Moral Development

ajqtrz wrote: Angrim wrote: i'm going to ignore the political part of all this and just respond to the bits that address my interest. I do suppose you can ignore the parts about the failure of the government to eliminate poverty and see them as merely political statements, but to do so would be to ignore the basic premise of the argument.

(so, ftr, no one but you was prepared to make this political.)

ajqtrz wrote: Angrim wrote: to begin, if "poor" is defined as making somewhat less than the middle class (the exact formula escapes me), then raising the standard of living of the poor is an effective way of reducing poverty; equally effective would be reducing the standard of living of the middle class...and ever so much easier. which was happening during the "war on poverty"? Correct.   Once you understand that if you define poverty by the middle class and the middle class moves you effect the number of poor.  I've analyzed the number of things you can get on current poverty programs and found that if a person could take advantage of all of them you would be hard pressed to distinguish between them and the middle class.

what seems clear is that eliminating poverty, as you have defined it, could only be achieved (mathematically) by eliminating the middle class. it's an odd definition, imo. to have completely left the wealthy out of consideration seems bizarre.

Get back to the topic at hand, and stay off of politics. 

i'm going to ignore the political part of all this and just respond to the bits that address my interest.

Angrim,

There are two predominant measures of poverty at play.  One, the one upon which most social welfare programs are based, compares the living standard of one group against another.  In the US we use the middle class as the standard and ask, what level of income is necessary to achieve a middle class standard of living.  This definition is based upon the analysis of Mollie Orshanky's 1964 report to the Department of the Interior and is, itself, based upon her 1957 analysis of the dietary needs of a family of four.  The methodology employed was to take the amount of income spent by the average middle class family of four to meet the 1957 dietary requirements and multiply it by three...because a family of four in 1957, spent one third of  their income to achieve the dietary recommendations of the Department of Agriculture.  Extrapolating from that data she concluded that the average family of four would need a certain income to exist at a middle class level (the level where people actually spent the money needed to reach the ideal dietary levels).  From this she calculated what the average person made in the five quintiles of the general population: poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich and determined the minimum income needed for a person to love at a middle class level (and hence not be "poor" any longer). 

This basic approach to poverty has prevailed for over fifty years.  The current welfare system is not about increasing the income of those whose levels of income are below the middle class (and thus who cannot live like the middle class) but of increasing the standard of living of those people.  In 1957 the poverty rate was at 21%.  When Johnson started his war on poverty it had gone down to 19%.  After 7 years, in 1971 it was at 11%, the lowest it has ever been.  Since that time the poverty rate has increased steadily...but the amount of programs has risen to 127 federal programs with an annual budget of 1.3 Trillion dollars.  In the book I'm writing I argue that the problem is not that we spent over 50 Trillion dollars on the problem, but that we don't really understand the problem and instead of helping the poor we have only bandaged the wound. 

The second definition of poverty is where the argument gets really interesting.  I'm arguing that people are not poor because they lack resources, but because they do not use the resources in the same way a middle class person.  My argument is that the emotional and financial (in that order) instability of the home produces people who learn by habit to live in the survival mode.  Thus, giving a truly poor person a 90 day training course in order to improve his or her skill level is like handing a blind person a basketball and telling them to shoot baskets.  They can't do it because they lack something fundamental to achieving the goal.  It's a middle class solution to a poverty class problem and it doesn't work.....except when it does.

When it works, almost always there is an influence in the situation which is middle class or above.  In other words, in family groups where people do make it into the middle class there is enough emotional and financial stability (not measured by income but by sustainable income), that the child growing up in that environment doesn't live in survival mode and thus can plan and execute a plan into the future.

It is this inability to plan and execute which I examine in the second 1/3 of the book.  I examine the records of those 127 programs (not all of them, but a good deal) and see what happens when the benefits arrive at the doorstep of the poor family.  In most cases they change nothing because they are what a middle class person would do to get out of poverty.  And in the vast majority of cases the amount of aid actually reaching the people is so small that if a private charity acted like the average welfare program it's administrators would be jailed in most states.  For instance, according to the Senate Finance Committee, 90% of the dollars set aside for food stamps is in administrative costs.  In general, for each welfare program the federal government takes 27% off the top, the states another 24% and the private agencies which actually administer programs, then take their 24%.  Seven percent is lost to fraud on top of it.

The statistics I'm quoting all come from Federal and state accounting, not from those stupid and irrelevant anti welfare web sites, btw. 

The second half of the second 1/3 focuses on the causes of instability in multi generational family poverty and finds some interesting data.  First, the causes of poverty are not the lack of income, or education specifically.  Those are the results for the most part.  Nor is poverty caused by lack of jobs.  Though that too contributes to some degree, it isn't as significant as you would think.  The real cause of poverty is that which causes the emotional and financial instability in the family unit (the group of people who think of themselves as a family but whom may not even be related).  And in over 90% of those cases, it is addiction which is at the heart of that instability.  Nothing kills families who have nothing with which to fight, like addiction.  13.8 million Americans are addicts.  Of that about 1/2 are in the poverty class.  But the effects of addiction are far more significant in that class than others because other classes have the resources to deal with addiction.  The poor do not.

The last part of my book deals with how to fix the problem and it's pretty radical. In fact, it's really anti-government altogether.  But that's another post for another day.

Hope the statistics helped you see I'm not just blowing smoke.  I can send you the sources of many of them if you wish.

AJ

PS.  I don't believe there is a correlation between intelligence and wealth, but there certainly is between income and education.  I think this is why people think that the poor are somehow less rational.  They too much equate education with rationality and thus fall into that trap.


Edited by ajqtrz - 16 Feb 2016 at 00:02

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