Racism? It's Not How Good; It's Skin Color

Great no excuses. Could you provide evidence of these endless arrays of ways and means to leave poverty? I know it happens but I mean backed by statistics across a wide range of data and facts?

To borrow a stupid right-wing meme, you have not provided a shred of evidence to back any claim you have made. Could it be just your "feelz" with absolutely no basis in reality?

If not, I challenge you to provide evidence to show why not.

 

Are those 'struggling' people living within their means? Any iphones? Any fast food? Any meat in the diet? Any soda in the diet? Any hair styling? Any tattoos? Any obesity? And cigarettes? Any alcohol? Any new clothes? Any new shoes? Any new furniture? Any pets? Any vacations? Any huge refridgerators? Any air conditioning? Any clothes dryers? ALL of these are luxuries. If you choose (and ALL are choices) any of these, or several, or all .. you are in no way poor. It's a grotesque insult to the genuinely poor to suggest otherwise.

Meantime, if you come out of college unable to immediately secure work at above $80k, you clearly chose the wrong course. If the degree doesn't provide you with the certain means of repaying itself, you are too stupid to be in college. If you insist on going ahead anyway, you cannot complain when it comes back to bite you. CHOICES.

 

The same way we all do it. Work hard, stay married, don't have any bad habits, don't have children if you can't afford them, and live below your means. Then keep it up for years or decades. If you want the finer details, I'm happy to provide them. They're not negotiable, so it's not a wish list.

 

1) those who elect to indulge their drugs, rather than remain functional, are the ones who often end up homeless.

2) yes, people ARE opting out. every parent who doesn't parent properly is opting out. every person who marries a loser is opting out. every person who neglects their marriage is opting out. etc etc etc. these are what generational poverty is. continued poor choices to opt out. what do you think opting out means? and what do you think preservation of family looks like? it doesn't look like opting out - it looks like staying and behaving yourself.

 

So no evidence of your claims whatever just your opinion blaming the poor for their own poverty.

So you think the only people living in poverty are lose who have no phones, no fast food depsite many living in food desserts, no meat or pop, no obesity despite the fact obesity is a sign of the lack of nutritional diet

So people with absolutely nothing, no shoes no furniture, as if those living in poverty take vacations or the homeless are carting clothes dryers around with them. And what if people got tattoos before falling into poverty or one of your helpful stable family members helped someone out with new clothes or bought them a soda? That means in your opinion they are no longer poor?

So judgemental and with no idea what real poverty all around you is about. Poverty is about how much you live on a day compared to expenses not you opinion of what is poor.

I'll try again:

"You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain)."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-states.html

And you think people living in third world poverty don't eat meat and drink pop or have pets?

https://www.researchgate.net/public...Look_at_Impoverished_Versus_Affluent_Children

And if it's all about choosing poverty and drugs, why do so many in your country, the most materialistic, capitalist, country in the world, choose these things compared to other developed industrial countries?

Does that make sense to you or can you explain it?

Just blame blame blame while being compelely oblivious to facts. And what about all those children living in poverty? Are you going to condemn them as well for having shoes or haircuts?

 

So no evidence at all to back your claim just your opinion and moralizing about how others should live their lives. Yes, please provide finer details with some documentation or data.

Can you explain why so many living in the US, the most materialistic, wealth worshiping, capitalist nation in the world, are choosing to live in poverty compared to other developed industrial nations? I know in Canada rates of drug abuse are similar.

Why is the US so far down the list of developed nations in terms of poverty and mobility? Why do more people choose poverty there than almost any other western nation?

 

Yet still no evidence to support this rediculous claim just more moralizing and blaming. Fortunately, we have people who actually study these things so we don't have to take your opinion and finger-pointing at face value. We can actaully study the stats:

“The American Dream” is rooted in the idea of upward mobility, the idea that individuals and families can escape the confines of poverty and disadvantage through hard work and perseverance. How widespread is upward mobility across generations? How do parents’ socioeconomic characteristics influence their children’s success? Do children from more affluent families remain at the top of the economic structure? Are poor children able to escape poverty as adults? How does race impact income mobility, especially mobility out of poverty? Intergenerational economic mobility is a key indicator of the degree of equality of opportunity in a society. 8 Even though the limited availability of long-term, longitudinal data makes economic mobility research challenging, 9 social scientists have been studying intergenerational mobility for some time.

