Best povery books according to redditors
We found 128 Reddit comments discussing the best povery books. We ranked the 58 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 128 Reddit comments discussing the best povery books. We ranked the 58 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
She's presided over UC Davis at a time of tuition increases and the expansion of a food bank program within UC Davis. While doing so, she employs her own personal chef. All this despite UC Davis leading in food policy as the #1 agricultural college in the world. Which, advocates for better food policies amongst inequality in American society. She is disconnected from the reality that students face--of being unable to afford tuition and feed themselves.
During the Occupy Protest, a call against the 1% , students were pepper sprayed to disperse protest. Despite a tradition of protest on college campuses. She has a history of ignoring calls for resignation from UC Davis faculty.
>Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, November 2011
>I have....taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.
>You are not.
>I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:
>1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today
>2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality
>3) to demand your immediate resignation
>-Professor Nathan Brown,
In the 2015 CAES graduation speech, she spoke of Thomas Edison's genius and struggle to discover technology while making several mistakes. Her words. "Everybody makes mistakes."
I guess that's right Chancellor Katehi.
Edit: Added Links. If you would like to learn more about the rise of food banks and inequality, Sweet Charity is a great read.
Please read Punishing the Poor, it goes into great detail to explain how these policies are enforced, how racism is systemic in the US and how it is probable that in the future prisons will represent a large chunk of the working and productive population. Here's the description:
>The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare" under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures--the teenage "welfare mother," the ghetto "street thug," and the roaming "sex predator"--and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of "small government" but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. You can't even imagine how rough some people have it.
I live in New York City, and take the train every day. I see at least four or five obviously homeless people a day. I probably see twice or three times as many that are living in a shelter, even though they are invisible to me. Whether you are living on a street or a shelter, homelessness destroys people. Do you think they have it "not that bad"?
Take a look at this video.
And you don't even have to be poor to experience the misery that many people go through in the US. The young psychology major with student loans she can't pay off? The father that just got laid off, supporting a family, and feeling useless while he's unemployed? The mother with frustrated, red eyes, looking at a mortgage statement over a kitchen counter? The young guy that sees another bill mailed to him from a collection company, from that time he went to the hospital for a stomach ache and they charged him thousands of dollars? The children that fail to create familial bonds because their parents are either out of the picture or work too much? The young overweight girl who's fed unhealthy food because that's what her single mother can afford, but is tortured by the images of females advertised everywhere? These are things that profoundly affect peoples lives.
Read this book about the most neglected place of the US. Watch this documentary about how the economy has destroyed families. Read this book about how neglected the poor are in the US, and what they go through. Watch this documentary about how the justice system and the drug war are like a holocaust in slow motion for minority males. Watch this interview about the slums of DC and what young black males go through there. Or this interview about the utter despair of native americans in the US. Or this documentary about children handling povierty. Read testimonials on this website of what it means and how it feels to be poor. Watch this trailer of the vicious immigration system and the oppression poor immigrants go through even though all they want to do is have a good life. Watch this interview on how tens of millions of people in the US don't have adequate access to food.
The poor are invisible. Society is naturally segregated so that you never see them, or they are too ashamed to voice their pain. You have passed them by the side of the road. But hopefully, you will notice now. And you will never say the ignorant statement you just did.
First, I don't have anything to say about the UK, but someone already ran numbers for replacing the US welfare system (the entire system mind you; welfare, TANF, disability, SS, medicare, medicaid) with an unconditional basic income system that provides 10k per year per person for everyone over 21, starting in 2010 or so, and it was roughly even. The book is In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 . Some countries, such as Australia and Brazil already have some degree of basic income systems in place, so just because such a thing might not be viable today, or for everyone yet, doesn't mean the concept has no merit.
Second, an economy runs on the flow of money. I don't find it terribly complex to understand the following argument: a) increasing automation will lead to higher capital/investment costs and lower ongoing costs for businesses b) businesses will need less employees and spend less money over time to produce their products c) wealth will collect in the accounts of the people that own the capital and businesses because they have minimal costs to pay; no employees, production costs are paid upfront, etc d) economy grinds to a halt as the owners continually make more money than they spend or lose through taxes until no one else has any money.
We're already seeing this happen to some degree; corporations are sitting on stacks of cash because they have no reason to invest it because there's no one left who can/will consume more of their products. Inflation seems by far to be a minor concern compared with this kind of problem, where we have the effective capability to provide for the needs of everyone, but we don't because of the mechanisms of our economic system isn't capable of dealing with our technological progress. In such a world money is much less important as a means of storing value than it is as a means of efficient resource distribution/allocation.
And finally, I'm missing the issue with corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are on profits; I don't see how this affects consumers, and I don't see how its a bad thing or affects investment. Corporate taxes should encourage investment by my measure, because it means you're better off spending a chunk of cash on R&D or whatever instead of putting 70% of that in your bank account and sending the other 30% to the government. Unless I'm missing something, in which case by all means, enlighten me.
