Apart from the few third world countries I had visited, I had never seen real poverty until I went to the US. I had expected the US to be like Western Europe with bigger cars and more fast food, but I found infrastructure such as roads, airports, bridges, railroads that were seemingly left unrepaired for decades, public institutions like schools or government agencies were in worse shape than in the better Eastern European countries. They even had power outs not unlike the Eastern European ones. And just about everywhere we drove, even in wealthy areas such as Orange County or Manhattan, one wrong turn would take us to neighborhoods where we literally felt unsafe.

A few months ago I visited the poorest regions of Bulgaria, which happen to be (one of) the poorest region(s) of the entire European Union, Severozapaden Region, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severozapaden_Planning_Region. It's just South of the Danube, in the North western part of Bulgaria. And yes, it is poor, barely any businesses, and young people are moving out of there to find a future elsewhere. But a regular lower middle class suburb in America feels vastly more hopeless, rundown and outright dangerous.

I love the US and the US is a great place to be wealthy and I still believe your chances of making it really big are better in the US than in Europe as a whole. But Europe provides for a better life right now, not only for the poor, but also for most of us regular folks with no or little wealth and with lower or upper middle class income.

I grew up in Seattle, went to school in Philly, and just spent a year traveling through 14 countries in Asia (incl 6mo in India). The poverty on the streets of my hometown when I returned was absolutely shocking. And I found the poverty in Philadelphia to seem so much more crushing than what I saw in far poorer areas, like Indian slums or Laotian villages (I'm really struggling to deconstruct exactly why I had this feeling).

I want to emphasize that this isn't an attempt to convict people in those economic situations as bad, but that as a society we're really superficial in terms of taking care of poverty itself. Having a house, a car, and etc doesn't mean you can't be poor or have no economic safety net to even maintain that standard of living which my parents still don't (even at 57 years of age). What makes this worse is the fact that some people snub anyone that is perceptibly "poor". It's something that irks me because I've known very bright and capable people of the same economic standing as I started with getting rejected from job opportunities and even social occasions purely based on their economic standing. Then people wonder why poor people stay poor.

I think you're completely off base, and obviously so. Americans have among the highest disposable incomes on earth, falling household to income debt levels, and a jobs picture that has been improving non-stop for five years. Americans also have among the highest median household net wealth levels of any nation, and the best universities by far. Bulgaria? That claim almost comes across more as propaganda, when you understand that even Romanians look down upon the poverty in Bulgaria.

I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia. My experience is the exact opposite of what you describe. Where I lived there were no homeless; wages were half the national average, and we had great public schools, with some of the best rated teachers in the state; everyone had a home, and a car; a nearly zero murder rate; the standard of living was on par with the US median because the cost of living was very low; unemployment was higher, and people lived relatively simple lives when it comes to materialism. This is all mostly still true there today. Compared to the childhood of real poverty my Romanian friend endured growing up there in the 1990s, I grew up in paradise. Where I grew up, the poor there today have access to medical care and routine medical tech via medicaid, which the median household in her Romanian city can't get access to without going to Bucharest.

But don't take my word for it -

OECD better life index:

http://cdn.dejanseo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/better...

And

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fu...

You could also run a dozen other economic metrics like long-term unemployed, unemployment rate, median income, median household net worth, household debt to income, health outcomes from medical care, access to the latest medical technology and drugs. You could compare classic markers for materialism for the poverty line and what it's defined by in say the US vs Bulgaria. The US does extremely well in most comparisons. There are perhaps eight countries on earth that produce better quality of life outcomes than the US, and for the top 75% maybe only five countries do better.

I too grew up in Appalachia and quite poor ($6000 / year for a family of 5), and aside from the camaraderie of poorness, I wouldn't want to inflict that hardship on anyone: few jobs, poor food, poor housing, poor schools, poor hospitals, poor infrastructure.

Where I grew up there were two classes of people: the 'professional class' and the 'working class'. The professional class were multi-generational groups of irresponsible doctors, preying lawyers, slum lords, land owners, government cronies, and other sorts of con men. Their spouses, children, and cousins took most of the other middle class occupations. The rest of us were left with the scraps of broken 100 year economies of iron, coal, and steel. And, these two group rarely mingled.

