When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do (which is not always wise) rather than just what they should do.

But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.

You are obvioualy wearing your policymaking hat. Unfortunately, policymaking is and endless mess of arguing and distracts real people from doing the right thing. Calling things "unfair", even if true, is discouraging for struggling people and makes them less likely to succeed if they listen to you.

The fact is that there's a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of people in the world realize that and come here to realize the opportunity.

Any message of unfairness, in my opinion, should be coupled with the context that the best way forward is still by prudent choices and a multi-generational outlook. Like so many immigrants have.

You call poverty a "trap", but part of that is imposed by a given location. That coal mining town might never come back, and opportunities will be scarce. But growing cities will always offer opportunity to newcomers. It's much easier to "immigrate" from a declining city/town to a growing one than from another country.

This is not to say that we can't improve policy. We can. But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.

How about a reality hat: the world does not offer everyone equal chances. You live in a country surrounded by fences and border patrol exactly to keep those that were less lucky from trying to get some of that luck.

Even when born in the country, there are better and worse schools, better and worse social infrastructure, a billion different glass ceilings according to color, gender, age, accent or faith.

Your comment perpetuates the eternal lie that everyone can rise to the top, but we all know that some have a 50% chance and others a 0.0005% chance to 'make it'. It's absurd to blame the kid with a bad school and no breakfast for not living up to the highest moral standards and take all the right decisions when they have probably barely to no good advice, guidance or role models.

Its easy to judge, but try to empathise. That's not a policy hat, it's acknowledging reality.

Think of it another way:

What advice would you offer a young poor student looking to get out of poverty

A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard, get good grades, keep a clean criminal record, go to college, and get a good job.

B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed.

Both are true, but only one of these messages is actionable and relevant for the student.

Yes, the system us unfair, but people can and do rise out of poverty every day. In fact, most children born into poverty make it out of poverty (66% according to this PEW paper [1])

https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a...

I don't understand why you can't tell the hypothetical young, poor student both 'A' and 'B.' In fact, not doing so seems a bit manipulative (regardless of your intentions).

A potential consequence of perpetually leaving 'B' out of the discussion is that, while some of these young, poor students will escape poverty and others will not, neither group may realize that the status quo reflects decisions made by human beings, not some invisible law of nature.

Telling poor and disenfranchised people that hard work is the solution to all of their problems sounds just like a recipe for inducing learned helplessness [1] to me. Sure, some hard-working poor people will escape poverty, but plenty won't. The difference between the two groups often lies in factors outside of their control.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

I would assume the opposite; tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless? Opportunities and success are not and never will be evenly distributed, but effort still plays a part. Inculcating a victimhood complex in children seems extremely antithetical to the cause of bettering their prospects in life.

> tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless?

I must not have done a very good job communicating my thoughts, because this is explicitly not what I was advocating for. The post I responded to claimed that both "A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard..." and "B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed", then suggested leaving B out of the discussion - even while acknowledging that both 'A' and 'B' were true.

My suggestion was simply to not leave out true, relevant information for the sake of provoking some desired behavioral response from the target audience. That just seems manipulative and paternalistic to me.

This isn't a revelation, however. It's certainly not uncommon for members of marginalized groups to tell their children that they'll have to work twice as hard as other children to end up in the same place.

My fundamental concerns are threefold:

First, is learned helpless. As the article you linked points out, learned helplessness is not the result of working hard and encountering challenges. It is the brain's default assumption in the absence of of encouragement. People's brains are already predisposed to inaction and helplessness by millions of years of evolutionary biology. Humans are already predisposed to fallacies and heuristics that overestimate the challenges and obstacles, and reinforcing them is actively damaging. Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

Second, discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy. Is it 90% hard work and 10% luck, or the the inverse.

Last is relevance. A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points. They can't go back and be born to a richer household. Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today, and will continue to be more impactful in the future.

My point wasn't that we should gather all of the world's poor and disenfranchised together and hold a giant pity party, it was that being honest with people about the reality of the (unfair) status quo is better than trying to manipulate them with the sort of self-help mumbo-jumbo you might find at a multi-level marketing conference.

In both the contemporary understanding of learned helplessness and its predecessor, that is to say, whether helplessness is the default state of human existence or a conditioned response, what's being considered is a person's view towards their ability to reach a desired outcome through their actions.

Decontextualizing the actions of those who face increased environmental challenges is likely to provide discouragement, not encouragement, as the actions of those facing greater challenges will seem less impactful in comparison to the more fortunate. In more practical terms, this means that the relative under-performance of the disadvantaged may be interpreted as some form of personal inadequacy rather than an expected response to greater-than-average challenges. This relates to something you said, quoted below:

> Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

This actually isn't true, at least in many important ways, and that's a major part of the problem. While poor Americans may realize that their house/neighborhood/car/etc. isn't as nice as those they see on TV, they can't understand what they haven't experienced - for example: the impact of stable finances, well-educated parents, or a high-performing school district on academic performance. This phenomenon also holds true for other segments of society - those more fortunate generally can't fully understand the disadvantages faced by those less fortunate than them.

This is why it's important to have honest discussions about the differing realities faced by those across society. If we don't understand the context of our actions, we can't understand the impacts of our policies, nor can individuals make realistic choices that optimize for their specific environment.

> discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy

I don't think this is at all feasible. The lived experience of every individual is too unique, with an almost infinite array of immeasurable factors contributing to visible outcomes.

>A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points...Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today

I don't want to sound overly blunt here, but the entire point of my previous comment was that we can encourage disadvantaged young people to take the actions most likely to lead to success while acknowledging that 'the system' is broken and trying to fix it. Where did you get the impression that we can't tell children to study and avoid crime while also telling them that they should be aware of unique challenges they could face?

And, again, I'm not trying to sound blunt, but what poor child doesn't want to be successful? What poor child wouldn't want "an education and a clean record?" I think it's important to consider why many of them won't achieve those goals. To me, ignoring the disadvantages some children face and simply telling them to work hard seems both naive and insensitive, but, most importantly, unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome.

I saw nothing of the sort in chmod600's comment. They even led with "When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do."

Policymakers in Washington and poor immigrants on the streets need different advice, because they control different things. If you are President or Congressperson in the U.S.A, then by all means: let's have a more humane immigration system, and universal health care, and a social safety net.

