Posted on 08/24/2009 10:25:00 AM PDT by freed0misntfree
IMAGINE GETTING A bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University.
In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
If you have no motivation to change, then why change?
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Yes, and their kids get free breakfast and lunch at school, they get free health care at the county clinic and/or on Medicaid; when food is low, off to the food pantry. Then various charities make sure their kids have winter coats, backpacks, school supplies, you name it.
1. The US “poverty line” is 20 times the _median_ world income. If you’re doing better - a LOT better - than literally half the people on this planet, you’re not poor.
2. I once tried helping a poor family (who had a house, nice clothes, running water, TV, etc.) by, among other things, putting back together their falling-apart sofa. When I was almost done, one girl came down and asked if I had any large sheets of plastic. “Why?” I asked, baffled. “We just tore the screen in one window” she replied. Stunned, I finished the sofa and left, my interest in helping the “poor” deeply rattled.
Sometimes stuff happens to you outside your control, and you could use some help getting back on your feet.
Sometimes stuff happens to you because you caused it, and you need to live with the consequences to learn not to do that again.
It always helps when you can "go down town to get paid".
Some lifestyle choice
You forget that they will be riding meat.
Don’t forget, some consider it heroic.
Those who stay poor don't have bad attitudes because they're poor -- they're poor because they have bad attitudes.
This would only be true if there were multiple solutions to the multiple problems. As it is, there is one solution to poverty, that would 'fix' all the problems he described: GET A JOB.
This whole article was basically created to justify getting rid of welfare reform and continuing to provide benefits to poor people simply because they are poor, because if the government 'solves' most of their financial problems, then they have more incentive to solve the one or two remaining ones. Total BS, IMO.
Same here. I knew the way out was to study something that I could make money at, and I did.
Leftists exploit issues such as the poor as cover for what they really want to do: take away more of your wealth and regulate your behavior in an attempt to placate their feelings of envy. No matter the issue, they have only one solution in mind: more government.
Those on the top rung of the economic ladder often become limousine liberals for the purpose of envy deflection. It's an effective strategy for protecting their wealth and enjoying it without being the target of resentment.
Can you please make that short story longer? Was it the missionaries or the people they were ministering to that caused you to end your support? I've cut several charities off my list myself.
Work hard and save.
It was amazing when I realized I was making more money from the money I'd saved than I was making when I worked.
A magic moment for me.
Why is it, when a big rain washes a wall of their mud hut away, they can't seen to gather up all that mud and straw around them, make new sun dried bricks and fix it?
Why is it when their grass roof is full of holes, they can't get some more grass and patch it? it's growing all around them.
Why is it that they can weave mats to sell at the market for a few handfuls of grain, they can't weave some grass to fix their weaved grass roof? Window coverings to keep the mosquitoes out at night? Floor coverings so they don't sleep on dirt? Why walk ten miles for water to haul back to a grass shack in the middle of nowhere? Why not build another grass shack near the water? Why not kill a wild animal for some food when they come for water at the old watering hole? Surely they can catch at least one of those ten thousand wildebeest...
Hi, I’m the guy that wrote the book described in the Boston Globe article.I took some heat when it came out for daring to suggest that poverty has anything to do with the behavior of poor people themselves. But at the same time, I think that insight just pushes the question back: why do these poverty-creating behaviors occur? I have read most of the comments in this string, and to me most of them have a piece of the truth about poverty. What I tried to do in my book is to estimate how big a piece of the truth that is. But more important, I tried to show that each of the conventional wisdoms (blame restricted opportunity, blame the work ethic of the poor, blame government handouts, blame limited time horizons of the poor, etc.) draws a fair amount of its plausibility from a mistake in economic theory. In a nutshell, my view says, blame Econ 101. The book has just come out in paperback if anybody cares to pursue this. Charles Karelis
I think he’s wrong about the solutions (EITC for example) because compulsory redistribution is both wrong and ineffective; however, I think he’s essentially right about the problem. Most poor people do not see significant improvement as a realistic possibility, so why pursue it?
I am by no means poor, but I am perpetually broke, and I certainly see some of this tendency in myself. There’s little incentive to work extra hard to, say, pay off one or two medical bills or old debts when there are six more in waiting, and experience tells me that there will be new problems (more doctor bills, car repairs, etc.) to eat up any headway I make in the short term, so I expect to always be playing catch-up.
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