[imacomputertoo]

The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.

I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?

I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.

The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly.

Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.

I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.

We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.

[sabarn01]

The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population.

When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.

[mortify]

>making it harder for people to fail at adulting

That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.

Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.

[mbesto]

> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care

The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?

Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.

[gentleman11]

If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now

[richardlblair]

It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization.

I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).

I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.

I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.

1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')

2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.

3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.

4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.

You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.

These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.

(edit - formatting)

[no-dr-onboard]

> Teach conflict resolution skills to young children.

This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged children because we neglect to introduce them to their inherent agency in conflict.

There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say about you isn't either. Again, these should come from parents.

[anon291]

Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery.

> Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.

No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being murdered / assaulted means stores close down.

There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing what we're doing. Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.

That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls seem uncalled for given the data.

[jtriangle]

Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed them to really make it in life instead of being stuck in the system. Weirdly, after some initial trouble that looked impossible to overcome, it was very simple to get them placed into our home, and, very simple to get them in with a relative. Most of that was the workings of the social worker assigned to them, who was hard to reach out to, and very clearly over worked.

Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your points.

I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who already struggle with math.

Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly should be done, is to create interactions between the kids who have poor situations with the kids that have good situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support to have a system where kids from the good side of town interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side product of the kids who have better situations being able to socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy, person to person.

[bccdee]

I'd love it if the government would throw resources at the problem, though. People act as if we're already flushing huge amounts of cash down the toilet of socialized benefits, but the fact is that the government has been extremely laissez-faire for decades. The midcentury boom was characterized by extensive intervention and public spending. There are much worse ways combat poverty than simply giving people public works jobs building the houses they need. Even direct cash transfers massively reduce the burden of poverty.

[fyrepuffs]

That's because Canada has safety nets for people. They have affordable healthcare and places to turn to if you're out of work and need assistance. It's because Canada is a compassionate society. It doesn't take this down right mean attitude of a "f-u" you're poor because it's your fault.

[nurple]

I'm 2 generations from immigrants on one side, 2 from pioneers and 1 from blue-collared work on the other. I wish more people could empathize with those who struggle within poverty as it is an incredibly hard row to hoe, not just physically, but also mentally.

I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.

I do like your thoughts on things the government could change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these things but have perverse incentives to keep the population stratified. This country would financially crumble without the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7 generations, if not more.

I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is actually a primary component of most govs immigration strategies.

[wiz21c]

I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too.

Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...

[thegrim33]

You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost.

To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.

[anon291]

I dunno as someone who grew up with relatives who have been trapped in these cycles, I do think some of it is a choice. I realize people are affected by all kinds of things, but when things are given to you and you have no interest, it's hard to see that as anything but what it is.

But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.

[richardlblair]

I fully agree. OP also ignores the compounded returns. If you lift a person out of poverty you immediately set their children up for better outcomes.

[willmadden]

Interesting. Would you agree that not everyone is the same? How about that not everyone is a "good person" by nature?

[constantcrying]

Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay money so these programs exist. How would I feel better in any way? I certainly do not.

>Give a job or a good life to anybod

This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.

>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to

Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.

[hammock]

>The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced.

That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:

Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.

The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.

[Glyptodon]

I do think the trend towards single parent and dual income homes makes all these things harder for parents. Clearly standard of living issues from lack of real income growth effectively filter down through parents into more of these adverse events.

[James_K]

Exactly, and I've always said the same thing about murderers. Why should we pay for police to catch murderers when the murderers could just not murder? This seems like a matter of individual, rather than collective responsibility. If they don't murder, it is better for us, better for them, and better for their victims. Why should we have to protect the victims of murderers when murderers could simply not kill people?

Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime. It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect the vulnerable from those who might harm them.

[Ntrails]

We have largely moved away from anything so crass as holding parents responsible

[nurple]

Do you realize that having the time and resources for those things is a privilege that many in poverty don't have?

[maxerickson]

And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?

This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.

For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.

[lazyasciiart]

There are lots of interventions that show massive returns on investment in social welfare: a recent one has been extended availability of support for teenagers aging out of foster care, that takes their outcomes from something like "percentage who have become homeless within one year of their 18th birthday" from 70% down to 30%, and similar for arrest records and pregnancy among girls.

But, sadly, many people feel morally injured by spending money to proactively help adults who should be eating their own boots or whatever, and so it is less of a sacrifice to spend 5 times the money on jailing them instead.

[perfectritone]

Unfortunately it's not all economics. The prison system in the US exerts its power on the population using fear. The goal is to have a certain amount of people in prison, not to save money by getting them out. There are myriad ways to achieve reducing the prison population if that was the goal.

