Why Poverty Persists in America
March 9, 2023 6:46 PM Subscribe
The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?
(from the upcoming new book by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted)
(from the upcoming new book by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted)
From Scott Winship, Director, Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at AEI: "This Matt Desmond article on poverty is definitely in the running for most embarrassing-or-dishonest piece I’ve ever read. There is not a credible poverty measure that doesn’t show a big decline in poverty over the long run."
From Jason Furman, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama: "I was appalled to see a leading scholar of poverty repeat the misleading claim that the poverty rate has not improved in the last 50 yrs."
Both threads include extensive data, if you care about it.
And to try to preempt the criticism: No one is saying that poverty is not a problem, or that we've won the war on poverty. But the first step in curing a disease is diagnosing it appropriately and understanding what treatments have helped.
As Furman notes, "Often left interprets [the decline in poverty] as showing success of anti-poverty programs and right that they are not necessary." Saying that existing antipoverty programs have not reduced poverty implies that they are not worth maintaining, when clearly the truth is that they are effective, but insufficient (and often inefficient).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:07 PM on March 9, 2023 [9 favorites]
From Jason Furman, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama: "I was appalled to see a leading scholar of poverty repeat the misleading claim that the poverty rate has not improved in the last 50 yrs."
Both threads include extensive data, if you care about it.
And to try to preempt the criticism: No one is saying that poverty is not a problem, or that we've won the war on poverty. But the first step in curing a disease is diagnosing it appropriately and understanding what treatments have helped.
As Furman notes, "Often left interprets [the decline in poverty] as showing success of anti-poverty programs and right that they are not necessary." Saying that existing antipoverty programs have not reduced poverty implies that they are not worth maintaining, when clearly the truth is that they are effective, but insufficient (and often inefficient).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:07 PM on March 9, 2023 [9 favorites]
Yeah, quoting the AEI and real-estate-heir Furman isn't the slam-dunk rebuttal you might think it is.
(I apologize about the link; I meant to use a gift link, but my link manager crashed and I accidentally used the original.)
posted by praemunire at 7:14 PM on March 9, 2023 [52 favorites]
(I apologize about the link; I meant to use a gift link, but my link manager crashed and I accidentally used the original.)
posted by praemunire at 7:14 PM on March 9, 2023 [52 favorites]
I'm glad this got posted. Regardless of arguments about poverty levels over time, the piece makes a really strong and clear connection between poverty and exploitation.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:22 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by Dip Flash at 7:22 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
So many encampments now. They’re everywhere. I keep seeing politicians plans on how to deal with the homeless that dare make us actually see them, most of them pie-in-the-sky disconnected from reality ideas that assume things like treatment is a quick solution. You know what I don’t see in most of their plans? How to keep people from being homeless in the first place. That would require inconveniencing people who have gotten bigger and bigger tax cuts from multiple levels of government. But it’s the only way to actually get a grip on the problem of bigger and bigger numbers of people not being able to afford a place to live. I worry about the police crackdowns that are going to be coming. It won’t solve the problem. It’ll just hurt a lot of defenseless people and push them further to the fringes. But god forbid we keep investors from making unlimited money with no social responsibility. Who benefits? It’s pretty obvious.
posted by azpenguin at 7:29 PM on March 9, 2023 [42 favorites]
posted by azpenguin at 7:29 PM on March 9, 2023 [42 favorites]
That Furman thread helped me understand the appeal of Trump--if you're going to be ruled over by a real estate heir who has very little concern about whether you live or die, might as well have one that isn't sneering at you to read a graph.
anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios.
Is it even legal to do things that, while socially helpful, might lower a stock's price? I know that the end of the pension system in the US means that fundamentally every sort of cheap trick in the book has to be done to keep stock prices up, but I thought that those leading public companies can't do something that might harm their investors financially in any way or they'll be fired at best and jailed at worst. The fiduciary duties and all that.
posted by kingdead at 7:30 PM on March 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios.
Is it even legal to do things that, while socially helpful, might lower a stock's price? I know that the end of the pension system in the US means that fundamentally every sort of cheap trick in the book has to be done to keep stock prices up, but I thought that those leading public companies can't do something that might harm their investors financially in any way or they'll be fired at best and jailed at worst. The fiduciary duties and all that.
posted by kingdead at 7:30 PM on March 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah, quoting the AEI and real-estate-heir Furman isn't the slam-dunk rebuttal you might think it is.
AEI, LOL
posted by AlSweigart at 7:37 PM on March 9, 2023 [16 favorites]
AEI, LOL
posted by AlSweigart at 7:37 PM on March 9, 2023 [16 favorites]
The fact that the American Enterprise Institute hates it makes me trust it more
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:39 PM on March 9, 2023 [48 favorites]
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:39 PM on March 9, 2023 [48 favorites]
Is the rate of low home ownership among the poor about hesitance to lend smaller amounts? I thought there was a starter home supply problem.
posted by Selena777 at 8:32 PM on March 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 8:32 PM on March 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
I read this earlier today and it's a fascinating breakdown of exploitation of poor and lower-income Americans that's been going on for decades. It is really not. their. fault. That's going to be a fundamental concept that needs attention and understanding before we can hope to mitigate wealth inequity.
posted by bendy at 8:44 PM on March 9, 2023 [19 favorites]
posted by bendy at 8:44 PM on March 9, 2023 [19 favorites]
There is not a credible poverty measure that doesn’t show a big decline in poverty over the long run.
You can make just about any measure decline over the long run if you just average enough things.
posted by flabdablet at 9:05 PM on March 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
You can make just about any measure decline over the long run if you just average enough things.
posted by flabdablet at 9:05 PM on March 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
Is the rate of low home ownership among the poor about hesitance to lend smaller amounts? I thought there was a starter home supply problem.
There are a lot of issues contributing to poverty and the unfortunately of housing. Anybody who tells you that there's one simple trick to solving these things is either deluding themselves or lying to you.
That said, in a lot of major metro areas there is indeed a severe housing shortage driving homelessness and leading people who are housed to financial ruin. There are many cities in which it is flatly illegal to build housing that will be affordable to people who make a median wage, much less something below that. Parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, minimum square footage of housing, and other policies are fucking people over left and right. Fixing that would still only be a start, though.
posted by wierdo at 9:08 PM on March 9, 2023 [23 favorites]
There are a lot of issues contributing to poverty and the unfortunately of housing. Anybody who tells you that there's one simple trick to solving these things is either deluding themselves or lying to you.
That said, in a lot of major metro areas there is indeed a severe housing shortage driving homelessness and leading people who are housed to financial ruin. There are many cities in which it is flatly illegal to build housing that will be affordable to people who make a median wage, much less something below that. Parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, minimum square footage of housing, and other policies are fucking people over left and right. Fixing that would still only be a start, though.
posted by wierdo at 9:08 PM on March 9, 2023 [23 favorites]
I don't know if poverty rates are declining. Perhaps these guys are correct that the poverty rate has declined. Who actually cares, that isn't the point of the article? Poverty definitely still exists. Open your eyes dudes. The article explores why we have so much poverty in the US, and provocatively, but with evidence, he asserts it exists because of exploitation. I think most would agree that wealth rates are going up - for a few: the .1 percent keeps getting richer, and the .01 percent are now rich enough to shoot themselves into space (where I pray they remain). How did they get so rich? It's that exploitation again. We have a choice through the magic of legislation to allow this kind of exploitation that extracts wealth from the many and funnels it to the few, and we continue with this policy.
posted by latkes at 9:12 PM on March 9, 2023 [26 favorites]
posted by latkes at 9:12 PM on March 9, 2023 [26 favorites]
Is the rate of low home ownership among the poor about hesitance to lend smaller amounts? I thought there was a starter home supply problem.
It depends on the city. Yes there are several cities where there are plenty of homes, but lending standards prevent them from being eligible for mortgages. That means the only viable buyers are flippers or landlords who can bundle or pay cash, and those depend on the viability of the rental markets, meaning plenty remain empty and deteriorate.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:40 PM on March 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
Well it's nice that today the NYT is anti-poverty. I mean, yeah, it really is. It's just, how are they feeling about homeless trans folk? How about the nice Nazi's next door, are they still just like us?
I would like to trust that they are on our side, or at least not completely on the side of of the scumbags. Maybe it's me, maybe I'm a little gun shy, but they post an article like this and I don't get the warm fuzzies and think positively about those nice folks at the NYT, I think, the magician waves his hand showing me it's empty, and the other hand is palming a card. What am I not being shown?
How do we get back to a place we can trust the media? Do we really have to wait til after we've introduced slicy boi and his friends to a couple hundred media moguls, and robber barons?
Sorry, I didn't mean to distract you from your weekly moment of nice happy feelings.
Forget I said this. And you have a nice day.
posted by evilDoug at 9:42 PM on March 9, 2023 [12 favorites]
I would like to trust that they are on our side, or at least not completely on the side of of the scumbags. Maybe it's me, maybe I'm a little gun shy, but they post an article like this and I don't get the warm fuzzies and think positively about those nice folks at the NYT, I think, the magician waves his hand showing me it's empty, and the other hand is palming a card. What am I not being shown?
How do we get back to a place we can trust the media? Do we really have to wait til after we've introduced slicy boi and his friends to a couple hundred media moguls, and robber barons?
Sorry, I didn't mean to distract you from your weekly moment of nice happy feelings.
Forget I said this. And you have a nice day.
posted by evilDoug at 9:42 PM on March 9, 2023 [12 favorites]
they post an article like this and I don't get the warm fuzzies and think positively about those nice folks at the NYT, I think, the magician waves his hand showing me it's empty, and the other hand is palming a card.
"Matthew Desmond is a sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab."
posted by praemunire at 9:54 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
"Matthew Desmond is a sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab."
posted by praemunire at 9:54 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
I would like to trust that they are on our side, or at least not completely on the side of of the scumbags.
Does it help that the author is a respected sociologist? And a Pulitzer Prize winner for his research on eviction?
I would discredit them if they were making biased claims based on imagination or something but they're just stating facts. We learned this week that Fox news is a lying band of liars but they never even tried to hew to facts.
posted by bendy at 9:58 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
Does it help that the author is a respected sociologist? And a Pulitzer Prize winner for his research on eviction?
I would discredit them if they were making biased claims based on imagination or something but they're just stating facts. We learned this week that Fox news is a lying band of liars but they never even tried to hew to facts.
posted by bendy at 9:58 PM on March 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
How did they get so rich?
I think that's a less important question than why the rest of us keep on propping up the systems that stop those riches being shared around to a much greater extent than they currently are.
The rich are as rich as they are because they control the assets that they do. The details of exactly how they acquired those assets in the first place really don't matter as much as the brute fact that they have them now.
If an entity controls a productive asset, then that productive asset will make that entity some money: that's what a productive asset is. Given a system where multiple entities each exert exclusive control over productive assets, the entities that control more assets will make more money off those than the entities controlling less.
Any kind of market in those assets is going to allocate them preferentially to the entities that have more money to spend on them. Which means that any such market has an inbuilt positive feedback that serves to concentrate ownership of productive assets across fewer and fewer entities. This is an inherent characteristic of private property: without strong countervailing measures, the very existence of private property within a society causes concentrations of wealth and control.
Such concentrations are not necessarily a bad thing. Where they get bad is where they are allowed to become so extreme that private property becomes unavailable at all to anybody who either starts out not having access to it or loses their existing access to it due to some misfortune or other.
If a society is going to set up rules that protect private property, then, it seems to me that it should also have some rules in place that stop inequality of resource ownership becoming anywhere near as extreme as that. It seems perfectly clear to me that formal criteria for what constitutes having too little are not going to do much good without a complementary formalization of what constitutes having too much.
Living above the excess line should be held to be every bit as socially undesirable as living below the poverty line, and the protection that the law affords to private property should not apply to assets above the excess line. There should be a cap on the value of the productive assets that any private entity is allowed to control. Ownership of assets in excess of that cap should automatically transfer to the public, as should a proportional share of the proceeds of those assets' productive capacity, and those proceeds should be distributed equitably so that nobody is forced into precariousness for economic reasons.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 PM on March 9, 2023 [23 favorites]
I think that's a less important question than why the rest of us keep on propping up the systems that stop those riches being shared around to a much greater extent than they currently are.
The rich are as rich as they are because they control the assets that they do. The details of exactly how they acquired those assets in the first place really don't matter as much as the brute fact that they have them now.
If an entity controls a productive asset, then that productive asset will make that entity some money: that's what a productive asset is. Given a system where multiple entities each exert exclusive control over productive assets, the entities that control more assets will make more money off those than the entities controlling less.
Any kind of market in those assets is going to allocate them preferentially to the entities that have more money to spend on them. Which means that any such market has an inbuilt positive feedback that serves to concentrate ownership of productive assets across fewer and fewer entities. This is an inherent characteristic of private property: without strong countervailing measures, the very existence of private property within a society causes concentrations of wealth and control.
Such concentrations are not necessarily a bad thing. Where they get bad is where they are allowed to become so extreme that private property becomes unavailable at all to anybody who either starts out not having access to it or loses their existing access to it due to some misfortune or other.
If a society is going to set up rules that protect private property, then, it seems to me that it should also have some rules in place that stop inequality of resource ownership becoming anywhere near as extreme as that. It seems perfectly clear to me that formal criteria for what constitutes having too little are not going to do much good without a complementary formalization of what constitutes having too much.
Living above the excess line should be held to be every bit as socially undesirable as living below the poverty line, and the protection that the law affords to private property should not apply to assets above the excess line. There should be a cap on the value of the productive assets that any private entity is allowed to control. Ownership of assets in excess of that cap should automatically transfer to the public, as should a proportional share of the proceeds of those assets' productive capacity, and those proceeds should be distributed equitably so that nobody is forced into precariousness for economic reasons.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 PM on March 9, 2023 [23 favorites]
If an entity controls a productive asset, then that productive asset will make that entity some money: that's what a productive asset is.
