Inequality much worse than most think

[santafe2]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

Being poor isn't just about the deprivation of things. It begins to hurt you mentally after a while and it is not something you can easily overcome. It is a disease of the mind and should be recognized as such.

When I lived in Los Angeles in the late '80s and early '90s I owned an information technology company that supported the legal industry. A few of the lawyers we worked with would occasionally volunteer to work with Legal Aid Los Angeles and through that connection, I began donating time each week to act as their sys ops admin. Over several years working in that office and seeing the situations Legal Aid would help extricate the people from I came to the understanding you describe. It's an affliction no one chooses. Poor children are hungry. Not once in a while, they're hungry every day in this country, in your community, and what do we do? We allowed the food stamp program to revert to it's previous level, (about 5% less than people received in October). There are 22 million children in the US depending on the SNAP program with 10 million below 50% of the poverty line. There is deep and menacing poverty in this country and the only way anyone does not see it is because they choose to ignore it.

[BadJuju]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

There is deep and menacing poverty in this country and the only way anyone does not see it is because they choose to ignore it.

It is worse than that. People are actively beginning to regard the poor as degenerates. I hear it every day at work from my co-workers. They think that they are Atlas and holding the entirety of the world upon their shoulders. And that people without jobs or on welfare of any kind are stealing from them. It is getting worse, too. I have no doubt that they would rather see the poor die.

[BadJuju]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

atta boy! - doesnt take long humpin sheets of 3/4ply up a ladder to figger out what are the better jobs

and even there in yer 'redneck' state, that must be perty good pay - why so down?

and hey! rednecks aint all bad - give me a choice of hangin with the 'intellectual elite'/wannabees or country folk?
must admit that i'm a country boy/hillbilly at heart - tho i did my k-12 days in the burb's of beantowne, my head/heart is in the mountains.

give me country (music, esp at christmas time) over just about anything - cept for maybe jazz and the blues...

Not saying I am poor; however, I probably won't have the job much longer. Construction being what it is.

I don't like rednecks. Never have. I don't have any sentimental feelings for them or their backwards ways. For me, it is either get with the times or just stay out of everyone else's way. There's no excuse for the ignorance that pervades this community (my city) and communities like it.

[RebbePete]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think

You speak as though people that have this ability earned it. They didn't. It was by happenstance that they have it. It is a favorable combination of genetics and environment that distinguishes people, not choice. At no point does choice ever enter into the equation. Everyone would choose to be gifted mentally and physically. Everyone would choose to have the physical and mental fortitude to withstand even the greatest adversity the universe could throw at them. And to have the ability to prevail. But we don't choose. There is never any choice. We are what we are by fortune or misfortune.

But everyone has a choice how to play the cards that he or she has been dealt. "Fairness" means that there are no obstacles placed in the way of achieving his or her maximum potential, especially that no one steals from him/her or takes unfair advantage.

[BadJuju]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think

But everyone has a choice how to play the cards that he or she has been dealt.

I do not think so. There is only an illusion of choice. We think we are making choices. In reality, it is all occurring without any agency from us. Merely A and B interacting physically to generate inputs and outputs.

[lektrode]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think - Americans widely believed fallacies

Not for nothing, but I think it's worth bringing this conversation from Lexington, Ma to Lawrence, Ma. A nice little trip up to I-495 can push some perspective onto an otherwise one-sided view here.

ya can say THAT again....

after having spent several years working in the lawrence/chelmsford area - not that there isnt PLENTY of opportunity there - or at least there was til wang&co started to head down - dunno what its like these daze, i left in the mid80's (moved from londonderry (NH) down to the north end of BOS - that whole area can be quite depressing - esp in the colder months - its not in the mountains and its not near the beach - and THEN there was the daily grind of i-93 S to 495 and back up again - and gawd help ya if there's so much as a few drops of the wet stuff and fuhgetabout the white stuff - turns an otherwise boring traffic choked slug of a commute to an absolute nightmare - esp when headed south into MA - where if it was snow-covered in NH, its a wipeout soon as cross the line - heading north during the evening trip was always glad to see 'bien venue' baybee

methinks this area - called 'the golden triangle' - was where this song must'ave been concieved:

