Difference between revisions of “Draft talk:Poverty”

Egalitarian Utopias

You can’t stop me dreaming that one day… Scherben (talk) 19:53, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Re-distribute wealth equally worldwide

When I plant the seed (of a new idea) then God gives the increase, so the idea begins as a tiny seed but grows until it’s worldwide (although if someone somewhere back in time has suggested it I’ll be happy to hear about them:). I doubt if many people ever said we ought to re-distribute wealth. Unequal wealth should not exist because it’s slavery of the masses to make a few people rich, & that stops progress. Stupid capitalists think that by TEACHING people to be evil (capitalists) they’ll still somehow be good! Look at the crowns & jewels in countries like UK. Those jewels were stolen in the first place over the centuries, then it is still being stolen because there is still poverty & unequal wealth. Capitalism has always existed because slavery has always existed, but with different names: colonialism, imperialism, mercantilism, etc. The wage is the cause of all the world’s problems, if only someone would tell USA & UK about that. It forces every person to BUY & SELL something every day or starve. When a big family has only one wage earner & he/she becomes too sick to work or dies, the family will starve. After natural disasters, the people won’t have fields growing food until they can get seeds, plant seeds, wait for seeds to grow, then harvest, etc. All people should have a guaranteed income. All people should OWN all things on earth to end poverty, but USA has been, & still is, forcing all attempts of a Perfect system (Socialism/communism) to fail (“Rogue State” Wm Blum shows it best, & “When Corporations Rule The World” David Korten, & Third World Traveler has many book excerpts). If we TEACH people worldwide to do things right, then they’ll do things right, & the snowball effect will soon force every person to do things right. How could Perfection possibly be imperfect?! If anyone says “What if no one will work & the human race dies,” I say GOOD! They deserve it, I don’t care, even if I starve, because I know that won’t happen because Perfection will be perfect. And the system we now have (wage-slavery) is doing that now, killing the whole human race, so stop being stupid, people. Klop789 (talk) 03:27, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Look at multi-national corporations to see they cause world poverty by moving to poor countries where they can get away with paying extremely low wages (& kill lots of people, including the rich!) that the employee-slaves can NOT live on, like Disney in Haiti, & Wal-Mart! (see TWT). Klop789 (talk) 03:31, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Denial that poverty exists in the First World is also found among Maoist-Third Worldists and Leading Light Communists as well as the far right. Vlasyx7 (talk) 03:31, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Destroying the page to save it?

User:Nerd – by all means create an un-referenced section which just contains definitions of absolute and relative poverty, which I can then add references to. But kindly don’t delete the entire page to make it just that. Can I ask why you’re trying to do this?–MAI742 (talk) 04:05, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@MAI742 I’m sorry but much of what you wrote contains nothing more than bashing a certain group of people you are critical of. This article is about Poverty. Don’t mention something if it does not pertain to Poverty. If it is interesting but only tangentially related, add a concise footnote. Frankly, I would rather see a page that is short and incomplete rather than a long one that contains little relevant information. Nerd (talk) 04:13, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

If you find my assessment unconvincing, let David Gerard know. He is a good one at trimming articles. Nerd (talk) 04:15, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@Nerd I also desire concision. But what in your opinion defines relevance, and what would the sections and content of a “complete” and referenced page on “poverty” be? –MAI742 (talk) 05:43, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Poverty

Is the user writing this page planning to cover how social forces can intersect with and exacerbate poverty, such as gender or ethnicity? What about how poverty intersects with the environment, such as how poor people inordinately bear the brunt of the negative externalities of climate change? Do they plan to include criticism of the World Bank poverty line? Such as the obvious one that nobody can live on a dollar ninety a day? How about how, according to a UN special rapporteur on poverty, that over half of the world of the world live on less than 5 USD a day, and how that number hasn’t shifted much since the 1990s? (1)

I feel like the Wikipedia article on poverty is fully sufficient for an explanation of this phenomenon, and any RationalWiki article that doesn’t cover these issues is gonna be incomplete at best, or misleading at worst. Just a thought. Carthage (talk) 16:37, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Saying that the number of people living on less than 5 USD hasn’t changed much is a blantant lie, even if you disconsider the fact that the global population is now 30% higher than it was 30 years ago.(2) I think you are conflating poverty and extreme poverty, both of which are covered by the World Bank. It’s hard to compare both things. When people earn less than 5 dollars a day, they live in a terrible situation. When they earn less than 2 dollars a day, their lives are in danger. This is especially true in poorer countries: since things are cheaper in poor countries, earning 5 dollars there can guarantee at least your short-term survival. Is that enough? No. But facing death from starvation is a much bigger problem than having a dire life. Regarding “social forces”, maybe I’ll write about how the rise of women on the labor market reduce poverty on the institutions/culture section. I don’t know if I’ll write about specifics. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 17:22, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

If you’re not gonna bother to write about the social effects of poverty, such as its gendered or racial aspects, then your article is incomplete. Also, I am not conflating poverty with extreme poverty. I am pointing out the criticism that the World Bank poverty line is too low. As many people have argued. Not covering this criticism, even to rebut it, is also arguably lending itself to an incomplete article. Carthage (talk) 17:29, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