First, u/Flewtea, please understand that I am not attacking you or your opinion or experiences, I am simply offering some thoughts from my own personal experience.
Also, to avoid derailing your post u/throwawayisnotgreat, I have tried to make it informative for your perspective. I am not sure I have succeeded, and it did get long. My apologies!
If I'm remembering my reading correctly, this book and/or this book (I'm sorry, it has been a while since I cracked them open) state that welfare's original purpose was to allow mothers to stay at home to parent their children effectively when other options became untenable. This purpose has been twisted and tangled over the decades through laws and interpretations into a dungheap of epic proportions which is used to negatively influence public/political opinion toward the poor and further constrain their ability to function effectively within our society.
A welfare queen, in my humble opinion, is someone who utilizes and abuses the system for her own benefit, without concern for her children's upkeep and well-being.
In this instance, OP is being instructed to utilize the system under the original intent of the Welfare system - in order to care for her child - because other options are not apparent, and it would be a viable solution. However, within the system that currently exists, OP would need to understand that the red-tape and political atmosphere of today would make it as difficult as possible for her to "go on the system" and find a comfortable solution.
OP should know that the process itself can be humiliating and degrading. The solutions provided are not intended to provide for anything beyond basic means and support. It is not a matter of waltzing down, getting a hug, and being handed a check. They make you beg.
Additionally, OP should exhaust every option before applying, and be advised that the answer may still be "no."
OP would then be advised to remember that, upon qualification, retention of assistance is not guaranteed. In fact, the system has been engineered in such a way that a qualifying individual or household can be denied or suspended from the system at any time without any forewarning. There is an appeals process available. It puts the burden of proof on the applicant, who generally does not understand the system. The people who work there have trouble understanding it.
OP should also be aware that getting off the system is even more difficult than getting access to it. The difference between allowance and affordability is a hard line which leaves empty bellies and unpaid heating bills, and no more help - unless one falls below the line or becomes homeless. Then, you have an existing file and new circumstances, and they can just plug in the new information and the dance resumes.
People who use this system more than prove that they need it. Is it possible to work the system for personal benefit? Of course it is. People who live by working any system exist in every system, not just welfare and assistance. They are present in government offices, school buildings, retail stores, corporations, banks, prisons, food suppliers, casinos, union halls - if it exists, someone has figured out how to work it for their personal benefit to the detriment of others. I am going to say "Bernie Madoff" to make this point. There are dozens of others whose actions have been untested in a court of law, or tested and mildly punished or unpunished altogether (think Enron, cigarette companies, the banking system) or even rewarded...
The main differences between these individuals and people on assistance of any kind is the amount of money involved, and the ability to hide or fight back.
I (personally) think "welfare queen" might be a bit strong for this occasion.
____
edit, fixed typos, tried to address better, and further apologies to u/Flewtea and u/throwawayisnotgreat because I'm not trying to attack anyone or any position, and as usual I mucked it up.
The model proposed by the Chicago school, generally, and Park and Burgess, specifically, was based on ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago in the 1920s. The Concentric Zone Model, while it still has some adherents and adaptations, has generally fallen out of favor, at least in the United States. It is overly ecological and premised on competition over resources, ignores culture, and is fairly reductionist in how it treats physical and social spaces in city. Empirically, the concentric zones do not really match up with how cities grow over time, which becomes especially problematic with the changing nature of American cities in the post-WW2 era, suburbanization, White Flight, and the rise of a globalized economy. The New Urban Sociology goes into much more depth on these critiques, and offers a compelling multidimensional model that accounts for the interactions between space, culture, economy and the usual sociological variables (i.e., race, gender, class, etc.) as well as migration patters.
To return to the OPs question, white flight (the mass migration of white people from city center to surrounding suburbs) is the widely accepted answer for the decrepit state of many American urban areas. This makes sense to an extent; whites left the city for the suburbs, commerce followed, and inner cities were left disproportionately populated by the poor, uneducated, and minorities. With declining tax bases and loss of manufacturing jobs, cities couldn't (and/or wouldn't) support the infrastructure necessary to break the cycle of poverty (e.g., adequately fund schools). The missing pieces to this puzzle, though, are neoliberal globalization and increased "crime control". Loïc Waquant goes over this in great detail in Prisons of Poverty and Punishing the Poor. In short, since the 1970s, the decline of the welfare state and diminishing social programs have been replaced by a neoliberal state that emphasizes commerce and "free markets" while simultaneously relying on police and crime control to fill the vacuum left by the absence of social support (See David Garland's largely Foucauldian The Culture of Control: Crime Control and Social Order in Contemporary Society for much more detail on how this functions).