But if you're a poor immigrant in this country, none of that policy is up to you. Non-citizens don't get to vote; Congresspeople do not listen to them. They risk being deported for the slightest infraction. They often require their employer to sponsor their continued stay in the U.S. They lack financial resources, and oftentimes job skills. They lack cultural capital and a support network.

But they can control several things. They can control where they choose to settle, and move to areas with more opportunity. They can control what they choose to spend money on, and not let anything out the door that isn't absolutely essential for survival. They can control what they do with their time, and allocate that to building new skills and pursuing new opportunities. If they don't do all of those things, they will fall behind, through the cracks, because that's how life is for poor non-citizens in America. It's usually worse for poor non-citizens in the countries they came from, too.

Being able to think systemically, act collectively, and be free from any sort of reprisal or consequence is itself a form of privilege. I thought that chmod600's comment acknowledged reality more than yours did, because not everybody has that privilege. And if you're one of the many people who don't, your best option is to think about your own enlightened self-interest, act according to the options available to you, consider consequences carefully, and not feel too guilty about doing the best that you can.

Yes, thank you. An important element of my argument is to focus on what's in your control.

It's not exclusively about immigrants. In fact, immigrants are less likely to be caught up in notions of fairness because they probably thought to themselves before they came something like "this is going to suck and be unfair, but it will be worth it for my children and grandchildren". So they just make the best of it and compare with the country they came from, not some ideal utopia.

The ability to vote is some tiny amount of control, but democracy is a blunt instrument to actually affect your life in a positive way. Policies and their implementation rarely live up to expectations even when enacted, so people waiting for them just get more discouraged. And a lot of policies that might sound good have bad unintended consequences, which is why there are endless arguments.

I don't mean to give up on policy, just to recognize that it's not going to be the salvation you're waiting for. Sensibly spend some effort to understand issues and vote for good representatives, but don't hold your breath. Focus on ordinary good advice and encouragement that work regardless of the policies.

Most of the goodness in the world is not some well-crafted policy, but ordinary people doing ordinary good things. Be positive and encouraging and give credit when people do those good things, don't be dismissive because you think people will misinterpret the story and craft bad policy out of it.

The way we build on success as a society is when people share their success stories. If every time someone shares their success, the response is instantly about how privileged or lucky they are, then our culture is sick. We should listen to and support those stories.

> If every time someone shares their success, the response is instantly about how privileged or lucky they are, then our culture is sick. We should listen to and support those stories.

I would argue that a culture which attributes success in life to personal effort or choices is sick. This makes people blame themselves for not trying hard enough etc, when in reality there are more decisive factors such as who your parents are (or luck).

For me, This is a very strange take.

Don't we want a culture where success in life is associated with personal choice and an economic environment which allows it to be true?

For now, it is at least a half truth where some individuals are successful because of their hard work and others due to luck.

In what world would we want a culture where success is viewed as entirely random? how would this be better?

I think we already have a culture that exaggerates this aspect. Tried-but-failed stories do not sell very well. Not everyone can be successful and pretending this is case makes people that feeling left out blame them self (or maybe immigrants). I am not advocating a "entirely random" view, just a more nuanced and perhaps more realistic one. Also, I do not think humans will ever stop struggling to achieve things in life, even if we had a society where success where attributed to pure luck.

(Perhaps we should define "success" in this conversation)

I think our impressions are colored about by our different observations of those around us, and this conversation is probably colored by our definitions of success.

This thread kicked off with someone who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class. I am not talking about the fetishization of the hyper-rich.

I do think that with persistence, hard work, and an average allocation of luck most people are capable of achieving a comfortable job and a happy middle class life.

In my observations, a lack of personal responsibility for improving your situation is much more harmful than idealizing the successful. For every person I know held back by some sense of inferiority, blaming themselves, I know 10 stuck in a shitty situation by complacency. I see skilled people in miserable jobs who could be interviewing, people lonely or shitty marriages they should change. I see people who are unhappy with their heath but make no change. Many of these people think, "I am just unlucky" and resign themselves to their situation.

While you don't think people will ever stop struggling, I'm not convinced. People can become disillusion and hopeless if you tell them their effort has no correlation with their success in life.

Some say that the "American Dream" of getting ahead with hard work is a lie, but I think the idea that your efforts have no impact on outcomes is an even bigger lie, and a more dangerous one.

Sad to say, $200k is not middle class. $300k is the line, nowadays. Very few of us are middle class, in the sense that our grandparents could be even on a regular wage. That is, there is essentially no middle class in the US anymore. Income is distributed strictly bimodally.

None of this is accidental: it is the consequence of a specific program started about 1970, outlined in the Powell Memorandum, to grab control of the levers of power. Perhaps the most important factor was using military-grade propaganda methods to get the poorer half of voters voting against their own interests. It has been running for 50 years now, and has been a roaring success.

Kids come out of college now saddled with decades of crushing debt, facing homelessness after one medical or legal hiccup; scared voters are easily manipulated. Half the nation actually voted for an out-and-out con man--twice!--pretending to represent them while doing everything imaginable to grind them down further. Meanwhile the opposition has been forced to pray to the same gods, and depend on hedge funds to finance a half-hearted alternative that has to use a vocabulary created by the propaganda machine.

The amount of money generated by the US economy has gone up and up and up since 1945, but the amount collected by regular people--the less-than-99%-ers--leveled off in 1975. All the rest has gone straight to the pockets of those at the very top, even minting billionaires left and right. Make no mistake, we could all be fantastically better off given pretty small policy changes.

>Sad to say, $200k is not middle class. $300k is the line, nowadays. Very few of us are middle class, in the sense that our grandparents could be even on a regular wage. That is, there is essentially no middle class in the US anymore. Income is distributed strictly bimodally.

If you think <300k/yr is not middle class, I think we are coming from such different places that we cant have a meaningful discussion.

I'm just going to put this out there:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...

You have displayed just the left-hand lobe of the bimodal US income distribution. The other bump is way off to the right. Middle-class, if there were one anymore, would be at the dip in the middle, where I said, just off-screen. The goal has been to develop and maintain a permanent underclass who are just barely well enough off that any change seems to threaten to knock them into homelessness, yet imagine they are doing lots better than people with brown skin.

