Maybe its me but the likes of oh Paris Hilton would remind us of a lazy rich person. And you still concede that social mobility is a joke. There are structural barriers that prevent advancement regardless of what you think. If you are poor, you probalby don't have the money to get a great education, to escape what many times is an awful public school system, or to even be exposed to a world not filled with crime and poverty. It is a cycle, NOT BECAUSE people are lazy or "lack the drive" but rather because they simply dont have an opportunity to advance themselves. Education isn't simply doing well in school but actually having a school that teaches you something. Get away from the priveleged thinking that is created by being born into a world in which you have access to a good education and all the necessaties of life. When you barely have food on the table, many times its impossible to get the "great education" you talk about.
That's the point. Its not easy to move up anywhere without aid from another source. If the government didn't provide me some money for college, I may not have been able to afford it. Yes social safety nets are important systems to help people advance. Without them, they're stuck where they are. The 20s and 30s are a great example of a world in which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Its not because they "didnt have the drive" aka laziness, but rather they were simply excluded from the growth of the 20s and suffered the worst in the depression of the 30s. The system without government safety nets collapsed because growth wasnt sustainable. No you dont have a choice in many instances. If you live in the poorest neighboorhoods of a major city, you've really got nothing. The schools are junk so you wont learn anything. (as in your lucky if you come out with algebra and basic english skills from high school) You live in a world filled with crime, drugs and poverty so youre primary concern is just staying alive and moving on. Its not simply getting up and going to school and working hard when youre worried about being hit up on the way home. Read stories about housing projects in major cities and you'll understand. You were granted the opportunity to go to a good school and have a decent life, others werent. There's no reason to just perpetuate that. Some level of development aid is a good thing in my mind. I have problems with the way its done now but doing nothing simply means allowing millions to die simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. They dont have a chance in hell to get out of poverty in a country that knows nothing but that. So your arguments about upward mobility are irrelevant meaning that some lives are worth more than others according to you which seems to be quite offensive to some. As for internal corruption of governments, they exist partially because we put them there so in some sense we have a responsibility to the people of those countries. I realize you're trying to move up but that's because you have a chance to. You have an education and you grew up in a family that helped you move up. Many others dont have this opportunity and simply didnt have a choice. They were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. To sacrifice them on an alter in my mind is ridiculous but I suppose you'll see it your way and I'll see it as mine.
Totally agree. If more realize that luck is huge factor then there'd be less to support Social Darwinistic policies. Or at least some people would have one less excuse to hide behind.
Great post. People don't realize how gruesome poverty is. When you're poor, you need EVERY break. It's pretty easy to say you need to "work hard" when working hard means not going out to party with your middle class suburbanite friends and sitting down to study in your quiet environment. Not worrying about getting shot at, robbed, dad's not home, mom's a crack w****, gotta take care of your baby sister, working two jobs to put food on the table. Education and work ethic are what will bring a collective society/community/ethnic group out of the depths of poverty. But to say that an INDIVIDUAL can make it out with hard work? Ignorant.
If you went to a very good school albeit being one of the poorest kids, it's a safe assumption that you grew up in atleast a halfway decent neighborhood, no? Lower middle class, atleast liveable conditions? At the very least you lived in a poor apartment complex. Now imagine living in the heart of the inner city ghetto where schools don't even have enough qualified teachers to meet the requirements to prevent too many kids in one class. Imagine growing up in south central L.A. at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Is that your fault that you were born there? That you don't know who your dad is and where your next meal is going to come from? When this is your life, "survival" is the only thing on your mind. I think it's easy to trumpet work ethic, but to understand poverty you have to actually attempt to empathize with "being poor." It's something we can't comprehend because we haven't experienced it. Oh, I'm sure alot of us here grew up "poor" by middle class standards, like you described. I'm talking DIRT poor. That's not a very easy concept to understand and it's much too complex for a simple solution such as work ethic.
Are you kidding me? The majority of these socialite Old Money hacks are lazy and owe their wealth to the good fortune of being born to a privileged patriarch. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as disrespectful, but it really makes my blood boil when proponents of the conservative "work ethic" model point to their own past and that they are self made men. Some people don't get the opportunity to "work hard" because they are working hard at "staying alive." That's how life is in these places. We don't know because it's not sensational enough for media coverage. In a word, noone gives a damn. Crime in the inner city? Same old news, we would rather cover the attractive white suburbanite that got abducted or ran away from her own wedding.
