"Culture" of Poverty

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"Culture" of Poverty

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Mar 26, 2014 7:12 am

Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
March 24, 2014

Paul Ryan’s culture attack is an excuse to do nothing about poverty. Blaming poverty on the mysterious influence of “culture” is a convenient excuse for doing nothing to address the problem. That’s the real issue with what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said about distressed inner-city communities. Critics who accuse him of racism are missing the point. What he’s really guilty of is providing a reason for government to throw up its hands in mock helplessness.

The fundamental problem that poor people have, whether they live in decaying urban neighborhoods or depressed Appalachian valleys or small towns of the Deep South, is not enough money. Alleviating stubborn poverty is difficult and expensive. Direct government aid — money, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and the like — is not enough. Poor people need employment that offers a brighter future for themselves and their children. Which means they need job skills. Which means they need education. Which means they need good schools and safe streets.

The list of needs is dauntingly long, and it’s hard to know where to start — or where the money for all the needed interventions will come from. It’s much easier to say that culture is ultimately to blame. But since there’s no step-by-step procedure for changing a culture, we end up not doing anything.

This is what Ryan said in a radio interview: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

What exactly does he mean by culture? In the context of “our inner cities,” Ryan can’t be talking about rap music and baggy pants. If so, he ought to visit any high school in any affluent suburb, where he will find kids listening to the same music and wearing the same clothes — kids who will grow up to be doctors and lawyers.

Is he talking about the breakdown of family structure? To me, that’s looking suspiciously more like effect than cause. As President Obama has noted, the rise in out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households seen years ago among African Americans is now being seen among whites, especially in communities hit hard by economic dislocation.

Ryan surely can’t be talking about the use of illegal drugs, since most surveys indicate that young blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to be drug users than are young whites.

Ryan refers specifically to “the value and the culture of work,” and he may be onto something — almost. His description of “just generations of men not even thinking about working” is ridiculous. That would be like demanding to know what cultural shortcoming keeps me from spending time thinking about sailing my mega yacht to my private island.

In depressed urban and rural communities, there is an acute shortage of meaningful work. There was a time when young men who didn’t plan to go to college could anticipate finding blue-collar work at “the plant” nearby — maybe a steel mill, maybe an assembly line. There they could have job security, enough income to keep a roof over a family’s head, a pension when they retired. Their children, who would go to college, could expect lives of greater accomplishment and affluence.

This was how the “culture of work” functioned. How is it supposed to happen without work?

Confronting the devastation suffered by what used to be working-class communities is hard; adjusting to post-globalization economic realities is harder. Say the word culture and you sound erudite and concerned, especially if you drop the name of the Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, who described world affairs as a clash of civilizations with different cultural values.

My problem is that when you identify something so amorphous as culture as the fundamental issue, you excuse yourself for not proposing concrete solutions.

As you might have gathered, I’m suspicious of the cultural hypothesis as a way to explain who succeeds and who doesn’t. I believe outcomes mostly depend on opportunities and that people are much less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior if they see opportunities that make sense to them.

If we had universal pre- kindergarten that fed all children into high-quality schools, if we had affordable higher education, if we incentivized industry to invest in troubled communities — if people had options for which they were prepared — culture would take care of itself.

But all of that is expensive. Hot air, as Paul Ryan knows, is cheap.
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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by hambone » Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:04 am

American Experience on PBS: "1964" - really blew my mind. All the ills of our current era were born then. The beginning of liberal/conservative based political parties on the heels of equal rights. "We want our country back" says the racist fearful chorus, wanting the 700 club shoved down every American pipe. I am amazed that the arc of society can swing so floppily. Would anyone even blink with a "hippy movement" these days of new button-down? No no pee in a cup and give up more of your civil liberties, but meanwhile delight in your glowing hand-held death-pad as the natural and compassionate world dies as an insect riddled leaf.
But who is the next American Idol?
Walls need to come down, but I'm not sure the way to do it. Compassion on the wake of need, or tragedy seem to be the only way to heal, blacks and whites in foxholes together face the same god. Stump speeches with one's cronies is all anyone is doing these days, seeming to cause even more polarization. And the rent goes up and up, and the neighborhoods are whiter and whiter, blinding teeth of affluence shielding us from "too much melanin". Well at least the klan stopped burning down churches.
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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by TrollFromDownBelow » Wed Mar 26, 2014 8:23 pm

Maybe I'm too pie in the sky, but I'm a firm believer that education is the true playing field leveler. Kids need access (i.e. free) to quality education in a safe environment, all the way through college or specialized trade school. Problem is, that it will take nearly half a generation for the results of that to show....much too short for any of our 2-4 year election cycles. Everyone is looking for the quick fix. There isn't a quick fix. The days of plentiful jobs that require minimal education are over....we need to educate our populace to catch up (not a typo) to the rest of the world.
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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Lanval » Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:23 am

TrollFromDownBelow wrote:Maybe I'm too pie in the sky, but I'm a firm believer that education is the true playing field leveler. Kids need access (i.e. free) to quality education in a safe environment, all the way through college or specialized trade school. Problem is, that it will take nearly half a generation for the results of that to show....much too short for any of our 2-4 year election cycles. Everyone is looking for the quick fix. There isn't a quick fix. The days of plentiful jobs that require minimal education are over....we need to educate our populace to catch up (not a typo) to the rest of the world.

