Does your opinion apply to children born into poverty?
Kids whose parents can't afford healthy food for them so their brains don't develop?
Kids who are unable to get educated because their schools are corrupt and 90% of the high school students graduate illiterate?
People who were abused as kids and so have mental illnesses and live on the street because they can't hold a job?
People who had their health insurance scam them and had to go $100,000 into debt to pay doctors?
Kids who were brainwashed from birth by parents, teachers, media that they no matter what the expense they must go to university, and now find themselves 22 years old and $100,000 in debt with nothing to show for it?
You live in an extremely exploitative society where the powerful coast while the vulnerable drown.
The majority of the sufferers are people who were born into their situation. They are chronically ill from lack of access to healthcare and quality food. They are mentally ill from being abused and discarded and having nowhere to turn. They are in financial ruin by following the mainstream, standard advice regarding mortgages, investing, and education.
If you were King of America, what would you do with all the destitute? You're right - there were already tons of miserable pre-2008. I just want to know what your plan for the unwashed, stupid, suffering masses is. Because it sounds like you're saying we should just let them wallow in their misery and watch as more cities crumble like Detroit.
When you tell mentally ill homeless addicts to "use their bootstraps" you're really just advocating for the growth of the vast American ghettos that are already the shame of the nation.
I voted the comment up not because I agree with the view, but because I think it's an interesting blurry-mirror into society at large (not necessarily the "1%"). Similar to Tim Minchin's "Fuck the Poor" song. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdtVD8X1-A ) People might claim to care about mentally ill homeless addicts and strongly disagree with the comment, but their behavior suggests otherwise. How much effort do people spend lobbying the government for a structural change that could help the mentally ill homeless addicts? How much money do people donate to them? How many of their actions directly benefit mentally ill homeless addicts? People care about the poor a lot less than they profess; I don't think that means they should necessarily stop professing (though it is worth an examination to see if what they are professing is the best thing to be professing), but instead to work a bit harder on making their professed beliefs better match their behaviors by changing their behaviors.
How many people can afford to lobby the government? By talking to people I am reaching out trying to make structural change. There is no poverty in Sweden. America does not need to be such a heartless country.
I've dedicated my entire career to helping people who are wallowing in misery and are simply unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But it's an extremely hard job because the nature of the economic system is that the most valuable services such as healthcare, education, psychological treatment, healthy food, and child card are NOT available for the people who are desperate for them. You have any idea how many mentally ill people people, after much misery, have told me they simply cannot afford the treatment they need and they simply go without? If you saw these cases like I have you would have nightmares.
The easiest way to make money is to sell to the already rich who don't really need your services. The easiest way to be poor is to spend your time helping the miserable ungrateful masses who have nothing to give back.
For my own sake I wish I could just forget about the miserable poor because my life would be a lot easier. But the demands of conscience make it impossible for me to slide into the comfortable cognitive dissonance of silicon valley.
You're implying that I'm all talk, but I'm not. But talk does go a long way. Right now silicon valley elites have enough money, talent, and resources to reshape society into either a technocratic heartless corporate grinder, or into an egalitarian higg tech civil society that recognizes the inherent worth of all people ala Sweden.
I left the computer field years ago to enter the mental health field. From my new perspective, of being in contact with the underclass, I am continually horrified at the heartless elitism displayed by computer people who I used to consider my brothers and sisters in creating a better world.
Political change isn't a fucking mystery. You tell your politicians to take care of the poor, you tell them to fix crony capitalism, you tell them to stop their imperial wars of aggression, and if they accept bribes you tell everyone you know how corrupt they are. You build a positive vision of a society without ghettos. You hold up examples like Sweden - a social structure that mos Americans would prefer if they just looked into it.
In reply to the dead comment by oelewapperke, I just want to say that while the poor in many countries are worse off, this kind of palliative comparison should not make anyone feel better.
America as a whole puts its best and brightest to work on playing zero-sum wall street games and making trivial things like FarmVille, while America's poor and the world's poor descend into barbarism and resurrect horrible forms of social organization long thought on their way out, from slavery to theocracy to communism.
"Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century"."
The most powerful and wealthy nation to have ever existed, spanning a continent, with a global empire and previously unimagined technology, is overseeing global economic collapse because it is too short sighted to even look 5 years in the future and reign in blatant destabilizing social injustice.
No, this has nothing to do with poverty. This has to do with people who believe they are entitled to the 'american dream' but refuse to sacrifice or work hard, or compromise in any way to achieve that dream.
I was raised on government cheese. I am alive because of foodstamps. You are arguing with strawman. I'm all for helping the poor. We need a safety net, specifically to help children. However, that doesn't mean that every hippy who hasn't succeeded is the victim of some grand conspiracy where the rich tilt the system in their own favor.
