Land of Plenty

February 19, 2006 11:51 AM

37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. Are you proud to be an American? (newsfilter - no apologies).
posted by adamvasco (255 comments total)

(newsfilter - no apologies).

Lame post. No apologies.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:55 AM on February 19, 2006

I liked it. (Nirvana - All Apologies)
posted by alteredcarbon at 12:02 PM on February 19, 2006

GYOFB - no apologies.
posted by soiled cowboy at 12:02 PM on February 19, 2006

The concept of a poverty line disturbs me greatly, not to take away from the fact that there are obviously many people struggling to make ends meet. There will always be a poverty line, and a certain percentage of the population that lives below it, by definition. That fact in and of itself should not be disturbing. The determination of what the poverty line is also leaves much to be desired.
posted by loquax at 12:05 PM on February 19, 2006

Pre-emptively calling yourself out really doesn't help.
posted by smackfu at 12:09 PM on February 19, 2006

The concept of a poverty line disturbs me greatly,

Rather, I should say that the misue of the poverty line as a statistic, especially a comparative statistic, disturbs me.
posted by loquax at 12:09 PM on February 19, 2006

It's not poverty, it's asceticism, duh. Rage on into that dark gloomy night, unlit by plasma screens.
posted by hellinskira at 12:14 PM on February 19, 2006

(steve jobs's social life - no apple orgies)
posted by Protocols of the Elders of Awesome at 12:14 PM on February 19, 2006

I'm sure the impoverished lady living in the Kentucky trailer has it better than the impoverished lady living in Vietnam.

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and hapiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

Yes, it's absolutely impossible to give everyone absolute equal chances of "success" but I think the U.S. does it better than anyone else.

The fact that we are a young country, with not very long familial lines helps a lot. Self-imposed caste systems are implied in many other parts of the world.
posted by b_thinky at 12:15 PM on February 19, 2006

Are you proud to be an American?

No. Because I'm not.
posted by srboisvert at 12:15 PM on February 19, 2006

adamvasco, I for one thank you for the post. Sobering and scary. The fact that people go hungry in the richest country in the world is the definition of tragedy. A really great - if somewhat flawed - book on the topic is "Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", by Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer who went "undercover" and attempted to survive as a waitress, maid and Walmart "associate", and the difficulties she encountered in the game of survival in the less-than-affluent realms of American society.
posted by dbiedny at 12:19 PM on February 19, 2006

"Are you proud to be an American?

No. Because I'm not."

Then perhaps the question wasn't directed at you, was it?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 12:20 PM on February 19, 2006

vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs.

Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that they're doing that.
posted by Opposite George at 12:21 PM on February 19, 2006

I think this would be a great opportunity to talk about poverty in America!
posted by mcsweetie at 12:23 PM on February 19, 2006

No apologies: That's pretty much been the American line on this for decades...
posted by Artw at 12:24 PM on February 19, 2006

Hmm, the article could have spoken for itself without the inflammatory editorializing, but this is an important issue and I'm glad you posted the link. For years, the priorities that have trumped all others come election time are national security and a growing economy. Yet, whatever economical gains we've achieved continue to disproportionately favor the ultra-wealthy. I'm not sure what's to be done about it, though; as the article rightly points out, there's an endemic cultural misperception to be overcome:

In America, to be poor is a stigma. In a country which celebrates individuality and the goal of giving everyone an equal opportunity to make it big, those in poverty are often blamed for their own situation. Experience on the ground does little to bear that out. When people are working two jobs at a time and still failing to earn enough to feed their families, it seems impossible to call them lazy or selfish. There seems to be a failure in the system, not the poor themselves.

But most reasonable Americans I've encountered nonetheless believe that anyone working full-time should not have to live in poverty, and I think the time's long overdue for the Democrats to make the living wage a major part of their platform. I'd hope that even the religious right would see the basic morality and humanity of ensuring that the children of working Americans don't go hungry.
posted by bcveen at 12:24 PM on February 19, 2006

Does it actually state what this fabled "Poverty Line" is at?
Is it 17K a year for single? What is it at really?
posted by Balisong at 12:24 PM on February 19, 2006

I'm proud to be an Okie from Musgokee...
posted by fixedgear at 12:27 PM on February 19, 2006

'America is meant to be free. What's free?' she laughs.

Somehow I think she does not quite understand the nuances of a word "free".
posted by c13 at 12:29 PM on February 19, 2006

Is it 17K a year for single? What is it at really?

About 20k/a for a family of four, and 10k for 1 person, not including government support and some other things, which skew the numbers.
posted by loquax at 12:32 PM on February 19, 2006

I'm sure the impoverished lady living in the Kentucky trailer has it better than the impoverished lady living in Vietnam.

Why did you have to pick one of the poorest countries on earth for your comparison? What about a poor person living in Germany or Greece? Has America sunk so low that 'hey at least it's better than living in Vietnam' is your rallying cry?
posted by Space Coyote at 12:35 PM on February 19, 2006

Dang, and I thought I was poor making 20K for a family of 2.5
But I still have cable internet, so I must not be.
posted by Balisong at 12:35 PM on February 19, 2006

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and happiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

As long as they get a decent education, which is definitely not everyone.

There are probably many, many countries where poor people are better of then they are here, mostly in Europe. Where they are at least guaranteed health, or healthcare anyway.
posted by delmoi at 12:38 PM on February 19, 2006

Somehow I think she does not quite understand the nuances of a word "free".

Well, one of you is.
posted by delmoi at 12:40 PM on February 19, 2006

Let's stand glibly aghast.
posted by Kwantsar at 12:41 PM on February 19, 2006

Yes, it's absolutely impossible to give everyone absolute equal chances of "success" but I think the U.S. does it better than anyone else.

The morality of the statement aside, it's also analytically incorrect. There are other countries where people from the lower classes are more likely to level up and become wealthy, rather then being stuck in poverty generation after generation. America does not do it better then anyone else that's a fact.
posted by delmoi at 12:42 PM on February 19, 2006

How does one manage to starve in America? You can find enough for a Big Mac in a couch.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:42 PM on February 19, 2006

Kwantsar: Unfortunately you can use economic numbers to prove just about anything you want, based on your ideology. Partisan analysis are not really worth bothering to read unless you know enough to figure out what might be wrong.
posted by delmoi at 12:46 PM on February 19, 2006

Is it 17K a year for single? What is it at really?

How the Census Bureau Measures Poverty (also referenced in the wikipedia article posted above) is informative, and features a chart of their 48 poverty thresholds, varying by size of family and age.
posted by Lirp at 12:47 PM on February 19, 2006

From NYT article Kwanstar linked to: By 2001, only 6 percent of "poverty households" lived in "crowded" homes (more than one person per room) - down from 26 percent in 1970.
Is this really true? So, if a family of four has a two bedroom apartment/house and the siblings have to share a bedroom, they live in a "crowded" home?
posted by c13 at 12:48 PM on February 19, 2006

How does one manage to starve in America? You can find enough for a Big Mac in a couch.

Huh? Obviously you realize that will only work once. What about the next day and the next? Are you suggesting that poor travel from house to house looking in other people's couches?
posted by delmoi at 12:48 PM on February 19, 2006

Oh yes. God forbid that you actually try to cook, which would be a lot chaper and stretch your "couch fund" a lot further.
posted by c13 at 12:53 PM on February 19, 2006

So there are some on MetaFilter who find humor in the fact that people are starving, and their children are starving, in a country as rich as the US.

Those of you who find snark and entertainment value in the actual suffering of others, kindly burn your membership cards to the human race.
posted by dbiedny at 12:56 PM on February 19, 2006

Well-paid work only goes to the university-educated. Many others who just complete high school face a bleak future. In Texas more than a third of students entering public high schools now drop out.

Could this be part of the problem? Instead of, say, in the short term throwing money at the poor for them to sustain themselves and their children in their poverty, perhaps people need to be looking at long term goals. Figure out what it takes to actually get these kids educated and out of the holes their parents have dug.

NB. I never have much sympathy for people who complain about not being able to eat but who can still afford little comforts. That Kentucky trailer-park woman should pawn her TV and use the money to buy some seeds.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 12:57 PM on February 19, 2006

So many Americans are so clueless about poverty. To my eyes, America looks much like the third world, yet people growing up here are taught that it's better here than anywhere, when it's demonstratably not.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:00 PM on February 19, 2006

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and hapiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

Some more. Some less.
posted by DirtyCreature at 1:03 PM on February 19, 2006

Loquax: "There will always be a poverty line, and a certain percentage of the population that lives below it, by definition. That fact in and of itself should not be disturbing."

Not so. There are countries where the poverty line basically does not exist, the social welfare safety net is designed so that the minimum income a person can have is (barely) enough to rent a room, eat, cloth yourself, and get proper healthcare. When I moved to the US, it was moving to the third world, seeing all the homeless, seeing all the people (even middle class!) trying to set their own broken bones because healthcare here is only accessable to some.

Much like the third world, if you're part of the elite, all your cares are taken care of, but if you're not, well, you better learn to like a toothless smile. The gap between the two is massive, and not based on personal merit.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:03 PM on February 19, 2006

c13: so glad to see you raising the intellectual level of the discussion. Am I to take it that you are someone who enjoys the idea of hardworking people who can't provide for themselves and their families? Working stiffs stuck in a rut, a paycheck away from being on the street? You get off on the notion of people who cannot get enough food to eat, whol have to choose between medicine and food? Why the GFY? Did I say something that offended you? Please enlighten me.
posted by dbiedny at 1:08 PM on February 19, 2006

If we believe that it is the fault of the poor person because they're not working hard enough or smart enough, then that takes the responsibility away from us. It is, of course, their fault.

Perhaps we are uncomfortable with our lives of privilege (in this context) because it is inherently unethical to have more than you need when your neighbour (local or international) can not afford to feed their child.

To say that someone born into poverty has the same chances as a wealthy person is naive. The first barrier is education. The wealthy child recieves not only a more comprehensive school education, but a social one too, how to act, dress, think etc in order to be part of a social class. Perhaps both kids are equal when applying for a job at McDonalds, they most definitely are not when applying for an internship that will give them employment opportunities.

It is easy to find fault with the behaviour of someone who's opportunities will always be less, but you may assume that there are people out there who do cook their meals, who do work three jobs, who do dress their children neatly and cleanly, and despite all this virtue, these people are in poverty, and worst still, it is totally acceptable to the majority.
posted by b33j at 1:15 PM on February 19, 2006

dbiedny:

This whole thread is lame because the poster essentially added a "fuck you, metafilter" at the end of the post. That undermines any message and any chance of rational discussion around here. There have been well-framed posts on this issue, bringing in perspectives from Ehrenreich, as noted above and others.

Also the Guardian article itself can be interpreted as a "Hey Americans, you suck" which, again, naturally puts people on the defensive. Most americans are very aware of the deep poverty in this country and are both concerned and ashamed. Again, its not the content or the facts, its the presentation here.

So now you come in and tell everyone they should be ashamed of themselves and you expect people to admit you're right. Not around here. Again, this is all a basic understanding of social dynamics, particularly of this place.
posted by vacapinta at 1:16 PM on February 19, 2006

posted by Marianne at 1:19 PM on February 19, 2006

b_thinky "
Yes, it's absolutely impossible to give everyone absolute equal chances of "success" but I think the U.S. does it better than anyone else.

You sound like you haven't travelled much. You sound here like the (negative) stereotyped American who has been brainwashed into reflexively thinking that America is best without ever having looked out the window. This might not be the case, and I've seen you say perceptive things in the blue before, but I hav difficulty comprehending that "the US does it better than anyone else" would come from someone familiar with some of the "anyone else"s.

The linked article mentioned that US poverty was the highest in the developed world, assuming that this is mere statistical drivel is just putting on blinkers.

Here's a study on the subject. That link seems to be down for me, but here's the Amazon synopsis:

The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism traces how individuals fare over time in each of the three principal types of welfare state. Through a unique analysis of panel data from Germany, the Netherlands and the US, tracking individuals' socio-economic fate over fully ten years, Goodin, Headey, Muffels and Dirven explore issues of economic growth and efficiency, of poverty and inequality, of social integration and social autonomy. It is common to talk of the inevitability of tradeoffs between these goals. But in this book the authors contend that the social democratic welfare regime, represented here by the Netherlands, equals or exceeds the performance of the corporatist German regime and the liberal US regime across all these social and economic objectives. They thus argue that, whatever one's priorities, the social democratic welfare regime is uniquely well-suited to realizing them.


(This is very true to my experience of living in different countries. The US system keeps people down more than that of many other countries. I have been horrified by the conditions in the USA, but the people who grew up here assume it is normal, even in countries in the developed world.)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:20 PM on February 19, 2006

vacapinta - point taken. I'm not expecting _anyone_ to think I'm right about anything. I'm just saying that the post makes some good points about the issues of poverty in the US. I was expressing an opinion that the snarkiness I'm seeing in response seems to imply that hunger is a laughing matter. It makes me sad. Sorry if I was not in tune with the social dynamics of MetaFi.
posted by dbiedny at 1:21 PM on February 19, 2006

I guess c13 is one of those 'America is the best place in the world 'cos I say so' kind of people. To say anything less is unpatriotic huh?

I think I'll stay right here thanks. You can be a shining WHITE light of democracy as much as you want, just keep your bullshit away from me.
posted by Jelreyn at 1:22 PM on February 19, 2006

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and hapiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

Yes, it's absolutely impossible to give everyone absolute equal chances of "success" but I think the U.S. does it better than anyone else.

No, it does not. Over and over again, research has shown that not only is the US the most unequal first world country, but also that social mobility in the US is lower than in many other first world countries, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. It's not even as mobile as Canada (which is remarkably similar to the US in history and resources). Please stop being an ostrich.

But this is a waste of time. It seems that too many Americans would prefer to believe their own national myths without letting pesky facts get in the way.

(Yes, I am bitter. I am so sick and tired of people who haven't given social mobility the amount of thought they would to chosing a television channel to watch spouting on about how their country is the "land of opportunity" and better than anywhere else in the world for equal opportunity. Just north of your own border there is higher social mobility, but no, you just go on believing the nice lies.
posted by jb at 1:25 PM on February 19, 2006

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and hapiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

Delusional.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:26 PM on February 19, 2006

They're only poor because they're lazy and they're not trying hard enough. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting of the local Objectivist chapter to dash off to.
posted by slatternus at 1:26 PM on February 19, 2006

Unfortunately you can use economic numbers to prove just about anything you want, based on your ideology. Partisan analysis are not really worth bothering to read unless you know enough to figure out what might be wrong.

What happens wehn you follow these statements to their logical conclusions?
posted by Kwantsar at 1:26 PM on February 19, 2006

How does one manage to starve in America? You can find enough for a Big Mac in a couch

Exactly- it's cheaper to eat poorly then it is to eat healthy, whole foods. So the poor, the ones without health insurance, are the ones with more health problems (the NY Times is doing a series on the rise of diabetes, fascinating). Funny how that works out.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:27 PM on February 19, 2006 [1 favorite]

The US has spent a great deal on making the poor less so. The US also invites more poor people to its shores than any other country.

There are billions of dollars in food stamps and other benefits that go untouched. Moreover, the poverty line is calculated pre-government assistance. So what does that term poverty line really mean? Its a reminder that we need to try and do better, but I don't think it's a mark of shame.
posted by ParisParamus at 1:29 PM on February 19, 2006

jb, profuse thanks for the reality check. Not all of us Americans buy into the bullshit, some of us have spent time overseas and seem to have a more balanced view of the reality of the situation.
posted by dbiedny at 1:30 PM on February 19, 2006

I come from a different country, dbiedny, so my definiiton (for the lack of a better word) of "poor" is slightly skewed. My definition of a "crowded" home is off as well. Or the word "free". So I tend to get a little snarky when I read an article about the plight of some poor woman who is being interviewed while waiting to pick up a disbursement of FREE food. But that's not the point. Yes, there is a great disparity in America, and there are a lot of hardworking people who can't make ends meet. But they are not ALL that hardworking, or innocent of their plight. And a lot of them would in no way be considered poor in most other places on earth. And I don't think that just because someone does not break down in tears immediately upon reading the article, he should, as you eloquently put it, "kindly burn ... membership cards to the human race."
I'm surprised that you expect a more serious response to this statement.

On preview: Jelreyn, I'm russian. I'm not foolish enough to think that America is the BEST place to be, but I know from experience that it really ain't as bad as a few people here are saying it is. Like PP says, America does have the longest immigration lines, and I also know it from experience.
posted by c13 at 1:33 PM on February 19, 2006

Unfortunately, nothing will change while the "national myth" jb described remains in place in the minds of so many, and it looks as entrenched now as ever.

In a kind of black irony, the national myth seems to lean towards being held the most strongly by the poorest.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:34 PM on February 19, 2006

ParisParamus "The US has spent a great deal on making the poor less so. "

Not compared to many. Comparisons are best made between peers - the other developed nations, rather than the "well we're doing a better job than ethiopia, so it's not too shameful" style of comparison.

However, yes, there are systems so thoroughly broken in the USA that the country gets less out of them than others even while pouring more money into them than others (healthcare is the obvious one). So you're right in that sense - some changes other than just spending more money need to made.

Not that they ever will be :-/
posted by -harlequin- at 1:41 PM on February 19, 2006

c13- thanks for the thoughtful response. I was not suggesting that anyone break down in tears, I was voicing anger that there are those who seem to find entertainment value in the suffering of others. It may seem too simplistic, or naive, to think that everyone should feel as strongly about these issues as I do - the social and economic injustices I witnessed growing up in South America opened me eyes and, I suppose, forever skewed my objectivity and sensitivity about poverty and human suffering. Being from Russia, I have no doubt you've seen your share as well. And I don't feel my statement about the membership card warranted a "fuck you", but MeFi is not exactly the place to be bashful, eh?
posted by dbiedny at 1:41 PM on February 19, 2006

Here's an interesting page on the phenomenon of Food Deserts - blighted urban areas where good healthy food is simply not available. It's no coincidence that those blighted areas happen to be poor areas. This isn't necessarily a uniquely American phenomenon, but it does address the myth that poor people are only a dive through the couch away from full bellies....
posted by slatternus at 1:42 PM on February 19, 2006

On a trip through rural Vermont, I was stunned by the number of young adults with missing teeth. The first time a grocery store cashier smiled at me, I recoiled. This was in the '80's so you can't blame meth mouth. I don't care how smart you are, you're never going to get an upwardly mobile job with 2 or 3 missing front teeth.
posted by TorontoSandy at 1:45 PM on February 19, 2006

The socialist "ethic" (written in BIG quotation marks) says that as long as there are "poor people," I'm not entitled to be other than poor. Well, that's bullshit, not only because its intrinsically BS, and not only because many, if not most poor people are poor because of their own weaknesses, but because if there were no rich and affluent people, there would be infinitely more poor and starving people.

Remember, any number of very rich people, Bill Gates, included, have done more to reduce poverty and suffering than Mother Theresa ever did. Or Karl Marx ever did.
posted by ParisParamus at 1:46 PM on February 19, 2006

"I was voicing anger that there are those who seem to find entertainment value in the suffering of others."

Who feels that way? Please tell me why this is not a very large strawman.
posted by ParisParamus at 1:49 PM on February 19, 2006

kindly burn your membership cards to the human race.
You can do that? Really? That's all it takes? I thought maybe you had to be jumped out, like in a gang.
posted by cilantro at 1:49 PM on February 19, 2006

Paris: I don't think the socialist ethic is not relevant here. I haven't seen anyone here advocating it, and the countries that get pointed too as examples of doing a good job, pay it no heed.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:51 PM on February 19, 2006

YOU ARE RIGHT, PARISPARAMUS, THERE IS NO ONE WHO DERIVES PLEASURE, PROFIT AND ENHANCED SELF IMAGE FROM THE EXPLOITATION/SUFFERING OF A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO HAPPEN TO BE LESS FINANCIALLY FORTUNATE THAN OTHERS. I MUST BE DELUSIONAL. I WILL TAKE THE PILL. I WILL BE HAPPY.
posted by dbiedny at 1:54 PM on February 19, 2006

Dude, I think your caps lock key is stuck.
posted by fixedgear at 1:55 PM on February 19, 2006

BILL GATES IS A BETTER HUMAN THAN MOTHER THERESA. PARISPARAMUS HAS DEEMED IT SO.
posted by dbiedny at 1:56 PM on February 19, 2006

Wal-Mart could be the cure for food deserts, but they seem to have problems finding approval to build stores there.
posted by Kwantsar at 1:57 PM on February 19, 2006

What the hell's up with the Alabama postcard?
posted by raysmj at 2:07 PM on February 19, 2006

PP actually never said that Bill Gates is a BETTER HUMAN.
And yes, you *are* delusional.
posted by c13 at 2:09 PM on February 19, 2006

Personally, I think nutrition plays a huge role in entrenching poverty. It's simply impossible for people to reach their full potential or even function at a high level when living on a diet of junk food. And for many people, junk food is all they have access to. What's more, they've been taught that junk food IS food.

A lot of problems with persistent poverty might be resolved by making basic nutritional knowledge part of every child's education from an early age. We have a responsibility to do that, and I don't think we need to invoke grand theories of socialism vs. capitalism to acknowledge that responsibility.
posted by slatternus at 2:10 PM on February 19, 2006

jb-- your economists and my economists have reached different conclusions. But feel free to imply that I am an unthinking buffoon who keeps lapping up the lies.
posted by Kwantsar at 2:10 PM on February 19, 2006

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the problem of persistent regional poverty might be as much cultural as economic, insofar as the culture says that Mickie Dee's is real food that you can expect to live on.
posted by slatternus at 2:13 PM on February 19, 2006

From the article: In 2004 the poorest community in America was Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Unemployment is over 80 per cent, 69 per cent of people live in poverty and male life expectancy is 57 years. In the Western hemisphere only Haiti has a lower number.

Working two or three jobs my ass..
posted by c13 at 2:14 PM on February 19, 2006

The socialist "ethic" (written in BIG quotation marks) says that as long as there are "poor people," I'm not entitled to be other than poor.

Slight tangent, but the article does allude to the topic: It's also the Judeo-Christian ethic, although the Religious Right seems to place more credence in the "magic of the market" than their own scriptural mandates and precedents.

Individual churches, as pointed out in the main article, are doing quite a bit to tend to the symptoms of poverty (and I don't want to diminish that), but the vocal political end of American Christianity seems not to take seriously the implications of Jesus' teaching on the topic and the practice of the primitive church (which was in effect a socialistic institution).

Just makes me wonder whether progressives could ever harness, on a broad political scale, the enthusiasm of the Religious Right to deal with the root causes of poverty (and I'm not talking about faith-based programs either, which are at best, a band-aid, and at worst, a dangerous precedent for the non-religious and religious alike).

I seriously doubt it, on the whole, but I imagine a campaign for a living wage, at least, might be an issue Christians could (and should) rally behind ...
posted by bcveen at 2:24 PM on February 19, 2006

Wow. Some of you are either willfully ignorant, or just completely uncaring about other human beings. That's great for you, but people are still starving. Does it really matter how many jobs they have? Does it matter what the "poverty line" is? What matters is people are being denied a basic right, the right to eat, to receive necessary medical care, the right to be treated as a human being.

I usually stay out of these kind of threads, because I know nattering at people over the internet does little good, but sometimes I'm just taken aback by peoples' lack of understanding of the issues of first world poverty.

None of this is a political issue, yet, but it will be very soon.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:37 PM on February 19, 2006

>How does one manage to starve in America? You can find enough for a Big Mac in a couch

Exactly- it's cheaper to eat poorly then it is to eat healthy, whole foods. So the poor, the ones without health insurance, are the ones with more health problems (the NY Times is doing a series on the rise of diabetes, fascinating). Funny how that works out.

Which I think begs for clarification-- it's very hard to actually starve to death in the US. Our poor want for a lot of things that a decent nation would provide for, but calories aren't one of them. Poor people are, by and large, larger than than people who are not poor.

And the "it's cheaper to eat bad" argument is ludicrous. It's cheaper to buy components of meals and assemble them yourself no matter how you slice it. But poor people are poor (partially) because they make bad economic choices The shameful thing is that no one with any real power is in a hurry to correct that because there's profit to be had (even from poor people because we have so many of them) and money is what this broken country is all about.
posted by Mayor Curley at 2:37 PM on February 19, 2006

Just makes me wonder whether progressives could ever harness, on a broad political scale, the enthusiasm of the Religious Right to deal with the root causes of poverty

No, they cannot. Poverty is good for the American Religious Right. Just in the same way poverty has been good to radical Islamic movements. Our government knows this, and is trying to fund this by supporting "faith based" organizations. To many American churches, feeding the hungry isn't charity, it's marketing.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:42 PM on February 19, 2006

People have kids before they can afford them. That's the problem. It's an easy solution... stop doing that.
posted by stewiethegreat at 2:43 PM on February 19, 2006

c13, your point is addressed elsewhere - sure, cooking for yourself is cheaper... in the long run. Similarly, owning a house is cheaper than staying in a flophouse/motel in the long run. However, many things that are cheaper in the long run require a certain amount of money in the beginning. Let's look at cooking for yourself - is there a decent grocery store that's easy to get to? [Look at slatternus's "Food Deserts" link - this is mroe difficult than you might think.] When you get the food home, where will you store it? Do you have a fridge or a kitchen? Have you been able to pay the electricity bill [without which the kitchen and fridge are useless?] Do you have pots and pans to cook with? If your stove is a gas stove, have you paid the gas bill? For many poor people, some or all of these questions have 'no' as an answer. When they get their paycheck, there isn't enough left over after paying for things like rent [or motel fees] and utilities and whatnot to buy the things that would make cooking at home possible - buying pre-prepared food is the only answer, and fast food is cheapest.

These aren't the poor who have their own houses. These are the poor who live in rentals if they're lucky, and if they aren't, in motels and in cars because they don't have enough money for the deposit on a rental unit. These are the poor who go to those 'checks cashed' places because they don't have a legal ID and can't get a bank account. Yeah, it's a loser's game - if only they did things the "right" way they'd save a lot of money. But it takes a certain amount of money and other stuff to be able to start doing things the right way, and too many people never have that money to spare.
posted by ubersturm at 2:43 PM on February 19, 2006

It's cheaper to buy components of meals and assemble them yourself no matter how you slice it.

Let's slice it when you don't have a kitchen. Let's slice it when you have $3 in change. What are you going to buy and assemble into a reasonable meal? The fact is the McDonalds is dirt cheap, cheaper than groceries, and way cheaper than the infrastructure needed to capitalize on said groceries.

Okay, I've had enough.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:46 PM on February 19, 2006

People have kids before they can afford them. That's the problem. It's an easy solution... stop doing that.

God, you're an idiot. So what do we do about the kids they already have? Let them starve to make an example? How do we prevent people from having children before you, or someone else, deems them ready to? Forced sterilization?

Now. I'm. Done.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:50 PM on February 19, 2006

"Now compare this list with the unemployed miner’s budget that I gave earlier. The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread."

-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
posted by the duck by the oboe at 2:57 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't know about others, but what bothers me is this childish maximalism. Bullshit is bullshit, regardless what side it comes from. Poverty is a problem. But no one here has said that the fuckers deserved it, or that we should not do anything about it. No one is holding house parties where they watch late night Feed The Children commercials and making fun of little starving kids. Like I've said before, not all poor people are lazy slobs, but also not all of them are hard working pure angels. Being poor does not equate with "starving". That word has a lot more specific meaning. Much like the word "denied". They are not "denied" the right to eat, or receive medical care or to be treated as a human being. They just cannot afford it in the same amount as richer people. Which is still bad, but again, no one is actively denying them their rights.
The reason progressives will not be able to harness enough political power to affect change is not because of the religious right, or some other boogeyman, but because their overblown rethoric will not be takes seriously by anyone with half a brain.

The fact is the McDonalds is dirt cheap, cheaper than groceries, and way cheaper than the infrastructure needed to capitalize on said groceries.

Here's a good example. If you actually count, you will see that this is simply not true. Buying groceries, and by that I don't mean frozen pizzas or potato chips, is actually cheaper. But it does require one to put more effort into food preparation than tearing the bag open.
posted by c13 at 3:01 PM on February 19, 2006

Ahem.. will not be TAKEN...
posted by c13 at 3:03 PM on February 19, 2006

McDonalds, apart from being shit nutrition, is not cheap. Nonetheless, I am sure that large swaths of the urban poor dine there regularly.

PS: the unspoken premise of many of the comments in this thread is that the US doesn't spend much on the poor, which is a patently false belief. Moreover, as you move from state to state, its not at all obvious that spending more reduces the number of poor.

Here in NYC, and NY State, we spend a hell of a lot per-capita, on food subsidies, on Medicare, on other social programs. And we still have poor people!

But I'm sure there are people reading this who don't think ending welfare as it existed until the late 1990's was a good idea, either.
posted by ParisParamus at 3:07 PM on February 19, 2006

But it does require one to put more effort into food preparation than tearing the bag open.

Like having an oven. In a kitchen.

See, it's overblown rhetoric like that that implies the poor deserve to be poor; that they just waste their money anyway so why even try to help them.

And yes, they are being denied goods and services. They are going without healthy meals and health care, not because the want to eat junk food and set their own broken bones, but because they cannot afford any other option.
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:10 PM on February 19, 2006

c13, that "more effort" requires "more money" - try cooking without a stove, a fridge, a microwave, etc., or without the electricity/gas to make those things work. Heck, try _storing_ the materials for making food without the above. You'll end up with curdled milk and wilted brown vegetables in two days. In the long run, it's cheaper, but many poor people just don't have the facilities and equipment needed to make and store homemade food. When it's a choice between "spend all that's left of my paycheck for the next two weeks on a 1.5 cubic foot fridge that we can keep in our motel room" or "feed my children McDonald's," most people, startlingly enough, end up opting for the latter, and fast food is generally the cheapest and the most readily available pre-prepared food. It's less healthy and more expensive in the long run, but for too many poor people, next week is a more pressing concern than 'the long run.' See also "why poor people don't have health care and then end up with expensive health problems" and "why poor people spend a lot of money to live in places like motels and flophouses rather than just buying their own house."
posted by ubersturm at 3:13 PM on February 19, 2006

Er, what elwoodwiles said, more concisely.
posted by ubersturm at 3:14 PM on February 19, 2006

So you're saying that "cannot afford" is equivalent to "being denied"?

As to having an oven and a kitchen, unless your're saying that all poor people are homeless, yes, they probably do have that.
posted by c13 at 3:15 PM on February 19, 2006

Is this overblown rhetoric, c13?

I welcome anyone with a serious set of proposals to alleviate poverty in America, and make things more fair for working people.
posted by edverb at 3:15 PM on February 19, 2006

Between not learning how to manage money and voting republican out of fear of gays I'd say there's some point at which you just have to say that some people don't want to live better.
posted by Space Coyote at 3:18 PM on February 19, 2006

Look, guys, the whole thread is about the article that begins with: "The flickering television in Candy Lumpkins's trailer blared out The Bold and the Beautiful. It was a fantasy daytime soap vision of American life with little relevance to the reality of this impoverished corner of Kentucky.
The Lumpkins live at the definition of the back of beyond, in a hollow at the top of a valley at the end of a long and muddy dirt road. It is strewn with litter. Packs of stray dogs prowl around, barking at strangers. There is no telephone and since their pump broke two weeks ago Candy has collected water from nearby springs.
So please, please, please cut that crap about starvation due to not having a properly equipped kitchen.
I don't know, maybe I'm just to cold hearted, but if it was me, I would be working on the pump rather than watching a TV.
posted by c13 at 3:20 PM on February 19, 2006

"Cannot afford something they need" = "does not have access to they need" = "being denied something they need." Yes, that is the way this works, since in America the medium of access is money. And don't purposefully try the whole "Okay, than I'm being denied a Jaguar to drive" BS. People need healthy food and they need health care, but some people are not able to access the economic networks that allow them to receive healthy food and health care. That's the problem.

Also, many poor people don't have working kitchen facilities, even if they are not technically homeless. Nonetheless, there are many barriers that make cooking at home difficult. I'd spell them out, but others have already done a pretty good job of it.
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:24 PM on February 19, 2006

It's shocking, isn't it? The richest country in the world have so many poor people... but I think it's a fact: no matter where you are, there are sure 2 extreme: rich people very rich, poor people very poor. God bless them
posted by datarecovery at 3:25 PM on February 19, 2006

I think poverty in America is on a gradient. I don't think you have to be living in a box to be poor. With all of the financial tentacles which ensnare the working class (credit cards, payday advance, rent-a-center), many families struggle week to week. Yes, this is a different kind of poverty, yet lack of education or resources often prevents those caught in such traps from ever emerging.

I've had to work as many as five jobs in order to keep myself afloat. My mother has three master's degrees, and skirts eviction regularly. Poverty in America is a very complex sociological issue, nowhere near as cut-and-dry as places like Haiti, Nicaragua or sub-Saharan Africa.
posted by moonbird at 3:26 PM on February 19, 2006

c13, one anecdote doesn't necessarily accurately describe millions of other people. There are dumb, lazy poor people and dumb lazy rich people and dumb lazy middle class people - if I cited something about some middle class family buying an expensive new TV but not having enough money to send their kid to college, that wouldn't "prove" that the middle class is full of lazy people either. Most of us aren't talking about starvation, anyways - few people actually starve here, one way or another, but for too many people, eating healthily isn't an option. Some of us aren't OK with that.
posted by ubersturm at 3:27 PM on February 19, 2006

Here are the bullets of John Edwards's "Working Society" proposals...there's plenty of wonkish detail beyond that link if you're into that sort of thing, but there are some ideas which could be implemented by government to help alleviate poverty.
posted by edverb at 3:28 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't know, maybe I'm just to cold hearted, but if it was me, I would be working on the pump rather than watching a TV.

How dare poor people watch tv! How dare they have any one moment of enjoyment of anything! Don't they know they're poor? Don't they know they could sell their tv's and buy Pump-Replacement-Part-Tree-Seeds and solve their own problems?
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:30 PM on February 19, 2006

Note also that the article says very little about the Lumpkins family. Maybe Candy Lumpkins is contemptible, sitting around watching TV instead of fixing things or taking on a job. Maybe she's a single parent who's already working two full-time jobs, comes back at midnight, and is too exhausted to teach herself mechanical stuff so that she can fix the pump. It's damn dumb to make a judgement about the moral worthiness of an entire class of people on the basis of a single mostly contextless sentence about a particular family.
posted by ubersturm at 3:35 PM on February 19, 2006

Elwoodwiles, your arguments remind me of that episode in Bulgakov's "Dog's heart".
'That guy . . . what's his name . . . Engels' correspondence with . . .
hell, what d'you call him ... oh - Kautsky.'
Bormenthal's forkful of turkey meat stopped in mid-air and Philip
Philipovich choked on his wine. Sharikov seized this moment to gulp down his
vodka.
Philip Philipovich put his elbows on the table, stared at Sharikov and
asked:
'What comment can you make on what you've read?'
Sharikov shrugged. 'I don't agree.'
'With whom - Engels or Kautsky?'
'With neither of 'em,' replied Sharikov.
'That is most remarkable. Anybody who says that . . . Well, what would
you suggest instead?'
'Suggest? I dunno . . . They just write and write all that rot ... all
about some congress and some Germans . . . makes my head reel. Take
everything away from the bosses, then divide it up . . .'
'Just as I thought!' exclaimed Philip Philipovich, slapping the
tablecloth with his palm. 'Just as I thought.'
'And how is this to be done?' asked Bormenthal with interest.
'How to do it?' Sharikov, grown loquacious with wine, explained
garrulously:
'Easy. Fr'instance - here's one guy with seven rooms and forty pairs of
trousers and there's another guy who has to eat out of dustbins.'
'I suppose that remark about the seven rooms is a hint about me?' asked
Philip Philipovich with a haughty raise of the eyebrows.

You can find the rest here.

Ubersturm, I actually completely agree with you.
posted by c13 at 3:36 PM on February 19, 2006

It's damn dumb to make a judgement about the moral worthiness of an entire class of people on the basis of a single mostly contextless sentence about a particular family.

And who here is doing that?
posted by c13 at 3:38 PM on February 19, 2006

c13, Okay, that's nice that you're reminded of something. This conversation has reminded me of things too, like that people in America are very, very poor and struggling to make ends meet.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you unhappy that I'm not offering solutions? That's odd, because neither are you.

And you are making judgements of the moral worthiness of a class of people. Others here, on the other hand, are making a judgement about the socio-economic condition of a class of people. You may notice that one of these judgements is basically empirical while the other is not.....
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:50 PM on February 19, 2006

You are, doofus.
posted by cillit bang at 3:52 PM on February 19, 2006

God, you're an idiot. So what do we do about the kids they already have? Let them starve to make an example? How do we prevent people from having children before you, or someone else, deems them ready to? Forced sterilization?

God you're an idiot. So what do we do about the broken incentives that are in place? Buy the poor gold-plated mansions to celebrate their irresponsibility?
posted by Kwantsar at 3:52 PM on February 19, 2006

How about raising the minimum wage?
posted by edverb at 3:54 PM on February 19, 2006

So what do we do about the kids they already have? Let them starve to make an example?

No. I have a modest proposal: we fatten 'em up and feed them to the rich!
posted by ericb at 3:54 PM on February 19, 2006

Yes, let's buy the poor gold-plated mansions to celebrate their irresponsibility. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:58 PM on February 19, 2006

My point is that, while SOME of the people in America are very poor, a lot are not. And that even the poor ones are pretty often much better off that their comrades in other places. For example, the country just south of the border. And that they are better off because they live in America, and that causes me to answer to the question posted in the beginning of this thread in the affirmative.
I don't expect you to offer some viable solution to this problem. People much smarter than you or I have failed many times before.
posted by c13 at 4:01 PM on February 19, 2006

c13, you are:

Look, guys, the whole thread is about the article that begins with [anecdote about TV in the Lumpkins' house].
So please, please, please cut that crap about starvation due to not having a properly equipped kitchen.

The article isn't just about that one family [in fact, they're not mentioned after the opening], and pretty much everyone else was talking about the general condition of the poor. A bunch of people were talking more specifically about malnutrition and ill health due to the eating choices available to poor people, rather than outright starvation. The fact that the Lumpkins family may or may not be doing enough to deal with their situation isn't particularly germane to this larger discussion. However, you appear to be implying that since this one family might not be as fiscally responsible as they should be, we should stop talking about the nutrition-related difficulties other poor people face.
posted by ubersturm at 4:01 PM on February 19, 2006

To rephrase the question of what the poverty line actually means into more tangible terms: how many of the Americans referred to as living below the poverty line own or have immediate access to one or more cars, a refrigerator, a microwave, an oven and range, multiple televisions, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, laundry washer and dryer, etc.? At least when you go out and buy your Big Mac you can save half of it in your fridge for breakfast tomorrow and you don't have to re-heat that over a dung fire.

This is wealth that most of the people in the world today, and most of the people who have existed throughout history, did not have. The equivalents for some of them were beyond the reach of kings and noblemen in ages past.

The fact that poverty statistics aren't able to quantify this, and that many self-righteous critics of American society ignore this evidence of a high standard of living, is what turns me off to lugubrious exposés of "Poverty in America". My suspicion is that the authors of these kinds of posts are more intent on stoking self-admiration at their own awareness of and sympathy for the terrible plight of others, rather than doing any good for the world.

I live up here in New Hampshire, near the dentally-challenged meth-addicted Vermont that TorontoSandy was telling us all about. My previous landlady was from Thailand. She could barely speak English read and write at a grade-school level. But she had all the amenities of a middle-class American, albiet second hand and bought at yard sales (rubbish sales to those speaking English of the British flavour). She had as much as she wanted to eat, most of which she grew and canned herself. And she owned two apartment buildings. She would laugh at the assertion that heart-rending poverty is rampant in the U.S.

P.S. I haven't had any run-ins with these toothless Vermonters, living 45 minutes from the border of that state as I do. In my travels in rural Vermont I am most frequently struck by the number of adults with doctorates I encounter (and teeth too).
posted by XMLicious at 4:05 PM on February 19, 2006

How about raising the minimum wage?

That will just cause more inflation.
Face it, if you're flipping burgers for a living, you're pretty low on the ladder, regardless of what the minimum wage is. You still will not be able to afford a nice house, first rate medical care and a Jaguar.
posted by c13 at 4:05 PM on February 19, 2006

I'm sure the impoverished lady living in the Kentucky trailer has it better than the impoverished lady living in Vietnam.

No doubt, but Vietnam is a piss poor country, USA is ultra rich and not from yesterday. Considering the value of goods and service produce in USA over the time, nobody should be in the conditions described in the article , or it should be a very marginal situation. 10% of the population is hardly marginal. Also the contrast with 270 billionaries is striking.

Quoting from the article

Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

That's even more disturbing as it signals that a class of poor is working without exiting poverty, thus altering significantly market balances as they offer a lot of value-work/hours worked without entering a situation in which they can demand or look for opportunities : their economic situation doesn't allow risk taking or additional required education.

When government help is being cut and wages are insufficient, churches often fill the gap. The needy gather to receive food boxes. They listen to a preacher for half an hour on the literal truth of the Bible.

Which obviously produces more indoctrination, which means more local Talibans. One wonders why is government giving money to religious groups IF the religious group use that money to buy food for poor ? Well certainly NOT all the money is being used for food..and it gives these group a good opportunity to thump bible and indoctrinate. You have AFGHANISTAN and IRAN as examples.

It's cheaper to buy components of meals and assemble them yourself no matter how you slice it.

Well Mayor I was about to agree partially with some of your arguments, but I have different experience. Obviously when you are un-employed the cost of your time seems to be zero, but it really isn't. OK, bottom line is that you must consider it zero and assemble your meal and save money..that makes a lot of sense, but it's a financial method to prolong the misery.

There are some hidden benefit as increased self-confidence by learning that one knows how to cook...it also teaches that many complicated products aren't really that difficult to prepare..actually learning even basic cooking is a satisfactory rewarding experience.

Yet food cooking is art-for-art sake task when one can exploit economies of scale in food preparation ; it is obvious that a factory hiring a catering service or actually preparing an internal catering service will be able to produce BETTER food with better ingredients that will be cost less / be cheaper then producing it at home. Yeah it will reduce diverstiy, but some will be introduced daily and at least one meal will have a very low cost.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn McDonald has a 100-200% profit margin on each burger or more.

Why isn't the surplus being passed down to workers ?

But poor people are poor (partially) because they make bad economic choices

Sometimes they are shaped into making bad ones..like looking only at brand obsession when making a buy choice.

Most people don't know how to evaluate property of objects..and it's hard to blame them, trained engineers have problem doing good evalutions. Certainly choosing CHEAPER seems to be a reasonable choice when you don't have much money..but that doesn't necessarily make economic sense as you know.

The shameful thing is that no one with any real power is in a hurry to correct that because there's profit to be had (even from poor people because we have so many of them) and money is what this broken country is all about.

Oh there is a LOT of profit to be made and a lot of money to obtain, but it's very risky plus nobody wants an economic-aware worker.

Try dealing with a worker that can tell fools gold from gold, that knows some contract are bullshit, that appreciates the way capitalism works and knows how to exploit industry weakness ; expecially when a worker of any level isn't ideologically opposed to capitalistic system..they become the rulers of the system.

Look at how many work intensive production were exported to China : it is NOT ONLY about cheaper workforce..it's also about a lot more subservient obedient workforce. The argument that has some merit is that some lawyers and syndacalist help unionized/organized workers
organize, only for the purpose of exploiting the "poor" capitalist..there's no class solidarity or worker sympathy, pure populistic exploitation.

Well what do they expect ? It's their own intellectual offspring learning the tricks of blind exploitation.
posted by elpapacito at 4:05 PM on February 19, 2006

Regarding the minimum wage leading to inflation.

Check this out.
posted by John of Michigan at 4:09 PM on February 19, 2006

Excellent, excellent quote, the duck by the oboe.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:11 PM on February 19, 2006

Well, if there's one thing I've learned in this thread, it's that I can make some useful judgements of the moral worthiness of a certain set of MeFi users.

If I'm ever stranded on a desert island, I hope it's with you, elwoodwiles. I think we could probably make things work out to our best advantage. I'd certainly help you, and I believe you'd help me.

Others here I would expect to do their best to screw me over. And would feel okay about it because, hey, at least they aren't screwing me over so badly that I'd be better off in [insert tragic third world country here].

I suspect some of you failed kindergarten.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:12 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't think it's fair to compare the number of billionaires in America with the number of poor. There will always be members of society that have more than others, and there will always be extremes at both ends of the bell curve. Those on the rich side have usually earned it and I have no doubt that a good chunk of them redistribute some of that wealth in one way or another, either by taxes, charitable donations, grants, etc.

I also think that there are degrees of distinction to be made in levels of poverty. I think that a social safety net such as unemployment insurance for when a person is in between jobs is a worthwhile endeavour. I think that unloading the uncertainty and exorbitant burden of medical aid through universal medicare would also help others from falling between the cracks. After that, I believe the only other viable solution is education. Education of the young in such matters as economics, home economics as well as overall education is another part, but I also think the US needs to remove the stigmatism that skilled trades are lesser to those that require a higher education, and make it apparent early on in highschool education. I don't see the US doing any of these things, and we all see them spending more and more on the military, so I can't think of a real reason why they couldn't implement some of these steps. Either that or eating babies.
posted by furtive at 4:15 PM on February 19, 2006

Serious question for you, furtive: how much of the wealth of those 270 billionaires would be required to fully alleviate the 10% poverty rate?

I am betting that it is so phenomenally little that the absurdity of poverty in America would be readily apparent.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2006

That will just cause more inflation.

Care ot substantiate that?

Face it, if you're flipping burgers for a living, you're pretty low on the ladder, regardless of what the minimum wage is. You still will not be able to afford a nice house, first rate medical care and a Jaguar.

We're not talking about living the good life, we're talking about a fair wage for a day's work.

400% increases in CEO pay haven't caused inflation...if mininmum wage were proportionate to CEO pay since 1990, it would be $23.00 per hour. As it stands now, the federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 1997. But health care, fuel, a gallon of milk are all considerably more expensive now. You do realize that this widening gap can only exarcerbate the economic disparity, right?

Consider this: Bush's tax cuts for the top 1% will total over $300B over the next five years. $300B could cover the uninsured for nearly five years. Which is more important?

Wealth is being redistributed, it's just a matter of who gets priority. Maybe the working poor just need better lobbyists. First they need to afford to pay for that tank of gas to get back and forth to their shit-paying, no health insurance service job for 5.15 an hour (which is below the poverty line -- about $10300 per year.)

Priorities, indeed.
posted by edverb at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2006

Regarding the minimum wage leading to inflation.

Check this out.

You're really expecting this to be taken seriously? Minimum wage was increased several times since I was getting paid that here in TN. Somehow I don't see that much of an improvement. Considering also how many jobs went overseas since then, increasing the MW more just does not seem like a good idea.
posted by c13 at 4:18 PM on February 19, 2006

I suspect that a lot of the arguments on MeFi boil down to one thing: the difference between people who are willing to at least try to make a difference, and those who are not.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:18 PM on February 19, 2006

Serious question for you, furtive: how much of the wealth of those 270 billionaires would be required to fully alleviate the 10% poverty rate?

But they would still be comparatively poor, and still below the poverty line, as the poverty line would be adjusted upwards. Either that or others would take their place in the bottom 10%. Of course, everyone would be a little better off, but it would not change the concept of "poverty".

That's not to say that it's not ludicrous that there are apparently people who lack access to drinking water in the US, only that there's a difference between the statistical definition of poor (a comparative resource deficiency), and life-threatening, lack of primary human needs poor.
posted by loquax at 4:23 PM on February 19, 2006

Consider this: Bush's tax cuts for the top 1% will total over $300B over the next five years. $300B could cover the uninsured for nearly five years. Which is more important?

I have. That's why I voted against him. But apparently more than half of us, (most from poorer states, by the way) thought it would be much nicer to get an extra twenty bucks on their tax refund.
Priorities indeed, exactly
posted by c13 at 4:24 PM on February 19, 2006

So, now that this SnarkyFilter™ post has been thoroughly filled with obtuse commentary, snap judgments and...well, nothing much more than the rehashing of the same arguments I've heard since I started in grade school so many years ago: where do we go from here?

What should be done in America to improve the plight of the poor?
posted by tgrundke at 4:25 PM on February 19, 2006

Tgrundke, these arguments were being rehashing for a lot longer than you or your parents or great-great parents were considered gametes.
posted by c13 at 4:28 PM on February 19, 2006

No. I have a modest proposal: we fatten 'em up and feed them to the rich!

As I pointed out earlier, America's poor do not need fattening up. Can we please stop with the 30-years-out-of-date concept of poor Americans starving? People want for decent housing, medical care and safety in this country. But they sure as fuck do not want for food.

Yes, yes, this is the Internet, so some American here regularly sees Biafra babies and Bobby Sands lookalikes every day. Most of us see poor people with full, round bellies. And I'm sure that there a few homeless people too mentally ill to dumpster dive for the literally thousands of tons of edible food that we throw out every day. But they're not even remotely typical or even really addressable. So shut up. And I'm not suggesting that it is just that crazy people should have to sift through others' refuse for food, but the food is there.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:33 PM on February 19, 2006

c13 -

Of that, I am well aware. It's posed all those in this discussion that feel reform is needed. Fine. Where do we begin this reform?

Have we contemplated the possibility that "America" (generically speaking) does not place the same emphasis on economic equality that other countries do, and that "America" on the whole, isn't terribly bothered by that?
posted by tgrundke at 4:33 PM on February 19, 2006

Minimum wage was increased several times since I was getting paid that here in TN. Somehow I don't see that much of an improvement.

Federal minimum wage hasn't changed in nine years. And Tennessee has no minimum wage law.

I could find poverty data for Tennessee for this period (and if it trends anything like the rest of America, it will have increased considerably by several quantitative measures). I could also find data which contradicts your assertion about higher inflation, but I'm too lazy and hungry for that.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. There is no one magic bullet. But you're doing a great disservice to good ideas by dismissing them away with a rhetorical wave, such as "higher inflation". It sounds like a ready-made excuse to never raise wages.
posted by edverb at 4:39 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't know. What do you do when people don't understand that everything costs money, and that if they want better health care, better schools and such, they have to pay for it. In the form of taxes. It seems like no one here is willing to do that. Rich people-- I understand. They have everything they need anyways. The poor? Unfortunately they would rather have extra few bucks. What are you going to do?
Fife fresh fish is going to be one lonely guy on that island of his, because most everybody is following the dream and looking out for number one...
posted by c13 at 4:40 PM on February 19, 2006

No. I have a modest proposal: we fatten 'em up and feed them to the rich!

As I pointed out earlier, America's poor do not need fattening up. Can we please stop with the 30-years-out-of-date concept of poor Americans starving? People want for decent housing, medical care and safety in this country. But they sure as fuck do not want for food.

Oops. It appears as if someone missed the historical reference to Jonathan Swift 's A Modest Proposal and his satirical commentary regarding the exact same issue under discussion here -- although he was commenting on poverty in 18th century Ireland.

Mayor Curley, I suspect Swift would agree with you.
posted by ericb at 4:40 PM on February 19, 2006

Edverb, they still have to pay federal minimum wage.
posted by c13 at 4:42 PM on February 19, 2006

It's tough to make your way in this world, even here in the US...I live in the depressed community(Main South) of one of the depressed cities (Worcester) in this state (MA). It's tough for me to watch my neighbors and neighborhood constantly denigrated for crime whilst most of the hard-working folks here work and work and work under the radar. It always amazes and disgusts me when the accusation is put forth that people here aren't engaged in the process of making things better for themselves because they didn't show up for a meeting at 5PM on a Wednesday about neighborhood safety. Hello...? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're working to support their family...?!? I'm there because I have an understanding and supportive employer, and this stems from the fact that I have many strategic advantages on most of my neighbors. I'm white, male, and well spoken. I'd be kidding myself if I thought that these attributes weren't the majority if not the entirety of the reason why I outplace other people in my non-college educated position. As college becomes more difficult to reach for more Americans and aspring Americans, we come closer and closer to being a society of doctors, lawyers, and servants. In turn, it becomes more difficult for the servants to raise their status, and the killer to me is that a lot of people here in MA at least are less concerned with basic needs than they are with nonsense like gay marriage and such. So I guess where I'm going with this rant is to say that everyone besides the very top is hurting and being hurt. Buy at Wal-Mart(*example*), support low wage work, become a low wage worker. This process continues because we're either blinded by our "ideals" about sanctity of life or marriage or whatever, or because we just don't have the time to sound off while supporting a family. I feel simutaneously fortunate and ashamed that I'm doing OK when people trying a lot harder are not. I guess that's the gist, not sure that I put my feelings together but I tried.
posted by rollbiz at 4:42 PM on February 19, 2006

jb-- your economists and my economists have reached different conclusions. But feel free to imply that I am an unthinking buffoon who keeps lapping up the lies.
posted by Kwantsar at 2:10 PM PST on February 19 [!]

Your articles state that there is some social mobility in the United States; of course there is. However, they do not make any reference to other first world countries, which have higher levels of social mobility. Please read the comments and your own links before posting. Or keep your head in the sand; it's your choice.
posted by jb at 4:47 PM on February 19, 2006

I think that rollbiz hits a good point here - this topic at hand is almost impossible to discuss because so much noise gets tossed in on both sides of the debate and the message gets lost. This thread is a classic example. Hell, at this point I've almost forgotten the core of what we're discussing. Imagine this discussion with 280 million other people......
posted by tgrundke at 4:49 PM on February 19, 2006

Edverb, they still have to pay federal minimum wage.

I realize that, which is why I addressed it.

Federal miminum wage hasn't changed since 1997. It stands at 5.15. In fact, in today's dollars...that is lower (4.23) than the minimum wage before the 1997 increase (4.25). The same arguments against it were trotted out against an increase, then as now -- layoffs, inflation, etc -- all scare tactics which never came to pass.

Wouldn't it seem reasonable, at the very least to index the minimum wage to inflation? Because if that were the case, since 1979, the minimum wage would currently stand near $7.00 per hour. That would raise the annual income of a full time worker from 10,300 to 14,000. That's a thirty percent raise. $3500 per year pays a lot of utility bills, puts clothes on a kid's back. Buys groceries.

Conversely, that inflation figure means that inflation has reduced the purchasing power of minimum wage workers by over 30% since 1997. Think about the effect that has on poverty.
posted by edverb at 4:52 PM on February 19, 2006

Sorry...using very rough figures there (about to make dinner), but you get the idea. Data here, lest you think I'm just pulling numbers out of the air.
posted by edverb at 4:55 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't know. What do you do when people don't understand that everything costs money, and that if they want better health care, better schools and such, they have to pay for it. In the form of taxes. It seems like no one here is willing to do that. Rich people-- I understand. They have everything they need anyways. The poor? Unfortunately they would rather have extra few bucks. What are you going to do?

People in the civilized world have figured out the idea of "the common good" long ago. The idea that your neighbours' wellbeing or lack of it actually does affect you is one that is ignored easily if you live in a gated community. (gated communities are something you find in places like Peru and Mexico and the U.S., but not in socially democratic European countries. Why is this?)

Fife fresh fish is going to be one lonely guy on that island of his, because most everybody is following the dream and looking out for number one...

Right, this while "society" experiment is clearly folly, we should all be looking out just for ourselves and ignoring that other people can sometimes do things we can't so why not help them to do it well to make our own lives better?
posted by Space Coyote at 4:58 PM on February 19, 2006

Space Coyote, you really should read the comments a little more carefully. I'm aware of the "common good" idea. I just don't know how to explain it to the other half of the country. Do you have any ideas (the ones that work, that is) of how to show everybody what we *should* be doing?
posted by c13 at 5:04 PM on February 19, 2006

So there are some on MetaFilter who find humor in the fact that people are starving, and their children are starving, in a country as rich as the US.

Hey, it's like Fark, but not quite so racy.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:08 PM on February 19, 2006

Besides, what civilized countries do you have in mind? France with its immigrants? Germany with its remnants of GDR?
posted by c13 at 5:09 PM on February 19, 2006

Frankly the US's political history is so drenched in making sure the exploited classes are kept angry at false enemies like blacks, communists, gays, muslims and liberal 'elites', that I don't know if a proper sense of community will be able to get a toehold while they still have whole generations raised on hate-talk radio, sensationalist news and perpetual war.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:09 PM on February 19, 2006

What I find interesting is that Americans have always had a choice of what direction to take the country. We've always been able to choose greater support for social programs and services, or to support those proposals and programs. However, increasingly we, as a society, have not pushed for an increase in these programs.

I think that one of the reasons for this is Americans' traditional distrust and dislike for re-distribution of wealth, for government social engineering and federal mandates. America was founded by wealthy landowners - that tradition continues today.

The American way of doing things is fundamentally different because the American experience has been unique. Europeans place more value on concensus and social equality because their history has demonstrated that great inequality leads to social instability which leads to self destruction. Americans place more value on self-reliance, self-determination and antipathy toward government because the its history.

Perhaps America's current course will lead it to the instability and self-destructive behavior that many European states faced prior to 1946. I don't know, but current trends notwithstanding, even those people who teeter just above the poverty line don't seem too keen on changing things. I don't pretend to understand it, but I also don't see anything changing anytime soon.
posted by tgrundke at 5:10 PM on February 19, 2006

C13, I think that the Dems need to come out strong in 06/08...THEN, I think the absolute key is to make some sort of even minimal effort towards national healthcare. I think Nickel and Dimed makes very good points about the importance of appearance (by way of decent healthcare) is a major key in ensuring that hard working folks can keep their bodies in one piece in order to obtain better work. It's a small facet, but a start. It will certainly be difficult to nationalize healthcare on any level given how entrenched the for-profit system has become, but it's now or never in my opinion.
posted by rollbiz at 5:11 PM on February 19, 2006

As I pointed out earlier, America's poor do not need fattening up. Can we please stop with the 30-years-out-of-date concept of poor Americans starving? People want for decent housing, medical care and safety in this country. But they sure as fuck do not want for food.

posted by Mayor Curley at 4:33 PM PST on February 19

Starvation is not the issue, no. Food insecurity, however, is very real and present in the whole of the first world. (Obesity is also a problem, but it is also linked to the poor quality of cheap food - that, however, is another thread.)

From Second Harvest

Child Hunger Facts - • In 2004 over 13.8 million, or 19.0%, of American children resided in food insecure households, meaning they were hungry or at risk of hunger. Over a half-million children lived in food insecure households with hunger

Hunger in the Suburbs - What the rebounding economy and the dramatic declines in welfare participation have not accomplished is any significant decline in hunger or poverty. In 2004, the prevalence of household food insecurity was 9.0 percent (4.1 million households), and the prevalence of food insecurity with hunger was 2.8 percent (1.3 million households) [i]. [my emphasis]

Senior Hunger
* 25 percent of client households with seniors (no children) indicated that they have had to choose between food and medical care and 30 percent had to choose between food and paying for heat/utilities.

* 6.5 percent of households with an elderly person are food insecure. Over 460,000 of those households experienced food insecurity with hunger during 2004 [ii].

* Elderly households are much less likely to receive food stamps than non-elderly households, even when expected benefits are roughly the same [v].

Note the numbers who live with hunger.

This isn't about America bashing. Poverty levels are similar (though inequality is less) all over the first world. This is about all of us realising and acknowledging that while first world poverty is different from and exists to a lesser extent than third world poverty, it still exists and its effects are real. I am grateful I live in a first world country and I worry a great deal about poverty in the third world, but that doesn't mean I don't ache when I realise that people in my own country go hungry. Or lack shelter (which leads to death in Canada).

As for all the debates about poverty lines and what is or is not poor, poverty is and always has been relative (and here I'm mentally quoting Adam Smith - poverty is lacking that which one's society considers to be "decent" - in his day it was shoes and a linen shirt, luxeries on the continent, but simply "decent" in England.)

But inequality is serious and it breeds problems. It undermines democracy and civil society - how can we be democractic if we are so unequal?
posted by jb at 5:11 PM on February 19, 2006

jb nails it as well...Where I was going with my first comment was the fact that it is very un-democratic that some can take the time to participate in making things better (usually those not in critical need), while those who are on the brink just cannot practically take the time to try to make things better or speak for the needs of their community. I see this as a primary issue in the fight against hunger, poverty, and class disparity.
posted by rollbiz at 5:16 PM on February 19, 2006

I think this idea of American uniqueness is part of the problem. It fools us into thinking that, since we are so special, things that hurt other countries will not hurt ours when we do them. And that leaves us no alternative other than to repeat all of the mistakes and learn of their consequences ourselves.

Rollbiz, I completely agree. But, as I've stated in the beginning of this thread, blowing things out of proportion is not going to help us at all. Questions like: "Are you proud to be an American? ", in the tone that was used by adamvasco, are not good for making friends and influencing people.
As for your last comment, why can't those %80 unemployed on the indian reservation (yes, yes, isolated example, not representative, etc..) take time to make things better for their communitiy?
posted by c13 at 5:22 PM on February 19, 2006

jb--

My paper: "Age-adjusted parental wealth, by itself, explains less than 10 percent of the variation in age-adjusted child wealth."

Your paper shows correlation of .348 and .289 between parents' (both father and father/mother) and sons' earnings.

Of course, the paper I cite looks at sons and daughters, while yours seems to emphasize male children.

Your vitriol, for what it's worth, is unbecoming.
posted by Kwantsar at 5:22 PM on February 19, 2006

FFFish is on the island of Canuckistan, which has the socialized medicine so desperately needed by the majority of the USA's population; which has unemployment insurance; which has welfare support; which has copious resources for education and job training; which has food banks and food cooperatives (alas, terribly underfunded); which actually tries to make it possible for people to claw their way out of the hole, instead of pushing them back in.

The chances that FFFish might get himself stranded on the island of fuck-you-I'm-looking-out-for-number-one-USA!USA! is less likely than the chances that he might flap his fins and fly.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:26 PM on February 19, 2006

Wow. I smell a lot of guilty indignation in this thread.
posted by washburn at 5:26 PM on February 19, 2006

And, yes, we have a shipload of impoverished Canadians. And that's with us generally trying to do the right thing. Except, of course, when we elect asshats like Gordon Campbell.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:27 PM on February 19, 2006

That's the thing, FFF. The rest of us are here. In the USA.
And I don't mean Metafilter.
posted by c13 at 5:29 PM on February 19, 2006

And speaking of Canada. I've not seen as many homeless poor young (and old) people anywhere in US or Russia, as I have in Toronto and Montreal.
Just a personal observation...
posted by c13 at 5:31 PM on February 19, 2006

A reasonable look at some comparative poverty statistics using the Luxembourg Income Study (barely decipherable data here), and focusing on Canada.

I've not seen as many homeless poor young (and old) people anywhere in US or Russia, as I have in Toronto and Montreal.

I agree with this, anecdotally. Family in Easter Europe refuse to believe that I see (far) fewer homeless in urban Bucharest or Budapest than Toronto (although cost of living likely has much to do with this).
posted by loquax at 5:35 PM on February 19, 2006

...which has the socialized medicine so desperately needed by the majority of the USA's population; which has unemployment insurance; which has welfare support; which has copious resources for education and job training; which has food banks and food cooperatives (alas, terribly underfunded)..."

Gee. The US has all of those things, except for the first, and even on that score, the US has Medicaid for the poor. PLUS, Canada has a bit free-er market friend to the south to, through trade, pay for much of the aforementioned programs.

What Canada doesn't have it lots of non-white, non-business class visa immigrants to tax the economy.

I really like Canada, but like the rest of the West, it gets to benefit from the US freer market, and yet curse that same market, as if its prosperty wasn't intimately linked to the US market (as well as the US military/US police role in the world).
posted by ParisParamus at 5:40 PM on February 19, 2006

1. If you call a post lame, then at least tell why you find it so, so the poster can hopefully improve next time (or not, but know why he isn't). Otherwise your comments are as bad as the post.

2. The "Newsfilter: no apologies" bit... is there something wrong with news on Metafilter? It's amazing that there are all these things to do or not do that aren't in the post guidelines. It says nothing about avoiding news, or having only one link, or even bloggish posts, so long as it's interesting, and not trolling or self-promotion. Oh, and contains one link.

3. bcveen: excellent point.

As for Bill Gates... there is a very interesting article to be written about that. Lots of people hate Bill Gates' guts, for reasons related less to his being rich and more to the way in which he became so. It is not acceptable that he help out so many people at the cost of the health of the U.S. computer market for the same reason that people hate communism.
posted by JHarris at 5:44 PM on February 19, 2006

(God, there's so many things to respond to in this discussion that if I let myself I'll waste the entire night in this accursed place.)
posted by JHarris at 5:45 PM on February 19, 2006

What Canada doesn't have it lots of non-white, non-business class visa immigrants to tax the economy.

Not so. I take it you haven't been to Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto lately?
posted by loquax at 5:45 PM on February 19, 2006

What kind of a name is "Candy Lumpkins" anyway? Probably why she's poor. Can't imagine a "Senator Candy Lumpkins."
posted by ColdChef at 5:51 PM on February 19, 2006

What kind of a name is "Candy Lumpkins" anyway?

And why doesn't she get a loan from her famous sister, the country singer Lurleen?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:55 PM on February 19, 2006

What Canada doesn't have it lots of non-white, non-business class visa immigrants to tax the economy.

The US's economy, as it's structured now, would fall to its knees without the cheap, unprotected labour that migrant workers provide.

It's like importing the benefits of free trade with Mexico right to your back yard.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:55 PM on February 19, 2006

Regarding the TV and the dipshits saying "Just sell the TV!" - Have you been to a Goodwill lately? You can find 13" color TV sets for $20. And who knows, it's quite possible that the TV was given to them for free. Just because you see "poor family" and "TV" doesn't mean that they went out and bought a $5,000 plasma.

And yeah, it might be nice to not have more kids you can't afford, but when your local pharmacy won't give you birth control and Planned Parenthood was protested out of town by the right wing religious terrorists, sometimes it's kinda hard.
posted by drstein at 6:06 PM on February 19, 2006

I blame televsion.
posted by gsteff at 6:13 PM on February 19, 2006

I believe the dipshits were saying "Turn the TV off and go fix the pump".
As far as birth control, last time I heard, condoms had 99% efficiency.

But how could any of this be resasonably expected?
posted by c13 at 6:13 PM on February 19, 2006

reasonably, damn it!
posted by c13 at 6:14 PM on February 19, 2006

What is 'poor' these days?
No HDTV?
posted by HTuttle at 6:29 PM on February 19, 2006

We all know that poverty is bad, but do we really need this overly sentimental journalistic pap to describe it for us? I mean come on:

The flickering television in Candy Lumpkins's trailer blared out The Bold and the Beautiful. It was a fantasy daytime soap vision of American life with little relevance to the reality of this impoverished corner of Kentucky.

I thought Neal Pollack ridiculed to death this kind faux emphatic reporting that's meant to tug at our heartstrings and make us think, 'Gosh, other people sure have it tough, Paul Harris and the Guardian are such saints for revealing the quiet suffering of these noble human beings to our part of the world, the part that actually matters.'?

Which isn't to say that the article doesn't make a lot of good points. It's just the tone that annoys me.
posted by Kronoss at 6:33 PM on February 19, 2006

What is 'poor' these days?
No HDTV?

There are two ways that this statement can be taken.

1) We assume HTuttle is being sincere. In these case he is unbelievably ignorant, on the scale of George Bush Sr. not knowing how much a quart of milk costs, or

2) He knows he's being disingenuous, and is signaling that he has no intention of giving a shit about the plight of the poor in his own country, and will not even entertain the notion of doing so, which he demonstrates by saying something completely absurd.

"let them eat cake" was perhaps getting anachronistic.

Above I was hinting at a certain poisoning of the American mind that's exacerbated by isolation and ignorance. Here we see it illustrated brilliantly.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:37 PM on February 19, 2006

ParisParamus: The idea that the US market is more free than the rest is a falsehood (once again commonly held by those who don't look out the proverbial window much). The US is rife with protectionism, trade barriers and tarrifs, and appears to be losing more major WTO cases than it is winning because it is lagging in the world of freeing its market. New tarrifs are still being created.

The US is number one at talking the talk about free markets and free trade, just not walking the walk. And walking the walk is what counts. More free than some, sure, but once again, comparisons should be made with peers.

OTOH, "our markets are freer than those of France" isn't exactly saying much either. :-/
posted by -harlequin- at 7:11 PM on February 19, 2006

God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.
posted by loquacious at 7:13 PM on February 19, 2006

What Canada doesn't have it lots of non-white, non-business class visa immigrants to tax the economy.

Errr, exactly what Canada are you talking about? The Canada I live in takes in scads of unskilled refugee claimants from all over the world, not just skilled white collar workers. We're fortunate, somehow, don't ask me how exactly, to have a system that allows those immigrants to assimilate and get working fairly quickly, so it's never a big strain on our social services.
posted by slatternus at 7:25 PM on February 19, 2006

The solutions are obvious, but there is no way they'll ever be implemented. Too many vested interests in the way. Too many lobbiests. Too much corruption. Too much "America is the best".
posted by -harlequin- at 7:34 PM on February 19, 2006

And all the while, you're being fed the line that American labour is "too expensive". That's the one that really cracks me up.
posted by slatternus at 7:36 PM on February 19, 2006

The socialist "ethic" (written in BIG quotation marks) says that as long as there are "poor people," I'm not entitled to be other than poor.


Well, you're wrong about that. But you should be used to it by now.
posted by delmoi at 7:36 PM on February 19, 2006

BILL GATES IS A BETTER HUMAN THAN MOTHER THERESA. PARISPARAMUS HAS DEEMED IT SO.

Bill gates has done much, much more to help poor people then mother theresa.
posted by delmoi at 7:38 PM on February 19, 2006

Too much "there will always be poverty" when proof of exactly the opposite is plentiful.
posted by -harlequin- at 7:40 PM on February 19, 2006

Harlequin, you'd have to show me some of that proof. There will always be some degree of poverty as the result of macroeconomic trends - lost forestry jobs here, whole industries becoming obsolete, environmental displacement etc. The problem is to mitigate poverty, and prevent it from becoming generational and permanent, which definitely can be done.
posted by slatternus at 7:47 PM on February 19, 2006

On the one hand, the USA has far and away the most massive population and thus economy of the developed world, giving massive strength to bulldoze through any obstacles. On the other hand, the society of the USA is completely FUBARed. I'm really curious how this is all going to work out in the end.
posted by -harlequin- at 7:54 PM on February 19, 2006

That's probably why poverty in America, especially working poverty comes as so much more of a shock than elsewhere in the world. We almost expect poverty in regions torn by tribal warfare and moribund caste, and exhausted economics, but America is supposed to be have the vitality and imagination and indifference for established ways of doing things to overcome these sorts of problems.
posted by slatternus at 8:04 PM on February 19, 2006

slatternus:
I grew up in a city in New Zealand effectively without poverty. As I said above - the welfare net was designed to ensure that no-one slipped though the gaps. I remember that when a guy was found living in a ditch, homeless, it was front page news with massive front page photo - many people were angry that this had been allowed to happen. Of course, there are downsides, and there are still plenty of people struggling week to week, and some people slip through regardless, but I grew up without ever seeing a begger - and I lived in a city. Here in the USA, beggers and homeless are everywhere.

But by and large, it was unthinkable for any person not to have shelter, food, medicine, clothes. You'll hear plenty of complaints about the system from people living there, but those complaints become insubstantial to me when compared to the dire things I see here in absence of that system.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:06 PM on February 19, 2006

posted by Otis at 8:16 PM on February 19, 2006

I don't know where it will end. It seems the U.S. is just determined to learn the lessons Europe learned in the early 20th century about the big picture social and political costs of poverty. And they're determined to learn in the hardest way possible.
posted by slatternus at 8:17 PM on February 19, 2006

The US has all of those things, except for the first, and even on that score, the US has Medicaid for the poor.

Which is being cut back, and which doesn't do squat for the working poor--part of the reason the Census Bureau has expeimented with a measure (maybe measures, I'm not sure) of poverty that takes medical expenses into account.
posted by raysmj at 8:29 PM on February 19, 2006

Also, the beggers here in the USA aren't just beggars, they're often visibly deformed by lack of healthcare. Husks of people. That's third world. That's shameful for any developed country and utterly appalling for the wealthiest of them all.

The worst part is, the US health system would deliver more services to more people for less money if the system was fixed, but it won't be fixed. Right now it's amazing how screwed up and inefficient it is. If the US healthcare was a company, it would have been put out of business years ago by higher performing competitors. Also, it's generally cheaper for the taxpayer to pay these people's healthcare, because when healthcare is cheap, you use it at the first sign of trouble, and the costs of this preventitive care is so small compared to the US method of leaving it until it's an emergency, then walking into an ER which will cost thousands but they're required by law to treat the person first and seek payment later (and not get it). The way the system is currently set up, it costs everyone a lot, and delivers little. In a ranking of developed countries, last I saw, there wasn't a one that spent as much on healthcare as the USA and got as little health services for that treasure.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:32 PM on February 19, 2006

In British Columbia, I pay about 128 bucks every three months for full coverage. Mind you, the costs of running the health care system are extracted from me in a variety of taxes, but I don't notice them, and they don't hurt. So we get a VERY big bang for our buck.

And you're absolutely right. Canadians will tend to run to the clinic at the first sign of trouble, and that preventitive mentality is probably the main thing keeping our health care system afloat.

Why can't America have a similar system? I don't get it.
posted by slatternus at 8:43 PM on February 19, 2006

A lot of what makes poverty a lot more difficult today is that because of suburban sprawl and the decline of urban life (in the traditional sense), it's very difficult for poor communities to provide for one another and take care of one another, because very little economic activity is done on a local level anymore. Take, for instance, what was possible in Boston's North End about sixty years ago -- considered by outsiders to be a slum, and blacklisted by mortgage lenders which basically cut off any financial resources to improve the community, the North End revived itself, by very modest means, into a decent place, because its people cared about their neighborhood, wanted to stay there, and did everything they could, from using their own savings to bartering skilled work to improve their shops and homes.

Such a thing would be nearly impossible today, because most poor people reside in suburbia now -- while dense cities are becoming the playgrounds of the rich or are crippled by the destruction wrought by urban renewal. In suburban communities there is very little sense of public life, and it is very difficult to have public relationships. It's kind of an all or nothing deal -- barring some formalized relationships such as in work and school, you choose to either intimate with a person and they know your secrets, or you choose to not know them at all. If you've ever lived in a thriving, healthy city neighborhood or small town, you know what an incredibly valuable resource *the street* is -- a healthy street is a place of trust and mutual support, and because there are eyes on the street at all times of day, there is enough sense of safety to have that trust.

Beyond that, if nobody runs their own shops or grows their own food or makes clothing or anything like that, then *everything* becomes a monetary expense, which artificially bloats the cost of living.

This is much more complex point than I have time to make here; but it is important to remember the very real and denigrating effect of modern environments on the health of poor communities.

I strongly recommend Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of American Cities; she talks about a lot of these points, and especially how the destruction of urban environments by an extremely misguided theories of urban planning (which showed an utter ignorance and disrespect for how communities actually work) has made it a million times harder, if not impossible, for blighted areas to improve themselves.
posted by bukharin at 8:58 PM on February 19, 2006

So Otis, I take it that you didn't like the gold standard?
posted by dwordle at 9:22 PM on February 19, 2006

I grew up in a city in New Zealand effectively without poverty

You won't see beggars on New Zealand streets because it has the lowest unemployment rates in the OECD. It also has one of the lowest per-capita incomes on a standardized basis in the OECD and is only barely considered a first world country by these standards. Work relations are very good and union power is very weak but the brain drain problem is severe. Presumably this is why you are one of the 25% of highly skilled New Zealanders who left for greener pastures.

The USA has some real issues with income equality but I'm not sure we should define poverty by the number of beggars you see in the streets.
posted by DirtyCreature at 9:23 PM on February 19, 2006

Next time someone talks about how librul mefi is, I may point to this thread.

rollbiz, hello homie, Main South Worc is where I was born and raised. Of course, that was more years ago than I like to count. I still have family there. I've got blue collar blood running in my viens, and proud of it, I might add.
posted by madamjujujive at 9:36 PM on February 19, 2006

The poor in Kentucky vote for Bush cuz he's an honest working fella with a truck and cowboy boots.




Mission accomplished.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 10:22 PM on February 19, 2006

One of the most attractive features of Indian society was the spirit of hospitality by which it was pervaded. Perhaps no people ever carried this principle to the same degree of universality, as did the Iroquois. Their houses were not only open to each other, at all hours of the day, and of the night, but also to the wayfarer, and the stranger. Such entertainment as their means afforded was freely spread before him, with words of kindness and of welcome. But it was in exact accordance with the unparalleled generosity of the Indian character. He would surrender his dinner to feed the hungry, vacate his bed to refresh the weary, and give up his apparel to clothe the naked. No test of friendship was too severe, no sacrifice to repay a favor too great, no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the Indian character. With an innate knowledge of freedom and dignity, he has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds of humanity… Lewis Henry Morgan, League Of The Iroquois

There was universal hospitality and charity within the tribe. Food was always shared. Those who did the actual procuring of an animal, such as a buffalo, might take some small special advantage, but that was all. Except in times of great scarcity, food could be had from a successful hunting party for the asking. So long as there was any food remaining in the lodge, every visitor received his share without the slightest hesitation. --Thomas E. Mails, The Mystic Warriors Of The Plains

Crazy Horse was a small man among the Lakotas and he was slender and had a thin face and his eyes looked through things and he always seemed to be thinking hard about something. He never wanted to have many things for himself, and did not have many ponies like a chief. They say that when game was scarce and the people were hungry, he would not eat at all. --Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

People were what counted, not property. Mere possession of property conferred no prestige, indeed could be viewed as disgraceful. The prestige came from giving away the property. An elaborate system of gift-giving, among individuals, families, bands, and even tribes, afforded constant opportunity for the practice of this virtue. As one Lakota observed, "A man must take pity on orphans, the crippled and the old. If you have more than one of anything, you should give it away to help those persons."[After surrendering to the US government, and passing some time on the reservation, Sitting Bull - who the whites viewed in a completely different manner than his own people, noting only his "stubbornness" and "resistance to change" - was allowed to accompany "Buffalo Bill" Cody on his Wild West Tour, which was a traveling, circus-like show that visited a number of US and Canadian cities, attempting to thrill audiences with recreations of gun-slinging cowboys and "savage Indians". While on the tour, Sitting Bull befriended American sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who came to be a great admirer of him. In the streets of the cities where the show played, sometimes outside the venue itself, they would frequently encounter poor children, begging for money. Sitting Bull could not believe that in a society so rich, filled with so many possessions, fine homes, and so much abundance, children could be neglected in this way, left, dirty and hungry, to the streets. In the end, he did not come away with too much money from the highly successful show, because most of what he made] as Annie Oakley [bore] witness, [was given away, ending up in] "the pockets of small, ragged boys." Nor could he understand how so much wealth could go brushing by, unmindful of the poor." He formed the opinion that the whites would not do much for the Indians [who they had promised to help support on the unfruitful lands of the reservation] when they let their own flesh and blood go hungry. Said he, "The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it." --Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull: Champion Of The Sioux

Native American Lessons In Generosity
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 11:10 PM on February 19, 2006

With all the moral indignation and whatnot flying about fast and furious, I thought that I would mention this.

While some have taken shots at what c13 had to say, as a fellow Tennessean (had to move out of state to find a job), I felt it necessary to back up a point that he alluded to in one of his posts to this discussion.

Many Americans who did turn out to vote in 2004 voted for Bush and his tax cuts. While many Bush voters may not have read the fine print about his votes for tax cuts that predominantly fattened the wallets of the wealthy, that block of voters (presumably some of them among the working poor) strongly supported his "moral stance" over and above what it meant to their wallets i.e. cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Many Americans haven't made the connection yet that more taxes in incremental amounts might actually help rather than harm them.

But unless the tax money can be spent on programs that will demonstrably alleviate the suffering of the poor, and unless you convince the wealthier middle class to raise taxes on themselves in the US, moral indignation over a few MeFi posters' pragmatic observations about the US condition regarding the working poor won't matter one iota.

And that means selling the US Congress (so risk averse it can barely stand up to the President and some of his recent naked power grabs vis-a-vis the warrantless NSA wiretaps) on raising taxes on the middle- to upper-income people, some of the very same people who paid the contributions that put many of them in office.

Find a way to do all of that, and then there might be some progress. I say this knowing what a tall order all of that would be, which means likely nothing will be done about it.
posted by Nacho Libre at 11:18 PM on February 19, 2006

Strangely, no-one seems to have yet mentioned Michael Harrington's ground-breaking book The Other America, which documented this very same issue in the early 1960s. Forty years on, very little seems to have changed.
posted by vac2003 at 11:24 PM on February 19, 2006 [1 favorite]

You want to know how to make this problem go away? By making it possible to GET some of that higher education without going into $50,000 worth of debt and having to work two shit jobs without healthcare for 10 years to pay it off, because the education level in many professional fields is rising to a level that is impossible to reach without sustaining massive debt in the first place.
posted by somethingotherthan at 11:51 PM on February 19, 2006

You want to know how to make this problem go away? By making it possible to GET some of that higher education without going into $50,000 worth of debt...

SOT, while I appreciate where you're coming from, this is not the solution. This is 1950's "educate-thineself out of poverty" thinking. Sadly, a great education isn't going to matter much if there are few (living wage) jobs to be had.

As long as the people in this country don't give a damn about why the manufactured goods at their local Wal-Mart are so cheap, our businesses will continue to shift production to the lowest bidder. We're basically asking our citizens to compete bottom-line's with people living in extreme poverty, many times with the aid and intervention of some rather nasty governments.