When people ask me what it was like to live in Appalachia in the 80s and 90s, I tell them to rent Gummo http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/.

Would you mind expanding on that?

My wife's grandmother was on the decline due to dementia. Her care requirements were so high that we had to put her into a care facility. The problem is, because her symptoms didn't require putting her into a $6k a month facility, insurance wouldn't cover it. So for the remaining year of her life, we had to come up with the $4.5k a month for her care.

The care for people here is expensive, so much so that it can destroy families.

> the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her

That happens here too, unless you have the ability to pay for a trip to the Mayo clinic.

> the local hospital had no MRI or CT machines

Ours does, and the costs for using it are prohibitive if you have no insurance. In fact if you have no insurance, you aren't welcome at the hospital unless you have a life threatening problem, like actively bleeding out.

> I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia.

That doesn't describe even my hometown, a relatively rich corner of Montana with lots of disposable income coming in from California expats. We have homeless, folks who can't afford a car, a few murders a year... in a town with a population around 40k.

Yeah, unfortunately a lot of our good doctors are swept by the offers made by the western countries. It's sad, but true.

However, an ugly bit about the poor that no one wants to confront is culture. What is to be done about the culture of the poor that locks them in poverty? I don't think throwing more money and resources at the poor helps -unless- it is somehow coupled with culture change.

Wasting money/health on cigarette smoking and booze and drugs, credit debt and payday loans and living paycheck to paycheck, dropping out of school, lotto, endless streams of chaotic drama-filled relationships and unprotected sex and babies outside of marriage, junk food and fast food and drinking pop instead of water at every meal... These things to me aren't -only- an education problem, they're -also- a culture problem.

It's judgey for a well-to-do guy like me to talk this way, sorry in advance. I just find this culture thing very depressing because I don't feel there is much that can be done. It's very tempting for me to pick a single group to blame, like the banksters (especially re: payday loans) for being the secret hand in causing all this. But in my heart, I know the culture of the poor just really sucks in America, and there's a lot of wasted human potential. Nothing is being done to change that culture based on what I see on the boobtube.

If you ask me, the victimhood status we confer upon the poor only serves to lock them in their place. The greater society could do well by shaming bad behavior and try to steer poor culture people onto better paths.

We can't forget about historical injustices such as slavery and Jim Crow. The nation has a moral duty to especially help those communities. But what we're doing now, spending billions of dollars on dozens of anti-poverty handouts, is clearly not working.

I agree that the politics of victimhood is especially damaging. It robs the poor of their agency and sells them the lie that the only thing between them and prosperity is oppression by the rich. It's a politics of helplessness and envy.

A man who does not believe that he is master of his own destiny cannot thrive. When he is sold a life of dependence, he is made a serf.

While I'm sure the left is different in the US, that seems backwards on a global level. It's generally the left that emphasizes immaterial things like education, maternity leave, kindergarten etc. while the right focuses on economic measures like lower taxes.

"you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people"

Throwing money at people seems like a very effective way to limit the bad effects of poor people. Drug addicts with money tend to do drugs, while drug addicts without money tend to do robberies, burglaries, go to prison etc.

"believe that he is master of his own destiny"

The mindset that you should fend for yourself and don't be a burden is much more prevalent among the poor. More prosperous families tend to try to give their kids all the advantages they can. If anything the poor needs to adopt a culture of entitlement.

At least for those where money is currently the hindering factor you actually can. Financing students for example.

You also reduce the feedback loop to which you alluded. There are lots of factors where it might not be that obvious that it exists. Stress factors like poverty can greatly reduce mental capabilities for instance.

And in the end you make the lives of the poor people suck less with that money.

But once an entitlement exists, it's almost impossible to take it away. As Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth is a government program". So it just becomes a permanent structural deficiency of our society.