[lektrode]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

Not saying I am poor; however, I probably won't have the job much longer. Construction being what it is.

have never met a 'poor' electrician - maybe an unemployed one perhaps, but they/we usually have enough sense to save when the moneys coming in - esp those of us freelancers (eh, don? ;) - and ya know the diff tween the self-employed and the UN-employed - right? (a savings acct)

I don't like rednecks. Never have. I don't have any sentimental feelings for them or their backwards ways. For me, it is either get with the times or just stay out of everyone else's way. There's no excuse for the ignorance that pervades this community (my city) and communities like it.

wont argue with ya there duude - but not all country folk are rednecks and not all rednecks live in the country.

theres quite a lot of em living in urban areas - even on the coasts - and methinks the dumbest mofo's are NOT out in the country - as evidenced by the results of 2008, and THEN there's what happened in '12 -

hows that one go??

fool me once...

[Polish_Silver]

How Congress works

Pertinent to EJ's fire graph,
is this interview on NPR

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/20...ion/transcript

He explains how congress sells influence. Anywhere else, it would be called a bribe. Here, it's legal.

[lektrode]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think

In the meanwhile, Lek, it's interesting to look at the studies on depression, suicide, and income inequality......
....
All-in-all it shouldn't be surprising. Take any pack animal, split the pack up, give sixty cows to one of them, nothing to others, and a cup of kibble to most. Make them all watch it go down. They're going to get neurotic. That's NYC in a nutshell.

yep - with apologies to (most) newyorkers.

would be interesting to see the stats on depression/suicide/violent-death comparing urbanites and country folk
(and/or - tween the red states and the blues...)
esp considering that most of, thinks its 90% ? - of gun murders happen in the inner cities - typically where the gun control laws are the 'toughest'

[lektrode]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think - Americans widely believed fallacies

....
The sports are a huge cost in money and effort and need to be cut way back.

esp in college level - the fact that the typical athdir makes more than the head guy is ridiculous to the extreme.

and THEN we have the pro's - 10's of MILLIONS per year - to throw a ball around their PUBLIC/TAXPAYER-FUNDED playpens - while the same public is GOUGED to merely enter them - never mind the price of a beer and hotdog (and some think skiing is expensive ;)

and only have to pay FICA on 113k ???
while the team owners ride off into the sunset with even more

dunno whats worse - that or the carried-interest scam - course then we see that uncle warren brought in 'only' 38mil/day this year

so yeah - the whole compensation and taxation equation is clearly outa whack - the taxcuts of 2001-03 did their job, but its time to fix things - AND CUT SPENDING - esp .mil spending and CORPORATE WELFARE

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

EJ has a really distorted view of what life is like being poor and unprivileged in the United States. I don't think he has ever lived it or been around it truly. It invades every part of you. It becomes you. You don't see these great or grand opportunities that America supposedly has. You are trapped because you don't know any other life. You hope for a better future, but you don't see any avenue where you can make it happen. Being poor for a long time can really transform your ability to see a way out. And once you can't see a way out, then you are not going anywhere.

Being poor isn't just about the deprivation of things. It begins to hurt you mentally after a while and it is not something you can easily overcome. It is a disease of the mind and should be recognized as such.

Personally, I couldn't possibly disagree any more.

I perceive your viewpoint on this topic as an attempt to excuse personal responsibility as a significant contributing factor to individual poverty.

I would be the first to support an argument to develop strategies to combat voluntary/involuntary debt slavery, the need for more effective financial education, and any other efforts to help people break the cycle of poverty.

But I think classifying poverty as a disease is incredibly dangerous for the following three reasons:

1)The term disease absolves the individual's role/responsibility for their financial success/failure

2)The term disease compels treatment which could easily lead to a Soma-esque nightmare that would make pharmaceutical formulations for off patent drugs to treat "diseases" like SAD(Seasonal Affective Disorder) seem tame in comparison in the American pill-cure culture.

