The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.
The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly.
Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.
I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.
We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.
The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population.
When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.
When do the greater communities need to pay their dues?
Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights.
Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts.
This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.
Schools in the US cost more than schools in any other developed nation.
Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system.
For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well as they did before with a 20th the staff.
At this point everything is so bad I'd support sortition for every public managerial position. You can't do worse than what we have today.
As an anecdote on the topic of education, as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in rural South Korea in the 1970s, I routinely visited secondary schools that (at the time) were little more than drab warehouses for large (-70 students/class) using ragged textbooks and ancient furniture. Spirits were high, though, and these farm kids were successfully learning math through basic differential calculus plus a daunting array of other subjects.
Thereafter, I have only felt (perhaps unfairly) mild contempt for the perennial whining of US critics who blame low funding for educational failing in the public schools. In my opinion the blame lies elsewhere, starting with the family.
A quote I once heard applies here. "All a preacher needs is 4 walls and the good book, and willing souls"
For most of school, all you need is paper and pens and a place where to meet. A notebook costs a dollar. You can also do quite a bit of lab science prior to college at home, and music only adds the cost of the instrument.
I have done tutoring in parks and coffee shops and in some of those sessions seen more learning than the most expensive classroom.
It's about the kids and the teachers, not the campus.
If you want a really really good school at a really low price, eliminate the building and all support functions other than hiring new teachers, and redirect all of the extra money to teachers salaries. Then just meet in libraries, parks, coffee shops, and the houses of parents and teachers.
99% of the outcome comes from the teachers (being competent) and the students (being motivated).
If all data sources indicate that domestic culture is the single biggest differentiator to educational attainment, who are you suggesting we blame besides the stewards of said domestic culture?
Go to school, get good grades, don't borrow money, look after your health, get a job, be polite, pay your taxes - these are all the fundamentals of a good culture and are massively predictive of success. Lots of this advice is millennia old. It's not the role of a liberal government to culturally indoctrinate its people.
I'm sorry I also don't have sources for the fact that water is wet and the sky is blue.
If you think that every major project from federal to local government being delivered over budget, behind schedule and with fewer capabilities than promised is a dog whistle I have a perfectly functional bridge in Baltimore to sell you.
How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes?
In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimately bankruptcy if it can't work. Where in the public sector is anyone held accountable for failure? When will we accept that simply throwing more money down the pit won't solve what is a multi-faceted issue that primarily isn't about money?
The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting on Twitter we can afford to eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and untreated /under treated medical conditions.
My wife's family fostered and the only thing that happens is the kids eventually get sent back to the families. Even families who have abused the kids multiple times. We don't have an answer to kids from bad families. The state can't overcome bad parents.
Anecdote is not data. States cannot afford (in dollars and beds) house every kid they are justified in taking from guardians. Increase the budgets until they can and fund solutions that reduce violence against children. Not as easy as just hand waving about bad parents and might also require evaluating your prejudices.
Two of the kids later died in parental custody after being returned. I'm not sure what prejudices I should evaluate. My experience is that Indiana CPS has a hard job and can't get it right in a lot of cases. We don't have a vast array of foster parents ready to handle kids with a lot of issues nor do we really have orphanages anymore. You number 1 most import part of life is having good parents who care for you regardless of their means there isn't a system that can fix that.
There is no amount of money you can pay someone to make them genuinely love a child. Employees do a job, you can throw money at the same employees, or more employees, but children need better parents.
Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.
You’re joking right? How many religious officials have been convicted for child sex abuse? I’ve lost count. Churches are social control and tax evasion devices. Their positive impact on communities is grossly outweighed by the harms.
There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.
> I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care.
With:
> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore
is a truely weird logic to me. Is it related ? Or are you offering to let kids get credit lines and suspend them over their mismanagement ?
That could actually be a great idea TBH. And while we're at it, adults could also get suspended or have to attend additional courses, instead of getting thrown into debt spirals.
I went to primary school in the 80s and 90s and even back then it was pretty hard to be held back a grade level. Typically it only happened when a kid missed a lot of school, like they were hit by a car and spent 2 months in the hospital. Failing grades alone didn't usually cause it, at least the kids who seemed completely uninterested in school still somehow managed to graduate.
"Everybody is a unique snowflake" attitude is causing way more problems then we publically admit. Setting boundaries is important. As is seeing the consequences of your own actions. I was held back in school for a year. Looking back, this was one of the most important things in my school time. I am glad it happened.
In both cases the point is benefit the system at the expense of the child with the issues. One kid should not be allowed to ruin a class. My kids school has emotionally disturbed kids in the classroom making it impossible to have regular lessons.
When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me. I also think alternate school is a reasonable answer for kids who are violent or have been otherwise expelled. I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
You’re continuing to argue based on your predilections. I’m using wide ranging academic studies. Your experiences are not relevant to the discussion because you’re not bothering to evaluate your experiences in the context of the literature. Bad faith is looking likely, low effort is certain.
The only thing I ruined for other students when I was in class was forcing them to look at my stupid haircut. My punishments were for truancy. I went to school, but spent all of my time in the computer lab because with severe ADHD without any academic support rendered class pointless. One crusty old Korean War vet teacher flat-out told me he "didn't believe in IEPs," and the administrators refused to even address the problem. I never once started a fight, brought drugs to school, or had a gun. While people found me pretty intimidating looking at first, I had a genuinely warm, mature, and mutually respectful relationship with damn near anybody I interacted with. No students really had a problem with me, but the adults actually enjoyed interacting with me more. Most teachers, administrators, librarians, etc would stop me for a quick chat to catch up, talk about current events, or whatever if we passed each other. I didn't ruin shit, and neither did a hell of a lot of other kids that were punished because the school didn't hold up their end of the bargain for academic accessibility.
> When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me.
Whoa there straw man. It's completely ridiculous to lump academically struggling kids or kids with run-of-the-mill behavioral problems in with kids that bring deadly weapons to school. Nobody is arguing that kids who bring guns into school should be sent on their way after a stern talking to.