In sum, suburbanization and globalization have changed the racial and class structure in the cities. The welfare state has retrenched and withdrawn support for already vulnerable populations, and replaced support with a highly punitive model of crime control that perpetuates the cycles of poverty and crime. Of course, this whole post is the tl;dr version, but there are enormous bodies of research on these processes.
It's refreshing to see younger adults resonate with Chris Hedges. He is one of the last true journalists of this country, and one of the few individuals from the press to openly speak out against the war in Iraq during the Bush administration.
He's one of the few individuals I consider my hero living today. Read his books, "Death of the Liberal Class" and "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt", because he paints an accurate picture at the problems we face today: division of the middle class, the profiteers of corporations, the rape and pillage of our ecosystem. It's extremely sad to read and it will make you angry because only then will you truly understand at how backwards American society has become. If anyone is interested to learn more, watch this interview he was in with Bill Moyers. He single-handedly taught me not only to be an objective reader and investigator, but how to debate using facts and sources instead of ad-hominems and logical fallacies, what a true journalist should be in my opinion.
The phrase, "ignorance is bliss" rings so true after reading these books for me, because it opened my eyes up to the greed and willingness of corporations to seek profit over human life. It was difficult for me to process at first because I was never aware of so many things he mentions in these books, I didn't want to believe they were true. The thought of Americans cities as disaster zones, or 3rd world countries, but also how easily they engineered this system of propaganda to an already apathetic and ignorant country upset me not because I was offended, but that it was painfully true. The overall narrative of his language is that very principle of Capitalism itself is to consume all the resources for the maximization profit until it will ultimately consume itself... and he hammers it home brilliantly.
Hell: PM me and I'll buy you a digital copy of these books myself, that is how powerful and impacting they are to me.
Edit: This also an open invitation for anyone else who wants to read these books. My Xmas gift to you guys...
You don't want to open dialogue. You're responding to vague arguments that no one on this subreddit has made that you imagine what some red neck tea party member would yell at hippies at a OWS rally.
If you really want to learn about conservatism, here's a few places to start:
Free to Choose
Basic Economics
Uncle Sam's Plantation
You guys should read Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations And Attainment In A Low-income Neighborhood by Jay Macleod.
Read this for my Social Stratification class in college.
Camden's plight, and how it got that way, is a bit part of Chris Hedges (the author of the article) and Joe Sacco's excellent book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt".
^ it's pretty much this. A good book about this topic:
http://www.amazon.com/Welfare-Ethnicity-Altruism-Evolutionary-Nationalism/dp/0714683523
> The book presents two separate studies that compare welfare expenditures around the world, both indicating that the more ethnically mixed a population becomes, the greater is its resistance to redistributive policies.
Chris Hedges wrote a great book about what happened in Detroit. It makes for a great read if you would like to put together an informed opinion about the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Days-Destruction-Revolt-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586434
> That seems to conflict with things like welfare. Some people commit welfare fraud, but we don't throw out the whole thing.
Few welfare systems assume good actors. If someone commits welfare fraud, that is illegal, and they can be punished for it, and the vast majority of systems have some sort of method to identify cheaters. This is one of the things that makes welfare so inefficient, in fact...the bureaucracy needed to prevent fraud costs more than the the fraud, but without it, there would likely be significantly more fraud. Either way that inefficiency is always going to be in the system.
This is personally why I'd prefer a system like Charles Murray's universal basic income, where we replace all current redistributive welfare systems for a simple UBI. The requirements to receive UBI would be: over 21, citizen. If you are earning over (iirc) 30k per year, you progressively reduce the amount of UBI you receive until half at 60k...everyone gets at least half that meets the basic requirements. The only additional requirement is that a small portion of the UBI must be spent on health insurance (all citizens must have health insurance. His book, In Our Hands, goes into additional detail about why this could work.
The short term advantage is that fraud is far less of an issue...everyone is receiving it, so there are less checks needed to determine if someone is eligible, and the other requirements are easy to check (income, health insurance status, citizen) via existing databases, so most of the bureaucracy can be eliminated. It also gets rid of some of the stigma, since if 100% of people are receiving all or part of the UBI, no individuals are unfairly getting government handouts. It changes welfare from a redistribution system that only benefits the few to a universally agreed upon social net. There are many other benefits as well.
Most of the systems you're talking about, such as state sickleave, unemployment, etc., would be unnecessary if everyone had a reliable basic income. You would always have a fallback, and wouldn't need to go through a ton of paperwork to get there.
I doubt it will ever happen, but I'd much prefer it to the failing welfare state that has done more to harm minorities in the past 30 years than white supremacy has done in the past 100.
>We're not talking about legalizing ghosting, but rather about no longer punishing sex.
I'm not sure I understand this. How is dealing with the consequences of your choices a punishment? If I get into a car accident, and am required to take my car to a shop, file an insurance claim, and get medical treatment, am I being punished for driving a car? Or is that simply a risk involved with the activity, that we all understand when choosing to drive?
