I guess that the mentally ill would have suffered an extreme ostracism and violence from the population, but I also think that some of the conditions that lead to homelessness (drugs, alcohol, financial problems) are very recent.
Yeah, it depends on the type of mental illness, I think. Addiction is obviously harder without easy access to the chemical/activity.
But even for something like depression, many of the behaviors that are known to help would be more prevalent/mandatory in small, close-knit, more primitive societies. For example, you'd probably be getting tons of physical exercise, getting good sleep without artificial light, have frequent contact with a close family/social network, and probably have a pretty fixed routine that would be expected of all members of your cohort within the community. I'm not saying those activities cure depression, but speaking personally and for close friends, those activities make a huge difference.
Sometimes it seems to me that histories like this put the weight of leaving poverty in the individuals himselves rather than the government social services, enforcing the myth that poor people is people that chooses to.
I don't believe that people "choose" to be poor, and there is an overwhelming societal component at play. But I can't say that the individual and their choices don't matter.
He admits he had problems with drugs, and that his life spiraled out of control. Do I think we should have treatment programs so it doesn't get this bad? Yes, of course. But some people don't think there's a problem, or need help until they hit bottom. It's part of their problem. Many times you can't commit someone to treatment against their will, at least in the US.
In this complicated world, where we view everything through our own subjective lens (consciousness), we have to admit that the individual has a role to play. How do they frame their reality? Are they giving up? Do they just feel "down on their luck"? Do they have that will? Why do some people fail in the face of adversity and others succeed? Are they just having "a good time" (with drugs)? Is there a mental illness at play? Understanding the problem is key to solving it.
If someone has completely given up on making their life better, then they are basically choosing to be poor, because their mind has accepted there is no other choice (no matter how slim the chance of success). They may not have any other choice but to be poor, but to stop improving basically ensures it. Some people lose the will to live, while others do not. (This isn't just people in extreme poverty either, but poor people marginalized by society, or people that become poor after being rich)
Let me just run a parallel to another public health crisis - obesity. I'm fat. Always have been. But the big difference to me is consciously making the choice I'm going to do what it takes to get rid of it. We all know that exercising and eating are in our control, they are choices we make. They might be painful choices, but we have them. But when we convince ourselves it's not possible ("it's genetic", "i'll never be thin", "i lack the strength", etc), we do give up, and that's basically losing the battle before you start. Sure, we could blame everyone who's putting bad things in food, and selling us french fries, but we also know that they wouldn't be selling them if they weren't so good. And that we all have a choice of how many times we eat them. Even if we only made healthy food, some people would still eat too much. There's always personal choice at play. If anything, society is the culmination of people's personal choices on a macro scale.
Do I think we need to help the poor and provide services? Of course. But we also need to give them hope. A lot of people don't know the government services that could help them, because they aren't looking, or have given up. Just getting services to people is a challenge, and relies on people wanting to accept help, and being able to accept those services to help get them back on their feet, and giving them the tools to stay on the up and up.
And the flip side of the coin is that the government needs to be willing to provide services, presumably because the government sees a correlation between choosing to help yourself, subsequently finding a resource that can help, using that resource to get help, and finally being helped and back on your feet, where the cost to provide sufficient help is less than the opportunity cost of having another person on the skids.
Everywhere has homeless. But places that offer little help have a lot more.
It's really odd to me that people read an article like this and jump to the assumption that the article is putting the responsibility for alleviating poverty solely on the poor. When you actually read the article, it doesn't imply anything of the sort (the closest I can come is the fact that the title has "instead of begging" at the end, but even that is stretching a bit). Particularly when the source is an organization whose About page says things like
"Helping secure legislation in the US, Canada and EU on transparency in the extractives sector to help fight corruption and ensure more money from oil and gas revenues in Africa is used to fight poverty."
and
"Successfully advocating for official development assistance, which has increased globally by $35.7 billion between 2005 and 2014."
It's pretty hard to draw the conclusion that they're some kind of bootstraps-only ideologues. Every time I see someone make a claim that an article about someone getting themselves out of poverty somehow implies that society doesn't owe the poor anything, I can't help but think it says more about the person making the complaint than it does about the article.
Probably it's me, because as you said there is nothing in the article that suggest a general idea like the one I exposed; probably I'm too pesimmistic.
It's always nice (and interesting) to see how different people interpret and feel histories differently.
> The correlation between parents' income and their children's income in the United States is estimated between .4 and .6.
> If a parent's income had no effect on a child's opportunity for future upward mobility, approximately 20% of poor children who started in the bottom quintile (in the bottom 20% of the US range of incomes) would remain there as poor adults. At the other end of income spectrum, if children were born into wealthy families in the top 20%, only 20% would stay in that top income category if their mobility opportunities were equal to every other child's in the country.
