident, but you can afford to make more poor life choices.
In a sense, I agree with the article that it won't materially change outcomes. Even if you can divide people in poverty by these traits, the people with them are likely to get out of poverty regardless, and it does nothing constructive for people without them.
This doesn't seem particularly surprising to me. If you look at the ideologues, you have some people arguing that if you just bootstrap your bootstraps you can bootstrap your way out of poverty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people basically claiming that it's all random and you owe absolutely none of your success to your own abilities. The truth, as with all things, is somewhere in the middle. The truth being in the middle, it stands to reason there are certain intrinsic personality traits that would predispose someone to financial/material/commercial success. And if there are traits that would predispose someone to success it stands to reason there would be traits equally predisposing other people to failure.
How do you know that these values can't be taught? It's not like it has been tried with any seriousness as of late. On the contrary, these values (literacy, education, strong self-discipline, public-mindedness) used to be rather widespread in the 19th century, pre WWI, and that seemed to help poor folks cope a lot better with their circumstances even in a society that was both much poorer as a whole and much more unequal!
These aren't values, so you can't teach them as such. They are cognitive traits connected to biology and likely hereditary. It is like saying everyone can be equally good at spatial ability, which facilitates many concrete skills, with training, despite being robustly and strongly connected to genetics. If these could be addressed with training, we wouldn't need drugs to treat things like ADHD or depression.
There is no evidence that people in the 19th century were more or less self-disciplined than they are today. Countless people from that era demonstrated a widely documented lack of discipline in all things. Human nature is what it is.
I'm not convinced that long-term thinking isn't a strategy that can be taught. Cognitive traits may make it come naturally to some people, but I would describe it as more of a "habit" than an "ability"
We refuse to talk about obvious contributors to poverty like out-of-wedlock births, and then we wonder why we have so much difficulty understanding the problem.
A healthy culture fosters those attitudes and outlooks that enable people to take care of themselves. Simple stuff like "don't have sex until married", "take care of your kids", "go to school", "work hard", "mind your money" are for many people bedrock values that serve them well. Instead we have subcultures that celebrate promiscuity, materialism and sexism, encourage drug use and dealing, and actively discourage positive behaviors. And we wonder why those in those subcultures do poorly? But we cannot criticize them because that would be insensitive or judgmental or -- worst -- racist.
When someone is making a mistake it is no help to overlook the mistake.
Abandoning helpful mindsets because they are hard to build is no solution. Of course being poor wears down positivity and agency, we've always known this. That shouldn't mean we give up on trying to help people adopt the approaches that will help them.
I don't have the solution to poverty, it is a very complicated and self-sustaining problem whose solutions are going to involve changes in many areas. But we're never going to solve it until we have a better conversation about what causes it.
Another factor I'd want to add is the impressive destruction of multi-generational households and even relationships. It has cemented loneliness in the old and lack of family values and destructive behavior in the young especially when both parents are working.
You mistake the cause for the effect. The "cultural issues" you mention are the effect of generational poverty, not the cause. If you want healthy culture, ensure that everyone gets good schools, housing and healthcare. As long as people get completely different education depending on their class, the situation can't improve.
The causes have been extremely clear for the past century at least. It's relatively simple to identify them if you don't approach the issue ideologically.
I agree that simply pushing a positive mindset is useless because that's not really something you can push unless if you're talking about a parent to your child. However, that isn't to say that a positive mindset is useless. I tutor poor kids and overall, there is definitely a difference between the attitudes of immigrant children and those born into intergenerational poverty. Immigrants tend to take their educational background seriously, where's an alarmingly high number of people born into intergenerational poverty accept the status quo that they're in. This is historically observable as well (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/upshot/immigration-americ...).
Also, I disagree that the government actually is trying to foster a positive mindset to begin with. Welfare is systemically structured to award victimhood (e.g. welfare cliffs).
It is both to a certain extent. Bad circumstances cause unhealthy mindsets, but it's undeniable that these unhealthy mindsets aren't making poverty worse. That doesn't mean I'm lecturing anyone about personal responsibility.
The solution is to design policy that empowers people rather than treats them as victims. Unfortunately, it seems like every politician who supports the former (e.g universal healthcare) also supports the latter (e.g. student loan cancellation).
Wait, why wouldn’t student loan cancellation be an empowerment of the poor? I thought the poor disproportionately suffered from shackles of student loans + didn’t finish degree, and the student loan payments are a major friction to breaking into middle class.
