Seriously, read “Wealth, Poverty and Politics”. He spells this out in detail and backs it up with statistics and examples. The problem for most people (including me) is that this stuff is ancient history. There are not many people alive today who would remember Rosa Parks appearing in the news, or Brown v. Board of Education. It’s easy to get a skewed view of how all this panned out if you rely on 21st century liberal media.
Sowell’s view is that things have got dramatically worse, not better, and again he backs this up with data.
I asked you not Sowell. People’s opinions of themselves don’t just magically change, and if they did change than that would lead to a change in policy. So which policies are promoting vicitmhood?
Sure. I was simply pointing you in the direction of Sowell’s books because he can answer your questions in detail, if you’re serious about learning the answers.
Indeed. There has been a deliberate policy push to change the way people think, and thoughts drive actions. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to cultivate an easily-manipulated underclass, or whether it was misguided do-gooderism, is a moot point.
If you are a victim, then by definition you have no control over your future. Your life of servitude and inferiority is mapped out before you, because you are of the Oppressed class and, by virtue of the conspiracy against you, will never move out of it.
Back in the day, many people refused to accept racism as a given and assumed that it would not - could not - persist in a modern society. They were right. There may well have been a “glass ceiling”, but they availed themselves of educational opportunities, made their own opportunities where Society didn’t provide them (eg., by setting up private schools), and generally held their own. They were not cowed, nihilistic, ignorant peasants waiting for the government to give them food stamps, because no such thing existed - or, when they did, they were too proud to take them. You either worked hard and made something of yourself, or you starved. Their was no third way.
I know who Sowell is. Those are answers you believe not I. He was an amateur “economist” and not taken seriously other than in conservative circles.
If people’s minds were changed then what policies were the result? Poverty has gone down over time and has not gone to shit. Things are improving but that doesn’t mean all systemic factors have been addressed.
Flu attributed cases are completely gone, and the same vulnerable people who are dying from Covid would be the ones that died from the flu
There have been many document cases of people’s deaths being wrongly diagnosed as Covid when really they had died from something else. This has been perpetuated by having incentives for both hospitals and the family of the deceased in many countries to agree with Covid being the cause of death
If you’re healthy and young, you have a higher chance of dying every time you get behind the wheel of a car, especially if you are in Taiwan from the driving I’ve seen…
The most recent one is probably the movement to defund the police. I used to believe in the idea of over policing. It made sense explained to me that AA and Latinos were in prison at such a high rate that the problem was over policing.
But at the same time, these are also the same people that complain that only liquor stores open in these neighborhoods. Who else would put any capital in these neighborhoods that gets shot up every night? Not me.
That is not a policy that has been enacted and we can see the consequence over time. There are people that support it and many politicians that don’t.
If there was a massive change in public opinion, then you would expect to see policy change as a result. Policy has not moved in that direction, and in fact, I see the opposite. Trickle down economics has been the mainstay of Republican administrations since the 1980s. The country has moved further right not left.
If you don’t want to take him seriously, that’s up to you. I was suggesting you read the book first and judge him on the facts rather than just assume it’s not worth reading because “people” don’t take him seriously. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the history and statistics he presents are interesting.
It depends how you define poverty. More people have access to a TV and a car. More people have decided to live on the margins of society because they have been convinced that that’s all life offers for them, and the government is still complicit.
My experience is that poverty is a lot like an infectious disease. If you live among poor people you will absorb their poverty-culture and become (or remain) poor yourself, unless you have the presence of mind to escape, and have a route out. The US government has largely prevented people from escaping, and has given up on poor communities as unfixable. As @Andrew0409 said, a big part of the problem is lack of policing. Remove the bastards who make poor communities a living nightmare for 80% of the other occupants, and they will again have a chance to sort themselves out, without “enlightened” (ie., racist) policies designed to give them a leg-up.
Or you will go to a poor school and have less of a chance of getting into a good school. Putting it all on opinion, culture just sounds too flimsy of a theory. Systemic factors should not be ignored.
Yes. But what makes a poor school? Feral children who don’t want to learn and make life hell for those who do. Get them out of there, and let the other poor kids do some studying.
This is a vicious cycle, as I think you said yourself. You can’t just say that A leads neatly to B. The whole mess feeds into itself. Now we’re in the unpleasant scenario of trying to undo past mistakes.