I'm not convinced state-sponsoring relief from consequences of human choice is going to benefit individuals in the long term, and certainly not society.
The study usually cited when throwing around that talking point is the awful Kellerman study from 1986. Here's an article talking about a lot of similar points with a section specifically refuting that study, and here's a more concise rebuttal (with tables!) from another source.
This book has a lot of good info on the subject of civilian gun ownership and crime, both from the perspective of how the guns get used and how criminals' perceptions change when they think a homeowner might be armed.
If you've ever had any time around guns or using guns it's also very clear they're tools with a simple purpose, and it starts to "feel" like bullshit. The whole statistic of "you're probably going to shoot your kid" is like someone telling you that you're probably going to kill your kid with your power drill. Unless you're trying to, or there are way bigger issues in play than the fact that there's a power tool nearby, it's just not likely.
He just SHREDDED the alt-right with his feelings when all we have are facts. We should hang our heads in shame.
https://www.amazon.com/Welfare-Ethnicity-Altruism-Evolutionary-Nationalism/dp/0714683523/
I think you have a very distorted understanding of Republicans.
Republicans, broadly speaking, believe in limited government. This stems from view that the private sector usually does thing better, that we should have less government influence over our lives, a basic belief in fiscal solvency, and belief that low taxes drive prosperity for all.
None of these is "love of money". Indeed, I think there have been studies that Republicans give much more to charity than Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-democrats-charity-philanthropy.html
Yet further, rejecting the welfare state does NOT mean leaving the poor to starve etc. Indeed, before the modern welfare state, Americans had a rich and robust tradition of charity. The book at the link gives great detail...but in any case charity used to be much more humane and "high touch"...and more effective than the impersonal welfare machine we have now.
https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-American-Compassion-Marvin-Olasky/dp/089526725X
I think this is where Rs and Ds have such a huge gap. Ds often can't seem to imagine that charity can happen without the government being involved. But it has and can.
I don't know if you read the Ferguson commission report, it was discussed in this subreddit a little?
One thing that's come up with regard to some police departments, including Chicago, is that if you live in a poor black neighborhood and you call for an ambulance because, say, your kid is sick or your mom is having a heart attack? The police show up first and refuse to let the ambulance crew into the house until they've searched the house and run everybody in the house's ID for wants or warrants. Examples that extreme are rare, but ...
Let's say somebody shot your friend, and you think you know who did it. So you call 911. Cops show up. They take your statement. It's your word against his, so they don't really do anything about it. But while they're there, they notice that the apartment isn't up to code. Or maybe they decide that, since you invited them in, they might as well call for a drug-sniffing dog and see what turns up. Now you have a dead friend, a murderer on the loose, and the cops have taken you in.
I know this comes as a shock, especially to people who haven't read, say, Sudhir Venkatesh's Off the Books, but in a poor enough neighborhood, nobody is earning a 100% legal living AND living in a 100% up-to-code home. Nobody can stand up to close scrutiny by the police -- if you tried to live that way, you'd be starving on the street, you'd definitely lose your kids. What jobs there are involve things like doing business without a license, or getting paid off the books, or other code violations; what housing you can afford wouldn't pass a city inspection.
Now, I'd like to think that in, say, a murder investigation, the cops wouldn't prioritize housing code violations or misdemeanor drug possession or operating an unlicensed hair salon over, say, protecting a witness to a murder. But you know, the murder conviction isn't a sure thing, but this ticket or this misdemeanor arrest shows up on CompStat.
Why don't you just read his book on the topic?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare-State/dp/0844742236
No, explicitly they didn't but the repercussions of policy making and the white flight post-WWII definitely did influence the problems inner-city blacks face today. This book by WJW details these problems and the intersectionality effects these individuals are facing daily, you should read it.
But, I realize you probably won't, so here's a tl;dr history lesson.
During WWII, factory work in midwestern and northern cities, such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and the like, was in high demand due to wartime production quotas. Many poor blacks from the south and around the united states migrated to these regions in order to gain reliable work in production facilities. Post-war, these factories closed or many workers were laid off, especially minorities, in favor of the returning GI's looking for jobs. At the same time, the white flight was occurring, leaving the only affordable housing in the run down, previously white-owned inner city housing, which became concentrated centers of poverty as these areas in cities became ignored.
An interesting note is that suburbs are mostly built to be a sprawling network of streets designed for an automobile culture. Poor blacks, at the time, and still today, had a hard time affording a decent car, and this poses a significant barrier in finding any sort of reliable employment outside of these neighborhoods, and thus these poor neighborhoods became even more isolated than they were.
Of course, there is a lot I'm leaving out; Incarceration culture, economic illiteracy, the implications and process of welfare and similar programs (which affects everyone across the race and gender spectrum, but women and minorities the most), and disproportionate use of resources by way of the city and state, to name a few.
