I think it’s hard to disagree that the poor could stop being poor–at least as the US currently defines poverty–if they behaved differently; it’s basically numerically impossible to fall under the poverty line if you finish high school, wait to have children until you get married, and both work full time. On the other hand, as I wrote a while back, I think this ignores the evidence that when you are poor–“which is to say”, noted George Orwell of unemployed coal miners, “when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable”–it is actually much harder to make those choices than Bryan seems to imagine. Which is why the poor of Orwell’s England also struggled with things like obesity and dental decay from consuming too much sugar and not enough vegetables; it is hard to get interested in dieting if a sugar high is the nicest thing that ever happens to you.
There’s also what I’d call the implicit left view, which is that, as Jesus said, “The poor, you will always have with you.” This Noah Smith post on poverty in Japan seems to encapsulate it pretty well. In response to Caplan, Smith argues out that about 16% of the Japanese seem to be poor, even though they are notoriously crime free, averse to single parenthood, and not big drinkers or drug users. These are people who work, but need to scrimp on things like food, and eschew vacations, in order to afford even more necessary items such as medical care and school uniforms. “Poverty in a prosperous society usually does not mean living in rags on a dirt floor,” Tokyo social welfare professor Masami Iwata told the New York Times. “These are people with cellphones and cars, but they are cut off from the rest of society.”
Read the rest here.
