The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
I think witnessing someone being shot is a good metric because it is factual. Either you saw someone being shot or your didn't, no ambiguity there, and no matter where you live, someone being shot is someone being shot. Not like "uninvolved parents" and "bullying" which are open to interpretation.
This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment. It correlates with wealth, but it is also kind of the point. Children who lived in a wealthy environment are better off as adults in terms of income. It is not that obvious, as rich kids could simply burn through their family wealth.
It’s likely strongly subject to Goodheart’s Law, however. In other words, there are probably many things you could do to improve the goal (e.g. figure out how to keep kids from seeing the violence) without improving outcomes for these kids (because they remain just as poor)
That makes intuitive sense, but that's not enough. Many untrue things make intuitive sense, especially when it comes to poverty.
Is there any research that shows that having witnessed someone get shot affects future prospects INDEPENDENT of the factors that lead to the kid witnessing someone get shot?
> This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment.
Probably, probably not. The probabilities of witnessing someone being shot is extremely low in both environments. If amount of people who are living in violent environment is much lower, it may be that a person who witnessed someone being shot is more probable from a good environment.
If one feels unhappy about the causality link between a good childhood and a better life as an adult please remember that we are talking about statistical effects here. If more people who were bullied end up in unfortunate positions that doesn't imply direct causality, it implies that people whose live paths lead to bad places often had being bullied as a station on it.
There will always be the tail ends of the statistical function, so people who became phenomenal adults despite all hardships, but also people who had a good childhood and became utterly disfunctional adults. But if we think about devising utilitarian political measures knowing what "broadly" has an effect on people is useful. Ideally you discover small things that if changed would have huge positive downstream effects. E.g. if bullying would be shown to have a big impact on later lives, it could be justified to pick up more funds to prevent it, to help victims and/or to change the way schools work in order to minimize chances someone is being bullied. Bullying is just an example, one could also pick other triggers.
Hard disagree with utilitarian interventionism. It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing. Economic and social outcomes are not universal moral values. The collective has no right to impose their utilitarian best-guess on the individual. People should have a right to reject them and raise illiterate children in forest school.
Free society is a liberal ecosystem, where participants are continually succeeding and failing. The authority required to mount a collective response to these inequalities is too susceptible to corruption, and represents injustice in its departure from liberalism. Not to mention that well-meaning interventions by federated authority have an abysmal track record.
> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing.
If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene in harmful family situations.
That's not what liberalism is, though. Who are you citing here? What aspect of liberal philosophy entitles parents to treat children like their property? Parents don't own their children; liberal individualist property rights cannot apply to the treatment of human beings, who have their own rights.
Rather than any sort of liberalism, what you're espousing here is a form of deep pre-liberal conservatism, where children have no rights and are instead property of their patriarch, whose authority is absolute and arbitrary. How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? That they have an inalienable right to withhold education and socialization from their children; that this self-evidently corrupt and selfish desire is beyond reproach?
Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms:
1) All people are moral equals
2) There is no moral oracle
It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answer.
Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity. Liberal literature is also pretty clear about what it is:
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
Centralized authority, no matter how well-meaning, has failed at every turn. Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else. More fundamentally, I think it's critical to separate your personal moral compass from a moral framework you are comfortable using force to impose on other people. The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
> Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms
Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle and setting yourself up as a moral oracle.
The core of liberalism is not an underlying system of ethical axioms: Mill was both a liberal and a utilitarian, but you can just as easily argue against liberalism from a utilitarian standpoint—moreover, the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian. No, the unifying source of liberalism is the political status quo which produced it. The real champions of liberalism were the capital owners who stood to profit by it, and who had the influence to bring it about, ousting the aristocracy in the process. The idea that liberal hegemony is a moral triumph and not a political one is simply history being written by the victors.
> Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity.
It's more correct to say that liberalism and industrial prosperity were both products of the industrial revolution, rather than one being responsible for the other. Illiberal authoritarian powers like China and India are demonstrating that industrial prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism, although I wouldn't consider that an endorsement of their respective ideologies.
> The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
The first step to literally anything is thinking you know better. You can't escape the duty of having to make judgements. Inaction is itself an action that can cause harm, and there's no a priori reason to privilege the choice not to act.
> Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else.
It injures the children. Besides which, raising a sufficiently hateful child does injure others if you ultimately induce that child to commit a hate crime.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The operant question here is what it means to "injure someone else" and how we intend to "limit the rights of other men to assure others' enjoyment of the same rights." Natural rights are a very flexible concept. Do I have a right to healthcare, or do hospitals have a right to deny me care for profit? Do I have a right to dump my garbage in the river, or do you have a right to clean drinking water? "Natural" rights are an oxymoron; every right is contrived, and deciding which rights we choose to legitimize and prioritize allows us to sculpt a flavour of natural rights theory to suit any belief system whatsoever. For example, just about anyone would agree that a person has a right to evict a violent burglar from their home. A conservative might further argue that Americans have a right to violently detain illegal immigrants in defence of their borders. Finally, a Nazi might plead that Aryans have an absolute right to defend their homeland from ethnic invaders. By tweaking exactly which rights you get and to what extent you get them, you can justify practically anything. That's why I find utilitarianism so much more rigorous.
> You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
> it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal.
You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.
> The answer, should you produce it
The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.
> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.
The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.
> Power is either diluted or concentrated.
Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.
> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.
Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?
I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.
Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.
Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.
I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.
I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.
> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.
The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.
The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political compass. Classical liberalism stands on the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics. Today these ideas are also called "libertarian" but the core desire is expressed in the Latin root word. I want to be free - as in without a master, elected or otherwise, who governs my life.
> I find them overly vague
I'd be glad to elaborate. I'm positing that it's more important our interactions be consensual than value-maximizing. Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
> China has done quite well
China is doing well because it is able to benefit from innovations generated outside its borders. It's not able to generate important innovations on its own. This was also the main problem in the USSR. The Soviets just didn't have as ready of access to innovations born of a liberal society. Where China does use its centralized authority, the results are often catastrophic, eg. its one-child policy or COVID response.
> Liberalism also concentrates power
Some parts of this paragraph are more true than others. There is nothing in classical liberal thought about eg. patent or copyright law. Also you're broadening the definition of power that I put forward:
> Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you
Corporations cannot arrest you for noncompliance with their policy. They cannot fine you. They are fragile structures, existing at the whim of their consumers and competitors. It takes a revolution to overthrow a government. Corporations live one big mistake away from ruin.
The main issue with today's corporations is regulatory capture, which is actually an issue of our government. If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
> that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests
No, it actually matters. The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated.
> Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
Responsibility is all that matters in human affairs. All we do in court is ascertain it. All of our organizations are structured around it. A death is only your fault (responsibility) if you had a duty to intervene. A duty that cannot be imposed on a free person without their consent.
> The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. The worst human catastrophes happen when power is concentrated into hands that do not make this distinction.
> quashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom
This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance, and self-organize into pools with different risk tolerances. Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. If you don't take care of it, it fails. The overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses are consumed by a tiny minority of chronically ill people. Many of these people do not make choices that are compatible with good health outcomes. The 80/20 rule applies. Caring for people who cannot care for themselves is the purview of charity, not authority.
The concept of freedom is actually much easier to grasp than quantifying harm and well-being. It's pretty simple: Did both parties explicitly agree to the interaction? Can either party opt out without being assaulted or imprisoned? If yes then the interaction is consensual. This is not a hard concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ
Using force to impose non-consensual binding agreements is slavery. Slave holders in fact often used utilitarian justifications for their atrocities. You are not any more entitled to the services of a doctor than of a prostitute. The guiding principle of all human interaction must be consent.
> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.
> What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness?
The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives. Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cambodian genocide, on and on the list goes.
There is no mechanism to constrain authority so concentrated. It always goes horribly wrong. Democracies elect genocidal dictators. The only solution that has been proven to work in the medium term is a regard for individual autonomy as sacrosanct and inviolable. I'm concerned at the erosion of this principle.
I would rather have a thousand robber barons and school shooters than one Cultural Revolution. If you're preparing kill an innocent person, no matter your motivation, you're always the bad guy. The ends do not justify the means.
> China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China? Usable smart phones? Social media? Ride hailing? Online shopping? Mass-market electric vehicles? Self-landing rockets? That's all just California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... This isn't a coincidence.
> where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners
You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees. Where it failed to uphold the very principles it espouses. These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong. Also, the harm done by these failures is immeasurably less than the aforementioned genocides.
> I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition? It's not a synonym of suffering.
> what about the right to freedom from treatable illness?
What is the source of this right? Why is your right to be treated more important than a doctor's right to choose whom to treat? Does it just stem from some back-of-the-envelope calculation that we're all better off if we use a bit of force to compel others to pay for your care? Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor? Or to euthanize the mentally ill? Or those who disagree with you? Where does it stop?
> a consequence of the personal choice to smoke
> poverty is a significant cause of substance abuse issues
These are incompatible statements. People have agency, and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it. The difference between forcing someone to do something and convincing them is of kind (categorical), not of degree.
> People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle
I agree, but I'm saying that your good luck to be born into a healthy body, with a capable mind, or into a stable family, belongs to you. It is no more within the purview of authority to redistribute than your kidney.
> "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers
They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefitted us all.
> The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives.
If your ideology would permit the preventable death of a billion people, I'd say it's very bad at preventing atrocities.
> Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, [...]
I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians, but you're completely mistaken. They did not consider the lives of the people they exterminated to have value. If they did, they would not have exterminated them.
In fact, if you examine the actual justifications the Nazis espoused for their crimes, you'll find that they were much more in line with rights theory. Nazis believed that Aryans collectively held certain natural entitlements; that their race had the right and a duty to look out for its own interests above and beyond those of other races. Hence the argument in favour of, for instance, German Lebensaraum. Nazis had plenty of rhetoric justifying the idea that nature had endowed Aryans with a destiny which they were entitled and obliged to fight for, but made no arguments that the Holocaust was somehow intended to minimize net suffering across all of humanity.
> What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China?
Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"; they're a way to squeeze profit from bad independent contracting laws. If you think self-landing rockets are a big leap of innovation, just wait until you hear which country was the first to put a satellite in orbit. And right now, Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media. WeChat is what Elon Musk wishes X could be. TikTok is a cultural juggernaut. Your argument here is weak; innovation can't be measured by "number of domestically famous apps."
As far as Nobel prizes go, China's disproportionate lack of awards is fairly well-studied, and is generally attributed to a particular set of cultural practices in their scientific institutions which conservatively reward and empirical advancements over theoretical ones. I think it'd be a mistake to overgeneralize that. China has put itself at the centre of the global economy; to argue that they must be an economic paper tiger because a lack of Nobel prizes proves they aren't innovative is frankly just denying reality via cherrypicking.
> You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees.
I'm citing cases where powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence, either using the state or circumventing it. You can frame that as "the state failing to intervene" if you'd like, but it still proves my point. The people in power call the shots.
> These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong.
I really don't know where you got this "utilitarian maniac" idea from. People in power don't make decisions according to some set of ethical rules. They act in their own interest and in the interests of their backers. Leaders don't have values—they have power bases. This is a universal constant in democracies, dictatorships, juntas, kingdoms, corporations—every form of organization that exists.
> You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition?
Sure. Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world. But that's just my opinion.
> What is the source of this right?
I'm not a rights theorist; I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights. But if I were, I'd say that it comes from the categorical imperative, or from my interpretation of nature's intent, or wherever you say rights come from.
> Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor?
No, because the math bears out that this is a net negative. Can you imagine the harm that would arise in a society where the state permits people to be abducted and have their kidneys stolen? Society would collapse!
These utilitarian "gotcha" hypotheticals tend to have massively negative utility once you take into account the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
> People have agency and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it
You're dancing right past my argument! Let's backtrack and revisit my injection scenario: If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Here, I'm chemically affecting your decision-making process. Do you have agency? Sure, in a sense. But I'm still unarguably causing your drug addiction. Because of this, "agency" is not a useful concept in ethical analysis. It's a way to exonerate the actor in question from the consequences of their actions. I caused you to use drugs. If I hadn't acted, you wouldn't be on drugs. My actions caused preventable harm. Given that my choice is the one being scrutinized, your agency does not change any of this.
Similarly, we can't let the fact that people have agency exonerate the state from putting them in positions where they're highly likely to make decisions that are harmful. This is still harmful policy. "Agency" and "responsibility" are ways of obfuscating that.
> They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefited us all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this reads to me as an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion and finding principles which support it. You want to preserve the current status quo (because of its perceived propensity to create innovation, which you believe is responsible for prosperity). You attribute the existence of the capitalist status quo to the freedom of "the capable and fortunate" (i.e. capitalists) to conduct business without government intervention in the market. You contrive a set of "natural" rights which permits them to do this and which does not permit anyone to get in their way; a set of freedoms which concentrates power in the hands of capital owners at the expense of the general public.
Also I find it funny that a bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle" while denying coverage to people dying of cancer is simply a tragic sacrifice which must be made in the name of freedom. Surely the wealthy could "tragically sacrifice" some pocket change instead.
Not every event that results in a lot of death is an atrocity. An earthquake is not an atrocity. Your ideology already has resulted in atrocities. Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
> I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians
You missed the rest of the genocides. Are you going to argue that the Cultural Revolution also wasn't utilitarian? What happened to all the sparrows?
Regarding Nazis, their ideology was complicated, but let's take a clear example of medical experiments. Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals. Having united society in a common hatred of a relatively dispensable minority, they proceeded to use this minority as subjects for the most horrific variety of medical experiments. They had good doctors. Many of the outcomes of these experiments have advanced the state of the art, and benefited society as a result.
Nazi society didn't collapse in fear that people would be abducted. It was only Jews, gypsies and other undesirable minorities who were subject to such horrors. Germans were content in the knowledge that their society would benefit, at the small cost of a few Jews. How would you construct an argument that unequivocally refutes this?
> Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"
Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car they otherwise would almost certainly have. I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
> Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media
Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
> [China] must be an economic paper tiger
I never argued this. I argued they're an innovative nonstarter. Yes being the world's factory has economic benefits, obviously. You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
> powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence
Yes, and where they were able to do that the state had failed. And our systems of governance should correct for this. This is their primary and only function.
> this "utilitarian maniac" idea from
Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
Only if you keep things simple. If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine. The banality of evil.
> If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs
Presumably without my consent, you've already violated the core principle I'm defending. I thought this was apparent. So of course you are responsible - you are an agent, and you used force. This example would not apply if you only suggested, or convinced me to use the drugs. In that case it would be me that is fully responsible.
Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force? As I've said, it's a categorical difference.
> Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world
How do you quantify wellbeing? Is a nuclear accident that kills 1000 just as evil as a nuclear bomb that does the same?
> I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights.
I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
> an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion
I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good. You owe nothing to no one. You exchange/associate with others on a voluntary basis. Disputes are resolved via due process. Violence is prohibited. I'm all for expanding who is entitled to be thus free. I'm vehemently against eroding the definition.
> the capitalist status quo
Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom as above described and the right to personal property. I'm not coming out in particular defence of special status for corporations, or even limited liability as a concept. These subjects are, while interesting in their own right, unrelated to individual liberty.
> bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle"
It's not about the rate, it's about what the government is permitted to spend it on. Before US v. Butler (1936) the power given to the government to tax and spend on the "general welfare" of the people was limited to what was explicitly written elsewhere in the constitution. After, the government could basically do whatever it wanted as long as it could be construed to be in the interest of the "general welfare". This was the turning point at which our liberty began to erode, and erode it has. If there is one decision I would reverse, this would be it.
Earthquakes aren't preventable. If you could stop an earthquake and you chose not to, that would be an atrocity.
> Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
Augusto Pinochet was a neoliberal, and he committed all kinds of atrocities. The US genocided the Native Americans, and continued to enact genocidal policies up through the 20th century.
And anyway, which atrocities has my ideology—progressive leftism—been responsible for? The USSR was a conservative authoritarian autocracy, not a progressive democracy, so don't go citing the Soviet Union again. I don't know why you're so fixated on them; you bring them up constantly.
> Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals.
Yeah because the Nazi death camps which made them possible generated so much net well-being. No, this is a half-baked caricature of utilitarianism. Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences, and the consequences of the policies responsible for Josef Mengele's experiments are a massive net negative.
> Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car
It's just a taxi subsidized by VC money. The fact that it benefits you does not make it an innovation.
> Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
Then why are you citing marginal innovations like "what if we reused rocket boosters" or "what if you could order a taxi with an app instead of a phone call" or "what if electric cars had better marketing"?
Besides, social media wasn't a singular invention; it was the product of a shifting communication ecosystem. The internet led to BBSes, which led to forums and blogs, which led to shared software frameworks for these things, which led to hosted solutions for these things, like Geocities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. Paradigm shifts ARE smaller innovative iterations. You fail to understand how technological progress happens.
> You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
What's to address? They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too. I'm not here to defend every choice China has ever made; only to debunk the claim that liberal administrations are inherently successful while non-liberal ones are inherently not so.
> Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good.
Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good. Even you're justifying your case based on the need to create prosperity and prevent atrocities. That doesn't mean they're principled utilitarians.
"Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!" No he didn't. This is a plainly unserious position.
> If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine.
Setting aside that a society would have to be doing much better than "just fine" to offset the harm caused by the mass slaughter of minority groups, what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs?
No, this is a sophistic parody of utilitarianism where you just assert that some nominal benefit outweighs the consequences of whatever harm you want to justify. Any ethical system can be twisted in bad faith to justify bad things; the question is whether such bad-faith analyses can be distinguished from proper rigorous ethical analysis. This is the case here: Your supposed utilitarian argument for organ harvesting doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force?
Sure. Maybe my factory produces a polluting smog that affects your propensity to make whatever choices. Maybe I've bought up all the property in your province except for land next to a toxic swamp that emits mind-affecting gas. Maybe I'm the only corporation who created a vaccine for a deadly new disease, and I choose to add the mind-affecting chemicals to the vaccine because it suits my interests to affect your decisions. There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
> I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
Then how can you condemn a serial killer? His idea of good and evil is just as valid as yours, and apparently you aren't entitled to privilege your own morals.
> I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good.
The reason this definition was created in the 1700s was because the 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete for power with the aristocracy, and they needed an ideology which would justify the consolidation of power in capitalist hands.
> Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom
Exactly backwards. Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism, in the same way that the divine right of kings is an ideological byproduct of feudalism. Capitalism arose because of the shifts in power caused by mercantile imperialism and the industrial revolution. Capitalists created an ideology to justify their own newfound power, and that ideology is liberalism. Power doesn't actually follow ethical rules. Ethics is a toy which philosophers play with to critique society. Power is self-justifying; whoever rules, rules, and the ideology of a ruler is just a set of excuses explaining why they are entitled to have the things they have already taken.
Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. The atrocities themselves are evidence of that. Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal. Also Chile was a resource economy. None of the ideas I have advanced preclude state ownership of natural resources. They would only preclude state seizure of resources already owned by citizens.
> The US genocided the Native Americans
Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens. As I've stated, I agree that everyone (adult) should have equal rights. I only disagree with watering down what those rights are.
> Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences
Isn't this precluded on the ability to predict the future? How do you choose a course of action? How do you weigh the consequences? How do you untangle the medical experiments (which have in fact done a lot of good) from broader Nazi policy? Who do you entrust to make these decisions?
> what if you could order a taxi with an app
As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car. My not having bought one is a pretty substantial change to my day-to-day life. Same goes for Tesla. Strictly because of their company millions of people drive electric cars that otherwise would not. They get credit for that.
> They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too.
Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful. No one was locking sick Americans in cages during COVID. It would not have been possible without facing armed resistance. The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
> what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs
Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely. Aside the obvious lack of individual rights protecting these people, how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
For your argument to be sound, you need to prove that its impossible to construct such a policy under any circumstances. For my argument to be sound all I need to do is prove one case where extrajudicially murdering someone is a net good.
You've actually already conceded this, when you suggested that killing one unwilling person to save a million is a good trade. From here it's just a matter of price. How many individuals would you murder to save a million? Two? Two hundred? Two hundred thousand? How do you measure the harm that such policies cause? The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
> Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good
No, that's the whole point. I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace. Thinking you know the greater good is the pinnacle of hubris.
> Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!
No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
> polluting smog
Again with the natural rights violations.
> There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. I can refuse to take your vaccine. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
> Then how can you condemn a serial killer?
Based on his actions? I'd never condemn anyone who simply daydreamed of serial killing. Nor would I condemn someone who killed a willing victim. The evil comes from violating consent.
> 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete
Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
> Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism
Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism. If you're skilled and lucky enough to accumulate wealth, maybe you'll buy a second and a third fishing boat and hire a crew. On the snowball rolls. All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully, and restrains itself to a reasonable tax for this service. Such capitalism has occurred since ancient times.
> Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. [...] Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal.
America has often suppressed critics. Take McCarthyism. Take the killing of Fred Hampton. I dunno what to tell you. The touted ethics of liberalism are a flourish to disguise the underlying power structure of capitalism. I've been saying this all along.
> Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens.
The striking minors who were shot at Blair Mountain were white men.
Here's my point: You claim that the ideology of the Soviet Union is inherently bad while the ideology of America is inherently good, but atrocities committed by America are always flaws in an inherently just attempt to aspire to a noble ideological goal, while atrocities committed by the Soviet Union always reveal the inherently ignoble underbelly of their ideology. What you fail to understand is that they are the same. Neither nation is/was an ideological project. They are pragmatic exercises in the management of power by a ruling class.
> In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
You think I'm arguing in favour of centralized authority, but that's backwards. I find that capitalism centralizes authority too much. It concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy. It's undemocratic.
Who do I think should wield power? The public, through democratic means, balanced between local and federal governments and trade unions and mass organizations, unhindered by the unilateral amassed power of wealthy capitalists and police-state dictators alike.
> I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace.
Then why have you tried to justify your ideology on the basis that it prevents atrocities? If you really don't care about the greater good, you should be able to say, "I don't care if atrocities happen. Preventing mass human suffering isn't my priority."
> Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful.
The US government cedes power to the private sector. The "death panels" which fearmongers claimed would result from public health care already exist in the form of private insurance assessors.
> The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
Do they have the power to send people to jail for having miscarriages as part of a push to ban abortion and raise the birth rate? Clearly they do, and Republican voters love it.
> As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car.
It IS just taxis, only cheaper, because it was subsidized by VC money.
> Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely.
China is not "just fine." They ethnically cleansed their Uyghur population. They massively suppress political dissent. Authoritarianism is not beneficial to citizens, even if the supply of organs is slightly higher. Besides, murdering healthy people to give their organs to sick people doesn't exactly sound like a way to reduce mortality in your healthcare system.
> No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
You're willing to use force to support your ideology too. Or do you not believe the use of police force to prevent property crimes is justified?
> how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
I don't. I strongly support violating what you consider to be essential property rights in favour of reducing suffering. Rights are not a cornerstone of my ethics.
> How do you measure the harm that such policies cause?
How do you predict the impact of a policy? With political science, of course.
> The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
Nazi leadership was a hot mess. Their nation would have fractured very quickly even if they'd won. And when I say "just fine," I don't mean functional. I mean good. I've already argued through my China point that a functioning society is not necessarily a morally upstanding one.
> Again with the natural rights violations.
If you think disruption of the natural world in ways that harm human life are violations of rights that justify state intervention, surely you must support massive state intervention to stop climate change, right?
> Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
Choices often take place in constraining ecosystems. Who's to say you have non-toxic land? Maybe you grew up here, and the rent is too high anywhere else to leave. This is how ghettos form. In theory, it's possible to leave the ghetto. In practice, it's so difficult that many people cannot.
> (How can you condemn a serial killer?) Based on his actions? The evil comes from violating consent.
But you said "each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid." In his conception, there's nothing wrong with violating consent. "What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?"
If you take morality seriously, you have to privilege your own morality over other people's. Otherwise you have no standing to condemn and combat evil.
> Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
ahaha that's a good one
Yeah existing hierarchies never touched the new world. No indentured servants, no slaves, no poor or rich men. No women. No white or black or indigenous people. Come on.
> Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism.
No, capitalism is not simply the existence of trade. Or rather, I guess you can define it that way, but then you lose any ability to understand how our society works and how it differs from the societies of centuries past.
In our society, capitalists constitute a ruling class. They derive their power from ownership of assets traded on capital markets. This distinguishes them from aristocratic ruling classes, which owned hereditary assets. Liberal ideology sprang up around the time the industrial revolution was shifting power from hereditary aristocrats to new-money capitalists, and it was created to justify this shift in power.
When I say "created," bear in mind that I don't mean the people who thought it up did so cynically. But all sorts of people come up with all sorts of ideas. The reason liberalism caught on was because it suited the interests of powerful people, and they used their power to magnify the idea. This mirrors how Eastern Bloc dictatorships used communist ideas as propaganda to justify their own legitimacy. Regardless of whether the people who originally thought up the ideas were acting in good faith, those ideas were then used as tools by the ruling classes of particular societies.
This pattern happens all throughout history. One big reason why Protestantism got big was because Martin Luther provided a religious justification for kings to oppose the authority of the pope. The birth of Anglicanism is the clearest example of this pattern, created by Henry VIII simply because he wanted to divorce his wife.
> All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully
The "legitimacy" of power is an interesting concept. All power considers itself legitimate. What happens when I declare the power of the American state to be illegitimate? Nothing. It would only matter if I had the firepower to overthrow the state. And at that point, the collapse of the state has nothing to do with legitimacy and everything to do with military might.
And what does "peacefully" mean? Are cops being peaceful when they beat and arrest a criminal?
> How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt?
Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child. Again, there will be some great exceptions of government employees who are truly fantastic, but the general perception I have described still holds.
That you cannot see this obvious fact means
> This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.
these words seem to describe your ideology. And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those. Even in a one-party state like California with progressive zealots in power, governor Newsom figured it is wiser to veto bills which encroach on a parent's rights.
>generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
I have personally seen parents care *so much* for their children that they don't see their abusive behavior. The "most caring" parents can turn out to be absolute monsters to their children, and think they're doing the right thing.
The latter, but parents that think that way would label their parenting style as the former at worst. Authoritative parents that traumatize their children with fear is pretty common in this world.
> There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Oh please. This could be used to justify anything. I could say that murder is uncommon, and when it does happen, that's "the exception that proves the rule." Moreover, the prison system is corrupt and violent. Therefore we should stop prosecuting murderers.
> Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience.
"In the 2012, Canadian Community Health Survey- Mental Health, 32% of Canadian adults reported that they had experienced some form of abuse before the age of 16. 26% had experienced physical abuse; 10% had experienced sexual abuse; 8% had experienced exposure to intimate partner violence." [1] Clearly this is a massive problem, and I don't accept "well what if we pretended it didn't happen" as a solution. If you believe parents are "universally" caring, I suggest you open your eyes and stop relying on your preconceptions.
Besides, being caring is not the issue. If a caring but misguided parent raised their children in the woods, cutting them off from society and education, that would still be an evil act. I have no interest in allowing extreme moral relativism to get in the way of preventing things which we all agree are evil.
> Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child.
I'm sure faceless bureaucrats don't care much about murder victims either. Again, that's not an excuse to stop prosecuting murderers. A bureaucracy does not depend on the enthusiasm of its participants to serve a purpose.
> And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those.
Which ones? If you've got a referendum to the effect that the public largely does not believe that CPS should ever intervene in families, I'd love to see it. Alas, I suspect you're referring to something much narrower and less relevant.
Bearing in mind we're talking about bullying here, which interventions are going to trample your fundamental civil rights?
Unless we're going with a reductio ad absurdum panopticon solution, I can't think of any way in which more robust interventions in bullying would be a bad thing.
People have the right to be and to raise bullies as long as their behaviour is nonviolent. As tasteless as it is, there is no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.
Because it's unambiguous, already a core liberal value, and because the enforcement mechanisms for violating the law are invariably physical (arrest, imprisonment). "Free" means "Free from the threat of illegitimate violence", not "Free from the possibility of having your feelings hurt". It would be unjust to impose physical consequences for non-physically-infringing actions.
Why all these appeals to "core liberal values"? You can't justify a bad idea by saying "but it's part of liberalism." If that's true, it just means that liberalism is a bad ideology.
Who says that's what "free" means? Why should we be free only from physical harm and not emotional harm? You can't claim an ideology is self-evident when it rests on arbitrary definitions of terms.
Besides, your definition is flawed. Does sexual assault count as a physical or an emotional harm, if it causes no physical injuries? There are many forms of sexual assault which cause exclusively emotional trauma. Are we not entitled to be "free" from these?
The difference between violent and non-violent bullying can be closer than you'd think. Also, and please note I have much experience in this, physical violence was the one thing I was in permanent fear of as a child but having decades now passed by I came to understand it was the emotional violence that did by far the most damage to me and my siblings. We will not recover.
Meta comment: people like you can argue on the basis of abstractions because clearly that's all you have to argue from – you obviously have no experience of child abuse. And I'm glad of that, but please be careful putting about your opinions ("...no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.") with Dunning-Kruger boosted confidence.
> Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different
From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35, came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup, sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm doing my 2nd startup.
Does it fix everything? No.
But it gave me something to do that wasn't TV, and it kept me safe from [redacted] dad and [redacted] mom, I could hole up wherever I wanted and spend hours in them.
You'd be surprised at the things that are lifelines. I had a really hard time explaining to this CS PhD dude who ran a weekend night basketball league for no particular reason how different and better that kept my life the last couple years of high school.
You aren't shifting the whole distribution with one act, but just like the little shifts add up in the negative, they add up in the positive too.
I remember a woman in her 30s running into me in the library lugging around those 7 volume MSDN published sets at 9 years old. She was incredulous and told me to keep it up. That mattered! No one had even noticed me or remarked on it before, gave me pride.
Up front, I have no intention of trying to detract from any of those accomplishments, because you've obviously been grinding pretty hard for a while and admire the tenacity you must have had as a kid and the progression you've seemed to follow.
I do however find it under-discussed how many subsequent dice rolls have to at least partially work out for that tenacity, and those little shifts, to be a compounding positive instead of negative, and usefully applied long-term. I'd be curious if you had any major setbacks that you rebounded from after things started rolling successfully forward for you. Now at 32, unemployed with a spotty resume and no prospects, I could really use a &pointer (or reference ;))
Reading through your comment and picturing my own upbringing (poor, abusive, but I guess I got a handle on it and discovered programming through gaming eventually, it does make me sad that although there were hand-me-down computers available that I gravitated toward and experimented with, I could not picture where the nearest library was, and had to Google it now. I'm not particularly resentful though, I did get out, and I'm grateful for that.
I wonder if the books alone would have been enough, but having the books and the physical escape together is kind of incredible, and it's heartening to hear you used the hell out of that space.
Much earlier on, I had some exposure to small motors, and had some mentorship from my extended family on the programming front, but didn't really have a sense of how to build on that; no conception of how to connect motors with gears in a more complex system, no business exposure at all, no ability or framework for learning how to execute on any project, and just a debilitating lack of motivation up until around 17, along with no appreciation for the idea of proving myself measurably; I thought I was capable, but apparently wasn't. I got my little bots for Runescape running though, and that was empowering.
Thankfully, I did and continue to have a similar refuge at the skatepark, which provided me some social and physical benefits for free, much like your basketball league, that a surprising amount of people I meet now don't have. I was nerdy, but couldn't execute, and couldn't see how I'd get there. My first job was a glimpse into how much potential there was available; I made more than my father who I was on good terms with, but then I was laid off for lack of reason to have me on the payroll, which took a positive signal and turned it into hopelessness in a way. I experienced adult job loss my first time trying. It was a great opportunity that I relish in some ways still. I then got another job as a frontend developer, making a bit more, and then burnt out, slowed down, and got fired, partially because I was trying to do CSS things that nobody was paying me to do, instead of just writing some JavaScript to handle dynamic layout and getting the job done. I was too deep in the weeds and got stuck there, but the idea of just cranking out things quickly wasn't stimulating enough and I'd just sit there trying to convince my brain to do the work.
Since then, it's just been gradual pay increases, some early freelance clients that worked out for a while, but at this point I've never held a continuous job for longer than a year and a half, and I feel like the pieces of minor success are hard to stabilize, despite being in a wildly better situation still than I'd ever have imagined in high school, and a hell of a lot of personal inward reflection. My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis. It's hard to be consistent over a long period of time without a manager deciding I was a liability or me just burning out so badly, or a series of unfortunate life events coming together for the negative, and once you're out, it's extremely hard to get back in.
For the last year, I've been working my way through Nand2Tetris, because in a career highlight I landed an actual interview with Apple (that ended up going nowhere, rightfully so because my lowest level knowledge didn't exist) as well as building a small SwiftUI project that may or may not see the light of day, and while I think those are positive moves, it's going to be a hard year ahead that may take me to net zero again unless I can pick up something in general labor for while (Waiting tables would be quite difficult without a solid short-term memory, and don’t believe someone would hire me for that with largely tech experience and random interspersed menial work).
Anyhow, ultimately I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, those little shifts really do add up for either the positive or sometimes negative. I think the longer you can keep them positive, keep the ball rolling forward, the more likely things will work out, and as a society it's crucial we continue making it possible to smooth out the experience of life, especially for people who grow up in volatile situations.
> My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis.
As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think, if you are a generalist and, like me, if you like "laying the pipes" to connect things end-to-end and see the satisfaction of having built the entire thing, embrace it. You should be proud that you can build a complete application though OS infra to database to backend services to frontend UIs and provide the glue of scripts as needed, all by yourself (not shitting on working in a team setting, just knowing that you could). I treat that as a badge of honor. Sure, I can't get super deep into one of these verticals, but then I'm a "builder" and I like the feeling it brings.
Well, I have and can do those things, and agree that those are very valuable skills to be proud of. I've just been kind of frontend only in team settings in a professional capacity lately, so it's something I'll be continuing to improve on.
Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness. As in, I can set up a database, build an API, wrangle a vps, and then build the front-end, but I don't really have much of a sense of how to do it quickly or by using decoupled cloud service providers, simply because I've never been in that position. Laying the pipes is sort of the essense of productive software engineering in my mind.
It is quite gratifying though to gradually be working my way to understanding how each layer of the hardware software stack work, and I'm starting to see those layers in real-world contexts, such as in getting a fault when compiling Swift, it'll show me the lower levels where the problem occured.
> Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness.
Without any context of the details of the work, one thing that has helped me is to lookout for scope of improvements beyond on the codebase itself. E.g. is there opportunity to provide a UI to the end-users of the code base. If so, since you have touched the codebase to contribute to it, your suggestion to work on those things to improve end-user's life may get accepted and then you have something relatively greenfield to work on. Doesn't always work out that way but sometimes it might. Another approach is building something on the side that you know will be very useful, even though nobody asked for it - helps you figure out the quick way of doing it (what you mentioned) since these are POCs and you can't repeatedly spend too long on them.
Really good suggestions, thanks. I suppose since I'm looking for work, it might not be a bad idea to do this externally as well, if any prospective companies' APIs are available, and use them as portfolio items.
It sounds like some of your thought processes are getting in the way of your success. Have you considered seeing a therapist? I think you would find it beneficial.
Given the order of events (childhood trauma THEN adult outcomes), and the strong relationships identified in the source material (while controlling for confounding factors), I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
> I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
No, we can try interventions (e.g. do a big and expensive anti-violence/CCTV/policing campaign in a neighborhood) and record the result.
I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
Fair. You can do those kinds of analyses from historical data too, though I don’t think CCTV would have much of an effect. Try free school lunches, after school support, parental benefits etc.
Better nutrition at school increasing attention span and grades, thus increasing hope for alternative life that isn't joining a gang. The reduced stress on family finances could also let them do something like move to a less rough neighbourhood.
> I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
> And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
My point is that there may be no causation from seeing violence to poor educational outcomes. E.g. instead of [violence->bad grades] it's [poverty->bad grades] and [poverty->violence], so the there may be no causal arrow between the seeing violence and the later bad grades.
> How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
Don't get hung up on the genes, it's just an example. Put lead in the water if you prefer.
If your question is genuine then the hypothesis here would be that the lead/genes cause poverty which means needing to live in rougher neighbourhoods.
Still books/ study material are of extreme importance.
No one could be living in more extreme poverty than Michael Faraday did. Still he managed to be one of the greatest minds of all times. He read a book called "The improvements of the mind" by Isaac Watts and applied it on himself literally. The book was written for poor people who can not afford themselves books and means to conduct chemistry/electricity/mechanical and biology experiments.
Michael Faraday had to draw and write down everything he learned and imagined meticulously in a military and highly disciplined way where testosterone was expressed in its noble manner: discipline and high focus, no distraction. He wrote himself an extremely dense and technical voluminous book like notes of things he read and noticed while he was still a boy.
The success story of Michael Faraday started only because he was accepted to work for a man selling books. There, Faraday read every single book he saw.
I hope the study mentioned in this article will not be taken seriously by people of modest environments. The victimization mindset is a gatekeeper to success.
Weird way to analyze this. If you look at Faraday's biology he was poor but he had an apprenticeship in his youth, so he clearly had at least adults looking out for him and giving him room to study. I would say it's way more likely that his success can be attributed to him having supportive adults in his life, as opposed to his testosterone(??).
Which apprentcieship are you talking about ? The one he had with the bookmaker ? He did not hire him to help him: he hired him only because he needed him, and Faraday was special as a child. Actually he was exploited by that bookmaker (worked without being paid for few years). It was during that period that he was reading books and he wrote one of his own (a huge selection of technical notes).
He spent 7 years in that library, if I remember. It was much later that Humphry Davy, the chemist, had offered him an internship: again, this chemist, did not hire him to support him but because he met him previously in the book shop where he worked, and many years later, he ad problems with his trainee, so he replaced him with Faraday whom he knew he was too curious and intelligent and cultivated.
So in both cases, Faraday was self taught, and made a huge effort to get the second internship with the chemist (he was rejected few times, if you call this adults supporting him).
And no, Faraday is not known for biology (but I supposed you meant "biography").
About your testosterone question: well, I have nothing to add.
There are common statistical techniques to better get at causality in this situation. E.g. given how relatively unlikely and random "seeing someone getting shot while still a child" is, it should be fairly easy to match this up with other variables to tease out causality, e.g. just looking at someone in the same socioeconomic situation, same parental situation (i.e. married/single), and then comparing gunshot witnesses vs. others.
If you knew even a little bit about trauma, you'd know it's not even up for debate at this point that trauma is a huge setback in life.
Your risk of bad relationships, emotional dysregulation, physical ailments and diseases, stress, life unsatisfaction, (...) all increase as your ACE score increases.
I keep repeating myself at this point, but trauma is the biggest epidemic with the most negative consequences that isn't being talked about enough.
The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult.
You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being poor is one of the adverse effects but not all. So that's your control right there.