This is not a law of nature, nor any any of the nouns in that sentence naturally occurring phenomena. The question of how is relevant because it illustrates how the system continues to maintain--and naturalize--itself.
posted by praemunire at 10:18 PM on March 9, 2023 [8 favorites]
This is not a law of nature, nor any any of the nouns in that sentence naturally occurring phenomena. The question of how is relevant because it illustrates how the system continues to maintain--and naturalize--itself.
posted by praemunire at 10:18 PM on March 9, 2023 [8 favorites]
Does it help that the author is a respected sociologist? And a Pulitzer Prize winner for his research on eviction?
He's also not on the NYT staff, if that is the concern. He's an academic and writer who got an excerpt of forthcoming work published in the Times, which is different from being, e.g., one of their opinion writers, in terms of how much one should identify him with the paper.
posted by praemunire at 10:20 PM on March 9, 2023 [19 favorites]
He's also not on the NYT staff, if that is the concern. He's an academic and writer who got an excerpt of forthcoming work published in the Times, which is different from being, e.g., one of their opinion writers, in terms of how much one should identify him with the paper.
posted by praemunire at 10:20 PM on March 9, 2023 [19 favorites]
This is not a law of nature, nor any any of the nouns in that sentence naturally occurring phenomena.
Economics is like that.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on March 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
Economics is like that.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on March 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
Then why are you talking as if the laws of thermodynamics were operating here, instead of human behavior shaped by human institutions?
posted by praemunire at 1:12 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 1:12 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
I thought this was a great post and an interesting read, thank you. A lot of the noise about the post seems to amount to whataboutery, playing the wrong man, or mistaking economic articles of faith for a science. But you know, it turns out mileages seem to vary an awful lot more when someone articulately points out problems that large parts of the discourse are comfortable having normalised into the margins...
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 1:47 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 1:47 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
Well it's nice that today the NYT is anti-poverty. I mean, yeah, it really is. It's just, how are they feeling about homeless trans folk? How about the nice Nazi's next door, are they still just like us?The evil pieces of shit running the NYT don't give a single fuck about the poor.
I think it's still worth collaborating with them on a piece like this because the NYT readership are the only people who might demand changes that help people in poverty that actually get listened to.
posted by zymil at 2:18 AM on March 10, 2023 [12 favorites]
become so extreme that private property becomes unavailable at all
yup, Milton Bradley's Monopoly is a Monte Carlo model marketed as a game.
here I'll just weakly wave my hand in the general direction of Georgist critiques about how the economy has been structured lo these many decades.
The house my parents bought for $63,000 in 1980 ($230k in 2022 money) now sells for $350,000 (1.5X inflation), since rents have risen 1.5X in real terms (nominal ~$1800 vs ~$300 in 1980).
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, much of Europe even have more brutal housing markets.
Housing is Different, because going even 5 minutes without legal tenancy in land is a traumatic life event . . . this gives the Rent Setters a very powerful whip hand in our current system, and to temper that dynamic the supply of alternatives must be increased to meet the demand.
The homeless we see are just the canaries in the coal mine.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:10 AM on March 10, 2023 [12 favorites]
yup, Milton Bradley's Monopoly is a Monte Carlo model marketed as a game.
here I'll just weakly wave my hand in the general direction of Georgist critiques about how the economy has been structured lo these many decades.
The house my parents bought for $63,000 in 1980 ($230k in 2022 money) now sells for $350,000 (1.5X inflation), since rents have risen 1.5X in real terms (nominal ~$1800 vs ~$300 in 1980).
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, much of Europe even have more brutal housing markets.
Housing is Different, because going even 5 minutes without legal tenancy in land is a traumatic life event . . . this gives the Rent Setters a very powerful whip hand in our current system, and to temper that dynamic the supply of alternatives must be increased to meet the demand.
The homeless we see are just the canaries in the coal mine.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:10 AM on March 10, 2023 [12 favorites]
Piling on from Heywood's comment, around here a small house near town that a middle income family could have bought a few years ago for $250,000 at 3% interest would have been a starter home. Now that same house is $450,000 and that family would have to make well into 6 figures to afford the mortgage at 7%.
The house didn't change. Is it still a starter home?
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:29 AM on March 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
The house didn't change. Is it still a starter home?
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:29 AM on March 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
It seems like the right response is to burn down the houses of the rentiers.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:40 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:40 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Relatedly I just read a piece* on causes of homelessness that I found surprisingly compelling (tl;dr: not enough affordable housing): Everything You Think You Know About Homelessness Is Wrong, by Aaron Carr.
*I should mention, it was published in Noah Smith's substack, and I know people have varying opinions on his work.
posted by mittens at 4:49 AM on March 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
*I should mention, it was published in Noah Smith's substack, and I know people have varying opinions on his work.
posted by mittens at 4:49 AM on March 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10ZSH
blue is home prices, red is mortgage rate, green is the wage level
rates were a price accelerant at 3% and will continue to push prices down at 7%; home valuations have a lot of lag and push/pull among buyers and sellers
doesn't help of course that 20-30% of all purchases were made by landlords acquiring what we euphemistically call "income properties" . . . this is a ratchet effect that increases the pressure on buyers to make that painful bid on a property to escape the game
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:54 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
blue is home prices, red is mortgage rate, green is the wage level
rates were a price accelerant at 3% and will continue to push prices down at 7%; home valuations have a lot of lag and push/pull among buyers and sellers
doesn't help of course that 20-30% of all purchases were made by landlords acquiring what we euphemistically call "income properties" . . . this is a ratchet effect that increases the pressure on buyers to make that painful bid on a property to escape the game
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:54 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
As noted above, the systems in place in America create feedback loops. Money makes money and entrenches its interests.
It reforms political systems in the interests of those who have it, and lobbies politicians against any regulation of itself.
At this point I have no faith there will be any change without violence. The system isn't set up to allow that. Why would it? Rich people don't want to make less money or be less powerful, and have only historically given concessions when forced to.
And I'm especially salty given that I was just offered a near 20% rent hike for the coming year.
posted by jellywerker at 4:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [11 favorites]
It reforms political systems in the interests of those who have it, and lobbies politicians against any regulation of itself.
At this point I have no faith there will be any change without violence. The system isn't set up to allow that. Why would it? Rich people don't want to make less money or be less powerful, and have only historically given concessions when forced to.
And I'm especially salty given that I was just offered a near 20% rent hike for the coming year.
posted by jellywerker at 4:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [11 favorites]
current inflationary economy is extremely split between people w/ fixed mortgages vs renters, yes. I notice the higher prices at Trader Joes but what was $50 going up to $80 is a lot different than $1500 going to $1800
my parents were renters during the 1970s inflation but from what I remember the rents were constant, $300/mo in the East Bay (SF) for a decent 3B apartment in a 6-unit building and later $400/mo for a decent 3B SFH in Salinas (which had been recently purchased by a very nice MD neighbor natch).
the landlords' costs were fixed, they had tenants to cover them, and things were static, price-wise even as gas and food costs exploded. In fact, the higher gas and food costs were a brake on rising housing costs to some extent.
a different factor now is that we have both the baby boom (age 58 to 77) AND their offspring echo boom (age 23 - 40) to house now, this is a demand crunch that was visible looming in the distance 20 years ago.
the reality now is dials are being turned to maximum returns and the housing market is a lot less personal now, you gotta pay The Man now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:11 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
my parents were renters during the 1970s inflation but from what I remember the rents were constant, $300/mo in the East Bay (SF) for a decent 3B apartment in a 6-unit building and later $400/mo for a decent 3B SFH in Salinas (which had been recently purchased by a very nice MD neighbor natch).
the landlords' costs were fixed, they had tenants to cover them, and things were static, price-wise even as gas and food costs exploded. In fact, the higher gas and food costs were a brake on rising housing costs to some extent.
a different factor now is that we have both the baby boom (age 58 to 77) AND their offspring echo boom (age 23 - 40) to house now, this is a demand crunch that was visible looming in the distance 20 years ago.
the reality now is dials are being turned to maximum returns and the housing market is a lot less personal now, you gotta pay The Man now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:11 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
a different factor now is that we have both the baby boom (age 58 to 77) AND their offspring echo boom (age 23 - 40) to house now, this is a demand crunch that was visible looming in the distance 20 years ago.
This is just not a real issue. There's more vacant housing in the bay than there are unhoused people to fill it. This is true in effectively every major city in North America now.
We don't have a housing-cost problem, we do not have a homelessness problem. We have a landlord problem and a private-equity-investor problem, and housing costs and homelessness are the symptoms.
posted by mhoye at 5:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [45 favorites]
This is just not a real issue. There's more vacant housing in the bay than there are unhoused people to fill it. This is true in effectively every major city in North America now.
We don't have a housing-cost problem, we do not have a homelessness problem. We have a landlord problem and a private-equity-investor problem, and housing costs and homelessness are the symptoms.
posted by mhoye at 5:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [45 favorites]
This article is profoundly compelling to me. Thanks for posting.
I think we need to get involved working for the solutions that the author points to.
posted by NotLost at 5:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think we need to get involved working for the solutions that the author points to.
posted by NotLost at 5:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's a very odd article, as some people have pointed out. It uses measures of poverty that don't actually include social support programs (despite making a big point that social welfare programs have increased over the decades). When you look at poverty with those benefits included, the poverty rate has gone from 19% in 1980 to about 8.5% now.* That's a pretty substantial drop.
Even if you accept the article's premise that poverty has remained stable over the decades, that conflicts with the argument that things were better back when unions were strong and income inequality was less.
(And there's also some weird handwaving to dismiss when things are clearly better. A high percentage of the poor have cell phones? Desmond argues "You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care." Well, no, but one of the structural barriers to poor people trying to get jobs in pre-cell phone era was that they didn't have a phone number that employers could reach them at. I remember social aid organizations handing out phone cards so that people could call about jobs on pay phones. Now that's suddenly not important when lots more people have that contact ability?)
*measure taken from here: https://jabberwocking.com/helping-the-poor-has-been-one-of-the-great-triumphs-of-the-progressive-movement/
posted by Galvanic at 5:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Even if you accept the article's premise that poverty has remained stable over the decades, that conflicts with the argument that things were better back when unions were strong and income inequality was less.
(And there's also some weird handwaving to dismiss when things are clearly better. A high percentage of the poor have cell phones? Desmond argues "You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care." Well, no, but one of the structural barriers to poor people trying to get jobs in pre-cell phone era was that they didn't have a phone number that employers could reach them at. I remember social aid organizations handing out phone cards so that people could call about jobs on pay phones. Now that's suddenly not important when lots more people have that contact ability?)
*measure taken from here: https://jabberwocking.com/helping-the-poor-has-been-one-of-the-great-triumphs-of-the-progressive-movement/
posted by Galvanic at 5:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
we've won the war on poverty.
Why the "war" language? War is failure.
And the US of A has had the war on:
Poverty
Cancer
Terror
Drugs
Poor Accounting (as announced by Donald Rumsfield on 9/10/2001)
It's just, how are they feeling about homeless trans folk?*
Is there some goal being met with the insertion of 'trans" here?
The New York Times exists to sell advertisements. The advertisers want to sell something, be it a product or an idea.
The homeless are not a very influential constituency for economic spending as a consumer or one which turn out votes/give money to the political class.
So the NYT advertisers don't care about the homeless and so there is no reason for the paper to care.
Upthread the $200K -> $500K starter home is mentioned. A $500K buyer is great for advertiser goals but leaves so many others behind. But some level of poor will be kept if only as an example for the capit[ao]l-owning class to point at while telling you how you could end up there if you don't get with their program.
* An example of NYT thinking found while looking for a comment on the low cost living at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:22 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Why the "war" language? War is failure.
And the US of A has had the war on:
Poverty
Cancer
Terror
Drugs
Poor Accounting (as announced by Donald Rumsfield on 9/10/2001)
It's just, how are they feeling about homeless trans folk?*
Is there some goal being met with the insertion of 'trans" here?
The New York Times exists to sell advertisements. The advertisers want to sell something, be it a product or an idea.
The homeless are not a very influential constituency for economic spending as a consumer or one which turn out votes/give money to the political class.
So the NYT advertisers don't care about the homeless and so there is no reason for the paper to care.
Upthread the $200K -> $500K starter home is mentioned. A $500K buyer is great for advertiser goals but leaves so many others behind. But some level of poor will be kept if only as an example for the capit[ao]l-owning class to point at while telling you how you could end up there if you don't get with their program.
* An example of NYT thinking found while looking for a comment on the low cost living at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:22 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care." Well, no, but one of the structural barriers to poor people trying to get jobs in pre-cell phone era was that they didn't have a phone number that employers could reach them at.
But missing the forest for the trees is a recurring theme in the article. Poverty is complex and it's evolved over the years, but we keep stubbornly pointing to things like the size of television screens and the availability of cell phones as yardsticks for how things have improved, while completely missing that the "opportunity" provided by those cell phones has opened up completely new avenues of exploitation like ridesharing, meal delivery, etc.
We keep deluding ourselves that the opposite of being poor is "having nice stuff" when reality it's about having stability and agency.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:23 AM on March 10, 2023 [70 favorites]
But missing the forest for the trees is a recurring theme in the article. Poverty is complex and it's evolved over the years, but we keep stubbornly pointing to things like the size of television screens and the availability of cell phones as yardsticks for how things have improved, while completely missing that the "opportunity" provided by those cell phones has opened up completely new avenues of exploitation like ridesharing, meal delivery, etc.
We keep deluding ourselves that the opposite of being poor is "having nice stuff" when reality it's about having stability and agency.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:23 AM on March 10, 2023 [70 favorites]
A small, Cape Cod-style house in my suburban, New England neighborhood sold for $495,000 a couple of years ago. Half a million dollars for like 1500 sq.ft. -- and it needed a new septic system immediately!
We heard about that sale, and I looked at my kids, and thought, "Wait, how can they ever have a house if this doesn't change?! It's rented apartments only for them, until one of them gets this place when we die."
That's a shitty, shitty situation for my generation to be handing down to them, but how can I change it? I can ask my representatives for laws that punish house-hoarding by big companies & landlords, and for other laws to encourage denser construction, but this is a bad system.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:29 AM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
We heard about that sale, and I looked at my kids, and thought, "Wait, how can they ever have a house if this doesn't change?! It's rented apartments only for them, until one of them gets this place when we die."
