There’s no way out of here
by Dale Coberly
An Op-ed
There’s no way out of here said the Joker to the Thief
… or is there?
This essay grew by strange turns from an argument I was having with another Bear, with whom I agree about all important things.
A long time ago I went with some civil rights workers to visit a migrant labor camp for sugar harvesters near Belleglade and Pahokee in way south Florida by the Everglades.
What I saw there left no doubt that these people were underpaid and treated badly, and that there was a dangerous level of race-based hate among the poor whites in the neighborhood.
But what we saw there could be understood in another way.
The farmer-supplied “rest rooms” were non functional and the sinks were filled with feces.
Almost all of the farmer-supplied “housing” was filthy with the filth of poverty.
But one young woman showed us her home, and it was cleaner and better kept than my own home.
So I wondered why ALL the houses could not at least be kept clean. And why the community rest rooms had to be so filthy. Even poor people ought to be able to manage public sanitation..even if its only a trench dug new each day and covered “as you go.”
And this is why I don’t think the answer to “poverty” is welfare checks alone.
What I think these people needed was someone to help organize the community to at least manage public sanitation, and negotiations with the farmer to maintain his own facilities in return for a reasonable level of care on the part of the tenants.
I think they needed someone to know enough about their lives to be able to, for example, help the woman who cleaned her house find a way to better her lot in life.
And they needed someone they could bring complaints of oppression and abuse… someone who would take them seriously and act on them. By negotiation if possible, by police action if needed.
Does any of this apply to “inner cities” or inner city schools? I think it does. “Liberals” cannot just throw tax transfers at people and expect magical results. Every community succeeds according to how well it is organized to meet the challenges it faces. The government… which has a critical interest in “solving” the poverty problem… needs to invest in community organization which will enable the people to solve their own problems… from repairing the schools, to monitoring how school taxes are spent.
I don’t know if this is already being done. But I don’t hear about it, and I should if it is. If the big O was a “community organizer,” what did he organize? What did they achieve?
And, oh yes, what ARE they teaching in the schools nowadays?
Ihave been told there are lots of do gooder organizations that fund community organizers, and the first thing those folk do is go in and organize a rent strike.
not what i am talking about.
i am saying any federal or state poverty program needs to find a way to help the people to organize to solve their own problems, and that does not begin by confronting the local power structure and demanding more money.
though when you are organized and you go in to negotiate with the local power structure you are in a position to come to a better agreement.
could be the reason why the local powers are so hostile to the idea. most people would rather have a nasty unending problem than risk losing a bit of power.
The Late Jack Kemp demonstrated while he was working for the first Bush how to make subsidized housing projects safe clean places for families: You give the occupants the opportunity to buy the units making them owners not renters.
He convinced GHWB to support $4B for a large pilot project but the democratic controlled congress cut that to a pitiful $360M.
” The government… which has a critical interest in “solving” the poverty problem… “
I agree with this statement, but the problem is many people do not. Local, state, and the federal government all spend money on public health nursing, social workers, etc. to do exactly what you are asking for – but let’s face it, this is not a subject on the media radar.
“The government…needs to invest in community organization which will enable the people to solve their own problems”
This was ACORN, which had been on the right wing hit list for years, and is now gone thanks to a scam. Perhaps this is one problem.
Amateur, welcome to the “woulda coulda shoulda” world of govt housing programs. Of course, the Congress cut the size of the program. They almost always do. It is never politically advisable to pass big spending bills. In any event, no matter what the majority party is, the Senate tends to oppose the Executive Branch. The specific D’s in the Senate that survived the initial assault of the Southern strategy were no fans either of spending or taxes. This was shown by several defections to the R’s and various D losses in key Senate elections in the early Clinton years.
However, Kemp’s program was nothing to write home about from the standpoint of pros in the poverty business. The deal was it was going to be run by HUD in Urban Enterprise Zones. Idea was to provide tax breaks to businesses and contractors to redevelop decayed downtowns on the East Coast. The South and West Coast’s poverty isn’t as localized and usually doesn’t get much out of such plans. So, not a lot of enthusiasm from the South, the Pacific Rim and the East Slope.