This is classic correlation is not causation. The thing about correlation is that it could be a causative relationship, or there could be another set of untracked variables that's causing some or all the effects, or it could be unrelated coincidence.
Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.
> I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books.
The problem here was not trying to infer causality from population-level data, but rather insufficiently controlling that data for correlated variables. If that study had controlled for the income and education of those kids' parents, it would have been much more able to predict the actual impact of giving kids books.
This visual essay thing doesn't present a particularly detailed data analysis, but I wouldn't be surprised if the original study, being properly academic, did dive into this kind of regression analysis.
I am pretty sure that the fact of witnessing someone being shot has an impact on your life. Maybe not connected with the data that was implemented here but still
I think how people relate to media and attitudes about out-groups can have an even deeper impact on a life. We all can witness people being shot in non-fiction on police bodycam footage, surveillance camera footage, published on video websites, etc.
Most people compartmentalize seeing shooting of a house and killing a child sleeping in their bed in Ukraine in 2024 different from a drive-by shooting on their own street or road rage on a highway killing a child sleeping in bed or car. But we can witness it easily now and most people are taught to detach non-fiction video of "others" and treat it like it is fiction.
It becomes a wealth and power status symbol to move to the "good part of town" and a "safe neighborhood" and create a compartmentalized mindset that what goes on in other areas is "not witnessed" the same. A detachment of compassion for those in the out-groups and a denial that indeed it is reality, it is non-fiction.
unfortunately in the US socialists theories, even the most diluted ones, are almost entirely removed from the public discourse.
These kinds of issues can be better analyzed in the context of the class struggle (or class conflict), of which they are a textbook example.
On a personal level people can get over hardships and have a successful happy life, but statistically, on a societal level, those who are born poor will, more often than any other group, end up being poor(er) adults.
> But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
Are you trying to say that these people are genetically poor?
To give one example, today's wealth distribution in UK still correlates quite strongly with Norman descent from the original participants of the Conquest. That's over 1,000 years of still-measurable generational wealth transfer.
I took it to infer that there are systemic factors that disadvantage segments of the population disproportionately and across generations.
Having worked with disadvantaged and vulnerable populations I would agree, we only hear about the pulled up by the bootstraps success stories and readily ignore the 99.99% of cases where offspring are worse off financially than their parents.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Very true. Self-confidence and grit are immensely important in overcoming or even just rationalizing the obstacles of life, doing so in an almost logical way without letting a person's self-defeating emotions or perceived shortcomings get in the way. It's such a huge divider and it singularly is based on what kind of adult(s) that person had in their life when they were young.
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
Learned helplessness can also afflict adults, especially those who are not accustomed to dealing with computers. I get that quite a bit, and it's not just older people. Young people who have only used tablets, phones, and Chromebooks also are affected. YMMV
No. They can see that there are other ways of living by watching their peers or random people on the street.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
Studies of identical twins raised apart, like MISTRA, show remarkable similarities in life outcomes and big five personality traits. There's a big genetic component, and the time spent with parents is dwarfed by time spent with others once they start school, so the role of parenting style on life outcomes would have to have a significant outsized effect compared to all other life experiences.
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
MISTRA is a citation, it's a well-known name, just Google the study. Also:
1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have.
2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well.
3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
"Just Google it" - really? I have no doubt MISTRA exists, but demonstrating specifically where and how a study proves your point is something else entirely.
The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are both passionate about and interested in improving children’s lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of donations and big brother big sister-type programs.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
>I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
I would like to volunteer as well, but it would have to be outside of home and school since I live in Texas. I would like to help young people learn to cope with being LGBTQ+, ADD, and other things, but I don't think parents would appreciate it.
Why? Helping kids develop study skills would help with adhd, helping kids deal with bullying would help with lgbtq issues. I can’t see how that would be harmful.
Where I live the superintendent and local groups formed a task-force style intervention and looped in local volunteers.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic.
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
I don't understand how to practically make this work.
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
> One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space
> We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
That "classic unintended consequence" was specifically tested many times in UBI context, and study after study doesn't find it in any noticeable amount.
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.
$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.
The 2024 FPL figure is $15060 + 5380 per additional person family member past the first. $12k/head/year comes up a bit short for an individual, but it's not that far off—expenses involved in holding down a job probably actually account for the difference anyway.
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure
It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an income tax, though.) Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary spending since you can target only new products and not used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
We have a tax rate with negative tax rates at the low end of the scale. For sketchy social policy/political tenability reasons it doubles as a child subsidy and phases in up to a nominal amount of preexisting so-called earned income, but functionally that's what the earned income tax credit is.
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
> someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable
This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
This feels like you're nitpicking the language, not the thinking.
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
Comparing someone's wage to the value they produce is a fine way for a company to decide whether to hire someone, but I didn't think that was the question you were trying to answer, was it? Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought you were asking something like, what policy would help people who are at the margins, which is an economy-wide question that can't be answered from one employer's perspective. Workers may only be "worth it" at some wage, at some point in time, but that wage is subject to supply and demand just like everything else. A policy intervention like raising the minimum wage will alter that supply/demand curve.
For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.
Except an employee's contribution isn't static, while their cost is.
$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.
A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.
Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.
I have a family member that is severely disabled. She used to be on a program where the government would supplement her wages - she worked at Jack in the Box, where her employer would pay like $3/hr and the government would top that up to $10/hr.
Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).
The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).
There's usually carveouts for people with certain disabilities. It allows companies to pay them below the minimum wage. I would be surprised if that was abolished with the increase in minimum wage.
A rather low hanging fruit is smoothing out welfare cliffs so poor people don't feel stuck in an position of a local maximum of utility near the bottom. The problem is that these initiatives are very complicated, and you get more public support just blindly throwing money at the problem.
The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to extract even more money. It's basically the late stage capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the past the only levers we had against this were breaking up firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital from even entering certain parts of our economy. We could, for example, ban private equity companies from buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the bargaining power of the company owner against the employees.
In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.
I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.
>If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.
Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.
I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
> imagine the state of society when that starts happening
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
Absolutely understandable, yet it also leads to a somewhat odd and undesirable reality. The problems you're talking about are ones that we inflicted upon ourselves, owing largely due to poor systems (and societies) enabling the turds of society rise to the top.
So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.
There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.
Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
It depends on what you mean by society. If you mean the entire world, then of course I agree with you. But cultures and societies do go extinct, quite regularly. The Roman Empire, most notably, also had a fertility collapse in their final years. And by the end Rome itself had just become a facsimile of what was once the greatest city of the greatest empire in the world.
So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.
We understand the implications, but I would not want anyone to bring forth children that are unwanted, thus bringing more unhappiness into those parents' lives (and their surrounding community).
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
Current global population is ~8 billion. Momentum will take us to ~10 billion by 2100. Will it be a challenge to manage this rapid population decline and attempting to provide real, meaningful community support [1] and social systems [2] to potential parents to encourage them to have children (in order to raise the total fertility rate to a steady state level)? Certainly, without any doubt or hesitation. We spent up a credit card balance of sorts with a ballooning global population, that debt will need to be paid back in various ways. But extinction? Hardly.
> I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement.
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?
This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
No, the words just have extremely different meanings. A child opens a Christmas present and starts rejoicing - nobody would claim 'Ah, look at him - he's so content!' One could even take this a step further to add that children, in general, cannot be content.
Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.
First, it's important to understand that words mean what people tend to use them to mean.
Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.
Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.
If I were simply restricting the meaning, then the examples I am offering would mean you could use happy or e.g. contentedness interchangeably, or at least doing so wouldn't sound ridiculous. Yet I'm sure you're realizing by now that you cannot! For another example - a stern and disciplined person, who is rather dour of character, could be completely contented, but it would be illogical to call this person "happy", however you might want to define the term.
The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.
Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Do you not then run into other problems? For instance I find that lifting brings an immense amount of contentedness, yet it's essentially hours upon hours of self inflicted suffering and pain. The same is true of family. Somebody raising a 2 year old could describe it in many ways, but reduction of suffering would not be one. Such things greatly contribute to this sense of contentedness and satisfaction.
I normally love the Pudding (getting a pitch accepted would be a high point in my career) but this one is hard to read. So many of the screens give you different colored groups whose sizes are hard to compare.
I thought I just wasn't understanding the visualizations. Glad it wasn't just me.
It also wasn't very clear to me what I was supposed to be noticing in the visualizations that was related to whatever text was currently popped up. In the end I just watched the youtube video that was linked to at the very beginning and it made everything much clearer to me.
I stumbled across this on youtube last night and closed it halfway through when I realized the visualizations didn't make any sense. Clearly a lot of work went into this, how does something so confusing get made?
Also, the visualization let you think that all the leftmost teenagers are the same ones stacking the bad things. That might be true, but I doubt it is. The part around Highschool was especially unclear.
Are they the same teenagers getting all the bad stuff. That would be plausible but not to the extend the visual displays I guess.
In other news, I hate that trend of scrolling to animate to get content.
The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.
The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly.
Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.
I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.
We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.
The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population.
When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.
When do the greater communities need to pay their dues?
Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights.
Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts.
This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.
Schools in the US cost more than schools in any other developed nation.
Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system.
For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well as they did before with a 20th the staff.
At this point everything is so bad I'd support sortition for every public managerial position. You can't do worse than what we have today.
As an anecdote on the topic of education, as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in rural South Korea in the 1970s, I routinely visited secondary schools that (at the time) were little more than drab warehouses for large (-70 students/class) using ragged textbooks and ancient furniture. Spirits were high, though, and these farm kids were successfully learning math through basic differential calculus plus a daunting array of other subjects.
Thereafter, I have only felt (perhaps unfairly) mild contempt for the perennial whining of US critics who blame low funding for educational failing in the public schools. In my opinion the blame lies elsewhere, starting with the family.
A quote I once heard applies here. "All a preacher needs is 4 walls and the good book, and willing souls"
For most of school, all you need is paper and pens and a place where to meet. A notebook costs a dollar. You can also do quite a bit of lab science prior to college at home, and music only adds the cost of the instrument.
I have done tutoring in parks and coffee shops and in some of those sessions seen more learning than the most expensive classroom.
It's about the kids and the teachers, not the campus.
If you want a really really good school at a really low price, eliminate the building and all support functions other than hiring new teachers, and redirect all of the extra money to teachers salaries. Then just meet in libraries, parks, coffee shops, and the houses of parents and teachers.
99% of the outcome comes from the teachers (being competent) and the students (being motivated).
If all data sources indicate that domestic culture is the single biggest differentiator to educational attainment, who are you suggesting we blame besides the stewards of said domestic culture?
Go to school, get good grades, don't borrow money, look after your health, get a job, be polite, pay your taxes - these are all the fundamentals of a good culture and are massively predictive of success. Lots of this advice is millennia old. It's not the role of a liberal government to culturally indoctrinate its people.
I'm sorry I also don't have sources for the fact that water is wet and the sky is blue.
If you think that every major project from federal to local government being delivered over budget, behind schedule and with fewer capabilities than promised is a dog whistle I have a perfectly functional bridge in Baltimore to sell you.
How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes?
In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimately bankruptcy if it can't work. Where in the public sector is anyone held accountable for failure? When will we accept that simply throwing more money down the pit won't solve what is a multi-faceted issue that primarily isn't about money?
The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting on Twitter we can afford to eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and untreated /under treated medical conditions.
My wife's family fostered and the only thing that happens is the kids eventually get sent back to the families. Even families who have abused the kids multiple times. We don't have an answer to kids from bad families. The state can't overcome bad parents.
Anecdote is not data. States cannot afford (in dollars and beds) house every kid they are justified in taking from guardians. Increase the budgets until they can and fund solutions that reduce violence against children. Not as easy as just hand waving about bad parents and might also require evaluating your prejudices.
Two of the kids later died in parental custody after being returned. I'm not sure what prejudices I should evaluate. My experience is that Indiana CPS has a hard job and can't get it right in a lot of cases. We don't have a vast array of foster parents ready to handle kids with a lot of issues nor do we really have orphanages anymore. You number 1 most import part of life is having good parents who care for you regardless of their means there isn't a system that can fix that.
There is no amount of money you can pay someone to make them genuinely love a child. Employees do a job, you can throw money at the same employees, or more employees, but children need better parents.
Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.
You’re joking right? How many religious officials have been convicted for child sex abuse? I’ve lost count. Churches are social control and tax evasion devices. Their positive impact on communities is grossly outweighed by the harms.
There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.
> I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care.
With:
> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore
is a truely weird logic to me. Is it related ? Or are you offering to let kids get credit lines and suspend them over their mismanagement ?
That could actually be a great idea TBH. And while we're at it, adults could also get suspended or have to attend additional courses, instead of getting thrown into debt spirals.
I went to primary school in the 80s and 90s and even back then it was pretty hard to be held back a grade level. Typically it only happened when a kid missed a lot of school, like they were hit by a car and spent 2 months in the hospital. Failing grades alone didn't usually cause it, at least the kids who seemed completely uninterested in school still somehow managed to graduate.
"Everybody is a unique snowflake" attitude is causing way more problems then we publically admit. Setting boundaries is important. As is seeing the consequences of your own actions. I was held back in school for a year. Looking back, this was one of the most important things in my school time. I am glad it happened.
In both cases the point is benefit the system at the expense of the child with the issues. One kid should not be allowed to ruin a class. My kids school has emotionally disturbed kids in the classroom making it impossible to have regular lessons.
When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me. I also think alternate school is a reasonable answer for kids who are violent or have been otherwise expelled. I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
You’re continuing to argue based on your predilections. I’m using wide ranging academic studies. Your experiences are not relevant to the discussion because you’re not bothering to evaluate your experiences in the context of the literature. Bad faith is looking likely, low effort is certain.
The only thing I ruined for other students when I was in class was forcing them to look at my stupid haircut. My punishments were for truancy. I went to school, but spent all of my time in the computer lab because with severe ADHD without any academic support rendered class pointless. One crusty old Korean War vet teacher flat-out told me he "didn't believe in IEPs," and the administrators refused to even address the problem. I never once started a fight, brought drugs to school, or had a gun. While people found me pretty intimidating looking at first, I had a genuinely warm, mature, and mutually respectful relationship with damn near anybody I interacted with. No students really had a problem with me, but the adults actually enjoyed interacting with me more. Most teachers, administrators, librarians, etc would stop me for a quick chat to catch up, talk about current events, or whatever if we passed each other. I didn't ruin shit, and neither did a hell of a lot of other kids that were punished because the school didn't hold up their end of the bargain for academic accessibility.
> When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me.
Whoa there straw man. It's completely ridiculous to lump academically struggling kids or kids with run-of-the-mill behavioral problems in with kids that bring deadly weapons to school. Nobody is arguing that kids who bring guns into school should be sent on their way after a stern talking to.
Also, nobody said that alternative schools weren't on the table. I, myself, graduated in a night school program designed for failing high school students who'd been successful at work, and it was a phenomenal experience. They gave us a lot more leeway and expected us to do schoolwork mostly independently while working at least 20 hours per week, and we'd fail the entire term for all classes if we missed a single assignment. It was precisely the lack of patronizing meddling you're advocating for that allowed hundreds of kids to graduate through that program.
> In both cases
Kids are generally held back because they're struggling with the material, not because they're being disruptive. How exactly does holding a kid back help the system if there's any expense to the child?
> I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
I'm glad you think so, but that doesn't actually counter any of the data presented.
We are talking past each other. Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
I don't actually think we are. If you've made a point I haven't addressed, I'm happy to address it.
> Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Did you read the paper in the comment you replied to? Because empirical evidence doesn't support that.
> Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
Still betting you didn't read those papers. Suspension/expulsion is absolutely one of multiple ways to remove a kid from the other kids. Unfortunately, it's one that necessarily removes any help or actual behavioral correction the kid could have gotten, and they're waaaay more likely than most other kids to need more intensive help. Suspension is a codified way for schools to abdicate their responsibility to manage the environment within the schools. So you responded to it? Great. You're not the ruler by which everyone is measured, and the data doesn't support your anecdote.
> I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
Zero people here are arguing that kids with disruptive behavioral problems should be in classrooms with mainstream kids. You're the one saying that suspensions et al are the best way to solve that. They weren't when I was in school, and they aren't now. Schools not having the funding or the staff to do what they need to do doesn't turn a harmful non-answer into an answer, or make it less harmful.
> We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
Sure. For most of the past 30 years we've been indiscriminately handing out suspensions and failing to offer support for kids that need it. My entire high school career happened squarely within the past 30 years. Maybe we should try looking at the data we have rather than just saying what feels right and doubling down on the back in my day tough love nostalgia.
As someone subjected to both of these actions, plus expulsion, in lieu of anybody bothering to try and figure out what was wrong, that certainly rings true. However, people just really really love a) nostalgia, b) validating their compulsion to inflict the same pain they experienced as children on young people, and c) watching people in out-groups get punished. It's a lovely thought, but I'll believe that there have been real changes, rather than overblown facets of moral panic about abandoning those bad habits, when I see them.
A) Suspension is a great way to pretend you're addressing a problem while sweeping it under the rug. If the administrators aren't willing to mediate conflict among students, they should find another line of work. The school has a responsibility to educate their students. If they fail to do that for a student without finding alternate placement better equipped to handle whatever problem they face, they failed in their responsibility.
B) If a student has a consistent enough problem with antisocial behavior that they require constant intervention, they should be in a non-mainstream classroom or school that can address that problem while still fulfilling their responsibility to educate them.
C) There's a whole lot of punishment doled out in schools for non-violent conduct violations. Caught skipping class? Caught vaping in the parking lot? Dress code violation? Caught copying someone's test? Caught using a phone multiple times when you're not supposed to?
You seem to be deliberately implying that questioning any suspension means you support violence in school, which is completely ridiculous. Everything in life can be turned into a black-and-white issue if you ignore enough details and context.
There was a lot of violence in the school I went to growing up. We had kids bussed from jail. The idea of suspension is 1 get the kids and parents attention and 2 to get the kid out of the classroom. Minor discipline problems should be handled differently but at some point you have to remove disruptive kids from the classroom for the sake of everyone else.
That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.
Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.
The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.
> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care
The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?
Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.
I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s).
Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.
I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.
Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.
Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.
You focus on banking, I’m talking about budgets. Do you track every cent in and out and have a quarterly updated forecast of your financial position a decade out? How close are you to that? If your answer doesn’t include a spreadsheet of some sort you’re not budgeting but taking a shortcut on faith your intuitions are correct.
Did you get taught how credit applications work, how banks determine credit worthiness, how to depreciate an asset, how to calculate lifetime cost of a vehicle, how to draft a bill of materials for a project? All things everyone should be able to do. It’s the lack of these skills and the cost of living crisis that creates ripe markets of ignorant people to exploit for profit through their financial mistakes.
Your school offers home ec? Mine dropped it forever ago. Only the trade school kids learned anything more hands on AP chem.
Cars are more reliable sure, but less maintainable in a home garage. I didn’t bring them up because the best argument I have for cars is repealing cafe and taxing cars annually with a multiplier for wheelbase squared x miles.
No I don't budget to that degree. Neither did most people 30 years ago.
I put a percentage of my income into an investment account automatically every payday and forget about it. What I have left is my spending money. That's very simple and tends to work for me.
My bank app does that stuff automatically. They have identified and classified pretty much all merchants so the app can breakdown spending and tell you exactly how much you spend on essentials, restaurants, alcohol, etc.
You get the same info as your spreadsheet, but without any work.
> Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.
> You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.
Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.
Society is consciously created by the active participants in that system. Government fails to hold them accountable for directly creating unwanted outcomes. Task companies with robust interoperability and let’s see how that goes.
If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now
Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.
Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated?
It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved.
It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now
I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.
Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.
Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.
I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
I'm not suggesting it is a good idea, it was just to illustrate the difference. He did learn grammar and went to university.
I'm pretty sure he is equally stubborn and hot headed as his dad if not more so. Now that I think about it, he even believes in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. ha-ha
It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization.
I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.
I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.
1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.
3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.
You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.
These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
> Teach conflict resolution skills to young children.
This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged children because we neglect to introduce them to their inherent agency in conflict.
There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say about you isn't either. Again, these should come from parents.
In the child world, sometimes you tell the adults, but they don't do anything, and the abuse continues. That's at least my experience with bullying in primary school. "Conflict resolution" and such virtue-signalling buzzwords don't work against violent bullies.
Sometimes the only resolution for a conflict is murder. Even in non stand your ground states.
I do not think you understand conflict resolution and should probably study it a bit before speaking so authoritatively. The basic gist of it is to identify the root cause of contention and identify the best practical solution. Most people bad at managing conflict fail to correctly identify the cause and empathize with the opposing view. Keep in mind - you do not need to agree with a perspective to understand it and failure to understand the other party is a responsibility shared jointly regardless of righteousness.
How would you attempt “conflict resolution” with primary school bullies?
Sometimes the only resolution to violence is (threat of) superior violence. If you’re a child and a group of kids attacks you, that’s “adults resolving the situation”. Anything else is a failure of the schooling system.
It's telling that you seemingly only think of extreme cases when it comes to conflict resolution, and not all the mundane conflicts kids get into, eg arguing over who gets to play with a toy, arguing over who's whose friend etc, teasing that doesn't rise to the level of bullying, or kids interacting with/being watched by someone who is both meaningfully older than themselves and is also too young for the kid to acknowledge them as having authority (eg an older cousin), or teenagers arguing over/teasing over crushes etc.
These are all things kids need to have the freedom to learn to resolve without a parent just jumping in all the time.
Such conflict resolution can come handy in adulthood for things like dealing with angry/complaining customers, miscommunications causing arguments, professional disagreements etc. I've seen so many people who are completely unable to do conflict resolution of any sort, everyone's always walking on eggshells around them knowing that any conflict is going to end up blowing up into full "Karen"-esque argument.
The role of law enforcement is rarely about direct intervention to stop criminal behavior (or in your example, violent bullying). They investigate and, potentially, punish criminal behavior that has happened in the past. They act as a deterrent to crime, but also to vigilante justice.
Conflict resolution provides the potential victim with agency to intervene in a situation on their own behalf. Of course, this doesn't preclude the option of calling the police. Why not expand someone's options for keeping safe?
We deal with a lot more conflict than you're accounting for.
Someone can be shouting at a waiter at a restaurant and people around will try to deascalate and help or consolate the waiter.
Af short fight breaks ? People close enough to the participants will act, and bystanders might stay as witnesses to not make it a "he said she said" situation etc.
In general people aren't playing heroes but will do a ton of small and cumulative effort to make tensed situations not expand further into chaos.
Not to mention, easy to find some killed by the very police they themselves called.
Aderrien Murry, 11, called 911 for help at his home in Indianola, Miss., last weekend. But after police arrived, an officer shot him in the chest. The boy is recovering, but his family is asking for answers — and they want the officer involved to be fired.
A Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a 27-year-old woman who had called 911 to report that she was under attack by a former boyfriend, police officials and lawyers for the victim’s family said on Thursday. Records show the deputy had killed another person in similar circumstances three years ago.
You clearly have no experience with what you're talking about.
In the low income neighborhoods near me, in which my sister lives (of her own free will, despite other options) due to chronic cognitive issues, the police are visiting constantly. People in low income neighborhoods call the police all the time. Surveys show that most low income people in dangerous neighborhoods are in favor of more, better policing, not less.
I recall trying once, it got to the principal level. Nothing happened. The kids got a talking to by the principal, but their parents did not care. Child bullies have parents who do not care what their kids do.
Fighting back works - against a single bully. If there is more than one, they will make the fight unfair. After all, it is about dominance and not proving yourself.
Bullies eventually usually grow out of it. That is the fix in my experience.
A friend of mine stepped in once and was prosecuted for injuring one of the attackers. Took 4 month of uncertainty before he ended up with a medal and an apology but he was this close to ending in prison for it instead.
Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery.
> Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being murdered / assaulted means stores close down.
There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing what we're doing. Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls seem uncalled for given the data.
The point isn't necessarily that stores need to spring up nearby, the point is that it needs to be easier to access stores (eg by making it easier to get transportation).
Well in my experience the rich and poor rely on public transit in mostly similar numbers, so I don't really see what transit in particular has to do with it.
Ideally you'd want businesses to voluntarily operate in these places but it's hard to get them to. It is difficult to operate at a profit in these environments. Margins are worse because poorer populations can less afford luxury items. Costs are higher due to increase in theft, the need for additional security services, and insurance.
In recent years there have been high profile closures of big brand stores in major metro areas for exactly these reasons. Proposals to address grocery store closures include regulating them in San Francisco with a lengthy 6 month notice period and other requirements. In Chicago the idea has been floated for government run grocery stores.
While the jump to call such moves "the moral equivalent of slavery" is a bit extreme, they do exist in the realm of compelled behavior and against liberty. In the case of SF it's with regard to making it more difficult to exercise the decision to close a store, which may require the operator to take financial losses for longer and incur additional compliance related costs. In the case of Chicago, it's using tax payer money (which is collected through threat of incarceration) to operate a service that's traditionally provided voluntarily by a private actor because it yields them benefit (profits).
OTOH, if being a cashier at the 7-11 paid $100k/yr in hazard pay, I'm sure you could find people willing to work there. the only question is where that money comes from.
My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods.
Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the nuances.
> Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
I can't imagine anyone in a major US city spending 3 hours. Maybe rurally, but even the so-called 'food deserts' in a big city like LA ... it's just a few miles.
At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have. They're given meals and such (and they should be), but that is not going to solve a cheating father, a mother too depressed by said cheating to lift a finger to do anything (and maybe whoring herself out or doing drugs to damp the pain?), and a family that sees the child as a cash bag. I mean what are we possibly to do? You give the food and still the child doesn't get it.
I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
> At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have.
> I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
I feel like you don't know any better than these policy makers you are dismissing.
Canada is about to become a 2nd world country. No industry, no ability to own a home, no healthcare [1], only one party, banking restrictions, etc etc,.
Almost all of these make absolutely no sense, they sound like propaganda zingers, not actual reflections of reality. The housing crisis is the only thing you can reliably hold against Canada, but it's far from the only first-world country to be facing that issue. Canada currently has five parties sitting in parliament. What banking restrictions? (I have no idea what even is described here). As for healthcare, there is a doctor shortage but you will get treatment in an emergency, the biggest choke point for wait times is people moving and having to wait to get a GP assigned to them.
Yes, been waiting for that GP for about 6 years now… treatment for emergencies is great but they won’t do preventive checkups… I’d rather not have to wait for a thing to become an emergency.
Maybe banking restrictions refers to lacking a credit score when you land? No idea.
Thats not what a second world country is. Second world was used to describe Soviet Communist block countries as opposed to Western Industrialized Capitalist Democracies. Third World was everyone else, what we would now refer to as the global south (because apparently economist much like Eurovision organizers are a bit fuzzy on geography and seem to believe Australia and New Zealand to be somewhere in the atlantic)
I think they intentionally meant second world. They mention "one party" (presumably one political party), which was generally a feature of the second world instead of third. Additionally, the third world generally allows you to own your house, which is another one of their examples.
I live in Los Angeles. Driving to work takes 15 minutes. Taking the bus _home_ from work takes an hour. Taking the bus _to_ work would require extra time -- leaving early to make sure I don't miss the bus. And this is only a 3-5 mile ride, where the bus picks up half a block from my work and drops me off a block from home.
There's a shopping center with multiple markets and Walmart and Kohl's that the bus comes up along then turns away from on the way to work; I can use this as an example of shopping from home, as I can probably get 90% of my living supplies there. Ralphs, Target, Walmart, Kohls, Trader Joe's, etc are all here. The bus transfer here is not an easy one, though, as the bus timings overlap going in both directions, meaning you have to leave early and get back later (about 1 in 4 trips I can transfer without waiting. _Not_ good odds with an hourly bus).
0:00 5 minutes: walk to bus stop 1.
0:05 5 minutes: wait for the bus (best to be at the stop early in case your bus is early, though this bus is usually exactly on time)
0:10 10 minutes: take the bus to stop 2.
0:20 3 minutes: cross the street to get on the other bus
0:23 12 minutes: wait for the next bus 2, the previous one left while you were crossing (yes, seriously)
0:35 10 minutes: take bus 2 to stop 3 where the shopping center is
0:45 90 minutes: cross the parking lot to get to the store (5~10 minutes), then try and get all your shopping done in under 40 minutes so you can take the next bus back home. Nope, today you had to go to the supermarket pharmacy, which is a 20 minutes walk across the shopping center, wait for your meds, _and_ walk back to the cheaper market to do your shopping as well.
2:15 30 minutes: shopping is done a bit early. Yay. You have time to walk back to the bus stop and wait in the sun until the next bus 2 comes. Yay.
2:45 10 minutes: Bus 2 comes. Take it back to the transfer bus stop.
2:55 15 minutes: Cross the street again, and wait for bus 1 so you can get home
3:10 10 minutes: take bus 1 home.
3:20 15 minutes: Now you're a block away from home, carrying bags of groceries, _and you had to get off 2 stops early so you could use a crosswalk_, because there's no crosswalks on this street and people don't stop. Walk home.
3:35. Tadah. You're home. Just a bit over 3.5 hours!
Unfortunately, since you don't have a car, you're limited to buying what you can carry. I hope you're ready to go shopping again later this week! You have family? Oh, well then you'll be shopping again 3 times this week. Maybe even 4 times. I hope you like waiting in the sun/rain, LA Metro only puts up cover where they can make money off advertising, so all the bus stops we've used only have benches (except one, but that one's further away).
If all you needed was medication, you'll probably want to get your shopping done anyways, as this is otherwise a > 2hr trip just for that (remember, bus 2 is hourly, so you're spending an hour at the shopping center _minimum_, including walking to/from the bus stop).
There's five other stores across the street from the shopping center that you'd like to check out sometime, including a new grocery store, but it takes 20 minutes to cross the shopping center, then probably another 10 to cross the street and the parking lot in front of the other stores. Add the time spent in these stores, and you've just added another hour to your shopping trip. This is only _partially_ offset by crossing to the supermarket pharmacy, as that supermarket is nowhere near the corner, and keep on kind that anything you have to carry will slow you down more.
-----
Buses:
- Bus 1 goes EW near home, turns NS between home and the transfer point (about 10 minutes), then goes EW again.
- Bus 2 goes EW, turns NS between the shopping center and transfer point, and goes EW again.
- There _was_ a bus that went NS along the east side of the shopping center (which also would have dropped me off at home, cutting out the need for a second bus entirely), but this bus route was changed in 2019 to turn away from the shopping center once it gets to the NE corner.
- There's a bus that goes EW along the other side of the shopping center, but that's not helpful.
-----
You're forgetting about just how much convenience your car gives you _besides_ the ability to get to and from the store.
- You don't have to wait for transfers or make what is effectively two trips to get somewhere.
- You don't have to cross parking lots or go in and out of stores from the street (you can park up near the store, then drive to the other side of the shopping center).
- You can make a quick 5 minute stop on the way home without increasing your travel time by a full hour (because the bus only comes hourly).
- You don't have to wait outside.
- You don't have to hope that the bus was cancelled without notification (two weeks ago I was lucky to get a ride, as my once-an-hour bus was straight up cancelled without prior warning; if I didn't use the former-official Transit app to check times, I wouldn't have known, and would have been waiting at the stop for 80 minutes like one of my less fortunate coworkers did, or taking a different once-an-hour bus home with extra transfers and lots of waiting, to only get home ~10 minutes earlier)
- You don't have to only buy as much as you can carry on a single trip (I work in a grocery store, people can and do fill _multiple_ shopping carts to avoid having to go shopping a second time in a week. People can and do purchase groceries for elderly relatives they don't live with).
- if there's a detour, it only costs you the time it takes to make said detour. If the bus has to make a detour and you have tight timing, you might miss your transfer, adding 10-60 minutes to your commute.
- You're not dependent someone being willing to pick you up. When I was in college, a full bus would often just go right by without stopping, since there wasn't enough room.
- You're not dependent on your fellow passengers being rule-abiding or polite. Last year the bus driver stopped for an entire 50 minutes at a high school because the kids weren't being safe or quiet. Not that they're ever quiet, or that a full bus in general is quiet, but they were throwing condoms across an overcrowded bus and yelling, and the bus driver understandably didn't want to deal with it when _he couldn't close the door_, so he stopped and said those past the yellow line on the floor needed to get off and wait for the next bus. Instead, they made fun of him, continued talking loudly, and those near the door who shoved their way into a full bus refused to move. (The next month or so was _very_ quiet on the bus)
- general garbage is everywhere. The filth that people leave behind when they cram into a bus and then leave. The noise of competing music playing against each other. Having the choice to either get up and lose your seat, or sit with someone's butt in your face because another busy bus broke down and yours is the first/closest bus going in the same direction.
- All you want to do is go home and go to sleep, but you don't want to get the bus in your bed and this sweaty dude's been sitting here talking in your ear for 15 minutes now and you wish you hadn't offered him a seat, and as soon as he leaves you realize the person behind you is yelling on the phone and now you have a headache.
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problems severity.
> No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful
Yeah, no kidding. But why are they awful to begin with? I'd hazard that it's because families have been asleep at the wheel in teaching their children to be good citizens. The change for something like this comes bottom-up, not top-down.
You could try to boil it down to economics, but that's misguided. The markets are a terrible tutor of morality and accountability.
Fix the families, fix the society. Hold parents accountable. Teach morality in the schools. It's not slavery to do that. You're not harming anyone by teaching children to have a modicum of respect for their communities, elders, authority figures or eachother.
It's just crazy to see people who still have this kind of absolute flat earth perception of life. Right up there with "if we build more roads then traffic will get better".
Look at the "morality" of America's wealthiest and most influental citizens, and how rarely they are ever held accountable for anything.
Our nation has been rotting from its head for decades, and telling the plebes to be better citizens is pissing into a firestorm and thinking you'll accomplish something.
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problem.
Depends on what you consider a generation, but we've had more than seven generations in American history at this point with a mostly similar economic system that has produced massive growth. I say keep doing it.
> Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.
I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then, poverty in China decreased by about 85%.
> Between 1973 and 2013, the number of people in poverty in the US increased by ~60%.
You edited your comment. I believe it originally contained the text above.
I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not corrected for US population growth.
I also think the US vs China comparison is basically apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty.
Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
> It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty
Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of China's extreme poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given that there is a huge number of poor people in America.
> Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years going in the right direction and the west has spent 40 years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today". This is not true by any metric.
The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty, (see the great leap forwards). Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China. its not socialism pulling China out of poverty its mercantilism. As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?
> Whats really lifting them out of poverty is the west exporting manufacturing to China
How does one export manufacturing? It is undeniable that that China has benefited from science and innovation, but these I would consider to be the fruits of all mankind. If anything, the west has tried its hardest to keep knowledge from China. China has only advanced by systematically breaking intellectual property law that the west set up with the intention of hoarding knowledge to ourselves.
> its not socialism pulling China out of poverty
As you would expect, since China isn't really socialist. That said, there is certainly something unique about China's approach that has cause it to be much more successful than many other countries.
> As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?
It should be a surprise. You cannot eat money. China consistently runs a trade surplus. That means that they give other countries more than they get in return. It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer. That the rich and powerful of our own countries discarded their citizens in favour of cheap Chinese labour. And so the benefit of all this free stuff which China has given us is focused into the hands of the few, rather than the many. This is sad, but not inevitable.
> The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty
Exactly. Just because a system lifts people out of poverty doesn't make it good. Yet the western system fails to even lift people from poverty.
By not doing it locally and purchasing it from another entity like China? they mean the export of the action of manufacturing and the associated benefits
So when I buy an apple from a shop instead of growing it myself, am I exporting apples to shops? No. The apple had to exist before I could buy it. Chinese factories were built by Chinese people and then the west began to buy products from them. We did not export those factories there. At most, showed China some of the knowledge required to build things. That's hardly an export, especially since a lot of this knowledge was taken without our permission and in violation of laws we set out to try and avoid other people getting it.
I suppose "coming up with the idea for something" is a good enough definition for exporting the manufacture of it, but it seems much simpler (and less egotistical) to say that "China used our scientific discoveries to advance itself" instead of "we exported manufacturing to China".
> It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer.
I mean... is it? I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.
The closest situation I can think of is when the west was dumping food in africa [0][1]. Which made it harder for local farmers to make a living and made the food problems worse.
Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production. And, in theory, China might be able to, in theory, do that. I don't know their elite culture well enough to say otherwise. But modern Western elites definitely seem too short sighted to give that sort of power, so the critique seems like it falls flat.
> I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.
Obviously this will be somewhat true in the short term, but there is no reason these people can't just retrain and start doing something different.
> Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production.
It wouldn't have to be autocratic. For instance, our system is not an autocracy, yet we chose to move manufacturing to China. Not every system that makes decisions is autocratic. People could just as easily vote to do something democratically if they know it is in their own good.
But consider what is really happening in these places. They have an economic system which makes decisions about the allocation of resources. In response to the addition of new resources, these systems decided to decrease production of local resources below existing levels, and hence make people poorer as a result. The issue here is purely one of distribution and management. Suppose in the trivial case of food being dumped in Africa, said food was instead sold below market rates, and the income from this was used to subsidise farms to bring their outputs to the same price as the aid. Local manufacture remains worthwhile, prices decrease, and supply increases. Everyone benefits.
I don't think it should be crazy to envision an economic system stable enough to allow people to benefit when you give them things for free. Especially since in the future, everything will be produced for free by machines. At that point, I should like everyone to live in luxury, rather than for everyone to be poor.
Pick a metric, it really doesn't matter. The claim that western economic systems are presently lifting people out of poverty is absurd, and my point is that China is responsible for the decreases in global poverty that have taken place over the last decades. Both of these facts are relatively uncontested.
I wasn't really intending to compare the countries. Just to point out that something which was being attributed to America (a decrease in poverty) was actually happening because of China.
This doesn't make sense. If your point is that global poverty is decreasing because people in China are moving from subsistence farming to factory jobs, then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing, i.e. not Chinese people.
But that point is a couple decades out of date by now and even then the situation was more complex than just "people in rich countries want cheap products, people in poor countries make them, therefore people in poor countries get richer, and people in rich countries get poorer".
> then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing
You know money is just paper, right? When we give China paper in return for something of value from their country, that is a bad deal for them unless they can trade the paper and get some actual good in return. China runs a trade surplus, which means they give away more than they get back, so it is actually a bad deal for them. It's one that makes their country poorer because they are giving away more than they get back. Almost all economists agree that China's trade surplus is bad for its economy, is even worse for its citizens, and should be reduced.
People in China were lifted out of poverty through the creation of manufacturing centres. These cities and factories were built by the Chinese, not by the west. It is ridiculous for us to try and take credit for their advancement when all we have done is exploit them.
