Poor and Homelessness

[Valjean]

When would you estimate that would have been?

@The Hammer estimates there was no poverty in pre-agrarian culture.

I would suggest that there were no poor in pre-agrarian societies because they simply didn't survive.

We didn't see beggars and massive homelessness in the post-war period. Homelessness really began proliferating with the switch from Keynesian to Neoliberal economics in the early '80s, when wealth and opportunity began 'trickling up' from the middle and working classes, to a handful of corporatists.

 

[Valjean]

This has existed well before Ds and Rs. How do we address a problem that is a fact of large-scale society itself.

Outside of partisan politics, what can we do, but act individually to address what we can: what we are actively in control of?

Congress and the presidency? Local and national economic and social policies?

This existed in the 1930s, and was largely ameliorated by FDR's liberal, New Deal jobs programs.
Fifty years ago we didn't see stagnant wages, tent cities, and beggars on every street corner. These began proliferating with Neoliberalism and privatization, in the '80s.

 

[Valjean]

Personally, I would vastly prefer to live now than then. Our issues now pale in comparison to the harshness of pre-agrarian life.

Much pre-agrarian life was prosperous and happy. The decline in health, leisure time, and adult mortality began with the move to settled, hierarchical societies.

 

[Valjean]

Have you ever lived in such a place?

Our lives in the modern world are vastly materially easier than the lives of people from millennia ago. We live longer. We are healthier. We don't work remotely as hard for the food we eat. Most of us virtually never experience actual hunger. Society's infrastructure provides a multitude of creature comforts and conveniences for us that folks living in pre-industrial societies could never dream of.

I think you need to bone up on your anthropology. Hunter-gatherers, on the whole, were prosperous, had abundant leisure and could support themselves with little labor.

Fossil evidence and modern ethnography indicate that the percentage of 'stone age' people in their '60s and '70s was much higher in pre-agricultural societies.

Skeletons from medieval Europe indicate poor health, hard toil, and short lifespans. Skeletons from early, industrializing societies, show even poorer health and longevity.

 

[Hermit Philosopher]

What does your religion say about helping those that are less fortunate than oneself?

In my faith is said that if one learns to distinguish between one’s wants and one’s needs and if one only ever “takes” what one needs; two things occur: 1) one will not experience poverty and 2) there will be more of most things to go around.


Humbly
Hermit

 

[Left Coast]

Much pre-agrarian life was prosperous and happy. The decline in health, leisure time, and adult mortality began with the move to settled, hierarchical societies.

So would you rather live in a society without running water, electricity, modern medicine, and so on?

 

[Valjean]

Certainly we are talking in generalizations and I am not an Anthropologist. Cultures will vary. I seem to recall that some Polynesian cultures were fairly unforgiving to those that seemed to have deficits or did not conform to the norm.

I can certainly see how extra effort may be afforded to comfort and support a well respected member of society if something befell them that left them less than capable of self-support, but for those who had trouble from the start, depending on group resources, I imagine there was less leeway in prehistoric cultures. Being prehistoric, however, it is really hard to know definitively. Most of our conceptions come from 18th and 19th century contact of Western explorers with then existent hunter/gatherer societies.

OK. I did major in anthropology -- and several other things .
Primitive childhood mortality rates were/are very high, but if you can make it to adulthood, your chances of living to your '70s was pretty good.

 

[Valjean]

These are people who live in tiny huts in the dirt with no running water or electricity and rub sticks together to make fire. Literally.

Sorry, you're not going to convince me that they live a higher quality of life than we do in the West. It's not even close.

What quality of life metrics are you using? Accumulated wealth? happiness? Health?

Primitives may be materially poor, but they usually have what they need, and they're healthy, happy and live rich, satisfying lives.

 

[Valjean]

So would you rather live in a society without running water, electricity, modern medicine, and so on?

Were I born to it; enculturated into such a society, I'd probably be happier than most 'civilized' people.

 

[Left Coast]

Were I born to it; enculturated into such a society, I'd probably be happier than most 'civilized' people.

This is not an answer, Valjean.

Would you like to move there? Would you like to live in a society without running water or electricity where you hunt for every meal and live in a grass hut in the dirt?

Being relatively happy because you've grown up in a society where you don't even realize what people on the other side of the world have at their fingertips doesn't really say much.

