Many of the decisions made by impoverished people are either somewhat sensible for their situation in the short-term (e.g., asking a 16 or 17 year old child to drop out and start working) or are sensible when viewed through certain forms of skewed perspectives (e.g., spending a small windfall immediately because 'that money will just be gone soon anyway'). Children of impoverished parents overwhelmingly learn these lessons, and the stress of poverty is an ever-present part of their lives, so they are often debilitated by it from the very start.
Think about it like how the courts view jury nullification. They really don't like that the idea exists, but because it is a natural consequence of principles they follow concerning a jurors right to vote how they feel, they cannot stop it as long as the juror doesn't openly admit to it.
In the same way, a solution to childhood poverty has to be a solution to poverty for a portion of the population, and thus one has to accept a bias in which adult we solve poverty for or extend the solution to all adults, at which point we are now discussing general solutions to poverty.
I agree with you 100%.
Also, this belittles the cases where one parent was making a great choice, by leaving the other.
What's the consequence for being deemed unsuitable? Who determines that you are unworthy of reproduction? What other fundamental rights should unsuitable people be deprived of?
When you consider that the type of family (highly educated) that can actually afford to have children is deciding against having children then your proposal to consider every child as a hobby is just plain stupid. Who's going to have children then? Not the upper class? not the middle class? Not the poor? Nobody?
Plenty of people are still going to have children, anyway; if we at some point find ourselves short of children, we can bring the incentives back (or just have more immigration). But I don't think it's likely to happen over the long term... the days of needing to make the maximum number of factory workers and cannot fodder for the motherland are over, at least for a time. Having children is totally a hobby.
The same exact reasoning applies to having children. I don't see any good explicit reason to produce more children across the board, in fact I see the reverse (be it global warming and the per capita emissions in the first world, the recent electoral successes based on the plight of poor workers suffering due to globalism, automation, whatever); plus there's also plenty of willing immigrants that would solve the governments/societies problem, if there even was one. So, the government has no good reason whatsoever to subsidize child-making. If someone wants to do it as a hobby, all power to them!
Treat every child in poverty as a societal responsibility. Everything will stem from there.
a.k.a. start with societal empathy.
Where will you find enough qualified teachers and nursing staff as the parents are obviously unsuitable? Cooks? Farmers? State would literally have to order at least some of those people to take such jobs.
Maximum of factor is perhaps 10 per person, likely much less than that to provide proper quality. Unless you will invest heavily in teaching and nursing staff.
It is an interesting model of a society halfway ran like military. Ultimately not too bad and orderly, but the problems of allocation are hard to solve and corruption is still likely.
The old adage is that the more you want to control, the more you have to control. (Providing strong incentives might be enough.)
Mind you EU socialdemocratic model is only halfway there, and thus limited in results. (Orphanages and nursing are too few, poor people are not relieved off parenthood. Free housing and food is very limited using merit as allocation through social services.)
A perfect example is when one of the parents succumbs to addiction that wasn't present before the child.
It's also a curious way to characterize it that "we're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents." Seeing as "we" had nothing to do with creating the plight of these children, "us" not acting to change it is not us condemning them. That's like saying "we" are responsible for that child that fell into the well and drowned recently as we didn't save him. Or that "we" are condemning that fat guy to an early death because "we" aren't forcing him to eat salad and go to the gym.
Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?
I will agree that it's a very unfortunately situation, but I'm not going to lower the standard of living of my own family that limits their chances of having their best life so as to provide for the child of a stranger who doesn't give the same care and thought to me and mine.
Yes you can. Why not? Not to mention your (implicit) assertion that [poor] people, "have as many children anytime they want" is also ridiculous.
> Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?
This is true, but irrelevant to the USA's own government policies. Presumably other countries should do the same with their own children.
Of course, we can take your line of thought and cut off the supply of public services to children and adults alike. Then see how quickly your own quality of life erodes. Indeed it's this very philosophy you hold that will explain why humanity will never take action on climate change or any global scale catastrophe that isn't imminent.
> Such parents have shown they have no limiting factor...
You make it sound like there’s an infinite loop of childbirth which will eventually use up every last dollar in the world, but that’s not what happens in reality when people have enough money to keep having children. There are also potential options to combat this, through incentives, support, education, etc...
