From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery
Date: 15 Apr 92 22:00:55 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In article <9204151928.AA09431@xuucp.ch.apollo.hp.com> nelson_p@APOLLO.HP.COM writes:
>
>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.  

It's not a mere ratio of cops to criminals which makes for a tight
supportive  police presence where real-estate values are high,
and a distant occupying-army presence where real-estate values are low.

>>>  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. 

No such presumption. The urban poor benefited from the social welfare and civil
infrastructure which were bastions of middle class morality (although,
certainly, the object of much lip-service). Now that the economy is
bifurcating into two segments, the poor are no longer able to benefit from
the public works programs and civic initiative of the 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. 

Well there are two points here. First, the lack of family structures and
values among the urban poor has been a favorite topic of middle-class and
wealthy observers since Feudal times, at the very least. Look at the
famous Hogarth engravings, or read Dickens, Zola, or Upton Sinclair
for prior versions of your argument. The poor, it seems, always drink too
much, fight too much, and are too damn unclean for the tender sensibilities
of their betters. You might also want to read "Jews without money", a great
book by a fellow named Gold who grew up in the old Lower East Side -- a
place where prostitution, gang violence and drug (alcohol) abuse were not
unknown. (God went on in life to become a very dull, proper,
middle-class member of the communist party,but that's another story). 
Point number two --- the family structure is in grave danger of extinction
all over the US. You might want to consider why teenage kids in the suburbs
spend so much time watching TV.

>  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.

Disagree. 




-- 


yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu