> WRT: Extreme Poverty, a few years back, we had a political party who tackled the problem of poverty by redefining the measuring stick of what constitutes poverty. POOF much celebration and self-handshaking when they announced that during their term, their efforts dropped the number of people living in poverty by a very significant amount.
In other words, Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
> The thing is, even when it’s defined as some absolute measure, it ends up being a moving target.
Even if, that's better then doing nothing. At least it would help people. I'd rather be a 'poverty' person with safe housing and full stomach, than a today's 'poverty' person.
> I would be equally thrilled if someone did something similar in the United States to see how our poor and working poor make ends meet so that we can stop making crap up in our own prejudiced and biased minds.
Part of the problem is that you can find a huge corpus of studies that support pretty much whatever position you want to take.
- You think poor people are shiftless layabouts who spend all their money on trivial garbage? There's a whole series of think tanks putting out papers that agree with you.
- You think poor people are noble hard workers who through sheer bad luck or malice by the upper classes have ended up in a place where they can barely get by?
I could get you a 1,000 pages of studies by Wednesday on that.
and so on.
Because the studies are so voluminous, you can also find almost impossibly fine-grained studies, like "A study on petroleum energy costs as a percent of net-income for single white mothers in non-coastal states" or whatever.
It takes almost impossibly focused and thorough critical thinking to assemble conclusions from this flood and it turns out taking meaningful action is even harder.
> despite living in a rich planet people are starving
A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to.
> it is a colossal subsidy that will greatly affect markets in a lot of ways
It is, by definition, not a subsidy since it does not target a subset of economic sectors.
> Plenty can be done to eliminate poverty.
Name one means of eliminating poverty without wealth re-distribution or subsidies. The only ones I know of involve sterilizing, deporting, killing or otherwise demographically elminating poor people.
> Charitable organizations, churches, help from family
Those "solutions" are as old as the problem.
They didn't work.
> I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people.
The gun pointing happens as a last resort, not first.
What you are telling me is that we should just wait around for the greediest people in the world to charitably give enough back.
That's just not going to happen. We all know it.
So what you are telling me is that we should just continue the status quo, because doing something about it is technically immoral.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 50 Americans collect as much wealth as the poorest 165 million.
Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty[1]. Is that not immoral?
Approximately 14.3 million households had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources[1]. Is that not immoral?
You are so obsessed with the threat to inconvenience people who have more wealth than you will ever see that you are willing to keep millions in poverty. Get off your high horse. Children are starving.
Minimization of poverty is important but I don't believe it can ever be totally eliminated. You and I just have different fundamental beliefs about human nature and motivation.
If the OP is right (and I think he is), the more safety nets and welfare programs there are the more poverty. This is because they have a learned helplessness and are subject to fiscal cliffs preventing them from escaping poverty.
in other words:
Poverty ought to be minimized.
Therefore, if giving people free shit increases poverty, we shouldn't do it.
> If you don't support the practice when it targets the poor, presumably you shouldn't with the rich either.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." -- Anatole France (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France)
I can't say I see a huge issue with treating the rich worse than the poor in this instance.
'Fair' is just an ideal; at any given moment there's tons of unfairness around, big and small. If SF had a bug tracker, issues of the poor being preyed upon would be P1 bugs. This issue should be a P3 (which means nobody will ever get around to it).
> Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day
Because if the population living in poverty has decreased by 1 billion in 25 years, then were clearly doing the right things to reduce poverty. If you think reducing poverty is a bad thing because you’d only accept a solution that eliminates it instantaneously, then I’d question your priorities.
>Does this reflect genuine concern for the poor, or is it a bad faith tactic to try to shoot down a policy for other
Does it matter?
>Especially with something like vaccine passports, any special issue the poor disproportionally experience is probably better dealt with through some kind of mitigation (e.g. make vaccines free, arrange free transportation or mobile clinics, mandate paid recovery days) than by scrapping the idea entirely.
Most policies aimed at helping poor people usually are usually either counterproductive or poorly done.
> I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers
Society knows and has always known. This government does not care.
I’m quite well off (at least relative to the area I live) and yet I genuinely despair because it feels as though every form of social good is at breaking point.
> Depressing to see so much vitriol in here for an idea to improve living standards for people who earn less.
It's depressing that you would frame the opposition in such a light. People are objecting to an idea that they think won't work, or actually be counterproductive.
It's really disingenuous to wrap a very flawed plan in the glowing virtue of its noble intent, and then dismiss any opposition as ignoble.
> The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support.
Good point. In my birth country you must support your elderly parents by law. Even without the law 99% of families would.
The idea that the government should do it seems crazy.
The government only needs to step in where the elderly have no family, are unable to work, and private charity is not enough.
This means the government only deals with a tiny percentage of people.
> The nature of modern civilization is such that some degree of inequality is inevitable if one optimizes for median welfare.
I just can't get over how dystopian this comment is. Aside from being untrue, it is just horribly wrong headed and borderline evil. Essentially you are suggesting we cement the bottom quartile of society into eternal poverty.
Not only is this cruel, it is ultimately terrible for society as a whole as the poor and homeless become increasingly desperate, and turn to crime and drugs; becoming an ever-increasing burden on society.
> It is almost universally agreed that the persistence of extreme poverty in many parts of the world is a bad thing. It is less well-agreed, even among philosophers, what should be done about it and by who.
Not even the philosophers agree?! This must be a serious article...
In other words, Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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