It's Western economies that lifted China out of poverty in the first place. China's economic development was built on the foundation of being a cheap sweatshop for the Western world. We'll see how well they navigate the middle-income position they've managed to reach in the coming years.
Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed them to really make it in life instead of being stuck in the system. Weirdly, after some initial trouble that looked impossible to overcome, it was very simple to get them placed into our home, and, very simple to get them in with a relative. Most of that was the workings of the social worker assigned to them, who was hard to reach out to, and very clearly over worked.
Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your points.
I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who already struggle with math.
Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly should be done, is to create interactions between the kids who have poor situations with the kids that have good situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support to have a system where kids from the good side of town interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side product of the kids who have better situations being able to socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy, person to person.
I had a lot of what you're talking about in your last paragraph in our Air Cadet program. I was exposed to a lot of different people, both adult volunteers and peers, from different walks of life. It had a really positive impact on my life.
I'd love it if the government would throw resources at the problem, though. People act as if we're already flushing huge amounts of cash down the toilet of socialized benefits, but the fact is that the government has been extremely laissez-faire for decades. The midcentury boom was characterized by extensive intervention and public spending. There are much worse ways combat poverty than simply giving people public works jobs building the houses they need. Even direct cash transfers massively reduce the burden of poverty.
That's because Canada has safety nets for people. They have affordable healthcare and places to turn to if you're out of work and need assistance. It's because Canada is a compassionate society. It doesn't take this down right mean attitude of a "f-u" you're poor because it's your fault.
I think it's a compassionate society only when compared to the United States. Not if you compare it to a place like France, Germany or the Nordics. Those places have safety nets that Canadians would find unbelievably generous.
I'm 2 generations from immigrants on one side, 2 from pioneers and 1 from blue-collared work on the other. I wish more people could empathize with those who struggle within poverty as it is an incredibly hard row to hoe, not just physically, but also mentally.
I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.
I do like your thoughts on things the government could change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these things but have perverse incentives to keep the population stratified. This country would financially crumble without the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7 generations, if not more.
I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is actually a primary component of most govs immigration strategies.
I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too.
Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...
You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost.
To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
> The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal.
I don't think that's the topic at all.
I grew up in a high-ACE environment. Money was mostly not the problem, and to the extent that it was, relatively small amounts were what made the difference.
If anything, tackling these problems would result in massive savings. One of the core points of this is that Alex's childhood resulted in life-long impairments: lower education, lower economic productivity, higher personal and societal costs. That costs us both directly (lower output, lower taxes) and indirectly.
So the question I'd like everybody to sit with: If it would be cheaper long-term, why aren't we already solving these problems? Who benefits, and how, if we keep creating Alexes?
Almost all of these calculations work out extremely in favor of just giving the poor money. It's expensive to be poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all the homeless cheap housing for free is by far the better option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can't, because we like the suffering. That's it: Americans like it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that those other people can suffer even more.
To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?
It's not that the US likes suffering. No, the US likes their 7% ROI.
There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield? Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?
Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income, no matter how high an income you seem to get?
It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the consumers.
As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news flash - that money comes from society. The house that once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4 million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI money printer.
Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation. We narrowly achieved our soft landing, but that should have taught us that while sometime helicopter money works, it isn’t free.
Maybe if more of that PPE money had actually been paid to those that need it rather than the employers that pocketed millions instead it would have gone better.
Inflation wasn't caused by the giving, it was caused by the printing. The cure for that is to destroy money (taxation). If you tax the people you just gave to, that's just doing nothing with extra steps. So if you want to help someone by giving them money, you need to take that money from someone else.
Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive people to trade with consumer, in which case the inflation is cancelled out by the increased real productivity.
> Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation
> They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems.
Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive
Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor
Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan)
Just throwing money at a problem without attaching strings or directing how it's used is administrative complacency
If parent is obtuse, so are you. The topic is clearly not entirely contained in "spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal", if how you do it can either be understood as a "sacrifice" or something else entirely (though, to you, it might, if you don't care about the difference).
There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then there is also different ways of how we think about something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
You're always "spending resources", even when you decide not to spend time and money: in effect, you decide to expend some people's lives.
Is it effective?
Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?
(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
I dunno as someone who grew up with relatives who have been trapped in these cycles, I do think some of it is a choice. I realize people are affected by all kinds of things, but when things are given to you and you have no interest, it's hard to see that as anything but what it is.
But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.
Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay money so these programs exist. How would I feel better in any way? I certainly do not.
>Give a job or a good life to anybod
This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.
>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to
Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.
>The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced.
That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:
Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.
The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.
I do think the trend towards single parent and dual income homes makes all these things harder for parents. Clearly standard of living issues from lack of real income growth effectively filter down through parents into more of these adverse events.
Exactly, and I've always said the same thing about murderers. Why should we pay for police to catch murderers when the murderers could just not murder? This seems like a matter of individual, rather than collective responsibility. If they don't murder, it is better for us, better for them, and better for their victims. Why should we have to protect the victims of murderers when murderers could simply not kill people?
Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime. It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect the vulnerable from those who might harm them.
It would be better for society if someone inclined to murder did not. Police do not protect the victim of murder -- they are dead already.
Your view appears to say "society" (the police?) should "protect" children from their own parents, if they are deemed "bad"? The line for police intervention should probably not include "living in a bad neighborhood" or "being poor". Those strategies are tried pretty often by evangelicals who steal poor children from vulnerable countries/populations, yet are perceived as bad by most people.
If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
But if they could, they most certainly should. Preventing murder is good, just as preventing a bad childhood is good.
> Your view appears to say "society" (the police?)
The police are (or should be) an extension of society. They are a part of the government, which in a democracy means the represent the will of the people, and hence they are society manifest. There are other manifestations of society that can help these children (schools, social services, etc). I am obviously not suggesting that the police become child catchers and round up all children of poor people.
> If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
From my perspective, there is no "fault". Blaming people for things is unproductive. There are bad things which might happen, and things we might do to prevent them from happening. If we can sever this great chain of injustice of which you speak, where poverty and suffering are transmitted from parent to child like a disease; aught we not take that action? It is even in our best interest to do so, as those children who live better lives will go on to contribute more in taxes and more towards the betterment of society.
Government has the responsibility to provide access to education and make it as transient as possible in regards to class. But government by experience is usually also a bad legal guardian, even if the people involved really want to help these kids.
Perhaps they get lucky and grow up in a good adoptive family. But for the others there are a few things that are quite difficult to replace.
A democracy isn't a manifested society, it is a compromise of everyone involved. Ideally at least, the reality is more gray and even in a democracy a government doesn't have the legitimacy to do everything it wants. Further its ability to evaluate which children would benefit from more direct support is limited.
So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well.
> So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well.
Clearly. It was other people who started suggesting that the children of poor parents should be forcibly put up for adoption. I can't fathom why anyone would think this is a good idea or even worth talking about.
Ah, sorry, then I misunderstood your point. I though you were suggesting that it would be a productive thing to do. Empirical evidence of the past would suggest otherwise and I believe government only ever has legitimacy to remove children from their home when they are in acute and tangible danger.
Nothing that should be decided by some sensibilities du jour.
Of course! Poor children are innocent victims. But once they turn 18 and start having children, it's time those adults pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their deprived childhoods don't matter anymore. Flawless logic.
Those in poverty do have that time. Number of hours worked increases with wealth. Share of people working more than one job has fell since the 90s, and never exceeded 7%. Average commute time (one way) has been 20 - 30 minutes since the 90s.
You're pushing rhetoric, not reality. Which is fine, but I won't let you lie.
I dunno man I work way less than my friends who work retail/hospitality/labouring jobs etc. Maybe the top people in my field work loads but most don't. But more importantly, I sit on my ass all day. Being physically exhausted from being on your feet all day is simply harder to deal with. Furthermore, I can afford a lot of things that take stress off me. I can afford to buy quality premade food when I don't have time to make food. I can afford to take Ubers when I need to get stuff fast etc etc. When I was growing up I probably had food from a takeaway or restaurant like once a year and I often couldn't afford to take the bus. That erodes your time.
And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.
For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.
There are lots of interventions that show massive returns on investment in social welfare: a recent one has been extended availability of support for teenagers aging out of foster care, that takes their outcomes from something like "percentage who have become homeless within one year of their 18th birthday" from 70% down to 30%, and similar for arrest records and pregnancy among girls.
But, sadly, many people feel morally injured by spending money to proactively help adults who should be eating their own boots or whatever, and so it is less of a sacrifice to spend 5 times the money on jailing them instead.
Unfortunately it's not all economics. The prison system in the US exerts its power on the population using fear. The goal is to have a certain amount of people in prison, not to save money by getting them out. There are myriad ways to achieve reducing the prison population if that was the goal.
The argument of the data seems to say we should put resources towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood.
But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improvement units" per dollar?
Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"
>Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off"
I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to split and one was allowed to determine the split and the other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing. A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because of a sense of being slighted.
The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.
The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?
> The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
> I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
What do you mean huge number of people in many adverse experiences making it to college? If you look at the graph from 2011 with highest qualification obtained. There's probably less than 1 in 8 of the many adverse effects that obtained a college degree, while about 50% of the no adverse effects kids did. Those are huge differences.
Did you expect that none of the many adverse effects kids make it to college? That's the nature of statistics with humans, yes some succeed but the probabilities are so much different.
Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual human behavior do you, in particular the decision making process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the publication.
Yes, we can believe many things without any proof or justification. We call that religion, not "physics".
Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a personal belief, not some sort of universally acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
That's not the claim. The claim is that if you're born poor, your chances of being poor when you become an adult are much higher.
Perhaps you know that and still think that because the kid who is born poor "chose" to stay poor, but I hope no one capable of having a discussion about this topic thinks like that.
No, that is not the claim. That is a simple statistical fact that is obvious to anyone who looks at the data.
The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.
> folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states"
FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??
Where does this quote you have made up come from? I am directly quoting the comment I directly replied to, you seem to be quoting... absolutely nothing? It's not on this page or the main article at least. Or do you use quotation marks to mean something besides a quote?
If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.
My feeling is that dumbo-octopus wants to fight somebody who believes that we have no agency and that socioeconomic conditions entirely determine our future, but it's not working because there's nobody like that nearby.
My reply was to erikerikson, who I there directly quoted. Just because y'all jumped in in their stead does not make you authorities on their opinion. That said, I've been happy to disagree with the exact points you've made whenever you've made them. (Excepting, I suppose, your comment about the spirit of the edit, which I have no way to reasonably contest)
I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past.
It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:
> You have to balk when anyone says....
and
> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...
And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.
We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.
To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)
This is too simplified. What is the state of a person? It's an object of infinite information, the question what aspect you focus on is very non-trivial.
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life.
Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
I agree with you that like the post I responded to that my response is too simplified. I also agree with the post I first responded to that we are, physically or mentally and emotionally, in at least some regards never in the same exact state twice.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10 years ago.
If you are worried about physics, the most important consideration is your diet.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate?
If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
Whether it counts as a collective sacrifice would sort of depend how it balances against the benefits of living among a population with a lower desparate/safe ratio. It may well be a collective investment instead.
In every society, taxes and government are the lens used to focus collective social responsibility and direct actions that will benefit the society as a whole, and individually. Even in a collectivist society, some work is done to benefit a small group of individuals when it's deemed necessary by the society. And in an individualist society, effort is also undertaken to benefit the whole.
The questions you pose are good questions, but they can't be answered by this presentation. Even if you were to ask a much more "fundamental" or "simple" question, like "How much should we sacrifice for sanitation?", the answer is not clear, as it will vary by location and other criteria.
This presentation can't answer the questions, but it can cause us to ask them. Let's remember these questions and take them forward into our local communities, and try to focus more on local solutions, and less on one-size-fits-all.
Yeah, agree with you that if they used percentages - it would have been much easier to see - disagree with you about what their data is implying. Think it clearly shows that those with less adverse experiences have more success in life.
Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.
And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe 30% for multiple adverse experiences.
... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting that the older they get, the less the differences in income and other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.
I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves. The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real and making decisions.
The person in the story might has well have been me
- I repeated 7th grade
- Was suspended Multiple times
- Lived in 11 different houses
- Lived with a teacher for two months
- Good friend murdered
- Mom of good friend murdered by their Father
- Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly
I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I got out
What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.
Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being that way?
No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So unless you believe government = collective community then there’s nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen and conservatives keep standing on our necks
I mean you did join a government organization that provided a (more or less) guaranteed job and training.
Also, this is a genuine question, how much of the chaos in your life was due to financial hardship? Do you think just having more money would have lessened the chaos?
It’s far from a guaranteed anything actually but I understand your point that we can have a robust government that is useful as a bridge to the middle class - and that’s exactly what it is in a lot of cases
Impossible to tell unfortunately but it doesn’t seem like it in my case
>The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
What exactly would we be "collectively sacrificing"?
Something like, 1% higher taxes?
Same taxes, but the use of some of the public money currently massively wasted in all kinds of endless sinks?
I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same proportion would be in other groups because they're not as wide.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I agree with your remarks. On the other hand, I strongly appreciate the attention to detail in:
- Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time, clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to form different charts;
- Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
I don't even think that the message is likeable. "Oh no they don't go to college!" is schoolmarmish and patronizing. "College is for everyone!" and "you're not really an adult until you're 25!" have done an awful lot of societal harm.
As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the strong data that for most people a college degree is a huge net benefit is reasonable.
As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable to say “after you are either a non college graduate with a number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2 years of post-college experience.
I hear you, though, it’s hard to sort people into buckets.
> As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the strong data that for most people a college degree is a huge net benefit is reasonable.
As another college non-graduate (although I'm currently going back to school). Have we ever figured out which way causation goes on this one? Does college actually have that much benefit, or do people who are motivated tend to go to college more?
As another college non-graduate that has friends that are graduates and non-graduates the graduates tend to live more fulfilled lives, regardless of income level.
People with support to go to college are more likely to go to college, less about motivation.
I think there needs to be more support for students failing/dropping out of college.
Also, the visualization doesn't update well when scrolling back and forth; and the grouping is bad -- "bullied" is listed as an adverse condition, but is also shown as a separate grouping; and the way it's displayed for "Seen someone shot with a gun" is backwards, implying that the vast majority have seen that. Too bad, because it otherwise seems like an interesting study.
Social sciences is not value-free. In reality the most important indicator of "at-risk" is previous involvement with social services and mental health professionals. Usually because these experiences tend to be so bad that the kids involved start to hide problems, or even attack anyone involved with social services. And THEN they get into a negative spiral. It is not the first time they get into a negative spiral, except now their experiences with mental help are so incredibly negative they fight to remain in the negative spiral, sometimes to the point of physical violence.
Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...
Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.
The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.
I thought the visualization was awful. Prose and some (non-animated) charts would do a much better job, and suit scrolling/scanning back and forth much better.
I understand the motivation of trying to (literally) humanize the data points, but it would have been much more successful if there were vertical groupings as well as horizontal ones.
Right now it's 3 buckets + colors, but you could literally make it monochrome, make it an actual grid, then you could see which cells are completely empty, which is impactful.
I think you're reading it right.
They have the color key correct but the key for which side is seen vs not seen is incorrect.
It should be
<--Seen someone shot ... Not seen someone shot-->
Agreed. Spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how I was reading it wrong for several of the categories - sometimes it is correct, but often it is not.
I know that the author is trying to argue that minorities are at higher risk for bad outcomes, but it feels intellectually dishonest to use the same colors for white and rich, or black and poor. If white people can be poor and black people can be rich, you can't overload the color to reinforce your bias.
Plus, that whole section seemed to be sorted in an incoherent way.
Agreed, not least because:
- area-based visualizations make the effect hard to distinguish; bar charts or data clouds with numbers and confidence intervals would have been way more immediate.
- the colors make the negative group (usually) more visually prominent, since it has higher contrast with the background, exacerbating the area-estimation problem. (e.g. me wondering, "are there more overweight pink people as a fraction of pink people?")
Came here to say similar - making the page extremely wide helps a big by making the rows more similar but ideally consistent scale and number of rows should be maintained so we can see a column-to-column width comparison of the data points.
The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.
The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.
"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.
> The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
I think in this case, it seems they did pretty well. They're not lumping in "people failed to use their pronouns" into it, but things like gun violence, violent crime, and bullying. Some kids might be made of tougher material and shrug that off better, but even for them if that's not an adverse experience, I don't know what could be. It seems like the researchers are using an appropriately conservative definition.
> Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around.
Yeh, but now we're confusing propaganda that was designed to encourage women to leave abusers for something of statistical significance about another matter entirely. If there are more men who would have made the kids' lives better than there are men so dangerous it's good they were separated from their children, then it doesn't matter that some are bad. The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
> The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor is it deterministic that a single father or mother is strictly worse off than an intact family with an abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would divorce, but we can't factor for that.
> Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is considered okay in one culture but not in another, the question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen, where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture and not in another.
That's an excellent observation. When I wrote this I was looking for the questions/heuristics from the study that produced these statistics. I couldn't find much. Do you happen to have a link by any chance? I'm sure others would find it helpful as well.
Just clicking randomly shows a (to me) unexpectedly low age for first sex. If I understand right, the people in here were born in 1984, so they are younger than me (late Gen-X), and i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations, but these numbers look on the young side. Sampling 11 across cohorts I got a median of 15, which is lower than I found for one all-generations measure I found[1]
[edit]
Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which is slightly closer to what I expected.
Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of millennials.
> i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations
This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
You have probably heard reports that teenagers are having less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're 30-40 year olds.
Why are some statistics awkwardly phrased in terms of "per 1000", "per 10k", "per 100k", etc. when we have a perfectly good shorthand for that?
13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%.
Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just hoping someone here has the answer.
I remember reading somewhere that people, on average, understand integer ratios better than they understand percentages. As in you you write 283 out of 10,000 vs. 2.83% and then ask comprehension questions the former shows much better comprehension.
As a side note, I have personally encountered large number of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a fractional value is foreign to them.
The article refers specifically to people aged 20-24 in 2016, but the headline just says "Millennials".
I, a millennial, was 30 by then.
My younger brother, a millennial, was only 23.
Millennials are people who were born between 1981 and 1996. Some millennials were having sex when other millennials were toddlers. I would call it poor reporting to call out a 15-year wide cohort when the research being reported spans a narrow 4 of those years.
That is an 8 year old article. Nearly half a generation ago. That article would how he comparing generation Z to older generations (assuming the focus was still on the average 20 something year old).
I was Alex (my name is not Alex). Graduated high school in 97, but with a 2.1 GPA (yeah, pretty bad). Went to community college while working part time, living in a 'separated' household (mom/dad did the splits), supported both my parents both emotionally and financially (as much as I could) through their transition and new living arrangements. We were all immigrants, and still learning the ropes in this wonderful country. I did not graduate college, but instead went the part-time/apprenticeship/gain-experience route, while going through many roles. My baseline was to be a good citizen. A good son, a good partner, good friend, good husband and a good dad (4 wonderful kids). There were many good times, but also sad times, including when we lost our house and cars (2008), and that month when we literally didn't have money for food... but this country gives you many opportunities. There are safety nets, use them! You just have to focus on the goal: Move forward! There is always someone else who needs more help than you. Stay the course, and try not to lose perspective.
I'm one of the luckiest people alive because I live in this country, and was always able to surround myself with supportive, positive and forward thinkers.
I don't know why I shared this. Maybe because I don't care to blame society for my adverse experiences. Through those experiences, I learned to lead. I learned to listen. I learned to value and appreciate. I learned to live.
I guess what we learn from this is that not everyone is as enterprising as you? While on some level I’d say that, of course you can do it if you want to. There’s many people for whom that is just too much of a leap, and it feels unfair to say they don’t deserve happiness just because they can’t make themselves seek it.
Really? Do you think it's fair that some kids will be able to command historic levels of political and capital power by being born and never need to work, most kids will need to work at this point it seems until death, some kids will achieve "needing to work until death" status by working harder than anyone else while being hungry and housing insecure, and many kids will simply live and die in squalor whether they work or not?
Considering we seem to be discussing the USA, the richest nation in human history, this seems very unfair to me. It seems to me at minimum we should easily be able to remove squalor conditions no matter how little someone works.
I think I agree on your take. Mental strength in people in adverse conditions is not the rule, it is the exception. Most won't have enough of it to overcome the difficulties and will instead fall prey to easy traps like drugs etc. It is easy for most of us, who have managed well enough to be commenting here which probably implies a baseline amount of mental strength, to take the shining examples and think that these examples are universal tools of motivation. To a person that is dealing with the deep-seated problems we are talking about, that could be, indeed, motivation but also could feel like we are mocking them or trivializing their struggles. Only you can feel your toothache, me saying other people experience it and get over it, doesn't lower your pain (obviously this is a scale and this analogy isn't universal).
A lot of cozy people underestimate the willpower challenge of poverty.
I meet so many tech bros that victim blame. "the mom working two jobs has at least an hour at night. She can use that time to take free coding classes, teach herself to code, upskill and get a high paying programming job. It's not easy but it's possible." Some variation of that said to me so many times. "my family grew up poor and I figured it out! My dad came to this country with five dollars in his pocket etc etc."
I think one or two were telling the truth from all angles. Most were telling the truth as they knew it, but didn't realize that the fact that their parents were able to afford a house in the good school district already gave them a significant leg up, or other random privileges they have over others.
But what everyone seems to overestimate is their own willpower when they aren't just working many hours - which many of us on this forum are used to from startup life - but working for those hours for 7$ or less per hour, while facing humiliation and depredation every day at however many jobs being worked (by customers, by managers), looking to the future and seeing nothing but this 7$ an hour, watching your meagre savings always get nuked at just the right moment by a blown head gasket or the landlord raising rent or the kid needing unexpected school supplies because they forgot their backpack at the bus stop or whatever else.
The psychological burden of a hopeless situation is enormous. I wish I could help more people understand that and empathize with people in these situations. In the richest country on earth I don't understand why we tolerate people having to live like that, out of some cultish dedication to nonexistent meritocracy.
> "my family grew up poor and I figured it out! My dad came to this country with five dollars in his pocket etc etc."
People also drastically underestimate the negative changes in social mobility since 1980. You mentioned one with housing but access to good education is another aspect.
I know the situation in France more than the US but at least in France, there used to be a lot more upward mobility. I went to a very well ranked engineering school that was created in the 60s with the goal of giving access to higher education to everyone. When they opened, 30% of students had parents who were farmer or factory workers (65% of the population had those type of jobs back then). By 2005, 7% of students had those kind of background (compared 39% of the population did those kind of jobs). I was in the school administration concil back then and this was already seen as a big problem. I know for a fact that the students coming from less advantageous background has been further reduced.
It's a generalized trend, increasingly all the best schools mostly admit from a small selection of students that come from a select number of good schools.
There's a lot of factors that changed and, surprisingly, evolution of upward mobility is poorly studied. My mother always thought that she succeeded because she went to boarding school in middle school and high school. Back then it was normal for people living far in the countryside like her. She thinks that boarding school allowed her to get a rest from her stressful and toxic home environment. Thanks to it she was able to read, study in peace and able to succeed. She later became a teacher and she was saddened by some of the kids she saw that grew up in an adverse environment with no real way out.
> The psychological burden of a hopeless situation is enormous.
Fully agreed on the psychological burden of a hopeless situation. When you are perpetually stressed about money, it's hard to gather the required energy to do anything besides surviving.
So true. This may come across as first world problems but here goes: once I forgot to take my wallet to the office; so no cash or cards (I had taken a cab and realized this once I reached office). I had to borrow some money from my co-worker (which I was quite uncomfortable about since I have a bit of an allergy about borrowing money). That day, I repeatedly calculated how much I had left to ensure that I had enough for lunch, dinner (which I used to do near office) and transportation. Not even close to hardships of someone dealing with real financial challenges but it was like a sneak peak that I stayed with me.
I think maybe the difference for me is that I know I’m very unmotivated myself. If it doesn’t come easy to me, chances are I wouldn’t do it. I’ve just been lucky that I was born in a middle class family in a socialist country and fell into a career that comes both easy and pays a lot of money.
If I’d been born in a low income family in the US, I’d be working a dead end cleaning job, with no prospect of anything ever getting better. I’m fairly certain I’d be a kick ass cleaner though.
yeah, I mean, I made it (what was it?)
I think I became conscious and awake at 16, and with a computer did anything imaginable. We have all became 10x with the internet, and will probably be 100x with AI.
The whole point of this study is to show that a well off person can do the bare minimum and a disadvantaged person could be doing way more than minimum, and the disadvantaged person will end up being disparaged as must have been doing the bare minimum.
It's as if you're responding to a different comment than the OP. GP talks about dealing with many years of hardship, no food, losing their house and car, and so on. Tolerating that and coming out stronger doesn't seem like doing "the bare minimum" to me.
Thank you for saying this. I spent a few years living outside the USA and it helped me deeply understand the positivity and opportunity life in USA can offer. It’s a special thing and I hope we can keep it that way for many decades to come
Rather than looking at USA as Scandinavian county, imagine living in some of the counties in the global south. The competition for good jobs is so intense that you’ll work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. You won’t miss work if you’re sick or have a family event because then somebody else gets your job. Culturally second chances don’t exist, and you’re the only chance your children have to get through school (because you have to pay for it) and for your parents to retire in peace (because they live with you and you care for them). Heaven forbid you get sick. There’s barely a regulatory system for doctors. The doctor takes your temperature but wasn’t trained to sanitize the thermometer correctly. You are now double sick and don’t have somewhere safe to isolate because your rented home has 2 rooms and no ability to ventilate. Your family is now sick, and your children’s school has no mercy for missing class. The children have to compete in complicated exams to even have the sliver of a chance to land themselves in a good university. Otherwise, they’re just gonna live in your footsteps. Oh and don’t take out a loan, because when you do and somehow your entire contact list lands in your lenders hands, every contact on the list will hear about your debt for the next several months.
I’m just demonstrating here but this is an example of the stressful life many people around the world are living. We are blessed to be in the USA.
Which countries in the "global south" are you talking about? I live in South America and life is not like this. Like, nothing at all like this; you might as well be describing Narnia or Middle Earth and it would sound just as fantastical.
Just as some examples:
Doctors are quite good here, none of that untrained nonsense you mentioned.
You have safety nets.
If you work formally employed (which granted is not a minor detail, since informal employment is a big problem), you have plenty of sick days, and these are mandated by law; so not at the mercy of the company.
Vacations are mandated by law to be paid according to how long you've been at the company. Nobody can fire you for taking vacations; it's about 2 weeks vacation once you've been working for a year. This is by law, the company is of course free to sweeten the deal.
Our best university is public and free.
While life is not easy for somebody without a family to support them or a good job, the reality is nowhere close to what you imagined.
Now, this is one country and I'm aware the "global south" is large and varied. I'm sure other countries have it worse. But it makes me suspect your global description of the south.
I am referring to the "global south" as in the UN definition, which is probably a little dated and could use a revisit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South) Much of these observations from spending a few years living in Southeast Asia. I've been to the untrained doctors. Watched them practice with unclean tools (did not accept care...). The vast majority of people will never achieve formal employment.
I was under the impressions that Americans work hard too. For example, if I'm not mistaking there's no mandated minimum number of vacation days, so you might get only 11 compared to 20 in most European countries.
> Heaven forbid you get sick.
The medical act is (very) good in the US, but is it affordable?
> The children have to compete in complicated exams to even have the sliver of a chance to land themselves in a good university.
Doesn't the same apply to the US as well? You either have lots of money, or good grades or you're good athlete.
> The medical act is (very) good in the US, but is it affordable?
The answer is....it depends.
If youre at poverty levels you would qualify for federal-level Medicaid insurance. learning about these benefits takes some digging. Some states(often democrat) provide their omedical benefit coverage for people who are at or below poverty line(which is itself a locale-specific metric).
If youre upper-middle-class or work for the government, you have good medical insurance through your employer or by paying $$$$$ out of pocket.
Anything between these two -- youre probably underserved in terms of medical coverage and you probably only see the inside of hospitals via emergency rooms.
20 days? The norm is 30-40 in the U.K (9ish bank holidays plus 20 minimum but many professional jobs are 25-30). I can’t imagine mainland Europe is worse.
The required minimum is 20 days in Romania + 2 for Easter + 2 for Christmas + a couple of other holy and secular days. Though if they're during the weekend, better luck next time.
> The competition for good jobs is so intense that you’ll work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. You won’t miss work if you’re sick or have a family event because then somebody else gets your job. Culturally second chances don’t exist, and you’re the only chance your children have to get through school (because you have to pay for it) and for your parents to retire in peace (because they live with you and you care for them). Heaven forbid you get sick.
I'll be honest, as a non-American, I thought you were describing the USA in these sentences. I quite frequently read things online/see videos etc where Americans are shocked that we can take several weeks or a month off for a holiday in Europe, that if we're sick we just take time off, there's no worry about being fired for getting sick, or needing to work in order to qualify for health insurance. Education isn't free everywhere, but in most places people acquire much less debt than it seems you do in the USA.
I think it’s more that we routinely see very poor and mentally ill people in the US get zero support?
It’s not a great stretch to go from there to assume they don’t have any social security at all.
If it’s available but many people cannot or do not know to make use of it, is it really social security? If they do make use of it and it’s still not enough, does that change things?
It's a nation of ~360-370 million people including undocumented.
Have you seen the horrific conditions the poorest people of Europe 'survive' in? The ghettos of Eastern Europe are every bit as bad as the worst areas of Baltimore or St Louis. The bad areas in and around Paris are hyper minority poverty with zero upward mobility and extreme unemployment problems (thus the annual large riots). People in rural Western Russia live in third world conditions on $20-$30 per month; they live like nothing has improved in a century. To say nothing of the Ukraine war, which is now part of their living condition (for Ukraine and Russia). You realize how poor Moldova or North Macedonia are? The level of education and outcomes among the bottom 20% of Europe is every bit as bad as the bottom 20% in the US.
It's exceptionally difficult to provide a median (or median+) first world outcome to so many, perhaps impossible.
Not sure how relevant it is to compare the poor in the USA to the poor in Europe.
The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric... Although averages are a dangerous measure to use and I guess the article is wrong for other reasons (I think it is talking about consumption). The study and article are in response to the crazy OECD poverty measurements: "OECD measure assigns a higher poverty rate to the US (17.8 percent) than to Mexico (16.6 percent). Yet World Bank data show that 35 percent of Mexico’s population lives on less than $5.50 per day, compared to only 2 percent of people in the United States."
I'm in New Zealand, where we have some social support for the unfortunate. Disclaimer: I'm very ignorant of conditions for the poor in the US and Europe.
> The state of California alone has spent $24,000,000,000 on homelessness
should very probably read "paid $24 B over 5 years to third parties on programs claiming to 'fix' homelessness"
This would include urban architectures and installions that seek to deter homelessness making sidewalks unsuitable for tents, benches unusable for sleeping, removing access to water and public toilets, etc.
Such things would not count at all as "support" for the homeless.
Regardless it seems remarkably ineffective and one has to wonder, as with military spending, how much goes to end use and how much is $$$ profit! for the contracters.
What would $24 B of affordable public housing look like, employing the homeless as labour?
You believe yourself to have a proper understanding of what's what with the United States? If so, I'd be quite interested in hearing how you went about acquiring an accurate model.
Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Child Care and Development Fund, housing assistance, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program, Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children
Those safety nets have huge gaps. The government doesn't want to be accused of harboring freeloaders (or, perhaps more accurately, a significant chunk of the population would rather people be homeless than a few "welfare queens" be permitted to cheat the system), so many who are genuinely in need can't get it.
It is, although it disproportionately affects people who are poor but not broke. If you’re truly broke, there’s Medicaid, if you’re old there’s Medicare, 4% by some form of military healthcare, many people covered by their employers, and so on. 90% of Americans are insured.
As a Britisher, obviously I’m in favour of universal healthcare, and I think the US system would benefit from it. But let’s not pretend it’s perfect there either
I'm one of those 90%. My health insurance (family of 4) costs more than my house payment, and the annual deductible is over $6000 (for one person). Either the premiums or my deductible goes up every year. In terms of total cost (monthly premiums plus annual deductible) it's also pretty much the least expensive plan that I can get.
It's not that health care here is bad, it's that it's ridiculously expensive compared to most other places in the world.
That doesn't matter for this discussion, because the average American spends way more on healthcare as a percentage of their income than the average European.
~25% of the federal budget goes to medicare and medicaid, i.e. healthcare for other people. On top of that, you're paying for your own medical insurance as an implicit deduction on your salary for your employer-sponsored healthcare plan, or you just pay for your plan directly if you're self-employed.
Those percentages add up.
Whereas in the UK, or in Sweden where I'm from, you only pay once through your taxes for healthcare for everyone, including yourself.
On top of that, copays are higher in the US, annual deductibles are much higher, procedures are much more expensive, medication is much more expensive. Healthcare in the US is simply disproportionally more expensive than in the rest of the world, as a percentage of people's income, and as a percentage of GDP. It's got nothing to do with salary levels.
The medium income is about $48k vs £38k which is much more realistic than averages when a select few make millions per year. Healthcare costs can easily exceed this difference.
Which doesn't prevent nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care because of the expense they're still subjected to. (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/americans-put-off-health-car...) Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy.
Again, with the caveat that I much prefer the British system...
> nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care
Hard to interpret UK NHS waiting-time figures, especially given the political weight given to them, but these[0][1] paint a picture of 6 month to >1 year waiting times.
Medical debt for non-elective treatment feels barbaric, although digging into the figures (2m personal bankruptcies a year, 60% medical) gives 0.3% of the US population declaring medical bankruptcy a year, possibly going up to 1% if you do fancier maths involving households vs people.
It might be worth stressing for US audiences that the UK NHS waiting times quoted are for elective non life threatening procedures; osteoarthritis surgeries that decrease pain for people already with a degenerative joint disease, hip and knee replacements, etc.
The long wait times, 22 weeks mean average, > 63 week in 8% of extreme waits, are regrettable but not indicitive of waiting for urgent emergency life threatening required non elective procedures which are relatively prompt and immediate for the most part.
I don't think your portrayal captures the reality of this well. Again, generalizing about numbers when it's such a hot political issue is difficult, and it's super-easy to cherry-pick, but take three NHS trusts in the South East, which for non-Brits is the rich part of the country -- I've chosen these three because I'm somewhat familiar with the hospitals themselves, and they're all big enough to have multiple specialties. I suspect if anything they understate rather than overstate the problem.
For each specialty, there's a waiting time, which is the time between you seeing your local doctor and then seeing a specialist, and then there's a waiting time given from when the specialist refers you for a treatment -- they need to be added together. Cardiology is 17+21 weeks, 10+12 weeks, and 25+28 weeks, urology is 12+18 weeks, 18+23 weeks, and 25+20 weeks. Orthopedics (for your osteoarthritis example) is at 17+24 weeks, 22+46 weeks, and 20+25 weeks.
> not indicative of waiting for urgent emergency life threatening
Hospitals in the US can't turn you away if you show up presenting urgent, emergency, life-threatening symptoms either, and I suspect those are not the types of medical care that people in the US are generally putting off for cost reasons (although I'm sure there are a few cases where they are).
The US in fact has a gigantic welfare state support system. The US spends more of its GDP on social welfare than either Canada or Australia, and we spend it poorly unfortunately (our return on investment is not great, we spend too much for too weak of results, as with healthcare).
To add to your list: housing, healthcare, food programs exist at the local + state + federal levels. The US state government system is huge unto itself, like having an entire other federal government nearly.
There are thousands of government support programs between the state + federal levels of government.
People outside of the US are almost entirely ignorant of how large the government systems in the US are. They're not as big as in France or Denmark obviously, they are still sizable compared to the median peer nation (on a GDP % basis).
We do some stuff (often not the right stuff) to prop up people struggling as adults. We do very little, relatively speaking, to enhance people's childhoods (or even just ensure that it's OK).
Your story rubs me the wrong way. For one, you say you had to financially support your parents, but then insinuate that people highlighted in the article should bootstrap themselves up since America is such a great place. Also being an immigrant doesn't make it 'high risk.' In many areas, belonging to an immigrant community might actually confer an advantage.
The point of the article is to think about how adverse childhood experiences might affect adulthood, using actual data, and try to think about an actionable way to address the issue. Maybe stuff like this is behind USA's secret sauce compared to other countries where the 'unfortunate' are left to rot.
> This is so foreign to the world I know. But so is my world to them. I think they’re wrong, but they’d say the same to me. I’m sure I’m right; so are they. Often the reason debates arise is that you double down on your view after learning that opposing views exist.
> Here’s another.
> Former New York Times columnist David Pogue once did a story about harsh working conditions at Foxconn tech assembly factories in China. A reader sent him a response:
>> My aunt worked several years in what Americans call “sweat shops.” It was hard work. Long hours, “small” wage, “poor” working conditions. Do you know what my aunt did before she worked in one of these factories? She was a prostitute.
>> Circumstances of birth are unfortunately random, and she was born in a very rural region. Most jobs were agricultural and family owned, and most of the jobs were held by men. Women and young girls, because of lack of educational and economic opportunities, had to find other “employment.”
>> The idea of working in a “sweat shop” compared to that old lifestyle is an improvement, in my opinion. I know that my aunt would rather be “exploited” by an evil capitalist boss for a couple of dollars than have her body be exploited by several men for pennies.
>> That is why I am upset by many Americans’ thinking. We do not have the same opportunities as the West. Our governmental infrastructure is different. The country is different.
>> Yes, factory is hard labor. Could it be better? Yes, but only when you compare such to American jobs.
>> If Americans truly care about Asian welfare, they would know that shutting down “sweat shops” would force many of us to return to rural regions and return to truly despicable “jobs.” And I fear that forcing factories to pay higher wages would mean they hire FEWER workers, not more.
This is an interesting perspective that I very much agree with (also being an immigrant), I feel there is this constant bashing on the country, and for what I can tell (at least in my circle), is citizens most of the time. I have found the US to be the easiest place to make it (and by far) of any other that I have been to, but they rather remove any ounce of responsibility from their own citizens for... their own doing.
> I have found the US to be the easiest place to make it (and by far) of any other that I have been to, but they rather remove any ounce of responsibility from their own citizens
I'm willing to bet - dollars to donuts - that there were (and are) American investors in your country of origin, and every other one you've been to. Sometimes being an outsider confers clarity / skills / experience necessary to exploit opportunities not available - or even visible to those who've lived all their lives in an environment.
While you may be right, I feel the dynamic is more about the fact that most expats tend to be more educated than the average. If someone willingly moved to a country where limited opportunity exists, that may not apply to them since they're better equipped for it.
This is especially true if you consider Indians or Chinese in America. Those populations have an even more acute education lead. So many people want to come here, that to commit means accepting you spend the next 15 or so years waiting in line to finally be a permanent resident (rather than an immigrant who can easily be forced to leave if their visa doesn't have a sponsor.)
