This is pure conjecture.
risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep
Reasonable point, but nothing to hang your hat on - it's the same for many poor people today that have poor access to medicine
and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape.
And we're back to just making stuff up again to make it sound like people in poverty have it easy.
The poor black kid in the story doesn't have access to self-sufficiency that your hunter-gatherers had. Where are the animals he can hunt? Where is the food he can simply gather? He has markedly different restrictions on his life, but you're ignoring all that to try and paint him as wealthy compared to "ye olde ignorant savage"
>>>> lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough
>>>> food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than
>>>> not
>> This is pure conjecture.
When my grandmother was young, she ate 1 bowl of rice a day (max), and had to spend her entire salary on food. Though she did sometimes get a few drops of pig fat to eat with her rice. Her job was carrying sand and rocks away from where the hill was demolished.
When my mother was young, she ate 2 bowl of rice, and vegetables, plus chicken on chinese new years. Her job was nursing.
Today, I eat cereal in the morning, rice and meat and vegetables for lunch and dinner. I'm a student.
Anecdotes are anecdotes but it is not a pure conjecture.
Reversing your premise, if you were to take a population of ancestral humans and greatly reduce the stressors on the population (illness, malnutrition, war, etc.) then would you not expect that they would tend to improve their lives at a much faster rate then their contemporaries?
Ancient progress was agonizingly slow by modern standards. Perhaps the bee sting effect is part of the reason why.
This is where I'm lost - isnt a "why bother?" attitute a textbook definition of lack of self-discipline?
I do agree with everything else in the article, especially with the idea of removing problems and roadblocks instead of simply throwing money at the issue.
So In my opinion there is a self discipline issue. Trouble is, the more you assist people in solving their problems, the more incline they will be to let their problems rot until you come and solve them again. The ultimate goal theere is to find a way to reliably restart the problem-solving circuit, once the people have been pulled back up to the surface.
AFAIK, no one has found a reliable way yet and unfortunately there is not much of a proposal in the article either.
I disagree, most people given a chance will try to improve their condition.
Your caricature of a person with a "really" miserable life crucially forgets that in many ways this person might have had a much more rich than someone living in poverty in the inner city. Namely, in terms of freedom, in terms of connection to his family and community, and in terms of his independence. People (not just the impoverished) living in cities with high population density have a fairly unique set of psychological stresses, historically speaking. This set of stresses seems to be particularly crushing, for whatever reason.
I mean, what I really don't understand about your comment is the tone of it. That somehow this child has all of these benefits, but still fails? What are you proposing? Can you really not see that the child must ALSO have some deficits that cause him to fail? Are you proposing that he's a bad person? I just really don't get it. What's your answer? What's your idea? That he's just not "trying" hard enough? What's the difference between a person who tries hard enough and one who doesn't?
It feels to me that underlying your comment is a deep blindness to crucial elements of human psychology. You somehow draw an equivalence between humans existing in superficially similar circumstances and then throw your hands up in the air and say "I don't get it!"
Your paragraph is pure conjecture.
But unlike the rich, working for money does not improve consumption significantly for the poor. Therefore, the poor choose not to work.
http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work
Note that this explanation doesn't require complicated utility functions, it merely requires that the utility function be nondecreasing.
That brings up an interesting question: in historical terms, the subject of this story is quite well-off; he's not always physically at risk, he has ready access to probably non-toxic food, he has shelter, etc. Over a long enough timeline, his life is pretty good. Even his home situation--mom is a prostitute, but he can't tell anyone lest the authorities separate them--is in all likelihood less common than it might have been centuries ago.
So if these conditions are so awful that we can't possibly expect people to improve without fixing said conditions, how do we explain historical economic growth. We're descended from people who had really miserable lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than not, risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep, and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape. Beings that were physiologically human (basically us, but probably lactose intolerant) had to deal with all of those circumstances, and managed to bequeath to the next generation some slightly less miserable circumstances.
It comes back to the anthropic principle: if misery is a strong disincentive for progress, how did we progress to the point that we have leisure time to discuss this?
(I've asked the same question on Quora here: http://www.quora.com/How-do-adherents-to-the-bee-sting-theor... . I am very interested in the answers.)