> "My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak."
This is one of the most stereotypical fallbacks of those who have "made it". It leads naturally to the conclusion that those who are weak are so out of their own accord, which is a laughably false statement.
It is not a position that is hard to understand - assigning moral blame to those less fortunate can be a defense mechanism against the hopeless and helpless injustice we see everywhere.
> "What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead."
This is nice rhetoric and a feel-good platitude, no better than believing in "the power of the self" or such motivational-speaker BS.
A hallmark of meaningless rhetoric is an inability to generate specificity. I've noticed in your other posts in this thread that this is the case. There are a lot of technically true, but ultimately useless statements.
Examples:
> "If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food."
How? I think we can all agree that if the economy was booming these people would have work and be able to buy food at fair market value - but you make it sound like "working on our economy" is trivial, or even possible in the short term. Along your logic, if we can just perfect cold fusion and supply free energy to everyone poverty would cease to exist! The devil, as usual, is in the details.
> "This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program."
Again, you're technically correct, but you've conveniently missed the how. The Income Problem is the most fundamentally difficult problem facing governments of our era, particularly in poor countries like India. So unless you have some groundbreaking insight into how this can happen, the statement is empty.
I know a lot of poor people, and they all share a poor man's mentality, so he must be mainly right. I never been to India, so i am not trying to present myself as an expert, but in Russia, the opportunities are limitless, and yet the vast majority of people are very poor. They make no real attempt to change they life (and those who do almost always succeed), and live in illusions about society, economy, and themselves.
How did it happen that India increased its per capita GDP 4x since independence, and still a lot of people face hunger? It just means many people simply failed to take any action for generations.
One manifestation of that poor man's mentality is having a lot of children being unable to feed them. Birth control is trivial and affordable to everyone. In Russia it is called 'hey what else you can do except having sex?'
Can you please make a point without passing personal remarks?
Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself. There will be failures, misfires and hits off target. But with a little trying eventually a person will make it.
So far as I'm aware I haven't attacked you personally - my post is entirely focused on your argument and statements.
> "Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself."
Again, an empty statement unless accompanied by specifics. It's easy to ask "why don't these people just try hard work?", but the specifics get, naturally, much more complicated.
- What is the realism behind expecting hard, industrious work from a demographic of people who can't even reach caloric break-even each day? How realistic is it to expect severely malnourished and starving people to bootstrap themselves? This strikes me like finding a person who's been stuck at the bottom of a well for days, tossing a rope ladder down, and wondering why they're not climbing. The answer is simple: they have passed the threshold where they can help themselves, but they are not yet past the threshold where they cannot be helped by an outside force.
> "There will be failures, misfires and hits off target."
The consequences of which is quite severe. When we try something and fail, our feelings get hurt, we might lose some money, and maybe we get to pull our belts in a bit tighter for a while.
When the already starving fail, they die. I don't think it's extreme to say that we shouldn't experiment with social policy on the potential deaths of tens of millions.
And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches.
> "But with a little trying eventually a person will make it."
Reality does not support your argument, even in first-world nations. Despite the stereotypes, the USA is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. The entire world is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it.
And this is why I think your argument is typical. In order to reconcile your world view (that enough hard work means success) with reality (the vast, vast majority of the world is unsuccessful), one must make the assumption that those who haven't made it have not worked hard enough.
This is a sadly typical view that's as vindictive as it is false.
Read the following classic books (I'm sure there are others) to get a better perspective on why "working hard" itself may be a luxury. They helped me understand better. Good luck!
Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.
This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.
Ehrenreich's book has been pretty widely rebutted, especially by Adam Shepherd, who wrote his own book. Shepherd started with $25, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and an empty gym bag and ten months later managed to have a job, an apartment, a pickup truck, and $5300: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings
Adam was a SINGLE, male, white, young, healthy, 25-yr old who worked mostly in construction during a construction boom (iirc).
FYI: I have not read this book, but have read reviews of it.
