Asymmetrical Information

I once sat in a Washington Metro behind two young black couples. The women had govt IDs and obviously worked at some agency. Overhearing snippets of conversation, the women really had their heads screwed on right about promotion, etc. The men were talking about opening a car repair shop and it was clear they had almost no idea what was involved. One of the key things I remembered was that they seemed to feel a need to connect with important "powers that be" who would then lead them to success! They had the right motivations and intents, but were doomed to failure by their lack of knowledge.

I have a friend who owns a construction company. He is very active at our church, and tries all of the time to hire people who are down on their luck for various odd jobs. After doing this for several years, he has come up with a list of "rules" that he tries to impart on his workers, and has success in teaching a lot of people how to become useful. His rules include:

1. Show up for work on time.
2. Do not show up drunk, high, or too tired from partying all night long.
3. Stay for your entire shift/job.
4. If you complete your work, ask before you leave.
5. You do not get paid until you do the work.
6. Do not ask for advances, loans, or other help until you have worked well for at least a month.

Those workers he has that want to be successful, and work hard at learning these things, generally move on to decent jobs, but he has a lot of stories of people (mostly young men) who just can't grasp their role in the employee-employer relationship.

Like Jane has said in the past, these rules are so ingrained in middle class culture, that we often miss that people have to learn these skills in order to meet the minimum requirements for the middle class.

Can we get some REAL PSA's on this?

Being late for work, or not completing a job, or showing up too tired for work, because one drank the night away, used to be described as "slothful". It wasn't that many decades ago that being slothful hugely increased the odds that one would perish from starvation. Greatly increased odds of starvation, and the actual gnawing pain of starvation, is an effective behavior modification tool. That tool no longer exists, and it is an unvarnished good that it no longer exists. However, all sorts of behavior which were once greatly discouraged by the prospect of starvation no longer carry that grim possibility, so it isn't surprising in the least that many do not change their behavior.

The difference between what you will eat today, and what you found too unpalatable to eat yesterday, is usually how you feel after a day or two of not eating. Similarly, what some will do today, and what they found too bothersome to do yesterday, is often how they view the probable outcome of not doing that bothersome thing. For some folks, the prospect of being bored and living in a small abode, or sometimes no abode, is not painful enough to lead to behavior changes.

Again, it is a very good thing that our society is where it is now, but even very good things can have some negative aspects. Many of the poor have the cognitive ability to grasp that certain behaviors will lead to vocational failure. They just view changing those behaviors to be more negative than vocational failure. In the not-that-distant past, people who clung to such beliefs didn't propagate much, since they tended to die pretty quickly.

Mentoring is indeed important. So, where to find mentors that have the appropriate information, and that the people in need of mentoring will listen to.

Almost all of the "rules" that Donut describes are things that used to be inculated by the school system. One can no longer safely assume that a highs school graduate has learned these things, and I even wonder about college grads in many cases.

Enter state lotteries; ie, gambling for the mathematically challenged. Offer the chance to "win life's lottery", literally. Remind them they "can't win if they don't play". Study the statistics regarding lottery ticket purchases; see who buys the tickets, in the hope of "striking it rich".

We are not simply dealing with the "poor". We are often dealing with the members of a multi-generational "underclass" who have made and continue to make choices which comdemn them to remain in that underclass.

Maybe it's not so much finding the right mentors as keeping young people away from the wrong mentors: those who would encourage magical, mystical thinking and play down the role of reason and planning ahead. How to do this? Well, not giving such people a prominent role in the culture would help.

Further reasons why McDonalds is the #1 trainer of young workers. Two years working at MickyDees starting at minimum wage and you can get a job anywhere.

My husband's father and brother both have a lifelong sense that if they can just hit on the right idea, their genius will carry all before it and they'll experience success and wealth (and of course happiness). Each of them has tried out dozens of ideas, from fashion design to drug dealing, but neither has ever persisted through the downturns that come with any endeavor (including the drug dealing, which to be fair I'm happy about). My husband's stepfather is similarly hampered by a klatsch of high school buddies who got into the construction biz in SoCal immediately after graduation, threw some money into a fixer-upper or two, and hit it big... again and again and again. The envy that exists in his stepdad's relationships with these now-rich people who in ordinary times and places would just have been your standard middle-class folks is sometimes painful to watch. They seem to me to be sort of the lottery winners who "prove" that it's possible to win the lottery.

My husband himself somehow learned the harder lesson, educated himself, worked hard and intelligently at every job, and is now reaping the rewards of his work and his fortunate smarts, but we still joke about "our ticket out" every time one of us comes up with an apparently original idea for a business. Luckily we both know we're joking.

