quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

http://shareable.net/blog/indias-rural-commons-at-odds-with-surging-industrialization

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into his article but what I see is actually privilege masquerading as poverty -- a hip lifestyle, travel, non-lucrative but "interesting" work, inherited money from grandma (I don't know how much, but still) etc. Again, I don't really care whether he gets food stamps as a result or not, I just think he sounds like someone who actually DOES have other options and doesn't want them.

upper middle class people who get thousands of dollars in tax deductions because they bought a nice piece of american sprawl have 'other options and don't want them', they could very well decide not to take that tax deduction, which they might not actually 'need'. do you think those people write articles about how they're ashamed of the money the gov't gave them?

whether or not he 'really took advantage of every option he had' or whatever is pretty much irrelevant. do you really think that the less-than-five-bucks-a-day-of-food-money is going to induce more people into glamorous slacker freelance lifestyles? if not, then it basically *does not matter* why he is poor, food stamps are one of the single most socially advantageous ways of spending gov't money - even when they go to poor people w/ huge tvs and SUVs.

I'm opposed to the mortgage tax deduction fwiw. I don't really think food stamps are the cause of this guy's life choices, I just think he is whining about sleeping in the bed he made. I'm all for extending food stamps too, even though I don't buy into the keynesian multiplier effect.

you have a hard time believing that money that can only be spent at local businesses to buy mostly-american-made products that would not have otherwise been bought would have a high keynesian multiplier?

dude iatee your conflation of economic measures & moral assertions (intentional or not, I dunno) makes this frustrating! like, The_Economy isn't something we should obey independently of our moral judgments about how things ought to work.

like, those economic measures only measure relative to a background framework which contains an implicit moral stance

(though I gotta say I think concerns about food stamps are misplaced, b/c they're so paltry & food is such an important right)

outside of the keynesian multiplier stuff most of what I'm talking about has nothing to do w/ The Economy outside of economics being a useful framework for efficiently allocating money to poor people and achieving social goals that deal w/ consumption habits. I don't think gdp growth is the one and only goal for society but when it can be achieved by giving money to poor people, sure, I'll bring it up.

I think you need to look at this from a national policy perspective - that's where moral assertions inevitable come in. once you've decided how much poverty is morally acceptable in america, how much money the american gov't should give to africa etc. etc. then you have to look at what the most efficient policy for achieving those goals would be - and that's where economics does come in. it doesn't matter if you think that someone w/ a SUV and big screen TV 'does not deserve food stamps' - from a policy perspective it doesn't make that much sense to turn social workers into professional judgers-of-human-decision-making

moral assertions inevitably* come in

find it kinda tragic that I even have to argue w/ nominally left-wing americans about the fact that no, the american welfare state is not too generous

I feel like you're arguing that point with a strawman here

'the american welfare state is not too generous*'

*but I reserve the right to judge anyone who uses it

man I dunno; if a policy prescribes that people get things they don't deserve, then lots of us (maybe me, depending on the case) are gonna think that this is too much poverty reduction.

okay, I grant that. I'm just saying that in a piece where you are harping on how hard-off you are and how much you're struggling, maybe you shouldn't mention that you shop at whole foods, take trips to india and smoke cigarettes!

"america should allocate more money to assistance programs as a way of promoting economic growth and of reaching the same standards set by other first world countries" is a perfectly valid and legitimate argument that can be made without resorting at all to how much poor people need the money.

what do you think 'deserve' means? xp

haha yeah that's the question! welcome to political philosophy.

the underlying theme of the dude's piece was the *guilt* factor not 'how hard-off he was'. xp

paragraphs like

Savings, I tell him. It’s true: For the past few years, as a semi-accomplished, mid-career journalist and writer, I’ve been scuffling in the always difficult, but now beastly hard choppy waters of freelancing, supplementing my obscenely low (often under $15,000) income with some money my grandmother left me years ago. Combined, in the city of San Francisco, I live on something around $20,000. Every year, even as I work my butt off scrambling for assignments and clients, that little nest egg shrivels frightfully smaller. Now it’s almost gone, and though I’ve had some good little runs here and there with work, I’m hurtling precipitously toward poverty.

don't really help his case!

he doesn't need a case

or rather, here is his case "I live on something around $20,000"

fin

can someone hook this guy up with the moneybags in two lights? between all of them they should be able to write the world's best article.

he doesn't need a case

OTOH, if he's putting a story about food stamps on the Internet, where it can get picked up by anyone who wants to attack social welfare/point to those wacky lib'ruls/etc., he kind of does. Or if not a case, then not mentioning things that many Americans do find objectionable (such as people on food stamps buying smokes at $7/pack - and maybe more since the last time I was in SF).

