An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong

http://www.good.is/post/an-ode-to-a-poor-black-kid-i-never-knew-how-forbes-gets-it-wrong/

by pitdesi • 15 years ago

114 47 15 years ago

wglb• 15 years ago

The Gene Marks article is breathtakingly out of touch. He really ought to get to know some seriously poor people. Perhaps live among them for a time.

Anechoic• 15 years ago

To be honest, I don't know that this article is HN material (but I didn't flag it). That said, thank you for posting this. Poverty is not just something you can "The Secret" your way out of.

pitdesi• 15 years ago

There's a hazy line, but it gratifies my intellectual curiosity (as someone who is relatively ignorant of the subject) so I submitted it.

From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

js2• 15 years ago

At least this kid tried to gain some perspective before writing about it - http://scratchbeginnings.com/

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

"How best to prioritize learning to read rigorously over scheming to get home and be the man of the house in the stead of the father who left? How best to find joy in school with so much hate and embitterment poisoning the rest of your life?"

How can we fix this? The problem is that no matter how much our teachers may push students to do better and work harder in school, their home life may work against it.

It's one of the side-effects of freedom. To some degree, there will never be a way to fix it. Unless we can control what happens when they get home.

klbarry• 15 years ago

This is why I think KIPP works (and why it has been criticized as a cult by some). It creates an intense school environment ("work hard, be nice") in school and then keeps kids in the school environment for as long as possible, while making work mandatory for parents as well.

Indy_Dh• 15 years ago

You are bringing up the argument for Welfare, Universal Healthcare, etc., that there is nothing that the schools can do. The problems that these kids are facing stems from the fact that they live in poverty. This leads to issues such as the one mentioned by the author. The only way to solve the problem would be to try to figure out a decent Social Benefits system for the poor, to where poor parents do not feel the need to resort to prostitution, drugs, drinking, etc.

anamax• 15 years ago

> try to figure out a decent Social Benefits system for the poor, to where poor parents do not feel the need to resort to prostitution, drugs, drinking, etc.

Why do you think that the lack of a "decent Social Benefits system" is the reason why they do prostitution, drugs, drinking?

To put it another way, you seem to be assuming that someone drinks because they're poor. Could it be (for some/many) that they're poor because they drink?

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

"You are bringing up the argument for Welfare, Universal Healthcare, etc., that there is nothing that the schools can do"

You can give people all of the healthcare and the free money that you want, but it still won't automatically create a productive member of society.

This will only create generations of people that are dependent on the welfare system and can't actually go out and get a job.

As long as you aren't mentally or physically challenged, you should be able to work.

ImprovedSilence• 15 years ago

Fantastic read.

Being an aspiring entrepreneur, I tend to look to others that have made it, and see what I can learn from them. I became fascinated with biographies autobiographies of everyone from Richard Branson and Steve Jobs to Lance Armstrong to Anthony Kedis (red hot chili peppers). The single best one of them I've read is "From Pieces to Weight" by 50 cent. It written so well that you don't just understand why he made the decisions he did (becoming a drug dealer) you understand that you would have very likely make the same decisions, should you have been in his shoes. It really opens up another perspective on an individuals behavior, and has made me that much less quick to judge.

_wp3r2• 15 years ago

Although I agree that the original post was naive, I do not think that the misleading vividness and hasty generalization employed by Jefferson addresses the issue to which the OP was referring. There is massive hardship across all low income families but the use an outlier scenario does not negate the valid argument that having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator.

I inferred that a lack of hope and knowledge of an achievable future, is one of the primary causes of lower performing low income students.

andylei• 15 years ago

> misleading vividness

what?

> hasty generalization

there are no generalizations here. the article says that the author of the forbes article (as well as you), as a person or privilege, does not understand poverty and thus has no idea how to solve the problem. if anyone is making "hasty generalizations", its the author of the forbes article, who thinks that poor kids simply aren't trying hard enough.

> the use an outlier scenario

how do you know this is an outlier scenario?