Expanding public university funding so that more people attend colleges without debt is empowering. Student loan forgiveness only rewards those who were unable to get value out of college. It's the same problem as a benefits cliff.
GP never said anything like that. They identified faults in government arrangements as a contributing factor, they didn't say the people themselves were at fault.
I live in the US South. There are many misconceptions about the South, and there is a lot of prejudice in American society toward the South, toward “trailer trash,” and toward “rednecks” and “hillbillies.” This is going to build hatred and resentment for “the wealthy” that cannot be overcome by a mindset change. They are hated and despised and therefore they hate right back.
Beyond this, there are people who are viewed as poor, dysfunctional, and “degenerate” even by the standards of the hated groups mentioned above.
Funny thing is, these hated people are the very people societies cannot live without. Some are the bus drivers, the line cooks, the truck drivers, the sanitation workers, the veterans, and on and on. These people do actual work so that everyone else can get on pushing paper and making new digital b.s. These are also people who’ve been underserved by the digital transformation because they are hated.
Why did it take reaching 2020 for someone to make PayPal that works for truckers?
> everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace?
I'm struggling not to be offended by the idea that humans don't have the ability to choose their own mindset when I believe it's the only thing we can truly reliably choose.
I just had a talk with my oldest child today about working hard because you don't know when you'll get your opportunity to shine, but you need to be ready when (or if!) you get it. It was in the context of basketball, but I fully believe it applies to just about everything in life.
I also disagree with the premise of the article in that just because the ranks of poverty are not subsiding doesn't mean _individuals_ aren't being helped by these programs.
A multi-generational outlook must be part of any solution to poverty. Maybe other things are important, too, but a multi-generational approach is required.
It's really hard to get out of poverty without good parents. By "really hard" I mean that it doesn't happen very often. Government programs can help here a lot, but are not very sustainable because they need to keep solving the same poverty problems for every generation.
Parents are self-replicating. And good parents replicate more good parents. That's a much more sustainable basis for societal improvement.
Multi-generational improvement is not easy, but the gains last much longer. The benefits even last through major hardships that create temporary poverty, like war or economic collapse.
1. I'm not sure how much that would be but people need to afford child care, transportation, housing, food, healthcare, and still have enough money for leisure.
2. Unregulated costs that hurt the poor. Unhinged cost of healthcare, all healthcare, including ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. Bank maintenance fees, like overdraft fees and checking account fees. Student loan interest rates. Child care. Housing. The judicial system, including things like income based fines (ie.. you make more you pay more).
Personal anecdote: I was raised in a poor single home family (father passed) and had very little going for me when I graduated college with an econ degree and an old Buick. After burning out at a gas station job, I just sold my car and moved to Seattle - telling myself I'd figure it out. 4 years later I'm making as much as my peers who went the CS route, lived in an urban area their whole life, had strong support systems (family), et cetera. I know of people in worse positions than I was, so I won't pretend that I had a bad upbringing: it just had its challenges.
But what made me succeed was when I stopped making excuses and just put in the 6+ hours a day of coding at the cafe while I job searched. That combined with opportunity (someone took my resume), environment (Seattle is a great place to start your career), and a good support network (my girlfriend).
Having a positive mindset is just one part of success, but it's necessary. I know of a lot of college friends from really well off families that work middling data entry jobs because they have zero drive in their career.
It's odd that the article depicts poverty as an inescapable trap, when this is empirically false. There are countless examples of people who have transcended poverty to either achieve tremendous success, or more realistically, middle-class status. People who have a great deal in common, and took specific steps motivated by specific ways of thinking, which led to their success. Why would you not want to share these recipes with others who could benefit from them? If you're a school teacher, why on earth would you not want to tell your students to study hard so they can go to University or trade school and build a good life for themselves?
I agree with the author that children living in poverty deserve a better social safety net, lower crime, and better public schooling. We need to improve our system to better serve those in need. But this doesn't mean we can't also teach kids the existing demonstrable pathways that can lead them to success.
Speaking as someone who's never -quite- been in poverty, but has been pretty close to the 'lowest tier' of financial status at least once.
How close? A little over 10 years ago I had to move back in with my parents, owed a lot of folks money due to a separation (back rent the ex wouldn't pay, moving costs, etc) and it got to where a low-interest loan from my parents was the only thing that kept me solvent.