A number of researchers have investigated intergenerational economic mobility by examining the correlation between parents’ and children’s income and earnings. For example, Becker and Tomes report a weak correlation (0.2) between parents’ and children’s incomes. 10 By the 1990s, other researchers’ estimates of the intergenerational income correlation were stronger (closer to 0.4). 11 Mazumder, however, contends that traditional approaches to measuring the correlation between parents’ and children’s income and earnings tend to systematically underestimate this relationship, leading researchers to conclude that there is greater economic mobility in the United States than actually takes place. 12 Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) earnings data, Mazumder estimates a stronger correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings to be 0.6. 13 Thus, the literature suggests that the actual correlation between parents’ and children’s income ranges from 0.4 to 0.6, suggesting that intergenerational economic mobility in the U.S. is lower than previous studies found. 14 Mayer and Lopoo caution that all estimates of an intergenerational income or earning correlation can vary depending on the time frame used by the researchers. 15

Recently, Isaacs’ analysis of income mobility using data from the PSID differentiates between the absolute and relative economic mobility of children. For example, she reports that two-thirds of adult Americans earn more than their parents did 30 years earlier. Thus, in absolute terms, most adult children eventually have greater incomes than their parents. Isaacs, however, also finds that relative income mobility among children is limited. That is, children who were born to families at the top of the income structure have the highest probability of being in the highest income strata as adults, while those born at the bottom have the highest probability of being poor as adults. Isaacs suggests that “about half of the difference in income between families in one generation persists into the next generation.” 16

Studies focusing on the intergenerational transmission of poverty find that while individuals can break out of intergenerational cycles of poverty, they are less likely to do so than is commonly thought. 17 Moreover, when subsequent generations do escape poverty they are likely to move into the ranks of the slightly less poor. 18 Poverty exits depend on numerous factors such as educational and employment opportunities, the availability of role models, and child and parent aspirations, 19 as well as a child’s birth order and when in the child’s life poverty occurs. 20

Researchers also find that the intergenerational correlation between incomes and earnings vary widely by race. For example, according to Hertz, 17 percent of whites who were born in the lowest income category between 1942 and 1972 remained there as adults while 42 percent of African-Americans did so. 21 Similarly, in a separate study, Isaacs finds that not only do African-American children live in families with lower average incomes than whites, but “African-Americans experience less upward mobility and more downward mobility than whites.” 22 In general, scholars have found that race matters a great deal in intergenerational economic mobility.

Although researchers have examined how having poor parents influences the chances of being poor as an adult 23 and how the timing of poverty in childhood influences economic success in adulthood, 24 little attention has been given to understanding how the duration of exposure to poverty during childhood influences the chances of being poor in early and middle adulthood. In this study, we use data from the PSID to examine individuals’ patterns of exposure to poverty during childhood and how these patterns are associated with poverty status at the ages of 20, 25, 30, and 35. Because earlier studies have found stark racial differences in patterns of exposure to poverty and intergenerational poverty,25 we examine these patterns and associations separately for whites and African"

http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_909.html

"Though poverty has slightly declined in recent years, the US Census Bureau found last year that nearly 40 million people are living in poverty in America.

Poverty affects almost every area of life for Americans in every state and city across genders, ages, employment, and education.

See the different ways poverty affects Americans across the nation."

https://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-in-america-photos-2018-11

I can give you information to try and help you have a more informed less judgemental opinion but I cannot force you to understand it. Blaming people for their situation only widens the divisions in the US and causes further erosion of pubic life.

 

1) the evidence is all around you. overweight 'poor' people talking on their iphones while eating at Mickey Ds.

2) I said (which you evidently didn't understand, at all), that a person who genuinely wants to leave poverty would never waste a cent on any of those luxury items. if poor folk are wasting their money on such luxuries, then they are clearly not genuinely interested in leaving poverty. this is not 'moralising', it's stating an apparently painful (to you) truth.

3) no one in America has 'absolutely nothing' unless they're very very determined. even a homeless panhandler can make enough money to live quite well on beans and rice .. if they don't spend a cent on drugs/cigarettes/alcohol. but that doesn't happen, does it? why keep pretending otherwise.

4) if you literally regard fact and reality as 'judgemental', I suggest that the world isn't for you. ignore science .. particularly cause & effect. it will only upset you.

5) 'my country'? we don't have it as bad as America, but we're getting there.

6) if parents subject their children to poverty (and shoes - like clothes - can be purchased from charity stores, that's the point), while themselves making poor decisions, you cannot blame the world. You MUST blame the parents. and yes, blame is absolutely the right thing to do. remove blame from the sphere of human existence, and life as we know it will be over. what an outrageously absurdist and profoundly elitist notion .. that we must dismantle the very concept of personal responsibility in order to protect those least worthy from having their feelings hurt. not the slightest consideration of how we reached a place where can help those in genuine need (hint: by taking responsibility for ourselves!), nor the outrageous offense such ivory tower thinking causes to those who are in genuine need.

 

I didn't say how others SHOULD live their lives. I outlined the path out of poverty. You don't like that, because you recognise it as an uncomfortable truth.

If you want to know WHY you guys are self-indulgent, fat, and lazy - spend some time learning about what happens to social mammals when food and security come easy over a few generations.

 

Do you believe in free will?
“Reality is as flexible and as pliable as the mind that we use to perceive it. The self-doubts, anxieties, and judgments that so often dominate our consciousness can be restructured using the same mental tools that our brain employs to retroactively insert the perception of free will.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/neuraptitude/201608/illusion-choice-the-myth-free-will

 

Here I follow Dr Johnson: "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it."
Or, more succinctly, "Sir, we know our will is free, and there's an end on it."