> While you may be right, I feel the dynamic is more about the fact that most expats tend to be more educated than the average
That's my point exactly! It's not that all Americans are particularly entitled, lazy, uncreative, or risk-averse. I specifically chose American investors in their country of origin as a counterpoint to the implication that Americanness infers lack of grit/drive, doubly so when Americans can succeed the countries OP left.
Voluntary migrants (that includes expats) are a self-selected, self-motivated bunch. OP is did not contrasting themself to the appropriate percentile of Americans.
> That's my point exactly! It's not that all Americans are particularly lazy, uncreative, risk-averse
And I said the opposite? the problem is not with all Americans, just the ones perpetually complaining that all of their misfortunes were caused by being born here vs some ideal place (which they can't never really point to in a map) where they were going to magically have an easier life.
> Voluntary migrants (that includes expats) are a self-selected, self-motivated bunch. OP is did not contrasting themself to the appropriate percentile of Americans.
I'm not Indian or Chinese (I'm a black latino), came here with not even a bachelors degree, and honestly, with no particular skill that someone from here could not obtain in a relatively short amount of time; I was still able to insert myself into the tech scene and find my place there. I'm still working on improving myself day to day, so I guess maybe you have a point on the motivation aspect, but that is an intrinsic quality, and I don't like how this analysis somehow attributes the lack of motivation on other people to <me>, and suggest that if I don't feel gullible and pay more taxes (which is the subtext of this piece) I somehow failed "Alex".
Many of them wish it were as short as 15 years! Here are the numbers.
US has a limit of 140k employment-based green cards issued per year, set by law.
Then per-country quotas (no more than 7% of the total number per country) are applied, meaning that the number of green cards issued to Indians per single year can be no more than ~15k/year for employment-based category. This is further broken down by meritocratically-worded categories such that the quota actually available to someone who doesn't fit the EB-1 "Einstein visa" category - i.e. someone with "merely" a master's, say - is ~8k/year.
And the backlog for this category for India is over 1 million. So, given an Indian applying today, and assuming everyone in front of them in the line will remain there, you get something on the order of 125 years wait. Of course, in practice this means that many people in the line will either abandon the wait or literally die of old age before their turn comes up, which moves it that much faster for those behind them. At current rates, this translates to the actual wait of ~50 years.
That's great, and I'm genuinely glad to hear you've done well, but your story in no way negates the data in the article. It's not claiming that nobody coming from an adverse childhood succeeeds - just that it's a lot harder. Your post is a great example of survivorship bias. I doubt that there are many people in poverty who post to HN.
Well of course no, there us simply no logical way how that could work, and claim what you (not you personally) can, reality and society are at base level quite logical, even if obscure way.
If you start life race very far behind athletes who had best training and nutrition, how easily you can even catch them, not even going into overcoming.
But adversity is a great, massive stimuli for those few with right mindset on their own, even if it stuns most. They would wither and get comfortable in comfort and security, instead they gather drive and focus that very few can match eventually. Often great men and women, albeit broken deep inside.
That is not what the person said, you are unfairly mischaracterizing the reply because you obviously did not understand it. I agree with the poster that it is great that person succeeded but I think the Op is rather crass to spend a hundred words describing how they succeed with literally no explanation. Which safety nets? What did he/she do to overcome? Feels more like BS without some details about the important parts.
I'm suggesting nothing of the sort, and it's disingenuous to suggest I did. I'm just saying that him being one of the purple group in his cohort doesn't in any way contradict the fact that that group is smaller than among people with easier childhoods.
That was obvious from the main article, and you had zero reason to rub it in Alex’s face except some sort of pervasive need to discredit his achievements because he didnt succumb to playing the role of a perpetual victim.
I'd bet that most do, but also know that America could be better and want it to be better. No one has to be ignorant about what is good in order to see what needs improving.
Why is it funny to want to make our country better? Do you believe it's impossible for America to more wisely spend its wealth? Do you believe Americans have it as good as is possible, considering how rich the nation is? I find this silly, because I can simply point at our education and healthcare outcomes to find two readily improvable conditions. Or, our child hunger rates.
> Why is it funny to want to make our country better?
If the complainers had that attitude, I wouldn't mind at all and would endorse it. It's the whiners that have nothing more creative to say than how terrible America is that get me.
Isn't the first step to problem solving, identifying the problems? What you perceive as whining may be people trying to wake Americans up to the issues in the country, since "America best" propaganda is incredibly widespread. I have plenty of friends back in Texas that believe the existence of the Houston Medical Center means America has the best health outcomes in the world. It does, for cancer, for a certain income class... but mostly, it has some of the worst in many categories among developed nations. As an example of the blindspot many Americans have.
That is great to read and I genuinely believe everyone with such adverse experiences will be better off if they lived their life with this attitude. It is also a healthy attitude to focus on what one can control, which is how they choose to think of their situation and act in it.
We should not forget though that at the same time the system in place will also produce people that face live with the same attitude and do all the same things, but with much less success.
Now the big question is, if we can have a system that does a similar job in encouraging your type of attitude while at the same time helping those out better, for whom it doesn't work out as much. Or are these things mutually exclusive.
There is a guy who cofounded a successful company and sold it. When asked if he would retire, his answer is no. Not because he isn't ready for retirement. Not because he wants to continue working or be even more successful. Because he has kids to put through college. Even successful people are not free of financial worry.
I wonder if all this success if fueled by constant adrenaline, no matter if it helps the individual or not. And if yes, if there is a better way.
Not to distract from the important content of this piece - which I simply can't devote any attention to in the middle of my workday, lest I ruminate for the next few hours - but for those interested in its development, here's a dev diary: https://bigcharts.substack.com/p/behind-the-scene-this-is-a-...
For a different approach on the socio-economic background's influence on growing up (and eventually growing old), check out the very interesting "Up Series" [0].
It's a British documentary series that starts out with interviews with kids at age 7 from different backgrounds, and then interviews the same group of people every 7 years (14 Up, 21 Up, you get the idea). They've come to "63 Up" so far.
One thing that jumps out is that being held back in school is one of the "adverse experiences" that will cause poor performance later. But of course being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward. All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
> being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward
Why is that backward? Couldn't they be mutually affecting factors a la the failures of "No Child Left Behind"'s penalty system (as in: ACEs damage school performance, leading to risk of being held back a year, which risks additional ACEs)?
> All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
If that is indeed a strong correlation, then that would be valuable insight gained from this study, I think.
Having a lot of money and having loving parents are not related in any way I can tell. Maybe they’re less likely to fight with each other in a money-based scenario, which is probably better for the kid.
Education makes a bit more sense since it’s at least easy to buy your way into a better education.
>Having a lot of money and having loving parents are not related in any way I can tell.
They're not, they serve different needs. Perhaps indirectly related, but having money certainly doesn't make you a good parent. Those are just prerequisites for a higher chance of success. If you have neither you have the least chance of success. If you have one, you're more likely to succeed, if you have both, you're most likely to succeed.
Apparently GPA distribution is less affected by adverse experiences. So doing college admissions based on GPA sounds more fair than affirmative action. Some people from disadvantaged groups also say they would rather be admitted on merit alone because it is more reliable in the long run, but they don't get this choice.
Problem is, GPA is incredibly subjective across different schools, hence the need for standardized testing. Do you rank someone that has a 3.5 at a boarding school where they were taking college level math classes at Princeton as less qualified than someone that has a 4.0 at a school where half the students aren't literate?
Agree. The place I went to HS had a 4.0 grading scale. There was no other high school in my town. Several towns over, their school district decided that AP classes should get weighted grades, putting me at a comparative disadvantage within the same curriculum.
What's missing here -- and in most of social sciences -- is the realization that adverse events is itself a product of genetics, and bad social outcomes are only weakly mediated through those events. Genetics is most of the story here and, although it's a depressing narrative, I'm sick of seeing people push a narrative that is not based on facts.
I disagree with you but upvoted you. I think it's an important discussion to be had, because I have seen lots of conflicting data, but it's unfortunate the forum doesn't want to have it.
On what factual basis can you claim that adverse events are primarily driven by genetics?
On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.
As someone who was on the adoption lists in California, we had to learn that statements like 'On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.' were false. I don't know if it was right or wrong, but California in its mandated adoption (fostering) training courses thought that we should be disabused of the idea that taking in a child (even a newborn) would mean that the child wouldn't end up significantly like the genetic parent. There were several studies we had to read (don't have them) that supported this claim.
We didn't end up fostering, for unrelated reasons.
For us, because of our apartment we were looking at very young (less than a year old since we didn't have a separate bed room).
They showed us studies that even infant adoptees tended towards the educational achievement of their genetic parents, not their adopted ones, for example.
Again, I don't even know if it's right or wrong, but the agency we were working with thought we should know that.
See for example the classic association between childhood maltreatment and future antisocial behavior [1]. As intuitive as it may seem that a child that is maltreated may develop negative externalizing behavior because of that, it looks like the true route of transmission is genetics, not environmental.
WTF? You are the product of your genetics AND your life experience. If anything, I've always felt that the latter, not the former, is the dominant factor. Granted, there are other biological factors apart from genetics that may disadvantage you at birth (e.g. exposure to alcohol / drugs / tobacco before birth). But to suggest that genetics is "most of the story" in determining your lifelong socioeconomic success, I find to be absurd.
It's not intuitive, but it's what decades of behavioral genetics studies say. Adoptees have much stronger correlations with their biological parents than with the parents that adopted them (in all socially meaningful metrics: intelligence, income, etc.). Monozygotic twins correlate much stronger than dizygotic twins, etc.
I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
First, … I don't think I dig the visualization done. These are essentially like bar-pie charts (whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole), but many of the "bars" are not of the same length, which makes visual comparison of the subsegments tricky.
> But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
But it's not that, since the bars are different thicknesses, and that changes the horizontal scale of each bar. These are some of the hardest to interpret charts I've seen in a long time.
The animations are misleading too. When the people run around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing color or not. It gives the impression that every individual in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario, which clearly isn't true.
It actually seems like it's the behaviors of other poor people, which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with -- note: not demonstrated to be caused by -- poverty).
FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
> There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)
I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ...
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize that not all lives can find a path to the same place and that you should stay focused on your own opportunities and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that "poverty fucks you up".
In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep its all about personal experiences.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
This is the exact question that this research tries to portray from a data perspective.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
Maybe but you can't teach a Labrador algebra no matter how many treats you feed it. These are aggregate effects of low IQ genetic traits as they play out over generations in our capitalist society. The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ. And don't call me racist. Ask why there was no IQ test line up amongst all that visualized data
Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
The IQs of adopted children have next to nothing to do with their environments, and much more to do with the IQs of their birth parents. IQ in general is very strongly heritable. There are several adoption and twin studies that have demonstrated this effect, e.g.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513766/
Trauma (physical and emotional) causing reduction in IQ is totally compatible with IQ being in part heritable.
Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:
"(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."
Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.
Low IQ doesn't "cause" poverty. Poverty is highly multivariate, and likely dominated by factors having nothing to do with IQ, like structural inequities in health/education access and historical lack of access to asset ownership, and exclusion from access to other vehicles of economic advancement.
Of course low IQ can cause poverty. Someone with below 70 IQ is going to have a much harder time finding gainful employment than someone with 100 IQ. A college degree is huge for escaping poverty, and the average US college graduate has an IQ of 113.
I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.
Is not the same as "people who are poor are that way because they disproportionately are genetically predisposed to have low IQs", which is the gist of the original comment I replied to.
The discussion also isn't about intellectually disabled people (who fall into a separate category with specific legal protections).
Ah, okay. My initial intent was to call out the different evidentiary standards between your own position and the opposition- it was enough for you to rule out low IQ leading to trauma by showing that childhood trauma leads to low IQ, but it was insufficient when someone pointed to evidence that genetics are the primary cause of IQ differences because it was still compatible with your position.
I was quite surprised with your response and that should have triggered a more charitable reading; I can see now that you were quite obviously not saying what I interpreted. My apologies.
Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.
That's kind of my takeaway. Nearly all of the visualizations did not show substantial differences between the groups. I was always surprised at how many kids with high numbers of adverse events were in the top group, and vice versa.
I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's choices.
It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're married to.
> Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things.
This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much awful - probably quite a bit more - in any previous 20 year period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial crisis... Great Depression? 9/11 and fear of terrorists? Cold war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and interpret data rather than the other way around.
Also, weirdly, it seems that the years following Trump's election, the people in the group did better, made more money, etc. So I'm not clear on how presidents being demeaning to people is relevant. That's not to say it's alright for them to do so, just, seems like a strange interjection when everything else is talking about the data itself.
The following is the full passage. It has Trump's as well as other president‘s (Reagan, Clinton) quotes as evidence for a certain kind of responsibility rhetoric. I think it is neither non-sequitur nor ideological but judge for yourself:
> It's 2015.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
> This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice." Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
Yeah I saw the same thing in the shape of what was presented. The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization, it's just that most people had some or many adverse experiences. But what I see is that in my generation your home life didn't matter as much. I agree that we need to move as many kids as possible out of the "adverse experiences" category but I don't think this data supports that.
The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
> The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization
They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)
Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)
I'm willing to bet poverty is really what is leading, everything else is a spurious correlation. If you're poor you probably live in a more dangerous area, are in a significantly worse situation to study, need money right now so need to get a job asap after school - or even during school, etc etc. I wish we could easily check this from the data.
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
The data visualization is fun, but the conclusion has exactly the same problem as the studies it links to: it's an analysis of a previous survey, with no experimental interventions, and as such is only measuring a correlation, with the causality being an asspull. In reality, every idealistic explanation of why these things happen gets shot down by RCTs or twin studies.
The presentation argues that the adverse experiences cited are outside the individual's control, some of them are and they can have negative effects, i agree, like gun violence or uninterested parents, but others are questionable, like suspensions or being held back in school, which is (in most part) derived directly from the individual's actions.
Since the margins in some of the statistics are so small i wonder how would they look with the adverse experiences ignoring this 2 points.
For me it is obvious that a person who was held back in school and received suspensions will be less likely to be well off when they are older.
Of course they are, but putting the locus of control on external factors disempowers people. "These people didn't do as well as they could have due to poor impulse control" is a better explanation/reason than "these people have poor impulse control because of the environment in which they were raised"; the environment is not the cause of the poor outcomes, the poor impulse control is the cause, and pointing out the cause shows a path to correcting the issue.
Yes, it's causative in the same sense that the formation of our solar system eventually caused me to write this reply.
And I agree that it's typically most efficient to address root causes, but there's a sleight of hand going on here. Note how your post correctly pointed out that environment influences a person's actions where I said poor impulse control causes poor outcomes. There are causal factors in both cases, but clearly there is a clear and direct causal link in the latter and a diffuse set of uncertain possible causes in the former.
I would not call environment a root cause in this case unless you can actually narrow down the specific source that causes poor impulse control (some of it is genetic and thus ineliminable).
Assuming a materialistic (non-spiritual) world this statement seems a bit vacuous as we are all the direct products of our environment (including womb environment, genes, nutrition, culture, etc).
The person is indeed influenced by their environment, but the "adverse experiences" should factor in just that, environmental influences, not actions from the individuals.
I think environment influences can increase the likelihood of those adverse experiences, contact with violent behavior for instance can make a person more likely to be suspended, but a person may have been brought up in a normal family and still be violent and be suspended (i got to know such cases, and they're more common than you imagine), and even a person that had contact with this kind of situation may think that they do not want that for their life and use this as a motivator (also have seen such cases).
But the adverse experiences should focus not on the results, but the causes. What factors are we able to quantify that made this student be held back (uninterested parents? a personality disorder? ...) and how big is the influence of each of them in a person's destiny. Only looking at them we will be able to really learn something meaningful from what happened.
Anyone else notice how those with the most adverse experiences were both more likely to be depressed and more likely to be happy "all of the time" for the past month?
Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
Challenges with emotional regulation was my first thought.
I imagine children who grow up in stable environments can better regulate their mood as they can return to a caring parent who will soothe them when they're emotionally dysregulated, compared to those in instable environments.
This might lead to the highs being higher and the lows being lower, a stretching of the bell curve.
I noticed that the no adverse group had very few people who said they were happy most of the time. I think this could come down to the weight of debt and maintaining a "stable" lifestyle. The more adverse effect group is probably generally lower income and less likely to have a lot of debt.
Maybe high achievers can never get enough...whatever...to be content, and will always seek to define themselves not by looking at what they have, but by looking at what they don't have (yet).
The format is very creative and technically impressive. I don't want to launch into criticisms without acknowledging that.
However, I find myself underwhelmed, for a few reasons.
- It's hard to compare the different cohorts, because of the different widths.
- The definition of "adverse experiences" seems too limited in scope of what's counted, leading to small numbers and small differentiation between the cohorts.
- The biggest difference appears to be "no adverse experiences" vs everyone else, but I think the narrative describes other things.
- Somehow, the viceral differences in experience between folks who come from healthy, happy, wealthy families and those that don't feel kind of flattened.
I'm deeply concerned for social justice and equity of opportunities. I'm sure the underlying research of this longitudinal study is fascinating. I just think that the execution of this summary misses the mark a bit.
I'm honestly not sure what conclusion to come away from this data with. It seems to be bolstering a (typically conservative) viewpoint that parenting is really important and that bad or unfit parents need to be kept in check by the state because the harm they may do to their kids can last a lifetime.
This article focuses on shootings, neglectful parents, etc. But what if we focused on more controversial things like only having one parent in the home or missing, specifically, a father figure, religious attitudes of parents, or even (to be maximally controversial) same-sex vs opposite-sex parents?
If those things were found to have impacts on children that last into adulthood also (since the data implies that our childhood shapes us so much), I doubt the author would agree that we have a collective responsibility to keep children from experiencing the negatives of those scenarios
I don't think it's at all unique to conservatives to believe that parenting is important. I would say conservatives tend to want to enforce (and sometimes preferentially support) "traditional" households, leaving up to people to self organize their support systems. Liiberals tend to want to accept households as they are but put in place systems to compensate for the specific conditions that might be suboptimal in a child's environment.
I'm biased, but I believe the liberal perspective takes a more open mind to letting people live the ways they want, under the assumption that this is likely to be locally optimal versus trying to coerce people into externally imposed lifestyles. I don't think it's controversial to say that two parent households correlate with better outcomes. But that doesn't mean that every family is better off that way. Some children are way better off if it's easy and unstigmatized for a single parent to get sole custody if the other parent is abusive.
This data seems suspect. Three "some adverse experience" and four "many adverse experiences" individual all report a most recent annual income of exactly $380,288? That seems highly unlikely, and if that is a data error there are likely others.
It doesn't seem unlikely to me at all. Lots of people are smart or successful despite coming from a broken home. Weird example but Eminem was extremely poor growing up.
You're misinterpreting. When sorted by annual income, the top 5 incomes all have the same value: 380,288. This points to something weird going on in the data, unless all of those specific participants happen to work the same job at the same company. Even then, years of experience and salary increases would likely differ.
Oh this is a fascinating coincidence- 380,288 just so happens to be the income reported by Vice President Harris and her husband on their 2021 federal tax return.
I have 7/10 ACE's and am a self-taught senior software engineer. We exist. Not always well, and good lord is it hard to find empathy from coworkers who had the "standard" life advancement, but we exist. Among folks who've gone through the same stuff as me, they are not doing nearly as well as a group compared to others in my generation.
(But yeah there's some data checking that needs to be done as denoted elsewhere in the thread)
Has anyone done anything like this for historical time periods? I realize the data is inherently sparse, but I'd be curious to see what the results would look like in 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, etc.
My impression of the data is that, actually, we're doing pretty well with social mobility. Not perfectly by any means, and there is lots of room to improve. But as compared to (I think) just about any historical period, I think the graphs would be even more skewed. I'm fairly certain that as a medieval peasant, there were basically no viable routes to improving your lot (and even the word "lot" betrays the assumptions of the time), and so acceptance was the only viable route (violent rebellions excepted).
We are indeed doing well by historical standards. Looking back to Dickensian times, for example, those at the lowest echelons of society were lucky to make it to their teenage years at all! Infant and child mortality was far higher than it is today. And for those (who were poor and who lacked supportive parents) that lived to 13+, the majority had received little or no schooling, were virtually guaranteed to be illiterate, had likely already lost close family / friends, had likely already been employed in slave-like conditions, had likely already lived a life of crime out of necessity, and were likely to be incarcerated or executed in their lifetime.
Not that any of that means we can't do better today. We can and we should.
...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The distribution of incomes don't actually look that different, to my eye.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing as well!
It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being able to understand this visually and intuitively.
Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
A large proportion of the time -- I hesitate to say "most" but that is my inclination -- the people making these visualizations have an agenda, and it's usually increased funding for their pet cause. So any time you're looking at this sort of thing especially when they're making broad over-arching generalizations (more "trauma" as a child makes life harder) it's important to read critically, interrogate the validity and bias of sources, and try to see if and where they may be skewing things with visualizations, omitting or lessening the perceived impact of damning data that disagrees with them, and/or making things that agree with their point more prominent than they probably should be. I usually don't even try to figure out what their "pet cause" may be before doing any of that because I don't want my own implicit biases to influence me more than they already do.
It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks earning the most as adults came from the "bottom" tier with the most adverse childhood experiences.
> If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group?
This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.
Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by
- categorizing people according to whether they had bad experiences or not,
- arranging them spatially in one big group on the "bad experiences" axis,
- and coloring them according to the severity / occurrence.
So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following slides
- categorize people on lots of different dimensions (income, health, etc)
- but always grouped spatially by no/some/many bad experiences
- color them according to the dimension being measured
- some of them are arranged spatially in reverse order compared to the
legend, see 4:50 in the linked video / the slide on "general health"
So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me "warmer colors -> bad experiences".
I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.
edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.
The visualizations suggested the differences were very marginal. Some people with no adverse experiences struggle; some with many adverse experiences thrive; and while the reverse is more often true there appear to be other factors more strongly determining outcomes.
I noticed that too... the effects didn't look nearly as dramatic from the visuals as the text would make me believe.
The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.
Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards.
The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.
I think the core message is that a child's life is strongly determined by his family life/environment, it's not just a personal choice to succeed or to fail.
So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.
In the presentation it talked about college, even a short amount, can give better outcomes.
But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue, and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and grounds for further research.
It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes (it should be obvious); it's not conclusive (in establishing causation), it does show a correlation. I really think it's almost obvious this is true, but it's important reinforcing with data nonetheless.
So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.
> It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes
Not to nitpick but this statement implies causation (family environment causes life outcome) which you contradict right after.
Sorry to sound obtuse, but, I asked because it may seem obvious to you, but it's not so obvious to me that there will be much improvement. I've seen data that indicates that outcomes are not changed (much) when those early interventions / "investments" are made. There is _an_ improvement, but not to the level people expect. Like a person's height, access to high quality food will only do so much; some people are just going to have short stature however much money you invest into making sure they have access to nutritious meals.
It also begs the question of nature vs. nurture. If researchers won't take this seriously, then nobody should take their findings seriously. It's almost impossible to untangle, "single-fatherhood leads to bad outcomes because kids need a father figure in the house" from, "single-fatherhood leads to worse outcomes because the type of person who would abandon their children is likely more impulsive and less conscientious than average and those traits are heritable."
Fair point in theory and I'm not familiar with the literature, but I'd guess at least some researchers have studied ways of controlling for this: eg, looking at cases where father dies early and mother does not remarry, single mothers who adopt or do artificial insemination, etc.
Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that this is exactly what they do. You don’t see the same single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of widows, for example.
Responsibility doesn't imply fault. For example we all have a collective responsibility to protect and improve our environment, even though none of us created it and none of us caused any of its problems.
I think the idea is that "only support your family" harms everyone. The example, Alex, has 2 kids, works manual labor to earn poverty wages, and is depressed. Which one of the types of teen do you think his kids will be?
The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).
Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism. If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Saying that problems are completely outside of someone's control or completely their own fault is a false dichotomy. Reality is usually somewhere in the middle, especially in studies like this one on teenagers. Everyone's situation is shaped by a mix of personal choices and the world around them. It's not just about blaming people or the system; it’s about seeing how both play a role. Voting is one way to make a difference, but it’s not the only way—people have a lot of ways to shape their lives.
> Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism
Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianism.
> If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
The circle of influence most people have over their own life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the ladder.
The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to justify the current status quo and block political change that would help poor people.
I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family. The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome. Beating ones children is much more influential than your socioeconomic class.
No a mount of political action can compensate for dissolution of individual responsibilities.
Ideally, they are complementary, but they can easily be antagonists.
Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
> I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family.
This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and later success in life.
> The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome.
Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if that were a free choice.
Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do drugs. Problem solved.
Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical illness. It requires a whole support network of people to cure in most cases.
> Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak, groups are strong.
Individual responsibility only works for the rich. Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid after all.
You may see correlations between socioeconomic class, but they are still by far weaker than correlations with Individual behavior and choice, which is my point.
Telling someone not to be born poor isn't actionable advice. Telling them their chance of success is 1000% better if they don't do drugs IS actionable advice. Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
>You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault.
It is a big difference between a higher statistical risk factor isn't your fault, and telling them their choices and behavior have no impact.
Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Everyone and their dog knows not to do drugs. Still people do. This is not actionable advice.
Knowing about the effects of poverty means knowing more about yourself. Understanding yourself leads to being able to take more effective actions increasing the control you have over your life.
You seem to think it is about victim mindset vs whatever you toxic middle-class self help "individual responsibility" thing is. Real change can only happen once you understand and accept yourself, including being a victim of circumstance and birth. After that there can there be healing and proper action.
> Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
That is not the point. The point is for them to educate themselves on the issues they are facing, to politically organize, to organize in the neighborhood, to help each other out and ideally become leaders and role-models in their community. It starts with seeking help and community, not trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps which often is not realistic.
> Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Yes, obviously collective responsibility includes a form of individual responsibility. They only work together when your are poor.
It seems like we actually agree on more than it seems, even if we disagree on the value of a victim mindset and the necessity of adopting victim in-group identity.
Of course I agree with having ones eyes open to their personal circumstance and challenges, as well as the value of giving and receiving help to others. However, I do think it is ironic that you think people have the agency to help others more and become leaders, but not have the agency to help themselves.
Circling back to drugs, this is akin to becoming a sobriety advocate, but not trying to get sober. You say everyone knows not to do drugs, but from what I know, hopelessness, self-hate, and self-delusion is a key difference between those who become addicts and those that dont.
I think that exaggerated messaging about statistical disadvantage does more harm than good if it is uncoupled from the message about statistical advantage of personal action (e.g. you may be 2x more likely to end up poor if born poor, but you are 10x more likely to escape if you stay sober and go to college). these numbers are obviously made up, but literature overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that personal behaviors have more impact than group statistics and environmental circumstances. Of course personal choices like staying in school or smoking meth have huge impacts on your personal life!
Incomplete messaging of this is harmful because people need to understand and believe there is an actionable path to a better life in order to try. Hopelessness and despair are real barriers that need to be acknowledged.
You brought up depression earlier, and while I dont tell people to "snap out of it", it is also true that almost nobody overcomes depression without the belief that their actions CAN have improve their depression, and that there is a path to improvement. It is central and fundamental to rehabilitation. Most of depression therapy boils down to convincing people improvement is possible, and teaching them how to do it. A therapist may be a crucial help that makes the difference, but the patient still has to do 99% of the work.
Statistically most people born into poverty stay there. Do you think most of them aren't trying? Conversely, do you thing most people born wealthy have to put as much effort into staying wealthy?
There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
If we had equal baseline access to education, housing, healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
We're not even close in our current state so "you're in control of your own life" is a completely ignorant argument.
>Statistically most people born into poverty stay there.
That simply isn't true. Look at the data on economic mobility, and the vast majority of people born in the bottom 20% leave the bottom 20%.
Outcomes obviously aren't random, but are far from deterministic.
For example, this article puts the number at 63% leaving the bottom 20%. 80% would require that there are no impacts whatsoever from every factor correlated with poverty
That data is paywalled, but I've got some conflicting sources:
> Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades
> Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
Also worth mentioning that the mean income for the second quintile is only ~$40k — it's still ~$30k off from the middle quintile... so we're not talking anything close to the american dream here either way. We're talking multiple generations at best for a small percentage of the lower quintile to reach the middle.
>Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
If you are talking about relative economic mobility, more than half of people cant end up in the top half by definition. Only 50 percent of people can improve in social class- and 50% of people have to go down in social class to make that happen. Of course I understand that the case is different if you are talking about nominal income. The biggest Issues there is that it is calculated using household income, and the number of adults/household has gone down quite a bit in the US. The last Issue I would point out is that these metrics rarely include transfer payments, which for the lowest quintile have gone up quite a bit.
There should be an Internet law for the phenomenon of taking systemic or statistical analyses personally and then dismissing them on that basis. It’s so common and always just results in a mess of people commenting past each other.
That it’s possible to work one’s way out of poverty or to maintain a healthy weight through willpower or what have you is simply irrelevant when talking policy. Its only possible role is to dismiss the problem or discourage action. The reverse is also true: that a system could hypothetically make it easier for one to succeed is irrelevant to the individual who’s trying to decide what to do to improve their life in the system that currently exists.
I guess all those guys that lost to Lance Armstrong over the years should have played their hands better? Being born wealthy is essentially economic doping.
I feel like when people start talking about money like this they're being intentionally illogical.
Being born into a situation where your problems are minor is a great way to be ignorant of how systemic issues affect people.
If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational issue for the parent. And their solution for when a distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts in classrooms.
If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then the child would already be fed. The political situation that made the most sense for the school district in which I grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it. That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the race and class of people who received it.
Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+ year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, and they can't help what age they are.
This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
I think social and individual expectations are a big part of this. Why is Alex depressed? If they had 20k more a year, would they be happier, or just 2 steps ahead on and empty hedonistic treadmill. Alex now has a new mustang, but is still depressed and fails as a parent.
I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?
Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy would like you to believe.
It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier with an extra 20k a year.
You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
Money buys happiness, up to a point. It's like a pretty linear increase in happiness to some spot somewhere above median income (I forget, something like 1.5x median income). After that, it has very little impact on happiness, if at all.
> Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy would like you to believe.
Individual happiness and being a good parent (which contributes to breaking the cycle) don't necessarily intersect as much as you think, or at least it's based on the individual.
Some people's happiness is only marginally related to how well their kids are doing (as evident by rise in single-parent households), so the 20k may contribute essentially 0 to the long term solution.
> You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting.
If I don't know, then you don't know either. You're taking the other good extreme and presenting is at fact. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
There are plenty of pre-industrialized peoples that smoked tobacco, drank alcohol, and did drugs recreationally. Were they too on hedonistic treadmills?
It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
> It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
You have things quite backwards, the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears. The USA added an amendment to their constitution banning the sale of alcohol and took a while to get repealed.
> This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
> the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears
also lines for bread and austerity, that's what I mean
> I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
while that example is memified, this is still a commonly held belief that I see reiterated almost daily (of course they're poor, they're buying iPhones! for example)
You can certainly go into debt to get your foot onto that treadmill. You can live with your parents and spend the entire $40k on entertainment. The exact figure of the income barely matters. FOMO and consumerist culture almost ensures that everyone is participating.
The companies are certainly happy to take your money, regardless of how hard it will be to pay back.
I don't think that "fault", which I take as implying blame, had anything to do with the presentation. I interpreted it as very neutral in that respect. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it?
I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
If a society has a trend line of poor home environments then I think the society is in some sense at fault for fostering poor home environments. This doesn't and shouldn't take away from the individual's responsibility for raising kids.
But home environments exist in a specific social context that effect how people think they should foster a good home environment. We've lost a lot of societal knowledge and experience around good family structures since probably the 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and institutions. That is going to have an effect.
Under President Johnson, government funding began to incentivize single (predominantly black) mothers not to marry the father of their children. IMO this had disastrous effects on our urban centers. Before the social welfare solutions of the Johnson era, 25% of black children were born without two parents. Now the number is nearly 75%, and the effect on young men has been tragic, in a way that affects the whole community.
The take-home for me was that as parents, or future parents, here are some things we can do to make the child have a greater chance at success. None of these are doorways to success, but they make it easier for success to happen with those conditions present, as well as the inverse.
In health care, sometimes we help the body fix the problem, and sometimes we "just" treat symptoms.
It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully considered.
But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
---
I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the blame.
I honestly think that the sorts of experiences that break kids are things like parents breaking up, not 'not having the newest toy' or 'not going on vacation'. In the sense that material poverty can cause family stress, I completely agree. I fully support programs to feed kids, provide medical insurance, etc. I even support it for adults. I'm just not sure how any of that at the end of the day is going to fix daddy cheating. Unless you're suggesting a crackdown on prostitution and/or making adultery a crime again (in which case sure! as a social conservative, I'm down)... but good luck getting that passed today!
Yeah, I'm tired of being told that it's all our responsibility, but we get none of the agency. My mother was a teacher in the inner city. There were kids our whole family fell in love with, and frankly, my mother knew what was best for them, and for a few would have been willing to even take them in. But, alas, they had to go home to their abusive parent. I am in no way advocating for forced separation, but it's hard to experience these things first hand and then be told it's all our responsibility.
I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other. However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school. What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even mean to say you're responsible for something you have no control over?
A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute, etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this situation other than the unthinkable?
Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I guess) today.
I guess I can see this conclusion if you start from a position that all families are nothing but isolated, self-interested atoms in the world. Rather than, you know, a part of society!
Maybe you missed some of the bits in the middle? Like how education is a greater boon to the people who can't afford it and that the cost of it has increased over time.
>So this piece is now at the top of @hackernews. This experience is always cool and terrifying, especially when they also see all the small things that don't quite work about the piece.
>>> He'll be bullied at school. He'll be held back a few grades. He won't go to college.
I dont even know where to start with this.
1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
> We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.
Who cares about zero tolerance rules tho, just simply ignore them on the parent and adult level. My nephew was getting bullied and we told him the kid bullying him was simply just mad at his own home life and to ignore him. We also told him that if the bully attacked him first, he has 100% the right to punch him back.
Well well well, the bully cornered him in the school bathroom and attacked him. My nephew punched him in the face. my nephew got made into a legend at school and got suspended.
Guess who doesn't get bullied anymore? Violence works.
You can’t say that you can just not care about zero tolerance. I was the nephew in a similar story and was probably held back from membership in the National Honor Society because of the timing of the suspension, worsening my college applications.
>but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the original concept was great: if anything happens, then you respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any punishments whatsoever.
I couldn't agree more regarding college education. Speaking as a member of the highschool graduating class of 2015, the pressure on every single child to go directly into college was insane. Even the mere act of telling an adult that you weren't interested in college could get you referred to a school counselor or called into an impromptu parent-teacher meeting. During my senior year, I was personally pulled out of class to discuss this topic on five separate occasions. I happened to be an unusually stubborn kid, but even I eventually caved and pre-enrolled at a local college.
Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
> that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
I don’t believe this. My first and second hand experience is that sure, there are some people who work blue collar and get paid better than $DESKJOB, but those are typically from wealthy households that can help them financially so they can ascend to owner.
If you are poor and start working in the trades it’s the status quo to be completely taken advantage of with no real opportunities. Expect to end each day beat-up and exhausted, with very little energy to take care of yourself. This is the poverty trap.
Blue collar is chock full of sociopath owners who actively lie, exploit, steal from, and emotionally manipulate their employees.
Visualization was confusing and I don't think the narrative matches the data being shown. Differences between groups were way less dramatic in the visuals than the narration suggests. The differences could just be statistical noise for all we know.
>But in 2022, the average cost for first-time college students living in campus was $36,000 – nearly $10,000 higher than a decade prior. It's made college inaccessible for kids who need it most.
College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
>Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.
It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.
>In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.
I read this, and I'm shocked at the number of people who seem to make it through life with no adverse experiences. And I also note how by almost every measure, there is a similar ratio of people with adverse experiences who are found at every level. Life is hard. I used to think that it's hard for a majority of people. But this article has convinced me that quite a lot of people have relatively easy lives, which, as someone who had my fair share of adverse experiences, I think is wonderful.
An interesting silver lining is that reported happiness (shown near the end) seems to be inversely related to all of the other negative effects. At least from first glance at the data.
Everything this is based on is subject to absolutely massive genetic confounds.
How you're raised is who your parents are, except for when it isn't.
Which is why we have adoption studies. Which strongly indicate that it's who your parents are, not how you're raised, which is more determinative of outcomes. Is it a mixture of factor? Yes, but the dominant component is clear. A study like this focuses on the minor component and presumes that it's causal. That is unlikely to be the case.
Regarding low-income as a result of adverse childhood experiences. This ignores the fact that some jobs just don't pay a lot, and even if everyone had super-duper childhood, some portion of those people would still end up working minimum-wage jobs - because somebody has to do them. The way our economy works is just stack-ranking, but at a nation-wide scale. In consequence, if you help one teenager, you'll lift them further the bottom of the stack - at the expense of everyone else who they've surpassed thanks to your help. Another corollary is that, if we want people to not have low incomes, we need to change how our society functions (as say Scandinavians did it, with very high minimum wage), as helping individuals will not matter that much. The one effect helping individuals has is making them more efficient and better adjusted to the economy, so that maybe they'll be slightly better waiters or burger flippers, which produces slighly more GDP for the nation to spread via welfare state policies - but, for simplest jobs, that effect can't be huge.
This is wonderful in a lot of ways but also seems to be designed to annoy HN specifically. With its somewhat, um, adventurous choices in data visualization combined with an overall conceit that poverty is harmful and kids are not the ones to blame... It's like a dangerous cocktail. I could read this thread in my head probably!
The layout of the data being poor and accuracy issues called out, while rightly, don't really engage with the narrative.
This infographic talks about the economic outcomes, but there are also major health outcomes like early death, mental health issues that this doesn't approach. I think in a way it takes away from the core ideas of the impact of ACE's, which Everyone should absolutely know about. There IS a direct causal link from ACE's to poor life outcomes, and here is some reading on that:
One thing I've been curious about but can never tell from the no/some/4yr+ income breakdown they always do is how trades like mechanics, electricians, welders, and plumbers actually do. Which box are they in? Do they make no degree multi-modal, or even more skewed to poverty than we think?
Don't know about the US, but in Australia at least, mechanics / electricians / welders / plumbers / etc ("tradies" as we call them) generally do quite well financially. Income often above the average for a university graduate. Often more job security. And often significant tax breaks due to being self-employed.
Also, income aside, I don't think that tradies belong in the broad "no college education" group, as almost all of them have a tertiary qualification (apprenticeship + TAFE diploma in Australia, maybe community college is the equivalent in the US?), even though it's not necessarily a bachelor's university degree.
