Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".
And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".
Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges.
My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
This makes me wonder if being told I was a smart kid (instead of "Good job kid!") wasn't such a bad thing after all. (Educators say tell kids "Good job!" instead of "You're so smart!", because the kids will fear losing that status and then not dare try hard problems).
I always think I'm lucky I was born with a pretty good brain.
This definitely comes up a lot and I've never found a satisfactory way to get through to these people that you can both work hard and be lucky.
The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.
The problem is the world isn’t clean, statistics aren’t clean, it’s all mosaic. You can have noble, moral poors and rich. You can have absolute dirt bags both rich and poor.
I grew up in a take of two households, with parents divorced at a young age. Father grows up in a picture perfect well-to-do family and ends up a classic party-hard drug addled dirt bag. He died last year living alone, homeless in a tent off an interstate motel town. Mother grows up in a stereotypical “dad went out for milk” family that descended into (and rose above) poverty.
While my father just kind of floated around and lived life, my mother remembered the poverty she experienced growing up, worked her ass off in university, and worked two jobs (one professional, one as a weekend cahsier) until she retired.
Nothing any of us can write here on a forum from on high will counter lived reality.
All this is to say, I agree about empathy being needed on society, poverty can still be moral failure. Pretending it can’t is just as in constructive as any other moral argument in this topic.
Having seen the above I would be cautious about believing it.
In divorce courts will often emotionally and monetarily abuse men. (divorce itself if you love the other party is emotional abuse, though I don't know what to do about this. Abusive men do love their wives despite the abuse). As such die of a drug overdose while living in a homeless tent is probably the only option seen left.
I'm not saying there are not lazy losers in the real world. However the picture is often more complex and few people will admit that.
My MAGA dad grew up dirt poor in a house with literal dirt floors in some rooms. Four kids. No dad. Government support. He got a job as a cop and raised me and thinks anyone can get out of poverty if they work hard. He’s a corner case but he’ll never see it tha way because he literally bootstrapped himself. How do I tell him he didn’t and just got lucky? He kinda has a point.
Well if you work hard enough silently lives out the important part: in a high demand area like say construction. But this applies to even high paying fields like IT. If you work really hard on things none cares about in IT you are not gonna make much ...
Yeah... and the basis of how to Make America Great Again: make the poor's lives miserable and they'll be forced to work hard. They'll be successful, problem solved! If they stay poor, that must mean they're still lazy, let them rot!
I dunno. People put too much stock in Max Weber, who cherry-picked his evidence: he literally used Benjamin Franklin, a deist who'd abandoned Christian doctrine, as his model "Protestant." He created a compelling just-so story that is now picked up by people who never check the actual sources.
I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:
> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.
> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.
> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.
> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."
Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:
If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
The most sinister part of it is that today many Americans are not doing well, but because they believe that meritocracy exists, they believe they must have no merit. Cue the graph of deaths of despair.
> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.
I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.
Culture is important, but it's widespread enough that there's probably a biological basis. Humans are wired to hate the idea of "good/bad things just happen", we're always creating stories about causation even when they might not be very accurate stories.
Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."
if you want to go down a rabbit hole, lots of its roots stem from protestantism, especially calvinism. that cultural influence is not unique to the us, but i don’t really subscribe to any evolutionary behavior explanations to attitudes like this, personally
Right. At least when I was growing up we were all constantly told stuff like "you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it". The corollary is that if you aren't able to accomplish something, it's because you didn't set your mind to it.
I was also of the naive impression we had collectively moved from this thinking and it was more so just a difficult problem to attack inherently. The comments here are very sobering.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
This view of the world puts everything on the individual. It might be worth reading up on structuralism to balance that perspective out a bit. I'm somewhere in the middle of the two extremes myself, but surely one must acknowledge that there are larger systems at play that can constrain an individual's ability to "optimize".
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
I imagine there's an even "earlier" starting point most people don't have to begin at, which goes:
"My own circumstances are too different to truly empathize and understand, and I'm not too proud/delusional to admit it. The presence of that gap in comprehension is itself a reason for action."
