We have a strong safety net. Why doesn’t it always work? Why doesn’t it keep everyone out of poverty?
If we just spend enough money and make the safety net big enough, will that end poverty? Or will people make decisions that keep them in poverty no mater how much money we spend on the safety net?
Is there a magic bullet or recipe that can help someone escape poverty? Turns out: there is. Economic researchers who study poverty have found 3 choices people make that almost entirely determine whether they escape poverty or remain in poverty.
The good news for those in poverty is that the power to improve their lives is entirely in their hands.
The bad news for those in poverty is that the power to improve their lives is entirely and only in their hands.
This gets right to the heart of the discussion about the solution to poverty, and whether “taxing the wealthy a little bit more” as Jamie Dimon says is actually the cure.
Here I explore some of the questions from my last post about the idea that “taxing the wealthy a little bit more” will cure or substantially reduce poverty and the hardships faced by the poor.
Should there be a social safety net?
Does everyone agree that there should be a safety net?
What causes someone to be poor? The answer could be that you’re born poor. In that case it’s easy to determine.
But not everyone who is poor now was born poor. If that’s the case, what are the factors that caused them to move from say the middle class down the economic ladder?
What keeps them poor? Is it primarily a lack of money? Or is it personal choices, culture, and family?
Some people, many people in fact, do escape poverty, so it clearly is possible. How do they do it? Do social welfare and government programs get them out of poverty? Or is it their own choices and lifestyles, over the long haul?
What’s the difference between successful cultures, families, and individuals, and unsuccessful ones?
Would you like to know the answer to this question? Well, I’ll tell you!
In my last video, I addressed comments made by JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon that he would tax the wealthy “a little bit more” to alleviate the problems of the poor. I asked and addressed who he means by “The Wealthy” who should be taxed more to solve these problems.
Here I address whether money is actually the solution for the problems that the poor face, and whether his premise even makes sense or is accurate.
Here is the testimony of an economic expert who studies poverty that lists the three-pronged “cure” for poverty mentioned in my video.
This is a long, dense read, that I don’t necessarily recommend taking the time for, but here is a very important nugget from this testimony that is quite frankly the “Magic Bullet” for poverty that we’ve been looking for. I find it strange that these three factors are virtually unknown to anyone and almost never talked about. We should be talking about them constantly if we want to help people make their lives better and reduce overall poverty. Everyone in America, especially all politicians and policymakers, as well as people who are interested in politics, society, and the good of mankind should know and talk about these three factors whenever helping the poor and alleviating poverty come up.
Strategies to Reduce Poverty
Although the dramatic increase in federal spending has not led to an overall reduction in the nation’s poverty rate, at least two strategies have been successful in reducing poverty within specific demographic groups. Both should be considered major successes of the nation’s social policy and both could be extended. The first is to give money to people who are not expected to work and the second is to use welfare policy to strongly encourage work and then to subsidize earnings because so many of the poor have low skills and often cannot earn enough to escape poverty.
Before reviewing these and other strategies for reducing poverty, I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. My Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I have spent years emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility in reducing poverty and increasing opportunity. One of our arguments, based in part on a Brookings analysis of Census Bureau data, is that young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2 percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77 percent and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4 percent. [25] Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation’s struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.
Here is a discussion about some other aspects of poverty from the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell.
Here is a blog post where I talk about the value of economic thinking generally, as a way to see things more clearly on a topic like this.
Yesterday I saw a video of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recommending taxing the wealthy more to help the poor so that they can have better schools, health care, and so on.
But who exactly does he mean? Who are “The Wealthy?”
Him, of course. But who else?
Your doctor? Your lawyer? Your dentist? Your plumber? You?
I explore who is or who should be described as “wealthy” both logically and morally, and for tax and policy purposes.
How would you define who is “wealthy?” Someone who makes $100,000 a year? $200,000 a year? $400,000 a year? A million?
Or does annual income matter less than net worth and assets?
What if your salary is $1 a year but you hold $1 billion in stock? Who’s wealthier, you or the lawyer making $500,000 a year?
Should the lawyer who makes $200,000 a year be taxed as much as Jeff Bezos? Should the couple working 80 hours a week and making $400,000 a year combined be taxed like a billionaire who never has to work again? Should we treat income earners of any kind like those with high net worth and assets?
Who counts as “wealthy?”
People say “Tax the wealthy” as a shorthand for fixing social problems and helping the poor.
But who are “The Wealthy?”
Is a 200k professional “The Wealthy” to be taxed like Wall Street millionaires?
I have developed a new economic law, called Shane’s Law.
Shane’s Law states that as the size of a company increases, the likelihood of woke DEI infrastructure and culture increases, until it reaches absolute certainty.
For example: you can have a small, 3-man construction company or consulting company (sorry ladies, we only hire men), and it doesn’t have to be woke or have any DEI components to its business practices or its culture.
And you can scale this up until a certain point, but only with small businesses. Once you reach a certain level of mid-sized business, it becomes extremely difficult to avoid corporate wokeness and DEI. In fact, it may be near impossible based on certain social, regulatory, and economic factors.
There are mid-sized businesses that do not have this, but they may largely or mostly be explicitly political, conservative organizations. I’m not sure if it’s possible for a mid-sized widget company to not be woke and incorporate DEI in today’s climate, they’re certainly trying to make it so it’s not.
For large businesses, it seems like it actually IS impossible to not be culturally woke and institute DEI practices, based on the aforementioned social, regulatory, and economic factors, all of which increase dramatically for large companies.
If charted, this economic law of woke DEI probability does not graph linearly, but in a stepwise fashion, exploding upward drastically at certain key points, like being big enough to fall under certain employment law regulations, reaching the size of needing an HR department, and going public.
