Re: When the Levees Broke

El Castor wrote:

Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


El Castor wrote:


Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



El Castor wrote:


Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:




We have to get to the root causes of poverty and our record on this is abysmal. Now, our current administration is attacking the very programs that we need in the name of a bankrupt ideology of laissez faire.


Ah yes, the "root causes" of poverty. Explained and substantiated in
exquisite detail by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their
ground breaking achievement, The Bell Curve - Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life, Simon & Schuster 1994.

"To try to come to grips with the nation's problems without
understanding the role of intelligence is to see through a glass
darkly indeed, to grope with symptoms instead of causes, to stumble
into supposed remedies that have no chance of working."
The Bell Curve


So, what are you saying, Jeff? That our government should favor those at the upper end of the bell curve and discriminate against those at the lower end?


I'm saying that the poor are for the most part financially
unsuccessful because they fall on the left side of the bell curve and
find it difficult to compete in a world which places a premium on
intellectual capacity and offers fewer and fewer jobs requiring
unskilled or low skilled manual labor. I'm saying that the plight of
the poor is not due to laziness, nor is it due to discrimination or
exploitation. How we deal with poverty should devolve from that
reality -- not from the rhetoric of class warfare.


Thanks for that clarification. Leaving out the inflammatory issue of race, I tend to agree. Those with lower intelligence are at a disadvantage. All men are not born with equal ability.

The question then is how to deal with poverty, even devolving from that reality. My question was not an idle question and rather than answer it you avoided it as "rhetoric of class warfare."

When manufacturing was the mainstay of our economy, there were plenty of jobs that people at all levels of intelligence could fill. That is no longer the case, in part because of public policy favoring the finance, insurance and real estate sectors over manufacturing. This is one of the reasons that I claim that the average working person is now denied the American Dream.

So, how should we deal with poverty?


I don't know, but I am skeptical of government programs aimed at
social engineering at the cost of economic growth. We can forbid the
import of shoes and clothing, and require that all television sets
sold in the United States be manufactured here. We can outlaw the use
of harvester machinery on the farm, and forbid the use of the backhoe.
That would create lots of jobs sewing shirts, assembling TV's,
harvesting wheat, and digging ditches, but would we be better off? I
doubt it.

Maybe we need to spend a half trillion dollars developing a pill that
will insure that every fetus is born with the brain of Isaac Newton. I
think that would do more to end poverty than outlawing the backhoe or
withdrawing from the WTO.


Why not social engineering AND economic growth? Very few of us make use of the brainpower that we have, so education has a role in a solution, I think. But, to motivate people to become better educated, we need to make the case that it will result in a better life. That is not altogether obvious to a lot of people who don't see a better future for themselves despite efforts to gain a better education. At the risk of getting into the class warfare issue, I strongly believe that we are not doing all that we can in this respect. The best educational opportunities are going to the wealthy. Meanwhile, programs to improve educational opportunities are being stripped of funds.

While you are correct in stating that better paying jobs go to the higher skills, a major disappointment to me is that we haven't taken advantage of our technology to provide more jobs for those less fortunate. We are quick to go abroad for low labor rates, but not to invest in technology that would allow us to be competitive here. Most of the emphasis on increased productivity seems to be to get more labor out of fewer workers rather than enabling workers to produce more at lower cost through the use of technology. This has cost us the capability to do manufacturing IMV.
.

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