Your point about it being worse in other countries is common enough. My reply tends to be that for every problem in the world we don’t find the worse example out of all 7.6 billion of us and start there. We start where we can and then try to keep going as much as we can.
> I'm not going to lower the standard of living of my own family
Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a lot of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle and income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out there which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical taxpayer’s lifestyle. Even then it would be minimal compared to the overall improvements to the country.
It's not infinite, but we cannot provide every child in the world with the same standard of living as that had by the average Norwegian, for example. And given that a couple chose to give birth to a kid even though they could easily see that they can't provide for the child and society can't provide for the child. E: It shows they don't have a limiting factor.
>Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a lot of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle and income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out there which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical taxpayer’s lifestyle.
Life is certainly zero sum in many ways. If you take ten thousand dollars from me this year and pay it back to me fifteen years later by saying "hey, the average productivity, prosperity, happiness went up by 30%" that doesn't undo the fact that you prevented me from sending my child to a better school. I will never have the opportunity again to send my five year old to a great preschool because next year that kid will be six and that one year of more nurtured development will never be able to be regained.
Currently the US doesn't pay for everything it does on an annual basis. Approximately 25% of spending is borrowed. And of the total four trillion dollars in spending, around sixty percent of that is for social security, medicare, medicaid, social safety net programs, chip, snap, and etc. Additionally, less than 40% of households are net tax payers. You really can't make dramatic changes in social programs without also dramatically impacting people's lives.
That's a straw man - that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about much more achievable aims, such as children not being hungry and not living in unhealthy housing. Many interventions to reduce poverty are relatively low cost. We’re certainly not talking Teslas & Scandinavian design for all.
On zero sum games, you’re talking about economics here and if anything is an example of non-zero-sum game, it’s economics and monetary theory. Large amounts of wealth and economic potential are created pretty much every minute.
Your example of sending your child to a better school isn’t really accurate for a few reasons. There is a practical, real world limit on school fees. At a certain level of income you would have been able to afford the best school possible, hired tutors, etc… and any further earning would not make a difference. You personally might not be at that level, but a lot of the progressive ideas for taxation target those who are exactly in that situation.
The wealth taxes being proposed by a couple of the US Democratic nominees would kick in at the level of millionaires, who are far removed from scraping together every last dollar for the college fund. Other tax changes would certainly not have “dramatic” negative impacts on tax payers, many might see gains.
The preschool/school example is great, especially as you brought up Norway! You have a problem of having to pay to send children to school. That’s the problem, not that any tax changes might jeopardise that. So let’s solve that problem!
In Norway you wouldn’t have to worry about affording preschool as they are all state funded, even the private ones. You pay a small additional contribution at most, if you can afford to, but that’s capped by the local government and about $350 a month. The schools are free (you pay a similar amount for after school babysitting if you need it) and all roughly a similar good standard. University is similar. So your problem of having to afford 20 years or so of education disappears entirely. Which is pretty awesome, plus your healthcare costs also don't exist and you have much more money for discretionary spending. A lot of Norwegians have cabins in the mountains and boats in the fjords, and it's not because they pay low taxes and ignore child poverty.
Well, the direct answer is: these are all Americans, and all pay some kind of tax to their city, county, state, and ultimately the country, in theory so they can draw on the shared resources of the nation. That's how you justify supporting the kid in Mississippi and not the kid in Cambodia.
As for rationally holding the belief that people can have as many kids as they want, and those kids will be cared for, yes, you can hold those simultaneously. I don't want any kids in my country to go hungry; how many siblings they have or what choices their parents have made are irrelevant to those individual kids' needs being met. There's no conflict there.
We live, as they say, in a society.
I also want to point out that they don't pay taxes to their city, county, state, and country. There have been several studies by the CBO[0 - see the chart on page 31] that show that the lower 60% of households are not net tax payers at the federal level to such an extent that their entire non-federal tax payments offset by the transfers and benefits they receive from the federal government.
0 - https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
You're also forgetting that those workers exist. Beyond taxes the benefit of workers is also in the products and services they provide. When you're a retiree you still need someone to stock shelves in the supermarkets and sit in front of the cash register or someone to work on a farm and pick up the harvest.
When these discussions come up, I often think about this simple chart:
https://i.redd.it/pg5w8ws3b0o31.jpg
If the distribution of wealth, i.e. access to resources, were what 92% of Americans considered ideal, we'd need the minimal social programs you seem to want, and your low-wage worker in Renton would probably pay nothing to support a poor kid in Mississippi.