The propaganda message is that any improvement for the people at far left (with brown skin, in particular) would be at the expense of people immediately to their right. The other lobe, off-screen, that could afford everything, is invisible. The program has been a fantastic success. Champagne corks are popping every year, but most especially in 2020, when the right lobe shifted quite a ways further right.

I have some relatives in the other lobe. Their lives are very different from ours. Their kids' lives are very different from our kids'.

This is the entire distribution. The last bucket is everything greater than 200k. When you look at it plotted out, it is a long tail.

To track where the money is going, you have to multiply the count in each bucket by the value on the bucket.

And, get the income not reported as "household income". Income of most millionaires does not show up on there. Jeff Bezos's and Trump's incomes are not on there.

I guess you don't know about family trusts.

> a culture which attributes success in life to personal effort or choices is sick.

Then what is the point of making better choices, such as staying in school, avoiding drugs and not committing crimes?

Meaning, why bother not just rotting in prison? Or, why stay in school when it will make no difference anyway? When you and I were kids, one hourly wage was enough raise a family on, and two (often enough the kid's) to send them to college. Now that is impossible. They graduate today with a lifetime of debt.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, both per capita and in absolute numbers (even counting, e.g., Chinese concentration camps). Cities have quotas now, where they are obliged to send a specific number to prison each year to maintain their contract. The prisons and police forces cost much more to operate than would be needed to lift every American out of poverty.

When you and I were young, no city police force had a billion dollar budget. Crime rates plummeted about 18 years after we stopped poisoning everyone with lead, so there is much less legitimate work for the police. They keep busy, though.

> one hourly wage was enough raise a family on

Having worked at minimum wage as a teen, I can guarantee you could not support a family on it.

> They graduate today with a lifetime of debt

The ones that did not google "starting salaries for major X" and compare that against the expected debt they'd incur, yes.

A culture that didn't do that at all would of course be doomed to failure. If people think it's all about luck, they won't make an effort. In reality it's of course not only about luck at all.

Yes you do need lucky genetics (and insane amounts of hard work) if you want to join the NBA, but if you're willing to work hard and make sacrifices it's more than enough to be born average (not too poor, not too sick), you'll be able to have a very decent life.

It's not about attribution. It's about learning from success, because we can't learn from luck.

Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not realistic at a population level and you should not promote that as a solution there, but individuals can and do achieve despite adversity. Telling people that they are real humans that can make decisions and do things is healthy and you don't want to take that away. It's a line you need to walk but only going with the population level approach has a lot of downsides.

> When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do (which is not always wise) rather than just what they should do.

> But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.

This exact dichotomy comes up when I give advice. I have started calling it 'advice for persons' vs 'advice for peoples' (the grammatical peculiarity is on purpose). Both are often completely different.

OP's advice is great for persons. It doesn't work for policy making which is decidedly about peoples. But, I don't think that was its intention to begin with.

Seems high crime rate decreases the efficiency and well being of societies a lot.

The person can't live in a dense area and must have a car, to avoid other people since they are potentially dangerous. Also their workplace is in a dangerous area. So a large portion of their money goes to transportation and housing.

What if they were just as poor but the crime rate in general was just lower? They could live in dense housing and use public transport all day, as could the spouse and the kids.

To an outsider, this seems like a really big factor.

Thank you for this response. As a first generation immigrant from a third world country, I don't understand this phenomenon of lightly chastising anyone who doesn't attribute their success to privilege, as if afraid someone might be inspired and succeed in something. I suppose its all a matter of perspective. If you haven't experienced poverty in the third world, its easy to whine about privilege and inequality in the USA. If you have experienced it, then you already know life is not fair and there is always someone better off than you.

I'm an immmigrant from a 3rd world country as well - I understand the phenomenon perfectly - it's not about "chastising anyone who doesn't attribute their success to privilege" - it's just pointing out the survivorship bias that's inherent in "If I made it through hard work, anyone can, if they just work hard". Implicit in that statement is that those who do not make it are lazy - this is just not true, but it also co-opts the "Just-world" fallacy.

I am doing better than the average American, in large part, because I'm not burdened by the things that hinder the average American (hyper-infation is one way of easily getting rid of your student loan, but the other aspects of your life will be terrible - I do not recommend it)

> If you haven't experienced poverty in the third world, its easy to whine about privilege and inequality in the USA. If you have experienced it, then you already know life is not fair and there is always someone better off than you.

Shouldn't it be a point of pride - that the USA has less inequality than third world countries. Americans should absolutely "whine" about it, and avoid moving closer to third-world standards. That should be taken as well as saying "If you haven't been detained for months without trial in the freezing gulags, it's easy to whine about mass surveillance and unlawful arrests in the USA".

> But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.

I don't get it, do you think the system is fair? Do you think it's fine to have so many homeless people in the US because they were given a fair chance? Do you think it's fair that you can go bankrupt due to a medical issue?

No, of course life is not fair. But in the limited time we have, we can either discuss how to make the world more fair, or succeed despite unfairness.

Each discussion has its place. We shouldn't derail every success story with comments about how "privileged" someone is for having an aunt.

I disagree, because people often focus on success story to argue that we don’t need to improve the situation, the market will figure out itself, and that’s what we’re seeing at play.

The opposite problem can also happen, where people focus on unfairness instead of taking advantage of the opportunities that they have. That probably causes more actual harm.

It depends on the situation, of course. Slavery was so oppressive that it needed to be abolished before any other progress could happen. But that's just not the situation today -- lots of progress can happen without policy changes. I know that policy makers (or politically-obsessed people) like to believe that policy is everything, but it's really not. Policy is important but it's just one piece of a complex social system.

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either.

I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I just mean to say that you can't discount the importance of hard work and good judgement. The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

>"OP made good decisions and worked hard"

On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves".

It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick.

Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.

Thank you for this analogy.

Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.

This is a good framing for thinking about policy, but if you were talking to an individual company that seemed not to be working hard or executing on their goals, then you would give them all the standard advice about correcting that behavior.

This difference between individual advice and group-level policymaking (mentioned elsewhere in this thread by chmod600) accounts for a lot of talking past one another in political debates. They are two totally separate levels of analysis.