HUD is as corrupt an organization as ever existed and has consisitently rewarded contractors from the majority party to the exclusion of anything else. Big city politics and juicy federal contracts produce known effects. Some people get rich. Period. Everything else stays the same. Even good results are very short term. The next Congress comes along and there goes another federal housing program.
Besides, what’s this I hear from the RW now about how the federal govt’s insistence that unqualified poor borrowers be given mortgage loans “caused” the Housing Bubble and subsequent crash? If the CRA was to blame for all our ills and the current foreclosure debacle, then Kemp’s program was doomed from the git go. Another woulda, coulda, shoulda bites the dust. NancyO
jtnRN
when I worked for the Food Stamps and shared an office with the Welfare, I saw no community organization effort at all. it was strictly one on one welfare in a very hostile atmosphere.
i am thinking more in terms of what can the people themselves do in a local community (self defined) by way of getting better schools, better housing, jobs, etc etc. I think the people can do a great deal for themselves if they are just encouraged to stop thinking of themselves as helpless and, mostly, “alone.”
to take “amateur’s” point, a community organization could fix up a house, then another, then maybe go to the government and ask for loans to build more housing that the occupiers would come to own. (i don’t think apartment living works for humans at low income levels… might be fine for rich new yorkers). but it needs to be done as participants, not as recipients. and it has to cost less in the long run than welfare and crime.
First, I’m not the angrybear with whom Dale has been debating.
There is something very odd indeed about the example of poor people who could do more to help each other fight poverty. The poor people in the example are doing a huge amount of work already. I mean work measured in Joules. Harvesting sugar cane is close to the hardest physical labor which people do. I think Dale might find it easier to understand the lack of an effective coomunity organization if he spent 8 hours chopping cane. Of course I might be confused, maybe they don’t do it with machetes there (my information may be out of date).
So what about just throwing some money at the problem ? What would the effects be ? Odd that you should ask, because there was an actual honest to god experiement in which some sugar cane harvesters (who worked for piece rates) were given cash grants (there was a control group). I don’t actually have a cite and I would suspect that the sugar harvesters were in the third world and even poorer than the ones Dale visited. The measured outcome was can harvested. Workers who received the grant harvested more cane. This is an interesting result, since a standard model would lead us to predict that they would harvest late — the income effect on labor supply.
The motivation for the experiment and interpretation of the result was the belief that with more energy — literally I mean calories not get up and go — the workers would be able to work more. It makes sense if one guesses that they were working at their physical biological limits. Again, I don’t think the conditions of the workers in the experiment were identical to those observed by Dale, but it is just a fact that the example in the efficiency wage literature of people worked to the biological limit was sugar cane workers. In any case, the approach of just giving money to sugar harvesters has been tested experimentally and the result was increased productivity.
Having noticed this odd coincidence, I go on to note that most poor people in the USA don’t harvest sugar. It just isn’t true that physical exhaustion is a big problem for most poor people in the USA. But I think the fact that Dale chose an example which is so atypical and roughly the worst available example for his case tells us something.
Also what jtnRN said. It isn’t as if the sugar harvesters just have to mention the problem to the authorities and something will be done for them. As Dale noted, they are not popular. I’d note that ACORN wasn’t hated and destroyed because of rent strikes. It’s offense was registering voters.
I think that it would be worth reading about Obama’s efforts to organize a community. He writes well. He accomplished very little. It’s hard. In any case, search a pdf of The Audacity of Hope for “asbestos.”
I find the criticism of welfare tossed off to be odd. Clearly it isn’t the problem there — the workers in question are not on welfare. I think it would clearly be part of the solution to the very narrow problem described — if the workers in question could get welfare, then their employer would have to provide higher wages or better working conditions to attract workers.
The argument that we shouldn’t just sent checks lead to a reform where we don’t send checks and don’t do anything else either and severe poverty is at the highest level on record (data go back to 1975).
An increase in the EITC (or rather some way to get the EITC to the workers in question would according to standard theory lead to an equilibrium with more workers […]
Robert
your letter is too long to be easily answered. i am sorry you are so sensitive about some issues that you can’t understand what i am trying to say.
i well understand the physical exhaustion that comes from 12 or 16 hour days of hard labor and poor food. i have nothing agains welfare checks. i just think it is not going to be the answer to poverty that a patient effort to develop a community will achieve.
but i specifically reject the idea that such organization must be confrontational. take it easy by easy and you will get better results.