The current wealth scheme in the US is very much a consequence of US politics, i.e. taxation, wage laws, etc., it's not a natural state of being. (There is no natural state of being for a society.) What we have now is the result of choices made over a long time; getting different results, so you'd never be on the hook for someone in Mississippi, would take different choices from society, not just you declaring that we cannot afford and therefore should end social programs.
Changing post-tax income distribution is fairly straightforward (in theory), but it's less clear to me how to change wealth distribution.
Where does this argument end? For example if you end up needing to live in a rest home and your family can't afford or refuses to take care of you, why should my tax dollars go to help you out? You should just be thrown out into the streets until you die to reduce the burden you put on society.
As many countries have justifiably chosen, they consider this to be an extremely barbaric approach.
Your tax dollars shouldn't. I would have to be a real asshole who has no empathy and care for you to live my life in a way that I end up destitute in my old age and expect you to sacrifice your family's well being so I can live my life selfishly and greedily.
>As many countries have justifiably chosen, they consider this to be an extremely barbaric approach.
You might phrase it like that, but every single day in every single country that provides a generous safety net someone dies whose life could have been extended by some amount of time if only the country had spent more money on doing so.
This is a nonsensical argument. Said safety net is often the reason why people don't die, because as a whole it's cheaper to prevent people from getting to the point of destitution than it is to pull them out of it.
And your first argument is nonsensical too. Because a lot of the time it's simply a roll of the dice whether or not our health nosedives. By your argument if you get in an accident, you would be an asshole to expect other people to help you out in a time of crisis.
That's not having no empathy, that's having a nihilistic worldview and expecting everyone to subscribe to your 'every person for themselves' mentality.
Writing snarky remarks is uncalled for and not pleasant to read on this forum.
That's what I call out and encourage them and others to slow down and consider peoples' humanity.
There are many poverties, many dimensions of wealth.
Happy educated young are a public good and the wealth of nations.
A rising tide raises all ships.
Female education is the driving factor in population stabilisation.
Inherited inequality is implicitly unjust.
A naive idea is, have a baby penalty. A baby penalty would make would be parents think twice about having children, and more about family planning and contraception. It would suck to be a child in a family that cannot afford to raise children (this really needs to be emphasized). To offset this people can be paid to bring up a child that their parents cannot afford, this works great as the people who raise the other parents children are less likely to have children themselves. Now this is naive, is not fleshed out, and has all sorts of things that can go wrong, but conversations about these things has to start. Take China, without their 'Family Planning Policy", the place would be a much worse place to live in than today. What was described is something much softer than the Family Planning Policy, but countries may have to move to something like China's policies to have any hope.
"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now." - David Attenborough
You didn't think that through. They are less likely to have children because they have decided against children. A female lawyer isn't going to give up her career to take care of other people's children. She has much better options.
What may happen is that poor people get their children taken away and sent to another poor family that now gets paid for taking care of the child. It's basically a very "unorthodox" form of childcare/adoption without class mobility.
So just to be clear on some points before I get accused of holding positions I do not hold. I am all for helping children who were let down by their parents. I don't think they should be condemned. I also grew up very poor, my parents had to go into debt to buy basic necessities and I still have to support my parents financially and will likely always have to do this.
When it comes to this issue, you need to pick a lane and stay in it. Either people have agency and are responsible for their actions and ultimate responsibility lays with the parents - or people do not have agency and nobody is responsible for anything and concepts like democracy makes no sense.
I personally pick the lane that people do have agency and do bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. I do make exception for those who are severely mentally ill but this is not the root of poverty.
Consequently, while social support for those who were let down by their parents is good - this alone cannot fix all problems. Maybe in a place like Norway with very low unemployment it is enough, but it will never be able solve the problems in places like South Africa where the unemployment is ~30% (calculated in the same way as unemployment reported for US and EU economies is calculated).
So sure, lets help the children - but lets stop making excuses for those who put the children in that position to begin with. I don't think it is okay to run cover for absolutely horrible human beings who bring children into this world that they cannot adequately provide for.
Either people have agency ...
Would one of those actions be the urge to have sex? If not then not sure what we are talking about here.