That's a shitty, shitty situation for my generation to be handing down to them, but how can I change it? I can ask my representatives for laws that punish house-hoarding by big companies & landlords, and for other laws to encourage denser construction, but this is a bad system.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:29 AM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
AEI, LOL
I believe the two following things: 1) AEI is a corporate-funded, ultra establishment think tank that espouses bad policies. 2) AEI is a generally reliable source of data (at least in the areas I'm knowledgeable about).
Many people here seem to think that there's no point in listening to anything that opponents say. Certainly, there are bad faith actors who just throw up a wall of shit, knowing that it takes more effort to rebut a lie than to make one. But if you apply that universally, then you're condemning yourself to living in an echo chamber where you'll never hear any facts that contradict your priors.
On the general political spectrum, I'm way closer to Desmond than to Winship/AEI. But it's incredibly frustrating that Desmond twists the facts to suit his arguments, and it certainly makes me more skeptical that I can trust the analysis that leads to his specific policy prescriptions.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
I believe the two following things: 1) AEI is a corporate-funded, ultra establishment think tank that espouses bad policies. 2) AEI is a generally reliable source of data (at least in the areas I'm knowledgeable about).
Many people here seem to think that there's no point in listening to anything that opponents say. Certainly, there are bad faith actors who just throw up a wall of shit, knowing that it takes more effort to rebut a lie than to make one. But if you apply that universally, then you're condemning yourself to living in an echo chamber where you'll never hear any facts that contradict your priors.
On the general political spectrum, I'm way closer to Desmond than to Winship/AEI. But it's incredibly frustrating that Desmond twists the facts to suit his arguments, and it certainly makes me more skeptical that I can trust the analysis that leads to his specific policy prescriptions.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1107H
blue is home prices
red is wage level
green is rent level (all 1990 = 100)
to escape the ratcheting green line you've got to hop onto the blue line (which will flatten for you once you get on it [except any rising property taxes], and even decline once you start paying down principal), or live in that SNL van down by river.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:38 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
blue is home prices
red is wage level
green is rent level (all 1990 = 100)
to escape the ratcheting green line you've got to hop onto the blue line (which will flatten for you once you get on it [except any rising property taxes], and even decline once you start paying down principal), or live in that SNL van down by river.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:38 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Poverty exists because people make big money off the backs of the poor. You see this in the persistent inability to ban check-cashing or introduce postal banking. Ditto Uber/DoorDash/Instacart spending enormous amounts of money for labor law carve-outs. Hell, the continued existence of places like Rent-A-Center is a damning indictment of our efforts to help the poor.
Side note: Two years ago during some very peaceful BLM protests, the ONLY business downtown that boarded up here was the local Rent-A-Center, which apparently thought that their everyday metal caging over the storefront wasn't enough so they encased everything in plywood. They know that their business is scum and that they'll be the first against the proverbial wall.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:42 AM on March 10, 2023 [25 favorites]
Side note: Two years ago during some very peaceful BLM protests, the ONLY business downtown that boarded up here was the local Rent-A-Center, which apparently thought that their everyday metal caging over the storefront wasn't enough so they encased everything in plywood. They know that their business is scum and that they'll be the first against the proverbial wall.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:42 AM on March 10, 2023 [25 favorites]
Even if you accept the article's premise that poverty has remained stable over the decades, that conflicts with the argument that things were better back when unions were strong and income inequality was less.
I'm looking forward to reading the actual book to see his arguments laid out in detail. My take on that question (without having read the book), is that he is making a different point there: that in the era when unions were strong and taxes where high, conditions were much better for the working class, even if those gains didn't extend down into the bottom of the poverty rankings. He goes on to talk about how real wages have fallen, especially for people with little education, between then and now. His argument is structured around poverty, but his points consistently focus on overall exploitation, which occurs for those of us further up the food chain as well, but just not in the extreme ways that it does for the very poor.
The house my parents bought for $63,000 in 1980 ($230k in 2022 money) now sells for $350,000 (1.5X inflation), since rents have risen 1.5X in real terms (nominal ~$1800 vs ~$300 in 1980).
This is true over a shorter time frame as well. We bought our first house for about $100k in the early 2000's (so about $160k in today's dollars). It was a very basic starter house, one bathroom, needed some work. According to Zillow, it would now be worth nearly $350k, with most of that rise happening in the past few years, and based on the photos nothing has changed since we lived there to justify that rise in value. It's genuinely not worth $350k -- it should be worth more like $160 or $200k. But the person who bought it cheap from us is going to be able to capture that rapid rise in value without having done anything to create any value, so yay for them. Meanwhile, someone who is house shopping for the first time has to come up with enough money to pay that rise in costs, while still getting the same crummy house they would have gotten for half the price not many years ago.
It's not just that a "starter house" like that has gone up in price to the point that it is no longer accessible to people starting out, though that is huge. Along the way, we've removed entire swaths of cheap housing without replacing it. The past few weeks I've been rereading some classic noir books, including by Jim Thompson. One of the things that stands out in them is that they are set in a time when there were SROs everywhere, offering fairly crummy but cheap daily/weekly/monthly furnished rooms. And they weren't universally terrible; the distinctions between the hotels and what that suggests about someone's status is a plot device in one of the books. We got rid of almost all SROs almost everywhere in the US, and didn't replace them with a different option that was available in the same way, leaving a large number of people with worse options as a result.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:50 AM on March 10, 2023 [14 favorites]
I'm looking forward to reading the actual book to see his arguments laid out in detail. My take on that question (without having read the book), is that he is making a different point there: that in the era when unions were strong and taxes where high, conditions were much better for the working class, even if those gains didn't extend down into the bottom of the poverty rankings. He goes on to talk about how real wages have fallen, especially for people with little education, between then and now. His argument is structured around poverty, but his points consistently focus on overall exploitation, which occurs for those of us further up the food chain as well, but just not in the extreme ways that it does for the very poor.
The house my parents bought for $63,000 in 1980 ($230k in 2022 money) now sells for $350,000 (1.5X inflation), since rents have risen 1.5X in real terms (nominal ~$1800 vs ~$300 in 1980).
This is true over a shorter time frame as well. We bought our first house for about $100k in the early 2000's (so about $160k in today's dollars). It was a very basic starter house, one bathroom, needed some work. According to Zillow, it would now be worth nearly $350k, with most of that rise happening in the past few years, and based on the photos nothing has changed since we lived there to justify that rise in value. It's genuinely not worth $350k -- it should be worth more like $160 or $200k. But the person who bought it cheap from us is going to be able to capture that rapid rise in value without having done anything to create any value, so yay for them. Meanwhile, someone who is house shopping for the first time has to come up with enough money to pay that rise in costs, while still getting the same crummy house they would have gotten for half the price not many years ago.
It's not just that a "starter house" like that has gone up in price to the point that it is no longer accessible to people starting out, though that is huge. Along the way, we've removed entire swaths of cheap housing without replacing it. The past few weeks I've been rereading some classic noir books, including by Jim Thompson. One of the things that stands out in them is that they are set in a time when there were SROs everywhere, offering fairly crummy but cheap daily/weekly/monthly furnished rooms. And they weren't universally terrible; the distinctions between the hotels and what that suggests about someone's status is a plot device in one of the books. We got rid of almost all SROs almost everywhere in the US, and didn't replace them with a different option that was available in the same way, leaving a large number of people with worse options as a result.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:50 AM on March 10, 2023 [14 favorites]
Is the rate of low home ownership among the poor about hesitance to lend smaller amounts?
A large part of it is actually about credit scores, and the ways in which just living while poor fucks your credit again and again.
I'm in an interesting situation right now, in which I have guaranteed stable income for the rest of my life. I'd be a pretty good bet for a mortgage. But I have a difficult time acquiring one, because over the last years, I've had various disputes with companies, etc, who felt they could screw me over because I was poor, and those things get to go on credit reports.
The apartment complex that wanted to charge a cleaning fee even though I cleaned the place and they were destroying the apartment? Well, that's in collections now, and that takes my credit down. The bills I couldn't pay during the pandemic, when everything cost more and people in my household became unemployed? Yep, those are now reporting negatively against me. And it will take nearly a decade to get that shit off. And *so many places* are resorting to collections nearly immediately. For parking and traffic tickets! For education! It's everywhere.
posted by corb at 7:17 AM on March 10, 2023 [16 favorites]
A large part of it is actually about credit scores, and the ways in which just living while poor fucks your credit again and again.
I'm in an interesting situation right now, in which I have guaranteed stable income for the rest of my life. I'd be a pretty good bet for a mortgage. But I have a difficult time acquiring one, because over the last years, I've had various disputes with companies, etc, who felt they could screw me over because I was poor, and those things get to go on credit reports.
The apartment complex that wanted to charge a cleaning fee even though I cleaned the place and they were destroying the apartment? Well, that's in collections now, and that takes my credit down. The bills I couldn't pay during the pandemic, when everything cost more and people in my household became unemployed? Yep, those are now reporting negatively against me. And it will take nearly a decade to get that shit off. And *so many places* are resorting to collections nearly immediately. For parking and traffic tickets! For education! It's everywhere.
posted by corb at 7:17 AM on March 10, 2023 [16 favorites]
My wife and I are in stable lower middle-class jobs (both in education), but after some huge financial setbacks (losing jobs during the Great Recession of 2008, combined with thousands of dollars in medical bills) we had to sell a house for a significant loss and then rented for a decade. The only reason we were able to buy a house again is that a relative died in 2019, leaving us just enough inheritance to put 5% down. We purchased a house in mid-2020, right before prices started shooting up and while mortgages rates were nearing historic lows. A year later, with prices going up, we would have had to settle for a much smaller home. Two years later, with higher prices and higher mortgage rates, we wouldn't have been able to buy anything at all.
We've talked about that a lot--we both have stable, decent income on the low end of professional wages, and we're pretty good money managers. But there was basically a six-month window when we could have bought our house, before which we wouldn't have had a downpayment and after which housing became unaffordable in our area. Who knows how long we would have been renting if my grandmother had died 18 months later than she did?
Of course, because we bought in 2020, our house now appraises at 50% more than we paid, so we have a ton of equity and were able to drop PMI almost immediately. The house "earned" more money in 2021 than I did. All of that is to say that as I get older I increasingly realize how much someone's financial status is sheer luck. I'm not any more skilled or more willing to work hard now that I'm sitting on $130,000 in home equity than when I was crashing with family because we'd lost jobs. Things just happen.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [51 favorites]
We've talked about that a lot--we both have stable, decent income on the low end of professional wages, and we're pretty good money managers. But there was basically a six-month window when we could have bought our house, before which we wouldn't have had a downpayment and after which housing became unaffordable in our area. Who knows how long we would have been renting if my grandmother had died 18 months later than she did?
Of course, because we bought in 2020, our house now appraises at 50% more than we paid, so we have a ton of equity and were able to drop PMI almost immediately. The house "earned" more money in 2021 than I did. All of that is to say that as I get older I increasingly realize how much someone's financial status is sheer luck. I'm not any more skilled or more willing to work hard now that I'm sitting on $130,000 in home equity than when I was crashing with family because we'd lost jobs. Things just happen.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:36 AM on March 10, 2023 [51 favorites]
Many people here seem to think that there's no point in listening to anything that opponents say. Certainly, there are bad faith actors who just throw up a wall of shit, knowing that it takes more effort to rebut a lie than to make one. But if you apply that universally, then you're condemning yourself to living in an echo chamber where you'll never hear any facts that contradict your priors.
But didn't we build our priors from what these opponents have already said? It's not like AEI hasn't already weighed in on similar matters. We know who they are, we know what they stand for. Isn't it up to them to convince us that they've turned over a new leaf?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
But didn't we build our priors from what these opponents have already said? It's not like AEI hasn't already weighed in on similar matters. We know who they are, we know what they stand for. Isn't it up to them to convince us that they've turned over a new leaf?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
I've lost my patience with reading a lot of things from think tanks, because the people working in those places might have started out as honest scholars, but once you get that job in a NoVa think tank. you get the memo: "change your mind? Lose your job."
So a lot of the talking points about poverty improving are true but also irrelevant, because they are bad faith conflations of poverty and precarity.
If you live on the brink of an economic downfall, but have yet to step over that brink, there are many measurable ways in which your life has improved over the last few decades.
But you're still living on the brink of a downfall that can land you in circumstances that will literally get you killed. THAT has not changed at all.
posted by ocschwar at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [14 favorites]
So a lot of the talking points about poverty improving are true but also irrelevant, because they are bad faith conflations of poverty and precarity.
If you live on the brink of an economic downfall, but have yet to step over that brink, there are many measurable ways in which your life has improved over the last few decades.
But you're still living on the brink of a downfall that can land you in circumstances that will literally get you killed. THAT has not changed at all.
posted by ocschwar at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [14 favorites]
But it's incredibly frustrating that Desmond twists the facts to suit his arguments
Every economics argument involves twisting facts to suit an argument. And that's not a complaint about economists, it's a complaint about the entire field. There simply isn't a base set of True Numbers that can be used by everyone in exactly the same ways to arrive at the objective truth. If you have two economists saying "The poverty rate has gone [up|down] over the last 50 years!", it's trivially easy to show that either one is correct. How do you define "poverty"? Are you counting people or households? Where do undocumented people (immigrants and otherwise) fit in?
Here's just one example: Do you count lack of reliable internet access as an indicator of poverty? If so, then everyone outside of a couple dozen rooms was closer to poor in 1973. If not, then you're saying that lots of people aren't poor despite their not having access to various programs that only exist online. If you count it as part of the equation in 2023, but not in 1973, then you've pretty clearly twisted the facts to suit your arguments, but only because you absolutely have to do that.
posted by Etrigan at 8:02 AM on March 10, 2023 [12 favorites]
Every economics argument involves twisting facts to suit an argument. And that's not a complaint about economists, it's a complaint about the entire field. There simply isn't a base set of True Numbers that can be used by everyone in exactly the same ways to arrive at the objective truth. If you have two economists saying "The poverty rate has gone [up|down] over the last 50 years!", it's trivially easy to show that either one is correct. How do you define "poverty"? Are you counting people or households? Where do undocumented people (immigrants and otherwise) fit in?