> But long-term income statistics show this isn't happening. Mobility opportunities are different for poor and wealthy children in the US. Parental incomes and parental choices of home locations while raising children appear to be major factors in that difference. According to a 2012 Pew Economic Mobility Project study 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults. Similarly, 40% of children raised in the top quintile (top 20%) will remain there as adults. Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults. Around twice as many (8%) of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom. 37% of children born into the top quintile will fall below the middle. These findings have led researchers to conclude that "opportunity structures create and determine future generations' chances for success. Hence, our lot in life is at least partially determined by where we grow up, and this is partially determined by where our parents grew up, and so on."
That is a correlation, not causal. Maybe (just throwing something out there) poor parent's children continue to be poor because the poor parents can't teach their children the appropriate life skills to save and earn enough money?
It's dangerous to cast blanket statements like that.
Some people end up in poverty by bad choices, sure. I don't think it's safe to assume that most "deserve" to be in poverty because of their choices. I think the more common scenario is mental illness develops > bad events happen due to mental illness and lack of treatment > job loss > more bad events/choices made out of desperation > repeat
And add in the fact, that until recently, insurance was available for only specific destitute or employees whom worked at jobs that provided insurance.
And we have a party that wants to dismantle everything, including Social Security.
I agree, but after reading articles like this I always leave with the impression that the personal change doesn't need to be encouraged by the society, and must come solely from the individual. Like other commenter said in the post, some people like the mentally unstable can't change without a lot of outside help.
do you athleticism at the pro level is achieved by personal abilities alone? what if you grew up in a society that doesn't value basketball for example, you will never have opportunities and support to develop a physical ability to reach pro level status. Societal conditions play a critical role in my example
You live in a class based society, poor people are poor because they were generally born into it and denied the privileged of the education necessary to escape it. Stop victim blaming.
I like to tell this to all the billions of people starving on the street around the world.
Poverty is not structural. It's the individual's responsibility.
Poor people just need some change from within to elevate themselves out the favelas of Rio, the Dharavi in India, the west side of Chicago.
The cancer they get from drinking polluted water, the failure of their body after being exposed to the elements, their family member getting murdered, dismembered, and hung from a bridge by cartels....could have been prevented if they had only just elevated themselves.
Who's saying it's their fault? The only thing I'm saying is that both descent into poverty and ascension from it can be due to personal action. Why do we have to choose 100% one cause or the other?
Your argument highlights a sensational occurrence to disparage an large group of people.
It's like saying all Muslims are terrorists, or all people on food stamps are lazy...
It's not an overtly lie, but taken statistically... it's definitely a lie....and false and misleading.
Poverty is without a doubt structurally caused around the world.
There are obscure cases of people who cause themselves to be in poverty but most people do everything in their power not to be in poverty...and are in poverty because they don't have opportunities...
Absolutely. Financial success requires determination, natural ability, and luck. But the popular narrative discards the last two and says that anyone can escape poverty--or be the next Bill Gates--if they just put their mind to it. Ergo, anyone who isn't successful is just lazy and deserves no help.
Still, it is nice to see people escape bad circumstances on their own, as long as we don't turn it into justification for selfishness.
Um, no, let's not fuck that. The way to help people get off the street is to help them access paid work instead of begging and instead of charity. Charity does not buy one a middle class lifestyle. You get that by working for it.
Why is this so very hard for so many people to comprehend?
i believe the narrative that everyone has to work for a living, and that the way to help everyone obtain the basic necessities of life is to somehow create jobs for them, is an increasingly dangerous fallacy. there is simply less and less need for everyone to be working in order to produce enough to support everyone, and the ideal producer/consumer ratio is only falling with every increase in automation.
if we weren't trying to cling so desperately to this sort of capitalist setup, we'd all be better off. it's just that the incentives for it aren't yet aligned with the immediate interests of whoever has the power to make changes.
as someone working and leading a middle class lifestyle, i'd be even happier, and feel a lot more productive, if i thought my work was helping other people lead the same lifestyle sans working (or even better, by working on whatever they felt like, without having to care about whether someone valued it enough to pay for it).
I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for all people. But we all still need access to the option to work. Accepting that jobs will simply vanish and those who don't already have massive amounts of wealth will just get a UBI is a horrendous dystopian nightmare.
If we can all work 20 hours a week and adequately support ourselves, awesome. But the current position is that the 99 percent have no inherent right to access the means to create wealth. They are merely mouths to feed, consumers who can add nothing. This is incredibly problematic and I dearly hope we get a clue before natural consequences inform us catastrophically that this simply does not work.
> But we all still need access to the option to work.
UBI makes work more attractive and available, not less, compared to the things it is generally proposed to replace (means tested benefit programs and minimum wages)—by replacing means-tested benefit programs it means people don't lose money for finding work, and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden.
and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden.
So your utopian ideal for ending poverty is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent. I fail to see how this is in any way better than minimum wage jobs. At best, it is a new variation of minimum wage, only you don't make minimum wage by getting a minimum wage, you get it by having a UBI plus below minimum wage pay.
That proposition only makes me feel even more opposed to a UBI.