Who wants to fix schools? Schools are corrupt in bad neighborhoods not because they are being sabotaged (they often have very high levels of funding), but because bad neighborhoods have bad parents and a poor PTA, so there is nobody with any incentive to fix the schools that also have the ability and experience to do anything about it. A poor inner city parent has never seen a school that works, and has never recieved any education to speak of, so they have no idea how to 'fix' their child's school, and most of the time they don't even know that is something they should be concerned about. Their priorities are all fucked. How is that the fault of me or anyone else in the 1%? How is protesting wallstreet in any way related to this? Your points are all entirely off topic.
Health insurance scam them? What does that have to do with wallstreet? Seriously, though, if your biggest problem is long term debt, you are pretty fucking rich in absolute terms. There are people in Africa who's #1 problem is starving to death. After all, our western legal system is completely friendly to debtors these days, they can have all debts removed (other than student loans) by declaring bankruptcy.
It's not my fault people are too stupid to major in a field that will let them pay back their student loans. The humanities do not lead to jobs, everyone knowns this. Hell, it's repeated so much it's a cliche! Blaming other people because you wanted to do an easy major and fuck girls in college while going into debt is an insult to those of us that worked our asses off so that we could make money later. This is just 'the ant and the grasshopper', don't blame the ant.
Actually, I was born into and lived in poverty almost my entire life before the age of 18. I attended many bad schools, and had no support. I don't feel exploited at all, in fact I think I'm lucky to live in an age where even the poorest people, who's parents make the worst decisions (drug use, alcohol abuse, child abuse) are able to attend school, and in fact are compelled to. If you can afford a big screen TV, and you have 500 channels of television, you are not being exploited. Turn off the TV and do something before you start bitching about how unfair life is.
Everyone has access to quality food. If you are too poor to afford quality food, foodstamps are provided for you and your family. If you choose to buy McDonalds and cheetos anyway, what then? Are we supposed to force feed people carrots? Because that is the only way you'll get many poor people to eat healthy food, by forcing them to. Is that what you advocate?
I think if you turned the anger down, you would see that there isn't a class of evil conspirators at the top. The solutions to our problems are not clear cut, and you don't have any answers to any of the problems you think you see. There is no silver bullet to the problems of society, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of lessons to move forward a little bit every generation.
The generations aren't moving forward, they're moving backward. The middle class has shrunken by 10% since 1970 and poverty has gone up, both worldwide and in America.
TVs are not good things to have, they're brainwashing machines that make people stupid.
Wall street moguls run the government and own the media. They are more powerful than presidents.
We barely have a social safety net anymore.
It's sad that the people who came from poverty often have the least sympathy. What you are missing is that not everyone can be born with above average IQs and work their way out. You got lucky and the social safety net is quickly crumbling behind you.
What you miss about ghetto schools is the school board corruption. The school boards eat all the funding in salaries and perks and corporate pork projects.
I'm not telling you or anyone else to sacrifice their well-being. I'm saying you should take a look at the demographic trends and recognize that for your own sake you need to play a part in bettering the communities of the unfortunate. Because your own livelihood depends on an intact civil society with a functioning non-corrupt government that is not owned by a few corrupt industries.
The society that gave you the opportunity to enjoy wealth did not just spontaneously arrange itself. It was designed and protected by altruistic, honest, competent and intelligent people just like you. Except you aren't playing a civic role in your community but the corporate lobbyists and Christian fascists are, which threatens your lifestyle.
Your social mobility was enabled by the middle class, through hardwon political and social battles with robber barons. You inherited the social traditions that made you more than a serf, but are not passing those traditions on to the next generation. They are quickly going away through corporate owned lawmakers creating a neo-feudalistic corporate fascism.
All I want is for people like you to spend some of your time engaging in community leadership and politics, like my grandfathers did after the war to create and defend the middle class, the social safety net, and social mobility. You came from a poor background, but I come from an upper middle class background whose ancestors played roles in creating those social programs that kept you alive and gave you access to educational resources. They did it for future generations of poor children like you were, and I want you to pay it forward through civic participation. Don't just tell the poor to go wallow. Lend a helping hand.
A helping hand doesn't always help. You act as though we know what the problems are, and what the solutions are, but refuse to act because of idiocy or bigotry.
Suppose you were given a budget of $100Billion USD to spend however you wanted. Now, give me your plan to fix something, anything. Tell me how this 'helping hand' will be used, and I'll respond with a long, long list of ways you are actually going to do more harm than good. It's not out of idiocy and bigotry that I advocate these positions, it's out of a desire to not simply waste resources (and thus cause harm) when we have no idea how to actually help.