> having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator

i doubt anyone would disagree with this statement, but it's irrelevant.

the original forbes article suggests that having goals and determination are sufficient for escaping poverty. this article makes the argument that even with goals and determination, escaping poverty is still extremely difficult; furthermore, the very condition of poverty undermines the ability to develop goals and determination.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

I think it is pretty safe to say that "acts out in school to get suspensions to stop your mother from being a prostitute" is an outlier.

I acted out in primary school. I did it because I was an asshole who didn't respect education. I suspect my peers were the same.

_wp3r2• 15 years ago

Misleading vividness is the use of a dramatic event that is not in keeping with the majority of the population group.

Hasty generalization is much the same, by weighting the effect of an outlier in an effort to substantiate an argument or counter. I was not using that phrase in literal. It is a type of logical fallacy. I was simply observing that the use of an outlier argument does not negate the position of the OP.

I conceded that the original article was naive. Meaning that it did not provide enough scope to truly address the issue, but the importance of having vision in an environment that allows little is very important.

yummyfajitas2• 15 years ago

...the article says that the author of the forbes article (as well as you), as a person or privilege, does not understand poverty...

If the article is saying this, we can safely reject it as being a pointless ad-hominem attack.

vacri3• 15 years ago

One of the most frequently overlooked issues is that wealthy people know that there's even a better way to begin with. If you don't have a decent mentor, how do you even know that there are decent mentors available? The example of google scholar: we know it exists, but we're in an ecosystem that tells us these things - how do you get into that ecosystem?

I've been poor and still kind of am, but I've never known real poverty. I've seen real poverty in others and there's no way in hell I'd want to start from there. The biggest hurdle to escaping endemic poverty is even knowing that there's a way out in the first place.

byrneseyeview• 15 years ago

This article alludes to the "bee sting" theory of poverty (see http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/... ).

That brings up an interesting question: in historical terms, the subject of this story is quite well-off; he's not always physically at risk, he has ready access to probably non-toxic food, he has shelter, etc. Over a long enough timeline, his life is pretty good. Even his home situation--mom is a prostitute, but he can't tell anyone lest the authorities separate them--is in all likelihood less common than it might have been centuries ago.

So if these conditions are so awful that we can't possibly expect people to improve without fixing said conditions, how do we explain historical economic growth. We're descended from people who had really miserable lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than not, risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep, and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape. Beings that were physiologically human (basically us, but probably lactose intolerant) had to deal with all of those circumstances, and managed to bequeath to the next generation some slightly less miserable circumstances.

It comes back to the anthropic principle: if misery is a strong disincentive for progress, how did we progress to the point that we have leisure time to discuss this?

(I've asked the same question on Quora here: http://www.quora.com/How-do-adherents-to-the-bee-sting-theor... . I am very interested in the answers.)

fferen• 15 years ago

I think it comes down to being relatively worse off versus absolutely worse off. Although people today are not worse off absolutely, what normally counts when one determines problems in life is one's relative situation.

vacri3• 15 years ago

We're descended from people who had really miserable lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than not

This is pure conjecture.

risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep

Reasonable point, but nothing to hang your hat on - it's the same for many poor people today that have poor access to medicine

and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape.

And we're back to just making stuff up again to make it sound like people in poverty have it easy.

The poor black kid in the story doesn't have access to self-sufficiency that your hunter-gatherers had. Where are the animals he can hunt? Where is the food he can simply gather? He has markedly different restrictions on his life, but you're ignoring all that to try and paint him as wealthy compared to "ye olde ignorant savage"

white_devil2• 15 years ago

I believe his point was that it should be possible for <hardship-experiencing-people> to gradually improve their living conditions even despite their hardships.

meric• 15 years ago

>>>> We're descended from people who had really miserable

>>>> lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough

>>>> food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than

>>>> not

>> This is pure conjecture.

When my grandmother was young, she ate 1 bowl of rice a day (max), and had to spend her entire salary on food. Though she did sometimes get a few drops of pig fat to eat with her rice. Her job was carrying sand and rocks away from where the hill was demolished.

When my mother was young, she ate 2 bowl of rice, and vegetables, plus chicken on chinese new years. Her job was nursing.

Today, I eat cereal in the morning, rice and meat and vegetables for lunch and dinner. I'm a student.

