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The disadvantageous behaviour you describe exists at every level. There’s wealthy families who couldn’t care less about any of the things you describe — most ge

The disadvantageous behaviour you describe exists at every level. There’s wealthy families who couldn’t care less about any of the things you describe — most generational wealth is lost within a few generations! There’s also a selection bias amongst immigrants like yourself: immigrant families have already made the biggest leap, they’ve uprooted their family and gone to a new country, and so they’re already on the path towards all of the behaviours you describe — they didn’t arrive in America and then decide that education was the path forwards, they arrived in America with optimism and gusto and were ready to do whatever it takes to realise their dreams. Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs. Many of those people are in poverty, many of those people are rich. Many people are not suited to a life of intense pressure to succeed. The problem of poverty education as the solution to poverty is that it is built on the idea that education is why people are in poverty, and that if they just knew a bit more than they’d be doing great… but that’s not really true, poverty is a trap, education cannot save you from the poverty trap. The value of support for people in poverty is that it gives them a better chance to escape poverty and for many people, education is a part of that support, but it’s important to understand that the solution to poverty is not education about how to open a checking account, it’s the whole spectrum of support from financial to education. Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed.

jimbokun 4y ago
"Give every person in poverty a million dollars..." and you will kick off hyperinflation because you will need to print so much currency to make that a reality it will devalue all of the existing dollars in circulation.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  it's not a policy suggestion, it's a rhetorical device. If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life because poverty is caused by money, not education. Education helps people escape poverty because education can be used to earn money, not because knowing how to open a bank account is the path to salvation. There are lots of smart and well educated and successful people who are terrible with money but never end up in poverty because they have enough money to absorb the mistakes.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    The rhetorical device is worthless in my opinion, we need to implement workable policy suggestions that solve real problems.
  - erikerikson 4y ago
    And yet, a significantly frequent outcome of winning the lottery is bankruptcy.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    // If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life You sound like you have never been around a poor person. Most people if they get a raise, their spending magically goes up by the same amount. And people don't understand how money works. My in-laws provide healthcare and profit sharing for everyone who works in their business. And guess what, a big percentage of their turnover is someone gets a 50 cent an hour raise somewhere else but doesn't understand that they are missing out on much more in profit sharing and healthcare. When they leave and get paid out their profit sharing, they are like "what's this??" even though it's been explained to them a thousand times. A million dollars is nothing. You can blow it on a few ill advised purchases and be back where you started. It takes brains to make it last, not to mention make it grow.
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      I’ve been around rich people, I’ve been around poor people. I am fortunate enough to be well off today but that’s not where I come from, I grew up around people in poverty. There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot. Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income. There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.
kneebonian 4y ago
> Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed. If this were true many lottery winners would have their lives and their children's lives changed forever after winning. As it stands almost every person who wins the lottery ends up in the same place they were before within 10 years. The skills required to get out of poverty are often the skills required to stay out of poverty.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  The "all lottery winners end up broke" meme is just that, a meme. Likewise, the idea that the lottery is a tax on those who are stupid or in poverty is a meme. There's lots of people who participate in (and win) lotteries who are living very comfortable lives, certainly not in poverty. Yes, many people who end up with money will go on to lose it (whether inherited or from a lottery or a lawsuit or some other means) but that's not unique to those in poverty. As I said, generational wealth is the perfect example of this: many rich and successful families will lose their wealth within a few generations. Losing money is an activity enjoyed by rich and poor alike.
coryrc 4y ago
GP: Basic things like figuring out how to get a bank account open vs paying a check cashing fee, things add up quickly. You: Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs. These things are incongruous. Separately, in the US you only need two factors to predict poverty: did you graduate high school and did you wait for marriage to have children. For the vast majority of people, it's their culture that determines if those are valued. You need to change culture to change those, and people are suspect of having the government do that because of past and ongoing mistakes.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  The GP suggested that the reason immigrants have succeeded is because they knew to learn to open a bank account, ergo, if people in poverty wanted to learn to open a bank account then they would escape poverty. My point is that is not the reason immigrants are so often successful: rather, immigrants succeed because their entire life is built around seeking out something better for themselves and their family, and they're taking risks and making sacrifices to get it. Education is a means to an end for immigrants looking to build a better life for themselves, it's not the reason they've succeeded. Many immigrants succeed without education! What predicts high school graduation? The framing of your comment ("did you graduate..." "did you wait for marriage...") suggests that these are choices made by people which determine whether they'll go on to live in poverty and if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great. The problem is, poverty does not start with the individual, in fact, it can be traced to before the person was born. High school graduation rates can be predicted based on the circumstance the child was born into.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    > if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great Yes, that's literally what they need to do. If we want to change that, then changing their culture to value education is the only way to do it. No culture which denigrates education is going to equip the majority of its adherents for the modern world. Edit: I feel you're saying the same thing. Said poor immigrants succeed because they value succeeding. That's culture.