As others have mentioned this site heavily implies causality with statements like "we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect" and "college or technical school can mitigate some of the effects of adverse childhood experiences". It is simply not possible to draw such conclusions from a longitudinal study. Interventions and actual experiments are necessary.
The site is really nicely done and even moving, but I find the ideas it is putting forth harmful honestly. We all would like to see better outcomes for teenagers, but if that is truly our goal we should not be shaping public policy around non-scientific observations on correlations. Let's do some actual science please and build policy around that.
The oddest example was suspensions. It treated suspensions as if they were random bad events not behaviour driven. Its not the suspension that causes poor outcomes its the behaviour.
It is odd that they don’t normalize the width of the dozens of 3 cohort graphs. Apparently in order to show fully filled rows.
But it dramatically blunts the visual clarity of comparison between the differing percentages in each cohort associated with better and worse outcomes.
you can find out your ACE score online easily. It is 10 questions. A lot of folks commenting are getting stuck on poverty. Even folks in higher socioeconomic categories can have high ACE scores; poverty is only part of an ACE score. What is wild is the relationship to health as it ties to ACE scores.
I found a lot of value reading The Deepest Well by Dr. Burke Harris. She notices that some of her patients are having strange health issues and then she realizes that these strange health issues can be tied to their ACE scores. Issues include epigenetic changes and immune system dysfunctions among many others. She advocates for early ACE screening to help address issues as early as possible.
This girl was unlucky, she got hit a few times when she was young. By mum, by "friends", bullied in kindergarden and bullied and bossed in school and when it looked like it would all be okay, the parents divorced. She felt like she's not good enough for this world, but eventually she found out she had been depressed for 25 year and blessed/cursed with adhd. When she fixed her diet, it all turned around and she got her first stable income at 37 and went up the ladder a bit. She happy? No. Happiness is for others. Today it's enough to not suffer too much.
Sorry for the meta-commentary, but I don’t think it warrants its own post: wow the Overton window has shifted right on HN. I’ve noticed it with other comment threads but this one drives it home. Not good for discourse.
I don't want to imagine your level of radicalism if you think HN is anywhere on the right. In my opinion you would have to be at the point of being completely disassociated with reality.
I haven't been on this platform for long, but I'm feeling it as well. Maybe it coincides with the extreme shifts that have been occurring in real life, or maybe the audience here is just more likely to be very conservative. From my subjective observations, I feel like the average HN user is older and richer than the average tech worker.
Same but here with Chrome on Android. I also get scrolling freezing in places so I am forced to reload the page (and then graphics disappear).
The article would have been vastly more readable if it was plain html with static embedded images and without any custom scroll/touch event handling - then one would easily be able to scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted by javascript bugs.
I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data visualization project, but in this case, the visualization makes the result in every way worse.
Lots of discussion about the conclusions relating childhood trauma to adult outcomes. One intermediate comment that struck me was the idea of college as a temporal/physical space for necessary growth in the 18-20s age range. I need to ponder more about this.
BUT, it struck me that one of the outcomes of the pandemic was the recognition that a major function of school for kids is childcare (as opposed to learning), and it’s funny to imagine college as the modern equivalent for older “kids”.
"Being held back" or grade retention is rare for high school students (teenagers), so rare that it is hard to find a study on it. RAND studied middle school and elementary school retention and found only some smallish negative effects.
The thing I took away from this, and seemed more than just a slight increase for one of the categories, was that people with zero adverse experiences are very rarely ‘happy all the time’.
It sure appeared that on a percentage basis, the difference in outcomes between the 3 identified groups, wasn't that significant. Or maybe it was just a poor visualization of the data.
I'm not sure if it was just me, but I struggled with the visual style. In some groups there were more rows than others, but then the rows would be of different lengths, making it difficult to intuitively compare the population sizes, especially when trying to break them down by color coding.
It felt like the "some adverse experiences" group was worse off than the "many adverse experiences" group, which I'm guessing is incorrect.
I was a bit sceptical to start with about correlation versus causation. Causes are what we are looking for here. If we see someone get shot, does that mean we decide not to go to university[1]?
I watched the video, and the semantic meaning of pink people kept changing, and I couldn't follow the story because too many moving parts.
There's a study looking at people from a "bad" neighbourhood, that used data on immigrants to and emmigrants from the neighbourhood to try and track causation.
If I was feeling obnoxious I would grab the data, and massage it until the conclusion is that we should blind children so they don't see someone get shot so that they go to university.
[1] actually I can think of plenty of friends where that would be plausible (disclaimer: gun violence isn't so common in New Zealand). I'm trying to pick an example where causation and correlation are more disjoint but I think I've failed here.
The chart titled "Percentage of people 25 to 29 years old with a bachelor's degree" is just wrong. Looking at their own source, NCES, in 2010 this was 32%, while their graph seem to show around 70%:
I don't know why they concentrated on college alone. For a lot of people, learning a trade like welding, carpentry, plumbing, auto maintenance, etc. is worth a lot more than going to college. They _can_ make a good living learning a trade. We should be looking more at sending the poorer kids to trade schools. Plus, working with your hands and building stuff is a mood-uplifter.
I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim of a piece of performance art!"
Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's Chrome...
> Then we turn 18 and we're expected to be "adults" and figure things out. If we fail, we are punished. ... The world we've built has shaped his life.
This is a powerful message. A cynical (mostly realistic) outlook is that we are powerless pawns at the mercy of the powerful (read rich) in the world whose actions are ultimately reasons for blaming the powerless.
> College isn't just a place that teaches you how to do a job; it's also a safe, structured, and productive environment for people to continue growing up – and to fend off adulthood for a bit.
This is actually a problem.
> in developed countries, there is an era between ages 18 and 25 when we collectively agree to let people explore the world and figure out what role they want to have in it. He calls it "emerging adulthood". And college is an environment built for emerging adults – a place where kids can leave their family environment and finally have a chance to independently shape their futures.
This is a wholly inaccurate description of college.
it was my experience of college. many I know would agree, and few would agree with you. I'm sure there are some that didn't feel this way, but strange sweeping statement to make.
It seems to me a lot of this is caused by inflation making it very hard for people struggling econimically, and the fall out effects of that for all society. Stop develuing the dollars people use by printing money and maybe some chunk of this goes away over time when people can enjoy the dividend of a productive society.
In case the author swings by - I think the presentation of this is really cool. The sprites bring it to life as they hurry around the screen! The way Alex bookends the walkthrough of the data is clever as well, and I felt the return to him at the end was quite evocative. Nice work!
Whoa. Mind blown. Worth the infinite scroll and meandering presentation.
Condescending and pearl clutching read. I used the military to escape. Life’s tough, navel gazing and pushing college doesn’t help in the vast majority of cases. Everyone has adverse things happen, but not everyone makes the choice to start finding solutions.
Great point, getting away is an important step when you are stuck in an environment that causes more harm to you than good. I think one of the related issues is that it is difficult to get away when you are 14 or similar.
It might be me not getting it but all the charts seemed to have roughly the same percentage of people across the different types, given some small wiggle room.
It was never an obvious impact.
Am I getting it wrong or is it a tiny change that statistically is significant at huge scales of population?
On the section for gun violence, it says "And these are the kids who witnessed gun violence", but the title says "See someone shot with gun". I'm curious which it is since gun violence encompasses things other than seeing someone shot.
The problem with 1) blaming early trauma on all outcomes and 2) saying it's out responsibility to support them, is that it sends a poor signal about personal responsibility. What kind of society would be created if we sent that message?
This should be the measure of our country, rather than the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Incidentally, rehabilitating these traumatized kids-turned-adults would probably have profound positive impacts on the economy (since that's all Jamie Dimon and friends care about).
The most important thing about a metric is that we all agree on how to interpret it. While money may not measure exactly the right thing, we can all agree that $50 is $50 regardless of our age, race, gender, upbringing, etc. Take a look at the other comments on this thread. There's hardly any consensus on what this visualization shows. If this was how we measured our country, we'd get nowhere because there's no agreement on what this data means or what to do about it.
Not disagreeing with your point that economic metrics often held too highly above others, but Jamie Dimon has commented a lot on the need to tackle inequality. Even if he's doing so for ulterior reasons, I feel like this is an uncharitable representation of his views.
Probably an unimportant detail, but the "weights today" are strangely low and seemingly unrepresentative of the general US population. A VERY strangely high percentage between 90lbs and 120lbs, and very few over 200lbs.
> I think in Europe no one holds back in the grades, school will push a kid forward.
That is hilariously incorrect.
I had an adverse childhood, my dad died when I was 8, and my mom was literally not around, she was on the other side of the country and not interested. I was in care. I was passed around middle and high schools like a hot potato, nobody wanted me, simply because I was in care. The folks in care told me I was going to do exceptionally well in life, as my IQ tests were incredible - they were the only really structured approach to testing at the time. I ran the computer labs at all the schools I was at (C64 FTW!), because I was known as a “whizz kid” and could be trusted with that, but before ever setting foot in any of those schools I was already “branded” because I was in care. The teachers, all of them bar one, literally didn’t give a fuck. The one that cared, cared deeply. He was the music teacher, steadfastly wore punk t-shirts to class, and taught me drums and percussion. I still think of him often, but music lessons are not enough.
As for the rest of the bastards, my questions and educational needs were ignored, I was told to “just don’t bother” by many. I was great in the computer lab of course, English, and history. I struggled with many other subjects, but was deeply motivated to do well in school - I saw all the _other_ kids in care around me and was absolutely positive that I did not want to end up like that, but as I said I simply was ignored. Not only can I not do math until today, the “European schools (Netherlands, to be precise) experience” traumatised me to an extent where any kind of formal learning causes some kind of brain freeze and I simply cannot. I was relentlessly bullied at and outside of school, until I learned to stand up for myself, at which point it went in a kind of binary fashion directly to outlandish punishments for standing up for myself. Punching back in self defence can, in fact, land you in a straitjacket and in isolation for a week, who knew?! That was also where my deep distrust and rejection of any kind of authority figure or structure comes from.
I never finished school, I emancipated myself from care and dropped out when I was 17, and got the fuck out of the Netherlands. I am, until this day (54 years old now), unable to get a degree as I dropped out and as I am unable to study in a traditional sense. I was homeless and living rough a few months later, and it took me years to fight my way out of that shit. By good fortune and stubbornness I was able to learn and work in stage lighting, and did that for many years. I designed shows, clubs, bars, and ran the lights at too many events to count. I was at the forefront of the (then new up and coming) move away from pure analog lighting and into digital control and moving lights.
I eventually pivoted into IT professionally, again at a time when this was all new for everyone, and managed to build a career. I did well for a very long time and love the work. As a certified Old, I now struggle to get the contracts I need to keep going, companies want young blood and believe that deep skill and experience is overrated, so we will see what the next stage of life will bring.
Nothing special about European schools. They suck just as much as all the others.
Push forward doesn't mean help in some special way.
It means only that they will never let a kid to stay the same level with younger kids, you always move with your peers to next class - even if you won't have any passing grades.
Maybe on high school level they will kick you out but in primary school I don't think they have any real grades even anymore.
We really do love pudding.cool[1]- I'd never bothered to go look at what it's actually all about till today, and you should too if you've not, because it wasn't exactly as I expected: https://pudding.cool/about/ - these people seem great, we should probably support them. I noticed they have a Patreon if you're feeling generous[2].
Their mission statement is disingenuous, to say the least, and I sensed it as soon as I started the current post. Here is the mission statement, in bold, and in this form, great, I'd be all for it:
The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait.
Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
"We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
"We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism, sexism, and classism head on."
"We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than hierarchical team."
Watching the video And looking at the visualisation rather than the voiceover, I’m surprised that having more adverse experiences in childhood doesn’t have A more significant effect on the adults.
This depiction actually slowed me the issue was much more subtle and less severe than I thought.. I thought it would have been much worse. I don't think that was their intent!
Great site. However, I think there's much more interesting things one could visualize from the same dataset.
I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).
I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.
The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.
To respond to a lot of these ridiculous responses here:
The answer to this is that we should optimise society towards less inequality. It is our collective responsibility because the privileged people who have disproportionally better results do so BECAUSE systems of inequality that keep wealth in certain areas of society exist. This doesn't mean you didn't work hard, obviously.
The evening out of such inequalities require much more radical policies than stuff like affirmitive action. We need things that address the root of the issues with how our society works. Nobody is willing to do that.
But yeah, its not the fault of the parents alone. I'm sorry that's some incredibly neoliberal individualist bullshit. There are so many factors listed here that poorer parents cannot sheild their kids from. They cannot live in a nicer place that they can't afford. They cannot just stop having chronic illness at a higher rate because of their own disadvantaged lives. Etc etc.
Everyone should take responsibility over their own life and do as much as they can to not let anything hold them back, just for the sake of their personal happiness at least. However, saying that does not then abdicate us from our other responsibility to make the world a better place. Telling people to work hard does not make societal factors go away.
Everything can't have a TL;DR. Well, it can, but it loses the essence, the meaning. I saw the animations, I read the text, I interacted with the page, and felt touched. I understood the message the author is trying to convey. I liked the execution.
Fair enough. I think I was just reacting to the "watch the video" suggestion which is a continuous source of irritation to me especially in the complicated video game word (e.g., Paradox games).
Is it just me or does this visualization show that things aren't actually that bad? And that adverse experiences don't have that much of an impact on outcomes?
Right away, I was struck by the early chart "Parenting style" which shows about 75% with "Two parents uninvolved". Pardon my language: What the fuck does that even mean? I call bullshit. The whole article is nothing more than typical doomerism that spikes the reader's emotions with clickbait.
Another one from "Household income vs. poverty line":
> And a lot of kids are growing up extremely poor – which, in and of itself, can be traumatic.
Here, the phrase "a lot" is absolutely an editorial phrase. It would be more clear and less emotional to use a percent value. Instead, they chose the clickbait route. Interestingly, they chose the term "extremely poor", but their own chart does not use it, nor include a definition of it. The lowest income category simply says "In poverty". In past discussions about poverty, many people on HN have shared their personal poverty experiences and the range of poverty. You can be right at the poverty line, but making ends meet. Or you can be deep in poverty, struggling terribly. Again, the article fails to provide necessary nuance.
Life seems to be a crapshoot for most people. Most people seem to be born into families not adequately equipped to raise children, and the ones that succeed and survive seem to do so despite what they missed out on, developing elaborate coping strategies that survive on into adulthood, which ironically, can lead to more underserved children.
Few seem fortunate enough to find a time to "pause" in their lives, examine what deep seeded issues they have developed from the process of surviving childhood, and finding and embarking on a path to a more balanced and mature, "adult" life.
But hey, it might be a sampling bias. I also imagine there is a silent majority of well adjusted people that don't show up on the internet or the news, projecting themselves all over everyone and everything within their reach.
If anything, I am shocked by how much the data between the groups evened out over time. The differences in "adverse experiences" started out so stark, but almost seemed to disappear by 2021, especially in categories like happiness and wealth. I would hate the be the researched who followed this for 20 years just to find nothing particularly interesting.
> "If we fail, we are punished. We are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing."
Not sure if the author and I are looking at the same data set. If anything, it's saying the opposite to me - the difference between a terrible childhood and a perfect childhood results in some barely perceivable differences by the time you are 27.
The quote saying that people from 18 to 25 need a safe environment to "explore the world" and "find their purpose" seems very infantile and backward.
First off, it's not realistic at scale and presents a very sheltered worldview. Majority of worlds workforce is between those ages and no automation, nor AI will change this.
Second, even in the first world it's backward because you can also explore the world and find your purpose while working, infact working will teach you much more about the world than any college and you can always decide to get education when you're more mature and better off financially.
Yeah, lots of people are traumatized. Lots of people have seen close friends or family members get killed... some have been sexually exploited... I'm not sure the answer is for them to get a degree in communications.
And furthermore, what actually is stopping them from getting a college degree if they so choose? The price. What is driving up the price?
oh, cool! that must mean, because of all those volcanos, that Honolulu means...
> From Hawaiian Honolulu, from hono (“bay, harbor”), cognate with Maori whanga, + lulu (“shelter”), from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian duŋduŋ (“sheltered”).*
ok, nope. "fire shelter" would have been pretty cool tho.
I'd like to share some of my experiences on this topic.
Growing up, I faced several adversities. My parents divorced when I was young, and I lived with my mother until the age of 13. Unfortunately, my mother struggled with alcoholism, often bringing friends over, even during my early school years. However, in hindsight, I believe she deeply missed my father and coped with her pain through drinking. Despite her struggles, I know she loved me.
Life became even more challenging when my stepfather entered the picture. I endured multiple school absences due to injuries like broken noses and ribs. Eventually, I reached a breaking point and called my real father, expressing my desire to live with him. One day, I left my mother's home and never returned.
Transitioning to life with my father brought new dynamics, including a stepmother and stepbrother. While our financial situation improved, a different form of abuse emerged, one that was emotional and insidious. I often found myself unfairly blamed and punished for things I hadn't done. Despite evidence implicating my stepbrother, I was consistently scapegoated. To extended family and relatives, I became the problem child, while my stepbrother was seen as an angel. My stepmother's behavior shifted when my father was present, exacerbating the emotional turmoil.
My academic performance suffered, contrasting sharply with my previous success under my mother's care. I developed a video game addiction, became extremely thin and struggled with dissociative identity disorder, challenges that persisted into my university years and adulthood.
Despite graduating with a GPA of 2.7 and needing an extra year to complete university, I was able to secure a job, thanks to the kindness of the people I met during an internship. I faced numerous exam retakes due to heavy gaming. Financial stability, facilitated by my father, spared me from experiencing poverty and enabled my education. Now, at 26, I'm married with a baby on the way in May. I'm determined to provide unwavering love and support to my child and wife, drawing from my own experiences of feeling blamed and unloved.
Reflecting on my past, I regret leaving my mother's home. A mother's love is irreplaceable, transcending monetary value. However, I don't blame anyone except myself. In conclusion, I might have been an unlikable and unlovable brat, often inciting displeasure and animosity. On top of that, loving a stepchild is undoubtedly challenging. Yet, I believe that surviving abuse and adversity can catalyze personal growth in ways we may not immediately perceive. Most importantly, it's crucial to have someone who loves you, whether it's a significant other, partner, or friend, especially if you're unable to find that love and support within your own home.
Very cool, clever and intuitive data presentation, this probably the way forward of effectively publishing research findings and help empower those who are not keen on reading research data (e.g policy makers). I will be very interested to see their workflow on how the data transformation from papers to what we see here, and this can be a game changer in publishing research results and findings.
Those who are designing computer based GUI, graphics, dashboard can learn a lot from this animation and interactive with timeline/frequency approach (soon someone will coin a this a special term e.g gamification, etc) because this is how we can optimize the brain to process its data for optimum users' usability. Deep learning AI has shown impressive results values in mimicking the brain functionality based on the human cognition and brain neurology and it is about time the user interface aspect get the same treatment. Excellent books like Designing with the Mind in Mind can be a good guiding principle based on human cognition for effective and intuitive user interface [1].
For the research presented by data it is kind of plain obvious that your childhood upbringing and experiences shape and affect your adult world significantly and considerably. Imagine children from war torned countries that experienced extreme adversity at some point of their life like Vietnam and the latest Ukraine people who witnessed not only gun violences but also all out war (e.g bombs, war machinery, jet fighter) with extreme insecurity food depreciation, malnutrition, etc will be several more times badly affected compared to these children reported in the study that are primarily based on developed and stable countries. Then imagine people who are residing in a continously intermittent conflicts/wars and oppressed regions (without a valid country) for example Palestine people that experienced the injustices and atrocities happening over several generations not years, badly affecting the childrens with family member's and friends got killed prematurely, and some with no parents or worst dependents left.
To think that how the people of the world ever allow, tolerate and even sponsoring the prepetrators of the oppression and injustice is beyond me. I think the only solace for these people in the region is that hopefully there will be easiness after hardship, and there will be justice sooner or later, here in this world or hereafter [2]. These are the sentences that really caught my attention, they say they are the peacemakers, but in rwality they are the real troublemakers or the root cause of the very problems and atrocities [3].
My biggest takeaway is that they nowhere address address the fact that correlation is not necessarily causation. Yes, our childhood affects who we become. But it is not the only thing that affects it. For example
Two giant factors come to mind. Genetics and racism.
Consider one genetic factor. I have ADHD. That means that it is extremely likely that one or both of my parents had ADHD. (My father, certainly. My mother, maybe. She certainly had a genetic propensity for depression that her children struggle with.) This resulted in an unstable family home. Unsurprisingly this resulted in me falling into their adverse environment category. As an adult I've done reasonably well. But yes, my challenges have affected my children. But were those challenges because I grew up with horrible problems? Or was it because I have a well-known genetic condition that causes challenges?
On genetics, I highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th.... GWAS studies can only tease out genetic correlations for European Caucasians. Part of that is that they can only be done with a lot of data from somewhat related people. And part of that is that with Caucasians it is reasonable to assume that bad results are due to personal characteristics, and not racism.
But we can do it for Caucasians. And so we can know for Caucasians that the impact of genetics is about as strong as the impact of socioeconomic status. We can also separate the effects of things like the effect of when you first had sex from the genetics that make you first have sex early or late. That one is fun, because it turns out that the genetics matters a lot, and when you first did it only matters because it is correlated with your genetics. We can look at the impact of reading to kids. Yeah, that's pretty much genetics as well. We put a lot of effort into getting kids read to more, and didn't get demonstrable results for it.
So you see, understanding the impact of genetics is very important for what public policies are likely to work. They tell a great just-so story. But I'm not convinced.
Moving on, what about racism? They trace the story of Alex. Hispanic. He had a terrible upbringing. Which could be caused by the impact of racism on his family. He had a terrible adulthood. Which could be caused by the impact of racism on him. He's just as good an example for "racism sucks" as he is for "adverse childhood sucks". Which is it? We don't know. What should we do about it? That's still an open question!
And finally, let's look at personal responsibility. I don't agree with condemning poor people for being poor. But suppose you are born in whatever circumstances, with whatever genetics. What's the best way to improve your life? Judging from my experiences and understanding of human nature, it is to encourage an attitude of personal responsibility. Don't worry too much about what's outside of your control. Focus only on what's in your control, and try to do the best that you can.
Ironically, this matters more when the deck is stacked against you. If you have family background and racism are holding you back, you can't afford the third strike of a self-destructive attitude. But if your background and race give you resources, your attitude probably doesn't hurt you as badly.
Does "personal responsibility" make for a good social policy? No. But should we encourage people to individually embrace it? Absolutely!
I strongly disagree with their cavalier dismissal of the idea.
I don't want to be that guy, here's a nice summary of what you missed, since the creator is so inconsiderate when it comes to accessibility:
The video introduces us to Alex, a 13-year-old in 1997, who is Hispanic and living with his dad and stepmom. At this point in his life, Alex's family has a net worth of just $2,000, and his parents are not particularly supportive or involved in his life. Despite these challenges, Alex expresses a sense of optimism about his future. This optimism is shared by many teenagers, as evidenced by a survey from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which includes 9,000 participants followed from their adolescent years into adulthood.
The video then shifts to highlight the importance of childhood experiences, as research by Vincent Fidi published in 1998 would later reveal. This research indicates that traumatic and stressful events during childhood can have profound, lifelong effects on an individual's health, relationships, financial security, and overall well-being. The video follows 400 of these survey participants, focusing on those with uninvolved parents, those who have been bullied, and those growing up in risky home environments. It tracks adverse experiences such as parental drug use, being held back or suspended from school, and witnessing violence.
By 2001, the participants are in their senior year of high school. The video examines the adverse experiences these students have faced, noting that Black and Hispanic youths are disproportionately represented among those who have experienced multiple negative events. These experiences often correlate with academic performance; students who face more adversity tend to struggle more in the classroom. The video also introduces the concept of "emerging adulthood" as a period between childhood and adulthood, during which college can provide a supportive environment for young adults to navigate this transition.
By 2010, some participants have completed a four-year college degree, with a clear trend showing that those who had fewer adverse experiences in childhood are more likely to have attended college. The video also highlights the financial struggles of those from less privileged backgrounds, many of whom are still grappling with the economic implications of their challenging upbringings.
In 2021, the long-term impact of childhood adversity is starkly evident. The participants' life outcomes, including income levels, health issues, and overall happiness, show a direct correlation with the adverse experiences they faced as children. Alex, whose story we have followed, is now 37 years old, living with his partner and two kids. He has struggled with his weight and health throughout his adult life, and his annual income remains around $20,000. The video concludes by emphasizing that the circumstances of our youth significantly shape our lives and that systemic factors play a significant role in individual outcomes. It calls into question the blame placed on individuals for their life circumstances and suggests that the collective responsibility to support young people is essential for breaking cycles of adversity.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
This is blatantly false and yet for no reason at all is embedded here. It makes it harder to trust the author for everything else when they do stuff like this. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is clearly much more than just a meme.
It's hard to take the Western world seriously. There was a guy on Reddit who lamented how so many Americans live in their cars, unlike Indians or Chinese. The 15th percentile in India puts one at 10k INR / year apparently and this constant woe and gloom in the US does not have a counterpart.
It would seem that some degree of thriving requires striving. The median person here has an iPhone - a luxury device. Here, the cultural belief is that if some other guy is richer than you, he cheated his way there. And you should steal from him. And the relentless woe is me whining about normal life.
"We were the first generation who had to live through 9/11 and a pandemic and the global financial crisis!"
Bro, in the '90s India was testing nuclear weapons and Pakistan had them and the possibility that two nuclear armed nations would go to war was real. There were massive genocides. The Gulf War. The President was impeached. The Unabomber. The LA Riots. In the '80, the AIDS pandemic was getting known and it wouldn't be handled for 30 years! It was a shadowy figure. Challenger blew up. Lockerbie bombing. The Iran-Iraq War. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The UK fought the Argentines in the Falklands. The French blew up the Rainbow Warrior. This is what normal life looks like. Things happen.
The number one thing that has come out of the modern Internet is this whiny brigade of losers who want to blame everything in the world for their problems. The majority of Americans are actually happy with their own lives. It's these few loud whiners. No, dude, 9/11 isn't why you can't get a girlfriend. Get a grip.
The animation is dominating the narrarive rather than assisting it. I (as many I assume) just want to skim the information and find myself stuck waiting for things to load or pathfinding algorithms to work. People keep flipping side to side needlessly also. Sometimes I'd just prefer flat 2d diagrams.
I can't believe I had to scroll down that far to find someone who had the same experience as I. Scrolling degenerated to 1 fps on an up-to-date Firefox. I didn't have a chance to follow the story.
Oh, is that the issue with all of this scroll-jacking bullshit web design lately? I'm not using the Designer's Choice mobile platform, so my experience just sucks? NYTimes is one of the worst offenders.
The author definitely has an agenda to push. They equate saying personal responsibility is the way out of poverty to calling poor people morons. I suspect that the author has specific policy proposals in mind but is intentionally being vague because other people will likely find them extreme.
Science and research are funded in phases. So greater awareness and understanding of a particular problem can often fund the research towards finding solutions. I hear your frustration that there aren't proposed solutions here but I don't think that's the point of this--awareness is.
I do know some teachers who work with very high risk kids. I can imagine some of these findings presented in an appeal to get more funding for their work as they are horribly under resourced to meet the need.
If you don’t explain your intentions it comes off as brainwashing the viewer. Because otherwise they’re just mindlessly taking in whatever you’re telling them.
It's not clear but I think what it's signaling is a progressive ideal of taking ownership over the collective good / a rehabilitation mindset towards crime vs a punishment, based on the following that's meant to get the viewer to empathize with "failure" as an adult is due to factors beyond just personal responsibility.
> When we're young, we have so little control over their lives [...] Then we turn 18 and we're expected to be "adults" and figure things out.
>
> If we fail, we are punished.
>
> We are blamed for not going to college [...]
In case readers aren't familiar with The Pudding, they sometimes have an angle but are just as often interesting data explorations aimed at their intellectually curious audience. I don't think they need to have an agenda for every piece, although I understand the suspicion for people not familiar with their work.
Parenting approaches vary in nature and culture. Some feature high parental involvement and long childhoods, while others have very short childhoods, or none at all.
These are evolutionary advantages and disadvantages to both strategies. In a highly stressed environment individuals who are less dependent on parental protection will be more likely to survive. The advantage of long childhoods and high parental involvement is that the individual will evolve sophisticated behaviors.
To simply assume everyone is exactly the same at birth and modified by society to an outcome is a vast simplification that requires substantial scientific justification, you cannot just assume it given the variations of parenting we see in nature.
Some of your proposals sound bigoted. Open the borders. A family is, of course, a group of people who say they are a family. It need not be permanent, they might not have been a family last week, nor will they necessarily be a family next year. It's all very fluid and progressive. We wouldn't want to discourage the idea that there can be serial divorce and remarriage, picking up new step-siblings along the way.
You can’t have higher prosperity in the bottom deciles and unlimited supply of unskilled labor at the same time. If you think you can, do please enlighten us through what mechanism that could be achieved.
What's your concrete proposal? Restrict the web to material featuring a concrete proposals? Establish concentration camps to re-educate those who would publish material lacking in concrete proposals?
It's HN. Most of these people have been programmed to think everyone can fix themselves with enough bootstrapping, therefore everyone should be able to.
Let me guess, the solution is ban guns and pay higher taxes. That is the solution to literally every single problem in human history according to western sociology.
Then you get some guy like Nayib Bukele who cuts the Gordian Knot of societal disfunction going from the highest murder rate in the world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in 3 years short years by putting all the gangsters in prison. All the "surplus elite" NGO people who spent their entire career ineffectually addressing "the root causes of crime" are all now out of a job and/or very upset.
> In early October, El Salvador’s police announced the seizure of 2,026 firearms, including 1,371 pistols and other small arms
> Imports of certain high-caliber firearms are prohibited. Arms for personal defense or hunting may be imported but are strictly controlled
No open carry either. Sounds like gun control to me. It goes way beyond “putting gangsters in prison” and a large part of the plan is investment in education to get kids away from this path.
One thing to note is the 72000 in prison did not receive a life sentence. They will be released at some point, and one has to trust that the “integration” part of the plan will work.
There are also an infinite amount of reports of police abuse, violence, unlawful imprisonment, and media being silenced. We’ll only know the true cost of this many years from now.
In my armchair opinion, there will always be crime, but the magnitude of gun violence is incredible. Kids get shot at parks near me because bullets don't stop. Guns are great at that, spreading violence across an area of intention, and from a distance.
If there were any simple solution, we'd have done that, but even with the idea of "banning guns" nothing has significantly progressed in that department because of loopholes and powerful gun advocates.
So anytime anyone complains of "banning guns" I laugh because nothing has changed.
It's amazing how surprised everyone was that the whole thing worked phenomenally well. It went against a century of "expert" advice. It literally did the exact opposite. The purpose of the system is what it does [1].
What kind of expert advice did it go against? Honestly sounds like the obvious approach, I think the controversy is around the authoritarian aspects of the whole thing.
"It's 2021.
The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment. It correlates with wealth, but it is also kind of the point. Children who lived in a wealthy environment are better off as adults in terms of income. It is not that obvious, as rich kids could simply burn through their family wealth.
Is there any research that shows that having witnessed someone get shot affects future prospects INDEPENDENT of the factors that lead to the kid witnessing someone get shot?
Probably, probably not. The probabilities of witnessing someone being shot is extremely low in both environments. If amount of people who are living in violent environment is much lower, it may be that a person who witnessed someone being shot is more probable from a good environment.
https://www.anesi.com/bayes.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM
There will always be the tail ends of the statistical function, so people who became phenomenal adults despite all hardships, but also people who had a good childhood and became utterly disfunctional adults. But if we think about devising utilitarian political measures knowing what "broadly" has an effect on people is useful. Ideally you discover small things that if changed would have huge positive downstream effects. E.g. if bullying would be shown to have a big impact on later lives, it could be justified to pick up more funds to prevent it, to help victims and/or to change the way schools work in order to minimize chances someone is being bullied. Bullying is just an example, one could also pick other triggers.
Free society is a liberal ecosystem, where participants are continually succeeding and failing. The authority required to mount a collective response to these inequalities is too susceptible to corruption, and represents injustice in its departure from liberalism. Not to mention that well-meaning interventions by federated authority have an abysmal track record.
If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene in harmful family situations.
That's not what liberalism is, though. Who are you citing here? What aspect of liberal philosophy entitles parents to treat children like their property? Parents don't own their children; liberal individualist property rights cannot apply to the treatment of human beings, who have their own rights.
Rather than any sort of liberalism, what you're espousing here is a form of deep pre-liberal conservatism, where children have no rights and are instead property of their patriarch, whose authority is absolute and arbitrary. How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? That they have an inalienable right to withhold education and socialization from their children; that this self-evidently corrupt and selfish desire is beyond reproach?
This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.
1) All people are moral equals
2) There is no moral oracle
It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answer.
Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity. Liberal literature is also pretty clear about what it is:
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
Centralized authority, no matter how well-meaning, has failed at every turn. Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else. More fundamentally, I think it's critical to separate your personal moral compass from a moral framework you are comfortable using force to impose on other people. The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle and setting yourself up as a moral oracle.
The core of liberalism is not an underlying system of ethical axioms: Mill was both a liberal and a utilitarian, but you can just as easily argue against liberalism from a utilitarian standpoint—moreover, the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian. No, the unifying source of liberalism is the political status quo which produced it. The real champions of liberalism were the capital owners who stood to profit by it, and who had the influence to bring it about, ousting the aristocracy in the process. The idea that liberal hegemony is a moral triumph and not a political one is simply history being written by the victors.
> Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity.
It's more correct to say that liberalism and industrial prosperity were both products of the industrial revolution, rather than one being responsible for the other. Illiberal authoritarian powers like China and India are demonstrating that industrial prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism, although I wouldn't consider that an endorsement of their respective ideologies.
> The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
The first step to literally anything is thinking you know better. You can't escape the duty of having to make judgements. Inaction is itself an action that can cause harm, and there's no a priori reason to privilege the choice not to act.
> Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else.
It injures the children. Besides which, raising a sufficiently hateful child does injure others if you ultimately induce that child to commit a hate crime.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The operant question here is what it means to "injure someone else" and how we intend to "limit the rights of other men to assure others' enjoyment of the same rights." Natural rights are a very flexible concept. Do I have a right to healthcare, or do hospitals have a right to deny me care for profit? Do I have a right to dump my garbage in the river, or do you have a right to clean drinking water? "Natural" rights are an oxymoron; every right is contrived, and deciding which rights we choose to legitimize and prioritize allows us to sculpt a flavour of natural rights theory to suit any belief system whatsoever. For example, just about anyone would agree that a person has a right to evict a violent burglar from their home. A conservative might further argue that Americans have a right to violently detain illegal immigrants in defence of their borders. Finally, a Nazi might plead that Aryans have an absolute right to defend their homeland from ethnic invaders. By tweaking exactly which rights you get and to what extent you get them, you can justify practically anything. That's why I find utilitarianism so much more rigorous.
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.
> The answer, should you produce it
The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.
> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.
The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.
> Power is either diluted or concentrated.
Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.
> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.
Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?
I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.
Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.
Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.
I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.
I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.
> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.
The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.
The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political compass. Classical liberalism stands on the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics. Today these ideas are also called "libertarian" but the core desire is expressed in the Latin root word. I want to be free - as in without a master, elected or otherwise, who governs my life.
> I find them overly vague
I'd be glad to elaborate. I'm positing that it's more important our interactions be consensual than value-maximizing. Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
> China has done quite well
China is doing well because it is able to benefit from innovations generated outside its borders. It's not able to generate important innovations on its own. This was also the main problem in the USSR. The Soviets just didn't have as ready of access to innovations born of a liberal society. Where China does use its centralized authority, the results are often catastrophic, eg. its one-child policy or COVID response.
> Liberalism also concentrates power
Some parts of this paragraph are more true than others. There is nothing in classical liberal thought about eg. patent or copyright law. Also you're broadening the definition of power that I put forward:
> Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you
Corporations cannot arrest you for noncompliance with their policy. They cannot fine you. They are fragile structures, existing at the whim of their consumers and competitors. It takes a revolution to overthrow a government. Corporations live one big mistake away from ruin.
The main issue with today's corporations is regulatory capture, which is actually an issue of our government. If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
> that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests
No, it actually matters. The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated.
> Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
Responsibility is all that matters in human affairs. All we do in court is ascertain it. All of our organizations are structured around it. A death is only your fault (responsibility) if you had a duty to intervene. A duty that cannot be imposed on a free person without their consent.
> The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. The worst human catastrophes happen when power is concentrated into hands that do not make this distinction.
> quashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom
This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance, and self-organize into pools with different risk tolerances. Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. If you don't take care of it, it fails. The overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses are consumed by a tiny minority of chronically ill people. Many of these people do not make choices that are compatible with good health outcomes. The 80/20 rule applies. Caring for people who cannot care for themselves is the purview of charity, not authority.
The concept of freedom is actually much easier to grasp than quantifying harm and well-being. It's pretty simple: Did both parties explicitly agree to the interaction? Can either party opt out without being assaulted or imprisoned? If yes then the interaction is consensual. This is not a hard concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ
Using force to impose non-consensual binding agreements is slavery. Slave holders in fact often used utilitarian justifications for their atrocities. You are not any more entitled to the services of a doctor than of a prostitute. The guiding principle of all human interaction must be consent.
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.
The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives. Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cambodian genocide, on and on the list goes.
There is no mechanism to constrain authority so concentrated. It always goes horribly wrong. Democracies elect genocidal dictators. The only solution that has been proven to work in the medium term is a regard for individual autonomy as sacrosanct and inviolable. I'm concerned at the erosion of this principle.
I would rather have a thousand robber barons and school shooters than one Cultural Revolution. If you're preparing kill an innocent person, no matter your motivation, you're always the bad guy. The ends do not justify the means.
> China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China? Usable smart phones? Social media? Ride hailing? Online shopping? Mass-market electric vehicles? Self-landing rockets? That's all just California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... This isn't a coincidence.
> where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners
You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees. Where it failed to uphold the very principles it espouses. These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong. Also, the harm done by these failures is immeasurably less than the aforementioned genocides.
> I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition? It's not a synonym of suffering.
> what about the right to freedom from treatable illness?
What is the source of this right? Why is your right to be treated more important than a doctor's right to choose whom to treat? Does it just stem from some back-of-the-envelope calculation that we're all better off if we use a bit of force to compel others to pay for your care? Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor? Or to euthanize the mentally ill? Or those who disagree with you? Where does it stop?
> a consequence of the personal choice to smoke
> poverty is a significant cause of substance abuse issues
These are incompatible statements. People have agency, and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it. The difference between forcing someone to do something and convincing them is of kind (categorical), not of degree.