Here's just one example: Do you count lack of reliable internet access as an indicator of poverty? If so, then everyone outside of a couple dozen rooms was closer to poor in 1973. If not, then you're saying that lots of people aren't poor despite their not having access to various programs that only exist online. If you count it as part of the equation in 2023, but not in 1973, then you've pretty clearly twisted the facts to suit your arguments, but only because you absolutely have to do that.
posted by Etrigan at 8:02 AM on March 10, 2023 [12 favorites]
It is sad to me to read both this article and this metafilter discussion, both of which are ringers for articles/discussions from, eg, 2010. We know all this and nothing changes, and nothing is going to change until there's some crisis which either tips us into full fascism or smashes up a lot of capital.
Also: if poverty is getting better, why is it obviously and visibly worse in my city and my neighborhood? Since 2015, things have gone completely to shit here - we have large homeless encampments everywhere, when prior to 2015 you saw occasional homeless people. I remember the first time that I saw a homeless person with an actual modern dome tent and it scared me a lot - here was someone well-organized and stable enough to have a new, decent-quality tent and they were still homeless. Now I distribute tents to unhoused people.
The streets are in worse shape, there's more trash everywhere, infrastructure is deteriorating, rents are up, everything has just gone to shit here. City services are collapsing - this winter has just overwhelmed our historically pretty good city snow removal service.
People are suffering and it is just virtually unbearable to think about and look in the face. This lousy country deserves to sink into the sea.
posted by Frowner at 8:17 AM on March 10, 2023 [39 favorites]
Also: if poverty is getting better, why is it obviously and visibly worse in my city and my neighborhood? Since 2015, things have gone completely to shit here - we have large homeless encampments everywhere, when prior to 2015 you saw occasional homeless people. I remember the first time that I saw a homeless person with an actual modern dome tent and it scared me a lot - here was someone well-organized and stable enough to have a new, decent-quality tent and they were still homeless. Now I distribute tents to unhoused people.
The streets are in worse shape, there's more trash everywhere, infrastructure is deteriorating, rents are up, everything has just gone to shit here. City services are collapsing - this winter has just overwhelmed our historically pretty good city snow removal service.
People are suffering and it is just virtually unbearable to think about and look in the face. This lousy country deserves to sink into the sea.
posted by Frowner at 8:17 AM on March 10, 2023 [39 favorites]
Hey, remember when the the federal reserve said inflation was caused by poor people having it too good and started engineering a recession? Like 6 weeks ago?
I wonder if stuff like that has anything to do with it.
posted by Reyturner at 8:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
I wonder if stuff like that has anything to do with it.
posted by Reyturner at 8:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Pater Aletheias: ...as I get older I increasingly realize how much someone's financial status is sheer luck.
That really hits home for me coonsidering my siblings and my wife's siblings, and comparing our experiences of macro events.
We're eight people spread across less than ten years, but the opportunities, near-misses, disasters, windfalls, and trends have all hit all of us differently. Some graduated college into a recession while others missed it by still being in school. Some already owned houses before things got crazy while others adjusted their dreams smaller (and then again, and again). I got into IT as the dot com boom took off, and was saved from whatever fate awaited me as an English major who didn't want to teach -- but that's no credit to me, just chance. Who can WFH during COVID? Whose kids were old enough to be out of school when COVID came? Whose mortgage payment -- which seemed insaaaaaanely high at the time -- is now about market rate for renting a small apartment?
Babies, jobs, houses, schooling: so many moving pieces in every life that all aligned differently, and left us better- or worse-prepared for whatever the world brought to our doors. It's all luck, always has been.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:27 AM on March 10, 2023 [25 favorites]
That really hits home for me coonsidering my siblings and my wife's siblings, and comparing our experiences of macro events.
We're eight people spread across less than ten years, but the opportunities, near-misses, disasters, windfalls, and trends have all hit all of us differently. Some graduated college into a recession while others missed it by still being in school. Some already owned houses before things got crazy while others adjusted their dreams smaller (and then again, and again). I got into IT as the dot com boom took off, and was saved from whatever fate awaited me as an English major who didn't want to teach -- but that's no credit to me, just chance. Who can WFH during COVID? Whose kids were old enough to be out of school when COVID came? Whose mortgage payment -- which seemed insaaaaaanely high at the time -- is now about market rate for renting a small apartment?
Babies, jobs, houses, schooling: so many moving pieces in every life that all aligned differently, and left us better- or worse-prepared for whatever the world brought to our doors. It's all luck, always has been.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:27 AM on March 10, 2023 [25 favorites]
We know all this and nothing changes, and nothing is going to change until there's some crisis which either tips us into full fascism or smashes up a lot of capital.
I had high hopes that the pandemic would be the crisis which smashed up lots of capital and jolted us into acting what with the miles-long lines at food banks and the cast of Parks and Recreation doing a goddamned telethon to feed starving Americans. For a while it looked like we were heading in the right direction with Biden reading up on Roosevelt and people talking about the need to reexamine the role government plays in helping people.......but it didn't last. Everything's back to the same super-shitty pre-pandemic normal.
All I can say is, FUCK JOE MANCHIN.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:32 AM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
I had high hopes that the pandemic would be the crisis which smashed up lots of capital and jolted us into acting what with the miles-long lines at food banks and the cast of Parks and Recreation doing a goddamned telethon to feed starving Americans. For a while it looked like we were heading in the right direction with Biden reading up on Roosevelt and people talking about the need to reexamine the role government plays in helping people.......but it didn't last. Everything's back to the same super-shitty pre-pandemic normal.
All I can say is, FUCK JOE MANCHIN.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:32 AM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
In the words of Chat Pile
Why do people have to live outside
In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing
There are people that are made to live outside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
When there are buildings all around us
With heat on and no one inside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
In tents, under bridges
Living with nothing and horribly suffering
Why
Why do people have to live outside
We have the resources
We have the means
Why
Why do people have to live outside
I couldn’t survive out on the streets
Why
Why do people have to live outside
I couldn’t survive out on the streets
I’ve never had to push all of my shit around in a shopping cart have you
Have you ever had ring worm
Scabies?
Have you ever had to live outside
I don’t want to live outside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
Horror story
Real American horror story
And it’s a fuckin tragedy
Every day
Everyday, people have to live outside
Why
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 8:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Why do people have to live outside
In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing
There are people that are made to live outside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
When there are buildings all around us
With heat on and no one inside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
In tents, under bridges
Living with nothing and horribly suffering
Why
Why do people have to live outside
We have the resources
We have the means
Why
Why do people have to live outside
I couldn’t survive out on the streets
Why
Why do people have to live outside
I couldn’t survive out on the streets
I’ve never had to push all of my shit around in a shopping cart have you
Have you ever had ring worm
Scabies?
Have you ever had to live outside
I don’t want to live outside
Why
Why do people have to live outside
Horror story
Real American horror story
And it’s a fuckin tragedy
Every day
Everyday, people have to live outside
Why
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 8:39 AM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Housing is Different, because going even 5 minutes without legal tenancy in land is a traumatic life event . . . this gives the Rent Setters a very powerful whip hand in our current system, and to temper that dynamic the supply of alternatives must be increased to meet the demand.
Very much like health care which isn't left to the private sector most places. This is why I think the only way out is some form of public housing. Whether that means building social housing till homes come down in price to 3x annual incomes or nationalizing empty homes or setting up some single payer system. Homeless people need housing and the state should be enabling that. We've known that for a long time, Carlin had a bit about it decades ago, we just need to some how remove the handle from the orphan grinder and get to it.
posted by Mitheral at 8:49 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
Very much like health care which isn't left to the private sector most places. This is why I think the only way out is some form of public housing. Whether that means building social housing till homes come down in price to 3x annual incomes or nationalizing empty homes or setting up some single payer system. Homeless people need housing and the state should be enabling that. We've known that for a long time, Carlin had a bit about it decades ago, we just need to some how remove the handle from the orphan grinder and get to it.
posted by Mitheral at 8:49 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
The AEI/Furman derail is a pretty typical example of smearing against academic work used by beltway consultant/thinktank type groups to advance their neoliberal agendas. I've seen it used a lot in my work by similar folks to taint discourse regarding COVID measures, oil&gas industry, military industrial complex issues, etc.
Step 1: Find some technicality or number used in the first few paragraphs of a piece and make a bad faith argument against it.
Step 2: Use strong words like "appalled," "dishonesty," or “incoherent” to show just how shocked you are (when, of course, you yourself are actually being dishonest and incoherent).
Step 3: Ignore the actual thrust of the argument, and dismiss the rest of the piece out of hand, insinuating that it's intellectually dishonest.
Here, they're picking apart Desmond's use of the official poverty measure, correctly noting that it doesn't include anti-poverty transfers like SNAP, EITC, etc, and that he should use something like the supplemental poverty measure. But Desmond addresses that in literally the next paragraph:
When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.
So the issue isn’t that Desmond is some scam artist that ignores the difference between the official poverty measure and the supplemental poverty measure, which is what those guys are insinuating. Rather, he’s saying that the drop in poverty that you see in the SPM is “more than offset” by the housing and healthcare cost crises. Is he correct on that front in that the CPI adjustment used by poverty measures doesn’t adequately capture the burden placed by housing and healthcare costs? I don’t know, but that's not really the point here (not my area of expertise). What's important is that it's clear he's making a specific technical argument, rather than some blatantly ignorant overgeneralization that the beltway folks are trying to cast it as.
Of course, as others have noted above, none of this is actually relevant to the main point of the argument, which is that workers are being exploited (defined as being paid less than the value they provide) and that’s a Bad Thing. By poisoning the discourse from the introductory paragraphs, they’ve successfully avoided having to grasp with the actual material from the piece.
posted by bongerino at 9:32 AM on March 10, 2023 [28 favorites]
Step 1: Find some technicality or number used in the first few paragraphs of a piece and make a bad faith argument against it.
Step 2: Use strong words like "appalled," "dishonesty," or “incoherent” to show just how shocked you are (when, of course, you yourself are actually being dishonest and incoherent).
Step 3: Ignore the actual thrust of the argument, and dismiss the rest of the piece out of hand, insinuating that it's intellectually dishonest.
Here, they're picking apart Desmond's use of the official poverty measure, correctly noting that it doesn't include anti-poverty transfers like SNAP, EITC, etc, and that he should use something like the supplemental poverty measure. But Desmond addresses that in literally the next paragraph:
When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.
So the issue isn’t that Desmond is some scam artist that ignores the difference between the official poverty measure and the supplemental poverty measure, which is what those guys are insinuating. Rather, he’s saying that the drop in poverty that you see in the SPM is “more than offset” by the housing and healthcare cost crises. Is he correct on that front in that the CPI adjustment used by poverty measures doesn’t adequately capture the burden placed by housing and healthcare costs? I don’t know, but that's not really the point here (not my area of expertise). What's important is that it's clear he's making a specific technical argument, rather than some blatantly ignorant overgeneralization that the beltway folks are trying to cast it as.
Of course, as others have noted above, none of this is actually relevant to the main point of the argument, which is that workers are being exploited (defined as being paid less than the value they provide) and that’s a Bad Thing. By poisoning the discourse from the introductory paragraphs, they’ve successfully avoided having to grasp with the actual material from the piece.
posted by bongerino at 9:32 AM on March 10, 2023 [28 favorites]
you and I live off the poor
posted by hwestiii at 9:38 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by hwestiii at 9:38 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Why doesn't the word "greed" appear anywhere in that article or in this discussion?
"I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
posted by J-Garr at 9:45 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
"I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
posted by J-Garr at 9:45 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
All I can say is, FUCK JOE MANCHIN
I very much doubt it was just Joe Manchin. It's easier that it looks like it was just Joe Manchin, but had his heart magically grown three sizes I suspect that another Democrat would suddenly have found objections to whatever bill was up for a vote.
posted by kingdead at 9:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
I very much doubt it was just Joe Manchin. It's easier that it looks like it was just Joe Manchin, but had his heart magically grown three sizes I suspect that another Democrat would suddenly have found objections to whatever bill was up for a vote.
posted by kingdead at 9:56 AM on March 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
We have a landlord problem and a private-equity-investor problem, and housing costs and homelessness are the symptoms.
Exactly this.
Real estate has long been understood as a productive asset. There are expectations about the ratio between what any given property costs to buy and what it will return in rent, and those expectations cut two ways: if somebody is looking to buy a property as an investment, they're going to look at what it's been returning in rent, and that will factor into the amount they're willing to pay for it. On the flip side, if somebody is looking to buy property because they need somewhere to park a sum of money and all they really care about is having the value of their holdings grow more over time than the money paid for it would otherwise earn as cash, then they'll be willing to pay more for the property than the usual property price to rental earnings ratio guidelines would suggest it's worth.
So any time there's a sudden surge in income for the very wealthy, they will drive up the price of real estate ownership by dint of being willing to accept a lower percentage rental return on the real estate they own. One tier down, rentier landlords are forced to compete with those higher prices to acquire the properties they buy, and they will then jack rents up to maintain something like the historical price:earnings ratio for real estate.
If this model of how things work is correct, it would predict that most of the property standing empty will be at the high-priced end of the property market, because those are the properties owned by very wealthy people who care more about capital value than rental earnings. You could check that, if you're interested.
I think it is correct, so I see the dysfunction in housing as one of many negative social effects of the hoarding of wealth by the wealthiest.
The thing about productive assets is that the income they return to their owners comes from somewhere. Offices, houses, factories, debts and so on: people pay the owners of these things for the use of them. So if the government pumps enormous amounts of income-support money into an economy that's temporarily been slowed right down by a pandemic, where most of the productive assets are already owned by a relatively tiny group of obscenely wealthy people, then it's not going to take terribly long before almost all of the funds pumped in ends up in the pockets of those people. And if there's no countervailing mechanism for the public to get its fair share of that windfall back out of those pockets, then all that's going to happen is a general rise in the price of productive assets - housing included - and a further concentration of ownership into even fewer hands.