Also, nobody said that alternative schools weren't on the table. I, myself, graduated in a night school program designed for failing high school students who'd been successful at work, and it was a phenomenal experience. They gave us a lot more leeway and expected us to do schoolwork mostly independently while working at least 20 hours per week, and we'd fail the entire term for all classes if we missed a single assignment. It was precisely the lack of patronizing meddling you're advocating for that allowed hundreds of kids to graduate through that program.
> In both cases
Kids are generally held back because they're struggling with the material, not because they're being disruptive. How exactly does holding a kid back help the system if there's any expense to the child?
> I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
I'm glad you think so, but that doesn't actually counter any of the data presented.
We are talking past each other. Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
I don't actually think we are. If you've made a point I haven't addressed, I'm happy to address it.
> Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Did you read the paper in the comment you replied to? Because empirical evidence doesn't support that.
> Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
Still betting you didn't read those papers. Suspension/expulsion is absolutely one of multiple ways to remove a kid from the other kids. Unfortunately, it's one that necessarily removes any help or actual behavioral correction the kid could have gotten, and they're waaaay more likely than most other kids to need more intensive help. Suspension is a codified way for schools to abdicate their responsibility to manage the environment within the schools. So you responded to it? Great. You're not the ruler by which everyone is measured, and the data doesn't support your anecdote.
> I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
Zero people here are arguing that kids with disruptive behavioral problems should be in classrooms with mainstream kids. You're the one saying that suspensions et al are the best way to solve that. They weren't when I was in school, and they aren't now. Schools not having the funding or the staff to do what they need to do doesn't turn a harmful non-answer into an answer, or make it less harmful.
> We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
Sure. For most of the past 30 years we've been indiscriminately handing out suspensions and failing to offer support for kids that need it. My entire high school career happened squarely within the past 30 years. Maybe we should try looking at the data we have rather than just saying what feels right and doubling down on the back in my day tough love nostalgia.
As someone subjected to both of these actions, plus expulsion, in lieu of anybody bothering to try and figure out what was wrong, that certainly rings true. However, people just really really love a) nostalgia, b) validating their compulsion to inflict the same pain they experienced as children on young people, and c) watching people in out-groups get punished. It's a lovely thought, but I'll believe that there have been real changes, rather than overblown facets of moral panic about abandoning those bad habits, when I see them.
A) Suspension is a great way to pretend you're addressing a problem while sweeping it under the rug. If the administrators aren't willing to mediate conflict among students, they should find another line of work. The school has a responsibility to educate their students. If they fail to do that for a student without finding alternate placement better equipped to handle whatever problem they face, they failed in their responsibility.
B) If a student has a consistent enough problem with antisocial behavior that they require constant intervention, they should be in a non-mainstream classroom or school that can address that problem while still fulfilling their responsibility to educate them.
C) There's a whole lot of punishment doled out in schools for non-violent conduct violations. Caught skipping class? Caught vaping in the parking lot? Dress code violation? Caught copying someone's test? Caught using a phone multiple times when you're not supposed to?
You seem to be deliberately implying that questioning any suspension means you support violence in school, which is completely ridiculous. Everything in life can be turned into a black-and-white issue if you ignore enough details and context.
There was a lot of violence in the school I went to growing up. We had kids bussed from jail. The idea of suspension is 1 get the kids and parents attention and 2 to get the kid out of the classroom. Minor discipline problems should be handled differently but at some point you have to remove disruptive kids from the classroom for the sake of everyone else.
That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.
Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.
The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.
> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care
The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?
Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.
I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s).
Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.
I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.
Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.
Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.
You focus on banking, I’m talking about budgets. Do you track every cent in and out and have a quarterly updated forecast of your financial position a decade out? How close are you to that? If your answer doesn’t include a spreadsheet of some sort you’re not budgeting but taking a shortcut on faith your intuitions are correct.
Did you get taught how credit applications work, how banks determine credit worthiness, how to depreciate an asset, how to calculate lifetime cost of a vehicle, how to draft a bill of materials for a project? All things everyone should be able to do. It’s the lack of these skills and the cost of living crisis that creates ripe markets of ignorant people to exploit for profit through their financial mistakes.
Your school offers home ec? Mine dropped it forever ago. Only the trade school kids learned anything more hands on AP chem.
Cars are more reliable sure, but less maintainable in a home garage. I didn’t bring them up because the best argument I have for cars is repealing cafe and taxing cars annually with a multiplier for wheelbase squared x miles.
No I don't budget to that degree. Neither did most people 30 years ago.
I put a percentage of my income into an investment account automatically every payday and forget about it. What I have left is my spending money. That's very simple and tends to work for me.
My bank app does that stuff automatically. They have identified and classified pretty much all merchants so the app can breakdown spending and tell you exactly how much you spend on essentials, restaurants, alcohol, etc.
You get the same info as your spreadsheet, but without any work.
> Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.
> You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.
Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.
Society is consciously created by the active participants in that system. Government fails to hold them accountable for directly creating unwanted outcomes. Task companies with robust interoperability and let’s see how that goes.
If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now
Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.
Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated?
It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved.
It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now
I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.
Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.
Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.
I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
I'm not suggesting it is a good idea, it was just to illustrate the difference. He did learn grammar and went to university.
I'm pretty sure he is equally stubborn and hot headed as his dad if not more so. Now that I think about it, he even believes in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. ha-ha
It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization.
I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.
I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.
1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.
3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.
You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.
These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
> Teach conflict resolution skills to young children.
This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged children because we neglect to introduce them to their inherent agency in conflict.
There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say about you isn't either. Again, these should come from parents.
In the child world, sometimes you tell the adults, but they don't do anything, and the abuse continues. That's at least my experience with bullying in primary school. "Conflict resolution" and such virtue-signalling buzzwords don't work against violent bullies.
Sometimes the only resolution for a conflict is murder. Even in non stand your ground states.
I do not think you understand conflict resolution and should probably study it a bit before speaking so authoritatively. The basic gist of it is to identify the root cause of contention and identify the best practical solution. Most people bad at managing conflict fail to correctly identify the cause and empathize with the opposing view. Keep in mind - you do not need to agree with a perspective to understand it and failure to understand the other party is a responsibility shared jointly regardless of righteousness.