Anecdotes are anecdotes but it is not a pure conjecture.

rictic• 15 years ago

I think your premise is flawed. As I understand the bee sting theory, it is not that self-improvement and community-improvement are halted by the effect, just that they are slowed.

Reversing your premise, if you were to take a population of ancestral humans and greatly reduce the stressors on the population (illness, malnutrition, war, etc.) then would you not expect that they would tend to improve their lives at a much faster rate then their contemporaries?

Ancient progress was agonizingly slow by modern standards. Perhaps the bee sting effect is part of the reason why.

andrewfelix2• 15 years ago

On the one hand you're discussing improvements in living conditions of the human race over 40,000 years and on the other you're discussing a minority that has been systematically oppressed up until a few decades ago. Two completely separate discussions.

zasz• 15 years ago

Hunter gatherers had much better lives than people give them credit for: http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j....

Your paragraph is pure conjecture.

nickolai• 15 years ago

That's a very intersting quote article you quote there. Just one thing : the article seems to claim that not caring to solve one's problems stems from the impossibility to solve them all in a forseeable future. Hence the problems create a "why bother ?" attitude, which in turn creates more problems. This pretty much nails the issue to me. But then the author goes on "The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity, my argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."

This is where I'm lost - isnt a "why bother?" attitute a textbook definition of lack of self-discipline?

I do agree with everything else in the article, especially with the idea of removing problems and roadblocks instead of simply throwing money at the issue.

So In my opinion there is a self discipline issue. Trouble is, the more you assist people in solving their problems, the more incline they will be to let their problems rot until you come and solve them again. The ultimate goal theere is to find a way to reliably restart the problem-solving circuit, once the people have been pulled back up to the surface.

AFAIK, no one has found a reliable way yet and unfortunately there is not much of a proposal in the article either.

Anderkent• 15 years ago

It would be a self-discipline problem if the affected people were showing less self-discipline than others. The author is saying that a rich person (that does not currently have the self-discipline problem) put into this situation would behave similarly. Thus the core issue is not with the poor people having less self-discipline, but instead with how poverty affects our self-discipline.

ranit8• 15 years ago

> the more you assist people in solving their problems, the more incline they will be to let their problems rot until you come and solve them again.

I disagree, most people given a chance will try to improve their condition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia

yummyfajitas2• 15 years ago

An alternative to the "bee sting" theory of poverty is a much simpler one. The poor, much like the rich, are rational utility maximizers.

But unlike the rich, working for money does not improve consumption significantly for the poor. Therefore, the poor choose not to work.

http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work

Note that this explanation doesn't require complicated utility functions, it merely requires that the utility function be nondecreasing.

yelsgib• 15 years ago

You mention physical security, food availability, and shelter as this little boy's three major boons in life. But does he have access to an intellectual tradition? Does he have access to any figure who can teach him anything? Does he have hope? Does he have freedom?

Your caricature of a person with a "really" miserable life crucially forgets that in many ways this person might have had a much more rich than someone living in poverty in the inner city. Namely, in terms of freedom, in terms of connection to his family and community, and in terms of his independence. People (not just the impoverished) living in cities with high population density have a fairly unique set of psychological stresses, historically speaking. This set of stresses seems to be particularly crushing, for whatever reason.

I mean, what I really don't understand about your comment is the tone of it. That somehow this child has all of these benefits, but still fails? What are you proposing? Can you really not see that the child must ALSO have some deficits that cause him to fail? Are you proposing that he's a bad person? I just really don't get it. What's your answer? What's your idea? That he's just not "trying" hard enough? What's the difference between a person who tries hard enough and one who doesn't?

It feels to me that underlying your comment is a deep blindness to crucial elements of human psychology. You somehow draw an equivalence between humans existing in superficially similar circumstances and then throw your hands up in the air and say "I don't get it!"

michaeldhopkins• 15 years ago

At least of a few of the teachers outraged about Forbes will be working Google Scholar into their curricula because of the article.

stablechaos• 15 years ago

My mother and grandmother have devoted their lives to outreach to the low-income community. From what they have told me, "poverty" is not at the heart of this issue. Most of these parents have self-destructive habits which will persist regardless of the degree of social engineering thrown at the problem. The only thing that will save children like the one in the article is one-on-one support from caring individuals around him.

ap222133• 15 years ago

Having started at the (US) 99th percentile and having luckily risen to the 2nd percentile, I'll say that the most difficult part was learning 'the language' of the middle class. By language, I mean all the nuanced understandings, cultural concepts, non-verbal stuff that is impossible to gain without being in it. And, as an adult I'm still learning.