> People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle
I agree, but I'm saying that your good luck to be born into a healthy body, with a capable mind, or into a stable family, belongs to you. It is no more within the purview of authority to redistribute than your kidney.
> "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers
They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefitted us all.
If your ideology would permit the preventable death of a billion people, I'd say it's very bad at preventing atrocities.
> Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, [...]
I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians, but you're completely mistaken. They did not consider the lives of the people they exterminated to have value. If they did, they would not have exterminated them.
In fact, if you examine the actual justifications the Nazis espoused for their crimes, you'll find that they were much more in line with rights theory. Nazis believed that Aryans collectively held certain natural entitlements; that their race had the right and a duty to look out for its own interests above and beyond those of other races. Hence the argument in favour of, for instance, German Lebensaraum. Nazis had plenty of rhetoric justifying the idea that nature had endowed Aryans with a destiny which they were entitled and obliged to fight for, but made no arguments that the Holocaust was somehow intended to minimize net suffering across all of humanity.
> What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China?
Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"; they're a way to squeeze profit from bad independent contracting laws. If you think self-landing rockets are a big leap of innovation, just wait until you hear which country was the first to put a satellite in orbit. And right now, Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media. WeChat is what Elon Musk wishes X could be. TikTok is a cultural juggernaut. Your argument here is weak; innovation can't be measured by "number of domestically famous apps."
As far as Nobel prizes go, China's disproportionate lack of awards is fairly well-studied, and is generally attributed to a particular set of cultural practices in their scientific institutions which conservatively reward and empirical advancements over theoretical ones. I think it'd be a mistake to overgeneralize that. China has put itself at the centre of the global economy; to argue that they must be an economic paper tiger because a lack of Nobel prizes proves they aren't innovative is frankly just denying reality via cherrypicking.
> You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees.
I'm citing cases where powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence, either using the state or circumventing it. You can frame that as "the state failing to intervene" if you'd like, but it still proves my point. The people in power call the shots.
> These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong.
I really don't know where you got this "utilitarian maniac" idea from. People in power don't make decisions according to some set of ethical rules. They act in their own interest and in the interests of their backers. Leaders don't have values—they have power bases. This is a universal constant in democracies, dictatorships, juntas, kingdoms, corporations—every form of organization that exists.
> You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition?
Sure. Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world. But that's just my opinion.
> What is the source of this right?
I'm not a rights theorist; I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights. But if I were, I'd say that it comes from the categorical imperative, or from my interpretation of nature's intent, or wherever you say rights come from.
> Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor?
No, because the math bears out that this is a net negative. Can you imagine the harm that would arise in a society where the state permits people to be abducted and have their kidneys stolen? Society would collapse!
These utilitarian "gotcha" hypotheticals tend to have massively negative utility once you take into account the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
> People have agency and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it
You're dancing right past my argument! Let's backtrack and revisit my injection scenario: If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Here, I'm chemically affecting your decision-making process. Do you have agency? Sure, in a sense. But I'm still unarguably causing your drug addiction. Because of this, "agency" is not a useful concept in ethical analysis. It's a way to exonerate the actor in question from the consequences of their actions. I caused you to use drugs. If I hadn't acted, you wouldn't be on drugs. My actions caused preventable harm. Given that my choice is the one being scrutinized, your agency does not change any of this.
Similarly, we can't let the fact that people have agency exonerate the state from putting them in positions where they're highly likely to make decisions that are harmful. This is still harmful policy. "Agency" and "responsibility" are ways of obfuscating that.
> They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefited us all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this reads to me as an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion and finding principles which support it. You want to preserve the current status quo (because of its perceived propensity to create innovation, which you believe is responsible for prosperity). You attribute the existence of the capitalist status quo to the freedom of "the capable and fortunate" (i.e. capitalists) to conduct business without government intervention in the market. You contrive a set of "natural" rights which permits them to do this and which does not permit anyone to get in their way; a set of freedoms which concentrates power in the hands of capital owners at the expense of the general public.
Also I find it funny that a bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle" while denying coverage to people dying of cancer is simply a tragic sacrifice which must be made in the name of freedom. Surely the wealthy could "tragically sacrifice" some pocket change instead.
Not every event that results in a lot of death is an atrocity. An earthquake is not an atrocity. Your ideology already has resulted in atrocities. Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
> I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians
You missed the rest of the genocides. Are you going to argue that the Cultural Revolution also wasn't utilitarian? What happened to all the sparrows?
Regarding Nazis, their ideology was complicated, but let's take a clear example of medical experiments. Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals. Having united society in a common hatred of a relatively dispensable minority, they proceeded to use this minority as subjects for the most horrific variety of medical experiments. They had good doctors. Many of the outcomes of these experiments have advanced the state of the art, and benefited society as a result.
Nazi society didn't collapse in fear that people would be abducted. It was only Jews, gypsies and other undesirable minorities who were subject to such horrors. Germans were content in the knowledge that their society would benefit, at the small cost of a few Jews. How would you construct an argument that unequivocally refutes this?
> Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"
Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car they otherwise would almost certainly have. I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
> Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media
Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
> [China] must be an economic paper tiger
I never argued this. I argued they're an innovative nonstarter. Yes being the world's factory has economic benefits, obviously. You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
> powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence
Yes, and where they were able to do that the state had failed. And our systems of governance should correct for this. This is their primary and only function.
> this "utilitarian maniac" idea from
Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
Only if you keep things simple. If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine. The banality of evil.
> If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs
Presumably without my consent, you've already violated the core principle I'm defending. I thought this was apparent. So of course you are responsible - you are an agent, and you used force. This example would not apply if you only suggested, or convinced me to use the drugs. In that case it would be me that is fully responsible.
Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force? As I've said, it's a categorical difference.
> Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world
How do you quantify wellbeing? Is a nuclear accident that kills 1000 just as evil as a nuclear bomb that does the same?
> I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights.
I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
> an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion
I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good. You owe nothing to no one. You exchange/associate with others on a voluntary basis. Disputes are resolved via due process. Violence is prohibited. I'm all for expanding who is entitled to be thus free. I'm vehemently against eroding the definition.
> the capitalist status quo
Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom as above described and the right to personal property. I'm not coming out in particular defence of special status for corporations, or even limited liability as a concept. These subjects are, while interesting in their own right, unrelated to individual liberty.
> bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle"
It's not about the rate, it's about what the government is permitted to spend it on. Before US v. Butler (1936) the power given to the government to tax and spend on the "general welfare" of the people was limited to what was explicitly written elsewhere in the constitution. After, the government could basically do whatever it wanted as long as it could be construed to be in the interest of the "general welfare". This was the turning point at which our liberty began to erode, and erode it has. If there is one decision I would reverse, this would be it.
Earthquakes aren't preventable. If you could stop an earthquake and you chose not to, that would be an atrocity.
> Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
Augusto Pinochet was a neoliberal, and he committed all kinds of atrocities. The US genocided the Native Americans, and continued to enact genocidal policies up through the 20th century.
And anyway, which atrocities has my ideology—progressive leftism—been responsible for? The USSR was a conservative authoritarian autocracy, not a progressive democracy, so don't go citing the Soviet Union again. I don't know why you're so fixated on them; you bring them up constantly.
> Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals.
Yeah because the Nazi death camps which made them possible generated so much net well-being. No, this is a half-baked caricature of utilitarianism. Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences, and the consequences of the policies responsible for Josef Mengele's experiments are a massive net negative.
> Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car
It's just a taxi subsidized by VC money. The fact that it benefits you does not make it an innovation.
> Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
Then why are you citing marginal innovations like "what if we reused rocket boosters" or "what if you could order a taxi with an app instead of a phone call" or "what if electric cars had better marketing"?
Besides, social media wasn't a singular invention; it was the product of a shifting communication ecosystem. The internet led to BBSes, which led to forums and blogs, which led to shared software frameworks for these things, which led to hosted solutions for these things, like Geocities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. Paradigm shifts ARE smaller innovative iterations. You fail to understand how technological progress happens.
> You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
What's to address? They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too. I'm not here to defend every choice China has ever made; only to debunk the claim that liberal administrations are inherently successful while non-liberal ones are inherently not so.
> Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good.
Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good. Even you're justifying your case based on the need to create prosperity and prevent atrocities. That doesn't mean they're principled utilitarians.
"Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!" No he didn't. This is a plainly unserious position.
> If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine.
Setting aside that a society would have to be doing much better than "just fine" to offset the harm caused by the mass slaughter of minority groups, what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs?
No, this is a sophistic parody of utilitarianism where you just assert that some nominal benefit outweighs the consequences of whatever harm you want to justify. Any ethical system can be twisted in bad faith to justify bad things; the question is whether such bad-faith analyses can be distinguished from proper rigorous ethical analysis. This is the case here: Your supposed utilitarian argument for organ harvesting doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force?
Sure. Maybe my factory produces a polluting smog that affects your propensity to make whatever choices. Maybe I've bought up all the property in your province except for land next to a toxic swamp that emits mind-affecting gas. Maybe I'm the only corporation who created a vaccine for a deadly new disease, and I choose to add the mind-affecting chemicals to the vaccine because it suits my interests to affect your decisions. There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
> I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
Then how can you condemn a serial killer? His idea of good and evil is just as valid as yours, and apparently you aren't entitled to privilege your own morals.
> I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good.
The reason this definition was created in the 1700s was because the 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete for power with the aristocracy, and they needed an ideology which would justify the consolidation of power in capitalist hands.
> Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom
Exactly backwards. Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism, in the same way that the divine right of kings is an ideological byproduct of feudalism. Capitalism arose because of the shifts in power caused by mercantile imperialism and the industrial revolution. Capitalists created an ideology to justify their own newfound power, and that ideology is liberalism. Power doesn't actually follow ethical rules. Ethics is a toy which philosophers play with to critique society. Power is self-justifying; whoever rules, rules, and the ideology of a ruler is just a set of excuses explaining why they are entitled to have the things they have already taken.
Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. The atrocities themselves are evidence of that. Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal. Also Chile was a resource economy. None of the ideas I have advanced preclude state ownership of natural resources. They would only preclude state seizure of resources already owned by citizens.
> The US genocided the Native Americans
Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens. As I've stated, I agree that everyone (adult) should have equal rights. I only disagree with watering down what those rights are.
> Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences
Isn't this precluded on the ability to predict the future? How do you choose a course of action? How do you weigh the consequences? How do you untangle the medical experiments (which have in fact done a lot of good) from broader Nazi policy? Who do you entrust to make these decisions?
> what if you could order a taxi with an app
As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car. My not having bought one is a pretty substantial change to my day-to-day life. Same goes for Tesla. Strictly because of their company millions of people drive electric cars that otherwise would not. They get credit for that.
> They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too.
Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful. No one was locking sick Americans in cages during COVID. It would not have been possible without facing armed resistance. The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
> what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs
Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely. Aside the obvious lack of individual rights protecting these people, how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
For your argument to be sound, you need to prove that its impossible to construct such a policy under any circumstances. For my argument to be sound all I need to do is prove one case where extrajudicially murdering someone is a net good.
You've actually already conceded this, when you suggested that killing one unwilling person to save a million is a good trade. From here it's just a matter of price. How many individuals would you murder to save a million? Two? Two hundred? Two hundred thousand? How do you measure the harm that such policies cause? The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
> Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good
No, that's the whole point. I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace. Thinking you know the greater good is the pinnacle of hubris.
> Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!
No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
> polluting smog
Again with the natural rights violations.
> There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. I can refuse to take your vaccine. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
> Then how can you condemn a serial killer?
Based on his actions? I'd never condemn anyone who simply daydreamed of serial killing. Nor would I condemn someone who killed a willing victim. The evil comes from violating consent.
> 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete
Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
> Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism
Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism. If you're skilled and lucky enough to accumulate wealth, maybe you'll buy a second and a third fishing boat and hire a crew. On the snowball rolls. All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully, and restrains itself to a reasonable tax for this service. Such capitalism has occurred since ancient times.
America has often suppressed critics. Take McCarthyism. Take the killing of Fred Hampton. I dunno what to tell you. The touted ethics of liberalism are a flourish to disguise the underlying power structure of capitalism. I've been saying this all along.
> Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens.
The striking minors who were shot at Blair Mountain were white men.
Here's my point: You claim that the ideology of the Soviet Union is inherently bad while the ideology of America is inherently good, but atrocities committed by America are always flaws in an inherently just attempt to aspire to a noble ideological goal, while atrocities committed by the Soviet Union always reveal the inherently ignoble underbelly of their ideology. What you fail to understand is that they are the same. Neither nation is/was an ideological project. They are pragmatic exercises in the management of power by a ruling class.
> In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
You think I'm arguing in favour of centralized authority, but that's backwards. I find that capitalism centralizes authority too much. It concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy. It's undemocratic.
Who do I think should wield power? The public, through democratic means, balanced between local and federal governments and trade unions and mass organizations, unhindered by the unilateral amassed power of wealthy capitalists and police-state dictators alike.
> I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace.
Then why have you tried to justify your ideology on the basis that it prevents atrocities? If you really don't care about the greater good, you should be able to say, "I don't care if atrocities happen. Preventing mass human suffering isn't my priority."
> Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful.
The US government cedes power to the private sector. The "death panels" which fearmongers claimed would result from public health care already exist in the form of private insurance assessors.
> The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
Do they have the power to send people to jail for having miscarriages as part of a push to ban abortion and raise the birth rate? Clearly they do, and Republican voters love it.
> As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car.
It IS just taxis, only cheaper, because it was subsidized by VC money.
> Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely.
China is not "just fine." They ethnically cleansed their Uyghur population. They massively suppress political dissent. Authoritarianism is not beneficial to citizens, even if the supply of organs is slightly higher. Besides, murdering healthy people to give their organs to sick people doesn't exactly sound like a way to reduce mortality in your healthcare system.
> No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
You're willing to use force to support your ideology too. Or do you not believe the use of police force to prevent property crimes is justified?
> how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
I don't. I strongly support violating what you consider to be essential property rights in favour of reducing suffering. Rights are not a cornerstone of my ethics.
> How do you measure the harm that such policies cause?
How do you predict the impact of a policy? With political science, of course.
> The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
Nazi leadership was a hot mess. Their nation would have fractured very quickly even if they'd won. And when I say "just fine," I don't mean functional. I mean good. I've already argued through my China point that a functioning society is not necessarily a morally upstanding one.
> Again with the natural rights violations.
If you think disruption of the natural world in ways that harm human life are violations of rights that justify state intervention, surely you must support massive state intervention to stop climate change, right?
> Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
Choices often take place in constraining ecosystems. Who's to say you have non-toxic land? Maybe you grew up here, and the rent is too high anywhere else to leave. This is how ghettos form. In theory, it's possible to leave the ghetto. In practice, it's so difficult that many people cannot.
> (How can you condemn a serial killer?) Based on his actions? The evil comes from violating consent.
But you said "each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid." In his conception, there's nothing wrong with violating consent. "What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?"
If you take morality seriously, you have to privilege your own morality over other people's. Otherwise you have no standing to condemn and combat evil.
> Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
ahaha that's a good one
Yeah existing hierarchies never touched the new world. No indentured servants, no slaves, no poor or rich men. No women. No white or black or indigenous people. Come on.
> Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism.
No, capitalism is not simply the existence of trade. Or rather, I guess you can define it that way, but then you lose any ability to understand how our society works and how it differs from the societies of centuries past.
In our society, capitalists constitute a ruling class. They derive their power from ownership of assets traded on capital markets. This distinguishes them from aristocratic ruling classes, which owned hereditary assets. Liberal ideology sprang up around the time the industrial revolution was shifting power from hereditary aristocrats to new-money capitalists, and it was created to justify this shift in power.
When I say "created," bear in mind that I don't mean the people who thought it up did so cynically. But all sorts of people come up with all sorts of ideas. The reason liberalism caught on was because it suited the interests of powerful people, and they used their power to magnify the idea. This mirrors how Eastern Bloc dictatorships used communist ideas as propaganda to justify their own legitimacy. Regardless of whether the people who originally thought up the ideas were acting in good faith, those ideas were then used as tools by the ruling classes of particular societies.
This pattern happens all throughout history. One big reason why Protestantism got big was because Martin Luther provided a religious justification for kings to oppose the authority of the pope. The birth of Anglicanism is the clearest example of this pattern, created by Henry VIII simply because he wanted to divorce his wife.
> All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully
The "legitimacy" of power is an interesting concept. All power considers itself legitimate. What happens when I declare the power of the American state to be illegitimate? Nothing. It would only matter if I had the firepower to overthrow the state. And at that point, the collapse of the state has nothing to do with legitimacy and everything to do with military might.
And what does "peacefully" mean? Are cops being peaceful when they beat and arrest a criminal?
Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child. Again, there will be some great exceptions of government employees who are truly fantastic, but the general perception I have described still holds.
That you cannot see this obvious fact means
> This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.
these words seem to describe your ideology. And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those. Even in a one-party state like California with progressive zealots in power, governor Newsom figured it is wiser to veto bills which encroach on a parent's rights.
I have personally seen parents care *so much* for their children that they don't see their abusive behavior. The "most caring" parents can turn out to be absolute monsters to their children, and think they're doing the right thing.
Oh please. This could be used to justify anything. I could say that murder is uncommon, and when it does happen, that's "the exception that proves the rule." Moreover, the prison system is corrupt and violent. Therefore we should stop prosecuting murderers.
> Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience.
"In the 2012, Canadian Community Health Survey- Mental Health, 32% of Canadian adults reported that they had experienced some form of abuse before the age of 16. 26% had experienced physical abuse; 10% had experienced sexual abuse; 8% had experienced exposure to intimate partner violence." [1] Clearly this is a massive problem, and I don't accept "well what if we pretended it didn't happen" as a solution. If you believe parents are "universally" caring, I suggest you open your eyes and stop relying on your preconceptions.
Besides, being caring is not the issue. If a caring but misguided parent raised their children in the woods, cutting them off from society and education, that would still be an evil act. I have no interest in allowing extreme moral relativism to get in the way of preventing things which we all agree are evil.
> Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child.
I'm sure faceless bureaucrats don't care much about murder victims either. Again, that's not an excuse to stop prosecuting murderers. A bureaucracy does not depend on the enthusiasm of its participants to serve a purpose.
> And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those.
Which ones? If you've got a referendum to the effect that the public largely does not believe that CPS should ever intervene in families, I'd love to see it. Alas, I suspect you're referring to something much narrower and less relevant.
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/health-promo...
Unless we're going with a reductio ad absurdum panopticon solution, I can't think of any way in which more robust interventions in bullying would be a bad thing.
Who says that's what "free" means? Why should we be free only from physical harm and not emotional harm? You can't claim an ideology is self-evident when it rests on arbitrary definitions of terms.
Besides, your definition is flawed. Does sexual assault count as a physical or an emotional harm, if it causes no physical injuries? There are many forms of sexual assault which cause exclusively emotional trauma. Are we not entitled to be "free" from these?
But don't you think that in some cases we have to show that there is another way to communicate with people, not through humiliation?
Meta comment: people like you can argue on the basis of abstractions because clearly that's all you have to argue from – you obviously have no experience of child abuse. And I'm glad of that, but please be careful putting about your opinions ("...no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.") with Dunning-Kruger boosted confidence.
From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35, came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup, sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm doing my 2nd startup.
Does it fix everything? No.
But it gave me something to do that wasn't TV, and it kept me safe from [redacted] dad and [redacted] mom, I could hole up wherever I wanted and spend hours in them.
You'd be surprised at the things that are lifelines. I had a really hard time explaining to this CS PhD dude who ran a weekend night basketball league for no particular reason how different and better that kept my life the last couple years of high school.
You aren't shifting the whole distribution with one act, but just like the little shifts add up in the negative, they add up in the positive too.
I remember a woman in her 30s running into me in the library lugging around those 7 volume MSDN published sets at 9 years old. She was incredulous and told me to keep it up. That mattered! No one had even noticed me or remarked on it before, gave me pride.
I do however find it under-discussed how many subsequent dice rolls have to at least partially work out for that tenacity, and those little shifts, to be a compounding positive instead of negative, and usefully applied long-term. I'd be curious if you had any major setbacks that you rebounded from after things started rolling successfully forward for you. Now at 32, unemployed with a spotty resume and no prospects, I could really use a &pointer (or reference ;))
Reading through your comment and picturing my own upbringing (poor, abusive, but I guess I got a handle on it and discovered programming through gaming eventually, it does make me sad that although there were hand-me-down computers available that I gravitated toward and experimented with, I could not picture where the nearest library was, and had to Google it now. I'm not particularly resentful though, I did get out, and I'm grateful for that.
I wonder if the books alone would have been enough, but having the books and the physical escape together is kind of incredible, and it's heartening to hear you used the hell out of that space.
Much earlier on, I had some exposure to small motors, and had some mentorship from my extended family on the programming front, but didn't really have a sense of how to build on that; no conception of how to connect motors with gears in a more complex system, no business exposure at all, no ability or framework for learning how to execute on any project, and just a debilitating lack of motivation up until around 17, along with no appreciation for the idea of proving myself measurably; I thought I was capable, but apparently wasn't. I got my little bots for Runescape running though, and that was empowering.
Thankfully, I did and continue to have a similar refuge at the skatepark, which provided me some social and physical benefits for free, much like your basketball league, that a surprising amount of people I meet now don't have. I was nerdy, but couldn't execute, and couldn't see how I'd get there. My first job was a glimpse into how much potential there was available; I made more than my father who I was on good terms with, but then I was laid off for lack of reason to have me on the payroll, which took a positive signal and turned it into hopelessness in a way. I experienced adult job loss my first time trying. It was a great opportunity that I relish in some ways still. I then got another job as a frontend developer, making a bit more, and then burnt out, slowed down, and got fired, partially because I was trying to do CSS things that nobody was paying me to do, instead of just writing some JavaScript to handle dynamic layout and getting the job done. I was too deep in the weeds and got stuck there, but the idea of just cranking out things quickly wasn't stimulating enough and I'd just sit there trying to convince my brain to do the work.
Since then, it's just been gradual pay increases, some early freelance clients that worked out for a while, but at this point I've never held a continuous job for longer than a year and a half, and I feel like the pieces of minor success are hard to stabilize, despite being in a wildly better situation still than I'd ever have imagined in high school, and a hell of a lot of personal inward reflection. My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis. It's hard to be consistent over a long period of time without a manager deciding I was a liability or me just burning out so badly, or a series of unfortunate life events coming together for the negative, and once you're out, it's extremely hard to get back in.
For the last year, I've been working my way through Nand2Tetris, because in a career highlight I landed an actual interview with Apple (that ended up going nowhere, rightfully so because my lowest level knowledge didn't exist) as well as building a small SwiftUI project that may or may not see the light of day, and while I think those are positive moves, it's going to be a hard year ahead that may take me to net zero again unless I can pick up something in general labor for while (Waiting tables would be quite difficult without a solid short-term memory, and don’t believe someone would hire me for that with largely tech experience and random interspersed menial work).
Anyhow, ultimately I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, those little shifts really do add up for either the positive or sometimes negative. I think the longer you can keep them positive, keep the ball rolling forward, the more likely things will work out, and as a society it's crucial we continue making it possible to smooth out the experience of life, especially for people who grow up in volatile situations.
As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think, if you are a generalist and, like me, if you like "laying the pipes" to connect things end-to-end and see the satisfaction of having built the entire thing, embrace it. You should be proud that you can build a complete application though OS infra to database to backend services to frontend UIs and provide the glue of scripts as needed, all by yourself (not shitting on working in a team setting, just knowing that you could). I treat that as a badge of honor. Sure, I can't get super deep into one of these verticals, but then I'm a "builder" and I like the feeling it brings.
Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness. As in, I can set up a database, build an API, wrangle a vps, and then build the front-end, but I don't really have much of a sense of how to do it quickly or by using decoupled cloud service providers, simply because I've never been in that position. Laying the pipes is sort of the essense of productive software engineering in my mind.
It is quite gratifying though to gradually be working my way to understanding how each layer of the hardware software stack work, and I'm starting to see those layers in real-world contexts, such as in getting a fault when compiling Swift, it'll show me the lower levels where the problem occured.
Without any context of the details of the work, one thing that has helped me is to lookout for scope of improvements beyond on the codebase itself. E.g. is there opportunity to provide a UI to the end-users of the code base. If so, since you have touched the codebase to contribute to it, your suggestion to work on those things to improve end-user's life may get accepted and then you have something relatively greenfield to work on. Doesn't always work out that way but sometimes it might. Another approach is building something on the side that you know will be very useful, even though nobody asked for it - helps you figure out the quick way of doing it (what you mentioned) since these are POCs and you can't repeatedly spend too long on them.
No, we can try interventions (e.g. do a big and expensive anti-violence/CCTV/policing campaign in a neighborhood) and record the result.
I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
My point is that there may be no causation from seeing violence to poor educational outcomes. E.g. instead of [violence->bad grades] it's [poverty->bad grades] and [poverty->violence], so the there may be no causal arrow between the seeing violence and the later bad grades.
> How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
Don't get hung up on the genes, it's just an example. Put lead in the water if you prefer.
If your question is genuine then the hypothesis here would be that the lead/genes cause poverty which means needing to live in rougher neighbourhoods.
No one could be living in more extreme poverty than Michael Faraday did. Still he managed to be one of the greatest minds of all times. He read a book called "The improvements of the mind" by Isaac Watts and applied it on himself literally. The book was written for poor people who can not afford themselves books and means to conduct chemistry/electricity/mechanical and biology experiments.
Michael Faraday had to draw and write down everything he learned and imagined meticulously in a military and highly disciplined way where testosterone was expressed in its noble manner: discipline and high focus, no distraction. He wrote himself an extremely dense and technical voluminous book like notes of things he read and noticed while he was still a boy.
The success story of Michael Faraday started only because he was accepted to work for a man selling books. There, Faraday read every single book he saw.
I hope the study mentioned in this article will not be taken seriously by people of modest environments. The victimization mindset is a gatekeeper to success.
He spent 7 years in that library, if I remember. It was much later that Humphry Davy, the chemist, had offered him an internship: again, this chemist, did not hire him to support him but because he met him previously in the book shop where he worked, and many years later, he ad problems with his trainee, so he replaced him with Faraday whom he knew he was too curious and intelligent and cultivated.
So in both cases, Faraday was self taught, and made a huge effort to get the second internship with the chemist (he was rejected few times, if you call this adults supporting him).
And no, Faraday is not known for biology (but I supposed you meant "biography").
About your testosterone question: well, I have nothing to add.
Your risk of bad relationships, emotional dysregulation, physical ailments and diseases, stress, life unsatisfaction, (...) all increase as your ACE score increases.
I keep repeating myself at this point, but trauma is the biggest epidemic with the most negative consequences that isn't being talked about enough.
I would disagree; trauma is an incredibly well-used word in 2024.
I don't see a disagreement. I'll say it again: It's not talked about enough.
The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult.
You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being poor is one of the adverse effects but not all. So that's your control right there.
Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.
The problem here was not trying to infer causality from population-level data, but rather insufficiently controlling that data for correlated variables. If that study had controlled for the income and education of those kids' parents, it would have been much more able to predict the actual impact of giving kids books.
This visual essay thing doesn't present a particularly detailed data analysis, but I wouldn't be surprised if the original study, being properly academic, did dive into this kind of regression analysis.
Most people compartmentalize seeing shooting of a house and killing a child sleeping in their bed in Ukraine in 2024 different from a drive-by shooting on their own street or road rage on a highway killing a child sleeping in bed or car. But we can witness it easily now and most people are taught to detach non-fiction video of "others" and treat it like it is fiction.
It becomes a wealth and power status symbol to move to the "good part of town" and a "safe neighborhood" and create a compartmentalized mindset that what goes on in other areas is "not witnessed" the same. A detachment of compassion for those in the out-groups and a denial that indeed it is reality, it is non-fiction.
unfortunately in the US socialists theories, even the most diluted ones, are almost entirely removed from the public discourse.
These kinds of issues can be better analyzed in the context of the class struggle (or class conflict), of which they are a textbook example.
On a personal level people can get over hardships and have a successful happy life, but statistically, on a societal level, those who are born poor will, more often than any other group, end up being poor(er) adults.
I would posit that it’s a cumulative effect from many generations and mostly heritable.
Are you trying to say that these people are genetically poor?
Having worked with disadvantaged and vulnerable populations I would agree, we only hear about the pulled up by the bootstraps success stories and readily ignore the 99.99% of cases where offspring are worse off financially than their parents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
My experience is it's the opposite and you need to overcome learned helplessness and understand that you can change your life.
Are there any good studies that could tell us which of us is correct?
Speculative. I rather think that it shows them that there are other ways of living and that they have agency to get there.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have.
2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well.
3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
And these two books have good, if somewhat redundant surveys of the research:
- No Two Alike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099821
- Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10266902
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/09/22/food-insecuritys-lo...
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.
$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.
A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.
Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.
Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).
The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...
In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.
I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...
Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.
There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
Western civilization was always a good idea, never achieved, and they have had their day
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.
Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.
Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.
The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things
Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it
It also wasn't very clear to me what I was supposed to be noticing in the visualizations that was related to whatever text was currently popped up. In the end I just watched the youtube video that was linked to at the very beginning and it made everything much clearer to me.
In other news, I hate that trend of scrolling to animate to get content.
It's the same cohort of people all the way through and each little character moves according to the survey they filled out each year
I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.
The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.
I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.
We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.
When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.
I'd like to go a little further and suggest that more recently there's been a trend of not holding the adults accountable either.
Instead of trying to improve outcomes for all, we seem to have decided to choose the path of collective failure.
Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights.
Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts.
This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.
Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system.
For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well as they did before with a 20th the staff.
At this point everything is so bad I'd support sortition for every public managerial position. You can't do worse than what we have today.
Thereafter, I have only felt (perhaps unfairly) mild contempt for the perennial whining of US critics who blame low funding for educational failing in the public schools. In my opinion the blame lies elsewhere, starting with the family.
For most of school, all you need is paper and pens and a place where to meet. A notebook costs a dollar. You can also do quite a bit of lab science prior to college at home, and music only adds the cost of the instrument.
I have done tutoring in parks and coffee shops and in some of those sessions seen more learning than the most expensive classroom.
It's about the kids and the teachers, not the campus.
If you want a really really good school at a really low price, eliminate the building and all support functions other than hiring new teachers, and redirect all of the extra money to teachers salaries. Then just meet in libraries, parks, coffee shops, and the houses of parents and teachers.
99% of the outcome comes from the teachers (being competent) and the students (being motivated).
Go to school, get good grades, don't borrow money, look after your health, get a job, be polite, pay your taxes - these are all the fundamentals of a good culture and are massively predictive of success. Lots of this advice is millennia old. It's not the role of a liberal government to culturally indoctrinate its people.
Of course if we go back to a one income family women will be rather upset that they can't work any more.
So fuck the kids I guess.
Cool, I learned a new word. Thanks.
At any rate a quick google search give you all the answers you need: https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/k-12-s...
Is the whistle you neglected to source.
If you think that every major project from federal to local government being delivered over budget, behind schedule and with fewer capabilities than promised is a dog whistle I have a perfectly functional bridge in Baltimore to sell you.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spen....
But the outcomes are quite poor.
How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes?
In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimately bankruptcy if it can't work. Where in the public sector is anyone held accountable for failure? When will we accept that simply throwing more money down the pit won't solve what is a multi-faceted issue that primarily isn't about money?
Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.
https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/97801....
> I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care.
With:
> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore
is a truely weird logic to me. Is it related ? Or are you offering to let kids get credit lines and suspend them over their mismanagement ?
That could actually be a great idea TBH. And while we're at it, adults could also get suspended or have to attend additional courses, instead of getting thrown into debt spirals.
like what problems?
Does that contradict real data that shows holding kids back and suspending them makes them more successful?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03055698.2014.93...
The same holds for suspensions.
https://edsource.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Noltemeyer_W...
When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me. I also think alternate school is a reasonable answer for kids who are violent or have been otherwise expelled. I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
The only thing I ruined for other students when I was in class was forcing them to look at my stupid haircut. My punishments were for truancy. I went to school, but spent all of my time in the computer lab because with severe ADHD without any academic support rendered class pointless. One crusty old Korean War vet teacher flat-out told me he "didn't believe in IEPs," and the administrators refused to even address the problem. I never once started a fight, brought drugs to school, or had a gun. While people found me pretty intimidating looking at first, I had a genuinely warm, mature, and mutually respectful relationship with damn near anybody I interacted with. No students really had a problem with me, but the adults actually enjoyed interacting with me more. Most teachers, administrators, librarians, etc would stop me for a quick chat to catch up, talk about current events, or whatever if we passed each other. I didn't ruin shit, and neither did a hell of a lot of other kids that were punished because the school didn't hold up their end of the bargain for academic accessibility.
> When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me.
Whoa there straw man. It's completely ridiculous to lump academically struggling kids or kids with run-of-the-mill behavioral problems in with kids that bring deadly weapons to school. Nobody is arguing that kids who bring guns into school should be sent on their way after a stern talking to.
Also, nobody said that alternative schools weren't on the table. I, myself, graduated in a night school program designed for failing high school students who'd been successful at work, and it was a phenomenal experience. They gave us a lot more leeway and expected us to do schoolwork mostly independently while working at least 20 hours per week, and we'd fail the entire term for all classes if we missed a single assignment. It was precisely the lack of patronizing meddling you're advocating for that allowed hundreds of kids to graduate through that program.
> In both cases
Kids are generally held back because they're struggling with the material, not because they're being disruptive. How exactly does holding a kid back help the system if there's any expense to the child?
> I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.
I'm glad you think so, but that doesn't actually counter any of the data presented.
Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
I don't actually think we are. If you've made a point I haven't addressed, I'm happy to address it.
> Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Did you read the paper in the comment you replied to? Because empirical evidence doesn't support that.
> Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
Still betting you didn't read those papers. Suspension/expulsion is absolutely one of multiple ways to remove a kid from the other kids. Unfortunately, it's one that necessarily removes any help or actual behavioral correction the kid could have gotten, and they're waaaay more likely than most other kids to need more intensive help. Suspension is a codified way for schools to abdicate their responsibility to manage the environment within the schools. So you responded to it? Great. You're not the ruler by which everyone is measured, and the data doesn't support your anecdote.
> I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
Zero people here are arguing that kids with disruptive behavioral problems should be in classrooms with mainstream kids. You're the one saying that suspensions et al are the best way to solve that. They weren't when I was in school, and they aren't now. Schools not having the funding or the staff to do what they need to do doesn't turn a harmful non-answer into an answer, or make it less harmful.
> We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
Sure. For most of the past 30 years we've been indiscriminately handing out suspensions and failing to offer support for kids that need it. My entire high school career happened squarely within the past 30 years. Maybe we should try looking at the data we have rather than just saying what feels right and doubling down on the back in my day tough love nostalgia.
B) If a student has a consistent enough problem with antisocial behavior that they require constant intervention, they should be in a non-mainstream classroom or school that can address that problem while still fulfilling their responsibility to educate them.
C) There's a whole lot of punishment doled out in schools for non-violent conduct violations. Caught skipping class? Caught vaping in the parking lot? Dress code violation? Caught copying someone's test? Caught using a phone multiple times when you're not supposed to?
You seem to be deliberately implying that questioning any suspension means you support violence in school, which is completely ridiculous. Everything in life can be turned into a black-and-white issue if you ignore enough details and context.
That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.
Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?
Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.
Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.
I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.
Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.
Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.
Did you get taught how credit applications work, how banks determine credit worthiness, how to depreciate an asset, how to calculate lifetime cost of a vehicle, how to draft a bill of materials for a project? All things everyone should be able to do. It’s the lack of these skills and the cost of living crisis that creates ripe markets of ignorant people to exploit for profit through their financial mistakes.
Your school offers home ec? Mine dropped it forever ago. Only the trade school kids learned anything more hands on AP chem.
Cars are more reliable sure, but less maintainable in a home garage. I didn’t bring them up because the best argument I have for cars is repealing cafe and taxing cars annually with a multiplier for wheelbase squared x miles.
I put a percentage of my income into an investment account automatically every payday and forget about it. What I have left is my spending money. That's very simple and tends to work for me.
You get the same info as your spreadsheet, but without any work.
Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.
> You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.
Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved.
It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).
I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.
Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.
Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.
I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
Well isn't that just awesome parenting.
I'm pretty sure he is equally stubborn and hot headed as his dad if not more so. Now that I think about it, he even believes in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. ha-ha
I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.
I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.
1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.
3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.
You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.
These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
(edit - formatting)
This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged children because we neglect to introduce them to their inherent agency in conflict.
There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say about you isn't either. Again, these should come from parents.
In the adult world, you'd just call the police.
In the child world, sometimes you tell the adults, but they don't do anything, and the abuse continues. That's at least my experience with bullying in primary school. "Conflict resolution" and such virtue-signalling buzzwords don't work against violent bullies.
I do not think you understand conflict resolution and should probably study it a bit before speaking so authoritatively. The basic gist of it is to identify the root cause of contention and identify the best practical solution. Most people bad at managing conflict fail to correctly identify the cause and empathize with the opposing view. Keep in mind - you do not need to agree with a perspective to understand it and failure to understand the other party is a responsibility shared jointly regardless of righteousness.
Sometimes the only resolution to violence is (threat of) superior violence. If you’re a child and a group of kids attacks you, that’s “adults resolving the situation”. Anything else is a failure of the schooling system.
These are all things kids need to have the freedom to learn to resolve without a parent just jumping in all the time.
Such conflict resolution can come handy in adulthood for things like dealing with angry/complaining customers, miscommunications causing arguments, professional disagreements etc. I've seen so many people who are completely unable to do conflict resolution of any sort, everyone's always walking on eggshells around them knowing that any conflict is going to end up blowing up into full "Karen"-esque argument.
Find and exploit their weakness publicly thereby robbing them of their power.
Conflict resolution provides the potential victim with agency to intervene in a situation on their own behalf. Of course, this doesn't preclude the option of calling the police. Why not expand someone's options for keeping safe?
We deal with a lot more conflict than you're accounting for.
Someone can be shouting at a waiter at a restaurant and people around will try to deascalate and help or consolate the waiter.
Af short fight breaks ? People close enough to the participants will act, and bystanders might stay as witnesses to not make it a "he said she said" situation etc.
In general people aren't playing heroes but will do a ton of small and cumulative effort to make tensed situations not expand further into chaos.
This is funny because you'd be hard pressed to find someone from a low income neighborhood calling the police.
Aderrien Murry, 11, called 911 for help at his home in Indianola, Miss., last weekend. But after police arrived, an officer shot him in the chest. The boy is recovering, but his family is asking for answers — and they want the officer involved to be fired.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/26/1178398395/mississippi-11-yea...
A Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a 27-year-old woman who had called 911 to report that she was under attack by a former boyfriend, police officials and lawyers for the victim’s family said on Thursday. Records show the deputy had killed another person in similar circumstances three years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/21/los-angeles-...
And this is just 2 random cases from 2023
In the low income neighborhoods near me, in which my sister lives (of her own free will, despite other options) due to chronic cognitive issues, the police are visiting constantly. People in low income neighborhoods call the police all the time. Surveys show that most low income people in dangerous neighborhoods are in favor of more, better policing, not less.
I recall trying once, it got to the principal level. Nothing happened. The kids got a talking to by the principal, but their parents did not care. Child bullies have parents who do not care what their kids do.
Fighting back works - against a single bully. If there is more than one, they will make the fight unfair. After all, it is about dominance and not proving yourself.
Bullies eventually usually grow out of it. That is the fix in my experience.
(Or everyone's, if they end up in top management.)
The worst ones I recall from my childhood are mechanics and laborers and a few are web devs.
No, you can't be a bystander, even if it might be dangerous.
De escalating is about dealing with angry people, especially people who aren’t usually violent.
Habitually violent bullies aren’t doing it out of anger, they’re using violence to provoke and manipulate.
Good luck with that.
> Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being murdered / assaulted means stores close down.
There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing what we're doing. Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls seem uncalled for given the data.
Weird conclusion to jump to. GP did not suggest grocery stores staffed under threat of jail time anywhere.
Better public transit benefits everyone. Better urban design favoring walkable neighborhoods benefits everyone. Better zoning allowing neighborhood shops at street level benefits everyone.
Sure, as someone who is raising a family in a city, I completely agree. But the reason why stores leave is invariably safety issues.
In recent years there have been high profile closures of big brand stores in major metro areas for exactly these reasons. Proposals to address grocery store closures include regulating them in San Francisco with a lengthy 6 month notice period and other requirements. In Chicago the idea has been floated for government run grocery stores.
While the jump to call such moves "the moral equivalent of slavery" is a bit extreme, they do exist in the realm of compelled behavior and against liberty. In the case of SF it's with regard to making it more difficult to exercise the decision to close a store, which may require the operator to take financial losses for longer and incur additional compliance related costs. In the case of Chicago, it's using tax payer money (which is collected through threat of incarceration) to operate a service that's traditionally provided voluntarily by a private actor because it yields them benefit (profits).
https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2024/01/31/grocery...
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...
Did home insurance availability increased arsons in any significant number?
Or am I mis-understanding how home insurance would incentivize arson
Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the nuances.
I can't imagine anyone in a major US city spending 3 hours. Maybe rurally, but even the so-called 'food deserts' in a big city like LA ... it's just a few miles.
At the end of the day, look... my mother taught in inner-city public schools. I know the problems these kids have. They're given meals and such (and they should be), but that is not going to solve a cheating father, a mother too depressed by said cheating to lift a finger to do anything (and maybe whoring herself out or doing drugs to damp the pain?), and a family that sees the child as a cash bag. I mean what are we possibly to do? You give the food and still the child doesn't get it.
I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
1:15 each way on the bus and 30min in the store
> I feel these policies end up failing because the policy makers are from whole families (And are likely extremely socially conservative in their own life) and can't imagine anything so debased.
I feel like you don't know any better than these policy makers you are dismissing.
1. Healthcare is where you can see a doctor.
Source: I actually live there
The hospital seemed functional, at least.
That doesn't sound plausible. Got some examples?
There's a shopping center with multiple markets and Walmart and Kohl's that the bus comes up along then turns away from on the way to work; I can use this as an example of shopping from home, as I can probably get 90% of my living supplies there. Ralphs, Target, Walmart, Kohls, Trader Joe's, etc are all here. The bus transfer here is not an easy one, though, as the bus timings overlap going in both directions, meaning you have to leave early and get back later (about 1 in 4 trips I can transfer without waiting. _Not_ good odds with an hourly bus).
0:00 5 minutes: walk to bus stop 1.
0:05 5 minutes: wait for the bus (best to be at the stop early in case your bus is early, though this bus is usually exactly on time)
0:10 10 minutes: take the bus to stop 2.
0:20 3 minutes: cross the street to get on the other bus
0:23 12 minutes: wait for the next bus 2, the previous one left while you were crossing (yes, seriously)
0:35 10 minutes: take bus 2 to stop 3 where the shopping center is
0:45 90 minutes: cross the parking lot to get to the store (5~10 minutes), then try and get all your shopping done in under 40 minutes so you can take the next bus back home. Nope, today you had to go to the supermarket pharmacy, which is a 20 minutes walk across the shopping center, wait for your meds, _and_ walk back to the cheaper market to do your shopping as well.
2:15 30 minutes: shopping is done a bit early. Yay. You have time to walk back to the bus stop and wait in the sun until the next bus 2 comes. Yay.
2:45 10 minutes: Bus 2 comes. Take it back to the transfer bus stop.
2:55 15 minutes: Cross the street again, and wait for bus 1 so you can get home
3:10 10 minutes: take bus 1 home.
3:20 15 minutes: Now you're a block away from home, carrying bags of groceries, _and you had to get off 2 stops early so you could use a crosswalk_, because there's no crosswalks on this street and people don't stop. Walk home.
3:35. Tadah. You're home. Just a bit over 3.5 hours!
Unfortunately, since you don't have a car, you're limited to buying what you can carry. I hope you're ready to go shopping again later this week! You have family? Oh, well then you'll be shopping again 3 times this week. Maybe even 4 times. I hope you like waiting in the sun/rain, LA Metro only puts up cover where they can make money off advertising, so all the bus stops we've used only have benches (except one, but that one's further away).
If all you needed was medication, you'll probably want to get your shopping done anyways, as this is otherwise a > 2hr trip just for that (remember, bus 2 is hourly, so you're spending an hour at the shopping center _minimum_, including walking to/from the bus stop).
There's five other stores across the street from the shopping center that you'd like to check out sometime, including a new grocery store, but it takes 20 minutes to cross the shopping center, then probably another 10 to cross the street and the parking lot in front of the other stores. Add the time spent in these stores, and you've just added another hour to your shopping trip. This is only _partially_ offset by crossing to the supermarket pharmacy, as that supermarket is nowhere near the corner, and keep on kind that anything you have to carry will slow you down more.
-----
Buses:
- Bus 1 goes EW near home, turns NS between home and the transfer point (about 10 minutes), then goes EW again.
- Bus 2 goes EW, turns NS between the shopping center and transfer point, and goes EW again.
- There _was_ a bus that went NS along the east side of the shopping center (which also would have dropped me off at home, cutting out the need for a second bus entirely), but this bus route was changed in 2019 to turn away from the shopping center once it gets to the NE corner.
- There's a bus that goes EW along the other side of the shopping center, but that's not helpful.
-----
You're forgetting about just how much convenience your car gives you _besides_ the ability to get to and from the store.
- You don't have to wait for transfers or make what is effectively two trips to get somewhere.
- You don't have to cross parking lots or go in and out of stores from the street (you can park up near the store, then drive to the other side of the shopping center).
- You can make a quick 5 minute stop on the way home without increasing your travel time by a full hour (because the bus only comes hourly).
- You don't have to wait outside.
- You don't have to hope that the bus was cancelled without notification (two weeks ago I was lucky to get a ride, as my once-an-hour bus was straight up cancelled without prior warning; if I didn't use the former-official Transit app to check times, I wouldn't have known, and would have been waiting at the stop for 80 minutes like one of my less fortunate coworkers did, or taking a different once-an-hour bus home with extra transfers and lots of waiting, to only get home ~10 minutes earlier)
- You don't have to only buy as much as you can carry on a single trip (I work in a grocery store, people can and do fill _multiple_ shopping carts to avoid having to go shopping a second time in a week. People can and do purchase groceries for elderly relatives they don't live with).
- if there's a detour, it only costs you the time it takes to make said detour. If the bus has to make a detour and you have tight timing, you might miss your transfer, adding 10-60 minutes to your commute.
- You're not dependent someone being willing to pick you up. When I was in college, a full bus would often just go right by without stopping, since there wasn't enough room.
- You're not dependent on your fellow passengers being rule-abiding or polite. Last year the bus driver stopped for an entire 50 minutes at a high school because the kids weren't being safe or quiet. Not that they're ever quiet, or that a full bus in general is quiet, but they were throwing condoms across an overcrowded bus and yelling, and the bus driver understandably didn't want to deal with it when _he couldn't close the door_, so he stopped and said those past the yellow line on the floor needed to get off and wait for the next bus. Instead, they made fun of him, continued talking loudly, and those near the door who shoved their way into a full bus refused to move. (The next month or so was _very_ quiet on the bus)
- general garbage is everywhere. The filth that people leave behind when they cram into a bus and then leave. The noise of competing music playing against each other. Having the choice to either get up and lose your seat, or sit with someone's butt in your face because another busy bus broke down and yours is the first/closest bus going in the same direction.
- All you want to do is go home and go to sleep, but you don't want to get the bus in your bed and this sweaty dude's been sitting here talking in your ear for 15 minutes now and you wish you hadn't offered him a seat, and as soon as he leaves you realize the person behind you is yelling on the phone and now you have a headache.
Debatable.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316730121
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problems severity.
Yeah, no kidding. But why are they awful to begin with? I'd hazard that it's because families have been asleep at the wheel in teaching their children to be good citizens. The change for something like this comes bottom-up, not top-down.
You could try to boil it down to economics, but that's misguided. The markets are a terrible tutor of morality and accountability.
Fix the families, fix the society. Hold parents accountable. Teach morality in the schools. It's not slavery to do that. You're not harming anyone by teaching children to have a modicum of respect for their communities, elders, authority figures or eachother.
Look at the "morality" of America's wealthiest and most influental citizens, and how rarely they are ever held accountable for anything.
Our nation has been rotting from its head for decades, and telling the plebes to be better citizens is pissing into a firestorm and thinking you'll accomplish something.
Debatable.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316730121
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problem.
We could provide better public transportation so that people could more easily travel to the grocers.
We could provide incentives for grocery stores to open in underserved areas.
I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then, poverty in China decreased by about 85%.
You edited your comment. I believe it originally contained the text above.
I'm assuming the edit was due to the fact that the statistic was based on absolute numbers and was not corrected for US population growth.
I also think the US vs China comparison is basically apples to bowling balls. It's "easy" to lift a giant percentage of the population out of poverty when a large swath of your population is in poverty.
Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
Not entirely true. When you look at the decrease of China's extreme poverty, it is almost linear up until the numbers got to essentially 0. Even if this were true, it should be easy for the US to lift people out of poverty, given that there is a huge number of poor people in America.
> Not saying the US doesn't deserve some criticism here, but your comparison was not apt.
My point more broadly is that China has spent 40 years going in the right direction and the west has spent 40 years stagnating and deteriorating. At any rate, my main qualm was with the text "and [our economic system] is still doing it [lifting people out of poverty] today". This is not true by any metric.
How does one export manufacturing? It is undeniable that that China has benefited from science and innovation, but these I would consider to be the fruits of all mankind. If anything, the west has tried its hardest to keep knowledge from China. China has only advanced by systematically breaking intellectual property law that the west set up with the intention of hoarding knowledge to ourselves.
> its not socialism pulling China out of poverty
As you would expect, since China isn't really socialist. That said, there is certainly something unique about China's approach that has cause it to be much more successful than many other countries.
> As western cash is exchanged for Chinese products, its no surprise then that as poverty has waned in China is has been waxing in the west?
It should be a surprise. You cannot eat money. China consistently runs a trade surplus. That means that they give other countries more than they get in return. It is surely a great critique of the western system that China giving us stuff for free made us poorer. That the rich and powerful of our own countries discarded their citizens in favour of cheap Chinese labour. And so the benefit of all this free stuff which China has given us is focused into the hands of the few, rather than the many. This is sad, but not inevitable.
> The same economic systems you praise resulted mass starvations due famine killing millions in the process of trying to raise them out of poverty
Exactly. Just because a system lifts people out of poverty doesn't make it good. Yet the western system fails to even lift people from poverty.
By not doing it locally and purchasing it from another entity like China? they mean the export of the action of manufacturing and the associated benefits
I suppose "coming up with the idea for something" is a good enough definition for exporting the manufacture of it, but it seems much simpler (and less egotistical) to say that "China used our scientific discoveries to advance itself" instead of "we exported manufacturing to China".
I mean... is it? I can think of a few times that something previously expensive is suddenly made very cheap, and there's always a class of people that really don't do that well.
The closest situation I can think of is when the west was dumping food in africa [0][1]. Which made it harder for local farmers to make a living and made the food problems worse.
Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production. And, in theory, China might be able to, in theory, do that. I don't know their elite culture well enough to say otherwise. But modern Western elites definitely seem too short sighted to give that sort of power, so the critique seems like it falls flat.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14iht-food...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2006/10/13/6256274/u-s-european-subsidie...
Obviously this will be somewhat true in the short term, but there is no reason these people can't just retrain and start doing something different.
> Unless you're talking about switching to an autocratic system where the elites can turn down cheap things in exchange for the long term benefits of local production.
It wouldn't have to be autocratic. For instance, our system is not an autocracy, yet we chose to move manufacturing to China. Not every system that makes decisions is autocratic. People could just as easily vote to do something democratically if they know it is in their own good.
But consider what is really happening in these places. They have an economic system which makes decisions about the allocation of resources. In response to the addition of new resources, these systems decided to decrease production of local resources below existing levels, and hence make people poorer as a result. The issue here is purely one of distribution and management. Suppose in the trivial case of food being dumped in Africa, said food was instead sold below market rates, and the income from this was used to subsidise farms to bring their outputs to the same price as the aid. Local manufacture remains worthwhile, prices decrease, and supply increases. Everyone benefits.
I don't think it should be crazy to envision an economic system stable enough to allow people to benefit when you give them things for free. Especially since in the future, everything will be produced for free by machines. At that point, I should like everyone to live in luxury, rather than for everyone to be poor.
Are they roughly equivalent, so that you are comparing similar things?
I think it would add a lot of clarity to your comparison to name the metrics you are using.
But that point is a couple decades out of date by now and even then the situation was more complex than just "people in rich countries want cheap products, people in poor countries make them, therefore people in poor countries get richer, and people in rich countries get poorer".
You know money is just paper, right? When we give China paper in return for something of value from their country, that is a bad deal for them unless they can trade the paper and get some actual good in return. China runs a trade surplus, which means they give away more than they get back, so it is actually a bad deal for them. It's one that makes their country poorer because they are giving away more than they get back. Almost all economists agree that China's trade surplus is bad for its economy, is even worse for its citizens, and should be reduced.
People in China were lifted out of poverty through the creation of manufacturing centres. These cities and factories were built by the Chinese, not by the west. It is ridiculous for us to try and take credit for their advancement when all we have done is exploit them.
Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your points.
I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who already struggle with math.
Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly should be done, is to create interactions between the kids who have poor situations with the kids that have good situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support to have a system where kids from the good side of town interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side product of the kids who have better situations being able to socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy, person to person.
I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.
I do like your thoughts on things the government could change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these things but have perverse incentives to keep the population stratified. This country would financially crumble without the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7 generations, if not more.
I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is actually a primary component of most govs immigration strategies.
Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...
To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
I don't think that's the topic at all.
I grew up in a high-ACE environment. Money was mostly not the problem, and to the extent that it was, relatively small amounts were what made the difference.
If anything, tackling these problems would result in massive savings. One of the core points of this is that Alex's childhood resulted in life-long impairments: lower education, lower economic productivity, higher personal and societal costs. That costs us both directly (lower output, lower taxes) and indirectly.
So the question I'd like everybody to sit with: If it would be cheaper long-term, why aren't we already solving these problems? Who benefits, and how, if we keep creating Alexes?
To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?
There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield? Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?
Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income, no matter how high an income you seem to get?
It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the consumers.
As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news flash - that money comes from society. The house that once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4 million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI money printer.
That's where all the money is going.
Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive people to trade with consumer, in which case the inflation is cancelled out by the increased real productivity.
No it didn't.
Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive
Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor
Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan)
Just throwing money at a problem without attaching strings or directing how it's used is administrative complacency
https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/165
But for stuff that requires actual care like your counterexample, yeah it's 100% a government problem
Maybe for crime, diet, civic engagement, it's more of an education problem
There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then there is also different ways of how we think about something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
Is it effective?
Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?
(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.
>Give a job or a good life to anybod
This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.
>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to
Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.
That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:
Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.
The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.
Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime. It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect the vulnerable from those who might harm them.
Your view appears to say "society" (the police?) should "protect" children from their own parents, if they are deemed "bad"? The line for police intervention should probably not include "living in a bad neighborhood" or "being poor". Those strategies are tried pretty often by evangelicals who steal poor children from vulnerable countries/populations, yet are perceived as bad by most people.
If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
But if they could, they most certainly should. Preventing murder is good, just as preventing a bad childhood is good.
> Your view appears to say "society" (the police?)
The police are (or should be) an extension of society. They are a part of the government, which in a democracy means the represent the will of the people, and hence they are society manifest. There are other manifestations of society that can help these children (schools, social services, etc). I am obviously not suggesting that the police become child catchers and round up all children of poor people.
> If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
From my perspective, there is no "fault". Blaming people for things is unproductive. There are bad things which might happen, and things we might do to prevent them from happening. If we can sever this great chain of injustice of which you speak, where poverty and suffering are transmitted from parent to child like a disease; aught we not take that action? It is even in our best interest to do so, as those children who live better lives will go on to contribute more in taxes and more towards the betterment of society.
Perhaps they get lucky and grow up in a good adoptive family. But for the others there are a few things that are quite difficult to replace.
A democracy isn't a manifested society, it is a compromise of everyone involved. Ideally at least, the reality is more gray and even in a democracy a government doesn't have the legitimacy to do everything it wants. Further its ability to evaluate which children would benefit from more direct support is limited.
So perhaps you need not only look at the children and instead try to improve the lives of the parents as well.
Clearly. It was other people who started suggesting that the children of poor parents should be forcibly put up for adoption. I can't fathom why anyone would think this is a good idea or even worth talking about.
Nothing that should be decided by some sensibilities du jour.
You're pushing rhetoric, not reality. Which is fine, but I won't let you lie.
This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.
For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.
But, sadly, many people feel morally injured by spending money to proactively help adults who should be eating their own boots or whatever, and so it is less of a sacrifice to spend 5 times the money on jailing them instead.
And the industries that could benefit from an expanded workforce are aligned with the pro-jail bloc for political gain.
But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improvement units" per dollar?
Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"
Of course reading his books would be the best source but for now here's a link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc
I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to split and one was allowed to determine the split and the other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing. A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because of a sense of being slighted.
Making rich people happier makes me more unhappy that it makes them more happy, so by your calculus it's not worth helping them.
See how quickly this line of reasoning runs aground?
The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?
> I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
What do you mean huge number of people in many adverse experiences making it to college? If you look at the graph from 2011 with highest qualification obtained. There's probably less than 1 in 8 of the many adverse effects that obtained a college degree, while about 50% of the no adverse effects kids did. Those are huge differences.
Did you expect that none of the many adverse effects kids make it to college? That's the nature of statistics with humans, yes some succeed but the probabilities are so much different.
Thats the wrong question -
How many adolescents and citizens of the future are we willing to sacrifice for our comfort today.
It will come back to byte us in the ass, condemn adolescents to life of poverty today, and get lost productivity, crime and political instability.
Push it far enough and get French Revolution
Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a personal belief, not some sort of universally acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate is moot anyway.
No it isn't "opportunity", there has never been as much opportunity in the world to move up the social hierarchy as it exists now.
The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.
FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??
If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.
It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:
> You have to balk when anyone says....
and
> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...
And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.
To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)
^ https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life. Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate? If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
Isn't that basically the gist of TFA?
Can't find any appropriate acronym
You can be the same person but different because of those experiences.
The questions you pose are good questions, but they can't be answered by this presentation. Even if you were to ask a much more "fundamental" or "simple" question, like "How much should we sacrifice for sanitation?", the answer is not clear, as it will vary by location and other criteria.
This presentation can't answer the questions, but it can cause us to ask them. Let's remember these questions and take them forward into our local communities, and try to focus more on local solutions, and less on one-size-fits-all.
Causality isn't easy to establish. Correlation is insufficient.
Note, too, I am unfamiliar with the literature cited by the Infoanimatedgraphic.
If we bring back wealth taxes "we" probably wouldn't have to sacrifice much if anything (not sure if your net worth is > 20 million)
Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.
And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe 30% for multiple adverse experiences.
... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting that the older they get, the less the differences in income and other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.
- I repeated 7th grade
- Was suspended Multiple times
- Lived in 11 different houses
- Lived with a teacher for two months
- Good friend murdered
- Mom of good friend murdered by their Father
- Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly
I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I got out
What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.
Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being that way?
No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So unless you believe government = collective community then there’s nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen and conservatives keep standing on our necks
Also, this is a genuine question, how much of the chaos in your life was due to financial hardship? Do you think just having more money would have lessened the chaos?
Impossible to tell unfortunately but it doesn’t seem like it in my case
What exactly would we be "collectively sacrificing"?
Something like, 1% higher taxes?
Same taxes, but the use of some of the public money currently massively wasted in all kinds of endless sinks?
- Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time, clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to form different charts;
- Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
At the top of each section header (No adverse, Some adverse, ect.) they could include a section count + percentage of each category they're showing.
As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable to say “after you are either a non college graduate with a number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2 years of post-college experience.
I hear you, though, it’s hard to sort people into buckets.
As another college non-graduate (although I'm currently going back to school). Have we ever figured out which way causation goes on this one? Does college actually have that much benefit, or do people who are motivated tend to go to college more?
People with support to go to college are more likely to go to college, less about motivation.
I think there needs to be more support for students failing/dropping out of college.
Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...
Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.
The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.
I understand the motivation of trying to (literally) humanize the data points, but it would have been much more successful if there were vertical groupings as well as horizontal ones.
Right now it's 3 buckets + colors, but you could literally make it monochrome, make it an actual grid, then you could see which cells are completely empty, which is impactful.
Plus, that whole section seemed to be sorted in an incoherent way.
This is usually the case for most stories published in The Pudding.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.
The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.
"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.
I think in this case, it seems they did pretty well. They're not lumping in "people failed to use their pronouns" into it, but things like gun violence, violent crime, and bullying. Some kids might be made of tougher material and shrug that off better, but even for them if that's not an adverse experience, I don't know what could be. It seems like the researchers are using an appropriately conservative definition.
> Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around.
Yeh, but now we're confusing propaganda that was designed to encourage women to leave abusers for something of statistical significance about another matter entirely. If there are more men who would have made the kids' lives better than there are men so dangerous it's good they were separated from their children, then it doesn't matter that some are bad. The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor is it deterministic that a single father or mother is strictly worse off than an intact family with an abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would divorce, but we can't factor for that.
> Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is considered okay in one culture but not in another, the question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen, where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture and not in another.
https://www.acesaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ACE-Que...
[edit]
Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which is slightly closer to what I expected.
Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of millennials.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1802108/
This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
You have probably heard reports that teenagers are having less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're 30-40 year olds.
13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%.
Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just hoping someone here has the answer.
As a side note, I have personally encountered large number of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a fractional value is foreign to them.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/health/millennials-less-sex-t...
I, a millennial, was 30 by then.
My younger brother, a millennial, was only 23.
Millennials are people who were born between 1981 and 1996. Some millennials were having sex when other millennials were toddlers. I would call it poor reporting to call out a 15-year wide cohort when the research being reported spans a narrow 4 of those years.
I'm one of the luckiest people alive because I live in this country, and was always able to surround myself with supportive, positive and forward thinkers.
I don't know why I shared this. Maybe because I don't care to blame society for my adverse experiences. Through those experiences, I learned to lead. I learned to listen. I learned to value and appreciate. I learned to live.
You and I have very different ideas about what's fair.
Considering we seem to be discussing the USA, the richest nation in human history, this seems very unfair to me. It seems to me at minimum we should easily be able to remove squalor conditions no matter how little someone works.
While I’d agree, you’ve read the OP’s comment in a significantly darker light than I did, or than I can get the text to support
Just that what worked for him might not work for many others. I’m still happy to hear he did ;)
I meet so many tech bros that victim blame. "the mom working two jobs has at least an hour at night. She can use that time to take free coding classes, teach herself to code, upskill and get a high paying programming job. It's not easy but it's possible." Some variation of that said to me so many times. "my family grew up poor and I figured it out! My dad came to this country with five dollars in his pocket etc etc."
I think one or two were telling the truth from all angles. Most were telling the truth as they knew it, but didn't realize that the fact that their parents were able to afford a house in the good school district already gave them a significant leg up, or other random privileges they have over others.
But what everyone seems to overestimate is their own willpower when they aren't just working many hours - which many of us on this forum are used to from startup life - but working for those hours for 7$ or less per hour, while facing humiliation and depredation every day at however many jobs being worked (by customers, by managers), looking to the future and seeing nothing but this 7$ an hour, watching your meagre savings always get nuked at just the right moment by a blown head gasket or the landlord raising rent or the kid needing unexpected school supplies because they forgot their backpack at the bus stop or whatever else.
The psychological burden of a hopeless situation is enormous. I wish I could help more people understand that and empathize with people in these situations. In the richest country on earth I don't understand why we tolerate people having to live like that, out of some cultish dedication to nonexistent meritocracy.
People also drastically underestimate the negative changes in social mobility since 1980. You mentioned one with housing but access to good education is another aspect.
I know the situation in France more than the US but at least in France, there used to be a lot more upward mobility. I went to a very well ranked engineering school that was created in the 60s with the goal of giving access to higher education to everyone. When they opened, 30% of students had parents who were farmer or factory workers (65% of the population had those type of jobs back then). By 2005, 7% of students had those kind of background (compared 39% of the population did those kind of jobs). I was in the school administration concil back then and this was already seen as a big problem. I know for a fact that the students coming from less advantageous background has been further reduced.
It's a generalized trend, increasingly all the best schools mostly admit from a small selection of students that come from a select number of good schools.
There's a lot of factors that changed and, surprisingly, evolution of upward mobility is poorly studied. My mother always thought that she succeeded because she went to boarding school in middle school and high school. Back then it was normal for people living far in the countryside like her. She thinks that boarding school allowed her to get a rest from her stressful and toxic home environment. Thanks to it she was able to read, study in peace and able to succeed. She later became a teacher and she was saddened by some of the kids she saw that grew up in an adverse environment with no real way out.
> The psychological burden of a hopeless situation is enormous.
Fully agreed on the psychological burden of a hopeless situation. When you are perpetually stressed about money, it's hard to gather the required energy to do anything besides surviving.
If I’d been born in a low income family in the US, I’d be working a dead end cleaning job, with no prospect of anything ever getting better. I’m fairly certain I’d be a kick ass cleaner though.
P.S. It's just a question. Not everyone lives in the US. Heck, maybe the OP was even talking about another country, say Denmark.
I’m just demonstrating here but this is an example of the stressful life many people around the world are living. We are blessed to be in the USA.
Just as some examples:
Doctors are quite good here, none of that untrained nonsense you mentioned.
You have safety nets.
If you work formally employed (which granted is not a minor detail, since informal employment is a big problem), you have plenty of sick days, and these are mandated by law; so not at the mercy of the company.
Vacations are mandated by law to be paid according to how long you've been at the company. Nobody can fire you for taking vacations; it's about 2 weeks vacation once you've been working for a year. This is by law, the company is of course free to sweeten the deal.
Our best university is public and free.
While life is not easy for somebody without a family to support them or a good job, the reality is nowhere close to what you imagined.
Now, this is one country and I'm aware the "global south" is large and varied. I'm sure other countries have it worse. But it makes me suspect your global description of the south.
Etc, etc.
I was under the impressions that Americans work hard too. For example, if I'm not mistaking there's no mandated minimum number of vacation days, so you might get only 11 compared to 20 in most European countries.
> Heaven forbid you get sick.
The medical act is (very) good in the US, but is it affordable?
> The children have to compete in complicated exams to even have the sliver of a chance to land themselves in a good university.
Doesn't the same apply to the US as well? You either have lots of money, or good grades or you're good athlete.
The answer is....it depends.
If youre at poverty levels you would qualify for federal-level Medicaid insurance. learning about these benefits takes some digging. Some states(often democrat) provide their omedical benefit coverage for people who are at or below poverty line(which is itself a locale-specific metric).
If youre upper-middle-class or work for the government, you have good medical insurance through your employer or by paying $$$$$ out of pocket.
Anything between these two -- youre probably underserved in terms of medical coverage and you probably only see the inside of hospitals via emergency rooms.
I'll be honest, as a non-American, I thought you were describing the USA in these sentences. I quite frequently read things online/see videos etc where Americans are shocked that we can take several weeks or a month off for a holiday in Europe, that if we're sick we just take time off, there's no worry about being fired for getting sick, or needing to work in order to qualify for health insurance. Education isn't free everywhere, but in most places people acquire much less debt than it seems you do in the USA.
It’s not a great stretch to go from there to assume they don’t have any social security at all.
If it’s available but many people cannot or do not know to make use of it, is it really social security? If they do make use of it and it’s still not enough, does that change things?
Have you seen the horrific conditions the poorest people of Europe 'survive' in? The ghettos of Eastern Europe are every bit as bad as the worst areas of Baltimore or St Louis. The bad areas in and around Paris are hyper minority poverty with zero upward mobility and extreme unemployment problems (thus the annual large riots). People in rural Western Russia live in third world conditions on $20-$30 per month; they live like nothing has improved in a century. To say nothing of the Ukraine war, which is now part of their living condition (for Ukraine and Russia). You realize how poor Moldova or North Macedonia are? The level of education and outcomes among the bottom 20% of Europe is every bit as bad as the bottom 20% in the US.
It's exceptionally difficult to provide a median (or median+) first world outcome to so many, perhaps impossible.
The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric... Although averages are a dangerous measure to use and I guess the article is wrong for other reasons (I think it is talking about consumption). The study and article are in response to the crazy OECD poverty measurements: "OECD measure assigns a higher poverty rate to the US (17.8 percent) than to Mexico (16.6 percent). Yet World Bank data show that 35 percent of Mexico’s population lives on less than $5.50 per day, compared to only 2 percent of people in the United States."
I'm in New Zealand, where we have some social support for the unfortunate. Disclaimer: I'm very ignorant of conditions for the poor in the US and Europe.
The state of California alone has spent $24,000,000,000 on homelessness in the last 5 years. The government spends about $50,000 per homeless person. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...
You can certainly argue that the support they're being given isn't working, but it's very far from zero support.
should very probably read "paid $24 B over 5 years to third parties on programs claiming to 'fix' homelessness"
This would include urban architectures and installions that seek to deter homelessness making sidewalks unsuitable for tents, benches unusable for sleeping, removing access to water and public toilets, etc.
Such things would not count at all as "support" for the homeless.
Regardless it seems remarkably ineffective and one has to wonder, as with military spending, how much goes to end use and how much is $$$ profit! for the contracters.
What would $24 B of affordable public housing look like, employing the homeless as labour?
As a Britisher, obviously I’m in favour of universal healthcare, and I think the US system would benefit from it. But let’s not pretend it’s perfect there either
I'm one of those 90%. My health insurance (family of 4) costs more than my house payment, and the annual deductible is over $6000 (for one person). Either the premiums or my deductible goes up every year. In terms of total cost (monthly premiums plus annual deductible) it's also pretty much the least expensive plan that I can get.
It's not that health care here is bad, it's that it's ridiculously expensive compared to most other places in the world.
Sure, but the average American also gets paid $20k more than the average Brit, on average.
~25% of the federal budget goes to medicare and medicaid, i.e. healthcare for other people. On top of that, you're paying for your own medical insurance as an implicit deduction on your salary for your employer-sponsored healthcare plan, or you just pay for your plan directly if you're self-employed.
Those percentages add up.
Whereas in the UK, or in Sweden where I'm from, you only pay once through your taxes for healthcare for everyone, including yourself.
On top of that, copays are higher in the US, annual deductibles are much higher, procedures are much more expensive, medication is much more expensive. Healthcare in the US is simply disproportionally more expensive than in the rest of the world, as a percentage of people's income, and as a percentage of GDP. It's got nothing to do with salary levels.
Edit: everything we pay out of pocket we can deduct from our taxable income (it's an HSA plan), but still.
Which you still might not qualify for, and may not get even if you do qualify for it (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/apr/15/john-ol...)
> 90% of Americans are insured.
Which doesn't prevent nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care because of the expense they're still subjected to. (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/americans-put-off-health-car...) Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy.
> nearly 40% of americans from being forced to put off needed medical care
Hard to interpret UK NHS waiting-time figures, especially given the political weight given to them, but these[0][1] paint a picture of 6 month to >1 year waiting times.
0: https://www.boa.ac.uk/resource/boa-statement-on-nhs-app-show...
1: https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-...
> Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy
Medical debt for non-elective treatment feels barbaric, although digging into the figures (2m personal bankruptcies a year, 60% medical) gives 0.3% of the US population declaring medical bankruptcy a year, possibly going up to 1% if you do fancier maths involving households vs people.
The long wait times, 22 weeks mean average, > 63 week in 8% of extreme waits, are regrettable but not indicitive of waiting for urgent emergency life threatening required non elective procedures which are relatively prompt and immediate for the most part.
0: https://www.myplannedcare.nhs.uk/seast/royal-surrey/
1: https://www.myplannedcare.nhs.uk/seast/oxford/
2: https://www.myplannedcare.nhs.uk/seast/buckinghamshire/
For each specialty, there's a waiting time, which is the time between you seeing your local doctor and then seeing a specialist, and then there's a waiting time given from when the specialist refers you for a treatment -- they need to be added together. Cardiology is 17+21 weeks, 10+12 weeks, and 25+28 weeks, urology is 12+18 weeks, 18+23 weeks, and 25+20 weeks. Orthopedics (for your osteoarthritis example) is at 17+24 weeks, 22+46 weeks, and 20+25 weeks.
> not indicative of waiting for urgent emergency life threatening
Hospitals in the US can't turn you away if you show up presenting urgent, emergency, life-threatening symptoms either, and I suspect those are not the types of medical care that people in the US are generally putting off for cost reasons (although I'm sure there are a few cases where they are).
"My" portrayal is a summary of the information in the links that you provided.
Same problem, same prescription.
To add to your list: housing, healthcare, food programs exist at the local + state + federal levels. The US state government system is huge unto itself, like having an entire other federal government nearly.
There are thousands of government support programs between the state + federal levels of government.
People outside of the US are almost entirely ignorant of how large the government systems in the US are. They're not as big as in France or Denmark obviously, they are still sizable compared to the median peer nation (on a GDP % basis).
We do some stuff (often not the right stuff) to prop up people struggling as adults. We do very little, relatively speaking, to enhance people's childhoods (or even just ensure that it's OK).
The point of the article is to think about how adverse childhood experiences might affect adulthood, using actual data, and try to think about an actionable way to address the issue. Maybe stuff like this is behind USA's secret sauce compared to other countries where the 'unfortunate' are left to rot.
From: https://collabfund.com/blog/immutable-truths-and-arguing-foo...
> This is so foreign to the world I know. But so is my world to them. I think they’re wrong, but they’d say the same to me. I’m sure I’m right; so are they. Often the reason debates arise is that you double down on your view after learning that opposing views exist.
> Here’s another.
> Former New York Times columnist David Pogue once did a story about harsh working conditions at Foxconn tech assembly factories in China. A reader sent him a response:
>> My aunt worked several years in what Americans call “sweat shops.” It was hard work. Long hours, “small” wage, “poor” working conditions. Do you know what my aunt did before she worked in one of these factories? She was a prostitute.
>> Circumstances of birth are unfortunately random, and she was born in a very rural region. Most jobs were agricultural and family owned, and most of the jobs were held by men. Women and young girls, because of lack of educational and economic opportunities, had to find other “employment.”
>> The idea of working in a “sweat shop” compared to that old lifestyle is an improvement, in my opinion. I know that my aunt would rather be “exploited” by an evil capitalist boss for a couple of dollars than have her body be exploited by several men for pennies.
>> That is why I am upset by many Americans’ thinking. We do not have the same opportunities as the West. Our governmental infrastructure is different. The country is different.
>> Yes, factory is hard labor. Could it be better? Yes, but only when you compare such to American jobs.
>> If Americans truly care about Asian welfare, they would know that shutting down “sweat shops” would force many of us to return to rural regions and return to truly despicable “jobs.” And I fear that forcing factories to pay higher wages would mean they hire FEWER workers, not more.
I'm willing to bet - dollars to donuts - that there were (and are) American investors in your country of origin, and every other one you've been to. Sometimes being an outsider confers clarity / skills / experience necessary to exploit opportunities not available - or even visible to those who've lived all their lives in an environment.
This is especially true if you consider Indians or Chinese in America. Those populations have an even more acute education lead. So many people want to come here, that to commit means accepting you spend the next 15 or so years waiting in line to finally be a permanent resident (rather than an immigrant who can easily be forced to leave if their visa doesn't have a sponsor.)
That's my point exactly! It's not that all Americans are particularly entitled, lazy, uncreative, or risk-averse. I specifically chose American investors in their country of origin as a counterpoint to the implication that Americanness infers lack of grit/drive, doubly so when Americans can succeed the countries OP left.
Voluntary migrants (that includes expats) are a self-selected, self-motivated bunch. OP is did not contrasting themself to the appropriate percentile of Americans.
And I said the opposite? the problem is not with all Americans, just the ones perpetually complaining that all of their misfortunes were caused by being born here vs some ideal place (which they can't never really point to in a map) where they were going to magically have an easier life.
> Voluntary migrants (that includes expats) are a self-selected, self-motivated bunch. OP is did not contrasting themself to the appropriate percentile of Americans.
I'm not Indian or Chinese (I'm a black latino), came here with not even a bachelors degree, and honestly, with no particular skill that someone from here could not obtain in a relatively short amount of time; I was still able to insert myself into the tech scene and find my place there. I'm still working on improving myself day to day, so I guess maybe you have a point on the motivation aspect, but that is an intrinsic quality, and I don't like how this analysis somehow attributes the lack of motivation on other people to <me>, and suggest that if I don't feel gullible and pay more taxes (which is the subtext of this piece) I somehow failed "Alex".
US has a limit of 140k employment-based green cards issued per year, set by law.
Then per-country quotas (no more than 7% of the total number per country) are applied, meaning that the number of green cards issued to Indians per single year can be no more than ~15k/year for employment-based category. This is further broken down by meritocratically-worded categories such that the quota actually available to someone who doesn't fit the EB-1 "Einstein visa" category - i.e. someone with "merely" a master's, say - is ~8k/year.
