The US has tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants. They mostly come here poor, with little in the way of language or employment skills. That naturally pullse down our statistics in income, education, and health.
We also have tens of millions of single mothers, with predictably bad results.
John
...and high school drop-outs (same predictability).
The three basic secrets to success in the US: 1: Graduate High School 2: Don't marry until you have a job 3: Don't have children until marriage
Yeah, an essential part of economic freedom is the freedom to fail. That's how we as a society adapt & evolve: keep the good, eliminate what needs eliminating.
Yet Obama calls them "too big to fail," and saves the worst of the worst.
Funny how the people who claim to advocate evolution don't believe in it. If nature stepped in and rescued failed mutations it'd quickly all go pear-shaped, yet gov't does that all the time.
Taking from the rich to give to the poor discourages both groups-- neither then has an incentive to work.
It also doesn't address the problem, which is not that some people are succeeding, but some are failing.
John's right too--importing impoverished people by the millions drags down our stats. Factor those out and the figures change drastically.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
Maybe "next time" you won't grow up to be a bum.
So your answer is to make it easier to binge and harder to succeed? Yep, sounds like Obama's answer to everything.
Al Gore?
I've complained about Jim Thompson being out of touch with reality, but James Arthur seems to live in a different universe.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Not a proposition that has much evidence to support it.
In fact they should be better fed as children, and get better primary education - without the improved diet, the education won't take so the diet comes first. Note that obesity is evidence of poor diet - the kids get enough food to put on weight, but not enough of the right nutrients to be healthy.
Amongst other things, you teach them that America is God's Own Country, and the American way is better than any other - claims that are so blatantly false that they devalue the rest of the curriculum. In fact you don't spend all that much on primary education in poorer neighbourhoods - the local tax base can't support it - the kids could probably do with a bit more bitterness and political correctness - real life gives them plenty to be bitter about, and US politics is in serious need of correction.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Other countries cope rather better. IIRR the US statistics for income education and health can be pretty vile for groups that were born here
- Native Americans come to mind.
US figures for births to unmarried women are high, but not as high as those of Denmark, France, Germany or the UK.
The US figures for single-parent households are higher - at 29.5% - than anybody else's in the statistics that I've found
but the UK comes second, with 25% and and Canada third, with 24.6% - not that much lower - and their outcomes aren't all that bad.
If the US outcomes are bad - and John Larkin hasn't bothered to tell us how bad they actually are, let alone compare them with anybody else's - it may say more about the US unwillingness to invest in the next generation of potential employees, independent of the number of parents looking after them.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Don't forget the fourth - and most important - "secret",
4: Have well-off parents.-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
g )
Modern socialism doesn't take anything like enough from the rich to discourage them from working - they get to retain more than enough to be able to count coup - nor does it give the poor anything like enough to discourage them from working, which is most peoples most significant social activity and their primary route to relevance in their communities.
Quite a few don't even get offered the chance to fail.
That's odd. The US grew for several centuries by importing impoverished people - now it can't even use the one's that it generates within its borders.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Myth, at least in the U.S. All the wealthy people I know earned it from scratch. But, that kind of leftist claptrap plays well with the envy crowd.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
You write like a bum.
Bums living in mommy's basement hardly need anything.
For an admitted bum, apparently not much.
d
But they had a good esucation, which helped them to "earn it from scratch" and they went to a "good university" which gave them good contacts, which didn't impede their progress either. Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth gives you rather more advantages than easy access to start-up capital.
-- Bill Sloman, Nimmegen
I reckon Bill might as well go and talk to himself - since he has selective deafness.
d
I'm sorry to be replying to this twice, but it took me a while to recall that "Inequality by Design:Cracking the Bell Curve Myth" went into this area in some detail, in the process of dissecting Herrnstein and Murray's flawed hypothesis that IQ was the best single predictor for success in American Society.
In fact Herrnstein and Murray supported this - false - conclusion by condensing all the social predictors into a single "socio-economic status" number, which was dominated by the father's income, and showing that this was a less effective predictor than IQ.
