Why does poverty still exist in one of the richest countries on earth? In this video, I respond to a claim made by Mark Littlewood that poverty “should be over” because the UK spends £300bn a year on benefits.
We have inequality, sure we do. But no poverty. So, there we are then.
So, what was this all about? Mark was clearly not really asking a question about poverty because he must know that poverty is a reality for many people living in this country, and it has not been relieved by £300 plus billion worth of benefits a year. And instead, this was a question that sought to transfer the blame for poverty onto those who were receiving benefits rather than those who have exploited them and left them in dire financial circumstances.
Let’s be clear. Forty-five years of antisocial, neoliberal economics have left us with an economy which is designed to extract wealth from people who work. What it does is transfer the profits that they make as a consequence of their efforts to a few, so that wealth is concentrated at the top of the economic system within our society, and economic insecurity is focused on those who have to work for a living and who do not have capital of their own. And this system is designed to discipline workers by threatening them with poverty benefits if anything should go wrong in their lives.
Of course, if we actually believed the Sae, Zucman, Piketty tosh then we’d capitalise that annual flow into wealth. About £6 trillion’s worth. Which means that we also don’t have excessive wealth inequality, do we? Because the poor have that £6 trillion more than currently claimed.
Well, that £300B figure plus the real message of the recent budget is that, contrary to the argument he’s attempting to make, we have an economy which is designed to extract wealth from people who work and liberally distribute it to the deserving (and many undeserving) poor.
Who cares about the fucking money? It means zilch. The question is: who and how many are producing the goods and services, and who and how many are sponging off them? I.e. how many spongers does a producer carry on his back, how has that number changed, and why?
Poverty nowadays is a result of poor life choices. Of low intelligence and no impulse control, of immediate rather than deferred satisfaction. Now that’s just my opinion, but why is the truth or falsity of that sort of opinion never part of bien-pensant debate? It is because they despise the poor so much that they must pretend to be bountiful to assuage their guilt at other peoples’ expense.
“Of low intelligence and no impulse control” – those are probably dominated by genetic inheritance, like so much else that is important (or even merely measurable). There is no moral defect in being born stupid – it’s just rotten luck. Or put in terms Steve will appreciate, it’s just God’s will.
Be that as it may I agree that the suppression of such considerations from open discussion is stupid or crooked. Indeed it is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Welfare_Trait
the argument was criticised in The Guardian for cherry-picking the data, relying too heavily on mice studies, and resembling eugenics.
Thing is, eugenics isn’t false. If it were, millennia of selective breeding of plants and livestock for specific characteristics, and to eliminate other characteristics, wouldn’t have been possible or successful.
The only questions are whether it would be likely to have the intended outcome, whether that outcome is practically desirable, and whether we have the right to do this to ourselves. Given that as I see it the three primary species imperatives are to reproduce, to eat and to thrive, and that selective breeding could increase the chances of our species thriving, there’s a strong argument for it. Whether it would be wise to attempt it is another matter. I don’t think morality plays a part. Whose? And why should that moral code have primacy over all others?
My objection to the sort of eugenics that used to be widely practised in, for example, the USA and Sweden wasn’t to the biological principle, it was to the coercion and violence that were often involved.
Also to the corrupting effect on constitutional government – the classic example being the morally corrupt Supreme Court Justice who announced “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Find me that one in the US Constitution.
Online I find “Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was … [c]onsidered by some scholars to be the finest philosophical mind and greatest legal scholar on the bench”. So much for “some scholars”. Bien pensants of their day, I suppose.
yeeeeesss….. but…..
a) It really only works in species with high numbers of offspring per individual per generation.
Humans.. not so much… due to our low number of offspring. Increasingly so going into the present.
b) Eugenics as a principle was conceived in the late 19th/early 20th century. When the mechanism of Inheritance wasn’t known. At all.
Just that traits inherited in a certain way, not How.
So unless things were bleedin’ obvious you couldn’t even select for them, and there was no way of knowing whether there were underlying factors.
Because not enough offspring per woman to get a decent statistical universe.
c) With the proof of DNA being the information carrier for our traits, we started to study it, and discovered things were.. a ‘tad” more complicated than previously imagined. By several orders of magnitude.