Increasing price (outside of aid) isn't actually the opposite of the effect aid is intended to have -- subsidies always increase the cost before subsidy; the intent is that they will decrease the cost after subsidy for those receiving the subsidy since, under most reasonable supply/demand conditions, the amount of increase will be less than the amount of the subsidy.

And this would probably work fine for grants taken alone, but we can't really isolate the impacts.

Loans, however, aren't subsidies, they are cost-deferment measures. They aren't meant to make college more affordable (in terms of lower net cost after the policy) for those who get them, they are meant to allow people who could not afford college up-front but who would benefit economically from college so that college would be affordable if it could be paid for on a deferred basis can afford it.

College loans, however, are problematic because humans (in general, and those younger than mid-20s in particular) tend to be irrational and to -- as has, I believe, been shown in numerous studies -- overly discount deferred costs, so that loans have the effect of subsidies on near-term costs while at the same time just being deferred costs. So they increase the pre-policy cost without actually being a subsidy to those who qualify for them.

They are subsidies on the cost of borrowing money, but not on tuition (except at a very small ratio); but they act (in terms of effect on tuition prices, for the reasons discussed in my previous post) like a much larger direct tuition subsidy. because of this, it is much more likely that loan subsidies have a perverse effect on affordability than grants.

There is proven way to change that: government money, laws, media restriction. That worked with racism and women discrimination.

That probably does not sound good ( forbid media trash talking the poor in the land of freedom of speech ) but it is a vicious circle that needs to be broken somewhere and government is the one that has all the ropes to achieve it.

For example, every time you objectively think a private institution for health or education (school or university) is necessary instead of being a mere convenience is part of the problem. But you can't just put your kids in the public school and hope that enough people do the same as you do out of civic duty, you have responsibility to your children too. Poor people think the private school is better too, they just can't afford it and give up leading their kids to give up ending eventually in

> Wasting money/health on cigarette smoking and booze and drugs

Others fights to put their kids in there anyway and take incredible financial risk that could end up to them using last resort payday loan that fuel the statistic that make you think

> the victimhood status we confer upon the poor only serves to lock them in their place.

For my part, I blame a culture of super heroes measured in dollar where anything can be forgiven as long as you made a buck out of it. There seem to be an obsession in the US Media with the people that "made it" that I don't remember from my youth in Europe. Along with it, a culture of individualism that despite basically anything requiring a team always ends up as the simple narrative of the one lone genius against the world.

Lots of problems aren't best solved by governments. I don't go to my elected representative when I can't find a good burger joint in town; I tell someone who grills a mean patty to open up a restaurant. Just as many solutions are best done in the private sector (eg; startups), others are best done in "the culture sector" - Hollywood, the twitters. They're just as important, it's true. And it can be helpful to have public outcry to get the culture machine working on it. But I don't think cultural change should be the government's job (not that you explicitly said as such, but many people might leap to that).

I also think it's important to keep in mind the importance of economic and educational environment when thinking about culture. If you spend a little while in a Philly public school, talking to kids and teachers, you'll very quickly realize that it's completely unsurprising that kids don't have any faith that they can work hard within the system and see positive results. I'd rebel or lose faith too - there's just so much arbitrary shit that rains down on you, so few things in your life that you really have control over, that it wouldn't make sense to believe you could get ahead just by working hard, being nice, and following the rules. I'm impressed that any do.

EDIT: I should add that I completely empathize with where you're coming from emotionally on this. It's super hard, confusing, and frustrating - and I really don't know how much of what I just said above is even correct.

You're right: it seems very difficult to change the mindset of poor people. Fortunately, we "only" need to decrease income inequality, so that lower classes can earn a livable wage. The demographic transition is the perfect analogy, where fertility rates seem to magically drop as countries develop. If we remove the stresses of poverty, the poor will be able to live more effectively.