I am a great believer in seed money. not so much in just throwing dimes out of your limousine.
I didn’t “choose” the example. I just wrote about something I had seen myself.
and, for what it’s worth, i have no respect for “standard models” at all.
and a good “community organizer” better damn well know how to negotiate with “the boss” and to prevent corruption in the community organization. i have some hope the governmetn could actually make such a system work, but they’d have to be a lot smarter about it.
not to be mean… seriously… but your reply looks to me like the standard liberal “no way out of here” answer. throw someone else’s money at the problem, but let us not actually think about what we are trying to accomplish because we all know that a welfare check and job training opportunities will solve everything.
no, i am not so worried about the poor rich man’s money. i am worried about doing something effective with it.
now i have to go do about 12 hours of hard physical labor. and i am too disorganzied to pack a lunch.
i’ll think about that lady who did manage to keep her house clean. and hope she got out of there. i don’t think she could do that on her own. one thing i have noticed about poor people is that decent and hard working and intelligent as they are, they don’t quite know how to find their boot straps. that’s what keeps them poor.
as far as i know people … humans… have always survived as communities which help each other. America is one place where cmmunities are routinely destroyed by both the bad guys and the good guys in the name of progress.
coberly, you have inspired me to do some household chores.
Robert, you have inspired me to go to the ATM.
It’s not an either/or, is it? 🙂
That was a singularly bad post. One worker prioritized housekeeping above rest after a hard day’s labor, it’s not evidence that workers should do more in addition to being wage slaves.
The successful agrarian community organizer I have studied eventually decided “political power comes from the barrel of the gun” and in the past 65 years were called enemy.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, the last two more liberal nationalists, decided ownership was needed to raise the “standards”. They were called communists and linked to a world conspriracy, but it was a conspiracy of the labor against the rent collecting exploiters.
Yeah, a little organization is needed but the balance of power needs to be established.
And when the martyrs to capitalism stand with the martyrs from capitalism, do you suppose the judge will treat the rent seekers as well as the folk who sought justice on this plane against them?
Min
no.
Here’s a google search on sugar cane harvesting. Has videos of a big combine doing it.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS386US387&q=sugar+cane+harvesting
So maybe it’s not hard labor, but automation cost us jobs?
In FL they still pick strawberries by hand. It’s very seasonal, and some farms let old people come and pick them themselves, and prices are much better than at the store.
In CA they use migrant workers to pick crops, but it is seasonal work. Seems that they are some inherent problems with the structurof production, like maybe we need different biology, and picking produce will never be one of those really good career choices.
But house and latrine cleaning seems to be a different issue.
What you write about has parallels to my recent experiences in North St Louis. I and a small group of people tried to organize an area of North St Louis to fight for a better deal from a large developer and our city leadership which is backing him. We’re all college educated and middle class. Also, and probably more crucially, most of us are originally from outside the region and we all own property in the area near or in the development footprint.
The developer in question used property acquisition methods that were brutal to what community still existed in the area. He would buy a house or commercial building and leave it wide open to theft, valdalism, and arson. Once there were enough of these looted and burned out properties other neighbors would sell out and leave. In an area that already had many vacant lots and empty city-owned buildings he was making it much worse. It was basically slum clearance and block-busting but private and largely legal, since if you have the money to pay the small fines the city levies against problem properties your neighbors have no leverage to force you to maintain a property.
Even with the abuses that were happening it was almost impossible for us to get our neighbors interested in fighting this. Even the weak organization we managed to assemble was hobbled by personal beefs, racial attitudes, sabotage from people tied into the local political machine (that backed the development), and people who were clearly mentally unbalanced. North St Louis has more than its fair share of damaged people simply because it’s the bottom of the barrel and that’s where the damaged people tend to land.
My point is that the poor are usually poor for good reasons.
Middle and upper class people like to think that “something is being done” meaning that there are government programs for the poor, charitable organizations, and besides those primary and secondary schools are all free. The attitude is, “you’re getting all this for free that my incredibly high taxes are paying for, what’s your problem?”