What kind of social effects do you want me to write? Stress? Because I think Wikipedia already covers it. Also, yes, I’ve already explained why this criticism doesn’t make sense: The 2 USD threshold is for people who are facing starvation, the 5 USD threshold is for people who are poor. The criticism I’ve seen fails to adress this point, poverty and extreme poverty, despite being related, are different situations. You can’t really compare how people living under 2 USD live with people earning 2.5 times it. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 17:35, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

If there was no distinction between poverty and extreme poverty in the World Bank data, I’d agree with you. But since there is, I don’t see the point. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 17:42, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

You include a criticism section in the free trade article, with responses. I don’t see why you can’t do the same here. Also, I don’t see why we can’t include mention that other metrics for poverty exist. This could even be secluded away in a reference note. As for social effects, we could mention how poverty tends to be distributed unequally along racial and gendered lines. In the US for example, Native and African Americans tend to be poorer on average than European Americans. I would argue this merits a mention. Carthage (talk) 17:50, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

You meant just repeating what I said here? I can do that then. Regarding other metrics, the section that I didn’t delete on the article, about measuring poverty, already covers them, of course income is not the only way to measure poverty. I’m not confident about writing about those social effects, though as I said before, I’ll possibily write about these issues especially on the institutions and culture sections. I don’t feel like saying “blacks earn less than white Americans” because, well, whites also earn less than Asians, for instance. I’m not very familiar with the racial gap on the US but I think that, just like systemic racism plays a major role in the issue, the “ghetto culture”, that apparently relegate education as a bad thing, could perhaps be of the reasons too. Before you call me a racist or anything I also think that the “redneck culture” explains, for the same reason, poverty among many white Americans. I don’t have the time and the energy to make a thorough research that I did on the free trade article, so it’s very unlikely that once this article is done, it will be on the same level as that one. Also, free trade is mostly an economic subject, while this one is already testing my knowledge in other areas such as history. I don’t think that diving very deep in sociology and other sciences is on the table for me right now. I don’t own the article, and once I’m done, however, others can edit it once I’m done. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 18:12, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

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Oh, wait, that section does not actually cover that. So yeah, I’ll probably have to write about it. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 18:14, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, fun. The person writing this article believes “ghetto culture” is a factor in racial disparities in poverty. As if African-Americans can just bootstrap themselves out of systemic discrimination in school funding, employment, housing, zoning laws, and criminal sentencing. Can’t wait for the brocialist lecture on how blood-sucking feminists are ruining class solidarity. Burnt Toast (talk) 02:40, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you intentionally miss the part when I said that “systemic racism plays a major role in the issue”? I didn’t say I believe that “ghetto culture” is the cause of the race gap, what I did say is that culture can often explain in parts (though not as much as institutions) gaps. If you are unhappy with the example I used, try Northern and Southern Italy. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 02:48, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Immediately after conceding that “systemic racism plays a major role” in economic disparities between races, you stated “the ‘ghetto culture’, that apparently relegate education as a bad thing, could perhaps be (one) of the reasons too.” Stop digging. Seriously. “Ghetto culture,” if such a thing exists, is an outgrowth of marginalisation, not a cause of it. Punk rock didn’t deepen the economic recession of the 1970s-’80s in the UK. People tend to react similarly to being poor and downtrodden. Burnt Toast (talk) 03:25, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I already said that “ghetto culture” was a poor choice of words since I wasn’t aware that it was a dog whistle. Still, if (notice that here I’m indeed changing my words a bit) this sort of marginalization causes people to relegate education for any reason whatsoever, it is still a possible cause for race gap. I’m not blaming the victim or anything (and yes, blacks are victims of systemic racism), just saying that, supposing that the premise is true (some groups, both black and white, think that education is no big deal), it will hinder their development. Can the premise be false? Absolutely. But as I said before, it was just an example, and I already gave another one. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 03:32, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Or, you can see this way: group A puts much more value on education that group B. Which one do you expect to be rich? The argument would still be the same. Again, maybe I was wrong when I said that blacks and some whites don’t put so much emphasis in education, I don’t know. But keep in mind that I never tried to explain why would they focus less. I do think that, supposing they do it is still at least in parts due to systemic racism. I thought that this was so obvious I didn’t have to write in detail. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 03:48, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Education won’t necessarily improve outcomes for African-American kids when the whole system is rigged against their success. Growing up in a shitty neighborhood with shitty schools and no libraries means starting at the back of the race. It’s harder to get (much less hold down) a good job if you get slapped with a felony conviction for weed possession while your white classmate gets off with community service. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have if potential employers admit to tossing out applications from people with “Black-sounding” names. And what’s with the northern Italy vs. southern Italy comparison? Are you seriously suggesting Sicily is poorer because of the Mafia? And not, you know, southern Italy having an agrarian economy, uniting with the rest of Italy last, or being cut off by mountains? Or literally any possible reason I can pull out of my ass that isn’t a stereotype? Burnt Toast (talk) 04:07, 5 October 2024 (UTC)