I still wonder where I'd be right now if they said no, or didn't have the money, or didn't let me live there rent-free during that time.
And I -remember- how hard it was, to do anything to improve the situation. I was being taken advantage of by a very toxic boss.
Here's a scenario:
- Your mom had a heart attack a week and a half ago
- There were severe complications and she might not make it past 72 hours
- Your boss tells you "Didn't I already give you a day off for that?" when you ask to see her.
What do you do? Staying 'positive' through a situation like that sounds a lot like other groups of people told to 'be happy with their lot'.
There's a huge difference between an accurate descriptive explanation of why someone is in poverty, and what mindset one ought to have if they are in poverty so as to maximize their chances of escaping it (or at least, of enduring it). The former should not inform the latter.
I am skeptical that putting the locus of control outside of oneself - even if partly or largely true as a description of reality - is a good solution to the latter objective due to the learned helplessness and depression that may be magnified by doing that.
> I am skeptical that putting the locus of control outside of oneself - even if partly or largely true as a description of reality - is a good solution
On the contrary, understanding and acknowledging what is outside one's locus of control is a sign of mental health.
> the learned helplessness and depression that may be magnified by doing that
It's the opposite. The "you can achieve anything if you try hard enough" message common in "positive thinking" clashes with reality.
The obvious implication is "it's my fault for not trying hard enough" which is a perfect example of learned helplessness.
Poverty is not an unfortunate side effect of civilisation. Indeed, economic gradient is the fundamental _basis_ of civilisation.
I've been reading a lot about World Systems Theory (inspired almost entirely by books from r/AskHistorians). Particularly at the moment, Ian Morris' "Why the West Rules, for Now". It's abundantly clear that at least on the macro level, classes, countries and civilisations escape poverty all the time. See civil wars, revolutions and the beneficiaries of collapsed empires for example. The simple fact is that poverty is escaped by sheer brute force, not by virtue.
In the archetypical confrontation between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, I side with X. The idea that poverty can be managed from within society's formal power structures is an eternal carrot of carefully calibrated false hope. The idea that we can fix poverty is itself what perpetuates it. The idea of the possibility of overcoming poverty serves more as a means to ignore the fact that civilisation is fundamentally dependent on economic gradients.
The West embraced economic gradient and lifted itself out of poverty with the brute forces of colonialism. China is now doing the same and will most likely overtake the West. We all know this hard truth about escaping poverty, let's not pretend otherwise.
There’s no better time in history to be poor, at least in a functioning society. You get police, fire service, in many European countries a health service, relatively inexpensive telecommunications, and a device in your pocket… or smart TV with access to most of the sum of knowledge of mankind for you to use to improve your life. Not only this but in with west… the absence of war.
> At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess others goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. And one's happiness is endangered if one is severely lacking in certain advantages—if, for example, one is extremely ugly, or has lost children or good friends through death (1099a31–b6). But why so? If one's ultimate end should simply be virtuous activity, then why should it make any difference to one's happiness whether one has or lacks these other types of good? Aristotle's reply is that one's virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other goods (1153b17–19). Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues.
Even the Buddha was a prince before he was enlightened! With all that said, while I agree with the basic premise of this article, a good mental framework IS an important part of becoming a fulfilled person regardless of economic status. Money doesn't correlate directly with happiness, but it does make it a lot easier to pursue happiness when you don't have to worry about it.
Imagine a scifi future where we have free cryochambers for the poor. Every time the rich decide to not spend their money we just throw a poor person into the cryo chamber until the rich person decides to spend their money. This saves food and shelter costs.
Oh right, there is no such thing as a free cryochamber, it will require maintenance and it has to be built in the first place. It is cheaper to leave the poor on the street and keep the money at no cost.
For this system to work the poor would have to earn the cryochamber fees by working dead end jobs for little pay.
Because money has no storage costs, poor people are stuck with the cost of storing their own body to be available to those with money.
The rise of "mindset" and "resilience" is just another chapter in the absurd poverty discourse.
Poverty is extremely simple to fix - just give people money. But rich people don't want that, so we can't do that, and it's largely taboo to even talk about it.
So instead of the real solution, we have to talk about all the fake solutions - education, marriage, mindset, resilience, learning to code. Andrew Yang even said that web3 was the most powerful anti-poverty tool we had.
