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Why America's social policy is not helping the poor
There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.
Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.
Isn’t this is exactly what China is trying to do with their Uyghur population? Well I guess you’re suggesting a more gradual process. China is trying to speed run it. But I imagine this would be the charitable interpretation of their policy. And it seems like it’s working.
Yes. Amusingly if the US hadn’t funded their opposition and the Soviet Union wasn’t already in the process of collapsing it’s quite possible that the Soviets would have eventually achieved this in Afghanistan. It’s not impossible to forcibly secularize Muslim populations, it’s just extremely hard and they put up much more resistance than anyone else.
The soviets didn't even manage to secularize the chechens, so I am skeptical that they could secularize a foreign population.
I think that's pretty ahistorical. The Chechens were subject, as all historically Sunni societies were, to the vagaries of the global Islamist movement that affected every single Sunni society on earth from the 1980s onward, which also perfectly coincided with the slow collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, Soviet attempts at forcible secularization of Chechens were extremely limited; they were much more concerned with forcing children to learn Russian and protecting the interests of the Russian settlers in Chechnya (especially after 1958) than they were in closing mosques. The Islamization of Chechen nationalist movements was a distinct process that occurred through the 1990s, and is in some cases both distinct from and not dissimilar to Islamization that occurred in far-flung regions of the Islamic world as distant as Malaysia and the Maldives.
This is indeed my point. Here's a population that Russia has been fighting with since the 18th century, they're right on the border (or even part of the country), and the Russians still didn't manage to secularize them. What hope did they have of secularizing the Afghans in a matter of years, even if it weren't for those meddling yanks?
You can claim it's because they didn't try hard enough, but that seems to me to be, as you say, cope, especially when the implication is that they would have tried hard enough in Afghanistan.
There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.
And even then, don't people say that the Mujahideen simply traded the Stingers for simpler, cheaper weaponry?
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
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