This isn't going to change until the general public wakes up to its own relative power here. None of us individually wields anywhere near the power of a Musk or a Bezos or a Putin or an Adani but there are a shitload more of us than there are of any of those people, and if it becomes widely and clearly understood that the richest of the rich are always and everywhere just ripoff artists and not people whose lifestyles are to be envied and aspired to, then we can stop affording their property the excessive protection it currently enjoys from our collective will as reflected in who we're willing to vote for.
It should not be possible to get paid tens of millions of dollars per year for doing nothing more than rolling out of bed whenever you feel like it. That's not "enjoying the fruits of your labor", that's just wrong. And yet that's exactly what we keep on supporting billionaires to do. I think we should stop.
Tax the rich. That's where the money spent on public benefits ends up, so that's where we should be getting it back from in order to send it back through the benefits web again. The asset hoards of the very wealthy currently function as financial black holes, sucking in sequestering public spending at an ever higher rate; but as noted above, the laws that let them work this way are laws made by people, not laws of nature, and we can change them if we want to.
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 AM on March 10, 2023 [23 favorites]
Exactly this.
Real estate has long been understood as a productive asset. There are expectations about the ratio between what any given property costs to buy and what it will return in rent, and those expectations cut two ways: if somebody is looking to buy a property as an investment, they're going to look at what it's been returning in rent, and that will factor into the amount they're willing to pay for it. On the flip side, if somebody is looking to buy property because they need somewhere to park a sum of money and all they really care about is having the value of their holdings grow more over time than the money paid for it would otherwise earn as cash, then they'll be willing to pay more for the property than the usual property price to rental earnings ratio guidelines would suggest it's worth.
So any time there's a sudden surge in income for the very wealthy, they will drive up the price of real estate ownership by dint of being willing to accept a lower percentage rental return on the real estate they own. One tier down, rentier landlords are forced to compete with those higher prices to acquire the properties they buy, and they will then jack rents up to maintain something like the historical price:earnings ratio for real estate.
If this model of how things work is correct, it would predict that most of the property standing empty will be at the high-priced end of the property market, because those are the properties owned by very wealthy people who care more about capital value than rental earnings. You could check that, if you're interested.
I think it is correct, so I see the dysfunction in housing as one of many negative social effects of the hoarding of wealth by the wealthiest.
The thing about productive assets is that the income they return to their owners comes from somewhere. Offices, houses, factories, debts and so on: people pay the owners of these things for the use of them. So if the government pumps enormous amounts of income-support money into an economy that's temporarily been slowed right down by a pandemic, where most of the productive assets are already owned by a relatively tiny group of obscenely wealthy people, then it's not going to take terribly long before almost all of the funds pumped in ends up in the pockets of those people. And if there's no countervailing mechanism for the public to get its fair share of that windfall back out of those pockets, then all that's going to happen is a general rise in the price of productive assets - housing included - and a further concentration of ownership into even fewer hands.
This isn't going to change until the general public wakes up to its own relative power here. None of us individually wields anywhere near the power of a Musk or a Bezos or a Putin or an Adani but there are a shitload more of us than there are of any of those people, and if it becomes widely and clearly understood that the richest of the rich are always and everywhere just ripoff artists and not people whose lifestyles are to be envied and aspired to, then we can stop affording their property the excessive protection it currently enjoys from our collective will as reflected in who we're willing to vote for.
It should not be possible to get paid tens of millions of dollars per year for doing nothing more than rolling out of bed whenever you feel like it. That's not "enjoying the fruits of your labor", that's just wrong. And yet that's exactly what we keep on supporting billionaires to do. I think we should stop.
Tax the rich. That's where the money spent on public benefits ends up, so that's where we should be getting it back from in order to send it back through the benefits web again. The asset hoards of the very wealthy currently function as financial black holes, sucking in sequestering public spending at an ever higher rate; but as noted above, the laws that let them work this way are laws made by people, not laws of nature, and we can change them if we want to.
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 AM on March 10, 2023 [23 favorites]
When an ally makes a hugely misleading statement about a central point, we tend to say, "Well, that's just a technicality." When someone we disagree with does it, we point it out as evidence why they are generally untrustworthy.
Here, they're picking apart Desmond's use of the official poverty measure, correctly noting that it doesn't include anti-poverty transfers like SNAP, EITC, etc, and that he should use something like the supplemental poverty measure. But Desmond addresses that
You cut out the beginning of that paragraph, where he writes, "What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result."
This is not tangential to his argument, which starts with, "On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis."
Again, I generally agree with Desmond's policy prescriptions. But facts matter, and it's important to get them right. That includes understanding what policies have driven the insufficient but meaningful improvements we have experienced over the past 50 years.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:31 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Here, they're picking apart Desmond's use of the official poverty measure, correctly noting that it doesn't include anti-poverty transfers like SNAP, EITC, etc, and that he should use something like the supplemental poverty measure. But Desmond addresses that
You cut out the beginning of that paragraph, where he writes, "What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result."
This is not tangential to his argument, which starts with, "On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis."
Again, I generally agree with Desmond's policy prescriptions. But facts matter, and it's important to get them right. That includes understanding what policies have driven the insufficient but meaningful improvements we have experienced over the past 50 years.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:31 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I blame superstition. We have mountains of wealth under a publicly-supplied money system, but somehow the most religious industrialized nation can't seem to tax it enough despite the knowledge that doing so improves the overall economy. It goes back to a traditional belief about the divine source of wealth and what it means. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's money manager, claims from long observation that greed isn't what drives people, but envy. I would agree, defining envy as one's emotional need for social and divine acceptance, in fear of rejection. This sentimentality is malignant because all around envy is never satisfying and increases alongside wealth accumulation. As long as society thinks in terms of riches as gifts from heaven, we perpetuate poverty. We can't even shame the wealthy to donate their earnings while they are envied, since that merely confirms they own it naturally, and implies the poor are cursed to beg, though blessed to suffer for an eternal reward, no systemic solution needed. The problem looms larger when an expanding labor base is deemed necessary to supply our retirement. But the wage base shouldn't even pay taxes to begin with, which lowers economic demand and increases poverty. Clawing back our money should be easier, but the mindset against it is fixed, especially among the lowest earners who have everything to gain. Change is hindered by so many voters wrongly associating redistribution of profit with communism, the memory of its totalitarian failures doing the most damage to progress.
posted by Brian B. at 11:15 AM on March 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Brian B. at 11:15 AM on March 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
Certainly, there are bad faith actors who just throw up a wall of shit, knowing that it takes more effort to rebut a lie than to make one.
I've become very good at detecting when the next word a person says is going to be "but."
But if you apply that universally
We're not applying it universally. We're applying it specifically to the American Enterprise Institute.
then you're condemning yourself to living in an echo chamber where you'll never hear any facts that contradict your priors.
Hearing out the latest talking points that Holocaust deniers have come up with to see if maybe they've been right all along doesn't make you intellectually superior and open-minded; it makes you a sucker with poor time-management skills.
AEI is a generally reliable source of data
And a reliable source of misleading and bad-faith interpretations and conclusions.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [13 favorites]
I've become very good at detecting when the next word a person says is going to be "but."
But if you apply that universally
We're not applying it universally. We're applying it specifically to the American Enterprise Institute.
then you're condemning yourself to living in an echo chamber where you'll never hear any facts that contradict your priors.
Hearing out the latest talking points that Holocaust deniers have come up with to see if maybe they've been right all along doesn't make you intellectually superior and open-minded; it makes you a sucker with poor time-management skills.
AEI is a generally reliable source of data
And a reliable source of misleading and bad-faith interpretations and conclusions.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:26 AM on March 10, 2023 [13 favorites]
I'm glad this got posted. Regardless of arguments about poverty levels over time, the piece makes a really strong and clear connection between poverty and exploitation.
This.
Also perhaps why there's such strong pushback from certain segments
posted by infini at 11:28 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
This.
Also perhaps why there's such strong pushback from certain segments
posted by infini at 11:28 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
We're not applying it universally.
I'm sure I've missed examples, but the times I've seen "Well, I disagree with everything X concludes, but they do bring up some useful facts that I otherwise would have not been aware of" are few and far between, especially around here.
And I think grouping a center-right economic think tank with Holocaust deniers says more about you than it does about AEI.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:33 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm sure I've missed examples, but the times I've seen "Well, I disagree with everything X concludes, but they do bring up some useful facts that I otherwise would have not been aware of" are few and far between, especially around here.
And I think grouping a center-right economic think tank with Holocaust deniers says more about you than it does about AEI.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:33 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Is the Entire Economy Gentrifying?
Companies are trying to maintain fat profits as the economy changes, making “premiumization” their new favorite buzzword*
But the shift toward premium products could signal the start of a more lasting change, as businesses settle into a routine of selling lower volumes for higher prices in a divided economy — a strategy that could leave poorer consumers worse off.
* I can see this article and am not a subscriber, unsure what to do
posted by infini at 11:37 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Companies are trying to maintain fat profits as the economy changes, making “premiumization” their new favorite buzzword*
But the shift toward premium products could signal the start of a more lasting change, as businesses settle into a routine of selling lower volumes for higher prices in a divided economy — a strategy that could leave poorer consumers worse off.
* I can see this article and am not a subscriber, unsure what to do
posted by infini at 11:37 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
unsure what to do
For the NYT, just paste the article's URL into the Wayback Machine and then post the link to the latest snapshot.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
For the NYT, just paste the article's URL into the Wayback Machine and then post the link to the latest snapshot.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on March 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Companies feeling pressure to pursue higher profits in order to preserve the kinds of price:earnings ratios that their stockholders have come to expect in the face of stock prices driven higher due to money-parking acquisitions by the suddenly-even-more-cashed-up ultra-wealthy is yet another way that those people's asset hoarding habit makes things worse for everybody else.
They control more wealth than is in any way reasonable. Tax it now.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
They control more wealth than is in any way reasonable. Tax it now.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 AM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
Tax it now.
"Revenue provisions in the proposed [Biden] budget prominently include what an administration fact sheet calls a new billionaire minimum income tax of 20% on both realized and unrealized gains and other income of the nation's wealthiest individuals. The budget also would increase the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 28% and institute measures supporting the United States' participation in a global minimum tax."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:59 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
"Revenue provisions in the proposed [Biden] budget prominently include what an administration fact sheet calls a new billionaire minimum income tax of 20% on both realized and unrealized gains and other income of the nation's wealthiest individuals. The budget also would increase the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 28% and institute measures supporting the United States' participation in a global minimum tax."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:59 AM on March 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
And I think grouping a center-right economic think tank with Holocaust deniers says more about you than it does about AEI.
"Two plus two is five" isn't as odious as "the Holocaust didn't happen" but it's just as wrong.
Also, AEI is "center-right"... LOL.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:05 PM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
"Two plus two is five" isn't as odious as "the Holocaust didn't happen" but it's just as wrong.
Also, AEI is "center-right"... LOL.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:05 PM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Excellent article. Surprised that he didn't mention the idea of a Postal Bank. This would essentially eliminate the predatory payday loan industry, so it's not hard to see how lobbyists keep it from becoming a thing. Biden has been doing some (surprisingly, to me) progressive acts--he should establish a Postal Bank asap, or at least put it out there as a ligit issue. If the article is correct, that should keep billions in the pockets of poor folks.
posted by zardoz at 1:34 PM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by zardoz at 1:34 PM on March 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
There are all kinds of solutions, all related to using governmental power to level the playing field, but nothing will pass because our political system is broken. All I know is, I live near the downtown of a major city, and real soon, the beggars on every street corner and onramp shaking cups and shouting at drivers are going to induce tens of thousands of urbanites who voted for Biden to vote Republican, at least at the local level, on the premise that a new city administration will drag the beggars away. That won't work either, but those beggars are causing a real backlash. The beggars aren't even all that representative of homeless people as a whole, either, but they're what people see.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:57 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:57 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I know that this is a reaction that people have, but I really don’t understand seeing more and more people needing to beg on the street and concluding that our social supports and policies must be too generous, time to cut back.
posted by eviemath at 3:25 PM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 3:25 PM on March 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
Looks the the Fed's rate hikes might have blown up silicon valley instead of the savings accounts of single mothers and pensioners, like they wanted.
Oops.
posted by Reyturner at 3:54 PM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Oops.
posted by Reyturner at 3:54 PM on March 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Surprised that he didn't mention the idea of a Postal Bank. This would essentially eliminate the predatory payday loan industry, so it's not hard to see how lobbyists keep it from becoming a thing.
The concept is mentioned briefly: Yet to stop financial exploitation, we need to expand, not limit, low-income Americans’ access to credit. Some have suggested that the government get involved by having the U.S. Postal Service or the Federal Reserve issue small-dollar loans.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:18 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
The concept is mentioned briefly: Yet to stop financial exploitation, we need to expand, not limit, low-income Americans’ access to credit. Some have suggested that the government get involved by having the U.S. Postal Service or the Federal Reserve issue small-dollar loans.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:18 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I spent most of the past 15 years in low socioeconomic settings where the dominant reality privileged in the narratives was that of 'poverty alleviation' and 'hapless victims" (see Kinyanjui, 2019; 2014;2010 for ex.). I also have 10 years of experience prior to that living in the US, both as a formal employee with pension fund and health insurance as well as a n00b independent practitioner without a safety net. It is extremely difficult to live without credit cards, a credit rating, or even variable daily cash flows (such as from gig work) within the American infrastructure.
IMO, the low income and poor (regardless of metric) suffer more precarity and vulnerability in the US than they do in a slum in Nairobi or New Delhi. Yet, nothing is done for them, not even affordable healthcare or free walk in clinics. Social enterprises would rather fly across the world to uplift the glamorous poor in India or Africa than attempt to enter the inner cities and actually make a difference in their own backyards.
/stops rant here.
posted by infini at 11:11 PM on March 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
IMO, the low income and poor (regardless of metric) suffer more precarity and vulnerability in the US than they do in a slum in Nairobi or New Delhi. Yet, nothing is done for them, not even affordable healthcare or free walk in clinics. Social enterprises would rather fly across the world to uplift the glamorous poor in India or Africa than attempt to enter the inner cities and actually make a difference in their own backyards.