How do you convince a company to keep its jobs in-country? You can either punish them (higher taxes on companies that produce goods overseas), reward them (tax incentives for businesses that produce domestically), or simply skirt around the problem altogether (tax the profits made from such ventures after-the-fact, like higher income taxes for the wealthy).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:18 AM on February 20, 2006

This is 1950's "educate-thineself out of poverty" thinking. Sadly, a great education isn't going to matter much if there are few (living wage) jobs to be had.

Bingo. What happens if we all become talented programmers; well, no need to pay them a living wage, as the market's flooded and they're lucky to get any work at all!

There will always be some unfortunate running the 7-11, there will always be a barista making your latte, there will always be a janitor at your office building. Regardless of how educated we become, these are jobs that someone will have, and that someone deserves more than minimum wage.
posted by mek at 7:13 AM on February 20, 2006

We live in such a meritocracy don’t we? Anyone who is the least son of a President can grow up to be President.
posted by Smedleyman at 7:27 AM on February 20, 2006

So Otis, I take it that you didn't like the gold standard?
posted by dwordle at 12:22 AM EST on February 20 [!]

"Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

-- William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" speech, 1896.
posted by Otis at 8:19 AM on February 20, 2006

Seems to me that part of the US problem is that poor people are worth big money.

Take, f'rinstance, the privately-run prison system. Poor people are its bread and butter.

And Wal*Mart, too: it requires a massive impoverished population, so that it can leverage bulk purchases that yield a retail price that is below smaller stores' wholesale prices.

I'd lay odds that a lot of the USA's food industry relies on the uneducated poor, the time-stressed poor, and the got-no-money poor. Even the g.d. "food pyramid" is written to deceive the poor, keep them unhealthy.

Point is, a lot of the economics of the USA rely on a large population of poverty-striken citizens.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:24 AM on February 20, 2006

Now that's just laying it out, fff.
posted by sonofsamiam at 8:48 AM on February 20, 2006

What makes America great isn't that everyone is guaranteed health, wealth and hapiness, but rather that everyone is more or less given a fair shot and regardless of where they start.

Delusional.

An African American who grew up in slums of Chicago just won a gold medal in Olympic Speed Skating. He had no silver spoon sticking from his mouth. He worked his add off. So I don't think it is delusional, so much as it is rare and much harder for some than others.

The United States is a capitalist society based on greed and exploitation of natural and human resources. It is not a socialist country where people should expect that anyone is obligated to help them out.

We are all expendable in the eyes of the ultra wealthy. As soon as robbie the robot can do your job, you will be unemployed.

Take off your rose colored glasses and peer at your world now.

The Government won't help you.
The rich won't help you.
The poor won't help you.
The church won't help you.

Will you help you?
posted by a3matrix at 9:20 AM on February 20, 2006

The Case of the Disappearing Trillion.
posted by homunculus at 9:37 AM on February 20, 2006

The Government won't help you.
The rich won't help you.
The poor won't help you.
The church won't help you.

I guess it's by my bootstraps, then. Oh, wait, I'm college educated, skilled in several marketable fields, intelligent, inventive, and still living below the poverty line. I work very hard, and do my job very well, and yet still can't seem to find work that pays health care.

I guess I'm just not working my add off enough.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:57 AM on February 20, 2006

Oh, and while it is true that the US is not a socialist country, there's certainly no reason we couldn't be. Unfettered capitalism isn't the only choice, and most European nations, who have greatly reduced rates of poverty, have adopted socialism to some extent.

But go back to reading Ayn Rand while the rest of the world suffers.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:00 AM on February 20, 2006

The minimum wage in the UK is £5.05 per hour - around $9. It was introduced by the Labour government in 1999 and annual inflation rates since then have been below 2.5%. Unemployment has not risen significantly either. LSE briefing.

There may well be independent reasons why the minimum wage in the US should not be increased, but the case of the UK indicates that fears of inflation and unemployment are groundless.
posted by altolinguistic at 10:34 AM on February 20, 2006

Regarding education in the US: I've read in the past that approximately 60% of Americans aged 18-24 are either in college or graduated from college. These numbers from the census concur:

http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html

(See Table 14)

In the same article where I read this statistic, it stated that for most other industrialized countries the number is 30% or below, even in nations that might be regarded as being highly educated such as Japan or Germany.

There are a spectrum of arguments to say that this "doesn't count' as a good education of the populace but Americans, poor Americans included, are definitely NOT disadvantaged as far as getting into secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. In fact, they're much better off for access to education beyond high school than almost anywhere else. This is a factor of social mobility between classes that the poor of other countries do not have.
posted by XMLicious at 11:59 AM on February 20, 2006

Astrozombie: I'm college educated, skilled in several marketable fields, intelligent, inventive, and still living below the poverty line.

Either your self-evaluations are way off or you're in the working in the wrong field, dude. Because if you really were skilled in several marketable fields, you wouldn't be impoverished.

Quit blaming society and looking for handouts. It's annoying and insulting to the folks who really do need help.
posted by b_thinky at 12:02 PM on February 20, 2006

b_thinky's position in life is due to hard work, not circumstance. He assures himself of the fact. He must.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:21 PM on February 20, 2006

“Will you help you?”

It’s not a completely invalid point. However what is demanded of helping oneself - f’rinstance making it ‘big’ as opposed to simply surving is that you adopt the morals and tactics of those who have made it big.

I come from a single parent family, we didn’t start off poor, but my dad died and we had to struggle to keep the house sort of thing, never would have gone to college if it weren’t for the military (one of a few problems I had with Regan - cut college benefits for the sons of dead vets), and busted my add to get where I am.
Have I ‘made’ it?
Well, no, because I’m still busting my add (and my wife is busting hers) to keep our house and I have a college degree. My dad was blue collar, made enough money to live where I now live on one job. My wife and I are both well-educated (wife’s an Ivy leaguer) and we both have to work to keep the house....huh?
So two college educated white collar folks working today are doing as well - relatively - as one blue collar guy 30-40 years ago?
Yep.
Now, I grant I could do better and so could my wife, but we would have to start stepping on toes and exploiting people to. I have friends who do that. They don’t do it to excess. Only a bit. It’s not like they’re extortionists, but it does show me that it’s not so much a line that is drawn as it is gradually darker shades of grey.

I see where that path leads. No thanks. I’ll forgo having a Rolls and not have the moral stomach ulcers that go with having a chain of payday loan stores or being a currency trader or ambulance chaser or any of the variety of ways to get very wealthy which involves - by necessity - fucking other people out of their money.
I’d like the money, but if I had to wake up as Donald Trump to have the money, I’d put a gun to my head.

Which means I’m on the losing side of the money equation. Which is what the beef is all about. So be it.

But don’t let’s pretend this is in any way about merit. If those who had real wealth truly earned it this would be an entirely different world.

So, yes, you can work your way up, but only so far without stepping up on other people’s backs.
The question “Why are you looking for a handout” always comes up when people start to ask why wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Like people are too stupid to realize multinational corporations have off-shore accounts, that really rich folks can do the same, that there are a variety of tax shelters and loopholes. Like we’re suckers for plugging money into the local school system.

It’s the selfish vs. the unselfish. Always has been.

That’s why you can ask someone their favorite sexual position but don’t dare ask them how much money they make.
Not only do we not ask why that is, but we don’t even ask who might benefit from that social order.
Why is that, d’ya think?

Or am I just some lazy guy with a cup in his hand?
posted by Smedleyman at 12:26 PM on February 20, 2006

Smedleyman is my hero now. All you posers go home.
posted by daq at 12:46 PM on February 20, 2006

DirtyCreature:
From my observation, the average quality of life is higher in NZ. Per capita income doesn't reflect that people earning more in the USA are often poorer because the after tax take-home income hasn't yet paid for things like healthcare and the rest of it.

The hand-wringing that some NZers have over brain drain seems a bit overblown to me. People like me work in the USA (my field only exists in a few large countries, NZ is generally too small for that industry), but there is no way I'd want to settle in such a FUBARed society. As some parts of Ireland are discovering, the ex-pats come home, and they bring wealth with them.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:27 PM on February 20, 2006

There are a spectrum of arguments to say that this "doesn't count' as a good education of the populace but Americans, poor Americans included, are definitely NOT disadvantaged as far as getting into secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. In fact, they're much better off for access to education beyond high school than almost anywhere else. This is a factor of social mobility between classes that the poor of other countries do not have.
posted by XMLicious at 11:59 AM PST on February 20 [!]


That's a really interesting point about the levels of tertiary education in the US. I knew it had been higher than Canada in the 1950s and 60s (about 30% vs 15-20%), but I didn't realise it had gone so high. That said, I think what I had read about earlier was specifically in regard to university, and didn't include community college, but it was a long time ago.

But it makes me wonder - if the US has higher levels of tertiary education, but apparently less social mobility than several other first world countries, how is this all working?

I do have to wonder whether all tertiary education can be counted as equivalent. Having personal experience with a number of different universities (in Canada, Britain and the US), I am very aware that not all universities are created equal.

Now, I'm one of the first to jump in and to defend the quality of teaching and research at less prestigious universities (my undergraduate university is not rated very high in magasine assessments, but is an excellent teaching institution and produces solid research). But I'm also very aware that the employment opportunities are not the same at different universities. My friend and I both had very good marks in undergraduate and now attend the same Ivy League graduate school. However, she had job opportunities from her top US school that just didn't exist at my middle-tier Canadian uni, and don't at most of the thousands of middle and lower-tier American universities. She was recruited into a consultancy job at Arthur Anderson right out of her BA; I could have applied for a teller position with the Bank of Montreal (I didn't - I did try for temp office positions and was turned down. Accepted for a Ph.D, but apparently not skilled enough to answer phones). We just didn't have any recruitment - our jobs fair was full of technical colleges trying to sell us classes on HTML (that we really didn't need - this was after the webbust).

Now, this isn't a conclusion - this is really a question, to be answered only by research. How do the factors of where one attains education, as well as the level obtained, affect social mobility? I know there is research being done on how social networks affect job hunts (well, more accurately, I have a friend who is researching that, I really should ask her what her results were). But what is the effect of where one is educated? It would change your social networks, for one.

I also wonder what the value of tertiary education is when it becomes so common. Other than increasing literacy, knowledge of the world and generally being educational in the all round sense, of course. But on that pure, cynical, money-grubbing side of life, I fear tertiary education has suffered from education and become the high school of yesterday.
posted by jb at 1:38 PM on February 20, 2006

Sorry, that should be "suffered from inflation".
posted by jb at 1:39 PM on February 20, 2006

Actually, I should clarify - per-capita income isn't the reason average quality of life seems higher in NZ, that was a seperate point I was making. Per-capita income is lower, but quality of life is higher, as I'm also looking at how stressed out a person's situation makes them, how trapped they feel, how able to cope they are, how able to succeed they are, debt, all those things that add or detract from misery.

The culture of materialism is definitely stronger in the USA (though I see NZ heading the same way) and there definitely seems to be more wealth in the US in the sense of bigger vehicles, more extravagent purchases, etc, but OTOH, most of it is purchased on credit deemed unsustainable by many economists, which depending on your stance, may render it an illusionary kind of wealth. (Of course, if you can hop in the truck and drive it, then that seems pretty substantial to me :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:39 PM on February 20, 2006

Smedleyman: "Well, no, because I’m still busting my add (and my wife is busting hers) to keep our house and I have a college degree. My dad was blue collar, made enough money to live where I now live on one job."

Have property values gone way up in your area since you were a kid? I'm not trying to make a point here. It's just a question.

"So, yes, you can work your way up, but only so far without stepping up on other people’s backs."

I disagree. There are honest ways of making money. Lots of them.

The question “Why are you looking for a handout” always comes up when people start to ask why wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Like people are too stupid to realize multinational corporations have off-shore accounts, that really rich folks can do the same, that there are a variety of tax shelters and loopholes.

Off-shore accounts are for multi-national corporations that already pay taxes in the US and other countries. If Acme International makes $10 in Germany, they probably pay $4 in German taxes. I don't see why they should pay U.S. taxes on the remaining $6, when they've already paid U.S. taxes on their U.S. profits, do you?

I don't know much about individuals with off-shore accounts, but I do know that if you're super-rich not paying your taxes is a quick way of fucking up an otherwise great life.

"Or am I just some lazy guy with a cup in his hand?"

No, you seem like a guy who earns his keep and is satisfied with where he is.
posted by b_thinky at 1:47 PM on February 20, 2006

It’s the selfish vs. the unselfish. Always has been.

Indeed. The problem is that the unselfish put a system in place to help each other out, then the selfish come along and loudly decry, "Chumps!" and take advantage of the system.

Which is bound to happen. But there must be consequences for this kind of anti-social behavior, since it is, at its heart, the very thing that could unravel social order. If I were king, the punishment for eggregious self-interest at the expense of your fellow man would be death. Or at the very least, banishment. If you don't want to live in a society, go play with the bears.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:49 PM on February 20, 2006

Nobody's yet mentioned an alternative to the minimum wage: the Earned Income Tax Credit, which subsidizes the working poor.

Other things being equal, a higher minimum wage will reduce demand for unskilled labor. The EITC, by subsidizing unskilled labor (and therefore reducing its cost to the employer), will increase demand for unskilled labor. Since we can't expect everyone to become plumbers and computer programmers, this is probably a good thing. See William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears for more discussion.

More statistics: Paul Krugman on increasing inequality, reviewing Edward Wolff's Top Heavy and Richard Armey's The Freedom Revolution.

Here's a rough (and reasonably certain) picture of what has happened: the standard of living of the poorest 10 percent of American families is significantly lower today than it was a generation ago. Families in the middle are, at best, slightly better off. Only the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans have achieved income growth anything like the rates nearly everyone experience between the 40's and early 70's. Meanwhile the income of families high in the distribution has risen dramatically with something like a doubling of real incomes of the top 1%.

Why has this happened? Krugman suggests that it may be a result of changes in technology and trade.

To me, the logical policy response would be to increase the progressiveness of the tax code, raising marginal tax rates for the top tax bracket, lowering them for other tax brackets, and increasing transfers to the working poor. At the moment, the US seems to be going in the opposite direction.
posted by russilwvong at 1:50 PM on February 20, 2006

b_thinky's position in life is due to hard work, not circumstance. He assures himself of the fact. He must.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:21 PM PST on February 20 [!]

With respect, what would you know about my position in life? I've been pretty low and pretty high, and no matter where I end up it seems to be my own damned fault.
posted by b_thinky at 1:52 PM on February 20, 2006

It’s the selfish vs. the unselfish. Always has been.

Indeed. The problem is that the unselfish put a system in place to help each other out, then the selfish come along and loudly decry, "Chumps!" and take advantage of the system.

Which is bound to happen. But there must be consequences for this kind of anti-social behavior, since it is, at its heart, the very thing that could unravel social order. If I were king, the punishment for eggregious self-interest at the expense of your fellow man would be death. Or at the very least, banishment. If you don't want to live in a society, go play with the bears.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:49 PM PST on February 20 [!]

OK, would anyone like to back up the "selfish vs the unselfish" claims with some kind of data or something?
posted by b_thinky at 1:55 PM on February 20, 2006

rollbiz, hello homie, Main South Worc is where I was born and raised.

Good stuff madamjujujive...I'm proud to be from here (now) too, I think it's funny how suprised people am that I survive in Main South. Ironically, these people are usually from sections of town that are as bad or worse, but that's not how it's perceived.

Anyway, I'll hold it down for both of us. :)
posted by rollbiz at 2:25 PM on February 20, 2006

b_thinky, I think the off-shore accounts people are referring to are more the tax shelters like those that exist in places like Aruba and other caribean nations. If you have a million dollars you'd like to keep, generally a nice place to put it is in a bank that a) give you interest on your deposit and b) doesn't have to report to any government who's money they are holding. That money in turn is used to do fun things like launder cash received in the commision of felonies and other such interesting nefarious dealings, but hey, if you really don't want to pay taxes on something, an accound with a private bank not located in your country which doesn't have to report your holdings, well, there's a nice fat tax break for you.

Oh, and if you don't believe me, here, see for yourself what banks exist down there. >a href="http://www.mcb-bank.com/index.php?nd=detail&id=46">Here's a fun little PR friendly page with one particular bank advertising "Private Banking". What exactly do you think this entails? They even advertises "management and administration" of offshore companies. Now, why would you need someone to manage and administer a business for you "off-shore" unless you are simply using it as a shell to funnel money away from places that will tax you.

Let's look at the taxes they'll pay in Aruba, shall we?

Taxes in Aruba. Oh, wait, if you are not a resident, and you earn income from interest, well, you don't pay taxes on that interest. Same for dividends payed out by companies. Strange. I wonder how that works out. Gee. I guess you get a lot of money, and don't end up actually paying taxes on it. And you earn interest. How very nice for them. Those rich people who can afford to bank in Aruba that is.


Just because you think the aren't doing something nasty, does not mean they aren't.

Btw, half the reason I looked into this crap in the first place was my soon to be mother-in-law used to run around doing freelance database work and hooked up working for one of these off-shore companies. They needed a database that could calculate interest on a few accounts. I don't think a single account was less than $4 billion USD. Now, not all of the account holders in these bank accounts are going to be U.S. citizens, or individuals, surely. But when you have tax laws, treaties, and business practices that are geared towards the retention and creation of arbitraty wealth through defrauding of the government (and don't forget, the government of your country is YOU, kids. For the people, by the people and all that rot if you're American. Whoever holds the gun if your somewhere else).

Please, someone tell me I'm wrong and can't read...
posted by daq at 2:30 PM on February 20, 2006

Oh, and here's the one term everyone should learn by heart.

Aruban Exempt Corporations - An AEC owned by non-residents whose income is derived from external activities is exempt from all taxation.

That's right kids. You make your money elsewhere, form yourself an AEC and viola, tax free money.


Thank you, and good night.
posted by daq at 2:46 PM on February 20, 2006

“Have property values gone way up in your area since you were a kid?’

Not insanely so. Honest question. But I would expect the validity of my assessment to hold some water granting that A. it is personal experiance and has direct bearing on my financial situation and B. I’m reasonably well educated and successful enough in my own field of endevor that I can make accurate enough judgements concerning these kinds of changes.

“I disagree. There are honest ways of making money. Lots of them.”

I’m not talking money. I’m talking wealth. Hell, anyone with a good idea or good speaking skills can make money. You’re not going to starve. I granted that. (With the caviat that not everyone has those skills).

“Off-shore accounts are for multi-national corporations that already pay taxes in the US...”
Being from Illinois, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland Corporation) is a dirty word. I was speaking generally. Even the Treasury Department
(and the GAO ) says that very wealthy folks find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter a lot of their income from taxes.
Leona Helmsley said “only little people pay taxes” and she was right. She got busted. She was small time.
Rupert Murdoch f’rinstance - if Newscorp Investments paid corporate tax to England at 30 per cent that’d be about 350 million pounds over 11 years. It pretty much didn’t pay a dime. And it was legal.
Enron didn’t pay a penny (until it went bust) and shoved loads of money into the pockets of politicians, judges, journalists, etc. etc. There’s about $6 trillion held off shore in the world. About 1/4 of that is laundered, so it’s ill-gotten in the first place.

“No, you seem like a guy who earns his keep and is satisfied with where he is.”

No, I’d like more. I just don’t want to hurt anyone else to get it. It would erode my soul (for lack of a better term).

Indeed - because I am merely an outstandingly meritorious individual as opposed to an exploitive money grubbing plutocrat - I get fucked by the government.
See, last I heard (I could be wrong) the alternative minimum tax screws people who make above a certain amount of money because it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation.
So because most of my income isn’t predicated on dividends and investment gains and I make under $1 million a year I get most of the money I make from work taken from me. Meanwhile the person who sits on his ass and does nothing - say a really worthwhile, intelligent, productive individual - like Paris Hilton - gets cut huge amounts of slack for not making their money based on working.
Neat, huh?

I’m a not a spaghetti dancing-Gaian loving-share with everyone hippie here. I’m an (old school) conservative who likes working hard and making money honestly.

I’m saying - I can’t make more money without doing it dishonestly. And a good deal of money I’m making now - I’m essentially giving to people who don’t do make any because I’m paying taxes and they aren’t.

And that standard applies from the well off suckers down. The extremely wealthy have most of the government in their pockets and want it that way.

And that state of affairs is a recognizable recurring situation since civilization began - from the Romans to Louis the XIV to Enron.

I’m not saying folks who are poor are any (morally) better or that folks who are rich are (fundimentally) morally worse. They’re just geared with different incentive.
If I stand to make, say, $1000 by cheating on my taxes there’s almost no way I’d do it. $10,000, probably not. $100,000 and you start thinking about it. $1,000,000 and it’s probably worth it because you might beat the rap by paying a good lawyer half that - so you walk away with net $500,000.

Just generally speaking.

