re: Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong

Not true. The rules are very simple and don't require much at all, except to follow them strictly - like a recipe:

1. Stay in school and earn a HS diploma

2. Don't have children unless you're married (and if you get married stay married)

3. Work at ANY KIND of job

4. Refrain from engaging in criminal activity

Chances are 1 in 20 you'll be poor and that doesn't take 20 years.

Boom.

I did it. By nothing it means nothing major like dropping out of school or a felony or get addicted to drugs or have a kid out of wedlock at a young age.

It is highly possible.

I see things a lot differently than most.

Poverty is relative, even within your geographical are.

I know lots people that are under the poverty line but they work hard, live efficiently, are clean and proud of what they have and generally seem happier than most OT ballers I know. I dont think any of them would admit to being poor or poverty stricken.

Poverty is a frame of mind.

He's not exactly breaking new ground here. Everything he is saying has been obvious to anyone with eyes for at least the last few decades, if not the entire history of man. After a brief flirtation (in the mid-20th century, roughly 1930s-1970s) with a more egalitarian approach, the masses have been reconditioned to accept the ancient status quo through a combination of propaganda, intimidation, religion and all the methods he describes.

Of course it's infuriating or saddening to anyone who bothers to pay attention and has an ounce of "human" decency (a concept we fantasize about, but evidently doesn't exist), but as long as most people are stupid and enough people have no empathy or compassion, it will continue. It seems that no matter how much we fancy ourselves intelligent, rational or somehow different, we can never improve our inherent nature above the common animals we came from, with our animalistic predation and battles for heirarchical dominance merely taking different forms rather than becoming obsolete.

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the masses have been reconditioned to accept the ancient status quo through a combination of propaganda, intimidation, religion and all the methods he describes.

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What ancient status quo is this?

Escaping poverty is simple unless you have a cognitive or physical condition that prevents you from being productive.

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He's not exactly breaking new ground here. Everything he is saying has been obvious to anyone with eyes for at least the last few decades, if not the entire history of man. After a brief flirtation (in the mid-20th century, roughly 1930s-1970s) with a more egalitarian approach, the masses have been reconditioned to accept the ancient status quo through a combination of propaganda, intimidation, religion and all the methods he describes.

Of course it's infuriating (or saddening, depending on what group you're in) to anyone who bothers to pay attention and has an ounce of human decency, but as long as most people are stupid and enough people have no humanity in their souls (that is to say, forever) it will continue.

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You do realize that poverty in the U.S. has stayed pretty consistent since the 1970's (and that poverty was much higher in the range you cited)?

Cultural degradation has far, far, far more to do with increased social immobility than anything else, and I say that as someone who is pretty socially liberal all things considered.

Yeah, his statement was weird.

Looks like it pretty much dropped starting in the late 40's and settled to it's present point (between 10-15%) in the mid 60's.

Or they could just...

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Escaping poverty is simple unless you have a cognitive or physical condition that prevents you from being productive.

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Ridiculous. But many people still believe it. It's a testament to the power of propaganda.

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Yes, the extreme disparities were exposed during the depression and two unprecedented bloody world wars which served as a sort of equalizing influence emotionally as people of most almost every class other than the super rich were more or less equal in the breadlines, on the battlefields and in body bags. This is what brought about the attempts to remedy them. Far short of actually succeeding, the effort was abandoned around the end of the 1970s when the elite class was able to co-opt the previously apolitical or anti-establishment evangelical protestant contingent into the effort to re-establish the same old economic and political power heirarchy.

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That sounds like a whole lot of anecdotes without any data.

The flip side to that story is that the massive expansion in the welfare state in the 1960's has created a screwed up incentive structure in which people in poverty have little incentive to actually create value. And I can point to the Great Society as the time and place in which that inflection point actually happened.

That's not even getting into the exponential leaps in information technology, globalization, and so forth which were inevitable with or without any sort of policy remedy.

Keep on hacking away at it, though, Comrade Sanders. I am sure some 19th or early 20th century ideology and methodology will work swimmingly.