The problem is that for every dollar that gets to a targeted person from one of these programs there are many dollars spent to pay the people delivering these services. On top of that, many of the funds you believe are available to provide help to the poor are siphoned off by local power structures into their pet projects, corruption, subsidies to local businesses, and just waste. After learning more about local and state government here in Missouri, I’ve come to the conclusion that corruption in the US is far, far greater than the great majority of people believe. And its’ not the hard corruption of bribes and payoffs for the most part. It’s the soft corruption of captured regulators and the old-boys network.
One example of the siphoning off here in St Louis has to do with Community Development Block Grants. In St Louis, 30 out of 31 CDBG dollars are spent either downtown or south of downtown. The poorest part of town is northern 40% of the city north of downtown. Picture the majority black areas of Baltimore shown on the HBO series “The Wire” and you’ll have a good picture of North St Louis. Downtown is pretty modern with nice tall skyscrapers and a newly developed loft district in old high-rise brick warehouses. South St Louis is poorer that it used to be but is many times better than North St Louis and is also majority white. The suburbs outside the actual city are largely 90-100% white with the exception of some small suburbs that are almost 100% black.
It’s very clear that in the 70’s city leadership decided to pursue […]
Keith
thank you. i was not advocating stopping all the other programs. mere adding an element to, well, organize, them. i pretty much agree with you about all the obstacles.
The virtuous poor, the proud poor whose dirt-floor home is spic and span, is a fine goal for people who as a population are roughly similar in income. If I was a cavewoman I would hope to have a tidy cave with fresh rushes to sleep on and a understated bison or two painted on the feature wall.
But I tell you, I get pretty annoyed (I may well be coberly’s quarrel-bear) when the poor who either cannot find work or who barely scrape by on low-wage jobs, are exhorted to scrub their homes and pump the remnants of their energy at the end of the day into a home which will never be unambiguously theirs — even if they technically hold title. It is one of the definitive traits of the wealthy and powerful that at any moment they might look over and say “Hmm, that depressed neighbourhood is looking quite nice lately. Time to gentrify.” and fiddle with taxes and zoning to nab that land. Or sometimes they skip the legalities and just move in with bulldozers.
Spite and the anger that comes with depression are pretty powerful forces. I don’t think people deliberately plan to keep a neighbourhood filthy in order to keep it for themselves, but I think often the effect is the same. When one is expending the sort of effort and frequent disappointment that comes with the bottom rung of America’s economic ladder, it must be tough to scrape up some more energy to scrub home and family just in case the gentry rides by and say, “Jolly good, that wench. She has some pride, I see.” and then trots off home without the wench’s pride having any effect on her pay scale or her kid’s education. Could you blame her for deciding it was a waste of good soap?
Cedric–Yep, it’s automated now. It’s been automated for years. But, Coberly was in Imokalee back in the 60’s when the cutters used machetes. I can attest that the conditions for the cutters back then were appalling. Conditions for migrants are still grim. I’m from Miami and lived in FL in that period. Saw the same thing.
You must bear with me while I explain some basics of migrant labor. For backgroud, I worked in California in Salinas for the first six years I worked for SSA. For a long time, I was the only Spanish speaking claims rep in the Salinas Valley all the way to Watsonville in the North and King City, CA in the South on US101. I know from ag in California particularly and generally from my contact with other SSA managers. I ran an office in the Central Coast of CA for 17 years until I retired. The town I worked in had one industry, and one only–Ag. Broccoli, berries, lettuce, sugar beets and grapes.
Long and short of it is that migrants do not pick one crop. They go from valley to valley or state to state, picking whatever needs it. On the East Coast there is some crop coming for at least 6 months of the year. On the West Coast, you can work all the way from Texas to Washington State and lay over the winter back in Texas and start the thing all over again. Or, you can start from Texas and pick all the way up to Maine and cross to the midwest, come down to Texas again and winter over. In the old days, people when back to Jalisco and Michoacan for the winter, but now, they have their families here and have a home base this side of the border. A lot of kids go with their parents around the country, go from school to school, and remain more or less illiterate. Of course, they work in the field with their parents. Of course, no one enforces the law. Of course, the grower or agricorp is not the employer. A labor contractor is and he either does or doesn’t collect and turn in payroll taxes. One way or another, labor laws are generally not enforced or enforced only sporadically.
That leaves us with the true horror of the migrant life–peonage. When people are imported to work by contract for a season(s) for a particular grower, people end up in debt to the growers, have access only to credit at a company store, and end up working forever to “pay off” a perpetual debt. Complain, and they dump you on the other side of the border in Mexico. Good luck getting home to Guatemala.
