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Jonathan Blundell
I'm a husband, father of three, blogger, podcaster, author and media geek who is hoping to live a simple life and follow The Way.
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I have recently seen several post on the cause of poverty and was hoping you would jump in with your thoughts. We are talking about poverty in the USA.
There are many.
– Laziness
– A bad economic system
– An unjust economic system
– Generational cycles
– Poor wages
– Lack of education
– Others
Which cause would you like to talk about?
First, I am surprised that you put “Laziness” at the top of your list. My view is that the root cause of poverty in American is poor decisions. Which begs the question, why do poor people make poor decisions? No one “wants” to be poor, yet they make decisions that clearly lead to poverty, why? My hypothesis is they have some learning disabilities that inhibit good decision making.
In my reading on the subject educational classes for the poor don’t result in changed behavior, even thought they complete the material.
I do think poverty is over reported in American. The Liberals says “see, we need to do more” and the conservatives say “see, what we are doing is not working.” I say the truth is somewhere in between.
Before we can address the problem of poverty, we need to know the underlying causes.
I listed laziness because I have several friends who have no interest in working as long as they can live at home on their parents’ dime.
Am I understanding you correctly that you think people are poor (in America) because they have a learning disability?
I would agree that poor choices can also play a part in a person’s poverty but I’m not sure I agree with the learning disability part of your hypothesis.
I have a friend who made a dumb decision one night while drunk and ended up spending several years in Denton County. He now has that baggage every time he tries to find work. But he’s also stuck without reliable transportation and a limited skill set and limited resources to learn additional skill sets. So we can blame all his problems on one poor decision or we could also blame a lack of reliable public transportation, a lack of accessible training, etc. etc. We could also make the argument I’m sure that poor choices tend to beget poor choices that beget poor choices and so on.
But no one born into poverty made a decision to live in poverty and with a lack of hope they may make their own poor choices – but it wasn’t their poor choice that initially caused them to be poor.
I also have friends who have chosen a life of voluntary poverty in order to better associate themselves with the poor. I’ve always found it REALLY hard to make an educated opinion about a topic without knowing someone who’s really living in the midst of it.
Regardless of the cause – it doesn’t excuse me or anyone else from helping those in need.
I know my friend hasn’t made the best decisions in his life but it doesn’t stop me from giving him gas money from time to time or buying him a bus ticket when he was stranded in Montana.
You may want to listen to this episode of Freakonomics for more – http://freakonomics.com/2013/11/27/fighting-poverty-with-actual-evidence-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/