But whatever, keep believing in your black president = no more racism guize! sentiment, because it is utterly false. Just because policy doesn't explicitly reveal a racist motive, it can easily be argued that lots of policy, intentionally or not, has created a racist outcome.
This one by Allan Sheahen is considered to be one of the best books on the topic, and Allan Sheahen is one of the oldest supporters of UBI in America.
This one is also great, from a more libertarian perspective. Charles Murray is a well-respected libertarian thinker.
If you're looking for something academic, these textbooks are pretty awesome- one and two.
You should read Off the books It's the guy that Levett and Drubner are talking about.
Kids just want respect and they see money or violence as a way to get it. They'd take the money over the violence no question. They just run hand in hand.
Dope dealing has the same appeal as all the dumb shit that surburban moms sell they just have a bit more commitment.
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Amazon Kindle Audiobook Torrent
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin Audiobook Torrent
A Darkness at Noon Arthur Koesteler Amazon Kindle Audiobook Torrent
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy Eds. Nalo Hopkinson, Uppinder Mehan, and Samuel R. Delany Amazon Kindle
The Well of Loneliness Radclyffe Hall
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson Amazon Kindle
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf Ntozake Shange Amazon Kindle
The Human Stain Philip Roth Amazon Kindle
The Stone Angel Margaret Laurence
Three Day Road Joseph Boyden Amazon Kindle
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway (As a primer on shitlordlery) Amazon Kindle ebook Torrent Audiobook Torrent
Black Like Me John Howard Griffin
Bless Me, Ultima Rudolfo Anaya Amazon Kindle
In the Time of the Butterflies Julia Alvarez Audiobook Torrent- Warning, no seeders
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets David Simon Amazon Kindle
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood David Simon
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor Sudhir Venkatesh Amazon Kindle
Gang Leader for a Day Sudhir Venkatesh Amazon Kindle
Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich Amazon Kindle
The Soviet Century Moshe Lewin
Griftopia Matt Taibbi Amazon Kindle Torrent
Where the Girls Are Susan J. Douglas
The Body Project Joan Jacobs Brumberg Amazon Kindle
Why School? Mike Rose Amazon Kindle
Killing Hope William Blum
Bad Samaritans, Kicking Away The Ladder and 23 Things They Don't Tell you about Capitalism Ha-Joong Chang
How Rich Countries got rich and why poor countries stay poor Erik Reinert Amazon Kindle
Whipping Girl Julia Serano Amazon Kindle
Republic.com 2.0 Cass Sunstein Amazon Kindle
Men in the Off Hours or Autobiography of Red Anne Carson
Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism bell hooks
Sister Outsider Audre Lorde Amazon Kindle
Getting Mother's Body Suzan Lori-Parks Amzon Kindle
The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir Amazon Kindle
Life Among the Savages Shirley Jackson
Bayou Jeremy Love
A Light in August Faulkner Amazon Kindle Audiobook Torrent
Authors, generally:
Margaret Atwood Amazon Kindle eBook Collection Torrent
Kate Chopin Collected Works Amazon Kindle
Oscar Wilde Amazon Kindle
Salman Rushdie Amazon Kindle eBook Torrent
Zadie Smith Amazon Kindle
Toni Morrison Amazon Kindle eBook and Audiobook Torrents
Chinua Achebe Amazon Kindle Things Fall Apart eBook Torrent
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (everything by him seems to be in Spanish) Amazon Kindle Torrents
Haruki Murakami [Amazon Kindle(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3AMurakami&keywords=Murakami&ie=UTF8) eBook and Audiobook Torrents
Sherman Alexie Amazon Kindle
Ha Jin Amazon Kindle
Please note that I do not endorse stealing from authors, and if you are financially able, I would encourage you to support authors that writ books that you read. That being said, I totally understand that not everyone is able to afford to buy books at will. What you do with these links is between you and your conscious.
I like American Drean and Random Family for insightful reads targeting a lay audience.
Cutting edge work is going to be presented at WREC in a few weeks., check out the people talking, and the videos once they're posted.
There are lots of other great documents and videos of Murray explaining his idea that he details in his book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
On 3:
[The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People are Educating Themselves ][1]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1939709121
> Everyone from Bono to the United Nations is looking for a miracle to bring schooling within reach of the poorest children on Earth. James Tooley found one hiding in plain sight. While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad's Old City. Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parentfunded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education. Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces readers to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.
Just because the government doesn't 'guarantee' education for everyone (as though it can actually guarantee anything; Governments that promise to provide universal education fail all the time) doesn't mean that education will be unavailable to anyone. You can have education available to everyone even without public funding.
It is racist when you don't consider why it occurs and, instead, associate it with blackness and black culture when, in fact, it has more to do with poverty, policing, and racialized, if not flat out racist, policy and policy enforcement.