jimbokun 4y ago

"Give every person in poverty a million dollars..." and you will kick off hyperinflation because you will need to print so much currency to make that a reality it will devalue all of the existing dollars in circulation.

phphphphp 4y ago
it's not a policy suggestion, it's a rhetorical device. If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life because poverty is caused by money, not education. Education helps people escape poverty because education can be used to earn money, not because knowing how to open a bank account is the path to salvation. There are lots of smart and well educated and successful people who are terrible with money but never end up in poverty because they have enough money to absorb the mistakes.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  The rhetorical device is worthless in my opinion, we need to implement workable policy suggestions that solve real problems.
- erikerikson 4y ago
  And yet, a significantly frequent outcome of winning the lottery is bankruptcy.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  // If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life You sound like you have never been around a poor person. Most people if they get a raise, their spending magically goes up by the same amount. And people don't understand how money works. My in-laws provide healthcare and profit sharing for everyone who works in their business. And guess what, a big percentage of their turnover is someone gets a 50 cent an hour raise somewhere else but doesn't understand that they are missing out on much more in profit sharing and healthcare. When they leave and get paid out their profit sharing, they are like "what's this??" even though it's been explained to them a thousand times. A million dollars is nothing. You can blow it on a few ill advised purchases and be back where you started. It takes brains to make it last, not to mention make it grow.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    I’ve been around rich people, I’ve been around poor people. I am fortunate enough to be well off today but that’s not where I come from, I grew up around people in poverty. There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot. Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income. There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.

kneebonian 4y ago

> Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed. If this were true many lottery winners would have their lives and their children's lives changed forever after winning. As it stands almost every person who wins the lottery ends up in the same place they were before within 10 years. The skills required to get out of poverty are often the skills required to stay out of poverty.

phphphphp 4y ago
The "all lottery winners end up broke" meme is just that, a meme. Likewise, the idea that the lottery is a tax on those who are stupid or in poverty is a meme. There's lots of people who participate in (and win) lotteries who are living very comfortable lives, certainly not in poverty. Yes, many people who end up with money will go on to lose it (whether inherited or from a lottery or a lawsuit or some other means) but that's not unique to those in poverty. As I said, generational wealth is the perfect example of this: many rich and successful families will lose their wealth within a few generations. Losing money is an activity enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

coryrc 4y ago

GP: Basic things like figuring out how to get a bank account open vs paying a check cashing fee, things add up quickly. You: Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs. These things are incongruous. Separately, in the US you only need two factors to predict poverty: did you graduate high school and did you wait for marriage to have children. For the vast majority of people, it's their culture that determines if those are valued. You need to change culture to change those, and people are suspect of having the government do that because of past and ongoing mistakes.

phphphphp 4y ago
The GP suggested that the reason immigrants have succeeded is because they knew to learn to open a bank account, ergo, if people in poverty wanted to learn to open a bank account then they would escape poverty. My point is that is not the reason immigrants are so often successful: rather, immigrants succeed because their entire life is built around seeking out something better for themselves and their family, and they're taking risks and making sacrifices to get it. Education is a means to an end for immigrants looking to build a better life for themselves, it's not the reason they've succeeded. Many immigrants succeed without education! What predicts high school graduation? The framing of your comment ("did you graduate..." "did you wait for marriage...") suggests that these are choices made by people which determine whether they'll go on to live in poverty and if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great. The problem is, poverty does not start with the individual, in fact, it can be traced to before the person was born. High school graduation rates can be predicted based on the circumstance the child was born into.
- coryrc 4y ago
  > if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great Yes, that's literally what they need to do. If we want to change that, then changing their culture to value education is the only way to do it. No culture which denigrates education is going to equip the majority of its adherents for the modern world. Edit: I feel you're saying the same thing. Said poor immigrants succeed because they value succeeding. That's culture.