Poverty in America, from AtomicSneeze at http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=2769They are the people who never seem to break free of poverty. Neither do their children, nor their grandchildren and their parents were poverty struck as well. They are born to poverty, and it seems like it is their heritage, one they can never shed; a curse unto seven generations.

The problem of the underclass is an old one. Victorian England dealt with it, and so, for that matter, did both Republican and Imperial Rome. It is a death spiral which seems impossible to escape.

Today it is with us as well and the old debates play out as they always have. The poor, it is said, deserve it. If only they had more discipline, if only they didn’t marry young, or do drugs, or have so many children, or have children out of wedlock. If only they stayed in school and got a better education. If only they did things the way the middle and upper classes did, if only, well, they wouldn’t be poor.

Liberals respond that if only, if only, the government were to provide education and daycare and other government care for these people, if only, then they’d be able to get themselves out of this mess.

Today we’re going to run through what makes you poor and keeps you poor.


The Parents Argument and the Education Argument

The best predictor for success in America is still (barely) education. The best predictor for education is… your parents education. Location is what matters here. If you live in an upscale neighbourhood then you have good housing values. They pay for more money for schools, those schools perform better on aggregate (there are exceptions, they are statistical anomalies). So if your parents can afford to live in a wealthier ‘hood you’re probably going to get a better education.

Real love of learning starts in the home. Children whose parents read, read. Children whose parents don’t read, don’t read. Children who get proper nutrition perform significantly better in school. Children whose family situation is stable and non-threatening perform better in school. While none of these things require that you live in a rich or even middle class home all of them do correlate non-trivially with money. You can be rich and miserable. But you’re more likely to poor and miserable. This connection does decrease as the income scale increases, but it does not decrease until after the poverty threshold has long been passed.

Families with a good income are also less likely to require that children stop going to school to support the family.

The Modeling and the “Right Crowd” Argument

A fairly convincing argument has been made that what effects children’s attitudes the most is their friends – the crowd they run with. Run with a group which values education and achievement and safe sex and you’ll tend to value those things as well (it shouldn’t be hard for anyone to understand that people want the approval of the people they spend their time with and that the best way to get that approval is to take on the same attitudes.) What’s the most important predictor of who your friends are? Where your parents live.

Acting like your peers is just a watered down example of “modeling”. Simply put the very best, simplest and surest way to succeed at something is to find someone who has succeeded at what you want to do and to model yourself after them. To do what they do. Act like they do. If they’ll cooperate, to work with them and watch how they work. Even better, find a few people who are successful in your field and learn from each one of them.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in most modern downscale neighbourhoods there aren’t a lot of successful models available. And the most visible models may well be people you may not want others modeling – drug dealers, gang leaders and other criminals. This used to be less of a problem. In the standard American immigration wave, while some immigrants who got successful would leave the Irish/Jewish/Italian ghetto, most stayed. They pulled other people up with them. In modern ghettos people get successful – and most of them then move to middle class suburbs. The people who make it pull out rather than pulling up.

The Credit Argument

Simply put, true success in America comes mainly in two ways – credentialization leading to professional work, or creating your own business. To create your own business you need money. You’re going to have to borrow it. There are three main places you can get money from – banks, family/friends and crime; successful minority groups have used all three (yes even Jewish immigrants had crime syndicates, and the Irish ran organized crime before the Italians. Since the Italian fall other immigrant groups have taken over the lucrative industry.) Banks don’t usually work – there’s an old joke, that is effectively true, that banks only lend you money if you don’t need it. Unless it’s a credit card. But for all intents and purposes underclass citizens have trouble even getting a checking account and a credit card let alone a business loan. Forget it.

The second option is family and friends. You can see this dynamic really work, when it works. Watch an immigrant community like the Sikhs or many Chinese and you’ll see a dynamo which works much as follows. The first person gets in, usually the most educated young adult. He or she works like a dog and lives with other immigrants in horrific circumstances. Any money earned is saved or used to bring in more family members. They all work like dogs. Eventually a fair number are in and they have enough money to buy a small business. They do so. A few of them work their butts off in that job while the others bring in money from outside jobs. They all move in together, with everyone living in one house on the cheap. They save up enough to buy another business. Eventually they sell the businesses they have built up and move onto more profitable ones. Eventually they are at least affluent, and for the most successful ones, actually wealthy. And they’ve earned every little bit of it.