Anybody who talks about any cure for poverty other than directly giving people in poverty more money is lying to you.
Because the first one is extremely simple and all that is needed. That doesn't mean that things like education aren't good - but they aren't required or effective for poverty reduction.
The other fundamental issue is the poverty is most severe for households with non-earning or low earning dependents, such as children, elderly, sick, disabled, and caregivers - simply because the household income needs to be split more ways. No amount of teaching can fix that - only redistributive welfare can.
It's not extremely simple. You have to make money before you can give it away - that's the hard part! (Even if you argue that rich people should be giving away some of their existing high incomes via taxes, that means that these taxes can't be used to fund other good things.) So you need both.
You lost me when you said education isn't required and isn't effective for poverty reduction. If you have a society that isn't educated then you have no wealth to take in order to give.
That’s just not true. We’ve done this and it has led to the destruction of the family and further impoverishment of many people. We shouldn’t continue doing things that have failed.
The Moynihan Report explored this in the 1960’s and has predicted where we are today. And although it was related to black Americans at the time it is very easily generalized to everyone.
Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.
I really have to disagree there. We have simply never tried to give people money in ways that, like UBI or the Negative Income Tax, carefully preserve good incentives and thus good overall outcomes while avoiding costly 'red tape' that only lets people fall through the cracks. What little research has been done on more effective arrangements for income redistribution in developed countries has actually shown remarkably positive results. And the evidence in lower-income countries is even more remarkable.
We have too sone this with Welfare. It destroyed generations of people.
The idea that when doing something harmful we should have done it bigger is absurd. People need meaningful lives. Giving them a bag of money doesn’t do that and it makes them dependent.
Give people skills and self empowerment. Not free money.
Making children live in deprivation because their parents had bad luck or made a mistake doesn't create meaning.
It's kind of silly that there is so much discussion of giving away money when we can't even bother to structure healthcare provision in a way that makes sense (It shouldn't be hard to get Medicaid and there shouldn't be a cliff...).
I know this from experience, I grew up in poverty and my parents died when I was young.
Bad luck = Lack of moral character to so many people who haven't experienced need.
It's the same Victorian England "just world" garbage that the fortunate have always embraced to prop up their own personal mythos.
It's funny that many self identifying christians treat the poor the worst from a public policy perspective, when the whole point of old testament law around land ownership and jubilee years was to protect children from suffering as a result of unlucky/stupid parents and to generationally guarantee access to capital and production.
The lack of a party equivalent to "christian socialists" (pro markets, pro capitalism, pro safety nets) in the USA really betrays the cruelty of americas faux christianity.
We seem very eager to punish unlucky and low leverage individuals... and their children.
There’s many ways to do this without incentivizing single motherhood. It’s devastating for the children. It might make you feel high and moral but you’re actively hurting people.
Better solutions involve getting kids out of these homes for as much of the day as possible and surrounding them with positive role models from extremely early ages.
> Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.
Would you agree that this is equally true for someone who comes from a wealthy family and has a trust fund that essentially guarantees that they will be "given money", usually in the form of capital gains, forever?
I would say that giving your kids a bag of money so they don’t have to do anything wound generally be a bad idea. I think Bill Gates said he gives his kids enough money so that they don’t have to do anything for money but that they do have to do something or something like that.
In the end, people need to be meaningful participants in their own lives.
Have you ever seen a UBI proposal that would give people so much money that they don't have to do anything? We would never be able to come up with that much money to give out.
It's more like giving them even less money than Bill Gates gives his kids, so they still have to work, but they "don’t have to do anything for money but that they do have to do something" as you put it.
No, we've done highly bureaucratic, dehumanizing but targeted means-tested programs. Those are very different than just giving poor people money through progressive taxation or other means. Just giving cash has been tried only very recently, and with generally positive results so far.
It seems to conflate changes in family structure with prosperity and is based on shaky assumptions about the relationship between them. It remains controversial.
"criminal laws that disproportionately penalized black males, sent them to jail for long periods of time and hurt their potential to find jobs, earn money, and support their families when released"
You've provided a perfect example for the kind of charlatanism I mentioned in the last paragraph - well done.
In fact, welfare works great, both in the US, where Social Security has saved millions from poverty, and in many other countries.
You'll find that in all of these countries, families continue to exist, so take your conservative talking points about destruction of the family are pure ideological nonsense.