I'd check out some books like The New Jim Crow, The Condemnation of Blackness, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door, Punishment and Inequality in America, Prisons of Poverty, and Punishing the Poor. I know of very few criminologists who would say that crime is a racial thing, instead, it is the enforcement of crime that is racial and it is the income disparity between blacks and whites that causes us to see higher rates of crime amongst blacks in America.
I don't know about this particular law, but laws governing charity handouts have existed since colonial times. It was more common than not to criminalize what was known as "bad charity" because it was believed to do more harm than good.
This book discusses the history of it rather extensively:
If you've read this book (which you probably haven't) what do you think of it ?
http://www.amazon.com/Off-Books-Underground-Economy-Urban/dp/0674023552
Alternately, would you consider reading this book and comparing it with your present surroundings? I'd love to know what you think.
Regarding some of the other suggestions so far: Reading Payne's book is fine, but keep in mind that her work is quite controversial. Moreover, much her work is self-published. There are many who feel her research lacks the academic rigor typically found in a field where research is peer-reviewed/published. Plus, there's also the profit motive, since she sets up workshops around the country and does quite well for herself. I'm not saying this is inherently wrong, but just to keep this in mind.
"The Invisible Thread" was an enjoyable read, although I found it to be a bit contrived. It's a feel good story, but I don't think you'll learn all that much from it.
Here are some additional suggestions going from more academic to less. Honestly though, to truly understand poverty from a big picture standpoint, it's best to draw from a wide range of topics and scholars.
The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by Thomas Sugrue. Pretty much required reading for those studying the roots of poverty in America. You'll learn about various factors like segregation, redlining, and other urban policies have formed the historical foundation for the cycle of intergenerational poverty that reverberates to this day. It's academic, but not nearly as bad as a lot of journals.
More Than Just Race, by William Julius Wilson. He actually has numerous books in this field that are great. As an African American and Harvard sociology professor, he has quite a bit of credibility in this field. That said, he does face some criticism, as his approach leans heavily toward structural factors and is said to be overly deterministic. Note, however, that just about every scholar has critics.
Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market, by Katherine Newman. This is a bit more accessible and personal, as she uses ethnographic portraits to complement facts and figures, giving the narrative a more personal feel, and offering readers real people they can empathize with.
There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz. This is a non-fiction book by an investigative journalist that is meant to be read by the masses, making it far more accessible. Great stuff.
The Other Wes Moore, by Wes Moore. An accessible autobiographical account of two boys name Wes Moore, both of whom grew up minutes away from each other, but ended up taking very different life paths.
By the way, where in the midwest are you? I just moved to Iowa City a week ago. The weather here is...weird. Everyone is warning me of the winters here.
Book description on Amazon
Seems the author is somewhat aligned with Reddit's collective political stance. Looks like I've just killed the joke. Hiyoooooo
http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/030733936X
buy this book with your jewels, it will help you understand some things that you will never have the joy of experiencing.
Since the creation of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) in 1996, benefits are capped at 2 children and 64 months. To receive these benefits mothers must comply with strict work requirements. If they get a job, they aren't allowed to leave it without being penalized.
A great read on the topic from a sociological perspective would be 'Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform'. I read this a few years back and it did a great job of explaining the current US welfare system with the data to back it up.
To answer your question - there are no incentives to have more children assuming you are already on welfare.
I asked myself the same question. Here's the answer.
http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/030733936X
Charles Murray (conservative) wrote a book about universal minimum income, at 10K/adult https://www.amazon.com/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare-State/dp/0844742236
unsure if that would work, but he put the idea out there
>It depends how you define "assimilation". These days it's more of a political term describing someone who is "economically productive". There are limits to assimilation. Social cohesion in ethnically homogenous nations will always be higher than in ethnically diverse nations. One of the main reasons why US is so against all social spending (universal healthcare for example) is because it is so ethnically fragmented that people don't relate to each other as much. That's why its culture is so individualistic. This is all very well studied:
http://www.amazon.com/Welfare-Ethnicity-Altruism-Evolutionary-Nationalism/dp/0714683523
So that's why it makes sense to keep nation as homogenous as possible.
"Assimilation" means becoming a part of the nation. It often does not take place within a single generation (unless someone moved to a new nation at a very young age), but over 2-3. You have not answered my question, which was "what does "collective memory of a people" have to do with genetics?" You have not explained why people of different racial origin cannot assimilate and become part of a nation.
>Almost all of them?
Name three.
>but many times correlation does imply a causation.
And many times it doesn't. If you want to make a claim that X causes Y, you need to prove that X causes Y. Merely showing that X and Y are correlated is not sufficient. Even Mexico with its large mestizo population is richer than Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, and many other East European "white" countries (I am not sure if East Europeans are regarded as "white" or not by fascists). With that being said, I don't think it is a mere coincidence that a largely white Canada is much richer than places like Mexico or Argentina (by the way, there is no significant difference in per capita income between these two latter countries). In my view, Western Europeans since the 18th century did inculcate superior cultural values that are conducive to building an advanced industrial economy (such as keen time-awareness, emphasis on literacy, and work ethic), but these traits are learned and are not a result of genetics, given that Western Europeans themselves did not possess such traits before modern times, and several non-Western countries (particularly East Asian ones like Japan and South Korea) have adopted these traits and outperformed Western European countries like Portugal and Spain (which remained largely illiterate and underdeveloped well into the 20th century).
>capitalism's abuse of humanity is so much more subtle than communism's was
Err...read this.
You sound like you are more politically-right oriented. Here's a great recent interview with someone from the right discussing why he supports a basic income, and how he suggests we go about it.
No it doesn't have the numbers you seek, but his book certainly does, if you want to read it:
"In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State" by Charles Murray
His new book with Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is absolutely amazing, and even more revelant to this discussion.
When Hannity and TV cop shows are your only source of information about this stuff a lot of well reasoned ideas can seem pretty crazy at first.
Edit: For anyone who wants a pretty good starting point for understanding this stuff "Off The Books" by Sudhir Venkatesh is worth a look. That chapter in Freakenomics about the drug war talks about this same guy's work.
I know my bias as a CCW holder myself, so I'm very cautious about promoting the idea they reduce crime, especially in a forum where objectivity is so highly valued. I trust the (admittedly dated) CDC study partially because they're cautious enough not to draw conclusions either way. Takes a good deal of integrity to study something in depth and return with "we still don't know."
The individual study I'm most familiar with is this one which I've read a couple times and which includes a great amount of data:
http://www.amazon.com/Armed-Considered-Dangerous-Firearms-Institutions/dp/0202305422
I like the link you provided though. I'll have to read through it in more detail with some more skepticism soon.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0844742236/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon
Great minds think alike... some of the details are different but the general idea has been out there for a while. Also google "basic income guarantee."
UBI, in the way Murray wants, it is not an expansion of the social safety net. He wants it to replace all other social services.
>This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society.
The libertarian version of UBI is a massive reduction in the benefits the average person uses
This is an important bill. Eviction is the root cause of considerable generational poverty
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/11/eviction-cause-not-just-condition-poverty
read this book! it's equal parts heartbreaking and enlightening
https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/dp/B01AKQ598Q
http://www.viewfromtheground.com (it's a little broken, but we're fixing it)
https://beta.prx.org/stories/1369
http://www.amazon.com/American-Project-Rise-Modern-Ghetto/dp/0674008308/
http://www.amazon.com/Off-Books-Underground-Economy-Urban/dp/0674030710/
http://www.amazon.com/High-Rise-Stories-Chicago-Housing-ebook/dp/B00G1SRCTC/
Pre-public housing: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Metropolis-Study-Negro-Northern/dp/0226162346/
I'll post more later. Thanks :D
Of course it's redistribution of wealth, and that's not against libertarian principles. Charles Murray wrote a whole book about it. The Cato Institute has thoroughly discussed the idea in mostly glowing terms. It's far from universally supported among libertarians, but it has solid traction.
https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Charity-Emergency-Food-Entitlement/dp/0140245561
Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement
ISBN-10: 0140245561
ISBN-13: 978-0140245561
Paying Venmo. State price
​
EDIT: ty for so many responses. currently talking to bookselller10
EDIT2: done
If you do want to go the personal route: I make minimum wage and can afford luxury groceries. I also pay all my own bills including rent. Maybe you should move somewhere less expensive. <---Yes I realize this is myopic of me to say, but so is everything about your post. If you are truly interested in learning about welfare systems and the like please educate yourself with some well-researched media on the subject. http://www.amazon.com/Flat-Broke-Children-Welfare-Reform/dp/0195176014 As a starting point, this book is likely available at your local library and does a wonderfully thorough job of addressing a lot of your concerns and will give you some context/a bigger picture. I also think you would be much happier if you kept your eyes on your own grocery basket.
That sounds like a great book, but you hit the nail right on the head when you said that it didn't relate to our discussion on sales tax. There's nothing in that writeup that helps us understand scale, which is very important here. There is also nothing addressing whether or not illegal immigrants are the driving force behind the black market economy in the US. Plus, we end up right back at the same problem I had with your earlier post: this book is about a single neighborhood in Chicago. Maybe if we both read the book, rather than the synopsis on Amazon, we would find some useful data.
To back up what hakuna_matata said, someone has written extensively on this topic.
I'd recommend reading American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare for a look at what Clinton's welfare "reforms" did to the poorest of the poor in your country. A humanitarian he was not.
You are now getting closer to the real argument, I applaud you.
Getting rid of Medicare seems like a bad idea. In fact, society as a whole would likely be better off if everyone had healthcare (cost per person goes down, less health-induced poverty related crimes, etc) - but getting to that point is hard in a nice libertarian fashion. Charles Murray's idea to have a UBI coupled with a requirement to spend some on healthcare might be better than our status quo, but probably has some externalities that make it undesirable.
