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from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.
Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:
We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.
This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).
The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:52AM
It's a fact of existence that many people are not well suited for thinking jobs, and they would be more productive doing manual labor instead like construction and ditch digging and factory work. When automation eliminates manual labor, the manual laborers can't just "put the thinking in" because you say they should.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mr_mischief on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:52PM
Your parent post is assuming poor people are capable but lazy. You're assuming they are hard-working but stupid.
I think both assumptions are dangerous stereotypes to throw around and both are extremely arrogant and condescending to the poor.
How about if we're going to subsidize these people, we do it in the schools and infrastructure required to get them out of dead-end job tracks in the first place?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:21PM
Both stereotypes are often wrong, but occasionally right. No matter what you do there will be some people who are too stupid to do the jobs available and others who are too lazy. To assume that the intersection is null is incorrect. To assume that this covers all, or even most, economically disadvantaged it also incorrect. (I distinguish between "economically disadvantaged" and poor because given to people with the same income, they will choose different ways to spend and save that income. Poor is someone who makes the wrong choices for his level of income. Economically disadvantaged is someone who has less income. Given a mild disparity, an economically disadvantaged person may well do better than a poor person. But you can't cure a person of being poor, only decrease their level of economic disadvantage. [Also economically disadvantaged is easily measurable, where poor can't reliably be measured.])
There is a real problem here, and I don't know the answer. It ties in with the fact that automation is not static, but is increasing, and that increasingly jobs that were considered secure are being automated either out of existence, or being deskilled. This means that no fixed answer is likely to work. Predictions currently are that by 2025 about half of existing jobs will be automated away (and I'm not sure whether that means automated out of existence, deskilled, or automated such that only elite practitioners of the skill can secure employment). Getting from here to there is guaranteed to be a rough road no matter WHAT we do, and it's fairly clear that insisting that someone have a job to support themselves is not going to work. Not unless we want to turn to massive forcibly violent population reduction. There are many indications that the government is preparing for widespread violent insurrection, and that could reduce the population enough that there might be jobs for everyone...for another few years, until the next round of jobs were automated away. To me this does not appear to be a desirable approach.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:07PM
Thankfully one of the many advantages to automation is lower cost. Regardless of what some people think, businesses do compete on price and lower cost does result in some amount of lower prices. Lower prices mean lower cost of living, so less money goes further.
One example of a good paying job that tends to be quite manual is home construction. With technology threatening to automate away many of these well-paying jobs, housing can theoretically actually be much less expensive. Basically the automation pulls up the bottom some but drops more people toward the bottom at the same time. Meanwhile, the people producing the 3D printing systems (or whatever form of automation is used) and fielding them save money on labor per unit. They take somewhat less per unit but can build many more units. They get richer, their former workers get poorer, but housing becomes more affordable overall.
One way to prevent so many people falling through these cracks is to spread the ownership of the producers of goods. That doesn't necessarily mean socialism or even permanent welfare. It can mean getting substantial numbers of shares sold to the workers. It can mean working for a worker-owned cooperative type of company that replaces your job income with windfall profits from the automation. It can mean temporary government or charitable assistance during retraining. Unfortunately it's difficult to get substantial portions of ownership into the hands of people already struggling to make rent.
It would be nice to live in a post-scarcity economy. Getting there smoothly seems to be unlikely, though. Perhaps we can lessen the blows.