As soon as they can, people get out of the fields–drive trucks, do autobody work, work in restaurants, get into construction, etc. There you go, a summary of migrant labor. Bottom line–it is virtually impossible to reach this population with any form of organization other than that in their permanent base. NancyO
hondje–Cleanliness and order is a matter of personal pride. If you had ever been poor, you would understand better. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re shiftless. Maybe it’s a woman’s point of view. But, you can keep your house and your kids clean if you want to enough. That’s my experience. NancyO
Miss Noni, at the risk of offending you, I must contest your take on the notion of the pride involved in being clean and keeping a clean house. It has nowt to do with what anyone else thinks, especially not any passing gentry. I myself have seldom met such people as may be described as gentry. However, I have been poor and have family who, being share croppers, were much, much poorer.
I have knowledge of this subject. All I am saying, Miss Noni, is that you do what you can. And, if you can keep your kids clean, you do. In the South, the inability to do so creates ugliness and misery beyond bearing. So, you might consider this observation for what it’s worth. NancyO
Here’s something else that much more sophisticated people have to say about income inequality–code, I guess, for poverty.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/10/income-inequality-too-big-to-ignore.html
Nancy Ortiz
noni
it wasn’t you. and i assure you i was not exhoring the poor to scrub their homes. i was suggesting that a poverty program needs to think about community organizing.
that was exhorting with the tea left out.
but yeah, nancy is right. my mom was poor and we kept our house clean.
i don’t think these people decided to live like animals, but i find it interesting that you and hondje, and perhaps Robert, are willing to stand up for their right to live like animals.
I’m a bit puzzled by the post. Managing is hard. Managing projects is hard and managing people is hard. Managing in corporations isn’t easy, and there you have the advantage of a presumed right to organize the work of the people and projects you are supervising. A community organization is voluntary, and you have to keep motivating people. It’s a lot easier to motivate people with money than with a promise that their quality of life will be improved. The free rider problem is more serious in voluntary organizing: in a corporation you can fire someone who doesn’t want to participate and make a serious effort; this is not really an option if you need everyone to work together to maintain the sanitation system.
Anyway, my basic point is: one reason people are poor is that they lack the personality characteristics, the skills, the energy, and the way of thinking about their problems to address them effectively. Even amongst educated people with privileged backgrounds, many are not competent managers. It should be obvious to everyone who has worked in any organization that managerial talent is a scarce resource. In capitalist USA, most effective managers are organizing corporations or government agencies, not helping poor people live better lives.
So while I think the observation that poor lives could be improved if the available resources were better organized and managed is valid, in and of itself it doesn’t get us very far.
Anyone who studied the Soviet Union and its laggard agricultural sector knows that lack of ownership results in a culture of minimal work and reduced efficiency. You aren’t going to get the same well run, high production farms using hired hands as you would get with farmers working on their own farms. Of course, conditions aren’t all that different in the US these days, though we call our system capitalism rather than communism. As so many Americans have been saying for years now, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” This has long been a working class thing, particularly at the lower end, but with 30 years of stagnant or falling wages, it’s been moving up the ladder.
I apologize for the re-posts. Didn’t realize I had done that.
And I didn’t think you were advocating gettting rid of all the programs. It’s just that without proper management of the money we do spend, and making sure that the effort is big enough to affect the change we wish to have happen, it’s all a waste.
Frank Dean
I am afraid it wouldn’t get YOU very far, because you seem to lack the managerial talent to imagine what to do next.
I think the free rider problem is solvable. Primitive societies do it and manage to keep the feces out of the kitchen.
I am also well aware that the percent of people who can find their own bootstraps is probably not greater than one in a hundred. It does not seem to be a question of “intelligence.” Plenty of very bright engineers have high paying jobs because they “followed instructions” from a society that wanted engineers. But when they lose their jobs they flounder,
I am also aware how difficult it is to stay clean when you don’t have any money.
That’s why I am proposing some outside intervention by skilled “leaders”. skilled.
but apparently everyone would rather have their feelings hurt. or assure me this has been tried before, and welfare checks are the only solution.
Keith
absolutely. but we gotta try.