/stops rant here.
posted by infini at 11:11 PM on March 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
And I think grouping a center-right economic think tank with Holocaust deniers says more about you than it does about AEI.
It absolutely does not.
posted by Gadarene at 1:53 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
It absolutely does not.
posted by Gadarene at 1:53 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Excellent article. Surprised that he didn't mention the idea of a Postal Bank. This would essentially eliminate the predatory payday loan industry, so it's not hard to see how lobbyists keep it from becoming a thing. Biden has been doing some (surprisingly, to me) progressive acts--he should establish a Postal Bank asap, or at least put it out there as a ligit issue. If the article is correct, that should keep billions in the pockets of poor folks.
Seems like an opportune time to point out that Louis DeJoy is, against all odds, still Postmaster General.
posted by Gadarene at 1:54 AM on March 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
Seems like an opportune time to point out that Louis DeJoy is, against all odds, still Postmaster General.
posted by Gadarene at 1:54 AM on March 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
Yet, nothing is done for them, not even affordable healthcare or free walk in clinics.
PPACA's Medicaid expansion was created in the attempt to address this need. Anybody with a State Medicaid card has access to the health care system at no cost.
It's the bottom tier of it, but it does exist and is expanding for them.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:48 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
PPACA's Medicaid expansion was created in the attempt to address this need. Anybody with a State Medicaid card has access to the health care system at no cost.
It's the bottom tier of it, but it does exist and is expanding for them.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:48 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Unless you live in one of the 11 states that haven't expanded Medicaid.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:23 AM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 3:23 AM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Americans would really benefit from learning something/anything from China, which actually had a plan to eliminate extreme poverty and did it.
posted by indica at 3:31 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by indica at 3:31 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I know that this is a reaction that people have, but I really don’t understand seeing more and more people needing to beg on the street and concluding that our social supports and policies must be too generous, time to cut back.
That's not the logic being used. The logic is "somebody get these goddamn beggars off our street corners". The beggars are for the very most part able-bodied people, in a time of historically low unemployment. The voters are middle-class strivers who do not for an instant believe that the beggars need to beg on the street, but are parasites who are using that money to drink and lay about. They'd be sympathetic to working people who live in tents, and to attempts to get those people into housing, but they don't think it's the city's responsibility: the efforts need to be state (LOL not happening here) or federal (broken). The city hasn't the resources to do anything about it and also refuses to enforce existing laws against panhandling, and this is the source of the backlash. The voters don't actually think the Republicans would solve the problem but are getting to the point where they just want something different.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:51 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
That's not the logic being used. The logic is "somebody get these goddamn beggars off our street corners". The beggars are for the very most part able-bodied people, in a time of historically low unemployment. The voters are middle-class strivers who do not for an instant believe that the beggars need to beg on the street, but are parasites who are using that money to drink and lay about. They'd be sympathetic to working people who live in tents, and to attempts to get those people into housing, but they don't think it's the city's responsibility: the efforts need to be state (LOL not happening here) or federal (broken). The city hasn't the resources to do anything about it and also refuses to enforce existing laws against panhandling, and this is the source of the backlash. The voters don't actually think the Republicans would solve the problem but are getting to the point where they just want something different.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:51 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Working their asses off to help people but completely overwhelmed and facing constant financial and bureaucratic obstacles, including landlords who refuse to take housing vouchers.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:30 AM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:30 AM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
Americans would really benefit from learning something/anything from China, which actually had a plan to eliminate extreme poverty and did it.
China recently announced it had ended extreme poverty, calculated at earning less than $2.30 US a day, according to the BBC. They achieved this by moving people from the villages to government work and housing zones. Poverty in the US is often related to housing affordability in urban areas, but it is not an option to forcibly relocate anyone to other zones. Instead they provide food assistance and other benefits from national programs. An average two person household receiving food assistance gets an average of $239 US a month.
posted by Brian B. at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
China recently announced it had ended extreme poverty, calculated at earning less than $2.30 US a day, according to the BBC. They achieved this by moving people from the villages to government work and housing zones. Poverty in the US is often related to housing affordability in urban areas, but it is not an option to forcibly relocate anyone to other zones. Instead they provide food assistance and other benefits from national programs. An average two person household receiving food assistance gets an average of $239 US a month.
posted by Brian B. at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Americans would really benefit from learning something/anything from China, which actually had a plan to eliminate extreme poverty and did it.
Side-stepping the question of what China's policies have actually accomplished and how "poverty" there is defined compared to "poverty" here, it's not that America (or Americans) doesn't know how to reduce poverty, it's that we as a society have consistently chosen policies that, while alleviating some of the worst aspects (like providing a minimal level of food assistance so people aren't starving in the streets), maintain (and increase) inequality and exploitation. See Hydropsyche's comment above about medicaid expansion -- even when the federal government creates an improvement in healthcare access, it isn't consistently welcomed at the state level, for example.
IMO, the low income and poor (regardless of metric) suffer more precarity and vulnerability in the US than they do in a slum in Nairobi or New Delhi. Yet, nothing is done for them, not even affordable healthcare or free walk in clinics.
This mischaracterizes poverty in America, and mischaracterizes the resources available. Not nearly enough is done for people in poverty here (particularly to address structural issues, for which progress currently is negative), but to say "nothing is done" is flat out false. In terms of where is it better or worse to be poor, my bet is that if you offered poor people in America free one way tickets to Mumbai, and poor people in Mumbai free one way tickets to America, there would be a very clear choice made simply because the material conditions of the poor here are much higher than of the global south, despite the precarity and vulnerability.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Side-stepping the question of what China's policies have actually accomplished and how "poverty" there is defined compared to "poverty" here, it's not that America (or Americans) doesn't know how to reduce poverty, it's that we as a society have consistently chosen policies that, while alleviating some of the worst aspects (like providing a minimal level of food assistance so people aren't starving in the streets), maintain (and increase) inequality and exploitation. See Hydropsyche's comment above about medicaid expansion -- even when the federal government creates an improvement in healthcare access, it isn't consistently welcomed at the state level, for example.
IMO, the low income and poor (regardless of metric) suffer more precarity and vulnerability in the US than they do in a slum in Nairobi or New Delhi. Yet, nothing is done for them, not even affordable healthcare or free walk in clinics.
This mischaracterizes poverty in America, and mischaracterizes the resources available. Not nearly enough is done for people in poverty here (particularly to address structural issues, for which progress currently is negative), but to say "nothing is done" is flat out false. In terms of where is it better or worse to be poor, my bet is that if you offered poor people in America free one way tickets to Mumbai, and poor people in Mumbai free one way tickets to America, there would be a very clear choice made simply because the material conditions of the poor here are much higher than of the global south, despite the precarity and vulnerability.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
The beggars are for the very most part able-bodied people, in a time of historically low unemployment.
One can obviously determine all disabilities just by looking. /hamburger
Americans would really benefit from learning something/anything from China, which actually had a plan to eliminate extreme poverty and did it.
Wonder how that is working for the Uyghurs.
posted by Mitheral at 6:10 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
One can obviously determine all disabilities just by looking. /hamburger
Americans would really benefit from learning something/anything from China, which actually had a plan to eliminate extreme poverty and did it.
Wonder how that is working for the Uyghurs.
posted by Mitheral at 6:10 AM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
One can obviously determine all disabilities just by looking. /hamburger
If they can spend all day running between cars stopped at a red light and demanding money from taxpayers, they're not too disabled to work. And no, those taxpayers are not going to vote for "just give them homes!"
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:20 AM on March 11, 2023
If they can spend all day running between cars stopped at a red light and demanding money from taxpayers, they're not too disabled to work. And no, those taxpayers are not going to vote for "just give them homes!"
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:20 AM on March 11, 2023
If they can spend all day running between cars stopped at a red light and demanding money from taxpayers, they're not too disabled to work. And no, those taxpayers are not going to vote for "just give them homes!"
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
posted by Frowner at 6:32 AM on March 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
posted by Frowner at 6:32 AM on March 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
outgrown_hobnail: To get a job in the US, you need a photo ID and proof of social security number. You need to be able to show up on time in the proper clothing. You often need to pass a credit check and background check. You may have to pass a drug test.
What are you personally doing to help these people you despise meet those needs? Are you donating to organizations that provide ID services? Here's one Are you helping them get access to transportation and uniforms? Are you campaigning against the classist nonsense that is the US credit check, background check, and drug testing system? Are you helping them get access to banking services and a place to receive mail? Are you helping them get access to housing and food? Or are you just calling them lazy and insulting them on the internet.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:36 AM on March 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
What are you personally doing to help these people you despise meet those needs? Are you donating to organizations that provide ID services? Here's one Are you helping them get access to transportation and uniforms? Are you campaigning against the classist nonsense that is the US credit check, background check, and drug testing system? Are you helping them get access to banking services and a place to receive mail? Are you helping them get access to housing and food? Or are you just calling them lazy and insulting them on the internet.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:36 AM on March 11, 2023 [8 favorites]
The other thing is that a lot of people who are precariously housed or unhoused aren't getting any sleep. I have seen a homeless friend's mental health baseline improve and capacity increase hugely after they'd found secure housing (a very slightly converted garage, but secure and stable) and I realized what a number sleeplessness does on people. Think about it - night after night, getting just a few hours of bad sleep, usually uncomfortable and cold or hot, knowing that there may well be violence or a police raid coming at any time, knowing that the next day you're going to scramble all over again. People pick up drug and alcohol habits while homeless because it's so horrible that can't stand being sober all the time.
And this is all recent!!!! As recently as, say, 2014, I very rarely saw unhoused people. I knew someone who was street level unhoused pretty well at that point, so I was aware that there were unhoused people living, eg, by the river, but there were a lot fewer and IMO it was easier to get out of homelessness. I remember when I saw my first unhoused toddler. I remember when I saw my first unhoused grey-haired old lady. It is crazy, it is just fucking lunatic that we have all decided to forget that this is a new problem and not something that just happens inevitably due to human nature. Massive homeless encampments are not in fact a steady feature of American life and yet we've all accepted them.
If you want to do things for unhoused people in Minneapolis St Paul specifically, message me and I will hook you up with both volunteer and donation opportunities.
Otherwise, you can google "mutual aid Your Area" to start - that will pop up low- or no-barrier distros and services. "Harm reduction Your Area" also.
I am telling you, the way this country is going it could easily be you or someone you love on the street in ten years. People who were able to maintain housing in 2014 are homeless now because of rent and landlord collusion. We're one big financial crisis away from many of us joining them.
Do you fancy having your retirement fall apart so you spend the last few years of your life begging on the street corner until violence, accident or treatable disease puts you in your grave? This happens. It absolutely happens to people who worked all their lives, to people who had middle class jobs. It can happen to you. I personally am haunted by the possibility. The only way to prevent it is to create institutions to stop it.
posted by Frowner at 8:58 AM on March 11, 2023 [20 favorites]
And this is all recent!!!! As recently as, say, 2014, I very rarely saw unhoused people. I knew someone who was street level unhoused pretty well at that point, so I was aware that there were unhoused people living, eg, by the river, but there were a lot fewer and IMO it was easier to get out of homelessness. I remember when I saw my first unhoused toddler. I remember when I saw my first unhoused grey-haired old lady. It is crazy, it is just fucking lunatic that we have all decided to forget that this is a new problem and not something that just happens inevitably due to human nature. Massive homeless encampments are not in fact a steady feature of American life and yet we've all accepted them.
If you want to do things for unhoused people in Minneapolis St Paul specifically, message me and I will hook you up with both volunteer and donation opportunities.
Otherwise, you can google "mutual aid Your Area" to start - that will pop up low- or no-barrier distros and services. "Harm reduction Your Area" also.
I am telling you, the way this country is going it could easily be you or someone you love on the street in ten years. People who were able to maintain housing in 2014 are homeless now because of rent and landlord collusion. We're one big financial crisis away from many of us joining them.
Do you fancy having your retirement fall apart so you spend the last few years of your life begging on the street corner until violence, accident or treatable disease puts you in your grave? This happens. It absolutely happens to people who worked all their lives, to people who had middle class jobs. It can happen to you. I personally am haunted by the possibility. The only way to prevent it is to create institutions to stop it.
posted by Frowner at 8:58 AM on March 11, 2023 [20 favorites]
It's less that homeless encampments are new and more that they've spread to places that haven't had a completely out of whack ratio of housing cost to median income for a long while now. Not that it minimizes the current predicament or justifies continued inaction, mind. I just don't much care for idealizing the past.
Miami has had a huge homeless population for a very long time now and rents were already insane due to all the new build housing being bought up as investment property and being left empty before the pandemic era rush to the city. It wasn't the most terrible place to be homeless because the cops were under court order to stop harassing the homeless. The moment the consent decree expired they started stealing people's shit and throwing them in the clink again, of course.
Personally, I don't understand why some folks get so upset about homeless people being visible. When you get massive encampments that cause actual problems for people rather than just taking them out of their comfort zone, sure, I get that. But the anger people show towards being asked for money or people sleeping under a bridge is just unfathomable to me. I get angry at the people responsible for the lack of housing, not the people who bear the brunt of our societal inaction.
The people themselves, though? Mostly more pleasant to be around than the suburb dwellers scurrying around with a scowl on their face acting like they're in mortal danger for daring to venture into a city and the rich assholes living in their towers with ample private security to shoo away the riffraff. Treat your unhoused neighbors as actual human beings rather than trash or pitiable creatures defined by their present circumstances and they'll treat you the same. At least that was my experience. I heard a lot of interesting stories from my temporary walking companions, it was actually kinda nice.
posted by wierdo at 10:24 AM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
Miami has had a huge homeless population for a very long time now and rents were already insane due to all the new build housing being bought up as investment property and being left empty before the pandemic era rush to the city. It wasn't the most terrible place to be homeless because the cops were under court order to stop harassing the homeless. The moment the consent decree expired they started stealing people's shit and throwing them in the clink again, of course.
Personally, I don't understand why some folks get so upset about homeless people being visible. When you get massive encampments that cause actual problems for people rather than just taking them out of their comfort zone, sure, I get that. But the anger people show towards being asked for money or people sleeping under a bridge is just unfathomable to me. I get angry at the people responsible for the lack of housing, not the people who bear the brunt of our societal inaction.