I like your analogy but I’m not sure it’s perfect. In the finance world I don’t think anyone would presume to say more work === more success. There is a talent component that is not perfectly replicable across hedge funds. BUT in real life more work very often does equal more success because so many careers really do not require a high level of ‘talent’.

Your counter argument seems to imply that people who work in finance don't share the same reality as the rest of us. I think that plays into a fundamental human error; for some reason when looking at individual industries we can see that the people can put in more or less the same amount of effort and get different results, but on a national scale we attribute effort much more highly, to the point we call losers lazy.

To be clear I'm not saying there isn't a level of difference in talent or work ethic; what I'm arguing is that viewing the world that way makes for terrible government policy. When someone says something like "welfare makes people lazy", they are making the mistake you are. Somehow the imaginary "real life work" is directly correlated with effort, but actual finance jobs are not.

Certainly, ingredients such as hard work and talent help make success more likely.

There are successful companies and products that don't seem to have a lot of either behind them beyond the initial work to find a successful niche, that they've leveraged to great success. And companies and projects have failed despite having both of those because of circumstances outside of their control.

Just like people, companies are products of their environment. Why -doesn't- someone work hard? Or make the right choices? Because either of their environment, what they've learned, or because of who they were born as. Neither of those is under their control. And even if they do, and it doesn't pan out, why didn't it pan out? Again, factors outside of their control.

Actually for most funds it is the hindsight component. Your bank sets up 20 funds, and then after two years promotes the ones which performed well.

Judging from the folks I know in the finance industry, they would probably say 'those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard"'. Bloomberg built a massive business off the idea that finance professionals need to be constantly informed about everything that goes on in the markets or else they'll be one of the losers.

Perhaps there are some fund managers out there that are just like "Yep, it's a rigged system, I'm going to be the one getting rich off rigging it", but I haven't met one personally yet.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

I think everyone is deserving of not living in poverty. Even "lazy" people.

I think most people here are guily of double-think. Either you believe in capital punishment, or you believe in universal income, the third option is hypocracy.

If you don't believe in state sanctioned murder, then we have to clothe and feed and house people that commited horrible crimes.

Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? Being useless is not a crime.

Also i dispute this qualification as lazy - some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.

> Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job?

The State actively deprived the rapist of their ability to act autonomously to care for themselves, so they are obligated to do so on their behalf. The State (typically) does not actively deprive an innocent person who can't find a job of their autonomy. (There are some arguable scenarios in which they do, however, such as excessive fines, but obligation to pay those are dependent on ability, and feeding ones-self supercedes that in most jurisdictions.)

> some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.

It is ethical to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. It's not as clearly ethical to force someone else to care for those who are unable to care for themselves.

The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not.

Calling the unemployed lazy is a lie untill you offered them a job and they refused.

> The state could put the same deal to the rapist as it does to everyone else: work if you want to eat. It does not.

And you would be okay with that? You're advocating for actual slavery of inmates?

Not at all, I am just pointing out that the previous ethics argument does not seem to make sence

And my point is that you are making a false equivalence. The prisoner is not in the same position as a free person. If the government deprives a person of all of their freedom, and then tells them "work or die", that's slavery.

A free has has to eat, because of the nature of the universe, but he is free. He can choose his job, has recourses with his employers, etc.

Your statement implies that it's the government which gives everyone the deal "work or starve", but that's simply not the case. The free man is simply existing in the world, surviving as he sees fit. By taking away his capability to survive on his own, you have the ethical responsibility to feed him.

It sounds like you are not aware of all the 'innovation' UK has explored in 16-18th century, where people had to pay for being in jail, were charged for being judged, we had debt prisons and people ran their business from them! Also we gave cocaine to kids when their teeth hurt.

These ideas are preposterous by modern standards, but people can and have come up with arrangements where a person works from jail without becoming a slave.

Can a 'free man' survive 'however he sees fit'?

You can't even walk around 'freely', some guy in Uk was trying to cross the country naked and spent 2 years in prison.

Build a house in the woods, plow the land, hunt without a license, and someone will show up to deal with you. Sing a song in the street? You are breaking copyright and some public nuisance or antisocial behaviour laws. You built something with your own hands and sold it? Might have broken some patents.

About the only thing a free man may do is work for a man freer than him. I appreciate we have a civilised society, but compared to free day of olde, it's a total straigh jacket.

So no, these situations are not equivalent but they are comparable enough that I don't buy the categorical moral judgement you are casting.

Either the government allows the prisoner to go free 8 hours a day to make a living he sees fit, or the government dictates how the prisoner labors. In the first case, the prisoner is not a prisoner but becomes a free man. The second case is slavery.

So you just straight up ignore my point about prisons in british empire and keep repeating the same thing over an over again?

Many states in the US force work. It's legal under the Constitution.

I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable Steve to live his desired lifestyle of leisure, hookers and booze.

However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?

Because some of the money also goes to Sally who genuinely needs help. I don't understand how you can be okay with people starving or working themselves to death to survive and provide for their families, just because others do things you disapprove of.

You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.

This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.

“ The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways” I think the idea is that if the government took less money, there would be more money in the hands of people to help take care of local misery.

The government doesn't generally tax poor people much, so most tax savings benefit those that can better afford life already. The whole purpose of taxes is to take enough from the ones that are still doing okay and redistribute it to stuff that more wealthy people wouldn't necessarily choose to spend it on, but that are still a net benefit to society over other causes.

So, say government increases the income limit for one of the lower tax brackets by $5,000. That's great for people who make more than that, which btw isn't all poor people, but at the same time it also gives more money to everyone who was already doing okay. Meaning inflation will soon eat up the extra money and we're right back where we started.

In order to help the poor with upgrading to non-poor, the government has to explicitly avoid extending that benefit to the rest of society, has to continue taking from middle and upper income people. It needs to be targeted, and tax cuts are a great way to target middle/upper classes while helping poor people less.

well said, thank you.

It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)

Paying Steve $100 isn't the only option.

If my alcoholic friend from college came to me because he was short on rent or needed to buy them groceries, I wouldn't give them $100. I'd offer to buy them groceries or write a check to the landlord directly.