I'm thinking about "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. For the most part I like her music much better than the sentiments she expresses through it, but that song strikes a strong chord both literally and figuratively.

My daughter's first husband appeared to be a clean-cut, ambitious young man. His family was dreadful, with his brothers in jail and his father having been allegedly disabled and out of work for 30 years, but then, I've got a grandfather who could never hold a job and left my father to put food on the table by snaring rabbits and sneaking up on woodchucks with a rock, and Dad became a college professor.

Then after the wedding my daughter found out that her husband had just quit his job. In the next two years (until she divorced him), he started and lost dozens of jobs. Usually he was hours late for work at least once within the first three days.

There used to be one more chance for young men like this to learn how to act at a job: join the Army or Marines and get the lessons hammered in at Boot Camp. It did not work for everyone, some guys just would not learn and had to be washed out, but they made that unpleasant enough that most would learn to follow the rules. Of course, the lesson was continually reinforced in the years of service following Boot Camp.

That was in the days when the Army used huge numbers of draftees, and won by numbers rather than skill. Todays smaller and more professional Army can and must set higher standards; if they didn't screen the recruits enough to eliminate most people with such problems, they would spend too much on the ones that refused to learn and washed out from Boot Camp, and far more on those that lasted a few months until they proved to be obedient but too stupid to learn all the weapons and tactics even an infantry private must handle now.

So maybe what we need are alternative boot camps - say, leading to six months of CCC-type work.

I am reminded of the term "velleity."
Volition at its lowest level.
A mere wish or inclination.

or as Jack Handy said:

It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
- Jack Handy Deep Thoughts

regards,

vtrtl

> Enter state lotteries

For a while, Massachusetts advertised the state lottery as a retirement plan.

Very interesting post.

Very interesting comments.

I've always had a problem with the quote about staying in school, etc. because it implies causality. That is, it suggests that those who follow its precepts will succeed as a consequence.

I strongly suspect that those who can follow its precepts will succeed simply because they can (a) plan and (b) delay gratification. So the quote is not really advice, but rather an observation.

I had some limited experience with the poor many years ago working in a college-related project.
Oh, hell. A sorority group was doing a community center in a poor neighborhood and I figured I'd help out. I look stupid, but it's an accident.

This happened to be the school year of 67-68. That was pre-Great Society, which might be relevant if one or two of the posters think the G.S. had an effect.

IMO, it is not a matter of the underclass not KNOWING what to do. After all, once they show up for their first job, they're TOLD what to do (show up, sober, on time, work hard, don't steal, etc.) and when they screw up, they're told AGAIN. If they don't get it in three or four tries, they're out. But it's not like they never knew, even if they didn't know when they got there. They eventually knew.

Those who didn't learn had one of two problems. One was that the prospect of going back to the unemployed poor ranks held little terror for them. They were used to it and the strains it imposed were more familiar than those of work. Question: Was this the case pre-Great Society?

The other is the possibility that they had some kind of mental problem which prevented them from processing the information (Show up, on time, sober, etc.)

Perhaps society, including but not limited to the welfare system, is a kind of filter.

My wife worked in a slum in Puerto Rico in 1970 in Vista. Her view was that every day was a struggle and the winners left.

Your wife is right. It's not that poor people can't learn those lessons...it's that the ones who do learn them stop being poor and get the hell out of the ghetto. The folks left behind to provide an example for the next generation are by definition the ones who never got the message.

I am living proof that genius is not sufficient to gaurantee success. Oh, I have a nice job as an engineer and make good money. But I probably have the work ethic of a poor person countered only by being white and male and smart enough to fake it. I see people around me who are not as intelligent, but who work hard and plan ahead and practice restraint and who are much more successful than I am.

While the lottery is a strong temptation for those who can't afford it to spend more than they should, it is true that spending a very small amount of money is the smart thing to do. Proof that no one should ever play the lottery usually rely on comparing the expected value in dollars of the pot vs. the cost of a ticket. Though there are times when the expected value is more than a ticket price (when pots carry over and there are no winners for a while), it usually does not. However, when doing a cost benefit analysis for personal consumption, one should use utility, not dollar value. The marginal utility of $1 (a week or month) is pretty low. Most people demonstrate this by buying some junk food out of a vending machine or spending it on something equally wasteful. The marginal utility of millions of dollars is really, really high (neglecting the fact that many people squander the money).

While many poor people are probably "built that way", keep in mind that incentives play a strong role in influencing behavior and poor people are not always rewarded for working just as single mothers are not always rewarded for providing a stable family for their child. These incentives drag the marginal folks over into the poor side where a little push in the right direction might have done the opposite.