Just because you say it doesn’t make it true. We literally see the divergence in family stability and welfare adoption. From there we see the effects as it leads to generational poverty, crime, etc.
"We have billionaires and children who are homeless".
Is there some evidence of homeless billionaires on the streets with their kids? Did you mean to say that there exist homeless kids and also there are billionaires?
Should we be pushing a positive mindset for anyone? To push a positive mindset (repeatedly) is sort of like saying you know how the other person should feel even better than they do.
I hate the constant positivity at work. You have to be positive or else you're "unengaged".
tldr: if someone’s poor they won’t form a “positive mindset” or “internal locus of control” because their life is objectively sucky and they objectively have little control over it. If someone struggles to afford basic necessities like food and rent, and there’s simply no clear opportunity for them to not struggle without tremendous effort, they’re not going to try.
This is a well-written article but it seems to me as kind of obvious. Is there something here that i’m missing?
If you spend time on the wrong parts of social media you will find that there is an industry of people (billionaire lifestyle type influencers) who are exploiting people that can’t grasp this.
I see it as a rather biased and unhelpful article.
The author makes the strong claim that "mindsets are not free-floating" because they are shaped too strongly by a person's external social environment and circumstances. While this is largely true, it is false and harmful in its absoluteness.
Interventions into thinking patterns such as CBT work and are effective. They may be less effective if the person has truly terrible circumstances, but poo pooing stuff that actually works just so she can advance her luxury beliefs is not good. People trapped in poverty need these cognitive tools more than anyone given how desperate their situation is. Poverty is every bit as traumatizing and difficult and impossible as she says it is, and such tools can help them avoid getting their spirit crushed under that hardship.
I think that she's doing this because she feels that the narrative that poor people can simply change their mindset and become middle class to be undermining political momentum towards helping them. She may be right about that, but that is no reason to throw away a practically helpful intervention that can help these people in the meantime.
I look to the worst situations in humanity for thinking about this. Stockdale is well known for becoming a POW and using stoicism to survive it. And to teach others and lead them using this mindset. Mindset is everything for a human. Encouraging a positive one is not wrong. It is also not a panacea or anything.
The article is reiterating a dictum of Marx: being determines consciousness. Your mental state is determined by your physical being (generally your economic circumstances) and therefore cannot be responsible for your physical being.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's not easy for the poor to simply adopt "healthy mindsets" and behavior patterns. I also doubt giving people money is going to be much help. We don't have good strategies to help people out of "intergenerational poverty traps".
Also, I find the argument against "victim blaming" silly. Whether or not your the circumstances of your life are your fault, they are your repsonsibility. Who else should be responsible for your life?
If you measure poverty by "how much money someone has," this is obviously true. I'm not convinced giving people money alleviates "intergenerational poverty traps". I'm not against welfare. Giving people money alleviates their suffering, I just don't think it will solve the fundamental problem.
I believe you are completely correct; one often remarked-upon example is lottery winners, who receive a massive lump sum and often end up broke anyway. This is not due to the nature of the lottery cash, but the nature of the people who buy lottery tickets.
I don't know what the parent commenter's life is like so I hesitate to cast too much doubt, but I have found that people who mentally model "the poor" as "essentially like the rich, but without access to resources" have never spent a great deal of time interacting with or relying on poor people (or rich people, for that matter.) [1] In general, there is a far greater poverty of culture and spirit among the "wealthy-country poor" than any middle-class or rich person who hasn't experienced it can imagine. These are people whose great-grandparents were robbed of societal status through offshoring or legal mayhem, and whose subsequent offspring lived in derelict, unprincipled circumstances for decades as the country crumbled around them, and that doesn't even touch the trouble of drugs.
There are many poor people for whom hard cash would transform their lives and the lives of future generations, but by and large these are not the poor people committing the majority of crime and decay visible to the upper classes. For the majority of the "troublesome poor", you could stick them in mansions with bank accounts stocked for six generations, and in two years you'd still have trashed, overgrown real estate and overdraft fees. [2]
[1] = This is specifically restricted to the poor in wealthy nations; poverty in the form of "living poor in the wild country of my ancestors" is different than poverty in the form of "living poor in a wealthy city", which is why dirt-poor immigrants to the US often succeed immediately--their principles and convictions are set up for success, they just needed access to easy money.
