This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem. In fact, the material outcome is just the end-result of the real underlying causes: poor education, broken families, and other cultural dysfunction. There's obviously a feedback loop between material poverty and cultural problems, but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people.

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.

"This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem."

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.

> but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people.

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.

Financing students is a great example of how government ends up getting it wrong. In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Flush with public money, colleges have become wasteful bureaucracies that are unaccountable to their customers, students and parents.

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.

> In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board.

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.

Subsidized loans are subsidies, in the form of 0% interest when you're in school and very low interest rates after. Those both cost the government a lot of money that the borrower would otherwise pay.

> Subsidized loans are subsidies

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.

Poor people don't live in an isolated bubble. The culture you talk about is everyone culture. It affect middle class with a selection bias, like only seeing the welfare queen, and it affects the poor in a broken window theory fashion.

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.

Your last comment may be the most telling. It's the same as climate change denial: as long as there's at least one narrative that fits your worldview, overwhelming evidence to the contrary is easy to suppress. Even if it were true and widely attainable, the implication harms the effort to reduce systemic poverty, because anyone who manages to break out of a high-crime, high-poverty area has all the incentive in the world to get the Hell outta there for the sake of their kids. The changes that are required to change communities come at the community level. Gentrification doesn't help - all it does is move the misery.

I agree with some things you say (culture is a major, problematic component to poverty, especially in America) and disagree with others. For example, shaming bad behavior is likely to be counterproductive, and requiring additional money/resources to be tied to cultural change doesn't strike me as the most pragmatic way forward either.

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.

I believe you have the causality backwards, from the societal perspective. The poor are not poor because they have bad habits (addiction, debt, babies, dropouts); rather, they tend to behave in these ways because they are poor. While some individuals can avoid these pitfalls, as a whole, their culture is a symptom of their socioeconomic standing. You would probably be less likely to commit crime if you have a fulfilling job and a successful life, and you would care more about condoms, loan terms, and health if you had more to lose. Being poor means that you live day-to-day, and that affects your ability to think long-term.[1] If we the comfortable observers find their behavior paradoxical, it is because we aren't in the thick of things.

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-...

I agree education is the key, but I cannot see how simply pumping more money into education is going to solve the problem.

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.