Working in the education field (private and public) I'm less sanguine about the prospects of education fixing anything. There are two problems, probably (but not absolutely) in this order:

1. Money. Everyone agrees education is good, but no one wants to pay the cost of educating their own kids (i.e. taxes) let alone educating other kids (more taxes). The result has been the shift in education from the public model to a de facto private model. In a conversation with one of the long-standing full professors at a University of California campus last year, he lamented the fact that since the heyday of the 60s, the UC has lost funding from the government, and shifted the burden of education to students. This means that two things have happened: a) opportunity has been narrowed to those who can afford it ~ he called it the Harvard/private education model. b) Wealthy outsiders have become a more important source of students (i.e. they can afford it), leading to a change in who is being educated. When an engineer takes his expertise overseas, a UC education is NOT an investment in the development of the US (whether you agree with that outlook ~ US vs. THEM is another post).

2. Who is in control of education and what is being done. There have been in the last several years, any number of long-standing teachers (i.e. career people, 20+ years teaching) who have quit publicly, denouncing the shift towards metrics that dominates education. Most people point to the "No Child Left Behind Act" by Bush as the culprit. Jobs/lives/success are being determined by test scores that many (if not most) educators believe do not reflect a meaningful curriculum education.

The current drive towards "measurable" education is no doubt a reaction to the hippy-dippy, "hey man, it's all cool!" educational reforms that came out of the 60s. A great deal of GOOD change came as a result of the cultural revolution in the 60s, but as always some good stuff was lost too. I'm not trying to take sides here, though I probably fall on the somewhat liberal side; I do see that the academy is at this time dominated by liberal people who carry ideologies which have clear roots in the counter-culture movement of the 60s. So the past 20-30 years has seen ongoing conflict (the culture wars of the universities in the late 80s are a good example; if you can stomach it, try Bloom's Closing of the American Mind as an example of the kind of response to cultural values held inside/outside academia).

**************************

In short, everyone agrees education is good, but no one agrees on how to pay for it, or what should be taught and how it should be taught.

My opinion: The current education system from grade school through graduate school is so broken, so focused on extracting value (money) with so many wealthy/power interests in control, that the only meaningful solution would be to restructure the educational system from the ground up, by reorganizing priorities, and even our concept of what "education" means, or what its goal is.

I'll note, for example, that in Irvine, the high schools don't even offer vocational classes; here, EVERYONE is going to college. What do you expect in a town with an average income around $100,000? Of course, you can make that working on cars, but no one here thinks that's a meaningful outcome. That kind of thinking is broken, and ultimately leads to the kind of balkanization of society that we have now, where one type of learning/skill is valued, and another is not. Until that is changed at the social/cultural level, we cannot fix the education system, period.

My .02 cents.

ML

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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Amskeptic » Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:08 pm

I am nervous at the interaction between business and education. We are losing the joy of learning, the power of critical thinking, hell, the joy of teaching to help the joy of learning. We are so insular in our "exceptionalism" hubris, that we refuse to look carefully at countries or schools were education is actually occurring. Finland, for example, holds on to that quaint notion that teaching is a profession with the prestige and pay that a professional should have. Here in the U.S. our ruling elite has somehow equated teachers with babysitters, just like they have denigrated pilots to bus drivers. Shameful how the profit motive destroys dignity.
We *can* be more inefficient in our labor efficiency! It would lower social costs! Big time! Less safety net AND less social pathology costs when everybody is employed meaningfully. Well, that is too far out of the orthodoxy for our Ruling Class to consider, as we race to the bottom.
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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Amskeptic » Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:50 am

Some more on the corrosive effects of the entitlement culture . . . I wonder if we citizens just give up in a "learned helplessness" despair. This will not change until we petition our representatives in an organized and inescapable sort of way.
Colin

The New York Times
A Nation of Takers?
March 26, 2014
Nicholas Kristof

In the debate about poverty, critics argue that government assistance saps initiative and is unaffordable. After exploring the issue, I must concede that the critics have a point. Here are five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of “takers.”

First, welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.

As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: “The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.’s flying on a corporate jet.”

I worry about those tycoons sponging off government. Won’t our pampering damage their character? Won’t they become addicted to the entitlement culture, demanding subsidies even for their yachts? Oh, wait ...

Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts.

In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America’s neediest. Hmm. How about if we house the homeless in these publicly supported yachts?

Third, welfare subsidies for hedge funds and private equity. The single most outrageous tax loophole in America is for “carried interest,” allowing people with the highest earnings to pay paltry taxes. They can magically reclassify their earned income as capital gains, because that carries a lower tax rate (a maximum of 23.8 percent this year, compared with a maximum of 39.6 percent for earned income).

Let’s just tax capital gains at earned income rates, as we did under President Ronald Reagan, that notorious scourge of capitalism.

Fourth, welfare subsidies for America’s biggest banks. The too-big-to-fail banks in the United States borrow money unusually cheaply because of an implicit government promise to rescue them. Bloomberg View calculated last year that this amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion to our 10 biggest banks annually.

President Obama has proposed a bank tax to curb this subsidy, and this year a top Republican lawmaker, Dave Camp, endorsed the idea as well. Big banks are lobbying like crazy to keep their subsidy.

Fifth, large welfare subsidies for American corporations from cities, counties and states. A bit more than a year ago, Louise Story of The New York Times tallied more than $80 billion a year in subsidies to companies, mostly as incentives to operate locally. (Conflict alert: The New York Times Company is among those that have received millions of dollars from city and state authorities.)

You see where I’m going. We talk about the unsustainability of government benefit programs and the deleterious effects these can have on human behavior, and these are real issues. Well-meaning programs for supporting single moms can create perverse incentives not to marry, or aid meant for a needy child may be misused to buy drugs. Let’s acknowledge that helping people is a complex, uncertain and imperfect struggle.

But, perhaps because we now have the wealthiest Congress in history, the first in which a majority of members are millionaires, we have a one-sided discussion demanding cuts only in public assistance to the poor, while ignoring public assistance to the rich. And a one-sided discussion leads to a one-sided and myopic policy.

We’re cutting one kind of subsidized food — food stamps — at a time when Gallup finds that almost one-fifth of American families struggled in 2013 to afford food. Meanwhile, we ignore more than $12 billion annually in tax subsidies for corporate meals and entertainment.

Sure, food stamps are occasionally misused, but anyone familiar with business knows that the abuse of food subsidies is far greater in the corporate suite. Every time an executive wines and dines a hot date on the corporate dime, the average taxpayer helps foot the bill.

So let’s get real. To stem abuses, the first target shouldn’t be those avaricious infants in nutrition programs but tycoons in their subsidized Gulfstreams.

However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?

Some conservatives get this, including Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. He has urged “scaling back ludicrous handouts to millionaires that expose an entitlement system and tax code that desperately need to be reformed.”

After all, quite apart from the waste, we don’t want to coddle zillionaires and thereby sap their initiative!
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Bleyseng » Fri Mar 28, 2014 7:06 am

Amskeptic wrote:I am nervous at the interaction between business and education. We are losing the joy of learning, the power of critical thinking, hell, the joy of teaching to help the joy of learning. We are so insular in our "exceptionalism" hubris, that we refuse to look carefully at countries or schools were education is actually occurring. Finland, for example, holds on to that quaint notion that teaching is a profession with the prestige and pay that a professional should have. Here in the U.S. our ruling elite has somehow equated teachers with babysitters, just like they have denigrated pilots to bus drivers. Shameful how the profit motive destroys dignity.
We *can* be more inefficient in our labor efficiency! It would lower social costs! Big time! Less safety net AND less social pathology costs when everybody is employed meaningfully. Well, that is too far out of the orthodoxy for our Ruling Class to consider, as we race to the bottom.
Colin
To make money in teaching one must become an Administrator as my new son-in-law did. Two years teaching experience, one year a assistant principal and now he is a principal making $85,000. He taught Health and coached Football! Something is crazy wrong here, but more power to him for working the system.
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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Jivermo » Fri Mar 28, 2014 9:06 am

Yep, we'll work the system until there is no system. New math, FCAT testing, charter schools...keep throwing crap at the walls, and see what sticks.

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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Amskeptic » Sat Mar 29, 2014 9:41 am

Jivermo wrote:Yep, we'll work the system until there is no system. New math, FCAT testing, charter schools...keep throwing crap at the walls, and see what sticks.
Parents . . . stay rested, it is up to you to infect your children with the joy of learning, then *protect* your children from the corrosive effects of an overwhelmed school system.

Cindy, if you should show up here, we need to open a national chain of neighborhood-home-school consultancies.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: "Culture" of Poverty

Post by Spezialist » Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:36 pm

Many sub cultures do not want anything to do with American "white" Culture, plain and simple.


<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vazCBv6xuew" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


http://youtu.be/vazCBv6xuew :compress:

about 5 minutes, worth every second, if you're interested a culture of poverty.
"white" in his story is about a "culture" not a white person.
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