From: nelson_p@APOLLO.HP.COM
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery
Date: 15 Apr 92 18:24:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: xuucp.9204151928.AA09431


From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)

>I don't argue that it is uniquely bad. I just argue that some new-age
>republican cliches about "bad personal choices" cannot explain why 
>the city police permit an open air drug market on Harlem's 8th avenue, or
>why there is no meny for schoolbooks for inner city kids.

  This is easy to explain.   (not that I'm defending it!)  The 
  same Senate Judiciary Committe report I mentioned before also
  noted that in 1950 there was one violent crime for every 3
  police officers and today there is one police officer for
  every 3 violent crimes.   The police are hopelessly over-
  burdened.   Arguably we should have more police.  But we
  already have more police per capita than any nation on
  Earth including the big-time police states.  And with
  over 800K people in prison, again we're #1.  
  
>Poor people have more babies then middle class people do. You argue that
>there is nothing that can be done about the squalor of urban america.
>You say that there is some "cultural" cause of urban chaos which, from the
>safe vantage point of the suburbs, you fail to understand. But, the major
>common element of the culture of rural Appalachia and Harlem boils down to
>the absence of money. 

  Actually, the BW article I quoted last week said that 
  welfare mothers have LESS.   
                               

>>  the response to this.  I claim the issue is cultural:
>>  the culture of the poor has broken down -- there is no
>>  community , no shared values, no shared identity. 
>
>I claim that it is the culture of the middle class and that of the rich
>which has broken down. Civic duty, a commitment to shared values and
>the ideal of fairness, a sense that wealth brings responsibility -- all of
>these have been tossed aside in favor of a mixture of naked greed and 
>cheap excuses.

  This presumes that the survival of the poor in the past was mainly
  by the "oblige" of the "noblesse".    It just isn't clear to me
  that, on average, the well-to-do expend less of their resources
  today for the poor than in the historical past. 

  But I still think this evades the central question:  In the past,
  whether it was a rural black community in Alabamain 1948 or a
  poverty stricken town in Sweden or Ireland in the 1870's (both
  suffered massive famines) what factors impacted people's choices?
  If a young poor person was considering a self-destructive act or
  an act that was destructive of the others around him, what 
  factors influenced that choice?    *I* claim that there used
  to be a community, and an instilled set of cultural values which
  functioned even in the poorest of communities.   I have col-
  lections of stories and histories of Jewish shtetl life from the 
  end of the last century in Poland.  These people were
  desperately poor, and, like blacks in America during Jim Crow 
  and the Irish in their country under British rule, they were
  subject to harsh treatment by the political leadership.  But
  ALL of these groups managed to funtion *as communities*, imparting
  a culture and instilling values in their children which 
  allowed the community to function and meet the basic needs
  of their members.   This does NOT exist among the urban poor
  in the US. 

  BTW, I *don't* disagree that the middle class has also lost its 
  cultural bearings.   The "sense of community" and "shared values"
  is no greater in my affluent suburban town, I'm sure, than any-
  where else.  Historically people lived in small, tight knit
  communities, often sharing the same ethnic or religious base,
  and interacted with their neighbors regularly (i.e., you knew
  the guy who milled your corn or the midwife who delivered your
  baby.)    And although urban life was was less common in the past,
  even urban communities were organized into ghettos (note that
  "ghetto" did not ALWAYS imply poor or wretched -- it used to simply
  mean a culturally autonomous part of a city such as the "Jewish
  Quarter", the "Arab Quarter", little Italy, Chinatown, etc)  Within
  such communities children would get a consistent moral message
  and a clear sense of identity.
   
  And Mr. Yodaiken is correct IMHO that it is our money which
  allows us in the middle class to compensate somewhat for this.
  If I lost my job and house I doubt very much that my neighbors
  would take me in, but I'm rich enough to have money in the 
  bank and maintain marketable skills, etc.   So I'm not arguing
  that, say, poor blacks, are unique in the breakdown of culture
  and community in 1992.  I'm just saying that THAT is the problem
  and government can't fix something like that.


---peter
Newsgroups: sci.econ