One example that I've recently become frighteningly aware of is that I have a vastly different understanding of what 'property' means than those who came from middle class US cultures. It's taken many years for me to understand this because in fact I know and understand the English definition of property as well as my counterparts. But, there are subtle differences in meaning that fundamentally filter my perspective. For instance, I never understood why my college friends became upset when I borrowed things and never returned them, nor why they thought it bizzare that I'd tell them, of my stuff, to just keep it.

There are countless other examples. The article particularly makes me think of my adult friends and their relationships, in and out, rarely 'settling down' from an outsider view. But, just because they get divorced a lot and re-married, or cheat a lot, etc. It doesn't mean that their social conventions are any less valid than those of the middle class America. There are strong social consistencies and social language, unfortunately reinforcing.

My models are very different still, the semantics don't align right with my current environment, and today I have difficulty teaching my son the middle class way.

MaysonL• 15 years ago

I'd be curious to know if you've looked at the Harlem Children's Zone project, and what your take on it would be.

ap222133• 15 years ago

I took a look at the program, and it seems well intended and effective (at least from the web copy). I certainly and happily took similar help throughout my childhood: housing, food, clothing, education, health care, etc. and, I'm happy to now be able to support those types of programs.

But, these types of programs supply the minimum requirements for a poor kid to be accepted to the party. For them to excel, they need integration. For instance, I owe a significant portion of my success to the various middle class connections that I've had along the way. Having friends in the middle class, and especially, having those friend's parents act as guides and mentors was incredibly helpful, looking back.

Now living in one of the richest counties in the US, I see a big risk in having this income segregation. Poor kids need to have an environment where they may learn the middle class ways. And, they can't do it easily by living only among the poor.

anateus• 15 years ago

In the interest of learning the middle, and upper middle class's vocabulary I respectfully make the correction that you probably meant that you went from the 1st percentile, to the 98th (of income, I believe you imply).

I've seen my parents make a climb in socioeconomic "position" similar to yours, and I've found that much as you found one of the fundamental things that separate the "classes" is awareness of taboos, and even more importantly, when taboos can be violated! My observations seem to indicate that the level of "taboo observance" is distributed in a bell curve over the incomes.

ap222133• 15 years ago

Thanks for the correction. I used that twist of view to allude to and separate out the so-called '1%', of which appears to me to have a separate 'language' in itself.

abstractnonsens• 15 years ago

Learning requires only access to education and a stable living environment... and then of course actually doing it.

Internet has mostly taken care of access to education. That leaves only living conditions and motivation as precursors to success.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

Motivation for grade hunting is a tricky thing. I don't understand where people are supposed to take that.

Boredom counter clicks like hell when near any education system featuring grades.

fallous• 15 years ago

How does "education" equate to "grade system"? Are you mistaking credentials for education?

andrewfelix2• 15 years ago

"Internet has mostly taken care of access to education." Having access to a library of information does not equate to access to education. Education is much more involved and complicated than throwing information at any individual. Especially for people who haven't had access to certain learning processes from an early age.

vacri3• 15 years ago

You have to already know how to study and research to get decently educated from the internet.

gradschool• 15 years ago

Is it off topic to wonder how the story of the badly behaved boy and his mother ended? Presumably with the police involved, they got separated and she was "protected" even more, albeit deprived of a livelihood. Maybe in another era, the consensus was that sex work was such a great job that legal penalties were needed to disincentivize it or there wouldn't be enough women left to be wives and housekeepers. In these more enlightened times, we consider it such a horrible job that anyone who would do it must be crazy or coerced, and needs to be shown that there are alternatives, but we retain the legal penalties in case we're not sure.

An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong

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