Yes, Mr. Dean. Management is hard. But, anyone who can clean a house and care for small children can manage a more complex enterprise. No problem. I don’t need to over-elaborate. Wash clothes for 12 people several times a week, and you could probably organize a small business.
I don’t think you meant to say that poor people are inherently inferior in organizational ability or logical capacity. But, your remark lends itself to that interpretation. My experience is that poor people are poor because no matter how hard they work, they don’t earn enough to prosper. Hard work is no guarantee of prosperity.
On NPR recently, I heard an interview on All Things Considered with Muhammad Yunus, the Nobelist who got his Peace Prize for developing a bank specializing in tiny loans to help people start small businesses in Bangladesh. Deal was that he thought that the US was a great place to offer a similar service. Poor people here, he pointed out, are subject to predatory lending.
Payday lenders here can charge thousands of percent interest over time, pile up to create unpayable debts. Flat tire? Get an advance on your paycheck, and voila–owe the lender twice the amount of your next check. Result, a continuing chain of more lending an more debt untill the borrower has no recourse but bankruptcy–if they could afford it. Owe my soul to the company store. Micro loans are better because the interest rate is lower and the terms are fairer.
Welcome to America, a place where consumer borrowing could be improved by using the same methods that work in Bangladesh. Only in America. Nancy Ortiz
Multiple posts is sometime a problem with jskit. Just remember if you get a ‘not posted’ note, wait to see if it is true. Sometimes it is just software hiccups. Repeated comments have been deleted.
As I went walking, I saw a sign there,And on the sign there, It said “no trespassing.But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing!That side was made for you and me.In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;By the relief office, I’d seen my people.As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,Is this land made for you and me? “Woody Guthrie”
With 4 degrees and having cut trees down, chip, cut grass to pay my taxes while on the dole; I can’t say I agree with you Dale. Been there and done it.
You are challenging generations of people who have lived in poverty and you expect them to believe the man? Baloney Dale, a mixture made of the cheapest cuts, fat, and whipped with air, stuffed into a casing, and smoked or cured. Its not steak Dale and you have to quit peddling baloney and calling it steak. After a while people begin to recognize it for what it is . . . baloney.
The issue you and the others appear to be stuck on comes after generations of being poor with little if anything to expect in the end. Clinton’s lifting of more boats changed nothing and was morr the result of selling his soul to Greenspan. We need a poor and under privieged people as we need a large labor pool to keep wages low.
Ag today in the US employs hired hands to do the work assisted by tractors worth $100K, satellite computer imaging, and automated combines to crop the wheat, soy, etc. Agricorp or small farmer, no difference except that small farmers are just about extinct because of the capital intensive nature of agriculture today. Did I mention my family farms and always has?
Oh, well. Tired of arguing. Capitalism works the way it does not to improve our lives but to improve capital returns. Cool. No problem. I beat the system though education and a good federal government job. Like ilsm and CoRev. That was then. What is now? So, not having had the last word and never having expected to have it, I say goodnight, y’all. Nancy O.
Nan and coberly, just a quick note to say I generally agree with you both, and agree with you both now, too. So what bugs me? It is good for people, especially children, to be kept clean. Ditto the home and yard. Who would argue with that? But between lack of resources, lack of time, lack of energy and lack of hope many people will dip into periods of slovenliness. In fact, “failure to keep clean” is a symptom of depression. I’m not sure where I am going with this train of thought, but in an economy that manufactures unhappy, depressed or hopeless people, filth is a predictable side effect.
Nancy,
as sigrid undset has one of her characters say, it’s not a question of what the neighbors will say, cleanliness is a luxury. it feels good. as Louis Pasteur said, it’s a matter of health. And at some point a messy house becomes a crippling inconvenience.
On the other hand, the neighbors say this because it’s the way communities police themselves witout “monetary incentives,” as the Econ 101 Fundmentalists would have us believe in some kind of Skinnerian hell.
Kaleberg
it wasn’t the lack of ownership. ordinary humans work for the joy of it, and for the respect of their peers. what killed initiative in the Soviet Union was not lack of ownership, it was the commisars.. the same people who kill initiative in big corporations and government jobs. these are completely different things, but the true believers in capitalism and state capitalism will never understand.
run
haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about. but now that i am a landowner i understand no trespassing signs.
why don’t you climb down from your rhetorical tree and tell me what you mean in ordinary words.
