Poverty - How to Be Poor (1st of 3)

How to Be Poor, Get Poor, and Stay Poor

The Underclass in America

　

The earnings level for a family of four to be considered living in poverty is $22,350. For a single person it is $10,890. Try living on that and you will discover that poverty is a very tough place to be. A four-person household with one wage earner making $10.75/hr. for 40 hrs./wk qualifies for the poverty level. A minimum wage job pays $7.25/hr.

So why are people poor and what can be done about it, if anything?

　

How to Be Poor

You don’t have to do anything to be poor because the fastest and easiest way to be poor is to be born into it. If being born into wealth is simple, so is being born into poverty. The best family situation to assist you into poverty is to be born to a single mother. If that is not possible, aim for a family whose members are already financially poor and poorly educated.¹

Being born poor does not mean you will stay poor, it only improves your chances. The same is true of being born rich. People rise form poverty and fall from wealth. It happens. Being born poor significantly hurts your odds of achieving prosperity.

The other way to be poor is to be born stupid. This isn’t a mean-spirited remark, it is simply a cold fact. The intelligence of the population is distributed along a bell-shaped curve with smart people at the high end and dumb people at the low end. This is why education only helps some people in poverty. You need a certain amount of raw brain power to benefit from it. The degree of training needed for decent paying jobs is beyond the grasp of a significant segment of the population. In a complex and technological society, having minimal brainpower condemns you to a low-skilled, low-paying job. Low-paying jobs equal poverty-level living.

Besides intelligence, there are many personal traits that are inherent from birth. People vary on their degree of initiative, persistence, organization, risk taking, frustration tolerance, and ability to delay gratification. Granted, some aspects of these can be enhanced or diminished, but a person’s inclinations on these makes up a portion of his core personality. Some personalities are more poverty prone than others. If intelligence or physical prowess is the raw horsepower for success, then personality is the steering mechanism that applies it successfully - or not.

Among the intrinsically poor portion of the population are the severely handicapped. Without family, government, or charitable support, these people would live and die in poverty. Even with support, they are not likely to be far above it.

Since the population will always have people with low intelligence, physical disabilities, and poverty-prone personalities (unless we resort to the genetic engineering of the species), there will always be poor people. Since there will always be poor people, there will always be children born into poor families. These children will become part of a never-ending supply of poor people. The potential for poverty is a problem that can never be eliminated; it can only be controlled.

What can be done is to mitigate the effects of poverty and provide opportunity for those with the ability and initiative to rise out of it so there is not a permanent, hereditary underclass in society. DNA being what it is, poor people can have smart kids who can escape poverty if their environment does not prevent it. Unfortunately, the environment typically works against this possibility. America today looks ever more stratified. Smart, educated, well-off people live together, marry, and have children (in that order). These kids have the best inherent environmental prospects for success. Under-educated, less intelligent, poorer people live together have kids, and don’t marry (in that order). They produce children who are disadvantaged across-the-board from the outset.

¹ The national poverty rate among families headed by a person with less than a high school education is 24%, for those with some college education it is 7% and for those with at least a bachelor’s degree it is 2%.

If parents have low education levels, full-time employment does not protect their families from poverty. Nationally, nearly three-quarters (73%) of children whose parents do not have a high school degree live in low-income families, compared with only 15% of children whose parents have at least some college education.http://fightpoverty.mmbrico.com/reasons/educational.html