The difference is I know what it takes to get rich and I’m not going to do it because, yes, it involves not paying your fair share, but also - it looks like a very slippery slope to me. Same reason I actively avoid public office. It’s a trap. And then your kid or grandkid turns out like Paris Hilton. Fuck that.

Some people are poor because they’re lazy or stupid. Those people can be spotted easily. I concede they are there, but those people aren’t most people.
Most people are poor because that’s how the system is geared. It’s fuck your buddy week only they call it ‘ambition’.
I’m fortunate to make decent money without doing that. I’ve escaped most of the traps and hang ups that seem to plague other folks. That and I am - many of us here are - smart enough.
Consider how many people fell for the nigerian mail scam. Consider the S&L scandal and other BS scams - there are smarts you use to avoid these pitfalls. Some people just aren’t that savvy. That doesn’t mean that they should just be fucked by those “smart” enough to perpetrate those scams.
They just want to work and have kids and live their lives without any drama and don’t really get the mindset of the vampires and vultures around them.

Tried to bury anyone lately?
posted by Smedleyman at 3:45 PM on February 20, 2006

Some people are lazy or stupid because they're poor.
posted by Wataki at 4:13 PM on February 20, 2006

jb--

My paper: "Age-adjusted parental wealth, by itself, explains less than 10 percent of the variation in age-adjusted child wealth."

Your paper shows correlation of .348 and .289 between parents' (both father and father/mother) and sons' earnings.

Of course, the paper I cite looks at sons and daughters, while yours seems to emphasize male children.

Your vitriol, for what it's worth, is unbecoming.
posted by Kwantsar at 5:22 PM PST on February 19

Do you even have a point? I have never once, in this thread or any other, said that there is not social mobility in the United States. I said that the myth that the United States has the highest social mobility in the world, a myth which is deeply imbedded in American nationalism, is not true. Perhaps it once was, though as someone who has read a great deal about social mobility in pre-modern Britain, social mobility in pre-modern Europe was higher than most people who haven't studied history think.

But to use the social mobility of the US, which is no higher than most other first world nations and lower than many, to justify (as if anything could) continued gross inequality, inequality more worthy of a third world nation than a first world nation - this is more than ignorance, this is arrogance and calous unfeeling for your fellow human being, and your fellow citizen. If you truely love your country, you will try to better it, not ignore reality.

My vitriol comes because I care about other people, and it makes me very angry when other people don't.

And speaking of Canada. I've not seen as many homeless poor young (and old) people anywhere in US or Russia, as I have in Toronto and Montreal.
Just a personal observation...
posted by c13 at 5:31 PM PST on February 19

c13 - I am from Toronto, and yes, there are many homeless there. There are many more since about 1995, when the then Conservative government cut welfare benefits, moved ambulatory mental patients out of care and froze subsidized housing. Every winter, the news reports deaths from freezing. This should be a shame for all Canadians - it is for me.

That said, I have since lived in New Haven, Connecticut, a very small city compared to Toronto, and have found that the homelessness level is as bad, if not worse. There are many homeless in the US as well.
posted by jb at 4:21 PM on February 20, 2006

Same reason I actively avoid public office. It’s a trap.
Tried to bury anyone lately?
posted by Smedleyman at 3:45 PM PST on February 20 [!]

Damn! And I was already to vote you in to office, too!
posted by Balisong at 4:45 PM on February 20, 2006

Off-shore accounts are for multi-national corporations that already pay taxes in the US and other countries. If Acme International makes $10 in Germany, they probably pay $4 in German taxes.

They probably don't. In your fictional example ACME's accountants have probably (and totally legally) structured the paperwork in such a way that their German operation runs at a loss, simply so that they avoid steep European taxes on profit.
posted by Ritchie at 8:50 PM on February 20, 2006

Unfettered capitalism isn't the only choice

I agree with you Astro Zombie. But it is what this country has chosen. I don't think it can be undone at this point. And I think if we did undo it, the system would collapse under the demands placed on it.

Don't misinterpret my post as right wing preaching. It was more a pessimistic drone than anything else.

And the misspelled add, hehe totally missed that one.

I have to say that I am in a similar situation as Smedleyman. Good post Smedley.
posted by a3matrix at 7:11 AM on February 21, 2006

Actually, despite what people think, we have adopted certain elements of socialism, we just don't call it that. After all, we don't refer to our police force, or our fire department, or our public schools as being "socialized," and we don't argue that people who make use of these services without payin directly for them as people who are just looking for "handouts." Or, at least, most of don't -- I can't speak for b_thinky.

There is a tradition of this country of recognizing that some things are universally necessary, and should be universally provided for. And this didn't come about all on its own -- once upon a time, people had to buy fire insurance from their fire department; if they didn't, the department just let their house burn down. Until it became obvious that doing so put other houses at risk.

This country is capable of providing a safety net for its citizens, and capable of meeting basic needs, as much as it might irk those who already have these needs met if the U.S. does so. But then, in a country that throws out some 60 billion tons of food per year, is it really okay that people in this country are starving? In a country where some 40 to 60 percent of any urban area is unoccupied at any point, is it really okay that people are homeless? And, in the country that often identifies itself as the wealthiest and fairest in the world, is it really okay that we are unique among industrialized nations in not providing universal health care for our citizens?

Call it socialism if you will, or call them handouts, but I think the U.S.'s current refusal to address these issues will long been looked back at with shame.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:28 AM on February 21, 2006

I don't think we refuse to address the issues so much as pretend they don't exist or outright ignore them.
posted by a3matrix at 10:19 AM on February 21, 2006

I wrote:

Regarding education in the US: I've read in the past that approximately 60% of Americans aged 18-24 are either in college or graduated from college. These numbers from the census concur...

jb wrote:

But it makes me wonder - if the US has higher levels of tertiary education, but apparently less social mobility than several other first world countries, how is this all working?

You strenuously avoid even entertaining the obvious conclusion: that the US does have greater social mobility than these other countries. Elsewhere you have to be in the cream-of-the-crop, top third of the population to make it into a college or university. And what do you want to bet it's most frequently the members of the upper classes that find themselves in that top third?

A friend of mine grew up in Britain and considers himself lucky to have made it to university. He talks about friends who were tracked into trades not requiring higher education and how they've struggled much harder than him in their subsequent working lives.

Of course if you compare the average academic achievement of two-thirds of the U.S. population to the scores of the top one-third of another country, the U.S. average is going to be lower. Yeah, the average U.S. college student looks less impressive - because the students with equivalent skills in these other nations aren't even allowed into university! How could such countries be offering greater social mobility?

And this is just ONE of the factors that provide citizens of the U.S., and a great many non-citizens, with more social mobility than can be found outside of places like Switzerland or Qatar.

P.S. Sorry for using the term "American" to refer exclusively to residents of the U.S. in that original post. Slip of the mind, must be my substandard college education... ;^)
posted by XMLicious at 10:46 PM on February 21, 2006

XMlicious - I am from one of those other countries (Canada) and I'd like to point out that participation =! selection. In Canada, people with 60% (the pass grade) in highschool can get into some universities. I was a B-C high school student (and from a non-educated family) and only had A- in my last year, and was accepted to every university I applied to. But many people choose not to go to university, either because or cultural reasons or because a BA is not that great an advantage in the job market, especially for young men. The skilled trades do pay better in Canada than most BA requiring clerical jobs. But as someone who was the first in my household to graduate high school, I did not find university hard to get into in Canada, despite the lower levels of participation. I don't know what the situation is like in other countries - I don't know if I remember right, but I had heard that in France, you are accepted into any university, but then can fail out?

As for the US and social mobility, please see the links I post above, in my first comment. The research by LSE, as well as other research I have come across on the web (just about every time this subject comes up on metafilter) shows that overall social mobility is lower in the US than in other first world nations, but not Britain, notably. (And yet Americans continue to use their suposed high social mobility to justify inequality substantially higher than Britain's, Canada's or just about any other first world country).

The American level of social mobility (equal to or less than other first word countries) is despite the higher participation in tertiary education. I want to know why - is it who is participating in tertiary education? Or is it the nature of tertiary education itself? At the University of Arkansas, you can major in Poultry Management - a major that would seem to lead only to one place (a job at the power Tyson foods) and which seems to me to be a cruel way to cheat students of a broad education. Or maybe it's that education is not as significant as people think in social mobility. I don't know. How are we measuring social mobility? By income? By class (white vs blue collar)? These are all important questions. But coming in proclaiming a national myth is not the answer.

That said, I don't think everyone should be in university. Having been at a university of 50,000 students (cut off grade 70%, or a C+/B-), there were many people there who were not interested and did not have the skills necessary. (Interestingly, many I knew personally were very middle class - they went to university out of expectation.)

University isn't useful to them, nor is it necessary to the skills they want to work. But we have set up our world that university=have and not-university= have not. We shouldn't require office managers to have BAs - my mother has been a very good office manager and bookkeeper for 15 years without a highschool diploma or BA. We shouldn't pay people geometrically more just because they have a BA. Suposedly "unskilled" work involves far more skill than most middle-class or educated people to admit.

And no matter the skill level in work, it is all essential to society - low pay comes not from it's lack of necessity than from historical reasons (low status, gendered female, assumed to be done by teenagers when really the person serving you at the donut shop is my aunt trying to support three children on her own). Raising pay for low-paid work is more important in the quest for equality than expanding university enrollment, which just perpetuates heirarchy (albeit by inflating the education necessary to move up in the heirarchy).
posted by jb at 3:12 AM on February 22, 2006

Oh - and in Canada, you can get into one of the best universities in the country (University of Toronto) with 80% (Good university, just very very large). We have no national debate on university acceptance like Britain, and little in the way of a university application industry like the US, because there really isn't that much competition. Of course, even at UofT, consulting firms don't really do much recruiting.
posted by jb at 3:17 AM on February 22, 2006

A friend of mine grew up in Britain and considers himself lucky to have made it to university. He talks about friends who were tracked into trades not requiring higher education and how they've struggled much harder than him in their subsequent working lives.

This is bullshit though. Just about anyone who makes it to the end of secondary school in the UK can get into a reasonable quality university. It is not hard.

And more to the point, it is essentially free, since the government automatically gives you a loan that covers 100% of tuition, plus rent, plus living expenses, for any university. No parents here keep a "college fund".
posted by cillit bang at 7:02 AM on February 22, 2006

jb, I searched the thread for the links you mention and I was a bit underwhelmed. Assuming I successfully found all of them, I didn't see anything in which the criteria of social mobility was actually defined. And on top of keeping the criteria under its hat, that London School of Economics article makes ridiculously strident claims for a study based in so soft a science as sociology.

As you point out, the definition of social mobility is quite germane to the conversation. So ah'm a-gonna do some definin'.

In addition to the vastly superior education opportunities available to the average U.S. citizen - which you are conflating with the lavish opportunities available only to the academically above-average citizens in the rest of the first world (As cillit bang mentions, no parents in Britain have a "college fund" - you either make it in, or you're screwed and there's no point in thinking that an education is something you can simply buy with the money you've earned - you must deserve it.) - the U.S. abounds with factors of social mobility which are more than technically available to the populace at large, they're actually taken advantage of:

- Fluid and accessible short-term capital markets: in the United States the financial structure that funds business ventures is characteristically biased towards short-term projects, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. This makes for economic updrafts more easily caught by the industrious members of the lower classes who found restaurants, hair salons, auto repair and construction firms, etc., in addition to the occasional firm that expands explosively and takes over a global market in a matter of decades. In the more risk-averse capital markets of Japan and Europe, if you don't come from a corporate establishment (so often cleft to the higher social classes) you do not merit funding. A great many of our short-term, high-risk business ventures burn brightly and briefly, but that's our way, and that's what real social mobility looks like.
- Ethnic diversity: not only does exposure to other cultures create some social "shear force" that helps to blur the class lines in other ethnic communities - often because an alien group initially supplants the existing lower class, granted - but because emigrant communities have often arrived so rapidly in the U.S. that any social stratification that existed in the home country is usually disrupted. The formerly downtrodden rise while the power and position of the socially dominant fall toward the mean. This is true both today and historically. (I wouldn't claim that the U.S. is exceptional in this diversity, most of the nations of the world are extremely multi-ethnic, but this is an important factor of social mobility that we have in healthy abundance.)
- Material wealth: we simply have "stuff", material posessions, coming out of our ears. As I pointed out in a previous post, many U.S. citizens living below the "poverty line" own cars, are entertained by multiple televisions, and have mechanical servants to do their dishes and laundry. The trappings of nobility in ages past are easily and cheaply had as cast-offs in a society that has so much money and stuff that we don't know what to do with it. Even in my darkest financial days I have had the pleasure of driving a variety of German luxury cars (albiet usually twenty-year-old luxury cars), an entire car often bought for less than one of my Indian coworkers spends on a single trip home for the holidays. And this doesn't have social stigma: "second-hand" enjoys periodic revival as chic among all but the most wealthy.
- Innumerable cross-cutting social movements that surmount class lines with brazen panache: jazz, civil rights, NASCAR, country music, the internet, religions (DAMN are we good at inventing sects of Christianity, and we aren't half-bad at getting other faiths to thrive too), the adoration of the automobile, rap, historical reenactment hobbyists, the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee, and above all our national pasttime of politics.
- A vital literary tradition: U.S. citizens are among the most voracious consumers of books and other printed materials in the world. For the socially mobile this means not only access to a constant flow of thought, news, information, and culture through both commercial media outlets and our unusual number of public libraries (which in most cases do NOT have to be funded by the government, as they must in many of the "more enlightened" nations of the world) but also a greater opportunity to be an author.
- Ownership of land: The most ancient device of social mobility. The U.S. is one of the nations in which an average citizen can come to own a considerable tract of land if he or she so chooses and pass that land down to descendants. (Certainly Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia, and many other places have the same advantage.) The Poultry Management majors that jb pities could quite possibly be going to work on their own farms. (What's wrong with working for Tyson, anyways? I'm inclined to wonder if what you really want is for everyone to be an aristocrat, and you're being contrary because the U.S. acheives social mobility without pursuing universal aristocracy, by creating pressure for the upper classes to like monster truck rallies as much as lower classes are pushed to appreciate Shakespeare.) How many European or Asian families came to the U.S. after a thousand years of being landless peasants and founded a homestead here? I know families, even of European descent, who have done this only in recent generations.

As I note above, we aren't the exclusive owners of some of these national traits; we simply have the best mix of them. You can go ahead and argue that the vehicles of social mobility available in your own or other countries are better than those of the U.S., but trying to frame our superior social mobility as a "myth" in the face of the evidence is pure sophistry.
posted by XMLicious at 12:27 AM on February 23, 2006

Listen, I'm not economist. But you are still just asserting your opinion - I'm looking for research. It would be better if the LSE study was clearer on its methodology, but its a press release. If we looked up the original reports/journal articles, the methodology would be there. Actually, some other studies I have seen recently looked only at mobility in a 10 year period, not generational - which can be quite muddled by people progressing in their careers, eg from age 20-30 (student to lawyer can be a very big jump). But most people talking about social mobility are talking about generational - how likely are poor people to have poor children. I think there were some links on metafilter recently which showed low correlation between parental and child income, but I don't know if these compared peak of earning to peak, or if it took inflation into account. (My grandfather made $45 a week in the 60s, but could (just) afford a house - my mother had more than that when on welfare in the 1980s and had to live in subsidized housing.)

we aren't the exclusive owners of some of these national traits; we simply have the best mix of them.

But this is still an assertion that you just cannot support. The US does have factors which favour social mobility and it is more mobile than many third world countries. But you can't demonstrate that the US's mix of these traits is most effective. In fact, it would seem that they are outweighed by all the factors against social mobility in the US - the higher inequality, the burden of health care.

The US has a substantially higher coefficient - 46.6 by the 2004 census - that is, it is as unequal in income as China, Bolivia and the Phillipines. This gap is growing. The richest 20% have 8.4 times the income of the poorest 20%, as opposed to Canada (GINI 33.1) where it is only 5.8 times, or Denmark (GINI 24.7) 4.3 times. This is not a situation which supports social mobility, and it shows - in the LSE study, the US and the UK were found to have the lowest levels of the several countries looked at. The UK GINI is 36.

Nor are some of your other factors supporting your point

- Ethnic diversity:

Levels of immigration are higher in Canada and Australia.

11.% percent of US (2002) foreign born.[1]

18.4 % in Canada (2001) [2] and 22.3% in Australia [3, including a very interesting chart comparing countries].

Material wealth

Between 1700 and 1900, the quality of food eaten by labouring people in England declined dramatically. But they had many more knickknacks. Material wealth is relative to your time - we have more stuff now, but it is of lower quality and does not have the same relationship to poverty (the costs of things has dropped dramatically when compared to the cost of food and shelter).

- Innumerable cross-cutting social movements that surmount class lines with brazen panache: jazz, civil rights, NASCAR, country music, the internet, religions (DAMN are we good at inventing sects of Christianity, and we aren't half-bad at getting other faiths to thrive too), the adoration of the automobile, rap, historical reenactment hobbyists, the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee, and above all our national pasttime of politics.

So this is now just jingo - but I couldn't help but point out that we (Canada) export country music stars, and drink more coffee per capita. Also, "a good cup of coffee"? In the United States? France and Italy are over in the corner, collapsed in laughter. Your stuff is nearly as bad as our Canadian swill.

A vital literary tradition:

Every country in the world would claim to have the best literature. Too bad it's all in different languages (though from what is in English, I would have put India before the US. But that's personal taste.)

But literature, while wonderful, does not have much to do with social mobility. Literacy does.

I was looking for data on functional literacy (because literacy isn't just being able to write your name, but to read and function in your society without hindrance). But I found this very interesting chart instead: The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) which compares literacy at different levels across different countries.

Interestingly, it seems that literacy is very unequal across the US - so uneducated and highschool educated people in the US have lower levels of literacy than many countries, while people with a BA have higher. That is interesting.

Ownership of land: The most ancient device of social mobility

Actually, in the eighteenth century trade and the stockmarket were more useful for moving from the middling to upper classes in Britain.

How many European or Asian families came to the U.S. after a thousand years of being landless peasants and founded a homestead here? I know families, even of European descent, who have done this only in recent generations.

Do you even know anything about European history? Landless peasants for 1000 years? Land engrossment and the loss of land is largely a modern phenomenon (post-1500 in most of Britain) in Europe, and was most extensive in England and Scotland (I'm not sure how extensive in Scotland other than the highland clearances - but that's a complicated story). France is still dominated by family (aka peasant) farmers - that's why the agricultural lobby is so strong (lots of rural votes). Whereas American farming is increasingly dominated not by family farming but by corporate farming. Also, once you are landless, you aren't a peasant (who are defined by their relationship to land). A landless peasant is a labourer.

Many people did come to the New World, to the US and Canada, and found homesteads. Of course, many of those homesteads were also bought up by speculators who made off like bandits selling them to the settlers. And many, many homesteads failed. Even more gave up farming in the east and mid-west to go into the factories. And how many labourers came to America to work her slave plantations - Africans were the largest immigrant group in the 17th and 18th centuries to the New World. How many of them got their own homestead and set off on the American Dream? As for Asians, well, they were originally heavily taxed, denied citizenship and even at times totally excluded from immigration. If you want to go into American history to talk about social mobility, you will also have to face the extremely racist character of the time as well.

It's nice that you know families who have experienced social mobility. So do I. I also known families who have not. That's the funny thing about anecdotal evidence. It doesn't change the reality that the US is current a very unequal place, getting (like the rest of the first world) more unequal, and has only average social mobility. But some Americans, including yourself, continue to insist to the contrary, in the face of all reason and fact. You have a good country. You could have a better country, but you would rather justify than to self-reflect.


The Poultry Management majors that jb pities could quite possibly be going to work on their own farms. (What's wrong with working for Tyson, anyways?

No, this particular person was working as a manager at Tyson. There is nothing wrong with that, but to spend his BA studying what he could be trained in at Tyson's expense in a matter of weeks is a waste of an opportunity. Companies are using universities, usually the state-supported ones, to subsidize their own training. The story of this man with the major (which I read in an athropological study of Tyson - there is a lot wrong with working there, but that has to do with their management policies) really saddened me because he was the first person in his family to go to college (like me), but like many lower class students he was obviously very concerned about his financial future and went for a "safe" major which would lead directly to employment. Did he want to study that? I don't know. Maybe he was fascinated by chicken. But he was stuck in a low management go-nowhere job where he didn't understand and was widely disliked by his employees.

I'm inclined to wonder if what you really want is for everyone to be an aristocrat, and you're being contrary because the U.S. acheives social mobility without pursuing universal aristocracy, by creating pressure for the upper classes to like monster truck rallies as much as lower classes are pushed to appreciate Shakespeare.)