I think you’re underestimating how difficult it is to organize a group of people to work on a new and unfamiliar project where the payoff is uncertain (at least in their own minds) and when they have all sorts of other problems. In your household you are basically a dictator. In a community, you are not. (And please don’t interpret this to mean that I think neighborhood dictatorships are the solution to poverty.)
I think the success of immigrant groups in the USA in climbing out of poverty compared to non-immigrants is primarily due to leadership and organizational skill within the immigrant community.
Coberly, there is an obvious measure that has been tried before in the USA and continues to be utilized elsewhere in the world: public works projects. This provides employment rather than welfare. Universal health care is effective. Providing all children with a quality education also helps, but only if the parents are supportive. Interventions in maternal health and early childhood development also works. There are some US states that implement some of these measures, but on the federal level they cannot even be considered or discussed. I suggest that these liberal measures, which indeed amount to tax transfers, have measurable and proven, if not magical, results. Once the decision has been made to provide these public goods, it’s a lot simpler than finding an outsider to perform a managerial intervention wherever poor people are struggling because they are divided, disorganized, and struggling just to get through the next week.
So yes, some poor people in the USA don’t manage their lives well. But the US elite does a far worse job managing the country. What are the great public works projects of the US elite? Foreign wars.
Noni
yes. and i wasn’t “blaming” the poor people. i was just saying that a little help with community organization would be a big help in getting them out of there.
one problem i have, and i think keith above notes, is that it’s hard to get anything done if everyone is going to have their feelings hurt by anyone noticing that there is a problem.
Frank Dean
yes. I know its difficult. and i know the “other” measures help. I wasn’t proposing getting rid of the other measures or expecting community organizing to be easy.
you yourself note that community organization among immigrants helped. the particular workers i was seeing had left their natural leaders behind in the their home country. that might be more generally true of “urban” communities as well.
and, as you note, the biggest problem is that the US elite is doing a poor job of managing the country… at least from a human perspective. they seem to be managing it for their own purposes quite well.
for instance, what exactly is it you disagree with.
Here’s a link to other thoughts on the culture of poverty.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/10/the-culture-of-poverty.html Excellent comments to this piece. NancyO
The problem isn’t that people aren’t trying to organize inner city communities. It’s that inner city communities already have organizational structures that aren’t interested in helping with public sanitation or getting a better education. They’re interested in selling drugs. That organization needs a constant supply of teens willing to risk imprisonment or death for the possibility of a substantial payout sometime in the future. Telling kids that if they work hard, go to school, and help other members of the community they’ll live better lives won’t sell drugs. In fact, it will probably make it more difficult to intimidate the community into putting up with open-air drug transactions and occasional public shoot-outs.
Our public policies have failed because “community organizing” is too often perceived as just going in there and offering particular services, without realizing that you’re engaged in a struggle to change an existing community organization that isn’t particularly happy having you walk around figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. As an economist, you’ll appreciate that it’s all about incentives. However, when you start to think like a sociologist you’ll realize that the community provides the incentives, and it’s the community that matters.
Keith
I wish you’d write a book about your experience.
Braden Smith
I think you agree with me. At least you identify what is wrong with the “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” approach. I think we’d need people with a little more subtlety.
Economists tend to think “incentives” means money. well, that’s one incentive, when the community has failed.
Watch this movie:’http://www.thegardenmovie.com/about-the-film/
It is an example of community organization, which the PTB took down. This is one of many such stories that you could find, “The powers that be” often try to squelch community empowerment.
Why do you think the FBI infiltrates various “peace” groups and other civic organizations?? Do a search to get a hint of what Homelans Security and the FBI think of as dangerous.
Read this, much is solvable but the money must be thrown in the correct direction:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/switch-how-to-change-things-when-change-is-hard.html
When Jerry Sternin arrived in Vietnam, the welcome was rather chilly. The government had invited his employer, Save the Children, the international organization that helps kids in need, to open an office in the country in 1990 to fight malnutrition. But the foreign minister let Sternin know that not everyone in the government appreciated his presence. The minister told him, “You have six months to make a difference.”