As for the other issues, I think many UBI advocates would handle the Social Security problem as an issue that will eventually phase out. You take anyone getting SS >1000/month and you give them their 1000/month in UBI plus the difference in SS. 1000 from UBI, 400 from SS. All people retiring after some cutoff don't get any SS top-up. Eventually phases out as an issue. Yes, if UBI stays at 1000/month and costs increase, this can be bad for the elderly. But it is also bad for the elderly to have an entire youth generation living in poverty, unable to get training. How do people retire? By purchasing the labor of the young with assets they acquired while young. One can't retire by hoarding assets unless there are people willing to do work to get those assets. Unless fully robotic retirement facilities pop up.
As for the gross price tag still being large, there are many arguments to be made on how to handle that issue, but I won't make them here as they typically require increased taxes of some kind and such discussions don't go far in this subreddit.
I would bring up the issue with treating money as a scarce resource. I like to look at money as valuable tool that helps facilitate market operations and allows a measuring of the value of a thing to a person. It measures a slice of goods owned to the holder. What does giving every adult 12k/year really mean? It means we think everyone deserves at least a small piece of the total goods produced; a base minimum before any productivity. No longer does anyone deserve 0%, even if they produce nothing. The real question is whether we want to move that direction as a society - and not whether X trillions of dollars is too costly.
Can society as a whole produce enough food, housing, and healthcare for all? Definitely. Many non-essential goods while doing it? Sure. We have a distribution problem, not a production problem.
If any of you would like to read an entire book on race and boundary theory then this is a very good and well written one.
https://www.amazon.com/Not-Quite-White-Boundaries-Whiteness/dp/0822338734
Yes.
William Julius Wilson would agree.
Great book and thinker on this topic:
http://www.amazon.com/More-than-Just-Race-Issues/dp/0393337634
https://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Sams-Plantation-Government-Enslaves/dp/1595552235
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare-State/dp/0844742236
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/04/of-course-we-can-afford-a-universal-basic-income-do-we-want-one-though/#5f62aa4ae00a
Perhaps not "hundreds," but historically the derogatory word "cracker" was used to label poor whites in the antebellum south. It was even used by white people to discuss other poor white people. It came about at the height of the eugenics movement when they thought that genetics was the determining factor of one's socioeconomic station. It has lasted ever since. Check out the book "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness." http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0822338734?pc_redir=1408084819&amp;robot_redir=1
It's a really interesting read despite it's flaws.
Read this book, and wonder no more. http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/030733936X
No it isn't. If you're serious about learning more about this, start with this book.
You are spouting meaningless socialist drivel.
Capitalism isn't terribly effective? Effective at what? I suppose that would depend on what your end goals are, but since the advent of free markets the world has seen an exponential increase in standards of living, health, education, and technology wherever it is adopted, not to mention that countries which peacefully trade with each other are less likely to go war. Capitalism has done more to help the poverty of mankind than anything else in history. But call it ineffective if you wish.
You cannot "destroy capitalism" without destroying freedom. A free market at its very core is simply two individuals agreeing on an exchange of goods or services in a way that benefits them both. If you "destroy capitalism," you must either prevent people from having the freedom of association and ability to trade without violence or coercion, or you have eliminate the property that permits trade - which is impossible.
Having workers own "the means of production" is an antiquated, hollow phrase that has no meaning. I can go to any online stock company and buy the means of production in any company on the planet that I wish, thus becoming a worker who owns the means of production. That phrase was coined by Marx in the middle of the industrial revolution, when he misread the movement to factory production as the future of mankind.
What if I can only get a job at the mills, but I want to be an owner of Google? Or I own the mill and it and goes out of business through no fault of mine? Should all workers in the mill own the means of production but be prevented from owning the means of production of anything else?
That phrase also misunderstands what property is. There are other forms of wealth besides "means of production" that he harped on about. Even animals understand the need for a nest or a den that is theirs. Property and wealth are the natural outgrowth of human work:
>The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.
If everyone has "according to his needs" but must work "according to his ability," you remove incentive to work and people simply do not produce, because most people work for their "wants" not their needs - and the only one who can define what those are is the individual. Wealth is stored labor (work) of those who perform it, which they can then trade with others for the labor those other people perform. In a market, the ONLY way to get money is by offering services or goods to other people that they voluntarily give you their own stored labor for - you MUST serve others to gain wealth.
The only way to destroy capitalism is to destroy freedom by enslaving everyone.
Since this article was about education, you might be interested to know that even the poorest people on the planet can educate their children through the freedom of association, because parents everywhere want their children to be educated. No "bourgeousie" involved.
Give people freedom and they prosper. Try and make people prosper and you destroy freedom and destroy prosperity.
People like you scare me.
Edit: clarity