The government can do the same thing. If someone needs healthcare or education and can't afford it, pay for the healthcare or education. A social net doesn't mean a blank check.

What if he blew his budget buying cable TV and soda? I lived in poverty, and had many aquaintances who were also in poverty. Everyone had children, and so many of them had $30-40k a year in benefits (welfare). Everyone had gaming consoles and very large modern TVs and computers, endless soda on tap (that is all they would drink), and everyone had cable TV and bought drugs (cocaine, weed)...and cigarettes. Everyone I knew. This was just their life with no serious ambitions. I forgot to mention that most households pulling in government benefits were engaged in fraud. Often the fraud was a live-boyfriend who contributed money but who's income was not counted on the mothers' benefit calculation because she claimed to live alone with her children.

Before you make soap box comments you should be aware of reality. You might think I'm arguing against welfare benefits but I am not. The whole time I watched this state of affairs I seethed because it was middle class tax payers making up the difference in pay for walmart and other corporations who pay poverty wages.

To add to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307485, the government may be in a position to turn that $100 directly into food or housing for Steve.

The $100 Steve asked me to borrow will also turn directly into housing. He said that he needs it to meet his rent, and he's not lying: he will use it to pay his rent. Nevertheless, that just enables him to continue his hookers and booze habit.

If he can continue to both pay his rent and continue [his habits that you disagree with], is there a problem? Is the problem that Steve won't pay you back, or that he won't pay you back because he spent money on [habits that you disagree with]?

In your mind, is blowing the "last of his cash on hookers and booze" the median behavior of people who are short on rent?

No, but the point is that when my friends ask me for help, I can use the circumstances under which they got themselves into needing help in my decision of whether I help them, and whether there is any moral obligation on me to help them. With government, there is no such option: they will take my money by force, use it for anything at all that they might possibly want, and all I can say is something on the order of one or two bits of feedback every 4-5 years.

In your mind, does that description fit absolutely nobody who is short on rent?

Not enough to make it a serious problem. But then I'm neither a Puritanical moralist nor a "better 10 (or 100) good people starve than one bad person gets benefits", either.

If society agrees to give $100 to the military you have no say in how they spend it.

If society agrees to give $100 to Steve then you have no say in how that move is spent.

If you think it's better not to give to Steve anything and you lobby to change the law and are successful. When Andre is affected by this change he decides to make up the difference by breaking into your place and killing you. At least Steve doesn't have his hookers right?

> How does that work?

Because to a first approximation, that's not what ever happens. "Steve" is far more a political talking point than a real person.

Interesting to hear this, when I modeled “Steve” after two people I personally know. One is my family member, and the other is my middle school acquaintance. Their lifestyle is exactly enabled by the money they get from government. Should I believe you, or my own lying eyes?

> Should I believe you, or my own lying eyes?

Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.

What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.

Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.

That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.

I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support.

Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.

I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.

Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.

Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?

I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.

Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).

In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.

Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".

Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people.

Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.

So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).

The empty houses in UK and especially London is a well-known and researched problem, they are prime real estate where the owner decided that renting them out is not worth the trouble, they are just land-banking and waiting for their 'investment' to grow. Many (of those) owners don't even live in UK.

We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.

The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.

Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.

Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?

Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?

That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.

The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years

> By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty

I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.

Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.

All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.

Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?

In the US, even before the 2008 the percentage poverty rate was higher than the 1970's. It was about to come down lower than the 1970's just before the pandemic hit. After the pandemic I presume we will be back to worse than the 1970's rate. But the poverty rate measure has been flat or worse for 50 years.

However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).

"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.

Homelessness is obviously increasing though it’s difficult to measure with precision. Homelessness is worse than poverty and homeless aren’t even counted in official poverty calculations. The census can’t sample them.

If you are in the US, you may be observing a local trend rather than one representative of the whole country. It's very difficult to measure, but this site has an estimate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...

It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.

As someone who doesn't live on the west coast and rarely interacts with homeless people, could you explain how this is "obvious" if there's no measure of it?

Firstly, 12 years is the relevant time period, not 100 or 500 years ago.

Specifically in UK in-work poverty has been going up and up for the past ten years.

The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.

I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.

As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).

Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?

You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.

Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.

You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.

Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.

And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.

Ah yes, the good old: 'this guy dares criticise the status quo, must be a socialist"!

You post is narrow minded and presumptious - I am not socialist, we don't have rent controls in London, and there are economic terms other than 'socialist' and 'capitalist'. Try 'Shumpeterian'

But if you want to go on believing that the only choices are socialism or economic collapse every 8 years, go on.

Do they need to be typical houses?

About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year. An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.

About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.

So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)

I don’t think they are lazy.

Many have emotional problems.

Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.

It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend.

We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow.

I am worried about inflation.

Most of the people I know who don't work who are sometimes dismissed as lazy have mental issues. In the family of ADHD, or anxiety. Unable to focus on pursuing a particular path long enough for it to pay off. Easily frustrated and prone to giving up when frustrated. And often a crippling doubt that they're capable of doing anything worth being paid for in the first place.

I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.

> Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.

Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.

The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all.

You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.

"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."

Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?

Probably also a fallacy that it would take infinite amounts of money to alleviate poverty (:

Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.

> Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario

Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.

The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.

> Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.

If you want to be pedantic, they have the ability to create infinite nominal dollars. They cannot create infinite wealth.

If they print money, they devalue the money people already have, so in the end again it is the people, not "government", who pay.

They "create" money out of your pocket.

I disagree, and I think most people disagree. This is the ant and the grasshopper, man. Most people are not inclined to enslave the ant for the benefit of the grasshopper.

For some definition of "deserving", I would agree. Certainly, everyone should have the tools and opportunities they need to build the life they want.

Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.

This is a lie. The world has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone. We've chose to build a system that does not.

Perhaps you find that defensible, perhaps you find that appalling, but argue that position, not one that isn't true.

> The world has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone.

this is kind of reductive claim. in one sense, it's trivially true that the earth has more raw resources than humans can consume even over the course of centuries. AFAIK it's also true that, under the current system of organization, the global economy produces enough finished goods to feed, clothe, and house everyone (though people often bring up logistical caveats here, eg, distributing stuff in places where there are no paved roads or airfields).

the real question here is whether we would still have that quantity of finished goods under a different system of organization with different incentives. to be clear, I don't discount the possibility that we might have even more! but it seems more likely to me that people would simply produce less stuff if they didn't get to keep the surplus by default.