I've never mentioned a utopian ideal. I addressed the false implication that UBI was somehow opposed to the availability of work.
> for ending poverty
Poverty can be mitigated, but not ended.
> is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent.
No, "slave wages" makes even metaphorical sense only in the sense that unmitigated capitalism provides economic coercion to work; a system with UBI doesn't share that features of unmitigated capitalism.
Further, while replacing the minimum wage with UBI reduces the minimum value of jobs that can be offered, it reduces the pressure to accept low wage jobs, so low wages jobs are likely to accepted for experience or other reasons, but not economic coercion,
a ubi needn't stop you from working. what it will stop, or at least sharply reduce, is low-paying jobs that are low-paying simply because everyone has to either work or starve, and because the job involves easily-replaceable skills. for example, being an amazon warehouse worker is, from all accounts, highly unpleasant, way more so than being an amazon developer. and yet the developers are paid a lot more. why? amazon absolutely needs warehouse workers; its business would collapse without them. but the price for the job is set by how easily they could replace those workers, and that in turn is set by the fact that there are more people who need jobs than there are jobs available.
also, look at it this way - there are lots of people who would find it satisfying and fulfilling to be painters, or gardeners, or heck, even nursery school teachers. the only problem is that those jobs don't pay as well as less fulfilling but more valuable to the "owner" class. why is your (and many other people's!) vision of basic income a bunch of zombies sitting around as "mouths to feed", when no one thinks that about people with inherited wealth?
No, what will stop people from working is that the people currently in charge of creating jobs will not bother to create jobs for everyone because "you have your UBI." That's the problem.
the idea that a job is something someone has to "bother to" create and hand to you already buys into the same sort of stratified inequality that you are complaining about with charity. if either way you have to depend on the people with capital and ownership to get money, how is being made to do something for it any better than being given it via the government taxing them and paying you a basic income?
also i'm afraid i had to stop reading that blog post at "poor women cranking out babies", because i seriously cannot engage with that sort of thinking right now. however, i will address your earlier point about ubhc being better than ubi - why are you framing it as an either/or thing? ubhc is absolutely the end goal of a civilised society, but it doesn't obviate the need for a basic income, nor does a basic income presuppose the rest of the existing setup continues unchanged.
I am a homeless woman right now. My alimony is roughly the amount of money being batted about as a figure for UBI. I have spent literally years on HN trying to network and figure out how one makes money in earnest on the internet because the only thing I need to make my life work adequately at this point is sufficient online income for supporting a middle class lifestyle.
I face enormous obstacles in trying to get taken seriously and trying to get traction for my writing and trying to find out how in the hell you make money online while surrounded by endless men who know how to do exactly that. So I feel pretty strongly that the people currently being left out will just be left out all the more if they have a UBI.
Maybe both of those problems can be solved. Maybe it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. But replies like yours in no way inspire me to believe that we can intentionally create a permanent underclass and still give them access to the means to create wealth. I have six years of college and I am finding it a huge uphill battle, in part because I am a woman.
And poor women would start cranking out babies if you posit that we give everyone in the nation a check from birth, a thing I have written about before:
what about all the people who work long, hard hours (often doing two or three jobs), who still don't attain a middle class lifestyle? do you think, given the option of a ubi and those jobs, they would still continue to do them? the lack of basic income adds a huge distortion to the equation of "the work you do is worth X to me, but i will pay you Y for it, and X can be way greater than Y because your side of the balance sheet is Y + not starving".
also, where do you get "permanent underclass" from? if you posit that there is some way to acquire skills that are so valuable people will pay you a middle-class salary for them, surely acquiring those skills is easier if you don't have to also do a laborious and crappy job at the same time. contrariwise, if you think that someone on pure ubi is doomed never to be able to transition from there to a job, what in that equation changes if you give that person a minimum-wage job instead of ubi?
You know, I am homeless right now and I don't know how I will eat for the rest of this month. I am finding your remarks insulting, depressing, frustrating and obnoxious.
Are you doing anything to help lift me up while trying to prove your point that I am wrong and you are right? In my eyes, you continuing to argue this while doing nothing to help me grow my online income just supports my point of view that UBI will be yet another source of class divide.
I have $10k a year unearned income and I have been on HN for several years. I am the top ranked woman here. I still can't make the business connections I need to figure out how the hell to make good money online. I don't know a stronger argument for what I am saying than my life and you can't be arsed to even finish reading things I have written.
I don't plan to continue to engage you. I don't feel your argument is remotely in good faith. I think if you were right and I was wrong, then I would have long ago established sufficient income to get my sorry ass off the fucking street. Having $10k in unearned income in no way gives you the business connections you need and if other people for any reason don't want to make those connections with you, then trying to figure it out your damn self tends to involve painfully slow progress that has little hope of ever leading to a middle class income.
There's probably some kind of ideal form of government intervention that will take the most out of poverty; and then there's probably some form of minimalistic form of humane intervention for the hopeless.