Anyway, the main point here is that lots of poor people with average willpower remain poor because life is just too tough for them. Nobody is saying that it is impossible for a poor person with above-average willpower to become rich.
There is no prejudice against the middle-class person with average willpower who remains middle-class. Why should we shower contempt on the poor who possess only average willpower?
More to the point, Adam was willing to live the way poor people actually live, rather than maintaining unreasonable middle-class lifestyle expectations (living in day motels!?) and whining about how being poor didn't pay the bills like Ehrenreich.
My main point here is that upper-middle-class people who go as far as Ehrenreich to argue that you just plain need an upper-middle-class income to get by are revealing more about their level of decadence than about the plight of the actual working poor. At best it's well-intentioned but patronizing--at worst it's just plain cynical.
Just to clarify: Barbara also wrote about others she met living in motels because of lack of money for a deposit. She wasn't the only one doing so.
Again, an explanation that made sense to me. At the extreme low end (using the analogy of quantum mechanical effects), effects of the lack of money will be different than the effects at a higher income level.
Just speaking for myself: if I had only $40 at the end of the night, I would check into a motel rather than go to a homeless shelter. AFAIK, there aren't an abundance of homeless shelters either, and they are populated by literally mentally ill people and I would be afraid for my safety. Not to mention the question of losing ones dignity by going to a homeless shelter. YMMV.
It's strange that you refused a scholarship - who knows where that money went (another needy student or another scam). Plus, turning down a reservation only means that you made sure that someone less deserving (via reservation) got an engineering seat over a more deserving one (a general student who otherwise would have ranked just enough to get admitted).
While your intent is good, I think you are letting your ego do the talking - dishing out theories over practicals. Practicality beats the st out of theory any given day. Try telling the farmer who hasn't eaten for a week to stand up and be strong - I bet he can't stand (quite literally).
If you come from a poor financial background, wouldn't it be good financial (and common) sense to accept the scholarship?
And as hashpipe rightly said, by turning down your reservation seat you probably let a less deserving (mark wise) reservation candidate over a more deserving candidate who probably won't even receive a scholarship let alone the seat. I would even go as far to say that you perfectly gamed the broken reservation system.
That's a conveniently self-fulfilling attitude. People just need to be shown how to be strong. If they still fail, it's because they didn't learn the lesson properly.
No, there's a whole range of factors that play into an individual's economic situation, and skill, intelligence, and "strength" is not the entirety of it.
"They just need to be shown how to be strong" is a convenient line that solves absolutely nothing.
They turned down food stamps when I was an infant, purely due to pride. That, and my dad wasn't even getting paid regularly by his employer. They were living on $10000/yr back in '82.
But "It made them better people".
addendum: I should also add that when I was born in '81, I required craniofacial surgery to the cost of $18000. They were required to make payments on this, to avoid garnishment.
So... once upon a time, falling back on others giving you stuff was something to be done as a last resort, when you had no other options. Presumably your parents felt like they had other options.
Somewhere along the way the social consciousness changed to more of a "get everything I can get from those 'other people'" as opposed to a "do what I can for myself first". It's not obvious to me that the result is better as a social contract, though it can obviously be better for a particular family.
Now there are definitely social problems when the self-reliance ends up trading off against other public goods (e.g. having your kids well-nourished and educated, not stealing, etc). But if people just want to be self-reliant in reasonable ways instead of falling back on public assistance as soon as they're eligible, I really don't see a problem with that.
10k per year is only 'poor' in the US replace that with 1,000$ in 2012 dollars per year and you might have an idea where India considers the poverty line.
Basic food costs, which is most of what we're talking about, don't actually vary that much (if anything, they tend to be cheaper in the developed world due to subsidies). It's true that Indian poor pay much less in rent and clothing. But food makes up the bulk of what they have to buy each day, and they don't get a meaningful discount (beyond assistance programs like the one described in the linked article).
I don't have any statistics on this, but your statement does not match my observations. Even within the US, the exact same product in a Kentucky supermarket will often cost twice as much in a California supermarket. I shop in both and my food costs are dramatically lower in KY.