In some ways, if you grew up in poverty, you always feel it. Even if you're one of the handful who got lucky enough to be living well. You don't forget, that's for sure. You can always feel the utility man, breathing down your neck, waiting for the first opportunity to shut off your electricity in the dead of winter. Or the scholarship counselor, tapping her fingers on the counter and waiting for you to **** up so she can kick you out of college. Or the pharmacist, waiting for your check to bounce so he can stop giving you your medicine.
40 yrs ago . . .replace internet with TV The standard of poverty is relative soon . . .internet will be like the telephone or TV if not now Rocket River
The ratio between people with education that leads to new inventions are pretty small. I personally don't think that creativity is lacking in American industries. If America don't maintain the big corporations, then another country will. It's dog eat dog and that's how the game is played. A good example would be post-Cultural Revolution China in the 70s and 80s... there are plenty of educated people, but they weren't getting opportunities and educated struggled with the uneducated.
Prior to Cultural Revolution, if there were enough people educated properly, the revolution would NOT have happened, and more people would have dispute the nation wide craziness. Post cultural revolution, a whole generation was wasted by being sent to the farms to get re-educated by farmers, there were not plenty of educated people. By education, I mean real knowledge of science, history, literature etc etc, NOT the unconditional faith and love in one person and one party.
When the current pool of educated people are not getting jobs, how is educating the poor going to resolve this issue? In regards to tax policy, tax policies along with government investment can be a long term solution. The balanced-budget policies of the Clinton era seriously stagnated our economy. It even resulted in corporations using much more extensive out-sourcing and taking jobs away from America. Deficit spending is fine as long as the country is growing with the deficit. It is very similar to debt financing. While I don't like debt financing on a personal level because each person has a limited lifespan and debts have to be paid off eventually, the U.S. government will be around in our lifetime and it's life should extend way way beyond that, so this type of spending is fine as long as it is managed.
China in the 50s and 60s was a reasonably educated populace. Education within China wasn't bad and plenty of students studied outside of the country. The problem was that there was no economic demand for the educated people and add in Cultural Revolution, which resulted in 40 or so years of wasted time. If China was not educated, Hong Kong and Taiwan would have never had it's boom.
Great post Sishir... I want to add that our country needs to make its own luck. Continue to build the economy and create more opportunities to the populace.
How on Earth do you conclude this? If anything, the falling deficit helped extend the expansion as long as it did. If the goverment is not buying $200 billion in debt every year, then those bond buyers are investing that money elsewhere - like private companies. That's part of the reason that debt was extraordinarily cheap for companies during the latter 1990s and early 2000's.
Lots of people talking about China, past or current, they only focus on big cities. In 50s and 60s, more than 85% of population lived in the country side, where education was always a big problem. To give you an exact statistic, I just googled, and found one sentense in a report from the Chinese Embassy of Iceland, that "Before 1949, more than 80 percent of Chinese adults were illiterate". How can you go from that state to "reasonably educated" as you claimed, within 10 years? No technology and general education, therefore the demand for educated work force is low, even though there are only a very low percentage of the population was educated.
The debt burden did decrease, but at what cost? The aftermath of the Clinton administration was a record low in GDP growth. While debt is certainly part of the equation when determining the health of the economy, you have to compare that to the growth of the economy as well.
If your stats is right, then I stand corrected on the China issue. However, answer me this... if you are an educated man (and I'm sure you are), but there are no openings anywhere. Would you still get a job?
The answer is yes. There are always openings, unless we are in a deep depression. Even though, if I am educated enough, there is no opening fitting my qualifications, I can either start something on my own, or do some jobs I would consider overqualified before. Or maybe I should get more education to adapt to the job market. Education, just like everything else, is a relative term. Better education than average, gives you an advantage over average work force. If that average is junior high, high school is good enough; but if that average is high school, maybe a college degree is safer. I do agree that education isn't everything, and it doesn't solve every single problem in the society, but it does give you more opportunity from personal perspective, for you can compete with others. No society, except in utopia communist society, will grant you 100% employment rate. Education makes you less likely to be replaced. I am not saying education would grant you high pay job. When I was a student, I overcame some bad years in job market, and I just grab whatever summer jobs came along, including washing dishes for 5DM an hour. I didn't have a problem with that, in fact, I was quite happy to feed myself and go on with education.
