The cycle of poverty

@Deboss: never had that problem myself. I loved science, literature, mathematics, and art since I was a small child. more than one of my teachers let me dork around reading random books because they knew I had already finished my homework and would be bored if I wasnt given more knowledge to consume.

Sounds more like you had terrible teachers and an overbearing sense of your own intellectual superiority to blame more than anything. Even the best teacher isnt gonna care if you're "too smart for the work" if you're acting like it makes you above doing it because of it. Not to mention, public perception of art is sort of like public perception of the engineering you loive so much. They think us art types all wear paint smeared coats and scream unintelligibily about our lack of inspiration all day, and they think you guys can magic up anything in 50 seconds or less or have degrees in every single science field at once.

Doesn't mean either stereotype holds any sort of truth outside the realm of ridiculous television.

As for the original topic, once again, at least where I live, both hard science and liberal arts tend to get viewed as "stupid" or "useless" because midwestern culture at least, seems more apt to value "hardworking family men" who live at the factory or the bar but go to church on sunday with the wife and kids.

edited 3rd May '11 10:06:15 AM by Midgetsnowman

That's just it, I did the fucking work. Most often before the teacher had finished the lesson and generally more accurate than ninety percent. Why this should be punished is beyond me. The day I learned the most was when I got shoved into a room alone and given several days worth of work. Which I finished in two hours.

And how's that working for you? You must be making tons of money right? Because you certainly can't be in the same boat as those "starving artists" at all.

Based on what? I don't have an engineering position. I'll live with it until I do.

Can we please drop Deboss' alleged superiority complex and get back on the topic? It actually seems like a discussion I'd like to read if it wasn't for the silly derail.

Well, to be on-topic, the superiority complex that many young people have is part of the problem with perpetual poverty. Higher education isn't properly communicated or advertised. Even now, I'm getting these banners saying things like "Get your online degree right now!" or "Single moms go back to school to a degree!" Degree in what? For what purpose and under what circumstances? Having a degree doesn't just make life a cakewalk all of a sudden.

I see messages like that and then I understand why people have an aversion toward higher education. People aren't understanding the real reasons why it's important to get a college education, so they spend gobs of money trying to get a degree that they don't really know how to use, and they end up being relatively unsuccessful. Non-college types try to use that as evidence for how college is a waste of time, and you end up with entire population sectors that are either under-experienced and over-educated or under-educated and too smug to admit that their economic viability has an expiration date.

We need to balance ambition with knowledge to fight poverty and lack of education. No, not all kids are going to be basketball players and brain surgeons. But the ones who aspire to reach these goals need to get clearly communicated explanations to supplement their motivation.

I keep seeing the opposite mentality on my campus. A big chunk of the pre-med students, for example, are convinced that going to medical school is one of those things you do so you can buy a turbocharged Porsche 911, not because you have a genuine interest in the circulatory system or how the human brain works. The pre-law students in the English and philosophy department are the same way, and the harsh reality is that we need to continue stringent academic standards to either weed out the ones who are just wasting time or to toughen up the ones who aren't quite sure what to do with their studies. I prefer the latter case because it fosters an environment of both goal orientation and creativity.

In other words, don't tell kids "you can be an astronaut" when you're not supplementing that ambition with books about what it takes to be an astronaut. Likewise, the more cynical parents need to stop mentally beating their kids down when they say they want to be a tattoo artist instead of a lawyer. Both professions are quite lucrative, and happiness does impact productivity and vice versa. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that unsuccessful people tend to work in fields that they don't like. Successful people can (but not always will) break from poverty by balancing their dreams with down-to-earth discipline and modest encouragement from their parents and teachers. Part of the reason why people stay in poverty is because they either have unrealistic dreams or they don't want to fulfill those dreams as much as they think.

edited 3rd May '11 2:48:09 PM by Aprilla

That's only a problem if they lack the skill to do it.

Chun Li's ass is better.

???

Shallow motivations can lead to poor results, particularly in the medical field. One of the reasons why people tend (but not always) to be broke and unsuccessful is because they don't really give a shit about their job beyond the basic tasks that need to be done. I'm not expecting a Mc Donald's employee to be ecstatic about his job, but that could be because he spends his alternate time (and energy) trying to finish his biology thesis research or getting a record label with his rock band.

One of the similarities between the hack doctor who just prescribes drugs without really trying to take care of his patients on a meaningful level and the guy at the front counter of a fast food restaurant is that they don't care. The doctor doesn't care about writing a prescription for drugs you don't need, and the burger server doesn't care if he screwed up your number 5 by putting mustard on your fish sandwich.

Whether you like it or not, compassion and attention to detail do go hand in hand, however slight it may be. Compassion sells because it makes people feel good, and people like feeling good. Life isn't just about making money, because if it were, we'd see more people making money. Only thing is, they'd be doing in ways that would be more detrimental to the ethos of the society in question. I could probably pay off my student loans right now by selling drugs, selling my body or professionally murdering someone, but that's not socially acceptable nor does society benefit from it in the long-term. Money is money, but I'm pretty sure people like to maintain some sense of integrity in what they do. Not everyone, but many people.

If integrity and compassion weren't issues of consequence, you'd have a lot more crimes being committed. Most criminals aren't breaking the law for shits and giggles. They're doing it because they're trying to break out of the cycle and get rich quick. I'm not trying to turn this into a topic about the relationship between crime and poverty, but you get what I mean.

edited 3rd May '11 6:30:51 PM by Aprilla

Which is where losing their job and paycheck comes in. Not caring makes doing your job well more difficult, doing your job badly is cause for getting fired.

In short, it seems that the best way to defeat poverty is to create an amoral society where people merely operate to satisfy the basic needs - food, shelter, water and reproduction to continue the species. That's how most life forms got their start on this planet, but we've become more complex over the course of our evolution. We have things like culture - science, math, art, literature, music (and let's not debate their merits, please) - traits that flesh out our current character as a species.

If we were totally utilitarian like a virus, poverty probably wouldn't exist because we wouldn't be hindered by consequences of morality. Clearly, there is a large realm of permeability for this effect, which is one of the reasons why crime exists in the first place. It's like a basic survivalist response that says "screw the law, I'm going to lie, cheat, murder and steal because I don't want to be broke (and therefore at risk)". Economic amorality is one of those platforms that would, for all intents and purposes, work, but at the expense of the value systems that separate us from animals. And even that is questionable. It would be like wiping out a chunk of the population, but only the ones who were deemed unfit to live. We might see economic stimulation, but at what cost?

Those in a state of poverty could arguably be supplying a necessary evil because you need a sizable labor force to really keep things running as they are. We haven't reached a technological point where the most crucial municipal functions like sanitation, food procurement and the construction of houses and roads can be automated with little to no human involvement. It's not a conclusive argument, but what I'm cynically substantiating is that some poor schmuck has to clean up the metaphorical and literal waste products that the more successful people produce.

edited 3rd May '11 7:03:54 PM by Aprilla

^ Just because someone's a laborer doesn't mean they need to be poor. Hell, look at ancient Athens—a farmer in Solon's time could still make two-fifths of what a rich "Pentacosiomedimni" made.

Yeah, that's true, but I think part of the problem is that many people at or below the poverty line take an attitude of self-defeat by assuming that labor = poor. Plumbers and heating/cooling technicians make a killing. There's that and people have gotten it into their heads that physical labor isn't a good way to make a living. Hell, I've considering cage fighting to pay off my car and some other bills. Physical labor seems less attractive today because of the potential for non-manual labor and all the comfort that entails. You also have to consider the fact that people are healthier and live longer than they did before the Industrial Revolution.

The lack of social mobility in many feudal societies may also account for the prestige of physical labor that we don't see as widespread today. If you were a farmer in ancient Sumeria, that was your life, but it was a secure and predictable life. Now, you get a degree, buy a car and a house, get medical insurance (if you can afford) and hope to God that you don't get into a car accident, have a heart attack or have a tree fall through your roof. You can rise more easily, but you can also fall pretty heavily. We've shifted from a labor-based economy to a service-based economy, meaning specifically that people no longer have the skills to totally sustain themselves on a basic economic level. We have to hire someone - a service provider - to repair the car and house and perform surgery on the heart.

That takes more money and more time because you need to find someone with highly specialized abilities to perform these tasks. Individuals in pre-modern times wielded a wider variety of skills (but that's not a fact so don't hold me to that statement), but they were economically stagnant. The reverse seems to be occurring now.

edited 3rd May '11 7:30:18 PM by Aprilla

Hence my preference for trade schools over college encouragement.

"Hence my preference for trade schools over college encouragement."

No shit. You've said that several times and you don't need to repeat yourself. Your opinion has been noted on several discussions. You can get off your soapbox about it. I personally find certain pats of college (but not college in its entirety) to be completely useless myself, but my advice is to do something about it or stop bringing it up. There are petitions circulating around the Internet on encouraging more public funding for trade schools, so jump on that instead of parroting the same anti-college rhetoric over and over again. Your opinion on the subject isn't exactly a secret around here, you know.

"You're starting from the assumption that what separates us from other animals is something beyond complex tool use and big brains. The entirety of civilization exists as a tool, not something worthy of existence in and of itself."

The entirety of civilization does exist as a tool. I agree. However, this statement by itself is A.) off-topic for the thread (if you actually tied this into the topic, I'd understand more) and B.) related to perception and opinion, not fact. Value systems are a sort of currency for our species, and animals don't need value systems because their primal instincts compensate for other aspects they lack such as language and advanced information processing abilities. The only meaning that civilization has is the meaning we attach to it, but a relative value is still a value nonetheless due to those who observe it as a value. In terms of cyclical poverty, this ties into the adage "one man's trash is another man's treasure". Our values shape our perception of the world, and even the most feral humans have traces of culture in them, however faint it might be.

You notice that animals don't really suffer from poverty in the economic sense because they have no use for it. When a weak member of a group-oriented species is found, that group takes measures to eliminate that member. We do the same thing in our species through practices such as minimum wage misallocation, plutocracy and corporatism, all of which are arguably side-effects of both a free-market economy and mercantile socialism. You're right in saying these are tools, but they're of a distinctly human variety in the sense that we foster actual institutions out of them whereas other animals primarily base value on ecological merit. Edit: I'll actually take that one step further in saying that our cultural values feed into our survivability. With a population of over 7 billion, we need elements like law, justice, morality, and charity to keep from ripping each other apart and forcing ourselves into extinction.

Crows have a fascination for shiny objects, but those objects still serve a purpose beyond mere aesthetic exchange. Cats like to play with balls of yarn, but those are actually skills they use to practice their catching and hunting. We're a bit more screwy than other animals because we have items that only have superficial value in the ecological and biological sense. As one troper put it a while ago, precious items like gold and diamonds are just pretty rocks that we decided to use as currency. They're valuable to us because they're rare, and their rarity makes them important in our heads. Poverty works the same way. We fight and toil over items that only have societal value and no absolute value in and of themselves. If this is what you're trying to get across, then I totally agree.

Luxuries are important to our value systems because they make life more bearable. However, we reach a certain threshold where these value systems start to lose their original meaning in the process of economic materialization. You start off saying "I need a car for college" which turns into "Hey, that expensive sports car looks nice" and then "all the X,Y and Z people drive this car, so I need to conform by buying one". You now have an item that you really don't need, and this contributes to the cycle of poverty when you spend your time and energy - your vitality - working to preserve a tool when the tool should be working to preserve you.

A better illustration would be the argument "I need to keep my car so I can get to work and I need to get to work to keep my car from getting repossessed". It's simply people buying items that are either beyond their financial reach or of no real value beyond the superficial value assigned to it. This is also related to how people think in terms of brand names instead of the actual usability and quality of the item. The off-brand cereal is just as good as the name-brand stuff, but that more marketable image of the lucky charms dude is going to hit you on a far greater subconscious level than the cheap rip-off cartoon character that isn't as recognizable to you. There aren't many animals besides dogs and some chimpanzees who act this way, and we're the only known species that acts this way with such profundity that it actually keeps people from making true financial progress.

edited 3rd May '11 10:53:02 PM by Aprilla

Interesting, I shall look them up.

This sounds more like something that should be included with basic home-ec/science. Analyzing the effects of a product versus the cost to find maximum utility from the product choice. Then again, most people don't get a good foundation in science/statistics/analysis.