The Myth of the Poverty Trap (2 Viewers)

[BirdinHand]

The trap is called the welfare state that destroyed the 2 parent family and created a culture dependent on the government. The main cause of poverty and crime is the single mother

You know who is responsible for single mother households?

The loser men that don’t support their kids and who are so bad, women would rather raise children without them than deal with them.

Not the government.

 

[Evilroddy]

The American government as a whole decided to give way too much power to the executive branch over the last few decades.

Real blank:

Off topic but it's time for the Congress and courts to take that power back - with extreme prejudice, if necessary. The refusal to follow court orders even from the highest courts, the poaching and undoing of Congressional authority, the threat against habeas corpus by suspending it over Congress' authority and the corruption of the Qatari plane "gift" in contravention of the emoluments clause of the constitution should all be the tipping points in this reaction to Mad King Don's delusions of pretender-ship.

I' get back on topic now and I'll say no more about this tangent.

Be well and be safe.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

The trap is called the welfare state that destroyed the 2 parent family and created a culture dependent on the government. The main cause of poverty and crime is the single mother

SoccerCoach:

Ah, the new "original sin" articulated by the coach. Let's not blame the dead-beat dads or the people exploiting poor working mothers. That would be inappropriate and might endanger exploitation and male irresponsibility. In India, one of the solutions which breached an escape hole for intergenerational poverty was a well-thought out micro-loan programme targeted at single or de facto single women used to start up micro businesses which raised both children and their mothers out of the deepest circles of poverty. But hey, go ahead and blame single moms and not any other actors in this process. Enjoy wallowing in a Calvinist version of the Protestant Work Ethic where women are blamed for the short comings of others and which kills poor women and children by the hundreds of millions.

Evilroddy.

 

[BirdinHand]

SoccerCoach:

Ah, the new "original sin" articulated by the coach. Let's not blame the dead-beat dads or the people exploiting poor working mothers. That would be inappropriate and might endanger exploitation and male irresponsibility. In India, one of the solutions which breached an escape hole for intergenerational poverty was a well-thought out micro-loan programme targeted at single or de facto single women used to start up micro businesses which raised both children and their mothers out of the deepest circles of poverty. But hey, go ahead and blame single moms and not any other actors in this process.

Evilroddy.

I can’t help but roll my eyes at those who blame the government and welfare and single Moms - instead of the men that these women made children with and no longer want to be associated with and/or have found that they cannot depend on to actually raise and support the children they create.

Nope…it’s the women who do the work of 2 parents that are to blame

 

[Evilroddy]

I can’t help but roll my eyes at those who blame the government and welfare and single Moms - instead of the men that these women made children with and no longer want to be associated with and/or have found that they cannot depend on to actually raise and support the children they create.

Nope…it’s the women who do the work of 2 parents that are to blame

BirdinHand:

Yup. it takes a special kind of world view to blame the still struggling victims and shield the predatory perpetrators based on a sex-linked chromosome's presence in a person's genome. the modern version of witch-burning perhaps? But again I digress.

Ecce Homo Stultissimus (Behold the stupidest of Man). The idea, not the poster.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

One dimension of this discussion which should be addressed is the usefulness of abject poverty to the people and factions in power in states. Earlier in this thread I quoted a section from the end of the OP's linked article which examined one of the human motives for maintaining such crippling poverty. I will quote it again here:

The other thing that I think is really interesting—I’ll just riff on this a little bit about teaching a man to fish—is the origins of it. So today you hear it, and the way we interpret it is it’s saying, like, Don’t just give people money, because they’re not going to use it in ways that have a lasting benefit. It’s important to kind of help them in these other ways, which I think is just empirically untrue.

But actually, if you trace it back, the first place that I’ve been able to find it, it shows up in this Victorian novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and she has this ironic character in one of her novels saying that the reason that we don’t do these things is because affluent people really don’t want it. They said you could really help somebody make progress, but affluent people would feel uncomfortable with that—it would upend the social order. So it’s funny that the origins of the term are actually this critique of inequality and of people’s unwillingness to—

Bolding above is mine.

This viscous bit of human nature is more responsible than politics, economics and technology when seeking the root cause of chronic and persistent intergenerational poverty. Fear by the well to do of the poor if they should have the opportunity to cease their struggles for subsistence survival for even a short time an God forbid to think and organise to drive change is as much a part of this as Malthusian Traps or their potential solutions or the hard economics of poverty relief. The emotion of fear and the appetite to protect the spoils of greed are the most powerful and irrational drivers which bulwarks persistent transgenerational poverty and necessitate angry revolutions rather than rational reforms. Until this discomfort with poverty relief because of a desire to maintain preferential status quos is dealt with both abroad and at home, changes will be difficult and likely transient, as we see in America, India parts of Europe and China today.

