From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery (Was: BIG LIE about the market)
Date: 15 Apr 92 15:22:14 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In article <9204150006.AA04498@xuucp.ch.apollo.hp.com> nelson_p@apollo.hp.com writes:
>
>>actions. Clearly, babies born to single teenage mothers are not going to grow 
>>up amid the social  conditioning which is needed to provide some breaks
>>on teenage behavior. Clearly, children who attend overcrowded,
>>underfunded schools where the rain pours into the classroom
>
>    Again, none of this explains why the problems here are so much
>    worse than in many other nations where the poverty is worse, 
>    the physical conditions are more miserable, the school spending
>    is lower, etc.  And again, these problems are rampant even in
>    places like Boston, which spends TWICE as much per student as
>    the wealthy suburbs.  

You seem to believe that there is a connection between what Boston spends
for on the educational system, and the amount of resources actually
delivered to poor kids in Boston. Is there any evidence to support this
belief? Certainly, the New York City public school system does not 
work that way. Not only is there a top-heavy bureaucracy, a massive
patronage system, and general incompetence, but the system is severely
skewed to direct more reources to wealthier kids -- in the magnet schools,
or in wealthier districts like Riverside. Similarly, I am not sure of how
conditions in Third world schools could be significantly worse, as you
claim, than conditions in, say, East St. Louis schools. Let's face it,
a school which is flooded in raw sewage, without water or textbooks, and
in the middle of a toxic pollution zone is pretty near rock bottom. A
tin roofed shack with a blackboard may be quite a bit better.
I sincerely recommend Kozol's "Savage Inequalities" to you.
Finally, I'd like to see a reference documenting the worse, as you claim,
coping with poverty demonstrated by US poor, as compared with the urban
poor of, say, South Africa, Brazil, or Mexico. 

>>>  But many of our problems *are* more true of the poor.  Again, I
>>>  cite the 15% rate of crack babies in at BCH.  Or the HUGE rate 
>>>  of AIDS among poor.   I mean, I suppose one could argue that 
>>>  the unwanted teenage pregnancy rate is just as high in Wellesley
>>>  (affluent community in Mass.) as Roxbury (poor coommunity 12 miles
>>>  east of Wellesley) but the rich Wellesley girls are just having
>>>  lots of abortions, but this would be highly speculative and 
>>>  you can't abort or easily hide a case of AIDS.   
>>
>>The rich are better educated, they make better decisions because of their
>>better education. And, having a social/economic cushion enables one to make
>>mistakes which are fatal to others without paying such a high price.
>
>   Again, this doesn't account for the data.  The Wall Street Journal
>   today ran an article saying that, adjusted for inflation, the 
>   average family in 1950 would be *below* todays poverty line.  

Please tell us more. Note that in 1950 a citizen of New York city could 
take a free first class education up through graduate school, had 
a world class free library system at his disposal, was able to avail himself
of the services of a working municipal hospital system, and, for millions of
americans -- could find readily available government help for housing via
VA loans. Poor kids in New York today, start from an unbelievably worse
point.  

>   Althougfh the rate of poverty has gone up in recent years, it's
>   still below what it was throughout most of this century.  But
>   you didn't have frequent incidents of bystanders being killed 
>   in shootouts between teenagers over ownership of a jacket as
>   you do today. 

False and true. First the false: until urban removal the cops were afraid
to go into the Hells Kitchen district of New York where open gang violence
was the norm. Violent crime is a constant fixture in American cities.
But, true, the level urban life over the last 20 years has reached
lows not previously seen in the US for many years. We differ on cause.
You look, at a distance, at the disaster of the South Bronx, and complain
about the bad decision making of the poor. But, the poor did not decide to 
turn Puerto Rico into a US colony, build the highways which moved the middle
class out of the cities, skew the tax burden to favor suburbs and bleed 
older urban areas, neglect and let the urban infrastructure decay, allow
open air drug markets in major cities, urban remove low-income housing so
that corporate skyscrapers could go up, create the lead paint fiasco, 
remove low or intermediate skill jobs from US cities, or even have any
input into deciding that poor people's housing shoudl first be giant, badly
made slum-scrapers, and second (during the Reagan bush era) be newspapers
and park benches. 

>   etc,  etc.   If you're going to argue that it's economics then
>   you have to show that the situation in the inner city is uniquely
>   bad either in historical terms or cross-culturally.  Being poor
>   does not automatically lead to self-destructive behavior.

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.

>>My sister-in-law, who delivers babies in Appalachia was just telling us
>>about the woman who took her 10th baby home to the trailer where she lives,
>>shocked at the suggestion of a tubal ligation -- "I just love babies". 
>>Is it your contention that there are deep cultural similarities between
>>the Appalachian poor and those who live in the South Bronx --- other than
>>poverty.
>
>  I'm not sure what the point of this anecdote is.  It seems to
>  support my position that the problem is cultural, not economic -- 
>  i.e., the woman in the story certainly does not appear to be
>  making her decision on an economic basis.

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. 

>  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.   These 
>  are what maintain the dignity of the poor in other cultures
>  and what government cannot provide.  And without it the rest
>  is hopeless.

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. But, I don't think that, for the middle class, this moral
collapse is due to some mysterious "cultural" problem, rather it is a result
of the increasingly precarious position of the middle class in an economy
which is being guided to classic third world palace/hovel structuring. 

-- 


yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu

Newsgroups: sci.econ