For the present, you can contribute by donating to charity, or by political advocacy: calling your politicians, voting for politicians who care about these issues, or helping fix campaign finance to level the political playing field.[4]

For the future, we can change quite a bit more. The obvious area is to make education more equitable and effective. For example, school districts are currently funded by taxes determined by housing values. This matters because education opens doors to higher-paying jobs: a PhD is expected to earn $4 million compared to $2.5 million for bachelors (lifetime),[2] and a high-school degree earns 40% less than that ($30k/yr compared to $50k/year).[3] Beyond the statistics, the culture of the poor stems from a lack of awareness of better possibilities or the belief that these better possibilities are unobtainable, so better education could break the cycle by inspiring children and giving them the tools to take control of their lives.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra...

[2] http://www.census.gov/library/infographics/sci_eng_majors.ht...

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77

[4] http://www.democracymatters.org/what-you-need-to-know-about-...

In Oregon, we had a HS graduation rate of 69% this year. That is insane, we are the worst! We're as blue/progressive a state as you're going to find in the states. Low income kids, English language learners, and minorities are failing the most. Our spending per student is right around the average relative to other states.

Please consider that there IS a culture component and there are poor and minority families and communities that tolerate this atrocious performance from their kids. This is just one issue of many where really bad choices are being made and there is no secret about the consequences. And frankly, I think the politics of victimhood are toxic in this state and help create a safe environment for kids to fail out.

I don't seek to punish anyone, but I'd like there to be some blame heaped on all the responsible parties. Calling people to account on their poor performance is really cheap, we should do it more often.

If your mind is entirely occupied with where your next meal comes from, whether you'll make rent at the end of the month, and how you're possibly going to cope with the random accidents of life, your mind can't even afford to think about bigger plans or opportunities.

Lift people out of that misery at the bottom. Make sure everybody has access to a good education. Make sure nobody goes bankrupt due to medical emergencies. Do that, and people will have the chance to move up again.

I can name about three to four dozen recently listed (Forbes 400) US billionaires that came from poverty. You can look them up, the lists are easy to Google. Further, according to Forbes about half of their real estate billionaires come from at or below middle class, and about 40% of tech billionaires do.

How many billionaires in the Middle East aren't counted? High ranking government officials in many countries also are likely billionaires via corruption.

It's unclear what proportion would be inherited vs new wealth, but it's another dimension worth considering.

"Sixty-five percent of the ultra-rich made their own money, while an additional 16 percent inherited a portion of the wealth that they grew to a larger fortune. The self-made rich have an average net worth of $142 million, versus $130 million for those who inherited their money."

http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/myths-about-the-ult...

Left: "there's an inequality of ability due to economic conditions, and the solution is redistribution"

e.g. affirmative action to push women/minorities/etc. into the workplace, taxes on the wealthy to finance programs for the poor, social housing quotas in every new development...

"Right" (usually more libertarian than where the GOP stands these days): "there's an inequality of opportunities due to regulations, and the solution is removing regulations"

e.g. Milton Friedman observing that the minimum wage increased black teenage unemployment and pushed many low-skilled black teenagers permanently out of the workforce as they were unable to get that first step on the job ladder; or Uber as a second, ad-hoc source of income for low earners being regulated out as an option as any Uber driver becomes an "employee"; or most extreme, that public schools are always a bad thing because the government monopoly on education means no effective oversight or pressure for teachers to perform.

The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it.

Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.

I think that if we started by backtracking on a lot of IP based protections, and changed the tax structure so that B2B transactions are taxed, actual investment over gambling could be a lot better. That's just me. We, as a nation and our government no longer legislate to ensure proper competition is allowed to happen and subsidize too much, and too often.

Poverty isn't a problem we can spend/indebt our way out of, we can only reduce some of the ways that the income gap has expanded out of control... Raising taxes isn't the solution, reducing loopholes, subsidies and deductions is. As would be making capital gains taxes line up closer to income taxes, with exemptions for directly inherited physical assets.

But, that's just my take on it... instead of spend at the bottom, cut from the top.

This is because the strength of a political faction (or its united subset) grows with the square of its size, and because the winning strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat.

The former reason stabilises the system towards two roughly equal sized parties fighting for power and slowly iterating towards where the people are standing politically (compare the respective positions of Johnson and Goldwater in 1964, or around FDR's new Bill of Rights, to today's discourse) and moves away from discussing ideas and towards the behaviour of sports teams in a high stakes championship.