How would you attempt “conflict resolution” with primary school bullies?
Sometimes the only resolution to violence is (threat of) superior violence. If you’re a child and a group of kids attacks you, that’s “adults resolving the situation”. Anything else is a failure of the schooling system.
It's telling that you seemingly only think of extreme cases when it comes to conflict resolution, and not all the mundane conflicts kids get into, eg arguing over who gets to play with a toy, arguing over who's whose friend etc, teasing that doesn't rise to the level of bullying, or kids interacting with/being watched by someone who is both meaningfully older than themselves and is also too young for the kid to acknowledge them as having authority (eg an older cousin), or teenagers arguing over/teasing over crushes etc.
These are all things kids need to have the freedom to learn to resolve without a parent just jumping in all the time.
Such conflict resolution can come handy in adulthood for things like dealing with angry/complaining customers, miscommunications causing arguments, professional disagreements etc. I've seen so many people who are completely unable to do conflict resolution of any sort, everyone's always walking on eggshells around them knowing that any conflict is going to end up blowing up into full "Karen"-esque argument.
The role of law enforcement is rarely about direct intervention to stop criminal behavior (or in your example, violent bullying). They investigate and, potentially, punish criminal behavior that has happened in the past. They act as a deterrent to crime, but also to vigilante justice.
Conflict resolution provides the potential victim with agency to intervene in a situation on their own behalf. Of course, this doesn't preclude the option of calling the police. Why not expand someone's options for keeping safe?
We deal with a lot more conflict than you're accounting for.
Someone can be shouting at a waiter at a restaurant and people around will try to deascalate and help or consolate the waiter.
Af short fight breaks ? People close enough to the participants will act, and bystanders might stay as witnesses to not make it a "he said she said" situation etc.
In general people aren't playing heroes but will do a ton of small and cumulative effort to make tensed situations not expand further into chaos.
Not to mention, easy to find some killed by the very police they themselves called.
Aderrien Murry, 11, called 911 for help at his home in Indianola, Miss., last weekend. But after police arrived, an officer shot him in the chest. The boy is recovering, but his family is asking for answers — and they want the officer involved to be fired.
A Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a 27-year-old woman who had called 911 to report that she was under attack by a former boyfriend, police officials and lawyers for the victim’s family said on Thursday. Records show the deputy had killed another person in similar circumstances three years ago.
You clearly have no experience with what you're talking about.
In the low income neighborhoods near me, in which my sister lives (of her own free will, despite other options) due to chronic cognitive issues, the police are visiting constantly. People in low income neighborhoods call the police all the time. Surveys show that most low income people in dangerous neighborhoods are in favor of more, better policing, not less.
I recall trying once, it got to the principal level. Nothing happened. The kids got a talking to by the principal, but their parents did not care. Child bullies have parents who do not care what their kids do.
Fighting back works - against a single bully. If there is more than one, they will make the fight unfair. After all, it is about dominance and not proving yourself.
Bullies eventually usually grow out of it. That is the fix in my experience.
A friend of mine stepped in once and was prosecuted for injuring one of the attackers. Took 4 month of uncertainty before he ended up with a medal and an apology but he was this close to ending in prison for it instead.
Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery.
> Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being murdered / assaulted means stores close down.
There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing what we're doing. Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls seem uncalled for given the data.
The point isn't necessarily that stores need to spring up nearby, the point is that it needs to be easier to access stores (eg by making it easier to get transportation).
Well in my experience the rich and poor rely on public transit in mostly similar numbers, so I don't really see what transit in particular has to do with it.
Ideally you'd want businesses to voluntarily operate in these places but it's hard to get them to. It is difficult to operate at a profit in these environments. Margins are worse because poorer populations can less afford luxury items. Costs are higher due to increase in theft, the need for additional security services, and insurance.
In recent years there have been high profile closures of big brand stores in major metro areas for exactly these reasons. Proposals to address grocery store closures include regulating them in San Francisco with a lengthy 6 month notice period and other requirements. In Chicago the idea has been floated for government run grocery stores.
While the jump to call such moves "the moral equivalent of slavery" is a bit extreme, they do exist in the realm of compelled behavior and against liberty. In the case of SF it's with regard to making it more difficult to exercise the decision to close a store, which may require the operator to take financial losses for longer and incur additional compliance related costs. In the case of Chicago, it's using tax payer money (which is collected through threat of incarceration) to operate a service that's traditionally provided voluntarily by a private actor because it yields them benefit (profits).
OTOH, if being a cashier at the 7-11 paid $100k/yr in hazard pay, I'm sure you could find people willing to work there. the only question is where that money comes from.
My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods.
Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the nuances.
> Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
I can't imagine anyone in a major US city spending 3 hours. Maybe rurally, but even the so-called 'food deserts' in a big city like LA ... it's just a few miles.
At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have. They're given meals and such (and they should be), but that is not going to solve a cheating father, a mother too depressed by said cheating to lift a finger to do anything (and maybe whoring herself out or doing drugs to damp the pain?), and a family that sees the child as a cash bag. I mean what are we possibly to do? You give the food and still the child doesn't get it.
I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
> At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have.
> I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
I feel like you don't know any better than these policy makers you are dismissing.
Canada is about to become a 2nd world country. No industry, no ability to own a home, no healthcare [1], only one party, banking restrictions, etc etc,.
Almost all of these make absolutely no sense, they sound like propaganda zingers, not actual reflections of reality. The housing crisis is the only thing you can reliably hold against Canada, but it's far from the only first-world country to be facing that issue. Canada currently has five parties sitting in parliament. What banking restrictions? (I have no idea what even is described here). As for healthcare, there is a doctor shortage but you will get treatment in an emergency, the biggest choke point for wait times is people moving and having to wait to get a GP assigned to them.
Yes, been waiting for that GP for about 6 years now… treatment for emergencies is great but they won’t do preventive checkups… I’d rather not have to wait for a thing to become an emergency.
Maybe banking restrictions refers to lacking a credit score when you land? No idea.