 

Dr Johnson was a while ago.

 

But his wisdom lives on. Hey, I'm a conservative: what's true is not new and what's new is not true.

 

The argument around poverty can be epitomized in one question: do people respond to incentives?

A deeper discussion would get into the question of 'free will' -- not the old philosophical chestnut, but the question of why we do things that we know will eventually be bad for us, or fail to do things that we know will be good for us.

Why is anyone obese? Why do people risk their marriages for a quick liaison? Why do people smoke? Why do teenagers drive at high speeds?
The fact is that our actions are the vector sum of a thousand impulses, some arising from deep biological levesl, others coming down from the lofty morality we
were taught as children, influenced by the living examples we see around us, by the media, and by who knows what.

I have friends who have ruined their lives by bad decisions -- obviously bad at the time -- but the ruining was incremental: leave your nice middle class job to live in the country, working casual jobs as dog-walkers and baby-sitters and house painters; smoke some marijuana, and sell some to your friends; smoke a lot of marijuana; try something stronger; then something stronger still. Each bad decision just one step on from their previous condition. The end result was not where they would have wanted to be but the path there was clear.

Social welfare measures should not encourage this sort of behavior. There is probably nothing that a non-totalitarian state can do to absolutely prevent it in all cases though, if people are determined to consume and not invest.

I think the father of behaviorist psychology wanted to train children to exercise self-control -- to put off immediate pleasures -- through hanging lollipops coated with powdered sugar around their necks. Anyone who could refrain from licking the lollipop until the end of the day would get some sort of reward. I can't see that working in American schools, but it might be worth trying.

 

Reality is your proof.

 

Your strabismic claim here* goes far far past being, ridiculous, and I bet it is thanks to U.S. Slave Trade's White Privilege you've exercised for your entire life so far. And the title of this thread is a, reality, for that same exact reason.

Poverty is always a product of, racism, for Black citizens in a nation where for 400yrs now; it's not how good, its skin color. So you would do yourself a great, service, by embracing real facts about American life ---for those who do not get to exercise White Privilege. Yes. Every since Lincoln freed their ancestors, as White America then herded them into ghettos; the USA has made sure that their poverty remains generational and systemic plus has very little to do with personal choice.




* - denotes how my post here addresses only the fact that Black citizens should be exempt from your subset, although any non-Black/non-darkskin citizen is eligible to be included there.

 

So you are saying that no white people have ever lived in poverty?

And you are accusing someone who is more or less on your side of "white priviledge?

You'd do better to drop the race baiting and approach this subject as honest discussion.

Or are you just trolling?

 

You didn't outline a path out of poverty. You're throwing out your prejudices and misconceptions in order to demonize and disparage people in poverty with your own hatred. And you are doing so without a shred of actual fact or evidence to back up evem a single point you are trying to make.

And why are you calling me "self ?indulgent fat and lazy? Judging me through the same filter of misinformed contempt you hold for people living in poverty?

You don't know anything about me and you seem to know very little about the reality of poverty.

 

Don't see it. I see a lot of suffering as people try to survive an opioid crisis and systemic poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth. What you are describing are symptoms of poverty not causes.

Your unsubstantiated opinions are not "painful" to me though your bias and ignorance of the true nature of systemic poverty in the US is a little painful. You are literally saying that food and furniture are luxury items for families and children living in poverty.

If you think a homeless panhandler living on beans and rice is doing quite well, you are living a delusion completely divorced from the reality of poverty.

But nothing you have said is scientific. It is only your unsubstantiated opinion and likely not even yours but something that right-wing hate media has implanted in your brain. I have a background in science and worked at a university for most of my career. How about you?

5) 'my country'? we don't have it as bad as America, but we're getting there.

Not blaming the world at all. I'm blaming a system that always lead to greater concentrations of wealth and inequality and then blames the victims for the failing of the policy. Removing blame from the sphere of human existence and life will be over?? And not doing so is elitist?

Wow! Can you explain that so it makes any sense? Studying cause and effect honesty with facts and figures as I have tried to provide you is not absurdist.

Placing blame and demonizing people across the board without a stitch of fact or evidence can only lead to bias and wrong conclusions.

 

Nope, reality is subjective to the observer.

Actual evidence is what we should be looking at because opinions about reality are like @$$%&!^s. Everybody's got one....

 

Huh?

 

Just a thought, how is a homeless person to cook his beans and rice?

 

A very knowlegeable and experienced specialist in teenage development, said that the root of all poor decisions is lack of self-discipline. It doesn't matter what you're into, how you specifically misbehave, or what your goals are .. it all comes down to that. He said "the self-disciplined child will be the successful adult". In both the human spheres (intellectual, emotional, social), and the technical spheres (finances, academics, etc).