[skrbjc]

The argument of the data seems to say we should put resources towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood.

But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improvement units" per dollar?

Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"

[12907835202]

If you haven't already look up John Rawls he's probably the most famous person who has argued for helping the worst off.

Of course reading his books would be the best source but for now here's a link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc

[bumby]

>Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off"

I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to split and one was allowed to determine the split and the other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing. A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because of a sense of being slighted.

[gowld]

It depends entirely on how you define utility.

Making rich people happier makes me more unhappy that it makes them more happy, so by your calculus it's not worth helping them.

See how quickly this line of reasoning runs aground?

[mortify]

The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.

The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?

[ErigmolCt]

I think this conclusion should encourage people to think about the current problem and how childhood can influence success in adulthood

[cycomanic]

> The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.

> I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?

What do you mean huge number of people in many adverse experiences making it to college? If you look at the graph from 2011 with highest qualification obtained. There's probably less than 1 in 8 of the many adverse effects that obtained a college degree, while about 50% of the no adverse effects kids did. Those are huge differences.

Did you expect that none of the many adverse effects kids make it to college? That's the nature of statistics with humans, yes some succeed but the probabilities are so much different.

[ClumsyPilot]

> how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?

Thats the wrong question -

How many adolescents and citizens of the future are we willing to sacrifice for our comfort today.

It will come back to byte us in the ass, condemn adolescents to life of poverty today, and get lost productivity, crime and political instability.

Push it far enough and get French Revolution

[colonelpopcorn]

You have to balk when anyone says that anybody is the same person they were 24 years ago.

[erikerikson]

You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.

[jf22]

A big part of what makes a person is their unique collection of experiences.

You can be the same person but different because of those experiences.

[__MatrixMan__]

Whether it counts as a collective sacrifice would sort of depend how it balances against the benefits of living among a population with a lower desparate/safe ratio. It may well be a collective investment instead.

[0xbadcafebee]

In every society, taxes and government are the lens used to focus collective social responsibility and direct actions that will benefit the society as a whole, and individually. Even in a collectivist society, some work is done to benefit a small group of individuals when it's deemed necessary by the society. And in an individualist society, effort is also undertaken to benefit the whole.

The questions you pose are good questions, but they can't be answered by this presentation. Even if you were to ask a much more "fundamental" or "simple" question, like "How much should we sacrifice for sanitation?", the answer is not clear, as it will vary by location and other criteria.

This presentation can't answer the questions, but it can cause us to ask them. Let's remember these questions and take them forward into our local communities, and try to focus more on local solutions, and less on one-size-fits-all.

[tomrod]

This highlights what Judea Pearl's causal framework gets at: Pr(Y|X) versus Pr(Y|do(X)), where we can set early.

Causality isn't easy to establish. Correlation is insufficient.

Note, too, I am unfamiliar with the literature cited by the Infoanimatedgraphic.

[komali2]

> And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice

If we bring back wealth taxes "we" probably wouldn't have to sacrifice much if anything (not sure if your net worth is > 20 million)

[computerdork]

Yeah, agree with you that if they used percentages - it would have been much easier to see - disagree with you about what their data is implying. Think it clearly shows that those with less adverse experiences have more success in life.

Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.

And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe 30% for multiple adverse experiences.

... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting that the older they get, the less the differences in income and other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.

[fergie]

The classic answer to that question would be to move to a more Scandinavian model.

[ransom1538]

I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves. The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real and making decisions.

[jeppester]

How would you interpret the results then? That there's a correlation between lying in the survey and doing worse in life?

[wyre]

This isn’t a jr high survey. This is a study of select individuals over decades.

[theicfire]

I had very similar takeaways, you said it well!

[AndrewKemendo]

The person in the story might has well have been me

- I repeated 7th grade

- Was suspended Multiple times

- Lived in 11 different houses

- Lived with a teacher for two months

- Good friend murdered

- Mom of good friend murdered by their Father

- Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly

I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I got out

What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.

Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being that way?

No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So unless you believe government = collective community then there’s nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen and conservatives keep standing on our necks

[bglazer]

I mean you did join a government organization that provided a (more or less) guaranteed job and training.

Also, this is a genuine question, how much of the chaos in your life was due to financial hardship? Do you think just having more money would have lessened the chaos?

[coldtea]

>The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?

What exactly would we be "collectively sacrificing"?

Something like, 1% higher taxes?

Same taxes, but the use of some of the public money currently massively wasted in all kinds of endless sinks?