Just like how that increase in marginal tax rate prevents anyone from climbing into the upper tax brackets (and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%), eh?

Of course people can keep the surplus. Some of it. But we're a far, far cry from the point where people will stop working when only getting a percentage of their labor's worth (or their parent's labor's worth, as is often the case).

> and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%

some caveats apply to this offhand quip (very different tax laws and perhaps even widespread evasion meant almost no one was paying an effective tax of 90%, regardless of actual income). I suspect you know this.

I'm sure there's a lot of slack in the tax brackets. I doubt we are close to a laffer curve inflection point. all I'm saying is I'm not convinced by the style of argument that goes "we already have enough food for everyone; we just need to radically reorganize the economy and then no one will go hungry!". more analysis is needed.

> and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%

Over 20% of the money in circulation in the US was printed last year. i.e. the pot is much bigger now. Also, while tax rates were high back then, loopholes were proportionately larger!

"We've chose to build a system that does not."

The kind of poverty where you starve and have to wear rags is becoming rare even in Africa. From this point of view, the system has clearly worked and the pendulum even went too far, with obesity becoming a serious problem in places that aren't typically considered rich (Mexico, Brazil).

Housing is a different problem. We have a housing crisis because many people want to live in a few select urban hotspots of the world.

This statement reads to me the same as something like "Computers have the resources to find the cure for cancer, but we've chosen not to find that cure." You're using the word "chosen" as if we know how to build the system you're describing. Our understanding of technology is sufficiently advanced to build a system that feeds, clothes and houses everyone, but our understanding of social sciences is not there yet.

We only have that much because of the incentive to produce. Redistribute, by compulsion, the fruits of one’s labors and most will soon stop laboring. I may be able to support >10, but compel me to and my productivity will plummet.

"compel me to and my productivity will plummet."

What you call incentive is really compulsion, just of a more extreme form.

Sustainable resources? Food production relies heavily on fossil fuels, for example. But I suspect the same people who make that claim you make also make the claim that it would be easy to solve the climate crisis, we'd just have to act more sensibly.

Half of all private wealth is inherited, not earned through work, by the wealthiest 5% of households.

In that context, why focus on giving small portions of wealth to those in poverty (even if they aren't working as hard as you think they ought to)?

If one were to redistribute all of the top 5%'s wealth at once:

- it wouldn't be liquid, so you'd be giving part ownership in assets

- the value would be slightly less than median yearly income per recipient. At a pretty sizeable 5% average return, the individuals would net about $2,000 a year.

- if they chose to sell the assets, they would end up with about one year's median income and then it's gone

I'm not sure how much money you think lives up at the top, but redistributing it is not sustainable, and it's certainly not enough to magically pull everyone out of poverty indefinitely. (Or even for very long, at that.)

There are a ton of reasonable discussions to be had about imbalanced power structures between socioeconomic groups, but this whole redistribution thing is just a fantasy.

One can look at a million/billionaire and say, "oh, this person has 50 cars. That's way too many cars for one person to have! Let's give them away to people who actually need cars!" So you seize them and give them away—along with the other 12,000 super wealthy people that own 50 or more cars—and then you have... 200,000 people who still don't have cars.

For groups that preach so frequently about global and ecological sustainability, there's a disturbing blind spot for economic sustainability. I think that's more a feature of envy than responsibility, unfortunately.

> For groups that preach so frequently about global and ecological sustainability, there's a disturbing blind spot for economic sustainability

What you've done is described a position ("redistributing all of the top 5%'s wealth at once"), described the problems with it, and then criticized my obvious blind spots due to this oversight. Forgotten in this tale is that I never held that position in the first place! You are criticizing your own invented argument.

Also, even if I did favor redistributing all wealth in the top 5% of families, a simple back-of-napkin calculation shows that your argument is wrong.

107 * 10^12 (total networth of US households [0]) * 0.619 (share owned by top 5% [0]) * 0.05 (rate of return) / (315*10^6 (population of US)) = $10k/yr for every person in the US just off of the returns from that wealth, which is 5x your estimate. The US Census poverty threshold is making below $13k/yr. If that wealth was held for you until you were 18, that would be every young person starting their life with $180k in savings, which is another $9k/yr with 0.05 rate of return.

Obviously, there's a whole host of issues with this, including some of the ones you mentioned, and (of course) price inflation, but I am not sure how you calculated your numbers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Very solid reply, thank you.

upvoted

> I'm not sure how much money you think lives up at the top, but redistributing it is not sustainable, and it's certainly not enough to magically pull everyone out of poverty indefinitely.

People just do not understand this. You could take away every penny from every billionaire in this country. If you sold everything they had, you would not have enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. And now the money is gone; you can no longer collect tax from the ex-wealthy.

Nevertheless, "just tax the rich" is treated as the solution to all problems. I guess people hear all the talk about the "top one tenth of one percent" and they imagine literally bottomless bank accounts.

The notion that children don't deserve the spoils of their parents is really crazy to me. Parents work so that they can give their children a better life. Heck, they even choose their partners to maximize odds for a better life for their offspring (wealth, good genes, and so on - it does not even depend on capitalism).

To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).

1 rich person saving his money so his 3 children never have to work is bad for the economy.

It's better the 1 rich person is forced to consume that in his lifetime. By doing so that money is redistributed back to the economy, and his 3 kids are also productive.

In scenario 1 only 1 out 4 people work. In scenario 2, 4 out of 4 people work.

Also - it's hypocritical for 'pull yourself by your bootstraps' for children born poor, and 'guaranteed basic income' for children born rich. That is more dehumanizing than not being allowed to pass off inheritance.

Its hard for me to imagine being so full of envy that you would like to see the children of rich people stripped of everything they have. Equality means nothing if you achieve it by pulling everyone down to the lowest level.

> 1 rich person saving his money so his 3 children never have to work is bad for the economy.

"Your rights are bad for the economy, we are taking everything from you. Back to work, pleb".

> Its hard for me to imagine being so full of envy that you would like to see the children of rich people stripped of everything they have.