I’m pretty sure a few cities have done it already. Policing is mostly done at the local level, so it’s not something that is just going be enacted federally. It’s just an example of how victim mentality moves politics into nonsensical solutions that hurt the people they should be helping.
The idea of over policing black neighborhoods is very prevalent even if defunding the police is still a rather new and growing idea, I was once a big proponent of that idea myself. But I soon realized that you can’t improve your neighborhood and get people to put capital into it if it’s just ravaged with crime.
I think there’s a big difference between being in poverty and being poor
I like how some people put it, that poverty is a mindset and way of life while being poor is just the current position of lack
I grew up in a country without any clean running water and my family came to Australia without a dollar to their name, but now we are better off than many locals who have had every opportunity presented to them
I think there are some people that no matter how much money you throw at them, it would just be a waste. You see this when people win the lottery and are broke in a couple of years, and I have seen this first hand with people getting big settlements for suing someone and all that money being gone into gambling and drugs
It’s sad, but there are people that simply shouldn’t be helped to the detriment of everyone else
Feral children?? No…no funding means they have no books.
You’re putting way too much on soft factors and completely ignoring systemic factors. If there was massive change in opinion where people all of the sudden became victims then you would see that reflected in the system. So where are the systemic changes that led to vicitmhood?
I’m talking about changes over decades. So show me where people all of the sudden became victims and that led to changes over decades. You’re focusing too much on one aspect and ignoring the other.
I do agree many schools are shit if not most public schools. At the same time, it doesn’t take an Ivy League education to get to the middle class in the US. The barrier from lower to upper class is still a challenge, but probably less so in the US compared to most countries. But you can definitely get to the middle class.
Worst case, the military in the US is a way to the middle class. You don’t even need to be great at school.
I think this is why most immigrants do so well. The first gen is willing to put the work in to get to the middle class. Do work that might not be nice to do. They know their kids can get to good schools and job once they establish into the middle class. Unfortunately, a lot of native born American minorities do not see wealth building as generational. Asians really understand this from their home countries for example.
This is a good example of another type of welfare IMO. There are entire towns in the south who are completely dependent on the military. This perpetuates the need for an ever expanding military industrial complex and endless wars.
High tax jurisdictions with lots of regulations that are supposed to help poor people. These are often plagued by homelessness with refugees coming to my home state of Texas.
Fair enough. Then all we need to do is buy them some books and poverty will magically disappear?
You really need to visit an inner-city school and look at the dynamics. There are usually a bunch of kids with bright futures ahead of them who are thwarted (usually violently) by the roving gangs that run the place. They’re a microcosm of wider society: they need more policing and less of the “it’s not your fault; you just need more understanding and more funding” attitude.
The feral kids may well have awful backgrounds. It may well not be “their fault” as such. But the fact remains that their presence destroys the entire school, and unless they’re removed, you can throw any amount of money at that school and it will produce no results.
If you really can’t see these things, which are so in-your-face that they’re hard to ignore, then nothing I say will convince you that they are there. Of course these attitudes are reflected in the system. Andrew gave you the example of light-touch policing in poor neighbourhoods. I gave you the example of badly-managed schools and misdirected social-security funding. These things don’t spring from nowhere; they spring from beliefs about the nature of poverty.
No solution will make poverty magically disappear. Neither will just telling people they need to take more responsibility. Denying that funding is an issue won’t help. It certainly is an issue.
Actually I don’t need to visit. I know first-hand. But your pointing out another resource constraint. Class sizes are too large and children are completely mixed by ability level. If you want to separate the high achievers from the trouble makers you need the resources to do it.
I don’t see how what you’re presenting can be a solution. What are you going to do? Just yell at people to be more responsible. I mean you have a tv right? You’re not poor. Be responsible and just move to a better neighborhood.
Fact is it’s all about balance. Conservatives too often try to over simplify things by saying everyone now believes this when they used to believe this. No…many people believe different things. The world is complex and requires nuance. Going full tilt to the Libertarian end of the spectrum would end in disaster just as going to far left solutions would.
Andrew’s example of Texas is a good example of going too far to deregulate everything. What happened to Houston in the floods? The city was devastated because of loose zoning laws. People were building houses where they shouldn’t and ended in financial ruin because of lax insurance requirements. There’s always a balance. And I don’t see Texas as being a prime example of that balance.