Now, to your specific points, you are just full of shit. You are spouting a bunch nonsense. I could refute one point at a time, but your MO seems to be to just move on to new talking points when old ones are refuted. No doubt you win arguments by simply wearing out your opponents with your endless stream of ill-posed statements.
Honestly, I would be happy to demolish your arguments one at a time. So, if you want to have this debate, lets start with one important theme, and go from there, not 500 assertions that you'll just abandon and replace with 500 more in your next post.
Just to be completely clear, I don't claim to know what all the problems and solutions are. I claim that you don't know what the problems and solutions are, and should stop criticizing people just because they don't advocate the same radical positions you baselessly hold.
These are solvable problems. You are way too aggressive with me.
University researchers have many consensus, scientifically based viewpoints on how to improve social issues. The simple fact is that the research is just ignored in favor of radical emotionally-potent ideologies.
Many political ideas have been scientifically tested. I spent years in university learning about them and I certainly don't know them all, but I know professors who have worked on these issues for decades and have been able to draw strong scientific conclusions.
Economists throughout the world are able to reach consensus (defined as 90%+ agreement) on many issues. Their consensus is ignored politically.
Psychologists are able to reach consensus on certain questions of public mental health and the mental health of the poor. Their conclusions are politically ignored.
This is the pattern. The pattern is that other countries have demonstrated social success stories and other countries have put the University social science into practice and reaped success. The USA does not. American political policy is a combination of Christian fascist social policy, corrupt Democratic/Republican fake social program pork barrel, and Military-Industrial-Security complex pork barrel.
People with reasonable views based on consensus science are underrepresented.
If you actually think you can "demolish all my arguments" then you've lost my respect for your lack of humility. You're just one man, you don't have time to be an expert in every field.
My opinions are mostly informed by the consensus views of social scientists. When implemented, social science has been very successful.
What do I want to do about the poor? I just want scientifically literate people to put more time into politics so that they can counteract the voices of irrationality that currently dominate lawmaking.
I want smart people to act on the good science that is out there instead of having the wealthy and intelligent throw up their hands and pretend it is someone else's problem.
I'm too aggressive with you? You are the one that says I advocate positions that are obviously wrong and hurt children. I suspect you aren't accustomed to having someone competently push back when you go on one of your rants? Either you think I advocate hurting children, or you think I just post bullshit to HN without thinking it through. Either way, you are far more insulting than I have been. I have the distinction of being direct, both with my arguments and with my insults.
Again, you give a dozen assertions, and again it's without any context, argument or evidence.
I would love it if you would give one of these near-universally accepted truths that economists all agree on. I also look forward to your rationalizations when you have to restrict who is a 'real' economist (I really doubt you will find 90% agreement among economists that are Chinese Socialists, members of the Austrian school, distributionists, working economists at major brokerage houses, etc). I suppose you want to limit it to 'mainstream' western economists at big name universities?
Try to keep it concise this time, and see if you can give me an example without bringing in another dozen unrelated 'facts'.
poverty has gone up, both worldwide and in America
I don't have the figures to hand for the US, but worldwide the opposite is true. In percentage terms the proportion living in poverty now is roughly half what it was in 1980[1]. In absolute terms it has dropped from 1.5 billion in 1981 to 1.1 billion in 2001[2].
"in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century"
You do realize that one with of the world regressing and less people living in poverty can both be true, right?
I'm quite familiar with the IMF report. That 1/5th was comprised mostly of former communist nations who's population was much worse off during the transition to market economies. That didn't always drop them into global poverty levels though.
There are plenty of bad things in the world, but the fact is that less people are starving to death now than 30 years ago and that is worth acknowledging.
Kids whose parents can't afford healthy food for them so their brains don't develop?
Kids who are unable to get educated because their schools are corrupt and 90% of the high school students graduate illiterate?
People who were abused as kids and so have mental illnesses and live on the street because they can't hold a job?
People who had their health insurance scam them and had to go $100,000 into debt to pay doctors?
Kids who were brainwashed from birth by parents, teachers, media that they no matter what the expense they must go to university, and now find themselves 22 years old and $100,000 in debt with nothing to show for it?
You live in an extremely exploitative society where the powerful coast while the vulnerable drown.
The majority of the sufferers are people who were born into their situation. They are chronically ill from lack of access to healthcare and quality food. They are mentally ill from being abused and discarded and having nowhere to turn. They are in financial ruin by following the mainstream, standard advice regarding mortgages, investing, and education.
If you were King of America, what would you do with all the destitute? You're right - there were already tons of miserable pre-2008. I just want to know what your plan for the unwashed, stupid, suffering masses is. Because it sounds like you're saying we should just let them wallow in their misery and watch as more cities crumble like Detroit.
When you tell mentally ill homeless addicts to "use their bootstraps" you're really just advocating for the growth of the vast American ghettos that are already the shame of the nation.