3)Not only does poverty as a disease absolve poor of blame for their genuine portion of their predicament(many, but by no means all), but also victimizes them and shapes the next step of the disease narrative to blame, possibly in a very malignant direction.

I grew up in a blue collar lower middle class neighbourhood where we had everything we needed, but little of what we wanted and often take for granted today.

I can't speak from the perspective of never having lived IN poverty, but I have often(and temporarily) lived WITH poverty.....mostly abject 3rd/4th world poverty.

I would oppose any argument that claims personal responsibility is the end all, be all of individual poverty, but I think the concept of poverty as a disease is simply the other end of the poverty perception continuum and I think it is equally wrong.

While I strongly oppose the idea of poverty as a disease, I would agree that it possesses similar viral characteristics within families/tribes/communities as found with domestic violence, gambling and alcohol/drug abuse as learned behavior(at least partial contribution to the cycle).

Over the last couple of years I've been pretty aggressive in classifying many problems I see in the 1st world as "1st world problems".

It's worth talking to recent immigrants TO 1st world nations and discussing this very issue with them.

I suspect the outlier high performance of certain 1st generation immigrant communities in entrepreneurial activity in 1st world countries is partially/largely a result of both their own discrimination between 1st world and 3rd world definitions of poverty as well as their ability to identify opportunities that the indigenous poor cannot see(due to perspective) or choose not to see.

Just my 0.02c

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Inequality much worse than most think

yep - with apologies to (most) newyorkers.

would be interesting to see the stats on depression/suicide/violent-death comparing urbanites and country folk
(and/or - tween the red states and the blues...)
esp considering that most of, thinks its 90% ? - of gun murders happen in the inner cities - typically where the gun control laws are the 'toughest'

I recall an article around 5-7 years ago that focused on the explosion in China's urbanization with a parallel explosion in mental health problems.....not sure how they dealt with the problem of possibly better data capture(of previously unknown mental health problems) skewing things in the wrong direction.

[vt]

Re: Visit the right places--change your tune

We do need to help the disabled, and those who are temporarily unemployed. We need to significantly reduce FIRE, create TECI and many other opportunities.

But we need to do something about these abuses:

http://safeshare.tv/w/csrqsTAmSx

[EJ]

Sunday Evening Ramble #1

Not for nothing, but I think it's worth bringing this conversation from Lexington, Ma to Lawrence, Ma. A nice little trip up to I-495 can push some perspective onto an otherwise one-sided view here.

Amusing, as if I've always lived in Lexington and didn't live after college in a tiny apartment in a run down 3-family home in Watertown with a roommate, my college friend Kevin Cullen, or in a tiny house in West Roxbury with my wife before we married.

You don't have to go as far as Lawrence to find a town with an appreciably lower tax base to finance public schools than Lexington has. As I said, Billerica the next town over will do. In fact, at 155 Lawrence ranks higher than Billerica at 179 in expenditure per pupil.

Of course, expenditure per student doesn't directly correlate to education quality. Belmont while spending 27% less per pupil weighs in with a near perfect Composite Performance Index score of 99.9. This compares favorably to Lexington with its still respectable 98.7 CPI but not so well on a CPI/$/pupil basis. Martha's Vineyard where the tax base is absurdly high due to extreme property values and taxes spends twice as much per student as Belmont but scores below Lexington in CPI, but the CPI isn't a perfect measure of education quality at the margins. Friends who live there year round report classrooms with a half dozen children per teacher and the data bear this out. They live there cheaply in a less than delux rented house across from a graveyard. Their children got into Ivy League schools on full scholarship.

It is tempting to conclude that differences in expenditure per pupil relate to quality by size of classroom as this logically correlates to how much individual attention the students get. But Lexington school classrooms at 19.6 on average are larger than the Lawrence schools' 17.1 and they score an abysmal 84.7 CPI. The secondary public schools that I attended in Belmont at 225 rank worse than either Lawrence or Billerica but I got a good education there anyway.

