Well, we are making progress towards a more spherical labor force… More corn subsidies!
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I think this is a real problem for democrats/progressives in general - they need to take a long look in the mirror and ask why they haven’t connected with these voters instead of throwing their hands up and concluding they are stupid racists. Some of the answers may not be pretty, but it can’t be that simple.
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I’m not sure that is always true. For instance, for generations children have been a big part of softening the blow for their parents as they age. This seems especially true for middle class folks who have modest pensions/retirement savings.
Children are expensive, but I often feel some of the quoted numbers are overblown, or at least misleading. I’ve heard numbers like 100,000 dollars to raise a child to adulthood, which sounds like a huge amount, but isn’t really compared to things like a house.
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I regret that I have but one like to give for your post. Perhaps I should create a legion of sockpuppets or reactivate some older accounts…
Given that I’m “people”, I think your advice stinks. How do other people take your advice?
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While it is true that children aren’t as expensive as is stated by some, they place limits on your life. It is also a great thing if someone actually gives a crap about you when you grow old and die. I just believe that the old “be fruitful and multiply” tradition is outdated. The need to have children has been diminishing over time. The time is past where raising children to work on the family farm or as cannon fodder to fight whatever war is raging at the moment makes any sense. I just know too many people who have children before they have the means or maturity to deal with them.
You haven’t really demonstrated that you understand poverty either.
What kind of work were they doing in the rural areas? Were they originally from the rural areas or did they migrate there for work? If they’re from those rural areas, what happened to their homes in those rural areas? What’s preventing them from engaging in some form of subsistence farming?
If that’s true, then why aren’t these poor rural areas already depopulated? According to your own framing of the issue, staying in those areas means certain poverty, but all you have to do to escape that certain poverty is to move. So why hasn’t everyone already moved?
I’m deeply skeptical of the neoliberal assumption that the poor are voluntarily trading lives of grinding poverty working in agriculture for lives of slightly-less-grinding-poverty in agricultural work. At the very least, I think the role of farming technologies in reducing the demand for agricultural labor should be acknowledged. This isn’t a case of people spontaneously realizing they could do slightly better in a city. It’s a case of technology eliminating (certain kinds of) jobs.
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One thing you should acknowledge before “advising” people too freely is that most people don’t base the decision to have children on a financial cost/benefit analysis.
And, in fact, anyone who does make the decision of whether to have children on the basis of your advice (basing the decision on financial reasons) would probably be a terrible parent regardless of how much money they have and should not have children at all.
But it seems like the desire doesn’t. I wonder if perhaps there is some aspect of the human condition you are ignoring?
- I suspect you’d feel this way about some of your own ancestors. If everyone throughout history took your advice retroactively, you probably wouldn’t exist. Good outcome?
- Who are you to decide who has the means or maturity to deal with children? Do you have children of your own?
- Do you realize that the majority of all human beings who ever lived did so with less means and less knowledge about the world than even fairly poor and ignorant Americans?
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I have moved substantial distances six times for work. As in 600-1200 miles. Twice without my family. It destroys friendships, upends lives, and is just shitty. I appreciate the areas I’ve been to, but I wish this kind of life on noone.
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Putting aside the “who should have children” question, I have to disagree here. (Note: I have no children). To me, $100,000 seems like at best a reasonable estimate, more likely an underestimate. At minimum 18 years of food, clothes, school supplies, and doctor visits, and (if you were single before, and maybe even if not) more expensive medical insurance. Life insurance. Lost work time when you need to stay home and take care of sick kids. This already adds up to almost $100,000. For me, it would be at least $80,000 based on how much I would need to pay for those things (and I’m young and healthy, with employer-subsidized health insurance).
If you (and partner if applicable) both work, you’re going to need childcare care for at least the first few years unless you happen to live near very generous and accomodating friends and family. I can’t even get someone to watch my dog for under $25/day. In practice the average for childcare is $12000/yr (I just googled it, $3500-$18000/yr range). Assume you need it for 3-5 years, and we’re now somewhatabove $100k.
This assumes you put $0 towards college and never give your kids a dime of support after their 18th birthday. It also assumes you don’t need extra room(s) (higher rent), or use more electricity/heat/water, or ever pay for any toys or entertainment of any kind that you weren’t buying anyway.
I also agree that spread over 18+ years this isn’t an unbearable expense for a couple making, say, 50k a year in most of the country or 80k in a more expensive city. Unfortunately a huge fraction of the expense is frontloaded in the first five years, when said couple is youngest, lowest paid, etc.
I have to admit, you have big balls to come on here and recommend we all change to a system that leaves millions in grinding, uneducated poverty. As you point out, you know nothing about me that I haven’t told you myself. Enjoy your wealth, but don’t pretend it makes you smarter, more intelligent, or handsome.
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Speaking for my own home area, a lot of families ended up here for coal mining. In this case, the dry-up was totally artificial: EPA regs shut down the coal mines. I think I said it in an earlier comment, but a lot of school districts went from being well in the black, to being in the red, overnight.
A lot of these families felt like they could live the good life, so they bought like crazy, often on credit. When you go from making an upper-middle-class wage to nothing overnight, there’s a lot of financial baggage.
A lot of folks do either farm around here, or at least have gardens. I’m about to start getting my garden ready, come to that. Keep in mind, though, that we have multiple regulatory bodies; it’s not as simple as, say, buying some chickens and selling the chickens for a profit. If cash changes hands, you will be found out, and you will be forced to follow the same expensive regulations that everyone else does. And right now, on my home turf, there’s a major fight because a group of Amish want to start a chicken farm. They’re ending up spending thousands of dollars just to go to court to fight an environmental group. The point of contention? They’re close to a reservoir. As far as I can tell from the map, they’re not even on the watershed.