I think the majority of people who have children they can't provide for bear the responsibility for that and I don't really see where in that you want to plug your nuance - but if you have something more than "there is nuance" I would love to hear it.
1) They have always been struggling, a didn't have a reasonable plan originally, and/or
2) They didn't take reasonable precautions to avoid pregnancy but still end up pregnant, and believe their best option was to raise the child
Both of these assumptions are clearly false in general although I don't know enough about the issues to hesitate a guess on percentages.
I was mostly thinking about (1). Someone with a partner and a solid household income can easily become a struggling single parent, for example, without having made any obviously bad decisions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
> The researchers further suggest that the "fraction of children living in single-parent households is the strongest correlation of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored."
See also: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/single-mothers-new-yo...
The black/white thinking espoused above, though: I doubt it leads to real insight or improvements.
It is very difficult to look at a random average person and predict whether they will become poor within the next 2 decades.
This is a good example where black and white thinking is dangerous. Some people have more control over their circumstances than others. That includes parents providing (or not) for their children. You don't need to be an apologist for bad parenting to acknowledge that human circumstances are due to some combination of choices, intrinsic nature, and environment.
I don't think the majority of the poverty problem comes from otherwise well to do parents falling on hard luck. At least in South Africa and I would think most of the rest of Africa this is not the case. If people just made sure to be in a position where they have the capability to provide for children at the point in time when they have them the poverty issue will be almost entirely gone.
And already just something as simple as providing a two parent household and not having children before 25 already virtually guarantees that they will not be impoverished:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-deny-the-link-b...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
I don't disagree - competent people, who have learned successful strategies, are unlikely to be reduced to permanent poverty except in extreme cases.
However, for those born into poverty, growing up surrounded by ignorance and lack of stimulation does make it exceedingly difficult to learn necessary life strategies to begin the slow, often times multigenerational climb out of poverty. First and foremost, what no one is willing to admit, combating poverty, at least in first world nations, really comes down to combating culture. And because a large proportion of certain (not all) minorities live within this culture, the idea of changing their way of life, even if you think it's ostensibly for the better, is understandably a sensitive subject.
But the way we dance around it isn't doing anyone any favors.
Is it really unexpected/surprising?
Ever since population sizes grew large enough for paternity to matter, where children didn't just fall into a common pool, we've cared more about our resources contributing to our own children's outcomes and not those of others.
Children born in poverty are just at the extreme low end of the spectrum, but anywhere on that spectrum there's economic disparity between families affecting the probabilities of outcomes for their respective children.
It's arguably irrational to care about someone else's children in this scenario, when you have your own. They're competitors, you want to give your children as much advantage as possible and disadvantage everyone else's, if you're playing aggressively. As the population continues to grow larger, there's only increasing pressure on parents to be aggressive, if they're paying attention.
Okay stupid comments aside... I had a convo with a guy arguing that "I don't have kids and shouldn't pay to support the kids of others. If you can't afford to send kids to school don't have em."
Nobody thinks: "Those unschooled kids will then grab a knife or a gun and go and rob you or your very well educated kids out of desperation and end up killing occasionally." also... "why are you pro having a lifelong torturing of kids?"
People really lack empathy for the pain of others, as if their suffering will lessen one's own.
It’s not perfect, and I don’t think “fix poverty” is necessarily main reason for the plans, but the effect has been to reduce it greatly compared to bygone times.
</armchair>
This ultimately means that giving to the poor deprives another.
The question then becomes should the parents and children of parents who make more sustainable choices be forced to support the parents and children those who don't. This is generally the current state of our welfare system. Tax burden and impact is predominantly on the middle class.
The result is dysgenic, i.e. Better outcomes are punished, worse outcomes are rewarded.
Its also a classic trolley problem, and thus both action (wealth distribution) and inaction are immoral.
The next argument will be that we should lift everyone to a minimum standard. However this still fails the test above and fails to realise that wealth is unfortunately relative.
Couple that with the dead-weight loss of the tax system and you actually create a spiral of poverty that starts to consume all except the richest.
We're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents to appease this view and severely reducing these children's potential, and in doing so reducing the potential of the country. As this article shows, the cost to a country's society and economy of poverty and low standards of living is very large and over a long time span. Our governments should be doing more to tackle child poverty as whilst it's not as bad as it used to be, we can certainly do better.