Thats not what a second world country is. Second world was used to describe Soviet Communist block countries as opposed to Western Industrialized Capitalist Democracies. Third World was everyone else, what we would now refer to as the global south (because apparently economist much like Eurovision organizers are a bit fuzzy on geography and seem to believe Australia and New Zealand to be somewhere in the atlantic)
I think they intentionally meant second world. They mention "one party" (presumably one political party), which was generally a feature of the second world instead of third. Additionally, the third world generally allows you to own your house, which is another one of their examples.
I live in Los Angeles. Driving to work takes 15 minutes. Taking the bus _home_ from work takes an hour. Taking the bus _to_ work would require extra time -- leaving early to make sure I don't miss the bus. And this is only a 3-5 mile ride, where the bus picks up half a block from my work and drops me off a block from home.
There's a shopping center with multiple markets and Walmart and Kohl's that the bus comes up along then turns away from on the way to work; I can use this as an example of shopping from home, as I can probably get 90% of my living supplies there. Ralphs, Target, Walmart, Kohls, Trader Joe's, etc are all here. The bus transfer here is not an easy one, though, as the bus timings overlap going in both directions, meaning you have to leave early and get back later (about 1 in 4 trips I can transfer without waiting. _Not_ good odds with an hourly bus).
0:00 5 minutes: walk to bus stop 1.
0:05 5 minutes: wait for the bus (best to be at the stop early in case your bus is early, though this bus is usually exactly on time)
0:10 10 minutes: take the bus to stop 2.
0:20 3 minutes: cross the street to get on the other bus
0:23 12 minutes: wait for the next bus 2, the previous one left while you were crossing (yes, seriously)
0:35 10 minutes: take bus 2 to stop 3 where the shopping center is
0:45 90 minutes: cross the parking lot to get to the store (5~10 minutes), then try and get all your shopping done in under 40 minutes so you can take the next bus back home. Nope, today you had to go to the supermarket pharmacy, which is a 20 minutes walk across the shopping center, wait for your meds, _and_ walk back to the cheaper market to do your shopping as well.
2:15 30 minutes: shopping is done a bit early. Yay. You have time to walk back to the bus stop and wait in the sun until the next bus 2 comes. Yay.
2:45 10 minutes: Bus 2 comes. Take it back to the transfer bus stop.
2:55 15 minutes: Cross the street again, and wait for bus 1 so you can get home
3:10 10 minutes: take bus 1 home.
3:20 15 minutes: Now you're a block away from home, carrying bags of groceries, _and you had to get off 2 stops early so you could use a crosswalk_, because there's no crosswalks on this street and people don't stop. Walk home.
3:35. Tadah. You're home. Just a bit over 3.5 hours!
Unfortunately, since you don't have a car, you're limited to buying what you can carry. I hope you're ready to go shopping again later this week! You have family? Oh, well then you'll be shopping again 3 times this week. Maybe even 4 times. I hope you like waiting in the sun/rain, LA Metro only puts up cover where they can make money off advertising, so all the bus stops we've used only have benches (except one, but that one's further away).
If all you needed was medication, you'll probably want to get your shopping done anyways, as this is otherwise a > 2hr trip just for that (remember, bus 2 is hourly, so you're spending an hour at the shopping center _minimum_, including walking to/from the bus stop).
There's five other stores across the street from the shopping center that you'd like to check out sometime, including a new grocery store, but it takes 20 minutes to cross the shopping center, then probably another 10 to cross the street and the parking lot in front of the other stores. Add the time spent in these stores, and you've just added another hour to your shopping trip. This is only _partially_ offset by crossing to the supermarket pharmacy, as that supermarket is nowhere near the corner, and keep on kind that anything you have to carry will slow you down more.
-----
Buses:
- Bus 1 goes EW near home, turns NS between home and the transfer point (about 10 minutes), then goes EW again.
- Bus 2 goes EW, turns NS between the shopping center and transfer point, and goes EW again.
- There _was_ a bus that went NS along the east side of the shopping center (which also would have dropped me off at home, cutting out the need for a second bus entirely), but this bus route was changed in 2019 to turn away from the shopping center once it gets to the NE corner.
- There's a bus that goes EW along the other side of the shopping center, but that's not helpful.
-----
You're forgetting about just how much convenience your car gives you _besides_ the ability to get to and from the store.
- You don't have to wait for transfers or make what is effectively two trips to get somewhere.
- You don't have to cross parking lots or go in and out of stores from the street (you can park up near the store, then drive to the other side of the shopping center).
- You can make a quick 5 minute stop on the way home without increasing your travel time by a full hour (because the bus only comes hourly).
- You don't have to wait outside.
- You don't have to hope that the bus was cancelled without notification (two weeks ago I was lucky to get a ride, as my once-an-hour bus was straight up cancelled without prior warning; if I didn't use the former-official Transit app to check times, I wouldn't have known, and would have been waiting at the stop for 80 minutes like one of my less fortunate coworkers did, or taking a different once-an-hour bus home with extra transfers and lots of waiting, to only get home ~10 minutes earlier)
- You don't have to only buy as much as you can carry on a single trip (I work in a grocery store, people can and do fill _multiple_ shopping carts to avoid having to go shopping a second time in a week. People can and do purchase groceries for elderly relatives they don't live with).
- if there's a detour, it only costs you the time it takes to make said detour. If the bus has to make a detour and you have tight timing, you might miss your transfer, adding 10-60 minutes to your commute.
- You're not dependent someone being willing to pick you up. When I was in college, a full bus would often just go right by without stopping, since there wasn't enough room.
- You're not dependent on your fellow passengers being rule-abiding or polite. Last year the bus driver stopped for an entire 50 minutes at a high school because the kids weren't being safe or quiet. Not that they're ever quiet, or that a full bus in general is quiet, but they were throwing condoms across an overcrowded bus and yelling, and the bus driver understandably didn't want to deal with it when _he couldn't close the door_, so he stopped and said those past the yellow line on the floor needed to get off and wait for the next bus. Instead, they made fun of him, continued talking loudly, and those near the door who shoved their way into a full bus refused to move. (The next month or so was _very_ quiet on the bus)
- general garbage is everywhere. The filth that people leave behind when they cram into a bus and then leave. The noise of competing music playing against each other. Having the choice to either get up and lose your seat, or sit with someone's butt in your face because another busy bus broke down and yours is the first/closest bus going in the same direction.