The latter reason means that if one side lowers itself to base populism, the other has to follow or lose the race. This cheapens the discourse and encourages simplification and the discussion of trivial matters (such as ideas no longer relevant, or high visibility but low impact "Cecil the Lion"s), whilst the civil service quietly takes care of the business of government. Panem et circenses.

Thus, people choose a camp, and rationalise their views accordingly so that they align with whatever the party is selling at the moment. This is, game theoretically, the most efficient use of their person for the cause since if they do not tit-for-tat, the other side will be stronger and win the argument.

It does not even make sense for the average person to think too hard about issues since they have such low visibility of them. How can someone who has never left the USA and whose town consists of 7th generation Swedish immigrants understand immigration and global competitiveness in a world where billions, equivalent to the entire US population several times over, are entering the middle class? How can one have a sound opinion about the Ukraine or Israelo-Palestinian conflict when both sides' intelligence agencies are doing their best to intoxicate public opinion? Whilst the NSA is now famous, how many of the general public know about the NRO, or have any idea how the roots laid by Soviet Active Measures distorted yesterday's zeitgeist and influenced today's? This is a subject Kissinger talks about many times in his works: that he had "no idea" and as he gained higher and higher clearance, his views changed.

But the senior party members do have access to the information (or as good as the alphabet soups can provide, anyway) and are supposedly meritocratically selected for their shrewdness, so what they decide is probably the best for the party. What is the fastest way to get the electorate to follow you? Shape the discourse with simplifications, red herrings, wild goose chases and The Donald's hairpiece. Let Fox News lead the GOP lot, let CNN lead the Democrats (or however you want to split your groups). This way, you manoeuvre House of Cards style into a position that optimizes your own, whilst not giving away too much of the country's future.

Personally, I think it is that last bit that the current generation of Washington residents is getting very wrong, because they do not see the bigger trends or think they'll be long gone, or the changes too gradual to be noticed and result in unpleasant circumstances for them. Like the Brits and the French they might find themselves swimming naked as the tide goes out... I could write for hours about it, but that would be off topic. Just thought I'd throw this in.

Nevertheless, I was recently told by a progressive regarding a tech conference that I was too privileged to offer a diverse perspective ('cause I'm a white guy, you see).

From the article:

"Sean Reardon of Stanford University has calculated that the race gap in student test scores has diminished, but that the class gap has widened. A half-century ago, the black-white test score gap was 50 percent greater than the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent. Now it is the other way around, with the class gap almost twice that of the race gap."

But for whatever reason progressives (broad term I know) seem to be happy to talk about anything except class and income equality.

It's of course very slippery to try to attach labels to any informal political groups, and probably better to discuss ideas, not people's labels.

In my experience, progressives are the ones who are pushing the class issue.

A smaller population size doesn't make it easier to reach a political consensus. I am from Belgium and we hold a world record in that category: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/... 589 days at the time, I don't know if another country has done better since then.

I disagree. I hear too much talk about solving gaps and creating jobs, and not single shred of sympathy for the simple rich.

We need to stop thinking its our problems to solve these so-called "societal injustices". It's not my problem. I'm trying to improve myself!

People should mind their own business and try to improve their own situations. If they're in no / shitty jobs, poor health / broken families, they need to figure it out like everyone else! We can't play God and it for them.

It just enable this entitlement attitude of your piousness and their own of what they deserve.

This does not mean that you must donate all your worldly goods and live the rest of your days in poverty. What it means is that, when the time comes to vote in a property tax increase to fund education, or public transit, or any of a host of things that you think don't affect you personally, you have a responsibility to consider how these decisions will affect people who are not you, and that you should at least try to decide in favor of those people, if at all possible. I'm asking you to consider providing some resources as part of your duty to the rest of society, so that those less fortunate can have some hope of bettering themselves just as you did.

If we have any hope at all of maintaining an orderly society, we have to stop thinking only of ourselves.