I think you misread the sentiment. What a lot of us would like to see is a more meritocratic system, where children start off on more equal footing and either earn their wealth or not. But inherited works against that. It is difficult to listen to arguments against taxing the wealthy heavily "because they earned it" while at the same time hearing support for what amounts to aristocracy.

Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up. This isn't a footrace, and it's not a zero sum game. When you say something like "we need to take money away from rich kids so they have to work like everyone else", you're doing nothing but harm. You may feel the people you're harming have it coming, but that's still what you're doing.

The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

This is all beside the pont anyway. Increasing tax revenue will not solve any of the problems you are trying to solve. As I said elsewhere, you could tax 100% of every billionaire in this country, leaving them homeless, and you would not have collected enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. You could sell off your entire "aristocracy" and it wouldn't make a dent. The strategy of "just spend more money" does not work.

> Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up.

And how are we to do that without taking money from somewhere and using it to help people up?

> The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

Case in point. You can't take money away from rich kids via inheritance tax (nevermind that they'd still have innumerable advantages from growing up in a wealthy household), you can't tax the wealthy, but you're somehow supposed to help poor children up anyway. Who's paying for that?

Furthermore, I disagree with the statement on the grounds that national infrastructure and protections are doubtless large contributors to anyone being able to amass that kind of wealth in the first place, therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that a portion of that wealth be contributed back.

Children already start of pretty well in most parts of the world. Every child gets an education, for example.

I think you would find that to make everything equal, you would have to take children away from their parents at an early age. Because having caring, loving parents is also an advantage. At least so far not all kids in a school turn out the same, even thought they all have the same teachers and lessons. Must be the parents that make the difference.

I don't think that would be desirable. I don't want my children to be raised in a government institution to make them exactly the same as everybody else, just for the sake of an arbitrary metric ("equality" measured in some arbitrarily chosen terms).

In fact why not get rid of parents altogether, and create children in labs? I bet that is the socialist dream fulfilled.

"Back"?

(Sorry about the cheap comment - I couldn't resist)

You misunderstand the nature of money. Money means society owns something to the holder of the money. By not spending money, society is temporarily richer.

Also, sorry, but I don't care how productive other people's kids are, or "the economy". I care about the well-being of my kids. yes, I want everybody to be happy if possible, but my kids have priority to me.

And what exactly is "hypocritical"? What are you referring to? You assume everybody should have the same starting position in life, and I reject that notion.

Children of course are not at fault for the actions of their parents (like if they are drug addicts and have an unwanted child they can't afford, the child is not to blame - but neither are other people's children or parents). But that doesn't mean every child should automatically get the same "starting money". This is not a game of monopoly.

As I said - people compete to give their children the best odds. That is not even unique to humans, it is true for all of nature.

If you take that away, why bother with anything? Why should you bother to get a good job to be able to support your family? Just fuck and live the good life, and dump your children on society to be taken care of.

Already in the west everybody gets a pretty good deal in the form of an education.

When rich person pays others to, let's say, build a luxurious castle, the money is both redistributed back to the economy AND the castle is there to use, for a few centuries at least. That's how investing* makes the society wealthier over time, and promoting consumption instead is nuts.

* There is a caveat that it should be a new investment rather than a purchase of the existing one, the latter is zero-sum.

In the latter case, the person who sold the castle can use the money to build a new castle.

Sure, but they can also choose not to do that, so the purchase doesn't necessarily increase overall wealth.

So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich?

Yeah, I disagree. We're talking about on the order of tens of millions of dollars or more being passed from one parent to one child.

You're right. We should kick that kid out on the street, sell all his belongings, and write a check to ever american for a fat 10 cents. Problem solved.

> So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich?

This is such a twisting of my words I am not even sure how to respond. Are you saying the only way out of poverty is to steal everything you want from the rich?

Why don't parents who work hard to give their children a good live deserve to do so? It is not their fault if other people have children while they are poor.

Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?

There's an extra layer of nuance missing in your reply. 3 of the 5 factors boil down to "op made good decisions and worked hard" AS A TEENAGER. OP's formula won't work for a 30-year old who is trying to work equally hard and making equally good decisions... if they are saddled with poor educational qualifications, kids to take care of, and/or a criminal history. At which point, we as a society are faced with 2 options:

1. We can tell them it's their own fault for not making great decisions when they were teenagers, and therefore, they deserve to remain stuck in a poverty trap for the rest of their lives

2. Or, we can acknowledge that they are now in a situation where hard work alone is unlikely to solve their problems. And we can provide them with the tools they need to help themselves, and also become more valuable assets to society. For example, subsidized/free college or job training. Free/subsidized childcare. Safe living environments. Better access to healthcare. Better public transit so they can actually get to work. Etc

The way I see it is that we should optimize less for the theory of pure agency. It's like the Polgar sisters - bootstrapping with structure yields benefits.

So it's less about "refuse to work to better themselves" and more about correctly placing incentives on the growth path for individuals so that they become the kind of people who want to "better themselves".

Of course there are those who, provided any amount of support, will not become productive individuals and it makes sense to continuously evaluate for growth.

But it is beneficial to society and to each participant to offer a minimum childhood to adulthood transition experience that optimizes for productive adults.

Of course, this is usually only important for the poor because most wealthier people are better at bringing up children.

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to being able to make the right decision because of outside factors. In this case, the aunt. Without that single person, I imagine things might have been different.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..."

The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."

I think the ones you are thinking of are those that specifically called out as being made as a child or only just out of childhood. Yes people who work hard in school or university should be rewarded (both in principle and because, as a practical matter, they make a financially greater contribution to society). But the converse to that doesn't fully hold: people that make bad decisions as a child should still be given a chance to redeem themselves, somehow, later in life.

I think the point is, with a middle-class (let alone wealthy) background few of those poor decisions in the youth spiral out into lifetime handicaps.

> of hard work and good judgement.

The common mistake here, which I think you mostly avoided but didn't make explicit, is to believe that if someone didn't make it they didn't work hard or have good judgment.

It's also problematic how little good judgment we require of young people coming from most backgrounds, compared to underprivileged ones. There is also a common and mostly false trope that many/most poor people are lazy and that is why they are poor. The truth is at minimum more nuanced than that.