As an extreme example of, “Why don’t people just pack up and leave?” look at Beattyville, Kentucky, where median household income is less than $15,000 a year. If you’re going to move, there are rules and regulations, and those regulations are different depending on what state you’re traveling through; your safest choice is to get a moving truck. So, let’s say you’re in Beattyville, and you get a job in the DFW area, and that your belongings can fit into a 15’ U-Haul. Just renting the truck will cost you $811, or 65% of median household monthly income. Someone’s going to be eating a hell of a lot of wish sandwiches and ice soup, and that’s just to rent a U-Haul. Obviously, if they could get hired on at a mine in WV, that’d be a shorter, and less expensive move; that’ll only be a couple hundred bucks. But still, to put it in perspective, that’s still about 20% of the monthly household budget, and once you get there, you’re sure to need to rent a place, put down a deposit, blah blah blah.
My own old hometown has a higher median household income–$38k–but renting that same U-Haul for a trip to DFW will cost you about a hundred bucks more.
Another misconception is that you can compare a third world household to a U.S. household. While it’s possible to live in a shack somewhere, you’re likely to get run out. Where I live, if you attempted to live in a pallet shack, it’d be torn down in short order and the local government would make you pay for it. Heck, even if you had a livable house and decided to do extreme cost cutting and go without electricity, you can have your house condemned. And this isn’t even a living-in-town issue, this is a county-wide ordinance in a relatively poor county.
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Slight nitpick on the hed, btw: the story is from the National Review, which collectively seems to hate Donald Trump.
I think you missed the point of me asking those questions:
- I was asking @muddi900 about conditions in his/her home country, not conditions in the US.
- I was trying to suggest it’s not so easy to just pack up and move, not to suggest that it is easy.
Everything you say contributes to the discussion, just want to minimize confusion by keeping straight who is saying what.
Right, but I was asking about households in the developing world, so you (inadvertently I think) are the only one comparing the two so far.
The analogous situation in the US isn’t your coal miners, but the urbanization of the US in the late 19th early 20th centuries.
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People talk about there being two Americas, but what they don’t talk about is that rich America writes the laws for poor America. I think of that case where a woman got charged with negligence for letting her 9-year-old go play in the park when she went to work. In an impoverished nation no one would think twice about leaving a 9-year-old unsupervised (and the 9-year-old would probably have their own responsibilities). In a wealthy nation full of impoverished people a woman making rational decisions for her family (what’s the point in looking after your daughter during the day if you aren’t going to be able to afford rent and food?) is charged with a crime. Her crime was being poor enough to be forced into that decision in a country where there ought to be enough for everyone (and nevermind the fact that when her generation was growing up letting your nine-year-old go out to play all day an not seeing them for hours was normal enough).
I’m pretty much the opposite of a libertarian, but I think you run into a lot of problems when regulations are written with one thing in mind and end up applying broadly. If you write environmental regulations for chicken farms assuming that chicken farmers are huge corporations with 800 chickens per cubic meter and then apply those regulations to people who want to have some chickens in their yard because they are struggling to figure out how they are going to eat, you get oppression of the poor in the service of the wealthy.
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Starving the Public Education Beast:
- Slash budgets for education / re-allocate away from teachers
- Overload teachers with large class sizes
- Complain about poor performance of schools
- Blame teachers
- Use resulting anti-teacher sentiment to steer more funds away from hiring teachers/reducing class size
- Complain even more about even worse outcomes
- (repeat steps 1-6 as needed)
- Decry the total failure of public schools
- Defund / starve with vouchers
- Bask in glory
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The funny thing is, successful socialist countries also don’t differ from some of the conclusions. When an industry leaves or dies, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Clearly coal mining/burning is horrible for everyone, and having a plan of “let’s keep coal so that these people have jobs” is very short-sighted.
Where they differ from conservatives is in what to do about that. Rather than saying “Sorry suckers, you done got in the wrooong industry, aaaaaand you’re dead.” They recognize that industries growing and dying is a necessary, and also structural phenomenon, and thus the solutions cannot be personal. The solution then is to invest in re-educating, re-training and, when necessary, re-locating people so that the most people can be doing as much actually productive work as possible.
No need to plan economies, just plan for a way to make sure as many people can follow it where it goes.
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Your list is good. I’d add:
*11. Puzzle future historians
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Agree and want to add that since economic planning happens already, it’s important to democratically involve more people — besides shareholders — impacted by the planning.
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This is the second time today I’ve replied to something with a quick joke and then come back for more, I guess it’s just that kind of day.
When I have discussions with people with libertarianism who believe in the idea that government generally messes everything up and we ought to leave everything to private industry, I’ll often bring up public school as an example of something that we can clearly agree countries are better off with than without. It would be very, very hard to argue that public school hasn’t resulted in massive benefits to every country that has implemented it. I use that as a foot-in-the-door to - in the words of the old misogynist joke - point out that we are now just haggling over price.
Apparently there are a lot of American politicians who would say, “Now hold on there, public school isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
If I had to rank stupid things people think in order of ‘obviously contradicted by fact’ I would put this above climate change denial. I think I’d put it above someone who thought smoking didn’t cause cancer, or HIV didn’t cause AIDS. I think 9/11 truthers and fake-moon-landing-theorists probably make better cases than anti-public-schoolers.
No one doubts that you could design a public school system that would do more harm than good (Canada, for example, ran such school system for Aboriginal children until 19-fucking-96!). But wow is it not hard to have schools that do so much good that they obviously outweigh the cost of building and running them, and that outstrip virtually any other conceivable use of the money.
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