The authors of Inequality by Design, who knew the sociological literature rather better, pointed out that social status had a number of separable factors, of which the parental income was only one, if an important one. Where you grew up, and where you went to school, while strongly correlated with the parental income, had separate and distinct correlations with social success, and - when correlated as quasi independent factors - collectively explained something like half the variation in individual success, about three times as much as IQ.
Herrnstein and Murray's analysis was flawed by the fact that - while wealthy people tend to live in good suburbs and send their children to good schools - there is considerable variation in wealth between the inhabitants of good suburbs, so that some of the less rich have maximal location advantages, and some of richer families don't live in the best suburbs.
It is a impressive piece of work, and well worth reading.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
I'd bet the ability to delay gratification is one trillion percent correlated with not being poor.
But American poor *did* budget in previous generations, prior to social "safety nets." Since Benjamin Franklin's time to as recently as the 50's and 60's thrift was lauded. Living beyond your means was ridiculed. Now is held up as a "right."
Budgeting can be taught. I caught an ex-girlfriends's *cat* estimating, then parceling out (i.e., budgeting) her short rations to last the entire day. (That cat's more responsible than a typical congressman today, for crying out loud.)
"Poor" people in my neighborhood consider as human rights amenities I've *never* had, have newer cars, elaborate cable plans, watch football, eat out, soda, smokes, and beer galore, and more. They take it all for granted. (And technically they're right--for them, it's granted, free.)
All those things are easily fixed--just return to teaching basic economics, arithmetic, and home economics in school. If people blow their income let's not pity them, bail them out, and elect them president. Oh, and let's teach civics while we're at it.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
s '
ng
Perfect correlation - absolute cause and effect - is 1.000.
"One trillion percent" is James Arthur reminding us that he uses statistics for support, rather than illumination.
In fact the potential to derive some advantage from delaying gratification depends on having some kind of asset that you can chose to either exploit imediately, or invest in some way that will give a greater advantage after a longer peroid. If you haven't got any spare income to invest, the capacity to delay gratification is irrelevant, and if you haven't got access to some kind of investment opportunity it is equally irrelevant, which means that the capacity to delay gratification may not - in fact - correlate with not being poor, particularly if you are dirt poor.
Scarcely.
It's not a sensible way for them to spend the income they've got, but some of the poor are poor because they are in need of psychiatric care, but - since they aren't dangerously crazy - nobody wants to spend the money to provide that care. It's cheaper to give them rent and food money and let them amuse themselves. They aren't representative examples of the under-employed, attractive though they may be to reporters from right-wiing newspapers.
Since the bankers who made the ninja loans - that gave the world the sub-prime mortgage crisis - would have been taught this kind of stuff
- and proceeded to ignore it - this can't qualify as a well-thought- out policy.
Civics includes such gems as "the American Constitution is perfect" .... Better to teach them logical argument, but that could destablise US society if a significant minority ever mastered it. James Arthur certainly hasn't.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
It's great for wealth redistribution from savers to spend-thrifts. We've got a president we can loan you for that.
I understand the argument, but it's backwards: the increased "velocity of money" resulted from the commerce, not the reverse.
V.$ is an indirect measure of activity, that's all. Forcing v.$ higher isn't necessarily good--we could also increase v.$ by losing our jobs and being forced to sell our stuff. Or by handing out borrowed, stupid, stimulus candy by the trillions, then find ourselves on the verge of default and buried in debt.
Yep.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
Dunno, since you didn't, you don't either.
You're really trying to beat AlwaysWrong. You're getting there, too.
You're a liar (shocking, I know). You have no friends.
^^^^
My what is so poor, AlmostAlwaysWrong? I'm sure you can't figure out what time of day it is, either.
Wrong. That would be you, AlmostAlwaysWrong, and your identical twin, AlwaysWrong.
You're a liar, AlmostAlwaysWrong. You have no friends.
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