{"id":722,"date":"2013-11-25T08:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T08:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/11\/on-poverty-should-we-all-just-pack-up-and-go-home.html"},"modified":"2013-11-25T08:54:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-25T08:54:00","slug":"on-poverty-should-we-all-just-pack-up-and-go-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/11\/on-poverty-should-we-all-just-pack-up-and-go-home.html","title":{"rendered":"On poverty: should we all just pack up and go home?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So apparently this article on poverty<\/a> has now gone viral \u2014 appearing on friends\u2019 facebook feeds, at the Atlantic and at Huffington Post.\u00a0 The basic gist of it is that poor people are so beaten down by their circumstances that they simply can\u2019t be expected to make efforts on their own to get out of poverty.\u00a0 And the author, Linda Tirado,\u00a0fills it with illustrations from her own life.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t going to comment on this because it seemed too personal and I didn\u2019t want to end up being perceived of as attacking the author on a personal basis, but, the more I think about it, the more I think there are real issues here:<\/p>\n

In the first place, I don\u2019t entirely buy her story.\u00a0 She says poor people don\u2019t try to save for the future, don\u2019t try to improve their lives because fundamentally they don\u2019t believe that there\u2019s any future ahead of them but a replay of their current life, day after day, so they seek small pleasures instead, even if, in the end, they may even be destructive, like getting pregnant by a man unsuited for fatherhood, because of the desire for companionship, however temporary.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But at the same time, she details her life full of woe: two jobs, 3 hours of sleep a night, \u2014 and a full load of college classes.\u00a0 In other words, she contradicts herself at the beginning of her second paragraph.\u00a0 Her biography at the Huffington Post also says her night job is a cook, but her day job is a \u201cvoting rights activist for a disability nonprofit.\u201d\u00a0 Now maybe she really meant to be showing us the mindset of the people she knows who aren\u2019t as ambitious as she is \u2014 and she now has written a follow-up piece<\/a> giving more of her background.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But her argument isn\u2019t new \u2014 it\u2019s just not usually expressed in first-person terms.<\/p>\n

Fundamentally the argument is that you can\u2019t expect poor people to try to better themselves, because everything they endure in their daily lives, and everything they have endured, has taken from them this ability.\u00a0 They can\u2019t budget, they can\u2019t cook, they can\u2019t quit smoking, they can\u2019t stop having sex with losers, or make a determined effort to use extremely highly-effective contraception \u2014 they can\u2019t do any of that because:\u00a0 poverty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet if this is true, then there are two choices:<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re fundamentally a wide-eyed optimist about human behavior, you\u2019ll say that this shows that we need to shower the poor with no end of services, and in-kind benefits, and just plain cash to take away the stress and hardship, and then, their burden lifted,\u00a0they\u2019ll educate themselves, get a job, read to their children every night and become upstanding citizens (even when, all hardship lifted, there\u2019s no material need for this any longer).<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not so optimistic, then there\u2019s no point to anything \u2014 you might as well bring back the workhouse to warehouse these people, and maybe bring back forced sterilization for good measure, if not doing so means a guarantee of successive generations, of increasing size, of similarly incapable poor.<\/p>\n

At the same time \u2014 we know there are people who climb out of poverty and people who don\u2019t.\u00a0 Poor people who insist on home-cooked meals and people who go to McDonalds.\u00a0 Poor people who hide some money under the mattress for when the car breaks down, and those who end up at the payday lender, or getting the heat or electric shut off.\u00a0 Poor people who make sure their children stay on the straight and narrow and poor people who end up at court hearings saying, \u201cmy Johnny\u2019s a good boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than getting stuck in a dead end, I\u2019d like to see a paper, an article, something that tells us why<\/strong> some succeed and some don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

(Tangentially:\u00a0 apparently tons of people were moved by this article.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t \u2014 neither the first nor the second; they were both defensive and angry, which seems to be a popular way of writing, especially on the internet, but not a particularly skilled way to write.<\/p>\n

And also tangentially \u2014 remember mincome<\/a>, from a few weeks back?\u00a0 Mincome simply doesn\u2019t work, because the 10K per person\u00a0isn\u2019t enough for a single mother, and no one who did any calculations in articles or comments recognized that it\u2019d require a big chunk more for children.)\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So apparently this article on poverty has now gone viral \u2014 appearing on friends\u2019 facebook feeds, at the Atlantic and at Huffington Post.\u00a0 The basic gist of it is that poor people are so beaten down by their circumstances that they simply can\u2019t be expected to make efforts on their own to get out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOn poverty: should we all just pack up and go home?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So apparently this article on poverty has now gone viral -- appearing on friends' facebook feeds, at the Atlantic and at Huffington Post.  The basic\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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