I agree with you, and I appreciate that you have extended a bit of generosity.

Currently, hard work is a prequisite. In order to achieve equility of opportunity, which would allow anyone to succeed, we need to provide for the "unlucky" scenarios people fall into. Access to childcare and education are two big things in particular that should be improved.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves

Who do you think wakes up and thinks, "I love poverty. This life is so easy"?

Lots of people wake up and never evaluate their life at all. People win the lottery and end up homeless with a drug addiction. If millions of dollars can't help them, do you think the government should keep writing those people checks?

This is a strawman argument, because this is in no way representative of the many people who live in poverty, but I’ll address it because it doesn’t change my final opinion:

Yes, because obviously what someone who won (and lost) millions of dollars needs is not money, but help and support.

Not to mention, by the construction of your own strawman, if they’ve won such a jackpot they’ve probably also then paid millions in taxes.

I don't see how this is a strawman. My argument is an existence proof. There exists people who cannot be lifted out of poverty by giving them money. I can trivially prove my claim by giving examples of such people[1]. I never claimed that all or most people are like this. But its undeniable that some people are simply irresponsible / lazy.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-...

"Some people" is not "all people" and certainly not "almost all" people or even "most people".

I'm curious to know your position on those who are homeless -- as if mental illness, systemic neglect, and abuse combined with skyrocketing housing costs such that even otherwise-able people are just a few missed paychecks away from foreclosure) are incidental, and it's really a result of being "lazy".

I don't have any personal experiences with homeless people, but my understanding is that the vast majority of the homeless suffer from serious mental illness / addiction. I think that's a categorically different thing than those unwilling to improve themselves (which I do have personal experience with).

Being homeless would rob nearly every opportunity from you. I don't think it would be fair to dismiss those people as lazy, if all the hard work in the world wouldn't do them any good.

> 3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard"

One of those "decisions" was avoiding prison. OP says people call him privileged, so he probably didn't belong to a race that is jailed disproportionately for crimes that white people are let off for.

Living with anyone beats being out on the street. And probably beat being in the foster system.

> Living with anyone beats being out on the street

a lot of folks on the street disagree

Some have left unsustainable situations, but some were the a-hole of the situations.

> "OP made good decisions and worked hard"

OP could as easily "made the wrong decisions", it's literally a crapshoot.

You'd throw impoverished and depressed people under the bus because they can't muster the energy to "better" themselves?

Why is it "throw under the bus" or help them?

> There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy"

> we as a society should do more to help people who are caught in a poverty trap, especially because of poor decisions made when they were teenagers. Just because someone ran a 4-minute-mile doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so.

Yes. Thank you. Lots of people start out poor and make it out. I did. Many friends did. But just as many did not. And it had _zero_ to do with "hard work". Almost all of it had to with the lack of a robust safety need and the need to (endlessly) prioritize survival.

In my experience, an individual who believes that success is the result of hard work will end up being more successful than a similar individual who believes that success is primarily due to starting conditions or luck.

At the same time, government policies that acknowledge that success is hugely dependent on starting conditions and luck seem to result in more equitable societies. (i.e. higher Gini coefficient or Shorrocks index)

I don’t think there's an inherent conflict between those perspectives -- it's boiling them down to two-dimensional strawman arguments that makes them look that way.

Fully agreed. At an individual level, there are often decisions you can make regarding career choices, saving, when to have children, etc. that can greatly impact your financial situation down the line.

At a societal level, not every single person can be a software engineer, UI designer, realtor, etc. And additionally some fraction of people simply will make mistakes or not-strictly-optimal decisions. It’s a balancing act recognizing that individual decisions can have an impact on outcomes, that some portion of people will still suffer anyway, and alleviating that suffering as much as possible without creating a cycle of dependence/socializing the costs of easily fixed issues.

If you're talking to the people in the professional class already, your points are valid. If you're talking to someone in OP's situation back then, your points are dispiriting. I know you didn't mean it that way, but it is important to a person who is in a disadvantaged situation to not hear well-meaning members of the professional class saying what sounds like, "you can't make your situation better until the whole system is changed". I think OP's statement of "I made it and you can too" was clearly aimed, not at you or me probably, but a person in the same situation that OP was in years ago.

you make a good point.

The trick is separating "Don't give up" from "it's your fault if you haven't escpaed poverty."

Cause it's also dispiriting to have worked your ass off for 10+ years and still be poor and have someone telling you if you were trying hard enough you would be in a different position.

I agree with that as well.

As I come back to this again I guess here's what I think it's really about:

The implication that there's some correlation between how hard you work and poverty. But most poor people I know work way harder than most "professional" people I know. If there's a correlation, it seems to me to be the reverse, poor people are, by neccessity to survive, as a general rule hustling a lot harder than wealthier people.

As the OP actually kind of outlines.

Does it really help to inform someone sharing a story of their privation that they could have had it worse? I mean I am on board with the notion that there are various aspects of privilege, and that someone who had it hard in some dimension might have some privilege in others. But it doesn't seem like an appropriate response in this context.

Read the conclusion again.

The conclusion is that poverty from systemic racism doesn’t exist. I don’t know how he ended up there but now I understand the need for a throwaway.

The conclusion is that it is a class problem, and there are many mechanisms at play that keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

That's the compassionate read on it.

I don't like your take, either, as it suggests we shouldn't push young people to make good decisions where possible.

I think what both approaches miss, is the biggest underlying problem is Cost Disease:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Reeling in out of control price increases on the most important expenses like health care, education and housing would do more to improve the lot of the poor than any redistribution scheme.

Now, redistribution may be a necessary part of lowering costs. Like establishing government run health care to control cost increases and investing in public universities to radically reduce or eliminate tuition.

This approach helps everyone, but disproportionately helps the poor. And controlling costs will help the poor more in the long run, I believe, than any redistribution scheme that doesn't address skyrocketing costs.

“Wise enough” is not quite the word for some of these points, “self-controlled enough” is. And giving bail-outs, either to individuals or big corporations, will always distort their incentives to take more risks, save less, spend more, and generally act more selfishly. If you’re going to give bail-outs, at least make sure you give more to responsible, “wise enough” people, or your recipients will experience a shrewd lapse of judgement.