I guess I accept that logic, tho again, his article is about the guilt factor and getting over it. if it makes a poor person in a similar situation feel more comfortable about going to the food stamp office tomorrow, then it's served its purpose. if a right-wing blogger wants to find an article about waste and gov't welfare they can do a lot better than that.

hey guys did you know that the successful quit rate for smoking w/o medical assistance is 1-2%?

and that when you chastise someone for wasting their money on a drug that's more addictive than heroin instead of other stuff you sound like assholes?

i have no idea what the circumstances of this dude's indian jaunt were so i can't judge but i did laugh when he's like "hope he notices!" about the indian food-stamp-office guy who looks at his passport, because like yeah, when you're trying to get a guy to approve food stamps for you what you really want is for him to notice your recent trip to india.

as a freelancer myself though i hope they fucking shower him in food stamps.

and I was an asshole there but: its a shame that the fact that someone buys cigarettes when on food stamps scans as "irresponsible" and not as "dang why can't that person get access to a cessation program via his PCP"

i read posts too fast and i thought that one was recommending spending your money on PCP

honestly if what you're looking for is stability and guaranteed food and housing, PCP might be your best bet, pound for pound

ashes to ashes, dust to dust

If only there had been some kind of public information out there in the last five decades about the addictiveness of tobacco, think what might have been avoided!!

I mean maybe then dude could have made a more informed decision and never even started!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLnOncrvY4

Irrespective of the health issues, it’s difficult to see how anyone could not understand that a relatively affordable pleasure (smoking) that can be spread out throughout the day, helps deal with the stress of bad jobs or unemployment and forms part of a communal activity isn’t going to be attractive to a lot of people who are poor.

It’s also difficult to quit without assistance. There may be health warnings on TV but there can also be enormous social and corporate pressure to start. The expectation that, at some point in their life, people aren’t going to make a bad decision is unreasonable.

The whole discussion cedes ground to the right. Rather than focusing on the pittance people are given in basic support, or why there are so many people in that situation in the first place, the focus is on whether that pittance is being used responsibly. It’s such an easy, lazy argument for not doing more to bring people out of poverty – ‘don’t give them more money, they’ll only waste it, the poor are feckless and morally suspect, you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves, etc’.

funny thing about the cigarettes is that while i do get worrying that the writer's (sort of lovable tbh) obliviousness to the fair-or-not implications of some of the cultural signifiers he's dropping is gonna make him vulnerable, tsk-tsking over his cigarette bill seems to me to be a "liberal" thing; i'm pretty sure middle america understands the need for cigarettes.

Shari obv otm

Hey, I don't care about the dude's food stamps or need or any of that - if he's getting it, he's getting it, whatever. Maybe it means the military will build one less Osprey or kill one fewer Afghani. (Let's hope!) I just find "Do you know how hard it is to quit smoking?" one of the most face-punchable phrases around. It's real easy if you never start; and yes, having grown up, in the 70s and 80s, around the military, with two parents and two grandparents who smoked, and a sister who started at 14, and going to a rural high school with lots of kids who smoked, and living around people who gauge inflation not by the cost of a gallon of milk but the price of a carton of cigarettes at the gas station, etc., I know about the pressures and cultural expectations.

You know what, actually, this is my own personal hangup that I'm dragging in here, forget it.

this is really hilarious and pitiful http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/realestate/so-youre-priced-out-now-what.html

i know it's probably just me and phil d and maybe beachville on this one but 'corporate pressure' rly? where are yr fkn mammies like

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EconomistsView/~3/2wmw7LV3pvg/who-cares-how-deserving-the-poor-are.html

do assholes deserve to be poor is more the question we should be asking ourselves

this is really hilarious and pitiful http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/realestate/so-youre-priced-out-now-what.html

― lag∞n, Monday, 30 January 2012 13:55 (1 hour ago) Permalink

Haha, yes. Saw this in the print edition and it was even more ridic as a giant RE section cover spread. "Can't afford to live in a neighborhood? Consider living in a different neighborhood! But you may want to look at neighborhoods other than the ones that abut your current neighborhood."

the whole tine of the thing was just really idk weird and sad, also its not like people dont know these 'other neighborhoods' exist

Bargains of the Times, always seven figures

Those "The Hunt" features are often quiddity-worthy except they're usually kinda too boring.

is 'ladies mile' really a thing

where the fuck is that? i couldn't be bothered to read more after I saw that G'point is the backup East Village.

Wait, since when is Yorkville not the Upper East Side?

"Roughly framed by the Avenue of the Americas and Broadway from 17th to 24th"

I think they should rename it 'the area near the chelsea trader joe's' xp

Priced out of New York? Try East New York, just east of New York.