Re:Flash Game Simulates Living on $9/hr.
by notahacker on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @01:53PM
(#3072019)
I thought the point of stacking the deck was to show that broken homes and a failure to save are root causes of poverty, and not readily-reversible ones. That said, people generally don't choose to lose their adequately-paid job and spouse any more than they choose to be the target of a Cultural Revolution lynch mob; certain behaviours increase the chances of it happening but bad things happen to people who make good, or at least explicable, choices too.
Sure, China had terrible problems with revolutionaries, before reforms leading to a remarkable rate of economic growth that nevertheless still leaves the average person in living conditions that would appal the average debt-ridden member of the American underclass. Mostly they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" by being able to work for (or employ people on) the sort of wages that would leave Americans unable to eat, never mind have houses, cars and mobile phone contracts to owe repayments on. So they didn't do it in isolation[] and their model doesn't work for the US unemployed. Perspective is useful, but deeming freedom of choice and support for the poor in a rich democracy to be adequate by comparison with a poor country rapidly recovering from internal chaos is like judging the adequacy of a government by how many gulags they operate. By the standards of first world countries, the poor in the US get a relatively rough deal.
Singapore, since you cite it as an example, is a million miles away from a society where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from capitalism. For a start, the government cleared the slums by building 85% of the country's housing stock and fixed the rents and prices far below private-sector levels. They might be extremely business-friendly, but governments in democratic states don't get much more paternalistic than Singapore's.
[]Arguably the American poor have benefited far more from the resulting availability of cheap consumer goods than they lose from cheap Chinese labour pulling down on the bootstraps of the US manufacturing industry. But the availability of those jobs is still reduced.
Sure, China had terrible problems with revolutionaries, before reforms leading to a remarkable rate of economic growth that nevertheless still leaves the average person in living conditions that would appal the average debt-ridden member of the American underclass. Mostly they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" by being able to work for (or employ people on) the sort of wages that would leave Americans unable to eat, never mind have houses, cars and mobile phone contracts to owe repayments on. So they didn't do it in isolation[] and their model doesn't work for the US unemployed. Perspective is useful, but deeming freedom of choice and support for the poor in a rich democracy to be adequate by comparison with a poor country rapidly recovering from internal chaos is like judging the adequacy of a government by how many gulags they operate. By the standards of first world countries, the poor in the US get a relatively rough deal.
Singapore, since you cite it as an example, is a million miles away from a society where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from capitalism. For a start, the government cleared the slums by building 85% of the country's housing stock and fixed the rents and prices far below private-sector levels. They might be extremely business-friendly, but governments in democratic states don't get much more paternalistic than Singapore's.
[]Arguably the American poor have benefited far more from the resulting availability of cheap consumer goods than they lose from cheap Chinese labour pulling down on the bootstraps of the US manufacturing industry. But the availability of those jobs is still reduced.