The people themselves, though? Mostly more pleasant to be around than the suburb dwellers scurrying around with a scowl on their face acting like they're in mortal danger for daring to venture into a city and the rich assholes living in their towers with ample private security to shoo away the riffraff. Treat your unhoused neighbors as actual human beings rather than trash or pitiable creatures defined by their present circumstances and they'll treat you the same. At least that was my experience. I heard a lot of interesting stories from my temporary walking companions, it was actually kinda nice.
posted by wierdo at 10:24 AM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
The voters are middle-class strivers who do not for an instant believe that the beggars need to beg on the street, but are parasites who are using that money to drink and lay about.
Yeah, see, I've known/known of plenty of more formally employed people who use that money to drink and lay about when not working, and whose jobs could definitely be considered parasitic. So even if one assumes the mistaken/inaccurate premise about folks who are asking for money on the street here, my point still stands. That is, even more people needing to get the funds for such activities via begging means that our social supports and policies are insufficient.
Plus it's an ignorant, classist, and often ableist false premise to begin with, as other commenters have pointed out.
Again, I know people have this viewpoint, I just don't understand on a visceral level being that petty, mean, and ignorant.
posted by eviemath at 11:42 AM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah, see, I've known/known of plenty of more formally employed people who use that money to drink and lay about when not working, and whose jobs could definitely be considered parasitic. So even if one assumes the mistaken/inaccurate premise about folks who are asking for money on the street here, my point still stands. That is, even more people needing to get the funds for such activities via begging means that our social supports and policies are insufficient.
Plus it's an ignorant, classist, and often ableist false premise to begin with, as other commenters have pointed out.
Again, I know people have this viewpoint, I just don't understand on a visceral level being that petty, mean, and ignorant.
posted by eviemath at 11:42 AM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
It's Calvinism / just world belief, though, and in the United States, it's absolutely the national religion.
If bad shit happens to you, you are a bad person. Conversely, if you're successful, you're a good person. Good people have good jobs and don't have to beg therefore they're good people, and beggars are bad people because they beg, and the homeless are bad people because they have no homes. If you don't behave, do what you're told, kowtow to the man, you'll wind up on the street. Therefore, if you are on the street, you didn't behave.
QED.
There are vast, vast tracts of people who believe this, it being instilled from a very young age.
There's no room in this calculus at all for disability, mental health issues, impoverished circumstances, medical events, racial disadvantage, or anything else, because that complicates the world view that ensures people behave as the status quo expects them to.
That's why these assholes fight so hard against social assistance and services, because helping bad people is unjust. It's why these same assholes keep raising police budgets even though every study has proven that it's cheaper and more effective to give people a hand up than to punch them down. It's okay to punch bad people, they deserve it.
This is what capitalism endorses and requires: if you don't do what the capitalists require, if you can't serve the capitalism machine, you are trash, you are bad, you are worthless -- you are a warning to the wavering not to misbehave.
It's evil, pure plain and simple. Capitalism creates a destitute underclass because it's necessary to keep the middle class in line so the upper class can extract value.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:38 PM on March 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
If bad shit happens to you, you are a bad person. Conversely, if you're successful, you're a good person. Good people have good jobs and don't have to beg therefore they're good people, and beggars are bad people because they beg, and the homeless are bad people because they have no homes. If you don't behave, do what you're told, kowtow to the man, you'll wind up on the street. Therefore, if you are on the street, you didn't behave.
QED.
There are vast, vast tracts of people who believe this, it being instilled from a very young age.
There's no room in this calculus at all for disability, mental health issues, impoverished circumstances, medical events, racial disadvantage, or anything else, because that complicates the world view that ensures people behave as the status quo expects them to.
That's why these assholes fight so hard against social assistance and services, because helping bad people is unjust. It's why these same assholes keep raising police budgets even though every study has proven that it's cheaper and more effective to give people a hand up than to punch them down. It's okay to punch bad people, they deserve it.
This is what capitalism endorses and requires: if you don't do what the capitalists require, if you can't serve the capitalism machine, you are trash, you are bad, you are worthless -- you are a warning to the wavering not to misbehave.
It's evil, pure plain and simple. Capitalism creates a destitute underclass because it's necessary to keep the middle class in line so the upper class can extract value.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:38 PM on March 11, 2023 [14 favorites]
Personally, my experience has been that the middle class striver is more likely to ask me for money than a homeless person is. Perhaps less frequently, but their asks are a lot bigger than a couple of bucks or a cigarette. The difference is that they're asking me to cover for their lack of savings because they spend all their money trying to keep up appearances. (Which, to be fair, is in some cases at least in part a near requirement of their job)
posted by wierdo at 1:07 PM on March 11, 2023
posted by wierdo at 1:07 PM on March 11, 2023
(For clarification: I don't need it explained to me. Again, I know of the opinion. I'm describing my own internal moral/ethical reaction.)
posted by eviemath at 1:14 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by eviemath at 1:14 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
What do you think could change the petty, mean and ignorant status quo belief system among voters to something that would produce broad support for a widening of the social safety net?
posted by Selena777 at 5:14 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Selena777 at 5:14 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Well, the most effective thing would be for wealthy people and politicians to stop stoking that meanness and pettiness. But they do that because they benefit from it, so aren’t going to willingly change tactics.
Instead, the problem is partly addressed by folks on the left providing alternate narratives that address the growing feelings of insecurity of many people who consider themselves middle class, but in a way that builds solidarity rather than splits people by gradients of poor, working class, or other non-capitalist/ownership classes would. I know many groups are working on that! That’s going to happen more through direct and local conversations and action, though, not by me either complaining or propagandizing on the internet.
But also, setting up social pressure against that pettiness and meanness is another contributing tactic. That’s where me commenting on the internet comes in, though of course I’m more effective when putting similar social pressure on people I know directly and personally. A lot of the folks I’ve met who would generally consider themselves liberal to progressive but who hold classist and mean-spirited views of folks who are visibly homeless or destitute in public seem to think they are making a valid moral judgement. They feel fear, disgust, or other discomfort in the presence of panhandlers, for example; but no one wants to think that they have unjust biases that affect their emotions, or that they might be making an attribution error, so they tell themselves that the people in whose presence they feel these negative emotions must be causing them, and go on to make up just-so stories to try to rationalize why their feelings are valid. But, like so-called “family values” that harm everyone except adult white men above a certain wealth level, we need to make it clear that the viewpoint they adopt in wanting panhandlers or homeless encampments, etc., removed is not the moral high ground, and to name it for the petty and mean-spirited approach that it is. It is distressing to see people forced into such economically marginal positions, of course! The right way to address that distress is to chip in to work on solving the structural issues that cause it. Supporting policies to simply hide other human suffering from one’s direct view is exactly the same sort of irresponsible escapism as such folks claim to be upset about with respect to people who they think are lazy parasitic drug addicts or whatever.
posted by eviemath at 6:59 PM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
Instead, the problem is partly addressed by folks on the left providing alternate narratives that address the growing feelings of insecurity of many people who consider themselves middle class, but in a way that builds solidarity rather than splits people by gradients of poor, working class, or other non-capitalist/ownership classes would. I know many groups are working on that! That’s going to happen more through direct and local conversations and action, though, not by me either complaining or propagandizing on the internet.
But also, setting up social pressure against that pettiness and meanness is another contributing tactic. That’s where me commenting on the internet comes in, though of course I’m more effective when putting similar social pressure on people I know directly and personally. A lot of the folks I’ve met who would generally consider themselves liberal to progressive but who hold classist and mean-spirited views of folks who are visibly homeless or destitute in public seem to think they are making a valid moral judgement. They feel fear, disgust, or other discomfort in the presence of panhandlers, for example; but no one wants to think that they have unjust biases that affect their emotions, or that they might be making an attribution error, so they tell themselves that the people in whose presence they feel these negative emotions must be causing them, and go on to make up just-so stories to try to rationalize why their feelings are valid. But, like so-called “family values” that harm everyone except adult white men above a certain wealth level, we need to make it clear that the viewpoint they adopt in wanting panhandlers or homeless encampments, etc., removed is not the moral high ground, and to name it for the petty and mean-spirited approach that it is. It is distressing to see people forced into such economically marginal positions, of course! The right way to address that distress is to chip in to work on solving the structural issues that cause it. Supporting policies to simply hide other human suffering from one’s direct view is exactly the same sort of irresponsible escapism as such folks claim to be upset about with respect to people who they think are lazy parasitic drug addicts or whatever.
posted by eviemath at 6:59 PM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]
(In my experience, people feeling high degrees of distress or disgust aimed at panhandlers or folks experiencing homelessness is intricately tied in with the xenophobia that is enabling the current completely unethical border policies along the US’ Southern boarder. Both are related to having an inaccurate and overly restrictive idea of who is included in one’s community and who is a neighbor. So many people assume that someone they see who appears homeless or who is panhandling must be “transient” rather than a long-standing resident of their community. And that’s even before we get into the issues with trying to set a duration of residency cutoff for who is considered a community member and neighbor.)
posted by eviemath at 7:11 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 7:11 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's less that homeless encampments are new and more that they've spread to places that haven't had a completely out of whack ratio of housing cost to median income for a long while now.
Homeless encampments are new in Minneapolis. Homelessness is not new in Minneapolis, but mass homelessness is. Weather-wise this is a tough place to be unhoused - the summers are bad enough to be a problem, the winters are very dangerous. Rents have skyrocketed here and policing has changed.
Further, if you look back at media from the eighties, it's clear that street-level homelessness of the kind we took for granted in, say, 2005 was relatively new then. My entire lifetime has taken place during the process of normalizing increasing homelessness across the country. Normalizing homelessness is in fact something that occurred in the eighties and nineties and has occurred more intensely since the financial crisis.
Like, when I was in California in the early 2000s and then after the financial crisis, visible homelessness was shocking both times - but it was much worse later. Now it wouldn't shock me, of course, because there are large homeless encampments a quarter mile from my house, all much worse than anything I saw there.
There is a left rhetorical move which I think is a bad one in which one says, "you're saying that things have changed and gotten worse, well, American has always been [whatever], stop being naive". And frankly, if America literally always has had exactly the same level of evil and all that happens is that it goes from being 80% racism and 20% other stuff (I'm making this up) to 70% racism and 30% other stuff, then the only solution is to tend our own gardens because there's going to be the same net evil no matter what we do.
Things are uneven. We didn't in fact always have the levels of homelessness that we do now, and the normalization of mass, extremely visible homelessness that has happened in the last eight years is a bad change. It's bad for the people who endure it, it's a moral injury to the people who are forced to learn to tolerate it and it's a mobilizing tool for fascism. If we could go back to merely 1995 levels of homelessness just by wishing it, that would be a massive improvement, particularly if you include masked homelessness/housing precarity.
Things get better and worse, laws change things, economic structures change things, mass mobilizations change things, crises of capital change things. We can't obscure the specifics of how things work by saying that the past is identical to the present and that any claims that anything has gotten worse are an idealization.
posted by Frowner at 7:50 PM on March 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
Homeless encampments are new in Minneapolis. Homelessness is not new in Minneapolis, but mass homelessness is. Weather-wise this is a tough place to be unhoused - the summers are bad enough to be a problem, the winters are very dangerous. Rents have skyrocketed here and policing has changed.
Further, if you look back at media from the eighties, it's clear that street-level homelessness of the kind we took for granted in, say, 2005 was relatively new then. My entire lifetime has taken place during the process of normalizing increasing homelessness across the country. Normalizing homelessness is in fact something that occurred in the eighties and nineties and has occurred more intensely since the financial crisis.
Like, when I was in California in the early 2000s and then after the financial crisis, visible homelessness was shocking both times - but it was much worse later. Now it wouldn't shock me, of course, because there are large homeless encampments a quarter mile from my house, all much worse than anything I saw there.
There is a left rhetorical move which I think is a bad one in which one says, "you're saying that things have changed and gotten worse, well, American has always been [whatever], stop being naive". And frankly, if America literally always has had exactly the same level of evil and all that happens is that it goes from being 80% racism and 20% other stuff (I'm making this up) to 70% racism and 30% other stuff, then the only solution is to tend our own gardens because there's going to be the same net evil no matter what we do.
Things are uneven. We didn't in fact always have the levels of homelessness that we do now, and the normalization of mass, extremely visible homelessness that has happened in the last eight years is a bad change. It's bad for the people who endure it, it's a moral injury to the people who are forced to learn to tolerate it and it's a mobilizing tool for fascism. If we could go back to merely 1995 levels of homelessness just by wishing it, that would be a massive improvement, particularly if you include masked homelessness/housing precarity.
Things get better and worse, laws change things, economic structures change things, mass mobilizations change things, crises of capital change things. We can't obscure the specifics of how things work by saying that the past is identical to the present and that any claims that anything has gotten worse are an idealization.
posted by Frowner at 7:50 PM on March 11, 2023 [15 favorites]
We didn't in fact always have the levels of homelessness that we do now, and the normalization of mass, extremely visible homelessness that has happened in the last eight years is a bad change.
I want to strongly second this. California had homeless encampments somewhat earlier, but in most places the big encampments are a very new phenomenon. In my anecdotal observation, it was like the saying about how one goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. Where I was living during that time there were always homeless people, but then very quickly the visible homeless population went from scattered to large encampments, many of which were stable enough that people were able to build shacks and other jury-rigged structures. (The most visceral thing for me is that the encampments I lived near had the exact same smell, of sewage and cooking fires, that the squatter/slum communities did when I was working overseas. I never thought I'd smell that in a major city in the US.)
It wasn't always this way and it doesn't need to be, either.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:17 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
I want to strongly second this. California had homeless encampments somewhat earlier, but in most places the big encampments are a very new phenomenon. In my anecdotal observation, it was like the saying about how one goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. Where I was living during that time there were always homeless people, but then very quickly the visible homeless population went from scattered to large encampments, many of which were stable enough that people were able to build shacks and other jury-rigged structures. (The most visceral thing for me is that the encampments I lived near had the exact same smell, of sewage and cooking fires, that the squatter/slum communities did when I was working overseas. I never thought I'd smell that in a major city in the US.)