To the point that actual “breeding to get desired traits” is practically impossible for humans.
Because there’s too many mutations, with too wide a distribution, with not enough offspring per generation.
Plus we can now test for undesireable traits/mutations, and inform the future parents about the odds of getting a defective child..
Which is *far* more effective for getting “bad genes” out of the gene pool than breeding for “positive” traits with a shotgun, while blindfolded.
So Eugenics is ultimately true, but for practical reasons not applicable to humans.
Grikath, that is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal for me. It can work, but not in humans, for these reasons.
That said, we sort of do reverse eugenics right now. Through medical interventions, IVF and benefits we enable the marginally viable and unviable to survive and reproduce, arguably weakening the species. The survival of the unfittest. This includes my entire family: both my wife and I would have died in infancy were it not for medical interventions and my daughter would have died in childbirth, probably taking my wife with her, so I’m personally grateful for all of this.
Did our survival help to improve the species? That’s debatable, and philosophically, that’s the problem.
And of course, birds of a feather flock together. “Good genes” will always self-select in marriage.
The survival of the unfittest.
Norman
Human tribes prioritise the protection of the weak, except when resources are very severely limited*. Why? Because survival of the tribe requires more than individual ‘fitness’. Warriors need to know they will cared for if they are wounded or disabled. And the born cripple can look after children, keep records, cook, make music….
So you are here to enliven our days!
*Google Colin Turnbull’s[?] contested anthropological study of the Ik, if interested.
There’s too many variables involved to even philosophically tackle that.
Other than that there’s no such thing as “unfitness” , just “fitness”.
Just like “heat” it is a singular. You can manipulate heat, you *can’t* manipulate “cold”. The concept of “cold” is merely a relative absence of heat, not a thing in and of itself.
And even that “fitness” for humans as extreme generalists is …. a *very* wide brush.
The medical intervention allowing you to live doesn’t change that, at all, except for the fact that for the species as a whole it’d be generally better that we wouldn’t need medical assistance to give birth.
The fact *that* we can, however, is automatically part of our “selective environment”.
It’ll only become an issue when Warmageddon happens, and we can’t do that anymore. At which point there will be a short, sharp Selection to filter the women who *can* give birth unaided
( which , fortunately, is by far most of them.)
As for the incident of your birth having “value”…
You seem to have been poking around in the music business, and at some stage brought some entertainment to the Masses.
On the other hand, there’s the little story ending with:
“Congratulations! It’s a boy, frau Hitler”….
The “worth” is not in how your existence came to be. It’s what you actually *do* with it, is what matters.
It’s not debatable because any improvement must be relative to some metric. Choose the metric to get any answer you want.
“It really only works in species with high numbers of offspring per individual per generation”
Do cattle have that many more offspring than humans? A cow might have 10-12 calves in its lifetime, 15 tops, which isn’t orders of magnitude greater than humans can. Yet cattle can be bred for specific traits relatively easily. Just in my lifetime cattle have had horns bred out of them. When I was a kid pretty much all cattle had horns, and you had to de-horn them as calves (a terrible operation involving medieval looking loppers, branding irons and copious amounts of blood when it went wrong) now (and this has been the case for 30 years or more) they are all ‘polled’ or naturally hornless. Having horns has literally been bred out of cattle inside a few decades.
Indeed. The cattle and human genomes share about 80% of their genes; but breeders can cull and breed incestuously. Back in the 70s in Yorkshire in my 20s, I ‘dehorned’ calves: it was, in retrospect, gruesome.
yeaaaas… but cows are bred for only a few very specific traits, and have been, deliberately and documented for… roughly half a millennium…
That gets results….
You can also N+1 after a mere two years * and* selectively inbreed and use the culls as Dinner…
Apply that to humans… And I’m not wearing my “I dare you” shirt at the moment, at all… /innocent.
I’m tempted. But Grikath, do you really think that people would want everyone else to be just like me.
Even I have my doubts!!!
That’s interesting. On our recent motorhome trip in SW France we were taken by how many cows had horns. I hadn’t realised that we had been de horning and then bred them out.