That said, if you'd really prefer that - go for it. I'm not stopping you. Go be happy.

 

[Valjean]

Sounds like they didn't, though. Or they wouldn't have changed. They changed because they saw a way to improve their lives. Like any of us would.

And I can tell you now, the vast majority of us would not do "just as well" with no running water or electricity. Our lives would demonstrably worsen. Ask anyone whose A/C has ever gone out in summer.

You and I are enculturated to "need" these things. Primitive societies are not.

Look at the ethnographic, psychological and sociological studies. People don't miss or feel a need for what they don't have, and introduction of modern 'comforts' usually ends up decreasing the prosperity and happiness of a society.

Primitives didn't want to change or improve their lives. Chance discovery of agriculture &/or animal husbandry forced change upon them. They had to change.

Hunting-gathering can't support large populations. Agriculture and animal husbandry increased available food. Increased population followed, and necessitated permanent settlements, accumulation of non-portable wealth and the need to defend it, specialization, social stratification and competition, both with each other and outside threats. Archæology indicates lifespan and quality-of-life decreased after the agricultural revolution.

 

[Valjean]

If it helped them survive, then it's a positive, in my book. That's my point - they needed to improve their lives, so they did. As many human cultures have done. And we have reaped the rewards of their work in doing so. Like this conversation that's happening right now because of the internet.

But how are you measuring "improvement?" What criteria are you using?

 

[Valjean]

I'm looking at a viewpoint of the entire last few thousand years of human civilization. I think some people idolize some idyllic past that they think was so great before modernity. Almost like the Garden of Eden or something. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You really need to take a few anthro courses.

 

[wellwisher]

Huh?
That's the orthodox doctrine. It's not what we see in actual operation.Economics isn't a zero-sum game.
General affluence threatens the élite. "Too much prosperity" for the masses = less for the rich. When the middle class wants a bigger slice of the pie -- which they baked, after all -- there's less for the rich. This has been an ongoing struggle for 200 years.

Fifty or sixty years ago both sides were prosperous. It was America's Golden Age. Since war was declared in the Powell Manifesto (1971) the middle class has stagnated. Since Reagan's Neoliberal, "trickle down" economic revolution (~1981), America's treasure has become increasingly concentrated at the top, the middle class has diminished, nothing's trickled down, and the workers are angrily blaming the liberals, supporting their own oppressors.
The poor are living in tents and begging on street corners.

Isn't trickle down economics how Big Government works? Big Government, via the IRS and Congress, commandeer your tax dollars and then deficit spend these along with future tax dollars. With all this money in hand, they tell us they are dealing with the poor, yet the rate poverty has not changed in 40 years. It this because of stupidity or corruption?

Those in power; at the top, need the poor, too forever be seen as poor, to maintain their own status as providers. The poor are pawns in this political power equation. The Government led War on Poverty has spent $10 Trillion and has not change the rate of poverty on 40 years. The programs are not designed to change the percent, but are an excuse to perpetuate wasteful and incompetent government programs. Government has become the problem and not the solution.

The amount of money spent on the poor is staggering. To support a single mother and two children you need to pay rent, food and clothing, transportation and medical, as well as all the overhead for the bureaucracy; wages, benefits; medical, vacations and large pension plans for early retirement. If we eliminated the bureaucracy. and give the total directly to the poor, the poor will become middle class; problem solved.

Unfortunately, the Democrats put themselves in charge of the poor, and through their own incompetence and waste, money goes into growing Big Government, which needs the poor stuck as perpetual pawns.

I read that in rich states like Connecticut a single mother with two children costs about $37,000 per year in state and federal tax dollars. This total includes the cost of all the middle men. If we gave mom that $37,000 directly; $3000/month, she is now middle class. But Democrats and Big Government need the poor to be classified as poor; middle man skim, to justify wasting tax dollars on their own political needs. It a part of a big government and political money laundering scam.

The political left first screwed the country when they taught that alternate life styles were all just as good. The nuclear family, by all metrics, is the most efficient way to deal with many social problems, such as poverty. Divorce, for example, requires two households and more total expenses.If you double the housing needs, housing prices to go up for all. This now exceeds the average bread winner wage and created poverty, where it had not been. This was by design. The very people who create the problem then tell us they are the solution, with solutions that create even more problems. Now the push for many genders is another money pit, designed to create future problems and grow government. There is a push to reverse the damage done to the country by the political Left. They cannot be trusted to solve poverty since it gets worse. under their care. We need a new approach such as direct payments with zero middlemen cost.

