Posted on 12/17/2001 4:59:25 AM PST by madprof98
Seems to be the folks who make up the underclass got there by their own choices, not by any oversight of the larger society.
Jobs went overseas because your fellow Americans want products made at bargain prices. You can't blame COngress for this one.
This is subject has interested me for some time. It's worrisome that so many are adopting the culture of "poverty" values. The middle class can afford it to a point, the economically poor cannot.
The first is the tattoo parlor. I don't know how things stand in England, but in the U.S., over the past 20 years, getting a tattoo has become pretty much unrelated to social standing and poverty.
The other is the trip to the suicide ward. For the most part, suicide is unrelated to poverty or income. In fact, suicide is one of the few major causes of death, for which the rate of death is significantly higher for whites than blacks in America.
That said, this book is concerned with poverty in England. So what would be inaccurate for the U.S. could be true for the U.K., for all I know.
Wait, I've got it! We'll seize India!
This book should be required reading for all high school kids, and for all "flaky" college majors (communications, education, psychology-- you know the touchy-feely types I'm talking about). If the white underclass in Britain suffers from the same social pathologies as the US black underclass, that negates rascism as a cause, doesn't it?
Jobs also go to lower-pay jurisdictions in part because of the stranglehold labor unions have on the American economy. When you are forced by unions to pay your workers so much that you can't make a profit (this is also known as being forced to pay workers MORE THAN they are worth in a true economic sense), then you have two choices: 1) go out of business, or 2) move your manufacturing plant overseas.
American consumers want low-priced manufactured goods and high-wage manufacturing jobs that pay more than the market will support. Until people realise that we can't have both, we will continue to see jobs lost to Mexico and the Phillipines.
Did the author make any attempt to find and write about people who were poor, but still managed to be optimistic and happy with their lives? There was a time in my life when I was living pretty much hand-to-mouth, but it didn't make me an aimless derelict. At some point, you have to wonder if we aren't confusing cause and effect. Does poverty cause the welfare state, or does the welfare state cause poverty?
Dalrymple's point about the tatoo parlor was that body decorations like piercings and tatoos were traditionally lower-class phenomena, and the fact that the middle and upper classes are now emulating this sort of behavior bodes ill for the culture.
He brings up the point that formerly, the lower classes used to mimic the upper classes in mannerism, speech, and dress. Though poor, they sought to emulate "respectable" behavior, and thus elevate themselves by conforming to behavioral norms, thus transitioning to a more "cultured" society when they attained the means to do so economically and culturally.
Now, you see the middle and upper classes mimicing the pathologies of the lower classes, such as tatooing, piercing, single parenthood, swearing, lack of responsibility for one's own behavior, etc. This coarsens society, and elevates the lower classes to some sort of "noble" status that we are all supposed to emulate to be "cool" and "hip." If we turn up our noses in disgust at the above-mentioned behavior, we are being "judgemental" and "classist." Freed of the shackles of judgment for our behavior, the formerly respectable middle and upper classes are now freed to act as vulgar and anti-social as our lower-class counterparts. The result: a loss of social niceties, and a loss of respect for courtesy, the rights of others, and civility.
Now, as a small-l libertarian, I'm all for not legislating morality, but when we stop being "judgmental" of anti-social and self-destructive behaviors like that which formerly was only tolerated among the most aberrant of the lower classes, we encourage the proliferation of more laws to keep order, because we ourselves have failed to exercise the moral pressure and disapprobation necessary to maintain some sort of sane and responsible society.
We don't need more laws if each of us has the backbone to condemn aberrant behavior and refuse to subsidize it (to the extent that our tax laws allow us). Am I making any sense here, or is this a disjointed, Monday-morning ramble? :^]
Poor people have poor priorities as well.
Me, too. It was the four years of my life I spent saving for college, and the four years of my life I spent in college. Somehow, though, I managed to join the upper middle class and now have an income equal to the top 1% of income earners in the United States. I grew up in a lower-middle-class household with parents who were high-school educated and had no great career prospects.
My experience echoes the finding of many poverty researchers who note that poverty is a temporary situation for the vast majority of people, and that education and work are the solution. In less than 10 years, I went from the bottom income quintile to the very top quintile. I did not get help from parents, government transfer payments, or affirmative action to help me get there. I just worked, plain and simple. I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I have a doctoral degree as well. It can be done.
That is, as the author himself notes, a phrase to savor, albeit unpleasantly.
Dalrymple gives numerous examples of this sort of behavior in his book. When a woman allows her abusing ex-boyfriend, by whom she has several children, back into her home, in a drunken rage he trashes her subsidized apartment, breaking down the front door, and breaking windows. She, however, will bear no responsibility for letting this man back into her home. She simply telephones the Housing Authority (or whatever they call it in merry old England) and they come out and fix everything for free. He'll be back in a week or two to play out the same tired scenario, and why not? She'll maybe get some money out of him for the kids before he trashes the apartment, and she doesn't have to pay for the trashed apartment.
When you give money to your niece, she is indulging in exactly this same behavior. Of course she can afford a dog -- she knows your generous family will not let her kids go hungry. The kids will learn this behavior, and the happy cycle will continue. Get my drift??
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