Be well and be safe.
Evilroddy

 

[dmpi]

That’s not what experience shows. The countries with the highest social mobility in the world are the most robust welfare states. They also happen to be the happiest societies in the world

“Denmark ranks top of the World Economic Forum’s new Global Social Mobility Index, which finds the five Nordic nations and parts of Europe outperform the rest of the world when it comes to giving everyone the chance to succeed.”

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/01/these-are-the-10-countries-with-the-best-social-mobility/#:~:text=Moving%20up%20the%20socio%2Deconomic,everyone%20the%20chance%20to%20succeed.&text=If%20you%20were%20born%20into,in%20Brazil%20or%20South%20Africa.

Why The Nordic Countries Are the Happiest in the World – The Nordic Mum

Why the Nordic countries are the happiest in the world? What can we learn from The Nordics? My decoding of the World Happiness Report.

www.thenordicmum.com

I think you need to re-examine cause and effect. The gig culture where individuals can seamlessly switch jobs is a good example of Social Mobility. It's more an act of financial desperation by participants. The only one getting rich is select companies (uber, lyft, door dash, etc) that use it as the central part of their business strategy.

 

[NWRatCon]

The trap is called the welfare state that destroyed the 2 parent family and created a culture dependent on the government. The main cause of poverty and crime is the single mother

Ah, another aggressively uninformed poster joins the fray without doing the homework. An "F" on your first assignment. Inauspicious.

 

[ataraxia]

I think you need to re-examine cause and effect. The gig culture where individuals can seamlessly switch jobs is a good example of Social Mobility. It's more an act of financial desperation by participants. The only one getting rich is select companies (uber, lyft, door dash, etc) that use it as the central part of their business strategy.

What does the success of the Nordic economic model have to do with gig culture?

 

[dmpi]

SoccerCoach:

Ah, the new "original sin" articulated by the coach. Let's not blame the dead-beat dads or the people exploiting poor working mothers. That would be inappropriate and might endanger exploitation and male irresponsibility. In India, one of the solutions which breached an escape hole for intergenerational poverty was a well-thought out micro-loan programme targeted at single or de facto single women used to start up micro businesses which raised both children and their mothers out of the deepest circles of poverty. But hey, go ahead and blame single moms and not any other actors in this process. Enjoy wallowing in a Calvinist version of the Protestant Work Ethic where women are blamed for the short comings of others and which kills poor women and children by the hundreds of millions.

Evilroddy.

70% of divorces are initiated by the women but go ahead and blame the man.

 

[BirdinHand]

70% of divorces are initiated by the women but go ahead and blame the man.

I do

Women wouldn’t seek a divorce because the man is a great husband and father.

They seek a divorce because often they feel as though it’s another “child” in the house - someone they have to take care of instead of someone that makes their life more enjoyable and easier.

They may hang in there when kids are young, but they get out as soon as they can because they don’t want to have to “parent” their partner.

 

[cpwill]

I endorse all of this. Especially the bolded.

I also found this quote from the article to be a good thinking point.

"So maybe a good sort of broad way to think about it is: It’s good to not be looking for, sort of, the solution and saying, What is the path that people need to walk? and more thinking about, like, What are the right paths for a given person in a given context, and how can we accelerate that and help them along that? As opposed to coming in expecting there to be one thing that’ll work well for everybody."

I agree with an aversion to monocausalism. Ultimately there is no One Neat Trick To Make Everyone A Success In Life (in a policy context), though there are certainly policies (see above) that set the conditions for greater success.

* I do argue there are policy changes we could make that would remove barriers to success that help keep people down (and there is such a thing as a welfare trap), as well as policy changes we could make that would result in the wide majority of our people becoming financially independent.

For each individual's specific case, though - all we can do at the policy level is make the best structures that incentivize, reward, and enable wise decisions. At the individual level, that's not something I think Government can do effectively or efficiently.

 

[noonereal]

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement."

Progress was allowed

For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

Vaccines have extended the human life span more than any other consideration. It is not even close.

The same things our most ignorant won't take.

 

[noonereal]

I do

Women wouldn’t seek a divorce because the man is a great husband and father.