No, I have no desire for everyone to be an aristocrat. I have lived in a country with aristocrats and frankly, their accents are annoying and their ignorance of the real poverty in their own country (or even what it is like to not have the same opportunities) is infuriating.

What I get angry about is how many people in the United States and Canada behave in the same manner, while insisting on how different their countries are. They don't have titled aristocrats, so they couldn't possibly have any poverty or inequality. "We're the Land of Opportunity! Come, have gold driveway!" Well, poverty is worse in the United States than in many places in that "Old" Europe. There is higher infant mortality and lower life expectency. The lack of health care should be criminal. There is an aristocracy - they may not be titled, but neither is most of Britain's aristocracy.

What I want is for peope to acknowledge the inequality that is in their own country. To recognise that some of their fellow citizens go hungry. To realise that opportunity, while there, is not the same for everyone - the poor can and do get out of poverty, but only through more work than the middle or upper classes. There is nothing more honorable than pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps - but not everyone has as far to go. And pretending otherwise is to just be ignorant.

As I note above, we aren't the exclusive owners of some of these national traits; we simply have the best mix of them. You can go ahead and argue that the vehicles of social mobility available in your own or other countries are better than those of the U.S., but trying to frame our superior social mobility as a "myth" in the face of the evidence is pure sophistry.

So you don't like my research. Where is your own? You are the one relying on sophistry (though your love of wisdom is apparently quite low). There is no evidence for higher social mobility in the US, and stating your myth over and over again isn't going to change that. In fact, you don't even care if your points aren't true.

It's like you are saying - "sure, we don't have eggs or flour or butter, but we've got the best cakes! Just look at this empty pan and tell me this cake isn't great! You're just jealous of our cakes."

Meanwhile, people in your country are starving and would like some bread please.

That was meant to be a metaphor, but considering my previous post about Second Harvest, it is more literal than I like.
posted by jb at 4:10 AM on February 23, 2006

Listen, I'm not economist. But you are still just asserting your opinion - I'm looking for research. It would be better if the LSE study was clearer on its methodology, but its a press release. If we looked up the original reports/journal articles, the methodology would be there. Actually, some other studies I have seen recently looked only at mobility in a 10 year period, not generational - which can be quite muddled by people progressing in their careers, eg from age 20-30 (student to lawyer can be a very big jump). But most people talking about social mobility are talking about generational - how likely are poor people to have poor children. I think there were some links on metafilter recently which showed low correlation between parental and child income, but I don't know if these compared peak of earning to peak, or if it took inflation into account. (My grandfather made $45 a week in the 60s, but could (just) afford a house - my mother had more than that when on welfare in the 1980s and had to live in subsidized housing.)

we aren't the exclusive owners of some of these national traits; we simply have the best mix of them.

But this is still an assertion that you just cannot support. The US does have factors which favour social mobility and it is more mobile than many third world countries. But you can't demonstrate that the US's mix of these traits is most effective. In fact, it would seem that they are outweighed by all the factors against social mobility in the US - the higher inequality, the burden of health care.

The US has a substantially higher coefficient - 46.6 by the 2004 census - that is, it is as unequal in income as China, Bolivia and the Phillipines. This gap is growing. The richest 20% have 8.4 times the income of the poorest 20%, as opposed to Canada (GINI 33.1) where it is only 5.8 times, or Denmark (GINI 24.7) 4.3 times. This is not a situation which supports social mobility, and it shows - in the LSE study, the US and the UK were found to have the lowest levels of the several countries looked at. The UK GINI is 36.

Nor are some of your other factors supporting your point

- Ethnic diversity:

Levels of immigration are higher in Canada and Australia.

11.% percent of US (2002) foreign born.[1]

18.4 % in Canada (2001) [2] and 22.3% in Australia [3, including a very interesting chart comparing countries].

Material wealth

Between 1700 and 1900, the quality of food eaten by labouring people in England declined dramatically. But they had many more knickknacks. Material wealth is relative to your time - we have more stuff now, but it is of lower quality and does not have the same relationship to poverty (the costs of things has dropped dramatically when compared to the cost of food and shelter).

- Innumerable cross-cutting social movements that surmount class lines with brazen panache: jazz, civil rights, NASCAR, country music, the internet, religions (DAMN are we good at inventing sects of Christianity, and we aren't half-bad at getting other faiths to thrive too), the adoration of the automobile, rap, historical reenactment hobbyists, the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee, and above all our national pasttime of politics.

So this is now just jingo - but I couldn't help but point out that we (Canada) export country music stars, and drink more coffee per capita. Also, "a good cup of coffee"? In the United States? France and Italy are over in the corner, collapsed in laughter. Your stuff is nearly as bad as our Canadian swill.

A vital literary tradition:

Every country in the world would claim to have the best literature. Too bad it's all in different languages (though from what is in English, I would have put India before the US. But that's personal taste.)

But literature, while wonderful, does not have much to do with social mobility. Literacy does.

I was looking for data on functional literacy (because literacy isn't just being able to write your name, but to read and function in your society without hindrance). But I found this very interesting chart instead: The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) which compares literacy at different levels across different countries.

Interestingly, it seems that literacy is very unequal across the US - so uneducated and highschool educated people in the US have lower levels of literacy than many countries, while people with a BA have higher. That is interesting.

Ownership of land: The most ancient device of social mobility

Actually, in the eighteenth century trade and the stockmarket were more useful for moving from the middling to upper classes in Britain.

How many European or Asian families came to the U.S. after a thousand years of being landless peasants and founded a homestead here? I know families, even of European descent, who have done this only in recent generations.

Do you even know anything about European history? Landless peasants for 1000 years? Land engrossment and the loss of land is largely a modern phenomenon (post-1500 in most of Britain) in Europe, and was most extensive in England and Scotland (I'm not sure how extensive in Scotland other than the highland clearances - but that's a complicated story). France is still dominated by family (aka peasant) farmers - that's why the agricultural lobby is so strong (lots of rural votes). Whereas American farming is increasingly dominated not by family farming but by corporate farming. Also, once you are landless, you aren't a peasant (who are defined by their relationship to land). A landless peasant is a labourer.

Many people did come to the New World, to the US and Canada, and found homesteads. Of course, many of those homesteads were also bought up by speculators who made off like bandits selling them to the settlers. And many, many homesteads failed. Even more gave up farming in the east and mid-west to go into the factories. And how many labourers came to America to work her slave plantations - Africans were the largest immigrant group in the 17th and 18th centuries to the New World. How many of them got their own homestead and set off on the American Dream? As for Asians, well, they were originally heavily taxed, denied citizenship and even at times totally excluded from immigration. If you want to go into American history to talk about social mobility, you will also have to face the extremely racist character of the time as well.

It's nice that you know families who have experienced social mobility. So do I. I also known families who have not. That's the funny thing about anecdotal evidence. It doesn't change the reality that the US is current a very unequal place, getting (like the rest of the first world) more unequal, and has only average social mobility. But some Americans, including yourself, continue to insist to the contrary, in the face of all reason and fact. You have a good country. You could have a better country, but you would rather justify than to self-reflect.


The Poultry Management majors that jb pities could quite possibly be going to work on their own farms. (What's wrong with working for Tyson, anyways?

No, this particular person was working as a manager at Tyson. There is nothing wrong with that, but to spend his BA studying what he could be trained in at Tyson's expense in a matter of weeks is a waste of an opportunity. Companies are using universities, usually the state-supported ones, to subsidize their own training. The story of this man with the major (which I read in an athropological study of Tyson - there is a lot wrong with working there, but that has to do with their management policies) really saddened me because he was the first person in his family to go to college (like me), but like many lower class students he was obviously very concerned about his financial future and went for a "safe" major which would lead directly to employment. Did he want to study that? I don't know. Maybe he was fascinated by chicken. But he was stuck in a low management go-nowhere job where he didn't understand and was widely disliked by his employees.

I'm inclined to wonder if what you really want is for everyone to be an aristocrat, and you're being contrary because the U.S. acheives social mobility without pursuing universal aristocracy, by creating pressure for the upper classes to like monster truck rallies as much as lower classes are pushed to appreciate Shakespeare.)

No, I have no desire for everyone to be an aristocrat. I have lived in a country with aristocrats and frankly, their accents are annoying and their ignorance of the real poverty in their own country (or even what it is like to not have the same opportunities) is infuriating.

What I get angry about is how many people in the United States and Canada behave in the same manner, while insisting on how different their countries are. They don't have titled aristocrats, so they couldn't possibly have any poverty or inequality. "We're the Land of Opportunity! Come, have gold driveway!" Well, poverty is worse in the United States than in many places in that "Old" Europe. There is higher infant mortality and lower life expectency. The lack of health care should be criminal. There is an aristocracy - they may not be titled, but neither is most of Britain's aristocracy.

What I want is for peope to acknowledge the inequality that is in their own country. To recognise that some of their fellow citizens go hungry. To realise that opportunity, while there, is not the same for everyone - the poor can and do get out of poverty, but only through more work than the middle or upper classes. There is nothing more honorable than pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps - but not everyone has as far to go. And pretending otherwise is to just be ignorant.

As I note above, we aren't the exclusive owners of some of these national traits; we simply have the best mix of them. You can go ahead and argue that the vehicles of social mobility available in your own or other countries are better than those of the U.S., but trying to frame our superior social mobility as a "myth" in the face of the evidence is pure sophistry.

So you don't like my research. Where is your own? You are the one relying on sophistry (though your love of wisdom is apparently quite low). There is no evidence for higher social mobility in the US, and stating your myth over and over again isn't going to change that. In fact, you don't even care if your points aren't true.

It's like you are saying - "sure, we don't have eggs or flour or butter, but we've got the best cakes! Just look at this empty pan and tell me this cake isn't great! You're just jealous of our cakes."

Meanwhile, people in your country are starving and would like some bread please.

That was meant to be a metaphor, but considering my previous post about Second Harvest, it is more literal than I like.
posted by jb at 4:11 AM on February 23, 2006

I have realised I have wasted far more time on this thread than I should have. Clearly you don't want to know the truth - you are the ostrich I described you as.

Go on living as you have - go on believing your myths. You will do nothing to help your country, and just wonder "why" when crime continues to go up, when it seems like your fellow citizens have no stake in the social order, no reason to participate in the "democracy". Why should they have a stake in a social order that does nothing for them?

When they have nothing to lose, they will no longer play the game. And then it will be very bad for people who have things to lose.
posted by jb at 4:14 AM on February 23, 2006

"What I want is for peope to acknowledge the inequality that is in their own country. To recognise that some of their fellow citizens go hungry. To realise that opportunity, while there, is not the same for everyone - the poor can and do get out of poverty, but only through more work than the middle or upper classes. There is nothing more honorable than pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps - but not everyone has as far to go. And pretending otherwise is to just be ignorant."


Your strawman and seeming arrogance is that there are many people who don't know/acknowledge what you claim they don't. Just because people kvell and are appreciative of opportunity in the US doesn't mean what you claim. And since many Lefties insist the US is closer to Hell than much of the world, it's only natural that USians get a bit defensive at times.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:53 AM on February 23, 2006

Your strawman and seeming arrogance is that there are many people who don't know/acknowledge what you claim they don't. Just because people kvell and are appreciative of opportunity in the US doesn't mean what you claim. And since many Lefties insist the US is closer to Hell than much of the world, it's only natural that USians get a bit defensive at times.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:53 AM PST on February 23 [!]

What am I claiming? That some people use social mobility as a justification for the dismissal of concerns about poverty and social inequality? That happened right here in this thread. No, I don't know how many, though I did once hear a paper about how the perception of poverty in the US is at odds with the reality - that a majority of people polled in the census believed poverty was going down in the late 1990s, when really it went up. (Basically, it seemed hard for people to believe that poverty could go up despite an improving economy, but that is just what happened.)

I was not arguing against strawmen, unless the commentators were puppets - I was arguing against very real people who were trotting out old myths to justify their opinion right here.

I'm sorry you think I am arrogant because I believe that the US, along with the whole of the first world, needs to admit it is not perfect, that it is a country which can better itself. I've always though bettering yourself was a good thing to aim for. I am sorry it arrogant to believe that equality is something which betters our societies and strengthens our democracies, and that the growing inequality in the first world is a threat to what we value. I thought I was being angry, not arrogant, though they do both start with A.
posted by jb at 5:52 AM on February 23, 2006

Jb, I apologize for calling you arrogant--not fair on my part.

Perhaps more accurately, yes, there are a lot of detached-from-reality people in the US, including many who seem to be heartless. But that's true pretty much everywhere; they just seem to have a louder voice in the US.

Moreover, there are lots of people, on the Left and Right, who are aware of poverty and working on it. Keep in mind that, what, 30 years of big-time social programs, we still have it. We also have aid programs that aren't used fully.
posted by ParisParamus at 6:13 AM on February 23, 2006

PS: why do you think the US thinks it's perfect?
posted by ParisParamus at 6:14 AM on February 23, 2006

In addition to the vastly superior education opportunities available to the average U.S. citizen - which you are conflating with the lavish opportunities available only to the academically above-average citizens in the rest of the first world

Are you saying America's system of being able to buy your way in is better for social mobility than having a meritocratic entry system where more or less anyone who doesn't completely fuck up at school can get a university place? What the fuck?
posted by cillit bang at 6:16 AM on February 23, 2006

cb, how does the quote you offer translate into what you are inferring? When I read the quote I think "community and local colleges, student aid, student loans, and a culture that doesn't find adults going to college odd/freakish." To say nohing of a culture that gives women and minorities more of a shot than most, if not all places; and does so on a huge scale.
posted by ParisParamus at 6:49 AM on February 23, 2006

Moreover, there are lots of people, on the Left and Right, who are aware of poverty and working on it. Keep in mind that, what, 30 years of big-time social programs, we still have it. We also have aid programs that aren't used fully.
posted by ParisParamus at 6:13 AM PST on February 23 [!]

I am aware of many people trying to help, though I don't really see much political divide. If people are working to reduce poverty, then they are doing good, not being Left or Right. I don't think we can end poverty - because much of poverty is relative, there will always be people who are relatively poor and people who are relatively rich. There is a reason the Bible says "always among you". Social programs only ever reduced inequality, acting either to help everyone (health, education) or as a net of last resource (welfare, unemployment insurance). These do help rduce inequality - it's the inequality which makes the difference in the effect of poverty. But I worry because after several decades (at least) of reducing inequality, inequality is currently going up all over the first world.

PS: why do you think the US thinks it's perfect?
posted by ParisParamus at 6:14 AM PST on February 23 [!]

I don't really, of course. The US doesn't think anything - it has 300 million people who think many things, just like any other country. (Including at least some who think that peanut butter and cucumber makes a very good sandwich.*)

But there is a tendancy of some in the first world to believe that the fact that their poverty is negated by not being as bad as that in the third world. I have just seen too many television news programs that say if you own a tv, you aren't poor - even if you haven't been able to pay rent that day. TVs are cheap - you can own a tv, and not have plumbing. A new TV costs less than a month's rent on a single room in Toronto. I'm not saying people never waste money (in fact, I think money management is a very important skill to teach people, and I wish it were mandatory in school - much more use than algebra), but that's it's a pat and false answer to say that is why they are poor.**

Third world poverty is inconceivable to many people in the first world (including myself - I've read a great deal about it, but I don't really conceive what it is like). But then, many people in the first world would be surprised by the living conditions that other people in first world have. Simple things that many of us take for granted - plumbing, heating, a bed for each person, private bedrooms for couples*** - this isn't for everyone. There are families that live in one room, families who live without running water, or without adequate heat, families who live in illegal apartments without the ability to escape a fire. We pass laws about these things, but it goes on - because economics is cruel, people have little choice.

The issues of first and third world poverty are different - and the solutions are not the same. But one doesn't negate the other. (Actually, dealing with one can help the other - raising incomes overseas decreases competition on wages and increases markets for our goods.

*These people would be right, of course.

**It does exacerbate poverty - and perhaps may be driven by it. People can get caught in a famine-feast cycle, where they don't have any money, so when they have it they spend it on small pleasures they have been forsaking (candy, cigarettes, alcohol), and then they are short again. My mother saw this among families on welfare, only with food - so short at the end of the month they didn't eat properly (like eating soup made from ketchup), that when the money finally came, they "feasted" on expensive treats like chips and cookies. It's not healthy, and they needed management help, but it is understandable.

***Yes, we do expect that as a culture - think of how Children's Aid would react to parents having sex in the same room as their children. I don't know, but they might take the children away. Whereas it is normal in other places. When my mom took in my niece from foster care, she was required to make sure my niece had her own bedroom, not shared with anyone. If we hadn't been able to afford a large enough apartment, my niece would have remained in foster care. That's what being poor means in the first world.

On Preview -

I think the big problem is that when people criticise the US, some people think they are saying that the US is worse than, let's say, Iran. Which no one in their right mind would suggest. But when people from the first world criticise the US, they really are saying the US could learn something from Sweden or Denmark (in terms of women's rights, for example) or perhaps Canada in terms of integration of minorities - but really I don't know if Canada does any better. Both Canada and the US have done better with immigrant populations than Europe, but both have many serious issues of poverty among non-immigrant visible minorites like African-Americans and Native Canadians or Americans. At one point (like the 1950s-70s -I read this in an article a while ago).), immigrants did financially better in Canada than the US, but that was because native-born Canadians were less likely to go to university than Americans, and so the immigrants had more education relative to the native-born. But it's not that way anymore - Canadians now go to university in higher numbers and the immigrants lost their advantage.
posted by jb at 7:11 AM on February 23, 2006

jb, you are kicking ass up and down the block!
posted by five fresh fish at 9:09 AM on February 23, 2006

.

good discussion.
posted by ParisParamus at 10:22 AM on February 23, 2006

cillit bang said:

Are you saying America's system of being able to buy your way in is better for social mobility than having a meritocratic entry system where more or less anyone who doesn't completely fuck up at school can get a university place? What the fuck?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Especially if "anyone who doesn't fuck up at school" amounts to only one third of the population.

I had very poor marks at school. My application to all but one university was rejected. Only because I could work for a few years, then pay my own way and start attending classes part-time, was I able to get the kind of education that I wanted and a four-year degree. So your meritocracy can go fuck itself.

And I can proceed to higher degrees at any time I want. I can take classes at Harvard University if I wish, as can anyone else; no one is locked out of the system.

--------------------------------------------------

So I'm a history-ignorant ostrich, am I, jb? Not only do you have to do all of that strenuous argument to overcome this "myth", and even backed with all that research and numbers, you still feel it is necessary to fire off personal attacks?

Come on, give it up. You yourself said above "The US does have factors which favour social mobility and it is more mobile than many third world countries." How can you say something like that and still keep calling it a "myth"? Call it pride or arrogance or whatever you want, but in so subjective a topic, why do you keep trying to deny the very existence of social mobility in the U.S.? (Does the word "myth" mean something different in Canada?) You don't do yourself or your position any good that way; it simply looks like intellectual dishonesty.

Let me respond to the bits about we in the U.S. thinking we're perfect: that simply isn't so. I and many of my countrymen despise many things about the United States. For all the opportunity that our education system presents to the average citizen, it certainly needs to be improved, for both the health and stamina of our economy and the edification and enrichment of the populace. That's one area in which I would like to see an aristocratic standard, though it must be achieved without loss of opportunity.

I have a number of friends and relatives in the U.S. military and I think it's horrendous and despicable that our military has been forced into the role of the bringers of war in the 21st century, when we should only be the bringers of peace.

The ascendancy that we have in many spheres is by no means unchallenged or permanent. The rising stars (galaxies?) of India and China and Brazil and others will overtake us in the coming century. But right now, I and many people here and around the world (even many poor from around the world) believe that the U.S. is the best place to live.

Now, to continue with the ripostes:

The richest 20% have 8.4 times the income of the poorest 20%, as opposed to Canada (GINI 33.1) where it is only 5.8 times, or Denmark (GINI 24.7) 4.3 times.

I've always been puzzled by statement of ratios like these in regards to poverty. What value does a particular ratio have to the poor? Is the basic argument something like "without the bell curve, there can be no social justice"? A ratio like this simply expresses the spread or distribution of the numbers - it doesn't say anything qualitatively or even quantitatively about the wealth or incomes of the subjects. You might calculate the same ratio within just the richest 20% of the population - figure out how wealth is distributed among the rich by themselves, that is - and get the exact same number. Except that in that case, the lowest quintile would be people making hundreds of thousands of US dollars per year.

Another way of putting it is that "The gap is growing" scenario could be produced by income growth among the lowest 20% along with much greater growth among the top 20% - the poor getting richer and the rich getting richer too. It doesn't mean that anyone is losing out - the size of or change in the "gap" has nothing to do with the wealth or income of anyone in particular. That kind of change could even be produced by many rich people becoming destitute and many poor people winning the lottery! (though I certainly don't think that the latter is the actual case.)