- All you want to do is go home and go to sleep, but you don't want to get the bus in your bed and this sweaty dude's been sitting here talking in your ear for 15 minutes now and you wish you hadn't offered him a seat, and as soon as he leaves you realize the person behind you is yelling on the phone and now you have a headache.
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problems severity.
> No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful
Yeah, no kidding. But why are they awful to begin with? I'd hazard that it's because families have been asleep at the wheel in teaching their children to be good citizens. The change for something like this comes bottom-up, not top-down.
You could try to boil it down to economics, but that's misguided. The markets are a terrible tutor of morality and accountability.
Fix the families, fix the society. Hold parents accountable. Teach morality in the schools. It's not slavery to do that. You're not harming anyone by teaching children to have a modicum of respect for their communities, elders, authority figures or eachother.
It's just crazy to see people who still have this kind of absolute flat earth perception of life. Right up there with "if we build more roads then traffic will get better".
Look at the "morality" of America's wealthiest and most influental citizens, and how rarely they are ever held accountable for anything.
Our nation has been rotting from its head for decades, and telling the plebes to be better citizens is pissing into a firestorm and thinking you'll accomplish something.
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problem.
Depends on what you consider a generation, but we've had more than seven generations in American history at this point with a mostly similar economic system that has produced massive growth. I say keep doing it.
> Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.
I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then, poverty in China decreased by about 85%.
> Between 1973 and 2013, the number of people in poverty in the US increased by ~60%.
You edited your comment. I believe it originally contained the text above.
I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not corrected for US population growth.
I also think the US vs China comparison is basically apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty.
Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
> It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty
Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of China's extreme poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given that there is a huge number of poor people in America.
> Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years going in the right direction and the west has spent 40 years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today". This is not true by any metric.
The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty, (see the great leap forwards). Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China. its not socialism pulling China out of poverty its mercantilism. As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?
> Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China
How does one export manufacturing? It is undeniable that that China has benefited from science and innovation, but these I would consider to be the fruits of all mankind. If anything, the west has tried its hardest to keep knowledge from China. China has only advanced by systematically breaking intellectual property law that the west set up with the intention of hoarding knowledge to ourselves.
> its not socialism pulling China out of poverty
As you would expect, since China isn't really socialist. That said, there is certainly something unique about China's approach that has cause it to be much more successful than many other countries.
> As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?
It should be a surprise. You cannot eat money. China consistently runs a trade surplus. That means that they give other countries more than they get in return. It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer. That the rich and powerful of our own countries discarded their citizens in favour of cheap Chinese labour. And so the benefit of all this free stuff which China has given us is focused into the hands of the few, rather than the many. This is sad, but not inevitable.
> The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty
Exactly. Just because a system lifts people out of poverty doesn't make it good. Yet the western system fails to even lift people from poverty.
By not doing it locally and purchasing it from another entity like China? they mean the export of the action of manufacturing and the associated benefits
So when I buy an apple from a shop instead of growing it myself, am I exporting apples to shops? No. The apple had to exist before I could buy it. Chinese factories were built by Chinese people and then the west began to buy products from them. We did not export those factories there. At most, showed China some of the knowledge required to build things. That's hardly an export, especially since a lot of this knowledge was taken without our permission and in violation of laws we set out to try and avoid other people getting it.
I suppose "coming up with the idea for something" is a good enough definition for exporting the manufacture of it, but it seems much simpler (and less egotistical) to say that "China used our scientific discoveries to advance itself" instead of "we exported manufacturing to China".
> It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer.
I mean... is it? I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.
The closest situation I can think of is when the west was dumping food in africa [0][1]. Which made it harder for local farmers to make a living and made the food problems worse.
Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production. And, in theory, China might be able to, in theory, do that. I don't know their elite culture well enough to say otherwise. But modern Western elites definitely seem too short sighted to give that sort of power, so the critique seems like it falls flat.
> I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.
Obviously this will be somewhat true in the short term, but there is no reason these people can't just retrain and start doing something different.
> Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production.
It wouldn't have to be autocratic. For instance, our system is not an autocracy, yet we chose to move manufacturing to China. Not every system that makes decisions is autocratic. People could just as easily vote to do something democratically if they know it is in their own good.
But consider what is really happening in these places. They have an economic system which makes decisions about the allocation of resources. In response to the addition of new resources, these systems decided to decrease production of local resources below existing levels, and hence make people poorer as a result. The issue here is purely one of distribution and management. Suppose in the trivial case of food being dumped in Africa, said food was instead sold below market rates, and the income from this was used to subsidise farms to bring their outputs to the same price as the aid. Local manufacture remains worthwhile, prices decrease, and supply increases. Everyone benefits.
I don't think it should be crazy to envision an economic system stable enough to allow people to benefit when you give them things for free. Especially since in the future, everything will be produced for free by machines. At that point, I should like everyone to live in luxury, rather than for everyone to be poor.
Pick a metric, it really doesn't matter. The claim that western economic systems are presently lifting people out of poverty is absurd, and my point is that China is responsible for the decreases in global poverty that have taken place over the last decades. Both of these facts are relatively uncontested.
I wasn't really intending to compare the countries. Just to point out that something which was being attributed to America (a decrease in poverty) was actually happening because of China.
This doesn't make sense. If your point is that global poverty is decreasing because people in China are moving from subsistence farming to factory jobs, then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing, i.e. not Chinese people.
But that point is a couple decades out of date by now and even then the situation was more complex than just "people in rich countries want cheap products, people in poor countries make them, therefore people in poor countries get richer, and people in rich countries get poorer".
> then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing
You know money is just paper, right? When we give China paper in return for something of value from their country, that is a bad deal for them unless they can trade the paper and get some actual good in return. China runs a trade surplus, which means they give away more than they get back, so it is actually a bad deal for them. It's one that makes their country poorer because they are giving away more than they get back. Almost all economists agree that China's trade surplus is bad for its economy, is even worse for its citizens, and should be reduced.