Was there any other reason than safety?
“Was there any other reason than safety?”
Not really. Just a lot easier to handle, less likely to injure humans, or each other, or themselves, by getting horns stuck in feed barriers, that sort of thing. As things like ear tags and cattle passports etc became compulsory, and TB testing too, it was necessary to put cattle through a cattle crush on a regular basis to read tags, take blood samples etc etc. Do all that with horned cattle is not really much fun for anyone involved, man or beast.
Do cattle have that many more offspring than humans? A cow might have 10-12 calves in its lifetime, 15 tops, which isn’t orders of magnitude greater than humans can.
The big difference is timescale. The human breeding window is about 30 years, for cattle it’s less than half that. Plus you don’t get many 10-child families these days (at least in 1st world families).
Selective breeding works when the selector has a lifespan at least magnitude or so more than the selectee. Otherwise, you’re dead before you’ve influenced anything with nobody to continue the programme. So, by definition, humans cannot selectively breed other humans because humans do not live longer than humans.
Eugenics works in dogs, with which we share 84% of our genome. It apparently works in chimps, too, with which we share c.98.8% of their DNA — though, AIUI, the total genetic chimp/human difference is c.4% due to c.35 million single nucleotide differences, c.90 million base pairs of insertions/deletions, and significant chromosomal differences (which I don’t understand). So I conclude that human eugenics would work, but it would be, er, very challenging, have to be coercive and possibly involve some incest and/or culling…
Also, there are positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics in humans is challenging (see above); though we should incentivise married employed people to reproduce in order generally to maintain the quality of the national gene pool. Currently, the UK incentivises a parasitic underclass to reproduce. Reducing their fertility by reducing the incentives for them to have children should be a priority.
As for compulsory sterilisation, the candidates are legion…starting with illegal immigrants, career criminals, mongols…
Theo…. all you’re stating here is that you do not understand the first thing about modern genetics.
If it’s percentage we’re actually closer to pigs, not chimps. Especially where it matters to us.
A fun bit of convergent evolution… Yet that *tiny* difference in *hack cough* percentage ……
Unless you’ve a taste even the Welsh don’t dare go into… last time I checked it’s easy to distinguish Man from Pig.
The difference with our “Cavemen Stoopid” Neanderthal cousins is something like 10^-5 to -6 when it comes to percentage…
Same as the clearly identifiable differences in just skeletal structure alone for Flavours of African, Asian and Eurasian varieties of us.
Just….. Don’t…..
No, selective breeding works over a number of generations: the number of offspring (after two) per generation is only marginally relevant (to the extent that those with unwanted/without the wanted charactreristics will be not be used for breeding, perhaps culled).
As for a decent statistical universe, that is *all* the individuals studied, not just the children of one individual. The size required depends on what you want to study.
Breeding to get desired traits (such as over 7′ 6″ tall basketball players) is possible in humans if you have an authoritarian state like China. Whether it is desirable is open to debate.
No it isn’t, and funnily enough… you give the reason right in the same paragraph…
Selective breeding imposes *massive* strain on what’s possible within the mechanics of mutation, and reinforcement.
Far beyond what Mother Nature ( uncaring bitch that she is…) can even manage.
For *each* generation variety and divergence is *exactly the same* within the available possiblities.
Se.pa.ra.te.** Dice Throws….. .for the mechanics….
All we do is severely limit the numbers on the dice….
** Even Mendel figured out that one, and it’s the very core of his theories… In ways *the* most important one…
I can’t even…. After being re-affirmed all the way up to modern molecular genetics, people still get this wrong?
That’s Spud-level …..
You assume variety and divergence are the same in each generation which is contradicted by selective breeding.
Yes I do, and I don’t assume, I know. As do the people who do this professionally. Because there’s lovely math that describes the process nowadays.
*Your* assumption only works if you just consider the traits you select for.
However, regardless of the number of traits you choose, there is a number of other traits which number several orders of magnitude more which you don’t select for. And are happily playing Random Tombola.
And most of them you don’t have a clue about *until* one aligns with your forced selection, and lifts along. Ruining your line, because they are always unwanted traits, else you wouldn’t even notice them.
