[lulmerchant]

I don’t disagree with most of that. The loan shark maths is just one (rather contrived) example of how a person can break out of a particular poverty trap.

It’s harder to break out of a poverty trap than it is to live with one, but it’s much easier to stay out of one than it is to live with it. My point is that with the correct effort, people can generally break free of most of the poverty traps they find themselves in.

To speak to your last point, there generally are non-profits around who help with these sort of things, and I used some of them myself in the past. The thing that non-profits can provide so simply is the motivation and discipline required to maintain a well planned budget. Each small thing that you improve, like buying diapers in bulk, is a step towards escaping poverty, and everybody has the capacity to do those things.

[mercer]

> My point is that with the correct effort, people can generally break free of most of the poverty traps they find themselves in.

I find 'correct effort' to rather deceptive term, because part of the problem is defining what that would be (and your example failed as a 'correct' one).

Furthermore, I'd say a cursory glance at history shows that what you're saying is not true. Slaves did not just free themselves, the working class did not just obtain the many rights all enjoy by themselves, women did not just gain voting rights and all that jazz by themselves, and all this applies to gays and the mentally disabled too.

I'm not arguing against 'correct effort', clearly many poor, slaves, women and gays fought hard. The crucial bit here is that they did so collectively, that they needed a lot of help from those who were not in their situation, and that a big part of this involved effecting political change.

I've never heard a convincing argument that somehow we're now in a completely different situation, and that somehow now the steps one can take as an individual are 'correct action', even if of course they can't hurt.

It strikes me that this focus on the individual is somehow a problem on both ends of the political spectrum. The one side devolves into perhaps too much identity politics, and the other too much into the "we'd all be fine if we just worked harder on ourselves".

Both sides, meanwhile, seem to prefer to paint the other side as being will-fully <insert shitty ism>, when I think we're all really mostly equally shitty and good, probably partly right, and really we should just be mad at the immense inequality that has left us mis-directing our anger at each other.

Broadly speaking, anyways.

[lulmerchant]

People aren’t property any more, we all have equal protection under the law, we have mostly reliable social welfare programs, and private charitable programs are bigger than they’ve ever been. Your analogy doesn’t hold any water at all.

The correct effort is simply whatever a person can do to make incremental improvements to their lives. It’s going to be different for everybody. Psychologically, part of the reason that poverty traps are so easy to fall into is because people in poverty don’t have the luxury of indulging in much long term decision making. However some opportunity always exists, and finding an exploiting those opportunities is the only way out.

The reason there is any focus on the individual is because you can’t simply subsidize out of poverty. If you want people to get out of poverty and to stay out of poverty, then those people need to take responsibility for their own destiny. Arguably society could do a better job of giving people the tools to do that, but that doesn’t change the dynamics of the problem. The truth is that if I was in that persons shoes, I’d be living a better life than they are. Because I was, and I managed to, and those skills eventually got me completely out of poverty all together.