People in China were lifted out of poverty through the creation of manufacturing centres. These cities and factories were built by the Chinese, not by the west. It is ridiculous for us to try and take credit for their advancement when all we have done is exploit them.
It's Western economies that lifted China out of poverty in the first place. China's economic development was built on the foundation of being a cheap sweatshop for the Western world. We'll see how well they navigate the middle-income position they've managed to reach in the coming years.
Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed them to really make it in life instead of being stuck in the system. Weirdly, after some initial trouble that looked impossible to overcome, it was very simple to get them placed into our home, and, very simple to get them in with a relative. Most of that was the workings of the social worker assigned to them, who was hard to reach out to, and very clearly over worked.
Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your points.
I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who already struggle with math.
Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly should be done, is to create interactions between the kids who have poor situations with the kids that have good situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support to have a system where kids from the good side of town interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side product of the kids who have better situations being able to socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy, person to person.
I had a lot of what you're talking about in your last paragraph in our Air Cadet program. I was exposed to a lot of different people, both adult volunteers and peers, from different walks of life. It had a really positive impact on my life.
I'd love it if the government would throw resources at the problem, though. People act as if we're already flushing huge amounts of cash down the toilet of socialized benefits, but the fact is that the government has been extremely laissez-faire for decades. The midcentury boom was characterized by extensive intervention and public spending. There are much worse ways combat poverty than simply giving people public works jobs building the houses they need. Even direct cash transfers massively reduce the burden of poverty.
That's because Canada has safety nets for people. They have affordable healthcare and places to turn to if you're out of work and need assistance. It's because Canada is a compassionate society. It doesn't take this down right mean attitude of a "f-u" you're poor because it's your fault.
I think it's a compassionate society only when compared to the United States. Not if you compare it to a place like France, Germany or the Nordics. Those places have safety nets that Canadians would find unbelievably generous.
I'm 2 generations from immigrants on one side, 2 from pioneers and 1 from blue-collared work on the other. I wish more people could empathize with those who struggle within poverty as it is an incredibly hard row to hoe, not just physically, but also mentally.
I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.
I do like your thoughts on things the government could change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these things but have perverse incentives to keep the population stratified. This country would financially crumble without the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7 generations, if not more.
I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is actually a primary component of most govs immigration strategies.
I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too.
Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...
You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost.
To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
> The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal.
I don't think that's the topic at all.
I grew up in a high-ACE environment. Money was mostly not the problem, and to the extent that it was, relatively small amounts were what made the difference.
If anything, tackling these problems would result in massive savings. One of the core points of this is that Alex's childhood resulted in life-long impairments: lower education, lower economic productivity, higher personal and societal costs. That costs us both directly (lower output, lower taxes) and indirectly.
So the question I'd like everybody to sit with: If it would be cheaper long-term, why aren't we already solving these problems? Who benefits, and how, if we keep creating Alexes?
Almost all of these calculations work out extremely in favor of just giving the poor money. It's expensive to be poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all the homeless cheap housing for free is by far the better option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can't, because we like the suffering. That's it: Americans like it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that those other people can suffer even more.
To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?
It's not that the US likes suffering. No, the US likes their 7% ROI.
There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield? Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?
Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income, no matter how high an income you seem to get?
It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the consumers.
As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news flash - that money comes from society. The house that once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4 million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI money printer.
Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation. We narrowly achieved our soft landing, but that should have taught us that while sometime helicopter money works, it isn’t free.
Maybe if more of that PPE money had actually been paid to those that need it rather than the employers that pocketed millions instead it would have gone better.
Inflation wasn't caused by the giving, it was caused by the printing. The cure for that is to destroy money (taxation). If you tax the people you just gave to, that's just doing nothing with extra steps. So if you want to help someone by giving them money, you need to take that money from someone else.
Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive people to trade with consumer, in which case the inflation is cancelled out by the increased real productivity.
> Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation
> They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems.
Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive
Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor
Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan)
Just throwing money at a problem without attaching strings or directing how it's used is administrative complacency
If parent is obtuse, so are you. The topic is clearly not entirely contained in "spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal", if how you do it can either be understood as a "sacrifice" or something else entirely (though, to you, it might, if you don't care about the difference).
There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then there is also different ways of how we think about something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
You're always "spending resources", even when you decide not to spend time and money: in effect, you decide to expend some people's lives.
Is it effective?
Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?
(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
I dunno as someone who grew up with relatives who have been trapped in these cycles, I do think some of it is a choice. I realize people are affected by all kinds of things, but when things are given to you and you have no interest, it's hard to see that as anything but what it is.
But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.
Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay money so these programs exist. How would I feel better in any way? I certainly do not.
>Give a job or a good life to anybod
This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.
>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to
Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.
>The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced.
That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:
Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.
The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.
I do think the trend towards single parent and dual income homes makes all these things harder for parents. Clearly standard of living issues from lack of real income growth effectively filter down through parents into more of these adverse events.
Exactly, and I've always said the same thing about murderers. Why should we pay for police to catch murderers when the murderers could just not murder? This seems like a matter of individual, rather than collective responsibility. If they don't murder, it is better for us, better for them, and better for their victims. Why should we have to protect the victims of murderers when murderers could simply not kill people?
Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime. It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect the vulnerable from those who might harm them.
It would be better for society if someone inclined to murder did not. Police do not protect the victim of murder -- they are dead already.
Your view appears to say "society" (the police?) should "protect" children from their own parents, if they are deemed "bad"? The line for police intervention should probably not include "living in a bad neighborhood" or "being poor". Those strategies are tried pretty often by evangelicals who steal poor children from vulnerable countries/populations, yet are perceived as bad by most people.
If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
But if they could, they most certainly should. Preventing murder is good, just as preventing a bad childhood is good.
> Your view appears to say "society" (the police?)