They seek a divorce because often they feel as though it’s another “child” in the house - someone they have to take care of instead of someone that makes their life more enjoyable and easier.

They may hang in there when kids are young, but they get out as soon as they can because they don’t want to have to “parent” their partner.

Lol

Let me guess. Your boyfriend/husband was a sociopath.

We chuckel about this all the time. Every women tells and believes they were victims of a sociopath. It's too funny.

 

[NWRatCon]

What does the success of the Nordic economic model have to do with gig culture?

We had spaghetti three times this week!

 

[BirdinHand]

Lol

Let me guess. Your boyfriend/husband was a sociopath.

We chuckel about this all the time. Every women tells and believes they were victims of a sociopath. It's too funny.

You’d be wrong. I chose well and my husband is absolutely amazing. .

I relay what I hear from friends and acquaintances that have opted to get divorced. That often remark that if their husbands were like mine, they never would have even thought about leaving.

The world would be a better place if more men had the type of integrity my husband has.

 

[noonereal]

You’d be wrong. I chose well and my husband is absolutely amazing. .

I relay what I hear from friends and acquaintances that have opted to get divorced. That often remark that if their husbands were like mine, they never would have even thought about leaving.

The world would be a better place if more men had the type of integrity my husband has.

Do their boyfriend/husband was a sociopath. Got it. Lol

 

[BirdinHand]

Do their boyfriend/husband was a sociopath. Got it. Lol

Not sociopath….that’s your word and desired explanation.

Just lazy and/or unwilling to do what it takes to make them happy and be a true partner instead of a burden.

 

[noonereal]

Not sociopath.

Just lazy and/or unwilling to do what it takes to make them happy and be a true partner instead of a burden.

But hey, if labeling people makes you feel better, go for it

It's not me labeling. It is the buzz word in relationship counseling now.
Every girl/women claims her boyfriend/husband was a narcissist sociopath.

 

[aociswundumho]

This really is a sea-change in the human condition. I think in the future, historians will look at the rise of the industrial revolution in the same way they look at something like the rise of agriculture ~10,000 years ago, or the rise of civilization ~6000 years ago.

You were smart not to waste your time reading it. There is zero mention of capitalism or markets or the industrial revolution.

 

[BirdinHand]

It's not me labeling. It is the buzz word in relationship counseling now.
Every girl/women claims her boyfriend/husband was a narcissist sociopath.

Well, breaking out the “every” qualifier gets this post dismissed as conjecture and bullshit immediately.

 

[noonereal]

Well, breaking out the “every” qualifier gets this post dismissed as conjecture and bullshit immediately.

Lol

You understood me perfectly well.

 

[reflechissez]

It's not me labeling. It is the buzz word in relationship counseling now.
Every girl/women claims her boyfriend/husband was a narcissist sociopath.

You made this up.

 

[BirdinHand]

Lol

You understood me perfectly well.

Yeah, bullshit as usual - it’s expected from many of your posts.

 

[NWRatCon]

I agree with an aversion to monocausalism. Ultimately there is no One Neat Trick To Make Everyone A Success In Life (in a policy context), though there are certainly policies (see above) that set the conditions for greater success.

* I do argue there are policy changes we could make that would remove barriers to success that help keep people down (and there is such a thing as a welfare trap), as well as policy changes we could make that would result in the wide majority of our people becoming financially independent.

For each individual's specific case, though - all we can do at the policy level is make the best structures that incentivize, reward, and enable wise decisions. At the individual level, that's not something I think Government can do effectively or efficiently.

To push back a bit on a couple of canards. The vast, vast majority of "welfare" recipients (a deliberately vague epithet) are short term recipients. Per HHS, "The majority of families who leave the welfare system do so after a relatively short period of time, about half leave within a year; 70 percent within two years and almost 90 percent within five years." So the "trap" is small, or, at best, ineffectual as a tapping agent.

Certain organizations obfuscate these figures by including in "welfare" programs not related to financial assistance (TANF, AFDC, food stamps), other assistance programs related to disability, like SSI. Some even throw in Medicaid and Medicare to pump up their numbers.

All government assistance programs cover nearly a third of the population when one adds in all Social Security programs, including old age SS and Medicare, VA and Tricare to military retirees. Those services, of course, are long term.

Second, again the "vast majority" of the population are "financially independent", that is, employed and making their own financial decisions. Even when unemployment is high, we're still talking about 90+% of the population working.

That, of course, has almost nothing to do with the subject of this thread, which is about abject poverty in the world.