My own personal opinion is that welfare should be a safety net, should provide all the necessities as well as some extras that could help someone get a job BUT it should not be pleasant. I would like to see a welfare system that ensures that users are not able to have much in the way of luxuries or easily have fun. I am a fan of mandatory work and providing goods and services instead of money. Assuming that one can construct such a system, means testing would become unnecessary as most people who could get out of the system, would.

Raspberry discovers what generations of black people before him knew from childhood: if you learn all that you can (especially "how to learn"), don't have a child before you can support it, don't have a bastard, the odds are you will not be poor in ten years or less. Now why is this news to him? It used to be part of the general culture of the United States; "rags to riches" stories were quite common in the 19th and into the 20th century both in popular fiction and reality. I know of men, now dead, who never even finished high school but who started and ran businesses that left them comfortable in middle age and secure in old age.

It isn't "mentoring", that is a tree in the forest. The forest is culture and the expectations of that culture. I can still find pockets of the black culture of 100 years ago here and there, now and then, and guess what? They are no more likely to be poor than anyone else.

So what changed? Daniel Patrick Monyhan showed "what changed" over 30 years ago, and was excoriated for telling the truth to power.

If you pay people to be poor, you will get more poor people. It is really that simple. If you fail to differentiate between the bastard daughter who nevertheless is willing to work, and the party girl who doesn't let work get in the way of her fun times, then you are rewarding the party girl for her irresponsible behavior...

It is good that Raspberry has finally found some reasons for poverty among black people that don't involve various Konspiracies To Keep Them Down by The Man and White People. I just can't help wondering why it has taken him decades to arrive at such conclusions...

Here's another piece of the puzzle.

What happens if you're middle class, reasonably intelligent, but you party through high school and college? Your family is helping to pay for school, so you're not disciplined by working insane hours.You never crack a book until the night before the test. You never start a paper until midnight the night before it's due.

This is not the behavior that's going to lead to success later in life for most people. But it is the behavior - it is exactly the behavior - that leads people to become public school teachers, social workers, and all the rest of the garbage professions who are interacting most closely with the underclass.

There are exceptions. But the vast majority of the (barely) middle class paid caretakers of the poor are lazy, shiftless, unable to plan ahead losers. They're slurping at the government trough just like their charges are - the only difference is they have to get up and get dressed everyday to collect their checks. This why such people are so obsessed with "privilege" as an explanation for all the inequities in society; the privilege of their middle class upbringing is all that separates them from the poor.

There are exceptions. But as a class, these people are unable to model the qualities that lead to success BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE THEM. If they did have them, they would get better jobs! Those who do have them, or develop them, do get better jobs. *There are exceptions*, but generally speaking, no one stays in public school teaching or social work who can possibly do anything else.

You cannot encourage people to work hard, sacrifice, and defer gratification when you repudiate those values. The culture of the "helping professions" bears no resemblance to traditional bourgeois culture. None. All it's going to do is produce people who act like its members, and suffer the consequences that access to government jobs has protected the scum of the middle classes from, thus far.

(1) Ellipsis: "It is good that Raspberry has finally found some reasons for poverty among black people that don't involve various Konspiracies To Keep Them Down by The Man and White People. I just can't help wondering why it has taken him decades to arrive at such conclusions..."

It hasn't. He's been saying it at least since the late 1970s.

(2) Common Reader: You saying we should get rid of social workers?

(3) Personally, I'm still oriented toward Mickey Kaus' strategy: require all able-bodied to work, provide a set of sub-minimum wage public jobs as a last-ditch emergency expedient for the unemployed, and then set the EITC high enough that it's actually possible to survive on such jobs.

I wrote:
"It is good that Raspberry has finally found some reasons for poverty among black people that don't involve various Konspiracies To Keep Them Down by The Man and White People. I just can't help wondering why it has taken him decades to arrive at such conclusions..."

Bruce Moomaw replied:
It hasn't. He's been saying it at least since the late 1970s.

Well, I suppose that it might seem that way to some. However as one who distinctly recalls Raspberry's ranting throughout the 80's, and especially during the two Reagan terms, it does not seem that way to me. Perhaps in hindsight his writing might look different, but frankly at this time I don't see much reason to go back and revisit all that bile, however thinly veiled with oh-so-reasonableness it may be.

One reason that employers like to hire illegal aliens if that they strong work ethics compared to native born workers. Somebody who will walk 500 miles for a job will show up on time and work hard.