The police are (or should be) an extension of society. They are a part of the government, which in a democracy means the represent the will of the people, and hence they are society manifest. There are other manifestations of society that can help these children (schools, social services, etc). I am obviously not suggesting that the police become child catchers and round up all children of poor people.
> If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
From my perspective, there is no "fault". Blaming people for things is unproductive. There are bad things which might happen, and things we might do to prevent them from happening. If we can sever this great chain of injustice of which you speak, where poverty and suffering are transmitted from parent to child like a disease; aught we not take that action? It is even in our best interest to do so, as those children who live better lives will go on to contribute more in taxes and more towards the betterment of society.
Government has the responsibility to provide access to education and make it as transient as possible in regards to class. But government by experience is usually also a bad legal guardian, even if the people involved really want to help these kids.
Perhaps they get lucky and grow up in a good adoptive family. But for the others there are a few things that are quite difficult to replace.
A democracy isn't a manifested society, it is a compromise of everyone involved. Ideally at least, the reality is more gray and even in a democracy a government doesn't have the legitimacy to do everything it wants. Further its ability to evaluate which children would benefit from more direct support is limited.
So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well.
> So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well.
Clearly. It was other people who started suggesting that the children of poor parents should be forcibly put up for adoption. I can't fathom why anyone would think this is a good idea or even worth talking about.
Ah, sorry, then I misunderstood your point. I though you were suggesting that it would be a productive thing to do. Empirical evidence of the past would suggest otherwise and I believe government only ever has legitimacy to remove children from their home when they are in acute and tangible danger.
Nothing that should be decided by some sensibilities du jour.
Of course! Poor children are innocent victims. But once they turn 18 and start having children, it's time those adults pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their deprived childhoods don't matter anymore. Flawless logic.
Those in poverty do have that time. Number of hours worked increases with wealth. Share of people working more than one job has fell since the 90s, and never exceeded 7%. Average commute time (one way) has been 20 - 30 minutes since the 90s.
You're pushing rhetoric, not reality. Which is fine, but I won't let you lie.
I dunno man I work way less than my friends who work retail/hospitality/labouring jobs etc. Maybe the top people in my field work loads but most don't. But more importantly, I sit on my ass all day. Being physically exhausted from being on your feet all day is simply harder to deal with. Furthermore, I can afford a lot of things that take stress off me. I can afford to buy quality premade food when I don't have time to make food. I can afford to take Ubers when I need to get stuff fast etc etc. When I was growing up I probably had food from a takeaway or restaurant like once a year and I often couldn't afford to take the bus. That erodes your time.
And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.
For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.
There are lots of interventions that show massive returns on investment in social welfare: a recent one has been extended availability of support for teenagers aging out of foster care, that takes their outcomes from something like "percentage who have become homeless within one year of their 18th birthday" from 70% down to 30%, and similar for arrest records and pregnancy among girls.
But, sadly, many people feel morally injured by spending money to proactively help adults who should be eating their own boots or whatever, and so it is less of a sacrifice to spend 5 times the money on jailing them instead.
Unfortunately it's not all economics. The prison system in the US exerts its power on the population using fear. The goal is to have a certain amount of people in prison, not to save money by getting them out. There are myriad ways to achieve reducing the prison population if that was the goal.
The argument of the data seems to say we should put resources towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood.
But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improvement units" per dollar?
Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"
>Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off"
I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to split and one was allowed to determine the split and the other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing. A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because of a sense of being slighted.
The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.
The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?
> The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
> I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
What do you mean huge number of people in many adverse experiences making it to college? If you look at the graph from 2011 with highest qualification obtained. There's probably less than 1 in 8 of the many adverse effects that obtained a college degree, while about 50% of the no adverse effects kids did. Those are huge differences.
Did you expect that none of the many adverse effects kids make it to college? That's the nature of statistics with humans, yes some succeed but the probabilities are so much different.
Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual human behavior do you, in particular the decision making process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the publication.
Yes, we can believe many things without any proof or justification. We call that religion, not "physics".
Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a personal belief, not some sort of universally acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
That's not the claim. The claim is that if you're born poor, your chances of being poor when you become an adult are much higher.
Perhaps you know that and still think that because the kid who is born poor "chose" to stay poor, but I hope no one capable of having a discussion about this topic thinks like that.
No, that is not the claim. That is a simple statistical fact that is obvious to anyone who looks at the data.
The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.
> folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states"
FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??
Where does this quote you have made up come from? I am directly quoting the comment I directly replied to, you seem to be quoting... absolutely nothing? It's not on this page or the main article at least. Or do you use quotation marks to mean something besides a quote?
If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.
My feeling is that dumbo-octopus wants to fight somebody who believes that we have no agency and that socioeconomic conditions entirely determine our future, but it's not working because there's nobody like that nearby.
My reply was to erikerikson, who I there directly quoted. Just because y'all jumped in in their stead does not make you authorities on their opinion. That said, I've been happy to disagree with the exact points you've made whenever you've made them. (Excepting, I suppose, your comment about the spirit of the edit, which I have no way to reasonably contest)
I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past.
It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:
> You have to balk when anyone says....
and
> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...
And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.
We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.
To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)
This is too simplified. What is the state of a person? It's an object of infinite information, the question what aspect you focus on is very non-trivial.
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life.
Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
I agree with you that like the post I responded to that my response is too simplified. I also agree with the post I first responded to that we are, physically or mentally and emotionally, in at least some regards never in the same exact state twice.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10 years ago.
If you are worried about physics, the most important consideration is your diet.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate?
If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
Whether it counts as a collective sacrifice would sort of depend how it balances against the benefits of living among a population with a lower desparate/safe ratio. It may well be a collective investment instead.
In every society, taxes and government are the lens used to focus collective social responsibility and direct actions that will benefit the society as a whole, and individually. Even in a collectivist society, some work is done to benefit a small group of individuals when it's deemed necessary by the society. And in an individualist society, effort is also undertaken to benefit the whole.
The questions you pose are good questions, but they can't be answered by this presentation. Even if you were to ask a much more "fundamental" or "simple" question, like "How much should we sacrifice for sanitation?", the answer is not clear, as it will vary by location and other criteria.