You *can*, of course cull the offspring with those unwanted traits, but that doesnt change the Tombola in the ones you do select.
Because they may well be “recessive” carriers of that trait. Which you can only find out by seeing how often or not it crops up in the next generations.
Or, of course, set up a separate breeding line to specifically target that trait to eliminate it, *ignoring* the traits you’ve originally selected for and adding them back to the Tombola.
And then combine the separate lines to see if it has the desired results.
And that’s where the number of offspring come in, and speed of the lifecycle, and building that statistical universe to *know* which individuals to select.
Because I’m not talking here about horses, cows, pigs, even mice and rats.
I’m talking about Drosophila , that staple workhorse of genetics.
And they have a generation time of a mere twelve days, with offspring around 500 per female.
And even for them your assumption that number of offspring does not matter after P+2 does not fly. Literally.
Because there’s plenty of cases there where the number of ( viable) offspring per female drops, sometimes drastically. Because of those Unknowns.
Which lines require several more generations, sometimes significantly more, to “stabilise”. If they do at all.
And that’s why your assumption is Spud-ian: It only looks at the desired results, ignoring everything else going on around it.
Including the fact that the effect you describe is not observed even in high-offspring, short generation time breeding experiments, where the effect *must* be observable if it is true.
I can do the lovely math – but it’s the underlying assumptions and the unlovely consequences that matter. No-one cares enough about fruit-flies to protest the breeding and killing of millions of them.
OK, but the Jewish outfit in NYC that tests couples and warns them not to breed if each carries particular defective genes: that’s pure eugenics, isn’t it? And very wise too.
yes… but the latter end of my original post…
We know now what to *avoid*, within our knowledge, and barring Murphy™ ( not Code-Monkey or Potato.. the Other One…)
Yes, it’s technically eugenics.. But… what would the odds for the child have been in …the original Jewish Goatherd setting?
Not…..good…. if at all….
Even chance of taking the mother out as well….
Eugenics only works on slaves. For it to work the eugenicists must know what traits they want, which is impossible for one’s own species. What traits could people have planned to use which would have resulted in Norman Borlaug, Stephen Hawking, or Oskar Schindler? People are far too complex for people to understand. If eugenicists of the past had had their way, they would have made people physically strong, with keen eyesight and hearing etc just as we moved into an era where we use machines for strenuous work, work at scales far below what we can see, and generally substitute thought for strength. It would have been a disaster. And that’s without considering the effects of narrowing the gene pool on susceptibility to large scale illness.If a disease kills off virtually all of a genetically vulnerable crop, that’s unfortunate, but we substitute another variety, a disease which kills off virtually all humans would be far worse.
The claim that a group of characteristics that make it likely the individual will (deserve to) be sacked is found more frequently among those on out-of-work benefits is utterly plausible.
To what extent these traits are hereditable, to what extent they are environmentally conditioned (through family, neighbourhood or school) to what extent they occur at random is a matter of dispute.
That’s Nature v/v Nurture….
The best abbreviated answer available to that is:
Nature gives Inclinations,Tendencies and Preferences.
It’s up to Nurture to amplify the “Good”, and Limit the effect of the “Bad”.
The juxtaposition subject to Culture. “Natural Fitness” in case of Warmageddon, and sheer blind luck.
The reason Philosophy doesn’t work at this level is because it might well be Quantum: You have a general idea, but you don’t find out until you poke the Bear…
“Poverty nowadays is a result of poor life choices. Of low intelligence and no impulse control, of immediate rather than deferred satisfaction. “
Spot on. Those who are mired in the benefits culture are almost entirely there due to their own (poor) choices over a long period of time.
I had an idea the other day – why do we pay benefits to criminals? Or illegal drug takers? Why, in any sense of the word, is that fair?
Personally I would declare that all benefits claimants are liable for random drug testing. Anyone who fails gets their benefits cut off immediately. I see no reason why the law abiding should have their legally acquired earnings taken off them to give to those who then use the money to indulge in illegal behaviour.
Jim – that is also for me why any notion of a UBI is DOA – for the reasons above. If you have that income to an addict it will be shot up a wall within a day.