Dig into the data and there is nothing to contradict the reports that any parent will tell you: the quality of public education depends entirely on the quality of the teachers and how much the parents help out with their kids' schooling.

There's an apparent "rich get richer" cycle of public school education in America and on the surface it is so: good students of good parents attract good teachers and good teachers fulfill the abilities of good students. That's the cycle. But what if good students of good parents can't afford to live in the towns with the good schools? My answer is that they seem to find a way.

Inner city kids were bussed into Belmont schools when I went to high school in the 1970s via the Metco program. At the time this was largely a racial integration issue.

"Without meaningful social contact, talk of tolerance and cooperation is nothing but an abstraction."
--US Federal District Court Judge Nancy Gertner regarding school integration efforts

My observation at the time was that if the family the students went home to after school supported them then it worked and if they didn't it didn't. The program was and is voluntary so it tends to attract parents who are supportive and it does tend to work, and this reinforces my point; it selects for certain qualities of family and culture.

In a perfect world every good student of good parents no matter where they live can attend a good school in a school district that has the tax base and the concentration of good students, parents, and teachers that's needed to cause good schools to happen. Programs like Metco are not scalable enough to achieve this, and no doubt towns do in subtle and not so subtle ways exclude students of low income families. But I'm too old for utopia. I hope for trends in the right direction but I don't have the data to tell me if this is so.

One of Belmont's public school spending efficiency secrets (CPI/$/pupil) is that the town has not given in to the facility spending contest among the suburban towns west of Cambridge for the school age children of MIT and Harvard graduates and faculty. The elementary school going in up down the street is slated to cost $40 million and will undoubtedly cost more before it's done. But I heard that Belmont has recently succumbed: Belmont high school cost $3M to build in the 1970s and is due to be "renovated" for $50 million shortly. The FIRE Economy again: get the town to float a bond to build an opulent school and put the same lousy teachers in it. The big stadium doesn't make the team better but FIRE sells the story all day long.

By the way, readers may recognize Kevin's name from the Boston Globe and recent NPR appearances to plug his book on Whitey Bulger.

It was a trip living with Kevin. He covered the Boston mob for the Herald at the time.

One evening I came home from work before Kevin and the phone rang.

"Is Kevin there?" asks the angry man in a heavy Southie accent.

"No," I reply.

"Well when he comes home tell him he's f***ing dead!"

"Ok. F***ing dead. Will do. And whom may I say is calling?"

"F*** you!"

Hangs up.

It wasn't the first call like that one while Kevin worked the mob beat. That one was none other than Stephen Joseph "The Rifleman" Flemmi and I found myself on the line with a dozen similarly unsavory characters then.

Kevin's friends were also enlightening. At one party a Boston homicide detective filled me in on a question that nagged me.

"When you arrive at the scene of a husband-shoots-wife murder, what does the husband say?"

"Oh, always the same. 'I just wanted her to shut up.' Bad to keep guns in the house. Bad. Really bad. Most people can't handle it. Guns are dangerous and so are people. A bad combo."

And so concludes my Sunday Evening ramble.

[lektrode]

Re: Sunday Evening Ramble #1

.....
And so concludes my Sunday Evening ramble.

nice one Mr J.
always good to and appreciate seeing how facts/figures enlighten this topic vs political bias.

was also interesting to see where my ole k-12 hometown fit into the equation - somewhere on the list south of billerica and north of lawrence - altho i think that whether/not ones parents achieved a college degree matters more in the end than how much is spent on per pupil or in the aggregate - as we see in some of the highest expenditure states with some of the lower/est results, its NOT what gets spent, its what gets retained (in the brains of the students)

the other thing about that list - at least above what are apparently all in barney franks former district? - is just how relatively close the expenditures of individual towns are in MA - while having wildly different results (i'm guessing)?