Bruce:

How expensive would that be? I recently read that something like 3% of workers are working for minimum wage at any one time, which (rightly, IMHO, as I see minimum wage as more equivalent to "training wage" or "apprenticeship wage") is not the same thing as a "living wage" in all places. If we bumped up the EITC to create a pseudo-"living wage" for the sub-minimum-wage workers you mention, OK, it spreads the pain more than directly raising the minimum wage, since it'd (I guess) be financed by a more widespread tax on those not eligible for the EITC, but how much additional tax are we talking about?

And then - please excuse my ignorance, EITC has never been an issue for me - don't you have to file for EITC? I've never been given a form akin to a W-4 that, if I'd filled it out a certain way, would've resulted in my receiving the EITC. So would we be talking about a once-a-year payment to people who empirically are unable to find and keep a job that pays well enough to bypass the EITC? If that's the case, how do we, the society that cares enough about the poor first, to ensure that they have some kind of productive work to do, and second, to ensure that they receive enough money to live on regardless of the wage they're paid, also teach those who most need the lesson how to manage their lump-sum payment?

I'm not in full control of the cynical edge to my tone there. My thought process is that once we've taken ownership of the problem of finding or creating employment for every apparently unemployable person, and further taken ownership of the problem of how to get enough money into their hands to live on, seems to me that our next purchase is the problem of how to get the recipients to parcel out that money over time, then how to bring them along the path of realizing that that's also how you progress out of poverty - by delaying gratification, prioritizing, and taking responsibility for all parts of your life over which you have some control. Back to life-skills mentoring. Just providing the job and handing over the cash is not enough, demonstrably, if the job is un-loseable.

In 1995 and 1996 I was taken out of commission by an illness. I had no health insurance during the illness and had to rely on the support of my folks. I recovered my health in 1997. At that time, in 1997, I had no money and no job. I had absolutely no idea how to restart my life. At that point I had my health, my computer skills, and the willingness to work hard, but what I needed was some cash to get going. I needed someone to hand me $2,000 so I could get an apartment, a job, and get started. Something like that eventually happened. Sometimes people just need a small loan to get their lives going again.

When the modern welfare state began to take shape in the 1930s, FDR and his advisors (people like Harry Hopkins) were thinking of white middle class people who'd had their lives disrupted by the Great Depression. The Oakies, swept out of the Midwest and exiled to California, just needed some cash to get going again. And for people like that, a small block grant is the most intelligent thing to offer.

Lawrence: Quite right. Of course, for the other kind of people, handing them $2,000 in one lump sum is probably a good way of discovering whether it is possible for them to party themselves to death. (That would cut welfare costs after the first month...)

markm wrote:
Of course, for the other kind of people, handing them $2,000 in one lump sum is probably a good way of discovering whether it is possible for them to party themselves to death.

Hey, hey, that looks a whole lot like Kennedy-bashing to me! It's one thing to go after Edward (D - Whisky & water) but leave the kids out of it...

(That would cut welfare costs after the first month...)

Oh, I thought we were discussing trust fund payouts, never mind.

This little psychodrama was brought to you by "rags to riches to rags theater"...

Several thoughts:

1. Why is it so noteworthy when a columnist like Raspberry acknowledges that school, work and deferred procreation correlate with an absence of poverty?

2. Shannon Love hits the nail dead center. People who never had any kind of safety net at all and who really know what hunger is fall in love with menial work at minimum wage. Work ethic=work=a life.

I would support the EITC idea except that I am against an income tax in general. I'd rather see a consumption tax or VAT with a few necessities like raw meat, fresh vegetables, laundry detergent, etc... exempt.

One thing to keep in mind is that whatever your view on why people are poor and/or what common traits poor people share, not all poor people will fit. Like any other stereotype, it may be accurate in many cases, but remember to look at each individual as an individual.

A good generalized model of aggregate behavior is an excellent policy tool. It is not necessarily a good tool for predicting individual behavior or characteristics.

P.S. I'm not saying this as an accusation as I believe that most commenters here already know this.

Yes we should get rid of social workers. And public education. Scrap it. Stop paying for people to manipulate the poor to give themselves an excuse to pick up their government checks. The best of the bunch will go work for private charities.

Your view on being poor i think leaves out one mechanism. Divorce.

It provides woman with support and power. It transfers wealth from the wealth creator to the consumers. It provides employment for the berely skilled - social workers etc.
Without rectifying this injustice, US prosperity is in great danger. Why is it illegal to discriminate by race but not by gender! Killing the geese stops the golden eggs!

Common Reader - you grossly stereotype teachers and social workers. Do you actually know any? Just because YOU wouldn't stay in that profession because you'd rather have a cushier job, don't assume everyone feels that way. I am friends with several smart talented teachers who work in public schools because they care about the kids and want to try improving the public education system.

Does that remove your guilt?

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