It wasn't always this way and it doesn't need to be, either.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:17 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong: "homelessness is primarily a housing problem."
@iamharaldur: "Every year tax records in Iceland are made public. I was hoping I’d be the person that paid the highest amount in taxes last year. But I was number 2 and I proudly accept that honor to pay back to the society that gave a working class disabled kid free education and healthcare."*
posted by kliuless at 11:34 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
- @AlecStapp: "Washington state legislature is currently speedrunning the YIMBY agenda and it's an amazing sight to behold:" - legalizing duplexes or fourplexes - legalizing single-staircase buildings - reforming ADU rules - exempting housing from environmental review
- Housing solutions are climate solutions - "If you're blocking infill housing, you might as well start burning coal in your yard."
- @bilalmahmood: "Why can't SF build housing?"
@iamharaldur: "Every year tax records in Iceland are made public. I was hoping I’d be the person that paid the highest amount in taxes last year. But I was number 2 and I proudly accept that honor to pay back to the society that gave a working class disabled kid free education and healthcare."*
posted by kliuless at 11:34 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
@mnolangray: "It's wild how dozens, maybe hundreds of UCLA students sleep in cars every night, and we're all just supposed to acquiesce to this."
@IDoTheThinking: "UC Santa Cruz has a 130% bed occupancy rate indicating mass overcrowding; whole parking lots of students sleeping in cars and the boomer hippie local crowd treats it like its just a quirky part of the beach culture from their $1.5 million bungalows and Victorians."
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
@IDoTheThinking: "UC Santa Cruz has a 130% bed occupancy rate indicating mass overcrowding; whole parking lots of students sleeping in cars and the boomer hippie local crowd treats it like its just a quirky part of the beach culture from their $1.5 million bungalows and Victorians."
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?
The Asset Economy (GarysEconomics, YouTube, 18m23s):
But the rich are just people. And there are more of us, and always will be until we win.
posted by flabdablet at 11:12 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
The Asset Economy (GarysEconomics, YouTube, 18m23s):
The reason I call it this is because asset prices have increased enormously in the last 30 years and wages have only increased a bit. We have moved into a new kind of economy where increasingly the work that you do is not really that important for determining how rich you are. Increasingly the only thing that matters is how many assets your family has.The Thatcher and Reagan administrations set the world on a path toward the resurgence of feudalism as an organizing principle, and there is no comfort whatsoever in always having been aware that that's what they were doing and what their ilk continue to do.
But the rich are just people. And there are more of us, and always will be until we win.
posted by flabdablet at 11:12 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
If anyone is still reading this thread, here is a sharp rebuttal to Desmond, noting that
Over the past 50 years, the United States has spent a considerable amount of money on new programs designed to lift the living standards of low-income people. The reason this hasn’t reduced OPM poverty is that OPM poverty excludes those benefits by definition. The SPM includes them, and the SPM does in fact show poverty falling over time.posted by twsf at 4:47 AM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I came back to link the Yglesias piece that twsf already did.
And no, neither he or I is arguing that everything is hunky-dory: The point is that to improve things, we need to understand what works. And spending money on anti-poverty programs does work. Saying (incorrectly) that it doesn't just gives ammunition to the right. "The idea that the welfare state has totally failed is a lie I’m used to hearing from Paul Ryan, not something I expect to hear from someone like Desmond."
There's are intellectually honest arguments for Desmond's approach: That it's more politically feasible to focus on improving labor power, or that we need to combine efforts to both reduce market income and direct government support. But implying that government anti-poverty programs have been ineffective is both false and politically counter-productive.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:37 AM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
And no, neither he or I is arguing that everything is hunky-dory: The point is that to improve things, we need to understand what works. And spending money on anti-poverty programs does work. Saying (incorrectly) that it doesn't just gives ammunition to the right. "The idea that the welfare state has totally failed is a lie I’m used to hearing from Paul Ryan, not something I expect to hear from someone like Desmond."
There's are intellectually honest arguments for Desmond's approach: That it's more politically feasible to focus on improving labor power, or that we need to combine efforts to both reduce market income and direct government support. But implying that government anti-poverty programs have been ineffective is both false and politically counter-productive.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:37 AM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Looking at Figure 1 in this this report titled “Official Poverty Measure Masks Gains Made Over Last 50 Years” from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does seem to show that some non-cash social welfare programs made a difference when they were introduced. It looks like the SPM is consistently around 2-3 percentage points lower than the OPM. But the SPM still looks pretty consistent, not significantly decreasing since about 1980 (which was 52 years ago). See also Figure 7 in this other report, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality”, or the comparison between OPM and SPM (Figure 1) in this journal article, “Progress on Poverty? New Estimates of Historical Trends Using an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure”. That some big improvements were made from around 1955-1975 does not in any way contradicts Desmond’s thesis in fpp link.
If folks have actually read the link, they would notice that Desmond notes that our spending on social welfare programs has increased, per recipient as well as total (inflation-adjusted in both cases), but he cites a statistic that poor families only receive $0.22 out of every dollar spent on the TANF program. In his discussion of where the rest of that money goes, he cites examples that are not simply the costs of administering a means-tested program, but where federal funding is completely diverted by states to unrelated spending. He then goes on to discuss some of the structural issues in the private economy that further work in opposition to the current governmental poverty-reduction programs, and that seem to put a bound on how effective those programs can possibly be.
Perhaps the folks who think they have found a “gotcha” or are otherwise arguing against Desmond’s thesis and conclusions should first summarize what it is they think he has said, and ensure that they have fully read and understood the argument they purport to be refuting. I’m sure, as with any academic analysis, that there are valid arguments that could be raised. But if someone’s main argument is that Desmond has used the wrong poverty measure, then they have clearly not understood the main thesis or the specific arguments he has presented in support, and are only arguing against his background explanation of why he started thinking about the thing he is actually talking about.
That is: even if, unlike Desmond, you believe that poverty in the US has continued to decline, his main point that exploitation has hindered the effectiveness of poverty reduction programs (thus, in the context of your assumptions or beliefs, slowing that decline) would still be relevant and important. (Well, important if you actually care about people living in poverty and want to see a reduction all the way down to zero, and for that to happen as soon as possible so as to minimize human suffering. That probably doesn’t apply to the folks at the AEI.)
posted by eviemath at 7:17 AM on March 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
If folks have actually read the link, they would notice that Desmond notes that our spending on social welfare programs has increased, per recipient as well as total (inflation-adjusted in both cases), but he cites a statistic that poor families only receive $0.22 out of every dollar spent on the TANF program. In his discussion of where the rest of that money goes, he cites examples that are not simply the costs of administering a means-tested program, but where federal funding is completely diverted by states to unrelated spending. He then goes on to discuss some of the structural issues in the private economy that further work in opposition to the current governmental poverty-reduction programs, and that seem to put a bound on how effective those programs can possibly be.
Perhaps the folks who think they have found a “gotcha” or are otherwise arguing against Desmond’s thesis and conclusions should first summarize what it is they think he has said, and ensure that they have fully read and understood the argument they purport to be refuting. I’m sure, as with any academic analysis, that there are valid arguments that could be raised. But if someone’s main argument is that Desmond has used the wrong poverty measure, then they have clearly not understood the main thesis or the specific arguments he has presented in support, and are only arguing against his background explanation of why he started thinking about the thing he is actually talking about.
That is: even if, unlike Desmond, you believe that poverty in the US has continued to decline, his main point that exploitation has hindered the effectiveness of poverty reduction programs (thus, in the context of your assumptions or beliefs, slowing that decline) would still be relevant and important. (Well, important if you actually care about people living in poverty and want to see a reduction all the way down to zero, and for that to happen as soon as possible so as to minimize human suffering. That probably doesn’t apply to the folks at the AEI.)
posted by eviemath at 7:17 AM on March 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Matt Bruenig SLYT: Response to Matthew Desmond's "Why Poverty Persists in America"
I think the piece is a bit of a mess and Desmond has mostly gone down the wrong path when it comes to understanding poverty.
posted by davel at 8:49 AM on March 14, 2023
I think the piece is a bit of a mess and Desmond has mostly gone down the wrong path when it comes to understanding poverty.
posted by davel at 8:49 AM on March 14, 2023
I’m sure, as with any academic analysis, that there are valid arguments that could be raised.
They are easy to find; the home owner vacancy rate in Birmingham AL is 1.8%, the rental vacancy rate is slightly higher than the US median, but that includes 2nd homes (majority), homes in various states of repair post/prior to renting (2nd most), and short term rentals (3rd most), so the actual number of apartments available for rent is far lower.
Also, the rents did slightly increase, but considering inflation, prices are falling slightly to neutral. And IMO if you have to dig all the way down to the 50th most populous metro area in the US to find rent anomalies, then you are digging for doom.
To his point that landlords can overcharge, I agree with that, and it's mostly because a large percent who rent cannot buy due to bad federal policies. They have no other choice than rent or homelessness.
The whole middle section is filled with vague stats like this.
Also the 'union' answer strikes me as a neoliberal answer (which the first part pushes against). Each shop should unionize, which is an extremely individualized action on a per-shop basis vs overarching Federal Policies. Not that unions are bad, but it would take a lot of union organizing success to make a difference.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:00 AM on March 14, 2023
They are easy to find; the home owner vacancy rate in Birmingham AL is 1.8%, the rental vacancy rate is slightly higher than the US median, but that includes 2nd homes (majority), homes in various states of repair post/prior to renting (2nd most), and short term rentals (3rd most), so the actual number of apartments available for rent is far lower.
Also, the rents did slightly increase, but considering inflation, prices are falling slightly to neutral. And IMO if you have to dig all the way down to the 50th most populous metro area in the US to find rent anomalies, then you are digging for doom.
To his point that landlords can overcharge, I agree with that, and it's mostly because a large percent who rent cannot buy due to bad federal policies. They have no other choice than rent or homelessness.
The whole middle section is filled with vague stats like this.
Also the 'union' answer strikes me as a neoliberal answer (which the first part pushes against). Each shop should unionize, which is an extremely individualized action on a per-shop basis vs overarching Federal Policies. Not that unions are bad, but it would take a lot of union organizing success to make a difference.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:00 AM on March 14, 2023
Collective direct action as neoliberalism is certainly a take.
posted by eviemath at 12:10 PM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 12:10 PM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
From Desmond's original article:
Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves.
...Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.
This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.
Where does he argue that antipoverty programs don't work? He doesn't. The fact that other people with different political inclinations might grab his "poverty has not meaningfully declined" framing and misconstrue it as arguing against antipoverty programs is not a fault of his piece. It's the fault of people reading the first few paragraphs in bad faith and dismissing the rest of it. Between Desmond and the critics, who's being intellectually dishonest here?
You could argue that he should've used a more airtight framing that bad faith critics couldn't pick apart, and I would somewhat agree. But my experience is that agitators always find something to pick apart, and really, do right-wing audiences expect their op-ed writers to have airtight arguments? At worst, it's a misleading framing, but his core arguments in the rest of the piece do not depend on it -- so why dismiss the rest of the piece?
posted by bongerino at 12:13 PM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves.
...Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.
This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.
Where does he argue that antipoverty programs don't work? He doesn't. The fact that other people with different political inclinations might grab his "poverty has not meaningfully declined" framing and misconstrue it as arguing against antipoverty programs is not a fault of his piece. It's the fault of people reading the first few paragraphs in bad faith and dismissing the rest of it. Between Desmond and the critics, who's being intellectually dishonest here?
You could argue that he should've used a more airtight framing that bad faith critics couldn't pick apart, and I would somewhat agree. But my experience is that agitators always find something to pick apart, and really, do right-wing audiences expect their op-ed writers to have airtight arguments? At worst, it's a misleading framing, but his core arguments in the rest of the piece do not depend on it -- so why dismiss the rest of the piece?
posted by bongerino at 12:13 PM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Collective direct action as neoliberalism is certainly a take.
As an example, Starbucks has 15,000 locations in the US. Starbucks is unionizing at the store level (around 250) not at the corporate level (ie: all 15,000 at once). The 'collective action' is not comparable, ie: about 4000 people vs 350,000 people.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:28 PM on March 14, 2023
As an example, Starbucks has 15,000 locations in the US. Starbucks is unionizing at the store level (around 250) not at the corporate level (ie: all 15,000 at once). The 'collective action' is not comparable, ie: about 4000 people vs 350,000 people.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:28 PM on March 14, 2023
Wut?
Those words all have meanings individually, but the way you have put them together does not correspond to a meaningful sentence in the English I am familiar with.
posted by eviemath at 2:30 PM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Those words all have meanings individually, but the way you have put them together does not correspond to a meaningful sentence in the English I am familiar with.
posted by eviemath at 2:30 PM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Also the 'union' answer strikes me as a neoliberal answer (which the first part pushes against). Each shop should unionize, which is an extremely individualized action on a per-shop basis vs overarching Federal Policies. Not that unions are bad, but it would take a lot of union organizing success to make a difference.
The author directly makes the opposite point, that requiring unionization by location is wrong and it should be allowed to happen more broadly:
As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way. This is why many new labor movements are trying to organize entire sectors. ... If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry. This is a way to organize all Amazon warehouses and all Starbucks locations in a single go.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:14 PM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
The author directly makes the opposite point, that requiring unionization by location is wrong and it should be allowed to happen more broadly:
As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way. This is why many new labor movements are trying to organize entire sectors. ... If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry. This is a way to organize all Amazon warehouses and all Starbucks locations in a single go.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:14 PM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I still don’t get what the link between small-scale or local action and neoliberalism was supposed to be. Or how focusing on Federal policy change is necessarily not neoliberal. Seems to me the scale axis is at least partially orthogonal to whether or not the political orientation of a project is neoliberal or something else, or that neoliberalist projects would tend to have more of an anti-local bias (eg. the labor laws that prevent industrial or sector-wide unionizing are imposed from above at the federal level). The claim seems to be that a local tenants’ union doing a rent strike is neoliberal but the Federal Section 8 housing voucher program is not, for example? That seems backwards to me.
posted by eviemath at 5:15 AM on March 16, 2023
posted by eviemath at 5:15 AM on March 16, 2023
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