And the backlog for this category for India is over 1 million. So, given an Indian applying today, and assuming everyone in front of them in the line will remain there, you get something on the order of 125 years wait. Of course, in practice this means that many people in the line will either abandon the wait or literally die of old age before their turn comes up, which moves it that much faster for those behind them. At current rates, this translates to the actual wait of ~50 years.
If you start life race very far behind athletes who had best training and nutrition, how easily you can even catch them, not even going into overcoming.
But adversity is a great, massive stimuli for those few with right mindset on their own, even if it stuns most. They would wither and get comfortable in comfort and security, instead they gather drive and focus that very few can match eventually. Often great men and women, albeit broken deep inside.
If the complainers had that attitude, I wouldn't mind at all and would endorse it. It's the whiners that have nothing more creative to say than how terrible America is that get me.
We should not forget though that at the same time the system in place will also produce people that face live with the same attitude and do all the same things, but with much less success.
Now the big question is, if we can have a system that does a similar job in encouraging your type of attitude while at the same time helping those out better, for whom it doesn't work out as much. Or are these things mutually exclusive.
There is a guy who cofounded a successful company and sold it. When asked if he would retire, his answer is no. Not because he isn't ready for retirement. Not because he wants to continue working or be even more successful. Because he has kids to put through college. Even successful people are not free of financial worry.
I wonder if all this success if fueled by constant adrenaline, no matter if it helps the individual or not. And if yes, if there is a better way.
It's a British documentary series that starts out with interviews with kids at age 7 from different backgrounds, and then interviews the same group of people every 7 years (14 Up, 21 Up, you get the idea). They've come to "63 Up" so far.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)
Why is that backward? Couldn't they be mutually affecting factors a la the failures of "No Child Left Behind"'s penalty system (as in: ACEs damage school performance, leading to risk of being held back a year, which risks additional ACEs)?
> All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
If that is indeed a strong correlation, then that would be valuable insight gained from this study, I think.
Education makes a bit more sense since it’s at least easy to buy your way into a better education.
They're not, they serve different needs. Perhaps indirectly related, but having money certainly doesn't make you a good parent. Those are just prerequisites for a higher chance of success. If you have neither you have the least chance of success. If you have one, you're more likely to succeed, if you have both, you're most likely to succeed.
On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.
We didn't end up fostering, for unrelated reasons.
They showed us studies that even infant adoptees tended towards the educational achievement of their genetic parents, not their adopted ones, for example.
Again, I don't even know if it's right or wrong, but the agency we were working with thought we should know that.
EDIT: Okay, here's an example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adoption-and-genetics-imp_b_4...
And reading that I'm reminded of the agency we were going with: PACT in Berkeley.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...
It's not intuitive, but it's what decades of behavioral genetics studies say. Adoptees have much stronger correlations with their biological parents than with the parents that adopted them (in all socially meaningful metrics: intelligence, income, etc.). Monozygotic twins correlate much stronger than dizygotic twins, etc.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
> But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
A percentage stacked bar chart
The animations are misleading too. When the people run around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing color or not. It gives the impression that every individual in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario, which clearly isn't true.
Those are awful things, but I suspect they don’t affect kids in the same way that poverty and violence does.
Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for life.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources at it.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
You have the primary direction of causality between trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...
Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:
"(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."
Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.
I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.
Is not the same as "people who are poor are that way because they disproportionately are genetically predisposed to have low IQs", which is the gist of the original comment I replied to.
The discussion also isn't about intellectually disabled people (who fall into a separate category with specific legal protections).
I was quite surprised with your response and that should have triggered a more charitable reading; I can see now that you were quite obviously not saying what I interpreted. My apologies.
In fact it is EQ - emotional intelligence - and not IQ that predicts positive life outcomes most strongly.
Among many others.
Even in health and longevity: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01...
Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.
I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's choices.
It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're married to.
This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much awful - probably quite a bit more - in any previous 20 year period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial crisis... Great Depression? 9/11 and fear of terrorists? Cold war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
> It's 2015.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
> This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice." Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
(The article has links to the quotes.)
The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)
Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
Maybe the visualizations are just bad.
Since the margins in some of the statistics are so small i wonder how would they look with the adverse experiences ignoring this 2 points.
For me it is obvious that a person who was held back in school and received suspensions will be less likely to be well off when they are older.
Are you saying that a person's actions aren't influenced by their environment?
It's not the proximate cause, but that doesn't mean it is in no way causative.
>and pointing out the cause shows a path to correcting the issue
Yes, it can often be most efficient to address root causes.
And I agree that it's typically most efficient to address root causes, but there's a sleight of hand going on here. Note how your post correctly pointed out that environment influences a person's actions where I said poor impulse control causes poor outcomes. There are causal factors in both cases, but clearly there is a clear and direct causal link in the latter and a diffuse set of uncertain possible causes in the former.
I would not call environment a root cause in this case unless you can actually narrow down the specific source that causes poor impulse control (some of it is genetic and thus ineliminable).
More like in the sense that smoking causes cancer.
I think environment influences can increase the likelihood of those adverse experiences, contact with violent behavior for instance can make a person more likely to be suspended, but a person may have been brought up in a normal family and still be violent and be suspended (i got to know such cases, and they're more common than you imagine), and even a person that had contact with this kind of situation may think that they do not want that for their life and use this as a motivator (also have seen such cases).
But the adverse experiences should focus not on the results, but the causes. What factors are we able to quantify that made this student be held back (uninterested parents? a personality disorder? ...) and how big is the influence of each of them in a person's destiny. Only looking at them we will be able to really learn something meaningful from what happened.
Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
I imagine children who grow up in stable environments can better regulate their mood as they can return to a caring parent who will soothe them when they're emotionally dysregulated, compared to those in instable environments.
This might lead to the highs being higher and the lows being lower, a stretching of the bell curve.
It could be people with more adverse experiences are less likely to take care in answering survey questions
However, I find myself underwhelmed, for a few reasons.
- It's hard to compare the different cohorts, because of the different widths.
- The definition of "adverse experiences" seems too limited in scope of what's counted, leading to small numbers and small differentiation between the cohorts.
- The biggest difference appears to be "no adverse experiences" vs everyone else, but I think the narrative describes other things.
- Somehow, the viceral differences in experience between folks who come from healthy, happy, wealthy families and those that don't feel kind of flattened.
I'm deeply concerned for social justice and equity of opportunities. I'm sure the underlying research of this longitudinal study is fascinating. I just think that the execution of this summary misses the mark a bit.
This article focuses on shootings, neglectful parents, etc. But what if we focused on more controversial things like only having one parent in the home or missing, specifically, a father figure, religious attitudes of parents, or even (to be maximally controversial) same-sex vs opposite-sex parents?
If those things were found to have impacts on children that last into adulthood also (since the data implies that our childhood shapes us so much), I doubt the author would agree that we have a collective responsibility to keep children from experiencing the negatives of those scenarios
I'm biased, but I believe the liberal perspective takes a more open mind to letting people live the ways they want, under the assumption that this is likely to be locally optimal versus trying to coerce people into externally imposed lifestyles. I don't think it's controversial to say that two parent households correlate with better outcomes. But that doesn't mean that every family is better off that way. Some children are way better off if it's easy and unstigmatized for a single parent to get sole custody if the other parent is abusive.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-0...
(But yeah there's some data checking that needs to be done as denoted elsewhere in the thread)
My impression of the data is that, actually, we're doing pretty well with social mobility. Not perfectly by any means, and there is lots of room to improve. But as compared to (I think) just about any historical period, I think the graphs would be even more skewed. I'm fairly certain that as a medieval peasant, there were basically no viable routes to improving your lot (and even the word "lot" betrays the assumptions of the time), and so acceptance was the only viable route (violent rebellions excepted).
Not that any of that means we can't do better today. We can and we should.
...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The distribution of incomes don't actually look that different, to my eye.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing as well!
It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being able to understand this visually and intuitively.
Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks earning the most as adults came from the "bottom" tier with the most adverse childhood experiences.
This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.
Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by
So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following slides So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me "warmer colors -> bad experiences".I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.
edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
their slide: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-16-25.uifh7bss3d5f66b...
proposed rearrangement + recoloring: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-45-19.n7ft281jipgv3tx...
Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.
The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.
The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.
So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.
But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue, and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and grounds for further research.
So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.
Not to nitpick but this statement implies causation (family environment causes life outcome) which you contradict right after.
Sorry to sound obtuse, but, I asked because it may seem obvious to you, but it's not so obvious to me that there will be much improvement. I've seen data that indicates that outcomes are not changed (much) when those early interventions / "investments" are made. There is _an_ improvement, but not to the level people expect. Like a person's height, access to high quality food will only do so much; some people are just going to have short stature however much money you invest into making sure they have access to nutritious meals.
The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).
Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianism.
> If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
The circle of influence most people have over their own life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the ladder.
The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to justify the current status quo and block political change that would help poor people.
No a mount of political action can compensate for dissolution of individual responsibilities.
Ideally, they are complementary, but they can easily be antagonists.
Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and later success in life.
> The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome.
Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if that were a free choice.
Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do drugs. Problem solved.
Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical illness. It requires a whole support network of people to cure in most cases.
> Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak, groups are strong.
Individual responsibility only works for the rich. Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid after all.
Telling someone not to be born poor isn't actionable advice. Telling them their chance of success is 1000% better if they don't do drugs IS actionable advice. Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
>You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault.
It is a big difference between a higher statistical risk factor isn't your fault, and telling them their choices and behavior have no impact.
Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Knowing about the effects of poverty means knowing more about yourself. Understanding yourself leads to being able to take more effective actions increasing the control you have over your life.
You seem to think it is about victim mindset vs whatever you toxic middle-class self help "individual responsibility" thing is. Real change can only happen once you understand and accept yourself, including being a victim of circumstance and birth. After that there can there be healing and proper action.
> Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
That is not the point. The point is for them to educate themselves on the issues they are facing, to politically organize, to organize in the neighborhood, to help each other out and ideally become leaders and role-models in their community. It starts with seeking help and community, not trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps which often is not realistic.
> Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Yes, obviously collective responsibility includes a form of individual responsibility. They only work together when your are poor.
Of course I agree with having ones eyes open to their personal circumstance and challenges, as well as the value of giving and receiving help to others. However, I do think it is ironic that you think people have the agency to help others more and become leaders, but not have the agency to help themselves.
Circling back to drugs, this is akin to becoming a sobriety advocate, but not trying to get sober. You say everyone knows not to do drugs, but from what I know, hopelessness, self-hate, and self-delusion is a key difference between those who become addicts and those that dont.
I think that exaggerated messaging about statistical disadvantage does more harm than good if it is uncoupled from the message about statistical advantage of personal action (e.g. you may be 2x more likely to end up poor if born poor, but you are 10x more likely to escape if you stay sober and go to college). these numbers are obviously made up, but literature overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that personal behaviors have more impact than group statistics and environmental circumstances. Of course personal choices like staying in school or smoking meth have huge impacts on your personal life!
Incomplete messaging of this is harmful because people need to understand and believe there is an actionable path to a better life in order to try. Hopelessness and despair are real barriers that need to be acknowledged.
You brought up depression earlier, and while I dont tell people to "snap out of it", it is also true that almost nobody overcomes depression without the belief that their actions CAN have improve their depression, and that there is a path to improvement. It is central and fundamental to rehabilitation. Most of depression therapy boils down to convincing people improvement is possible, and teaching them how to do it. A therapist may be a crucial help that makes the difference, but the patient still has to do 99% of the work.
There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
If we had equal baseline access to education, housing, healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
We're not even close in our current state so "you're in control of your own life" is a completely ignorant argument.
That simply isn't true. Look at the data on economic mobility, and the vast majority of people born in the bottom 20% leave the bottom 20%.
Outcomes obviously aren't random, but are far from deterministic.
For example, this article puts the number at 63% leaving the bottom 20%. 80% would require that there are no impacts whatsoever from every factor correlated with poverty
https://www.wsj.com/articles/upward-mobility-income-quintile...
> Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades
> Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-b...
Also worth mentioning that the mean income for the second quintile is only ~$40k — it's still ~$30k off from the middle quintile... so we're not talking anything close to the american dream here either way. We're talking multiple generations at best for a small percentage of the lower quintile to reach the middle.
If you are talking about relative economic mobility, more than half of people cant end up in the top half by definition. Only 50 percent of people can improve in social class- and 50% of people have to go down in social class to make that happen. Of course I understand that the case is different if you are talking about nominal income. The biggest Issues there is that it is calculated using household income, and the number of adults/household has gone down quite a bit in the US. The last Issue I would point out is that these metrics rarely include transfer payments, which for the lowest quintile have gone up quite a bit.
You really think it is ignorant to believe you have control over your life? What do you do just lay on the floor and wait for things to wash over you?
That it’s possible to work one’s way out of poverty or to maintain a healthy weight through willpower or what have you is simply irrelevant when talking policy. Its only possible role is to dismiss the problem or discourage action. The reverse is also true: that a system could hypothetically make it easier for one to succeed is irrelevant to the individual who’s trying to decide what to do to improve their life in the system that currently exists.
I feel like when people start talking about money like this they're being intentionally illogical.
If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational issue for the parent. And their solution for when a distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts in classrooms.
If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then the child would already be fed. The political situation that made the most sense for the school district in which I grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it. That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the race and class of people who received it.
Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+ year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, and they can't help what age they are.
This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?
It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier with an extra 20k a year.
You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
Supposedly, based on some studies.
Individual happiness and being a good parent (which contributes to breaking the cycle) don't necessarily intersect as much as you think, or at least it's based on the individual.
Some people's happiness is only marginally related to how well their kids are doing (as evident by rise in single-parent households), so the 20k may contribute essentially 0 to the long term solution.
> You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting.
If I don't know, then you don't know either. You're taking the other good extreme and presenting is at fact. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
Is that what you're saying?
Kill Alex's parents, and rape them as a child, addict them to meth, and 20k wont fix that.
This article and data is in desperate need of a Analysis of variance for the different factors.
Sometimes it is one beer and cigarette to the next, sometimes it's one sailboat and handbag to the next.
It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
Yes.
> It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
You have things quite backwards, the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears. The USA added an amendment to their constitution banning the sale of alcohol and took a while to get repealed.
> This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
also lines for bread and austerity, that's what I mean
> I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
while that example is memified, this is still a commonly held belief that I see reiterated almost daily (of course they're poor, they're buying iPhones! for example)
The companies are certainly happy to take your money, regardless of how hard it will be to pay back.
I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
But home environments exist in a specific social context that effect how people think they should foster a good home environment. We've lost a lot of societal knowledge and experience around good family structures since probably the 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and institutions. That is going to have an effect.
It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully considered.
But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
---
I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the blame.
The government has been actively working to break families for years through economic policies that encourage single mothers to raise children on their own: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-root-cause-of-crime...
Another point is that if you're not thriving as an adult, it could be because of the experiences you had when you were a kid.
I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other. However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school. What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even mean to say you're responsible for something you have no control over?
A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute, etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this situation other than the unthinkable?
Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I guess) today.
https://twitter.com/alv9n/status/1780289344852431041
>So this piece is now at the top of @hackernews. This experience is always cool and terrifying, especially when they also see all the small things that don't quite work about the piece.
I dont even know where to start with this.
1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.
Well well well, the bully cornered him in the school bathroom and attacked him. My nephew punched him in the face. my nephew got made into a legend at school and got suspended.
Guess who doesn't get bullied anymore? Violence works.
Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the original concept was great: if anything happens, then you respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any punishments whatsoever.
Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
Isn't the US in the top of funding per student? I think if anything we over fund public schools.
Teacher Pay?
Class room size?
Hours of education?
We may WASTE more money on students than other countries but in these metrics were behind and our below average everything makes that apparent.
I don’t believe this. My first and second hand experience is that sure, there are some people who work blue collar and get paid better than $DESKJOB, but those are typically from wealthy households that can help them financially so they can ascend to owner.
If you are poor and start working in the trades it’s the status quo to be completely taken advantage of with no real opportunities. Expect to end each day beat-up and exhausted, with very little energy to take care of yourself. This is the poverty trap.
Blue collar is chock full of sociopath owners who actively lie, exploit, steal from, and emotionally manipulate their employees.
College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
>Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.
It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.
>In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.
So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.”
I don’t understand how it’s our responsibility that he is “sometimes depressed”. I didn’t make him not study.
How you're raised is who your parents are, except for when it isn't.
Which is why we have adoption studies. Which strongly indicate that it's who your parents are, not how you're raised, which is more determinative of outcomes. Is it a mixture of factor? Yes, but the dominant component is clear. A study like this focuses on the minor component and presumes that it's causal. That is unlikely to be the case.
This infographic talks about the economic outcomes, but there are also major health outcomes like early death, mental health issues that this doesn't approach. I think in a way it takes away from the core ideas of the impact of ACE's, which Everyone should absolutely know about. There IS a direct causal link from ACE's to poor life outcomes, and here is some reading on that:
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(98)00017-8/ful...
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/resources.html
Also, income aside, I don't think that tradies belong in the broad "no college education" group, as almost all of them have a tertiary qualification (apprenticeship + TAFE diploma in Australia, maybe community college is the equivalent in the US?), even though it's not necessarily a bachelor's university degree.
The site is really nicely done and even moving, but I find the ideas it is putting forth harmful honestly. We all would like to see better outcomes for teenagers, but if that is truly our goal we should not be shaping public policy around non-scientific observations on correlations. Let's do some actual science please and build policy around that.
But it dramatically blunts the visual clarity of comparison between the differing percentages in each cohort associated with better and worse outcomes.
I found a lot of value reading The Deepest Well by Dr. Burke Harris. She notices that some of her patients are having strange health issues and then she realizes that these strange health issues can be tied to their ACE scores. Issues include epigenetic changes and immune system dysfunctions among many others. She advocates for early ACE screening to help address issues as early as possible.
[edit]
I scrolled all the way to the top and then back down and it seems to have resolved the issue.
The article would have been vastly more readable if it was plain html with static embedded images and without any custom scroll/touch event handling - then one would easily be able to scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted by javascript bugs.
I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data visualization project, but in this case, the visualization makes the result in every way worse.
BUT, it struck me that one of the outcomes of the pandemic was the recognition that a major function of school for kids is childcare (as opposed to learning), and it’s funny to imagine college as the modern equivalent for older “kids”.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10025.html
Most middle\high school grade retention I see these days is self-imposed for an advantage in athletics; don't get me started.
It was between $50 to $1700 annually. Was that the income when they were 13 years old?
It felt like the "some adverse experiences" group was worse off than the "many adverse experiences" group, which I'm guessing is incorrect.
I watched the video, and the semantic meaning of pink people kept changing, and I couldn't follow the story because too many moving parts.
There's a study looking at people from a "bad" neighbourhood, that used data on immigrants to and emmigrants from the neighbourhood to try and track causation.
If I was feeling obnoxious I would grab the data, and massage it until the conclusion is that we should blind children so they don't see someone get shot so that they go to university.
[1] actually I can think of plenty of friends where that would be plausible (disclaimer: gun violence isn't so common in New Zealand). I'm trying to pick an example where causation and correlation are more disjoint but I think I've failed here.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_104.20.a...
Title appears.
I start scrolling.
Nothing happens.
I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim of a piece of performance art!"
Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's Chrome...
This is a powerful message. A cynical (mostly realistic) outlook is that we are powerless pawns at the mercy of the powerful (read rich) in the world whose actions are ultimately reasons for blaming the powerless.
This is actually a problem.
> in developed countries, there is an era between ages 18 and 25 when we collectively agree to let people explore the world and figure out what role they want to have in it. He calls it "emerging adulthood". And college is an environment built for emerging adults – a place where kids can leave their family environment and finally have a chance to independently shape their futures.
This is a wholly inaccurate description of college.
Why is the first statement a problem?
(not trying to be confrontational, just would like to know more)
Whoa. Mind blown. Worth the infinite scroll and meandering presentation.
Condescending and pearl clutching read. I used the military to escape. Life’s tough, navel gazing and pushing college doesn’t help in the vast majority of cases. Everyone has adverse things happen, but not everyone makes the choice to start finding solutions.
It was never an obvious impact.
Am I getting it wrong or is it a tiny change that statistically is significant at huge scales of population?
I guess we all have our own positive and negative deviations from the mean across different aspects of life's 'expected' outcomes.
Incidentally, rehabilitating these traumatized kids-turned-adults would probably have profound positive impacts on the economy (since that's all Jamie Dimon and friends care about).
The most important thing about a metric is that we all agree on how to interpret it. While money may not measure exactly the right thing, we can all agree that $50 is $50 regardless of our age, race, gender, upbringing, etc. Take a look at the other comments on this thread. There's hardly any consensus on what this visualization shows. If this was how we measured our country, we'd get nowhere because there's no agreement on what this data means or what to do about it.
Good
Let's put him on the BBQ
When I was a kid they did hold kids and they were usually worst bullies and bad influences.
Wonder if it still the case in US or “Alex” would be born somewhere 1990ish or earlier?
That is hilariously incorrect.
I had an adverse childhood, my dad died when I was 8, and my mom was literally not around, she was on the other side of the country and not interested. I was in care. I was passed around middle and high schools like a hot potato, nobody wanted me, simply because I was in care. The folks in care told me I was going to do exceptionally well in life, as my IQ tests were incredible - they were the only really structured approach to testing at the time. I ran the computer labs at all the schools I was at (C64 FTW!), because I was known as a “whizz kid” and could be trusted with that, but before ever setting foot in any of those schools I was already “branded” because I was in care. The teachers, all of them bar one, literally didn’t give a fuck. The one that cared, cared deeply. He was the music teacher, steadfastly wore punk t-shirts to class, and taught me drums and percussion. I still think of him often, but music lessons are not enough.
As for the rest of the bastards, my questions and educational needs were ignored, I was told to “just don’t bother” by many. I was great in the computer lab of course, English, and history. I struggled with many other subjects, but was deeply motivated to do well in school - I saw all the _other_ kids in care around me and was absolutely positive that I did not want to end up like that, but as I said I simply was ignored. Not only can I not do math until today, the “European schools (Netherlands, to be precise) experience” traumatised me to an extent where any kind of formal learning causes some kind of brain freeze and I simply cannot. I was relentlessly bullied at and outside of school, until I learned to stand up for myself, at which point it went in a kind of binary fashion directly to outlandish punishments for standing up for myself. Punching back in self defence can, in fact, land you in a straitjacket and in isolation for a week, who knew?! That was also where my deep distrust and rejection of any kind of authority figure or structure comes from.
I never finished school, I emancipated myself from care and dropped out when I was 17, and got the fuck out of the Netherlands. I am, until this day (54 years old now), unable to get a degree as I dropped out and as I am unable to study in a traditional sense. I was homeless and living rough a few months later, and it took me years to fight my way out of that shit. By good fortune and stubbornness I was able to learn and work in stage lighting, and did that for many years. I designed shows, clubs, bars, and ran the lights at too many events to count. I was at the forefront of the (then new up and coming) move away from pure analog lighting and into digital control and moving lights.
I eventually pivoted into IT professionally, again at a time when this was all new for everyone, and managed to build a career. I did well for a very long time and love the work. As a certified Old, I now struggle to get the contracts I need to keep going, companies want young blood and believe that deep skill and experience is overrated, so we will see what the next stage of life will bring.
Nothing special about European schools. They suck just as much as all the others.
It means only that they will never let a kid to stay the same level with younger kids, you always move with your peers to next class - even if you won't have any passing grades.
Maybe on high school level they will kick you out but in primary school I don't think they have any real grades even anymore.
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2]https://www.patreon.com/thepudding
The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait.
Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
"We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
"We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism, sexism, and classism head on."
"We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than hierarchical team."
I’m about to be 40 and I finally feel like my family has escaped it.
This is my peer group too!
So cool to see how our experiences shape us. For better or worse.
I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).
I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.
The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.
Great title and initial presentation though!
The answer to this is that we should optimise society towards less inequality. It is our collective responsibility because the privileged people who have disproportionally better results do so BECAUSE systems of inequality that keep wealth in certain areas of society exist. This doesn't mean you didn't work hard, obviously.
The evening out of such inequalities require much more radical policies than stuff like affirmitive action. We need things that address the root of the issues with how our society works. Nobody is willing to do that.
But yeah, its not the fault of the parents alone. I'm sorry that's some incredibly neoliberal individualist bullshit. There are so many factors listed here that poorer parents cannot sheild their kids from. They cannot live in a nicer place that they can't afford. They cannot just stop having chronic illness at a higher rate because of their own disadvantaged lives. Etc etc.
Everyone should take responsibility over their own life and do as much as they can to not let anything hold them back, just for the sake of their personal happiness at least. However, saying that does not then abdicate us from our other responsibility to make the world a better place. Telling people to work hard does not make societal factors go away.
Please add a TL;DR here as well. Some of us never want to watch the video instead.
Just as you, I don't like (much) watching videos.
Another one from "Household income vs. poverty line":
Here, the phrase "a lot" is absolutely an editorial phrase. It would be more clear and less emotional to use a percent value. Instead, they chose the clickbait route. Interestingly, they chose the term "extremely poor", but their own chart does not use it, nor include a definition of it. The lowest income category simply says "In poverty". In past discussions about poverty, many people on HN have shared their personal poverty experiences and the range of poverty. You can be right at the poverty line, but making ends meet. Or you can be deep in poverty, struggling terribly. Again, the article fails to provide necessary nuance.Few seem fortunate enough to find a time to "pause" in their lives, examine what deep seeded issues they have developed from the process of surviving childhood, and finding and embarking on a path to a more balanced and mature, "adult" life.
But hey, it might be a sampling bias. I also imagine there is a silent majority of well adjusted people that don't show up on the internet or the news, projecting themselves all over everyone and everything within their reach.
... of a fairly mundane data set.
If anything, I am shocked by how much the data between the groups evened out over time. The differences in "adverse experiences" started out so stark, but almost seemed to disappear by 2021, especially in categories like happiness and wealth. I would hate the be the researched who followed this for 20 years just to find nothing particularly interesting.
> "If we fail, we are punished. We are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing."
Not sure if the author and I are looking at the same data set. If anything, it's saying the opposite to me - the difference between a terrible childhood and a perfect childhood results in some barely perceivable differences by the time you are 27.
First off, it's not realistic at scale and presents a very sheltered worldview. Majority of worlds workforce is between those ages and no automation, nor AI will change this.
Second, even in the first world it's backward because you can also explore the world and find your purpose while working, infact working will teach you much more about the world than any college and you can always decide to get education when you're more mature and better off financially.
Cool website though, kudos to the author.
And furthermore, what actually is stopping them from getting a college degree if they so choose? The price. What is driving up the price?
oh, cool! that must mean, because of all those volcanos, that Honolulu means...
> From Hawaiian Honolulu, from hono (“bay, harbor”), cognate with Maori whanga, + lulu (“shelter”), from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian duŋduŋ (“sheltered”).*
ok, nope. "fire shelter" would have been pretty cool tho.
Growing up, I faced several adversities. My parents divorced when I was young, and I lived with my mother until the age of 13. Unfortunately, my mother struggled with alcoholism, often bringing friends over, even during my early school years. However, in hindsight, I believe she deeply missed my father and coped with her pain through drinking. Despite her struggles, I know she loved me.
Life became even more challenging when my stepfather entered the picture. I endured multiple school absences due to injuries like broken noses and ribs. Eventually, I reached a breaking point and called my real father, expressing my desire to live with him. One day, I left my mother's home and never returned.
Transitioning to life with my father brought new dynamics, including a stepmother and stepbrother. While our financial situation improved, a different form of abuse emerged, one that was emotional and insidious. I often found myself unfairly blamed and punished for things I hadn't done. Despite evidence implicating my stepbrother, I was consistently scapegoated. To extended family and relatives, I became the problem child, while my stepbrother was seen as an angel. My stepmother's behavior shifted when my father was present, exacerbating the emotional turmoil.
My academic performance suffered, contrasting sharply with my previous success under my mother's care. I developed a video game addiction, became extremely thin and struggled with dissociative identity disorder, challenges that persisted into my university years and adulthood.
Despite graduating with a GPA of 2.7 and needing an extra year to complete university, I was able to secure a job, thanks to the kindness of the people I met during an internship. I faced numerous exam retakes due to heavy gaming. Financial stability, facilitated by my father, spared me from experiencing poverty and enabled my education. Now, at 26, I'm married with a baby on the way in May. I'm determined to provide unwavering love and support to my child and wife, drawing from my own experiences of feeling blamed and unloved.
Reflecting on my past, I regret leaving my mother's home. A mother's love is irreplaceable, transcending monetary value. However, I don't blame anyone except myself. In conclusion, I might have been an unlikable and unlovable brat, often inciting displeasure and animosity. On top of that, loving a stepchild is undoubtedly challenging. Yet, I believe that surviving abuse and adversity can catalyze personal growth in ways we may not immediately perceive. Most importantly, it's crucial to have someone who loves you, whether it's a significant other, partner, or friend, especially if you're unable to find that love and support within your own home.
Sounds like self-blame to me. No matter how you act, getting your bones broken isn't something that you deserve, ever.
Those who are designing computer based GUI, graphics, dashboard can learn a lot from this animation and interactive with timeline/frequency approach (soon someone will coin a this a special term e.g gamification, etc) because this is how we can optimize the brain to process its data for optimum users' usability. Deep learning AI has shown impressive results values in mimicking the brain functionality based on the human cognition and brain neurology and it is about time the user interface aspect get the same treatment. Excellent books like Designing with the Mind in Mind can be a good guiding principle based on human cognition for effective and intuitive user interface [1].
For the research presented by data it is kind of plain obvious that your childhood upbringing and experiences shape and affect your adult world significantly and considerably. Imagine children from war torned countries that experienced extreme adversity at some point of their life like Vietnam and the latest Ukraine people who witnessed not only gun violences but also all out war (e.g bombs, war machinery, jet fighter) with extreme insecurity food depreciation, malnutrition, etc will be several more times badly affected compared to these children reported in the study that are primarily based on developed and stable countries. Then imagine people who are residing in a continously intermittent conflicts/wars and oppressed regions (without a valid country) for example Palestine people that experienced the injustices and atrocities happening over several generations not years, badly affecting the childrens with family member's and friends got killed prematurely, and some with no parents or worst dependents left.
To think that how the people of the world ever allow, tolerate and even sponsoring the prepetrators of the oppression and injustice is beyond me. I think the only solace for these people in the region is that hopefully there will be easiness after hardship, and there will be justice sooner or later, here in this world or hereafter [2]. These are the sentences that really caught my attention, they say they are the peacemakers, but in rwality they are the real troublemakers or the root cause of the very problems and atrocities [3].
[1]Designing with the Mind in Mind:
https://shop.elsevier.com/books/designing-with-the-mind-in-m...
[2] https://quran.com/ash-sharh/5-6:
5 - So, surely with hardship comes ease.
6 - Surely with that hardship comes more ease
[3]https://quran.com/ms/al-baqarah/11-12:
11 - When they are told, “Do not spread corruption in the land,” they reply, “We are only peace-makers!”
12 - Indeed, it is they who are the corruptors, but they fail to perceive it.
Sorry, what? This statement feels like the exception, not the norm for most people who have attended college.
Two giant factors come to mind. Genetics and racism.
Consider one genetic factor. I have ADHD. That means that it is extremely likely that one or both of my parents had ADHD. (My father, certainly. My mother, maybe. She certainly had a genetic propensity for depression that her children struggle with.) This resulted in an unstable family home. Unsurprisingly this resulted in me falling into their adverse environment category. As an adult I've done reasonably well. But yes, my challenges have affected my children. But were those challenges because I grew up with horrible problems? Or was it because I have a well-known genetic condition that causes challenges?
On genetics, I highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th.... GWAS studies can only tease out genetic correlations for European Caucasians. Part of that is that they can only be done with a lot of data from somewhat related people. And part of that is that with Caucasians it is reasonable to assume that bad results are due to personal characteristics, and not racism.
But we can do it for Caucasians. And so we can know for Caucasians that the impact of genetics is about as strong as the impact of socioeconomic status. We can also separate the effects of things like the effect of when you first had sex from the genetics that make you first have sex early or late. That one is fun, because it turns out that the genetics matters a lot, and when you first did it only matters because it is correlated with your genetics. We can look at the impact of reading to kids. Yeah, that's pretty much genetics as well. We put a lot of effort into getting kids read to more, and didn't get demonstrable results for it.
So you see, understanding the impact of genetics is very important for what public policies are likely to work. They tell a great just-so story. But I'm not convinced.
Moving on, what about racism? They trace the story of Alex. Hispanic. He had a terrible upbringing. Which could be caused by the impact of racism on his family. He had a terrible adulthood. Which could be caused by the impact of racism on him. He's just as good an example for "racism sucks" as he is for "adverse childhood sucks". Which is it? We don't know. What should we do about it? That's still an open question!
And finally, let's look at personal responsibility. I don't agree with condemning poor people for being poor. But suppose you are born in whatever circumstances, with whatever genetics. What's the best way to improve your life? Judging from my experiences and understanding of human nature, it is to encourage an attitude of personal responsibility. Don't worry too much about what's outside of your control. Focus only on what's in your control, and try to do the best that you can.
Ironically, this matters more when the deck is stacked against you. If you have family background and racism are holding you back, you can't afford the third strike of a self-destructive attitude. But if your background and race give you resources, your attitude probably doesn't hurt you as badly.
Does "personal responsibility" make for a good social policy? No. But should we encourage people to individually embrace it? Absolutely!
I strongly disagree with their cavalier dismissal of the idea.
:/
The lies we continue to allow ourselves to tell as a society.
The video introduces us to Alex, a 13-year-old in 1997, who is Hispanic and living with his dad and stepmom. At this point in his life, Alex's family has a net worth of just $2,000, and his parents are not particularly supportive or involved in his life. Despite these challenges, Alex expresses a sense of optimism about his future. This optimism is shared by many teenagers, as evidenced by a survey from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which includes 9,000 participants followed from their adolescent years into adulthood.
The video then shifts to highlight the importance of childhood experiences, as research by Vincent Fidi published in 1998 would later reveal. This research indicates that traumatic and stressful events during childhood can have profound, lifelong effects on an individual's health, relationships, financial security, and overall well-being. The video follows 400 of these survey participants, focusing on those with uninvolved parents, those who have been bullied, and those growing up in risky home environments. It tracks adverse experiences such as parental drug use, being held back or suspended from school, and witnessing violence.
By 2001, the participants are in their senior year of high school. The video examines the adverse experiences these students have faced, noting that Black and Hispanic youths are disproportionately represented among those who have experienced multiple negative events. These experiences often correlate with academic performance; students who face more adversity tend to struggle more in the classroom. The video also introduces the concept of "emerging adulthood" as a period between childhood and adulthood, during which college can provide a supportive environment for young adults to navigate this transition.
By 2010, some participants have completed a four-year college degree, with a clear trend showing that those who had fewer adverse experiences in childhood are more likely to have attended college. The video also highlights the financial struggles of those from less privileged backgrounds, many of whom are still grappling with the economic implications of their challenging upbringings.
In 2021, the long-term impact of childhood adversity is starkly evident. The participants' life outcomes, including income levels, health issues, and overall happiness, show a direct correlation with the adverse experiences they faced as children. Alex, whose story we have followed, is now 37 years old, living with his partner and two kids. He has struggled with his weight and health throughout his adult life, and his annual income remains around $20,000. The video concludes by emphasizing that the circumstances of our youth significantly shape our lives and that systemic factors play a significant role in individual outcomes. It calls into question the blame placed on individuals for their life circumstances and suggests that the collective responsibility to support young people is essential for breaking cycles of adversity.
This is blatantly false and yet for no reason at all is embedded here. It makes it harder to trust the author for everything else when they do stuff like this. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is clearly much more than just a meme.
It would seem that some degree of thriving requires striving. The median person here has an iPhone - a luxury device. Here, the cultural belief is that if some other guy is richer than you, he cheated his way there. And you should steal from him. And the relentless woe is me whining about normal life.
"We were the first generation who had to live through 9/11 and a pandemic and the global financial crisis!"
Bro, in the '90s India was testing nuclear weapons and Pakistan had them and the possibility that two nuclear armed nations would go to war was real. There were massive genocides. The Gulf War. The President was impeached. The Unabomber. The LA Riots. In the '80, the AIDS pandemic was getting known and it wouldn't be handled for 30 years! It was a shadowy figure. Challenger blew up. Lockerbie bombing. The Iran-Iraq War. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The UK fought the Argentines in the Falklands. The French blew up the Rainbow Warrior. This is what normal life looks like. Things happen.
The number one thing that has come out of the modern Internet is this whiny brigade of losers who want to blame everything in the world for their problems. The majority of Americans are actually happy with their own lives. It's these few loud whiners. No, dude, 9/11 isn't why you can't get a girlfriend. Get a grip.
Bottom comment: "Get a grip!"
Two kinds of people...
Well done.
I do know some teachers who work with very high risk kids. I can imagine some of these findings presented in an appeal to get more funding for their work as they are horribly under resourced to meet the need.
If you don’t explain your intentions it comes off as brainwashing the viewer. Because otherwise they’re just mindlessly taking in whatever you’re telling them.
So what are we supposed to take from this?
> When we're young, we have so little control over their lives [...] Then we turn 18 and we're expected to be "adults" and figure things out. > > If we fail, we are punished. > > We are blamed for not going to college [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pudding.cool
Sorry, what?
These are evolutionary advantages and disadvantages to both strategies. In a highly stressed environment individuals who are less dependent on parental protection will be more likely to survive. The advantage of long childhoods and high parental involvement is that the individual will evolve sophisticated behaviors.
To simply assume everyone is exactly the same at birth and modified by society to an outcome is a vast simplification that requires substantial scientific justification, you cannot just assume it given the variations of parenting we see in nature.
(Am I missing the irony or something?)
Then you get some guy like Nayib Bukele who cuts the Gordian Knot of societal disfunction going from the highest murder rate in the world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in 3 years short years by putting all the gangsters in prison. All the "surplus elite" NGO people who spent their entire career ineffectually addressing "the root causes of crime" are all now out of a job and/or very upset.
> Imports of certain high-caliber firearms are prohibited. Arms for personal defense or hunting may be imported but are strictly controlled
No open carry either. Sounds like gun control to me. It goes way beyond “putting gangsters in prison” and a large part of the plan is investment in education to get kids away from this path.
One thing to note is the 72000 in prison did not receive a life sentence. They will be released at some point, and one has to trust that the “integration” part of the plan will work.
There are also an infinite amount of reports of police abuse, violence, unlawful imprisonment, and media being silenced. We’ll only know the true cost of this many years from now.
If there were any simple solution, we'd have done that, but even with the idea of "banning guns" nothing has significantly progressed in that department because of loopholes and powerful gun advocates.
So anytime anyone complains of "banning guns" I laugh because nothing has changed.
https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...