I'm currently poor. I don't lack the skill to do something else. I've been offered money for sex. I've always turned it down.
Homeless men with no skills sometimes find day labor jobs. They are much less often offered money or a place to stay in exchange for sex.
I used Glass Ceiling as shorthand for removing barriers generally. Given the response here, I don't think it's worth the time and effort to try to "clarify." I don't think most people here actually want to understand the point. They are too busy shooting the idea down to wonder if there's any merit to the idea.
I see this message as the first time you really contributed new ideas to the conversation that go beyond I disagree. Which is nice because it seems like you're ready to converse.
Ultimately, I read your point here as poor people can't find work. My immediate counter-argument is that there are tons of high paying jobs in the trades that don't require an advanced degree. So getting a living wage is possible even for poor people.
I know there's a pivot point right here in this counter-argument that we will probably disagree on and that I'd like to explore. You might say, "it takes knowledge and connections and money to get those kinds of jobs". To which I will respond, "there are charities and government retraining and corporate sponsorships for journeymen all begging for solid people to apply themselves and land great jobs". To which you might respond, "these people are shut out, institutional barriers".
So, here's the pivot point I see, and we can go two ways here. This may be too crude and you can refine this, but I frame your "poor people can't find work" argument in a belief system that says there exist class hierarchies in the U.S. that are structured to keep poor people poor and generally keep people from rising. And, also too crude, but I frame my "but there are jobs, and they're well-paying" argument under a world view wherein people don't rise because of a culture of victimhood where they will settle into an impoverished state and accept welfare to get by.
I can't deny the fact that uninformed people won't have the innate ability to identify opportunities, and by-and-large there isn't any cultural crossover between classes any more to help spread the knowledge of opportunities more widely. (See Coming Apart by Charles Murray for a deep study on this.)
But it also cannot be denied that unprotected sex leads to babies, and that condoms are free for the taking, and the pill is basically free if you're poor. Noone can claim ignorance to the fact that sex often leads to babies and babies cost money. So, there must be some culture issue with the lower class as @Consultant32452 was alluding to where poverty is allowed to become multi-generational.
Please don't break off here and zero in on one thing that bugs you about a response. Right now I'd ask you to go back and address @Consultant32452's point that I think was, at its root, a criticism of culture:
> You keep repeatedly and intentionally dodging the fact that all three things I listed are symbiotic of one another. Single motherhood is one of the largest contributors to poverty, and it tends to be cyclical/generational as single mothers tend to have children who have children out of wedlock, are more likely to drop out of high school, and as a result have a harder time maintaining employment. And no, I'm not picking on the mothers here, because it takes two people to make a single mother.
I think @Consultant32452 addressed your open ended "The question is how" directly from his world view. His response might not be sufficient or relevant to you (I don't know, you didn't respond.) Would you please do the same with @Consultant32452's point about single motherhood, and from your world view? I want to understand where your head is at on that.
- Men without Skills in-demand-- skills which are at least somewhat fulfilling & interesting to those men.
Solution: Research labor data for careers in high demand, then cross reference those careers with skills a person is interested in. Then identify resources & a roadmap for learning those skills. And sit down, and put the time in to learn & apply those skills at a novice to intermediate level.
- Men who refuse to work. Part of why they refuse to work is that they might not recognize the solution above: to build skills relevant to a career they consider meaningful. This may also be due to a lack of monetary resources to live somewhat comfortably while building those skills (That said, I lived in a tent for months while teaching myself web development). Or they are overburdened by obligations and decided to give up and check out of society (i.e. turn towards homelessness and/or drugs)
Caveat: I know some folks who call themselves "poor folks". The reality is that their problem isn't that they're poor. Their problem is that they refuse to put together a well formatted resume, apply to jobs, and accept that they may have to start at the bottom of the career ladder. (And/or build new skills)
The concept of "Work" is but one link on a dependency chain:
Study -> Skills -> Productivity -> Work -> Career -> Build resources
Your reply rubbed me the wrong way, as it implies that being poor, unemployed, or homeless are by definition failures. Perhaps you didn't intend that (or perhaps you do believe it). Not looking for a philosophical argument - just stating my opinion contrary to what yours comes across as.
Re: help networks -> poor people might not have a network that can make a house payment for them, but their networks are (IME) more likely to give a hand via couch-surfing and the like.
As a person who grew up poor and made it out of the bottom quintile, I can tell you that the number of my poor friends who had the talent and opportunity to do the same but didn't actually do it is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who did.
So why don't they actually make it out? The theory in the article sounds interesting, and I hope to see more research done to test it.
Willing to accept a low enough wage? There's a hard floor on that in most countries. Even ignoring minimum wage, there's a minimum amount of management overhead involved in having an employee, especially a low-wage, low-skill employee, and the value produced by a worker must at least overcome that even if he is to be worth hiring for free.
Willing to relocate? How about able to relocate? Moving to a distant land is a non-trivial exercise.
I seriously don't get your attitude in this thread. You're basically declaring that various serious problems in society are not, in fact, problems at all. According to you, as best I can tell, every single poor or homeless person out there has no obstacles to getting out of their predicament if they just did some obvious things like find employment. This leads me to ask: why do these people exist at all, then? Nobody wants to be poor, so if they can get out of it so easily, why are they still poor?
This is one of those instances where the mere existence of a problem indicates that it's hard to solve, while you're blithely proclaiming it to be trivial.
I'm trying to say that with less inequality and more resources available to them, these people could go to the grocery store to feed their family, or go to school to get a profession...
Yes, it is a complex topic and one that disproportionately impacts some demographics. It is related to the phenomenon of unpaid internships where getting your foot in the door requires you to be able to work for free for a substantial period of time. This has been criticized as a form of gatekeeping because young adults from already prosperous families can comfortably do this and people from the lower classes cannot.
Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them.
If you are poor, my firsthand experience suggests most people are all too happy to take advantage of you and then not let you walk away. That worked for them, they want more and at the same price: free.
Money is a wonderful thing but there is no excusing a common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes for what often amounts to free therapy and other free services with zero plans to in any way return the favor.
I doubt the person you are responding to believes that low skill workers deserve to live in poverty. I don't think that's a particulalry charitable interpretation
the economy only selects the best and the rest are left to compete in the same income bracket as the lazy, stupid, young, immigrant, unskilled etc.
As a homeless person with more than 6 years of college who was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, I think you are ...ill informed, to put it very mildly.
I turned down a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of school at age 20 with no student loans. I have one student loan that will be paid off about next July that is for a Certificate in GIS that is the equivalent of Master's level work. I have also had a college class on homelessness and public policy and I run (at least) a couple of websites aimed at addressing problems of the most desperately poor in the U.S.
In the vast majority of cases, poor people are not lazy, stupid or unskilled. In the vast majority of cases they are one of the following:
Female -- Poverty is a gendered issue and there are many factors that make it a gendered issue, more than I care to go into today as I am trying hard to resolve my own serious financial problems by doing as much paid work as I can here lately.
Chronically ill (or maimed for life) through no fault of their own -- One of the side effects of all of our modern medications and what not is that we can often "cure" things like cancer, but we don't really know how to get people well. We keep them alive, but often in a state where they are limping along and not able to work full time while saddled with high medical bills. (I have heard that more than half of all bankruptcies in the U.S. involve high medical bills, even when the person has good medical insurance -- I know this from someone very informed on the subject.)
Mentally ill -- and there is increasing evidence that mental illness and associated problems, such as alcoholism or addiction, have biological roots. So it may be called "mental illness," but it really is still a form of physical illness, one that even modern medicine does an incredibly poor job of addressing. We still don't have this one figured out all that well as a society.
Unable to find affordable housing -- There is a dearth of affordable housing in the US. This is a problem that goes back many decades and is only getting worse with time. I don't have time to find stats right now, by the shortage is really extreme and the result is, in part, increasing levels of homelessness nationwide.
Bailing out people who borrowed too much money for college falls far short of my priority list for trying to fix the problems in the U.S. Fixing those other problems would help all people, regardless of their educational achievement, income level or other details.
It would even help the fools who borrowed far too much for college. I dropped out specifically because I knew two people with a completed bachelor's degree and some form of college beyond that who were both delivering newspapers. One was living with his mother in his 30s. The other was mooching off his fool of a wife who eventually got wise and divorced his sorry ass.
They obviously are not and can not be or become "top-tier males". That's the objective reality.
They don't want to be part of the system as it has nothing in it for them.
In other words, their existence as part of the system is perceived as miserable as - if not more so - than being outside of it. So why bother trying?
There's very little to no return on investment for their efforts in improving themselves (or being part of the system).
If due to pressing economic circumstances they were forced to work, they would not be any less miserable, perhaps more so.
are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work?
I'll go with "yes". Doing productive work, earning money, and gaining basic computer experience would be much better for everyone involved than panhandling on the street.
In equally loaded terms, why would you deny poor people an opportunity to improve their lives?
Looking at some random sources around [1], some of the studies on this conclude the issue is these men don't want to work for such low status/pay jobs, and the skill bars are too high for the jobs they would work.
Many are dependent on wives/parents to get by. So not paying welfare probably won't help much because those men aren't on it to begin with.
If you want people to work, you need to be willing to take on some of the opportunity risk and train them. If you want them to work in the trades, you probably need to train them and pay them well.
Even then the status issue wrt blue-collar work is hard to get around without a significant cultural shift.
By this time I can't tell if you're deliberately misunderstanding reality to virtue signal some sort of privilege?
But I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Vulnerable populations can have their employment opportunities gamed by powerful groups where they are essentially enslaved by their reliance on their paycheck to support their family, food, housing, etc. I don't understand why this doesn't register with you.
> You act like lower-class "uneducated" men _should_ be unable to get a job.
Where did you get that idea? As a farmer, I see endless work opportunities where the employers would just be happy to have someone show up. It seems most aren't willing to do the work though[1]. Which is fine. It's not everyone's cup of tea. Even more comfortable or 'higher status' work is also easily attainable with a bit of effort.
However, none of this addresses the reason for the situation they are in, and I don't mean just because they are lazy like you insinuated in another comment. There are a number of reasons why some people struggle in the workplace and it is related to the same reasons why they struggle in school, or even learning on the internet for that matter. To pretend that we can just throw education at this problem is misguided. Lack of education isn't the problem.
Giving a poor person an underpaid job is not helping them. Is making them "an offer they can't refuse". You want to alleviate poverty? Pay for their education, healthcare, give them a house. They'll pull themselves out of poverty without need for your exploitative job offer.
The sad truth is that some people simply just start off in a tough situation, work hard, and never get a lucky break.
Your tone implies that I don't understand the disparity of the human condition. I lived my entire life very impoverished and at times homeless. I come from a very abusive household and grew up in a rural area with little prospects. I've never caught a break. I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time.
We are talking about engineers here, supposedly one of the best occupations you can have. This is not about poor starving without education and no choice.
Seriosly, there is more emphaty for people who can find another job real quick (or just need to be content to not climb career ladder) then for poor-about-to-be-homeless that does something unethical.
Homeless men with no skills sometimes find day labor jobs. They are much less often offered money or a place to stay in exchange for sex.
I used Glass Ceiling as shorthand for removing barriers generally. Given the response here, I don't think it's worth the time and effort to try to "clarify." I don't think most people here actually want to understand the point. They are too busy shooting the idea down to wonder if there's any merit to the idea.
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