Sternin had traveled to the country with his wife and 10-year-old son. None of them spoke the language. “We were like orphans at the airport when we arrived in Vietnam,” he said. “We had no idea what we were going to do.” Sternin had minimal staff and meager resources.
The conventional wisdom was that malnutrition was the result of an intertwined set of problems: Sanitation was poor. Poverty was nearly universal. Clean water was not readily available. The rural people tended to be ignorant about nutrition.
That analysis was, in Sternin’s judgment, TBU — true but useless. “Millions of kids can’t wait for those issues to be addressed,” he said. If addressing malnutrition required ending poverty and purifying water and building sanitation systems, then it would never happen. Especially in six months, with virtually no money to spend……
mcwop
thanks.
yes, like that. hope frank dean reads it.
I can’t believe that there is a blog discussion here on how to over come the effects of poverty? It’s a topic that could, and has, fill a library or two. The discussion is naive at best. Community organization? What? Like unionizing the poor when the working poor can’t be easily organized by professional union organizers? Why not simply recognize that the effects of poverty will be ameliorated when people have jobs paying a decent wage? Not as though it’s rocket science. The first step out of poverty is a good education.
I’m not sure that Dale was referring to something I had said about the need for adequate funding of education, but if so it needs to be understood that if government is going to provide basic essential services to its citizens it needs to do so with adequate financial investment. What business starts a program or process without such a financial investment? Those that try to do so are bankrupt in short order. Financing good education is not “throwing money” at a problem. It is recognizing that such efforts have a cost and those costs are not an entitlement, but an investment. The most basic step out of poverty is a decent education.
Read my above post, you do not necessarily need to solve poverty to solve problems. A good education is a step out of poeverty, but the key is how do you get a poor kid to take interst in getting an education in teh first place – that is where our system often fails.
mcwop says it better than i would.
jack, we have discussions so we can come to grips with the details. a better education you say? fine, how do we go about that?
all those damn libraries are filled and sitting there. this naive person doesn’t think it takes a union to dig a latrine. or a college degree.
Is it the system that fails the disinterested student? An interest in learning is a many faceted problem. The conditions of poverty are a prime contributing factor, but we surely knnow that different families cope with those conditions in a differential manner. Making the daily conditions of life for the poor more humane would be a good start. Preventing the geographic concentration of poverty and providing satisfactory basic services to the “pockets” of poverty is essential to improving the self image of each individual that suffers a life of poverty. Picking up the garbage, preventing the growth of rubble strewn lots, keepinjg the roadways in good repair, etc are all essential services to any neighborhood that will ameliorate some of the psychological effects of poverty.
Coping with the personal distress of poverty is difficult and worse so for the children of the poor. Localities have to first make poverty less of an environmental misery. What goes on within the living spaces of each poor family will be far more difficult to approach. Certainly the beginning of a better home life is to improve the general environment that sorrounds each home.
“a better education you say? fine, how do we go about that?”
It’s not a mystery. The educational system can’t readily effect the condition of the student upon entering the school environment. Asking the educators to sove the social problems that are antecedent to better learning only stretches the resources and capacities of those who do the hands on educational process. It is within the walls of the educational setting that we need to expect and demand a high quality of performance by the teaching profession. That’s where the finacial investment comes in. Schools that are in good repair; Text books that are up to date and well written (that’s a whole chapter on its own); Educational administrations that are professional and knowledgeable; System wide administrations that are focused on an educational agenda rather than the politics of education; And finally a professional teaching corps. If an educational system is going to produce a better product then that system has to be properly funded as does any business. Those who say that government should bring a business approach to their agencies generally only expect the cost cutting aspect of a business approach. That’s not how successful educational systems are run. The north shore communities of Long Island generally spend $20,000+ per student. The less affluent localities and NYC spend a good deal less. So those north shore students start with multiple advantages in the race to the top (of life.) Enriched home environments and enriched school systems. It is the school system factor that any locality can control and replicate. It’s an investment in their own children. What’s that worth? And it doesn’t take any protracted community organizing effort. That can be left to the social workers, Boy Scouts of America and the church of your preferred denomination. Leave the schools out of that part. They’ve got their hands full trying to teach your kids.
Joker 1 Thief 0
It seems that throwing money at people is actually quite effective:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/25/the-new-fix-for-poverty-give-cash-to-the-poor.html?