But they were successful not because of their individual efforts, or even those of the nuclear family (a dysfunctional stub when it comes to really dealing effectively with economic duties), but because they had a functional extended family. A person alone generally can’t do this. Neither can a couple. It takes a family – a big one.

The other way this works is very simple. Most entrepreneurs get some or all of their money from friends and family. If you’ve got a well off family, you’ve got a source of credit. If you don’t, you’re SOL. This has especially hit the modern black community very hard because of the breakdown of extended families and because successful blacks leave their communities. You can’t hit somebody up for a loan if you don’t know them.

Then there’s organized crime. For organized crime to be effective at raising a community up it has to have deep ties into that community. You need leaders and members who are family men. You need stability. You need the sort of syndicates who want peace, because peace is good for business and who want some respectability. For reasons too extensive to go into in this article, that model of organized crime has faded from the American scene. Frankly, it’s missed. Some types of crime organization /are/ better than others. Crime will always be with you, but the type and the amount are a choice government and society makes. America has chosen a very anomic disassociated violent form of organized crime.

Then there’s the elephant in the room….

Racism

Yes, it does make a difference. Especially in American (and Japan, but a full discussion of Japanese Koreans and Ainu will have to wait another opportunity.) If a white has the exact same resume as someone with a “black” name they will get more than twice as many calls for interviews. The argument that racism does not effect job prospects has been disproven far, far beyond any reasonable doubt.

But the black “problem” is far larger than simple racism. It has to do with disproportionate incarceration rates, with black men committing the exact same crimes as whites getting stronger longer sentences and with the effect that has had on black families. It has to do with the disparate way drug crimes are treated between blacks and whites (how often to executives go to jail for coke use, for example?)

It has to do with labeling. Simply put, once you’re in the justice system, you are branded ever after with the mark of Cain. Ever get yourself convicted of any crime and you will probably never, ever, have a decent job.

And black youths are much more likely to be charged and convicted for the exact same crime as white youths.

At that point their prospects in the legal system are effectively gone. The choice to migrate to illegal activity is their only chance. It probably won’t work – but at least their aren’t background checks. At least they stand a chance. And if they’re the moral type who wouldn’t walk that path, well, they can’t walk any other path. They can’t get education loans, they can’t get decent jobs – they’re down and out. In America you only get one chance.

And this trend is continuing. Many companies, for example, are using credit ratings to determine if they should hire you. If you have trouble even getting a checking account, you aren’t going to have a good credit rating (if you’ve never had credit, you have a bad rating because they figure those who aren’t used to managing credit aren’t good at it.)

Things like background checks and credit checks are wonderful from a corporate point of view. They keep out the wrong sorts of people (blacks who have become middle class and assimilated middle class culture are not such a problem) and they appear race neutral.

But in a society which isn’t race neutral they have effects that simulate the effect of bias very effectively, without ever requiring anyone to actually tell the undesirables that you don’t hire nigger/spics/wetbacks/slants/micks or whatever.

I once explained the underclass to someone with the following metaphor: you have a hundred people. If they can bench press a hundred pounds they can leave the room. If they fail their kids will have to take the same test. Some of those people, of certain races, have someone pushing down on the bars. As a result, as a percentage, more of them fail. Next generation more of their kids are in the room. A larger percentage of them fail.

Over time the room begins to have more of that race than the simple ability to lift a hundred pounds would predict.

That’s the effect of race on class. There are strategies that can overcome it, but it is an obstacle and sometimes the strategies don’t work (a discussion of the life cycles of immigrant minorities may be forthcoming at a later date.)

Concluding Remarks

If you don’t break out of the underclass in the first generation your family falls into it, the odds shift dramatically against your children. They have worse schools, less access to credit, few good people to model themselves after and face a society in which apparently impartial mechanisms produce results that tend, over time, and in aggregate to keep them in their place.

In a game where the dice are weighted against you, which is the only game in town, what do you do?

Do you roll the dice?