In Central America, I found local food prices to be highly correlated with affluence. Food (both served and in markets) in Costa Rica is significantly more expensive than just north in Nicaragua. Rural Panama is a lot cheaper than Panama City. Honduras is generally expensive; Guatemala is generally cheap; but there are zones of relative expense within those countries. Food in general is dramatically cheaper south of the US border, especially if you shop in public markets.
I have not been to India but I am told by friends that food prices are significantly below US prices.
Yes, basically, the only economic exchange at that point is bulk cheap food and that's at close to the same exchange rates. The real differences is how it's almost hard to be that poor in the US, even though so many people are that poor in India.
PS: There are places where houses sell for less than 1,000$ in the US.
I'm taking handouts for my education. I'm also on foodstamps to make sure I can eat healthy foods as I learn. When I am done with my educational program (draftsman, and then mechanical engineering), I will be able to support myself and others via taxes.
I am seeking to better myself so I can be a productive member of US society. Is what I am doing wrong?
It's not wrong. Yet if the handouts and food stamps weren't available you can bet your education would cost less. Free stuff enables you and others to pay more, which promotes inflation. In the same vein, easily procurable student loans have made tuition soar.
Yes it might "cost less", but I wonder, he also gets food stamps, do you think (in this case) less would some how be affordable for him? In reality without the handout tuition might cost less, but he still wouldn't be able to afford it and now he would have no alternatives to getting an education when he's clearly motivated. Interested in any thoughts on this.
Suppose you're right, that even with lowered tuition other factors don't go down enough for many people to afford it. This means they don't go to college, this doesn't mean they don't get an education, especially if they're already motivated to learn, and especially in the US where even the homeless can get free access to the internet if they really need it. In your scenario, if the job market continues its insistence on Bachelor's degrees they will find a quickly shortening supply and will have to loosen up that requirement to stay competitive.
As a compromise I'd support giving every US citizen a free netbook and rolling out free public wifi that only routes to a subset of the internet with each site hand-approved (or with a sufficiently clever algorithm from Google or someone else) to be "of public utility for learning" rather than entertainment. No facebook, no porn, no games, and education sites will have to host their own videos instead of using youtube (or an education-only youtube clone can appear), at least if they want the free users to see it. If you want the full internet, pay for it, which we already do. (Very inexpensive all things considered.)
Good question. The existence of food stamps probably makes the tuition more affordable. Before student loans, tuition was affordable on a minimum-wage job. Houses were far more affordable before easy mortgage loans created a housing bubble. There's lots of evidence that easy money of all types causes inflation. But the food stamps cause food inflation more than they do tuition inflation, so they're likely a net benefit in this case.
"Before student loans, tuition was affordable on a minimum-wage job."
That sounds right with what my mother and other relatives say about the old days. She told me; 35 years ago she could go to a university during fall and spring. If she then worked a job or 2 during summer, she could have it paid all off. If she got a campus job as well, she could have had spending money to boot.
Same with my parents. They wouldn't pay for my college based on the belief that I could easily do it myself, after tuition growth had far outstripped general inflation for a couple decades.
If you're on foodstamps then it's because you don't have the ability to work, right? Or are you saying you're healthy and able to work but you're on them?
That is partially true. I am unemployed at this time. I have tried plenty times to gain work I can excel in, and still look/apply.
Also, due to lack of 'provable education', I can only get jobs that require manual labor (or thereabouts). Also 4 years ago, I shattered my shoulder and have a permanent injury (it is obvious in the way my arm moves).
I was let go recently from a gas station after not being able to repetitively reach across the register.
I have applied for SS disability and medicaid. I was denied for both. I do have my schooling paid for via Vocational Rehabilitation (govt agency that acknowledges permanent physical disability), as well as FAFSA. That is the route I am going, so I can do something as a respectful citizen.
I actually come from a pretty poor financial background.
What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships.
I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it.
My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak.
What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.