[2] = The analogy I most like to use is the bathrooms at my old high school; due to a series of naive clerical decisions, the advanced classes took place on the highest floor of the school, and the basic, remedial classes on the ground floor of the school. The bathrooms on the third floor were mostly clean and working, while the bathrooms on the first floor were perpetually filthy, broken, and covered in graffiti. They were each cleaned at the same rate, but the users of the first floor bathrooms grew up with expectations of trash and graffiti, and thus perpetuated their own dispiriting environment. Money or access to cleaner bathrooms wouldn't have changed their behavior; only a deliberate and manual restructuring of their value systems would, and that is not a hands-off task.
I am astonished to see that you apparently work for a police force. Do you seriously believe that endemic poverty in England can be remediated by regular direct cash payments?
Direct cash payments plus "no broken windows" social policy would be a good start. That's how you can reasonably kickstart widespread social trust and social capital formation.
Money is practically the only thing that does help, not that people won’t find some way to reallocate that money into their own pockets in a hurry. Most poverty reduction schemes are a way for the privileged to put themselves inbetween the poor and the money on the grounds that the poor would spend all their money on drugs or something.
> Also, I find the argument against "victim blaming" silly. Whether or not your the circumstances of your life are your fault, they are your repsonsibility. Who else should be responsible for your life?
This stands out to me too. I've always told my kids that they are responsible for everything that happens to them, including by chance.
I get downvotes for that view a lot. It baffles me.
What exactly does it mean, for you, to say that a person is responsible for a thing?
To me it means things like: you can reasonably be blamed if it's bad and praised if it's good; you have/had the ability to influence it a lot; someone wanting it changed would be well advised to go to you for help; it's the way you wanted things to be, or at least a predictable consequence of the way you wanted things to be.
If something happens to me by chance then by definition I didn't have the power to make it different, there's no point praising or blaming me for it; it has nothing to do with what I wanted.
(There are intermediate cases. Suppose I deliberately created a situation where a particular thing was more likely to happen, and it happened. Even if the processes leading to the thing happening were random, I could still be somewhat responsible for it. That's why there are laws around things like recklessness and negligence.)
If you reckon that everything that happens to you is your responsibility, it sounds as if you mean something very different by "responsible". But what?
another way that word is commonly used is to indicate the person who has a responsibility; the one who is tasked with handling a situation. ie "who is responsible for cleaning up this mess?"
I take it that's what was meant by the notion that you're responsible for everything that happens to you. In this case it has nothing to do with praise or blame. Rather, it means that whether something happened to you by chance or through your own fault, the onus to clean up the mess falls upon you.
Hmm, maybe. The way I'd say it is that dealing with whatever happens to you is generally your responsibility, not that the things that happen themselves are.
("Generally", not literally always. Extreme example: If you get hit by a car and your injuries put you in a coma, then both fixing the injuries and taking action against the driver if appropriate are necessarily other people's job.)
How are they responsible for what happens by chance? Do you worry your kids will grow up to idolize lottery winners? How do you think this attitude helps them?
As far as I can tell, my choices for dealing with injustices and terrible coincidences in life are:
1) to assume someone else is responsible to solve the problems for me, or
2) to assume I am responsible to solve my problems.
The former winds up leaving me bitter and angry with others in my life for not doing their job and taking care of my problems.
The latter helps me develop a sense of agency and helps me cope better with injustices and uncontrollable hardships in my life.
In this perspective, "fault" means "who caused this problem?", while "responsibility" means "who should try to solve the problem?"
Thus, taking responsibility for your problems doesn't mean assuming guilt for their existence.
This also applies in an inverse way to fortunate coincidences - in your lottery example, this mindset would say "I did not earn this money, so I'm not going to take pride in having won it, but I am responsible to use this money well."
This attitude also doesn't mean absolving wrongdoers of the harm they've done. Taking responsibility for healing the hurts others have done you may often include telling third parties about the harm and seeking help in repairing the injustice and preventing similar ones for potential future victims.
As that implies, "taking responsibility" for your problems also doesn't mean solving your problems solo. If help is offered, take it! If you need help, ask for it!
Just don't sit around waiting for someone else to deal with the hardships and problems for you, because that leads to despondency, disempowerment, and hopelessness.
That's how this has worked in my life, anyway. I really wish I'd been raised with this idea - I didn't encounter it until my mid-thirties, and it was a significant discovery for me.
