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America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.
Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.
At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.
Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.
Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.
Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.
Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.
The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.
Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)
Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.
Schools - are free
Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)
Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.
Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough
Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.
Doctors are evil and landlords have uniform behavior?
Fair enough.
At this point every new-urbanist has made so many videos about this, that I thought the point was obvious enough. 1 2
The current incentives force landlords to behave the way they do. If I was a landlord, I'd be a selfish dick too. Afterall, the system actively promotes it.
Full disclosure, I am still working on this thought right how. Not entirely sure if I believe it myself or I am trying to be transgressive for the sake of being transgressive.
But my underdeveloped argument goes as follows:
Programmers are idiots
Status and wealth of a profession is tied to limiting access
Doctors by and large populate all medically relevant structures - from hospitals, to NIH, to Medical university depts, to Govt. health secretary roles
They have made no effort to make it easier to be a doctor
Introducing AI / tech / new ideas / pathways to be a doctor are limited, not because it keeps medicine safer, but because it keeps doctors a rare commodity
GPT-4 is already a better doctor than most
Lawyers are very similar, but they conceded control on the university side of things, and their profession has lost a lot of prestige and wealth since
Programmers are idiots, we make ourselves obsolete, we make it easy to access our profession, we don't gatekeep and then wonder why it is so competitive
Doctors are evil, doctors are effective at extracting all value from their profession, even if it means worse healthcare
Be like doctors.
Selfless people are idiots
Being selfless has not seemed to have been a bad play for developers so far. The more we try to automate away our jobs the larger the force multiplier one Developer can make and the higher we're paid. Yeah, maybe eventually this virtuous spiral runs out of runway and the last programmer hands the keys to gpt to business people but we've been trying and failing to replace ourselves for decades and the pay just keeps going up.
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