Added: I don't think the parent comment is wrong. It IS our duty to perform charity. But it should not be forced on us.

People have shown time and again that it does take action through central authority to enact societal change because people will not "change [their] allocation of charitable donations" accordingly or have an allocation of charitable donations at all.

Societal progress in the face of injustice takes action from society as a whole.

Fortunately, "no I don't want to give back to the society I take from" doesn't fly with the IRS.

How would you go to make it happen, practically ?

Since people willing to donate have no real vision of people who are in need, you would need some sort of organization to collect the donations and distribute them.

This organization would need to run some sort of policies in order to make sure the people asking for donations are actually in real need of those.

You also would need to pay the people needed to run these organizations, perform the checks, mantaining a database of people in need and donators, and perform the actual donations.

For any country (remember, a country is responsible to the welfare of all its citizens, not only the ones well-off), working with possibly millions of willing donors and petitioners, pulling off something like this without a predictable budget and some defined policies and rules is quite hard.

Thus the modern welfare state, which might not be an ideal (or even efficient) solution, but a better one has not been invented yet.

They usually do, it fits their vision of what a "worthy" recipient of benefits looks like. Relying on charity to provide social services would mean a significant portion of people would be cut out from receiving them, either due to policy or the lack of donations.

please note that I +- agree with you. anon3_ 2 had a slightly ignorant comment, maybe not intended, but I understand his view too (albeit I don't agree that much). the thing is, if he is really rich, he for sure wants to live in calm, secure and stable society where he isn't threatened daily just because he worked hard and now he is well off. For that, there needs to be broad(er) prosperity. Poor hungry people won't stay quiet for long. On the other hand, let's face it - people are lazy. not all of course, but many. Create easy conditions, and very few will do their best for society (aka work). Create too hard conditions, and many will break without ever reaching their potential.

I think state should be there to give a helping hand to those who work hard to make better life for themselves, but NOT make the better life for themselves. How? Now that's a question nobody has really good answer for :) I would bet on proper public schooling with high wages and great inspiring teachers. Add a non-abusable health care system (statement ridiculous in real world on its own), and society will flourish. All US would need is divert maybe half of cash for waging useless wars around the globe... ah wait

According to whom? I never signed up for this.

The only "responsibilities" (what a loaded word; you automatically imply we're irresponsible if we disagree with you) I acknowledge are those I took on of my own volition.

Most good and considerate people who aren't complete shitheads

Most higher organizations/clubs/associations/families engage in philanthropy and charity, most religions espouse the virtues or godliness of good will towards others and, again, most people who have the capacity to feel will agree that extending that empathy towards others is a good thing.

The point is most people, especially those who see things from a higher level socially and intellectually, recognize the value of compassion and selflessness.

Someone who balks at the suggestion that they have a responsibility as a good person to be considerate, who embodies the message of Ayn Rand's Anthem, might be considered immature. A shithead, even.

When poor people can't get decent jobs, often it's not because they aren't capable of doing them. It's because there's a systematic policy of credentialist prejudice and discrimination.

When poor people can't get any jobs, often it's because there's a systematic policy of ageist prejudice and discrimination, in many cases enforced by law, plus bureaucratic regulations that make it hard to become an employer and impose costs on employers that exceed the value an employee could provide.

When poor people can't find a place to live, it's not because there's no land or we don't have the technology to build shelter. It's because zoning laws make it illegal to build more housing anywhere you could find a job to pay for it.

When poor people are sick in the U.S., often it's not because they aren't willing and able to pay fair market price for medical treatment. It's because for every dollar you spend on real costs of medical treatment, another ten dollars are consumed by the corruption and waste in the system.

If you've ever voted for a politician who contributed to any of these problems - which is almost certainly the case if you vote Democrat or Republican - then to some extent it is your fault, and you do have some moral obligation to do something about it.

The most abject failures I've known in life are those who've been unable to recognize their mistakes, unable to handle criticism, and most clearly, those who've always had a bailout and never hit rock bottom.

Like everyone else who isn't in a shitty job/poor health/broken family? And, by definition, haven't had to figure it out?