Because very few people are willing to just lie down and die if they are too poor. While there may be motivation to find lawful employment, that’s clerly not always possible, so we would have a lot of desperate criminals who have nothing to lose.
And, of course, for those who are old-fashioned enough to believe in a single breadwinner family, we consider it unfair that others would suffer due one person’s poverty.
Drug tests would be complete stupidity. What’s wrong with people who have no job from taking drugs? It’s not like they could be reducing their employer’s productivity. And that’s quite apart from the fact that there should be no such thing as illegal drugs. Have we learned nothing from Prohibition?
“ What’s wrong with people who have no job from taking drugs?”
Why should a law abiding person pay taxes at the point of a gun so someone else can break the law using their money? Why shouldn’t a society say ‘You want the free welfare money, you abide by the laws of the land?’ If you want to do illegal sh*t, pay for it yourself with your own earnings, not other peoples.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I don’t want them to take illegal drugs: I want those drugs to be legal.
And why does the illegality matter? Why do you think anyone should get benefits?
“Now that’s just my opinion…”
No, definitely nor just yours!
Commie talk to get people to accept communism. Appeal to pity shit.
Gamecock never ceases to be amused by the ‘extract wealth’ from the poor bullshit. THEY DON’T HAVE WEALTH; THAT’S WHY THEY A POOR.
Well if £300 BEEEELLION of transfers *still* hasn’t “solved” poverty, then nothing is going to, is it? So, job done, just accept reality and move on. It’s like saying “I’ve done everything possible, and I am *STILL* younger than my parents!”
“Poverty nowadays is a result of poor life choices. Of low intelligence…”
Not necessarily low intelligence but poor life choices certainly. I know people with a sound work ethic, who earn decent money, but are simply terrible at handling money. The kind of people that would win the lottery and end up broke again in five years time. We want to eliminate poverty, then what do we do with such people, make them wards of the state and run their lives for them?
The economy generates wealth for people who work; the government extracts wealth from people who work to transfer it to people in need and to the government’s favoured clients
Careful! The economy also generates wealth for people who don’t work if they are wealthy and allow their wealth to be put to productive uses.
People often view work (especially hard work) as a virtue, but the value is in the output – not the input.
“also …”
Yes, but primarily for those who work. Corporate profits *before tax* in total are about 10% of GDP, 25% goes in tax, about half the balance is invested, so dividends are only 3-4% of GDP and any amount over a low threshhold is subject to further tax so investors in total receive 3% or less while wages are 47% of GDP, fifteen times as much
I don’t see what corporate profits have to do with it. An individual can own one or more properties and let them to earn money while doing negligible work.
And you’re comparing dissimilar things. Corporate profits should be compared to personal profits. Wages are personal revenue – not profits.
Barbara Castle (bless her little cotton socks) announced 50 years ago that Labour had ended poverty. And she was right, but of course the poverty industry didn’t declare “job done” and look for something productive to do – they redefined poverty as “having less than someone else”, so that it can never go away.
If there are really children going to school hungry today, it can only be because either the state has fucked up (hard to believe, I know), or the parent(s) have fucked up – spending their benefits on scag and spending their days comatose on the sofa. Neither of these problems can be fixed by throwing more money at the wall.
A lot of ‘poverty’ in the uk is down to the definition of poverty. It’s arbitrary. Since it looks at after tax income, taxing the rich reduces the number living in poverty even if none of the tax ends up in the hands of the less well off.
…and taxing the rich so much that they leave reduces the mean and median incomes, so people at the bottom of the distribution scale would be “better off” (in relative terms) without an extra penny to their names.
As a friend has pointed out: Close down all the oil industry in Aberdeen, all the high-paying jobs vanish, the median income plummets, bingo! more of the population is *over* the 60% of Median Income, you’ve reduced poverty! By destroying jobs.
Destroy every job so that everybody is on the Dole, nobody is below the mean, wonderful, ZERO POVERTY!
Government gives a man a fish, so he stops fishing.
And his neighbour, seeing that free fish are available, stops fishing also…….monkey see, monkey do.