This presentation can't answer the questions, but it can cause us to ask them. Let's remember these questions and take them forward into our local communities, and try to focus more on local solutions, and less on one-size-fits-all.
Yeah, agree with you that if they used percentages - it would have been much easier to see - disagree with you about what their data is implying. Think it clearly shows that those with less adverse experiences have more success in life.
Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.
And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe 30% for multiple adverse experiences.
... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting that the older they get, the less the differences in income and other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.
I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves. The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real and making decisions.
The person in the story might has well have been me
- I repeated 7th grade
- Was suspended Multiple times
- Lived in 11 different houses
- Lived with a teacher for two months
- Good friend murdered
- Mom of good friend murdered by their Father
- Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly
I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I got out
What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.
Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being that way?
No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So unless you believe government = collective community then there’s nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen and conservatives keep standing on our necks
I mean you did join a government organization that provided a (more or less) guaranteed job and training.
Also, this is a genuine question, how much of the chaos in your life was due to financial hardship? Do you think just having more money would have lessened the chaos?
It’s far from a guaranteed anything actually but I understand your point that we can have a robust government that is useful as a bridge to the middle class - and that’s exactly what it is in a lot of cases
Impossible to tell unfortunately but it doesn’t seem like it in my case
>The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
What exactly would we be "collectively sacrificing"?
Something like, 1% higher taxes?
Same taxes, but the use of some of the public money currently massively wasted in all kinds of endless sinks?
The first part was responding to the idea that the internet hasn’t really gotten better for the consumer in the last decade, despite technological advancements. And I see the reason for that being the regulatory capture of the American government, which allows a few massive conglomerates to monopolize and organize cartels in various internet-adjacent domains. Any reasonable version of America would have invoked antitrust a long, long time ago.
The second part is referencing the specific problems most HNers see with the modern internet: giant SPAs with huge packet sizes and questionable, non-accessible, hand-rolled functionality. And I think the reason for that is that our system is barely functioning right now: we made stock buybacks legal again for some reason, and executive pay and shareholder dividends were already absurdly high. Big SPAs that supposedly do everything, and the mobile apps that they mimic, have become a way to lower expenses rather than an additive new medium for business. When was the last time you talked to a business on the phone?
Long story short, capitalism makes bad websites by underpaying, underhiring, and overspeccing.
Be careful because there are two many out of pocket amounts. One for in network and one for our of network. Most ACA plans that I can get in my state do not have an out of network max. That's a huge risk because most hospitals have out of network contractors. That means if you stay in a hospital that is in network, you'll still get billed separately for out of network care. And half the hospital staff might be out of network. So you can still go bankrupt in an in network hospital. The ACA really didn't do much to protect people from bankruptcy.
That "tax cuts for the rich" line buds me so much. Republicans do not simply cut taxes for the rich. I've looked at income tax tables going back to the mid 70's. It's clear that Republicans cut taxes for all, not just the rich. Regan , G.W. Bush, and Trump cut taxes for the poorest, Middle class and the wealthy. I don't know of any case in the past 50 years when Democrats have cut taxes for the poor, though Obama did continue the Bush tax cuts.
Now if that's a good policy to cut taxes and spend as much as they do (Trump especially), that is another question.
They do throw a couple bucks to the poor and middle class so they can say that, you've got me there, but you should be able to see in your explorations of the historical tax tables who is getting the biggest benefit.
This has been the dynamic long enough that I can remember an SNL skit from 20 years ago about how bad the Democrat's messaging was on the subject. Something like the Democratic leadership of the time cutting ads about how the rich could use their tax cut for a full-service holiday at a brothel, while all the middle class could get from their cut was a lousy handjob. Obviously it was amusing enough to stick with me.
Thank you! I was just watching Oppenheimer yesterday, and cringed at the part where he points out that Alfred Nobel invited dynamite as a reason he might get the award for the A bomb. It's a silly idea. As you put it, it's a quirk of history. Interesting, but not relevant.
Isn't this rejected by the study. If poor people have less to lose, then why doesn't the data show that increasing their wealth reduces their crime rate? If they are awarded more money, then they have more to lose, yet their rate is crime forward but decrease according to this study, no?
I've been using swipe on Android for almost a decade and it still features me. Sometimes it works well. Other times it mangles almost every word in a sentence. I've sent thousands of embarrassing messages over the years, but I can't imagine doing regular typing all the time.
Google always does fake advertising. “Unlimited” google drive accounts for example. They just have such a beastly legal team no one is going to challenge them on anything like that.
What was fake about unlimited google drive? There were some people using petabytes.
The eventual removal of that tier and anything even close speaks to Google's general issues with cancelling services, but that doesn't mean it was less real while it existed.
What about when gmail was released and the storage was advertised as increasing forever, but at first they just increased it infinitesimally slower and then stopped increasing it all.
I don't remember the "increasing forever" ever being particularly fast. I found some results from 2007 and 2012 both saying it was 4 bytes per second, <130MB per year.
So it's true that the number hasn't increased in ten years, but that last increase was +5GB all by itself. They've done a reasonable job of keeping up.
Arguably they should have kept adding a gigabyte each year, based on the intermittent boosts they were giving, but by that metric they're only about 5GB behind.
I really like some aspects of this, but I don't understand the incentives. If I own a home, I want to know everything about it. However, if I'm selling a home, I don't want the buyers to know everything about it. I also don't want the sellers to learn something about it, that might be considered as having some bearing on the value of the house. In other words, I don't want to get caught knowing something that I should have disclosed but didn't. So as a home owner and potential seller someday, it's better not to make a record of everything because that could hurt me when I sell. It also doesn't benefit me at all to have helped the new owner.
This all might sound very cynical, but it really does seem like incentive misalignment.
I'm an ideal world, every home would have a permanent, up to date, digital record of all the relevant home info. Building planes, modifications, maintenance records, paint and shingle colors, wire and plumbing placement, maybe even a 3d model of the home with structure, plumbing and wiring info. Unfortunately, I don't see how a homeowner would be better off giving that info to the next owner.
I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.
The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?