 

[Valjean]

It appears that the people group you're referencing disagree with you.



I think we can learn some lessons from people who live differently, don't get me wrong. We certainly have a lifestyle that is fast-paced and consumeristic and produces lots of waste. But I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and regress back to some preagrarian society with no modern technology to improve our lives.

But does it really improve our lives? By what metrics?
Post agricultural revolution, most lives were poor, nasty, brutish and short, till modern, recent medicine improved health and mortality, and Humanistic social values improved social and economic life. Yet neither has succeeded in recreating the happiness indices and life satisfaction of many primitive societies.

 

[Left Coast]

You and I are enculturated to "need" these things. primitive societies are not.

So I'll take that as a "no."

That primitive socities survive without these things does not mean they are not obviously improvements that make life easier. I'm not making an extreme point here. Why do you think people from developed countries spend so much time and money and energy trying to raise people's standard of living in the poorest parts of the world? Because it has obvious benefits for people's lives.

Look at the ethnographic, psychological and sociological studies. People don't miss or feel a need for what they don't have, and introduction of modern 'comforts' usually ends up decreasing the prosperity and happiness of a society.

Yet oddly, you are not giving them up. You're arguing that ignorance is bliss here. Which yes, I suppose to some degree it is. Knowing what I know about both ways of life, I'm well aware which life I'd prefer to live.

 

[Left Coast]

You really need to take a few anthro courses.

Thanks for the tip. I don't think it'll change my appreciation for modern civilization, though.

 

[Valjean]

This is not an answer, Valjean.

Would you like to move there? Would you like to live in a society without running water or electricity where you hunt for every meal and live in a grass hut in the dirt?

No. I'm enculturated to live in the civilized, Western society I was raised in. I have attitudes, values, desires and 'needs' peculiar to that society.
As a loaf holds the shape of the pan it was baked in, I can no longer fit into a different mold. Nor would a Amazon native or African Bushman (San) fit into, or be happy in our culture.
Beware judging other cultures by your own metrics

Being relatively happy because you've grown up in a society where you don't even realize what people on the other side of the world have at their fingertips doesn't really say much.

That said, if you'd really prefer that - go for it. I'm not stopping you. Go be happy.

Nobody's advocating 'going native', here. I'm just pointing out basic anthropological, psychological and sociological realities.

 

[Left Coast]

No. I'm enculturated to live in the civilized, Western society I was raised in. I have attitudes, values, desires and 'needs' peculiar to that society.
As a loaf holds the shape of the pan it was baked in, I can no longer fit into a different mold. Nor would a Amazon native or African Bushman (San) fit into, or be happy in our culture.
Beware judging other cultures by your own metrics

I will continue to advocate for the relative luxuries I enjoy to be enjoyed by others. If they're exposed to them and don't want them, that's fine. From what I've seen though, most folks in poorer countries welcome our support, money, and technology to improve their lives.

Nobody's advocating 'going native', here. I'm just pointing out basic anthropological, psychological and sociological realities.

And I'm just pointing out the reality that when you lift your head from a textbook and see how people actually live their daily lives, it's pretty clear that these people are living lives that most of us would never adopt if given a choice. They literally live in the dirt, lack education, lack modern medicine, lack social mobility...the list goes on. And if they'd been given a choice from early childhood, I doubt most of them would choose that life either. Just like us.

 

[The Hammer]

They literally live in the dirt, lack education, lack modern medicine, lack social mobility...the list goes on. And if they'd been given a choice from early childhood, I doubt most of them would choose that life either. Just like us.

This just shows what standards you think "civilization" needs.

It's actually quite common for societies that have Hunter gatherers populations nearby "civilized" ones, to actually have a shift of people leaving FOR that lifestyle HG), not towards civilization. Because it ultimately is easier.

What social mobility? In the Ju, there is no social stratification. A clan head doesn't really dictate what does or does not get done for instance (he's not a government body).

If given the choice from early childhood, most of them choose to stay as HG, unless it becomes impossible for them to do so due to encroaching interest-conflicts with civilization.