I’ve grown very suspicious of utilitarian mindsets which essentially function by deluding yourself into something useful rather than truth being the motivating factor. Some people are actually disempowered and hopeless and delusions of agency are going to just inflict psychic harm upon them. I’ve seen severely disabled people take care of from cradle to grave for instance, trying to get them to take responsibility when bad things happened to them was just cruel typically.
I’ve been in situations in my own life where my situation was literally hopeless and I had to simply wait to get beaten badly enough that the authorities around me couldn’t ignore it. There was no third party to consult, no future victims to prevent (terrible burden to put on people by the way), no help to be had, I really had no real options. Sometimes all you can do is bide your time and taking responsibility is a stamina sapping waste of energy.
Agency isn’t simply a thought exercise and it’s not productive to simply just imagine that you have it. Taking the bitterness and anger you have at others not doing their jobs and directing those impulses inwards is hazardous and should be approached with caution.
I'm in no way trying to say that anyone can get themselves a good outcome by trying hard and believing they can. That's obviously fiction.
I understand, too, that I have freedoms and opportunities most humans never get, and that I can't truly understand the experience of someone who has been abused and beaten down, or of someone deeply disabled and unable to perform the basic mechanics of survival on their own.
I do understand that it's clearly a bad idea to tell people that they can do things the world has not left them with the capacity to do. You're certainly right that in many cases agency is partly or mostly lost, and then there isn't much can a person can actually do to help themselves. I'm sorry to hear that's something you've experienced.
I'm not suggesting that others should try to push the attitude I'm trying to describe onto others. I'm saying that I've found it very helpful and I'm trying to explain why.
I'm not recommending pointing bitterness and anger at yourself. Humans often do horrible, reprehensible things, and they should be held accountable for those things. We should never hold ourselves at fault for others' abuses, we should not pretend they haven't harmed us, and we shouldn't repress the emotions we feel in response to the mistreatment and abuse we experience.
I'm just saying that you can take responsibility for taking care of yourself, as much as you are able, while accepting any help and support you are able to find or that others offer.
The only alternatives I can see are counting on others to do it for you or giving up entirely.
Marx's studies show that the existence of unemployment in those not disabled was a category created when the capitalist ruling class displaced the feudal ruling class ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). One purpose of it is as a wedge in the "lutte" of a worker creating wealth - between the worker keeping the wealth they created in wages, or it being sent as a dividend of profit to an heir.
More importantly, Marx noted what is quite obvious, but not in the quotidian hegemonic discourse - that the idea that a mine worker is poor as he does not own the mine he creates wealth in, whereas the heir is rich, as he does own the mine the worker creates wealth in, is fetishism. The focus on ownership of objects as opposed to human relationships is fetishism. There is a relationship between the worker and the heir, there is an expropriation of the surplus labor time of the worker by the heir. This focus on various objects is fetishism. It begins to reach its zenith in the modern age with concepts like intellectual property.
So this discussion is in this context. There are those in the poverty class, and those in the class of heirs, and a professional/managerial class and a semi-skilled working class, and these classes have relations to one another. The class mindset of the various classes flows from their relationship to one another in the context of the means of production.
> It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face. How did such a belief become commonplace?
Since it's true? You try doing anything while believing you'll fail and can't achieve anything. Then try doing it while believing you're really good at it. The results are obvious.
No shit you can't use a "proactive mindset" for a free "get out of poverty" card whenever you want. It just helps not to despair and make do with what you've got.
One thing that helps the poor a lot (everyone, but especially the poor) is functioning, competent institutions.
Things like effective policing and crime prevention, a functional healthcare system, competent teaching in schools, sufficient childcare options, little to no corruption, wide availability of credit, a good transportation network, zoning laws that permit cheap and sufficient housing, employment laws that don’t make low-value labour too expensive to employ, etc.
When these institutions are not working well, they represent a “drag coefficient” that well-off people can just pay their way out of (complicated tax forms? Pay an accountant $2k, solved) - but for poorer people these can represent existential hurdles.
Making institutions perform better (or offering entrepreneurial alternatives) is measurable, empirical, and does not rely on any psychosocial assumptions to produce an effect.
Example:
“How hard is it for someone who is barely literate and is working 50 hours per week to get and keep a driving license?” If the answer is “hard” that’s a big drag on poor people. If they could do minimal paperwork, do the test for free on nights or weekends in cheap rental cars close to where they live or work, etc. that is a massive boon to someone whose next step up the ladder is to get a driving job.