And on top of that, I would bet that the studies producing these numbers are only taking into account strictly quantifiable things like paychecks and bank account balances, but not factors like being able to buy a car for $500.

So the numbers that you quote there are just economic statistics - they don't describe or compare the status of poverty in these countries, much less social mobility.

I hadn't noticed that the LSE article was taking into account econometric ratio numbers like these. If they were trying to measure social mobility that doesn't bode very well for a good study design on their part.

- Ethnic diversity:

Levels of immigration are higher in Canada and Australia.

Uh, yeah - and according to that chart that you linked to yourself, they and Switzerland are the only nations with higher percentages than the U.S.! You're complaining that the U.S. has only the fourth highest ethnic diversity in the world!?! (jb is the one putting forward ratio of foreign birth as the metric of ethnic diversity here, I might choose differently.)

- Material wealth:

...we have more stuff now, but it is of lower quality and does not have the same relationship to poverty...

The hell it doesn't! Have you ever washed your clothing by hand like most people in Central and South America have to, or cooked a full meal over a fire, or walked halfway across Africa like Sudanese refugees have had to? I will machine-launder my clothes, cook on a stove, and drive away from danger, thank you very much.

the costs of things has dropped dramatically when compared to the cost of food and shelter.

I disagree completely. Food is so inexpensive that most people don't need to grow even supplemental food themselves (though some do, refer to the anecdote of my Thai landlady above). And I would expect that the cost of shelter has greatly decreased; I have immigrant acquaintances who work low-income jobs but live 10 or 12 people to a small apartment, as did urban residents in 1800s British and U.S. cities, and thereby have disposable income for all of the luxuries they want, like much newer cars than mine (they make fun of me, actually, for driving twenty-year-old cars). And nowadays individuals and families below the poverty line can have an entire apartment or house to themselves!

- Innumerable cross-cutting social movements...

So this is now just jingo...

"Just jingo"? To take just one of these examples: jazz, which is one that originated in the U.S. and has had a profound impact in crossing both class and racial lines not only here but in the rest of the world as well. Anyone can google and find both scholarly and popular research and literature to this effect, but for a particular case take a look at British jazz voices: Crossing borders of race, nation, and class. Both native social movements like this and cosmopolitan ones thrive in U.S. culture - ALL levels of culture, bringing together people of different social classes.

Speaking of uproarious laughter: your response to this was "It doesn't matter that the New York debutante and the city street sweeper buy their coffee side by side at the same Starbucks, because your coffee sucks."

- A vital literary tradition

Every country in the world would claim to have the best literature.

You are the one turning the things I'm saying into jingoism in your head. I didn't say that we have the best literature, and I don't think that's true at all; while I have a soft spot in my heart for Mark Twain and H.P. Lovecraft and Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros, on the whole I have greater appreciation for European literature, both the British stuff I've read in the original and translations of Continental artistry. And if you're going to throw in an ill-defined reference to Indian literature, I'll go ahead and say that African is good too. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe are da bomb.

What I said was that consumption and authoring of literature in the U.S. are the most voluminous in the world. That's what's of benefit to social mobility. Even if we had the best literature in the world, it wouldn't be of any benefit to social mobility.

Literacy: good point. Good job in actually coming up with a criteron of social mobility for once.

- Ownership of land: The most ancient device of social mobility

Actually, in the eighteenth century trade and the stockmarket were more useful for moving from the middling to upper classes in Britain.

When I said "ancient" I was shooting for a little bit earlier than the eighteenth century.

Do you even know anything about European history?

Yes.

I said: What's wrong with working for Tyson, anyways?

...he was stuck in a low management go-nowhere job...

I think that most of the world's poor would not mind a low-level management job and wouldn't cry very hard about this guy's situation. Again, the fault you're finding in the U.S. through this situation isn't social mobility - you're bemoaning the fact that he didn't have a nice fulfilling college major for his first degree! That's practically a bohemian criticism, that's what I mean when I say you're gunning for aristocratic values. Again, maybe he wants to own his own farm some day; he certainly would be able to, with that kind of education, or he can get another degree in something noble and stratospherically intellectual, even if he has to wait until he retires. Still a bazillion times better than the fate of a destitute Bangladeshi.

Meanwhile, people in your country are starving and would like some bread please.

No, they're not. You're starting to believe your own hyperbole. Show me even an anecdotal case of someone who is unable to get bread because of their economic situation. In some soup kitchens in the rural U.S. they have to throw away donated bread if it's too epicurean and fancy because no one wants it.

So, to sum it all up -

Argument that the existence of social mobility in the U.S. is a mythical fairy tale: weak and founded in polemical delusions.

Argument that the U.S. has the best social mobility in the world: not airtight, but pretty strong.
posted by XMLicious at 11:13 AM on February 26, 2006

Argument that the existence of social mobility in the U.S. is a mythical fairy tale: weak and founded in polemical delusions.

Never made, at least by me.

Argument that the U.S. has the best social mobility in the world: not airtight, but pretty strong.

No evidence has been presented for this, while some evidence has been presented against this.

I'm sorry, I like evidence.

As for truly ancient social mobility, swords tended to be the most important.


As for why GINI matters:

You are very right to point out that a low GINI co-efficient doesn't mean people aren't poor. Some of the countries with low GINI are in fact very poor. However, it is a very good measure of the inequality in a country; poverty is, after all, relative. The heath of the poor, for instance, "is harmed in proportion to the size of the gap between rich and poor".

As for where is the best place in the world to live? This is far from a subjective question. I, of course, am totally biased towards my home country, for illogical reasons of simple patriotism and home-sickness. But thinking more logically, and having lived in the United States, I don't think I would never live there out of choice. The health system is too scary - I don't want to live in a country where so many people live without health care, and where my own access to health care is precariously tied to my employment (it is a selfish motivation as well). I will, in fact, be living in the US next year, and still have no idea how my family will be able to afford health care. Perhaps this doesn't matter as much to other people.
posted by jb at 6:53 PM on February 26, 2006

For lots and lots of different quality of life statistics, the Human Development Index reports are always a good read. I didn't realise just how much Ireland's GDP had increased in the last few years.
posted by jb at 6:55 PM on February 26, 2006

Unfortunately, looking on in the Human Poverty Index*, it seems that the growth in Irish GDP hasn't been all that equal - they were ranked 16th out of 18 first world countries, with only the United States and Italy ranked lower.

From the page, this "is a composite index measuring deprivations in the three basic dimensions captured in the human development index - a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living - and also capturing social exclusion."
posted by jb at 7:05 PM on February 26, 2006

In response to my point that land ownership is the most ancient route to social mobility and is abundant in the States, jb said:

As for truly ancient social mobility, swords tended to be the most important.

The footmen of the Shang dynasty Chinese and the Hittite armies had swords as commoners, as did the other contemporary military and all armies since. It was the individuals who possessed land who became gentry and noblemen, not the ones with swords.

And before you point out the one exception, yes, at certain points in Japanese history swords were reserved for the samurai. But commoners were permitted equally lethal weapons.

Argument that the U.S. has the best social mobility in the world: not airtight, but pretty strong.

No evidence has been presented for this, while some evidence has been presented against this.

Let's investigate one of your items of evidence, shall we?

The heath of the poor, for instance, "is harmed in proportion to the size of the gap between rich and poor".

Dude, do you even read the articles you're posting links to? From the (1996, BTW) article:

"...Utah and New Hampshire have the most EQUAL distribution of income, while Louisiana and Mississippi have the most UNEQUAL distribution of income.

This measure of income inequality was then compared to the age-adjusted death rate for all causes of death, and a pattern emerged: the more unequal the distribution of income, the greater the death rate. For example in Louisiana and Mississippi the age-adjusted death rate is about 960 per 100,000 people, while in New Hampshire it is about 780 per 100,000 and in Utah it is about 710 per 100,000 people."

So for the two most extreme cases, the difference in death rates is 250 people per 100,000! One quarter of one percent of the population! A difference this small could easily be a normal fluctuation. I bet it's well within one standard deviation, but of course the article doesn't give any real statistical information like that. And so small a deviation for the most extreme cases - much less the differences between other states! Their correlation metrics are probably completely crappy too, as is usually the case for sociometric studies (i.e. numbers indicating so low a degree of correlation that the result would be considered completely meaningless in a field like physics or chemistry).

And furthermore, even if the correlation numbers were good, immediately concluding that income distribution ratios cause higher death rates is fallacious. Both variables could be dependent - they could both be caused by some third factor or set of factors.

And this is in the British Medical Journal - a prominent publication in several fields! This really is the standard quality of sociometric research. Someone is making a career by getting grants for, performing, and publishing studies like this, so they have to abstract the topic to the point where they can measure it quantitatively, then make really emphatic claims from a cherry-picked set of figures out of the meager numbers they're able to drudge up.

To give an analogy, the inability of "soft science" to produce meaningful statistics is the same reason why standardized testing, though an important tool in the education process, cannot be relied upon to give an accurate or complete picture of the student's learning. Just because Johnny got poor marks on a test, or even gets poor marks on all the standardized tests he takes, is not "evidence" or "proof" that he is stupid or has some learning disability.

And that's the same reason why the "poverty is relative" principle keeps getting advanced. A moment's thought demonstrates that this is absurd - it would mean that someone with only one yacht and one vacation home is destitute and in abject poverty when among a population where owning ten yachts, ten vacation homes, and a private jet is common. That's not even remotely close to the meaning of the word "poverty". But wealth and income ratios are easy to compute from tax returns, whereas the factors I list that would accurately depict poverty are much more difficult to quantify.

And of course, grants are given to researchers for examining poverty because it's perceived as a problem. If studies came out that said things like "people with incomes under the federal poverty line have more luxuries than miseries" the agencies that make the grants might get the wrong idea, mightn't they?

The linked article above ends with this:

How does the gap between rich an poor harm the health of the poor? Evidently, the psychological hardship of being low down on the social ladder has detrimental effects on people, beyond whatever effects are produced by the substandard housing, nutrition, air quality, recreational opportunities, and medical care enjoyed by the poor.

Hear that? Poverty has nothing to do with reality, it's all psychological. Nothing that anyone ever does will be enough. And don't try judging this yourself because it is beyond the tangible ken of mere mortals. The sociometric researchers are the priest and shamans who are our intercessors to the Knowledge of Poverty and woe to those who would think about it on their own.
posted by XMLicious at 10:21 PM on February 27, 2006

Since the thread is still going...

XMLicious: --how many of the Americans referred to as living below the poverty line own or have immediate access to one or more cars, a refrigerator, a microwave, an oven and range, multiple televisions, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, laundry washer and dryer, etc.?

Here's some data: The Effect of Income on Appliances in U.S. Households, from the EIA. 99.9% of households have a refrigerator. 99.7% have a cooking appliance. 98.9% have a color TV.

I didn't see anything in which the criteria of social mobility was actually defined.

From the LSE report (PDF):

The most intuitive way to see the extent of intergenerational mobility is to see where children from the most or least affluent families end up in the earnings or income distribution as adults. This can be shown by a transition matrix showing movements in the income distribution across generations.

So for the two most extreme cases, the difference in death rates is 250 people per 100,000! One quarter of one percent of the population!

Huh? The death rate in Louisiana compared to Utah is (960 - 710) / 710, i.e. it's 35% higher in Louisiana than Utah.

jb: Poverty levels are similar (though inequality is less) all over the first world.

I think that's worth underlining. No country in the world has figured out how to solve the problem of poverty. Every economy has its own strengths and weaknesses; compared to most European countries, the US has done extremely well at generating jobs and keeping unemployment low. (Unemployment and poverty are two separate problems.)

And it's a fallacy to assume that if the US doesn't adopt policies which have worked well in other countries, there must be something wrong with Americans. Different countries have different historical experiences. The US was founded on a revolt against established authority. My impression is that suspicion of authority and the state still runs very deep in the US.

Consider what Canada does to alleviate inequality:

One measure of income inequality is the ratio of income received by the 20% of families with the highest after-tax income compared with the 20% of families with the lowest after-tax income.

In 2003, for market income, this ratio was about 12.9 to 1.0. That is, the 20% of families with the highest after-tax income received about $12.90 in market income for every $1.00 received by the 20% of families with the lowest after-tax income.

However, taxes and transfers moderate the differences between the quintiles of the income distribution. After taxes and transfers, the one-fifth of families with the highest after-tax income received $5.50 for every $1.00 received by the one-fifth with the lowest.

To me, as a Canadian, the natural question is, why isn't the US do something similar? But Canadians don't have the same level of distrust of their government as Americans do. To a large number of Americans, living without a social safety net appears to be better than living with a social safety net provided by a more powerful and intrusive state.

Besides its different historical experience, the US is also a very large country, which means that its federal government is much more remote, psychologically, than in smaller countries. Under these circumstances, I think there's a natural tendency to distrust solutions which involve the state.

Seymour Martin Lipset comments on this basic difference between the US and Canada in Continental Divide. As he puts it, the US is--in this regard, at least--much more left-wing than Canada is. There's lots of other examples: the strength of libertarianism and libertarian thinking in the US, the paranoid style in American politics.

(tgrundke makes some similar points.)
posted by russilwvong at 12:49 AM on February 28, 2006

russilwvong , Thank you for posting that link on household appliances - I didn't think numbers like that would exist! - and for taking an insightful, but calmer and less polemical tack than jb and I have.
posted by XMLicious at 6:26 PM on February 28, 2006

No problem, XMLicious. It's been an interesting discussion.
posted by russilwvong at 10:56 PM on February 28, 2006

And that's the same reason why the "poverty is relative" principle keeps getting advanced. A moment's thought demonstrates that this is absurd - it would mean that someone with only one yacht and one vacation home is destitute and in abject poverty when among a population where owning ten yachts, ten vacation homes, and a private jet is common. That's not even remotely close to the meaning of the word "poverty"

If we lived in a world where it was considered normal and decent to have 10 yachts, etc. then yes, the person with one would be "poor". Because that would be the kind of world where you had to sail to get to school, to get to the shop, and your family had to have multiple boats to do what regular families did. Kids would get together on their yachts when they went out to play. Much as suburban kids drive to hang out, while urban do not.

It may seem like a silly example, but already in our world, internet access is in the process of moving from luxury to necessity. Teachers expect children to have internet access to do homework. Sure, you say, but schools and libraries provide internet - but there is still an inequality created. The child without internet must complete their homework within a certain time without parental support. This is not equality of opportunity, though the gap is not yet that large. It may widen considerably in the next few years.

(Worse than the education side, of course, is that government departments expect people to access essential services through the internet.)

Poverty is relative. Someone who didn't own a car in 1930s Toronto was not disadvantaged regarding employment opportunities; someone living in Toronto today is. Someone who lacked shows in 1776 England was poor (when Adam Smith made the observation about poverty being relative); this was not true in other places in Europe at the time.

The psychological point is very interesting - is the effect less real for being psychological? Also, there is nothing to suggest there is "nothing to do" - reducing inequality would directly address many of the psychological effects of poverty.

This should matter to everyone, whether they care about poverty or not -- in a grossly unequal society, there is an underclass of people who see themselves as not benefitting from that society and can easily be alienated from it. That means they have no stake in that society, in its rules and laws. Why shouldn't they deal drugs? Why shouldn't they commit break-and-enter? As far as they are concerned, they are losing the game, so why play it?

Reducing inequality is the best way to make that game more relevant to everyone, rich and poor. To create a society which they have a stake in, so that they want to work with that society.

The sociometric researchers are the priest and shamans who are our intercessors to the Knowledge of Poverty and woe to those who would think about it on their own.

I do think about it a great deal on my own. Perhaps it was growing up in a neighbourhood where hot water was a luxery, the crack dealers hung out in our lobby, the police were not Officer Ed and there was no reason to finish highschool - no one we knew had gotten into university.

But I also recognise that my personal experience is just that - my personal experience. If I were to generalise from it, I would end up thinking the average Canadian household income was about 1/2 or less what it is. Whereas my now husband insisted his family's income was just a little above average; it's actually in the nintieth percentile. (StatsCan is a great website). Just like I don't rely on looking out my windown to understand climatic change (however good it is for deciding whether or not wear a jumper), I try to pay attention to what the people who spend their career studying this sort of thing have to say. From social science, I have learned that Canadians are richer than I thought, and my husband has learned they are poorer than he thought. We don't have amateur engineers, amateur doctors, why shouldn't we listen to social scientists? Unless it is, of course, that they say things that make us uncomfortable.
posted by jb at 8:59 AM on March 5, 2006

More alarming to me is the increasing rate at which wealth is being moved from the lower and middle classes into the pockets of a very few extremely wealthy people.

People who are millionaires are, I think, pretty damn well off in comparison to most of us. If you can manage to scrape together about five million in wealth, you can probably retire for life. Even in today's inflated economy, being a millionaire is a pretty sweet deal.

And yet there are people who are billionaires. These people are three orders of magnitude more wealthy than the millionaires.

Three orders of magnitude is a big deal.

And as we are witnessing with the likes of the Saud-Bush connections, these massively wealthy people are putting themselves into political positions that enable them to further extract money from the majority population. As if being a billionaire isn't enough, they are systematically bankrupting entire nations — the nation of the USA for one — to pad their accounts even further.

It is a baffling thing. Why on earth do we dummies allow it?
posted by five fresh fish at 11:56 AM on March 5, 2006

CS Monitor: Growing Disparity and its potential consequences.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:10 AM on March 6, 2006

And that's the same reason why the "poverty is relative" principle keeps getting advanced. ... wealth and income ratios are easy to compute from tax returns, whereas the factors I list that would accurately depict poverty are much more difficult to quantify.

Actually, it's easy to study absolute poverty, and researchers do. An example.

Reducing inequality is the best way to make that game more relevant to everyone, rich and poor. To create a society which they have a stake in, so that they want to work with that society.

Personally, I tend to agree; but for a lot of Americans (who for historical reasons are suspicious of state power), the cure may be worse than the disease. Hoover's ideal of rugged individualism may have been more suited to a nation of largely self-sufficient family farms than to modern American society, but a great many Americans are reluctant to give up the ideal of individual self-sufficiency.

And the idea that individual responsibility will be diminished by a social safety net may be exaggerated, but it isn't unfounded. Hans Morgenthau, "Reflections on the End of the Republic" (1968):

When the student turns from the university as the pretended source of truth and experiences it as one social institution among many, he comes face to face with another gap between pretense and reality. Social institutions pretend to serve the individual, and the university even pretends to do so in loco parentis. However, for whatever services they render, they exact a price, which, in turn, impairs or even negates the services themselves. Social institutions, in the measure that they are mechanized and bureaucratized, diminish the individual, who must rely upon others rather than himself for the satisfaction of his wants, from the necessities of life to his spiritual and philosophic longings. What he once controlled himself others now control, and in the measure that they do, they diminish his freedom.

Thus, modern society suffers from a profound ambivalence. It pretends to take care of needs that formerly the individual had to struggle to take care of himself, and to a high degree it lives up to that pretense. Yet the institution that takes care of man's needs also has the power to withhold that care. If it does, the individual's needs are left without care, in so far as he has no alternative means to satisfy them through his own individual efforts; and the sphere in which such individual efforts can be effective has been reduced by the mechanization and bureaucratization of social institutions below the minimum necessary for the satisfaction of the individual's elemental needs. In a word, the individual, to a high and unprecedented degree, is at the mercy of the institutions established for the purpose of meeting his needs.

Besides, a strong welfare state in Canada hasn't eliminated the existence of an underclass, so it's not like we've managed to cure the problem. (My commute to and from work takes me pretty close to the Downtown East Side in Vancouver, the poorest postal code in Canada.)

fff: according to Seymour Lipset, inequality of wealth is actually higher in Canada than in the US! I suspect that people at the top end of the income spectrum are more willing to pay taxes than people further down (example). To quote Tocqueville:

... The first of these classes consists of the wealthy- the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and the third is composed of those who have little or no property and who subsist by the work that they perform for the two superior orders. ...

It is evident that each of these classes will exercise an influence peculiar to its own instincts upon the administration of the finances of the state. If the first of the three exclusively possesses the legislative power, it is probable that it will not be sparing of the public funds, because the taxes which are levied on a large fortune only diminish the sum of superfluities and are, in fact, but little felt. If the second class has the power of making the laws, it will certainly not be lavish of taxes, because nothing is so onerous as a large impost levied upon a small income. The government of the middle classes appears to me the most economical, I will not say the most enlightened, and certainly not the most generous, of free governments.

posted by russilwvong at 11:22 AM on March 7, 2006