For fun: can you think of any large companies that are not culturally woke and do not have a DEI infrastructure? Any mid-sized ones?
This post brought to you by me arguing with a friend over whether it’s possible to live your life and make money working in an industry or in a company that doesn’t have DEI bullshit, and whether you can make a living without bending the knee. Basically whether you can avoid living under the Woke Religion or not. This was my thought.
15 years ago today, I lost my father at age 60 to lung cancer. I had just graduated from Harvard Law School and started working at a firm in New York. My life from starting in a trailer park was about to turn around and shoot to the stars.
My father’s death made me realize that life is too fucking short, and I’m not here to be miserable, but to try to be happy. I left my lucrative New York law firm life to play guitar and live in poverty in New Orleans, to pursue the kind of life I want, the world be damned.
I had a lot of friends and loved my classmates and coworkers, but in a lot of ways, I never fit in with them. And outside of them, as a general rule, the world of moneyed New Yorkers was full of the most abominable people I could imagine, so while I loved my friends (and still do), I found the general culture I was in to be despicable and full of shitty, shallow people I didn’t want to be around.
The day my dad died, I walked from my apartment in Long Island City, across the 59th street bridge, and up to my alma mater, Columbia, where I had the best years of my life, and where I saw my first glimpse of an intellectual life. It was a perfect, sunny day, great for reflection. My best friend Brandon was with me all day. I remember sitting in my apartment waiting for him to arrive as I stared out the window in the morning. I remember my dad’s wife calling me around 5:30 in the morning to tell me he had died. I remember calling my mom and telling her “I don’t have a dad anymore.”
That was a shit day. And in a strange turn of life, I thought that was the culmination of shitty things that could happen to me, but it was just the beginning of some of the hardest, most struggling years of my life.
Life has a way…of humbling you. I was knocked right off my high horse about who I was and where my life was going.
I don’t have a nice ending to wrap up this story, but this experience is certainly one of many that shattered my ego, humbled me, and made me see life as a journey rather than a culmination of goals or accomplishments. The universe can take everything away from you in a second, you better believe that. And more than likely you’ll find out someday, if you haven’t already. Pray that you’re strong enough to endure it, and that you learn the best lessons you can from it.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about Marvel movies these days.
The hip, artsy, film critic-y thing to say is that this is such a boooring fad, that’s long since run its course and outstayed its welcome. I know these movies aren’t for everyone, but I find that to be a bit pretentious. A genre will certainly run its course, but I think that’s more because it gradually becomes culturally irrelevant or outdated, while at the same time, the writers run out of new ways to express the genre, and interesting things to say about it. Eventually they wring out every lesson about human nature a genre has to offer.
The best examples of this are westerns and gangster movies. The Old West simply lost its hold on the cultural imagination over the years, as America solidified itself as a “settled” country, and as new generations lost touch with prior generations who still had a settler mentality. Stories about exploring the country, facing danger in the unknown wild, and moving west would have been real and vibrant to people born in the 1920s or 1930s (or even earlier) who were making and watching movies in the 1950s and 60s. They would likely have recent family lore of both immigration and settlement across the country, perhaps from parents, but especially from grandparents and great-grandparents, the latter of which they would probably have much more contact with than we do today considering the age at which people married and had children. But at some point, these stories slowly faded from firsthand tellings and from the personal relevance to subsequent generations of Americans, particularly youths. And the western as a genre slowly died.
Speaking of da yutes, these same yutes who grew up on westerns went on to create and consume a new version of a previously establish genre, one with just as much action and daring as the western: gangster movies. As with westerns, at this time in America, this was a whole new world to be explored for cinema, for American culture, and for dramatic arts. These new filmmakers would completely change the gangster genre, from stories designed for cheap matinee thrills, to deeply personal examinations of human frailty, ego, and evil that were positively Greek or Shakespearean in depth and scope.
Two pieces of context are important for understanding this moment: artists were mining a new and exciting avenue of storytelling, and the mob was at that time a very real and powerful force in many parts of American society, especially in certain major cities. It was not even a recent historical artifact, as the Old West had been. It was a then-happening, currently extant reality for many people and in important parts of our society. Don’t believe me? Just ask renowned scholar and historian, Joey Diaz.
I heard the ghosts of gangsters past rattling around the city while living in New York in the 2000s. People would tell me stories about how back in the 70s every so often someone would find a body in the trunk of a car in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, or someone would point out that a famous mob hit happened at this restaurant in my neighborhood in Queens. I would hear stories of phone calls saying “We know where your kids go to school” when you ran for local office.
But, like the Old West, the mob eventually ran its course and faded from prominence in American culture and memory. To be sure, there are still job opportunities in “waste disposal” in places like New Jersey, and long-standing structures of mob corruption exist in some cities and their governments, but by and large, the modernization of society and anti-corruption efforts by people like Rudy Giuliani in the 1980s and 90s wiped out the true power of the mob as we know it and understand it. At the same time, the creative well ran dry, and there were only so many variations that even our most talented filmmakers could conjure from the types of characters and situations present in a gangster movie. In any genre, there are only so many stories you can tell.
So where do we stand inside the creative well of the modern genre of superhero movies, which to be fair really only means Marvel movies? Are we near the bottom? Have we already plunged through the ground only to not realize it yet?
I suppose I may be biased since I grew up on Marvel comics and basically learned how to read with them, but I honestly don’t see the well drying up yet, or any time soon. Here are my reasons.
First, their popularity is not attached to, and therefore not contingent upon, certain artifacts of history or culture that are tied to a particular time, that will recede as the reality of those artifacts or events fade into history. Superhero stories are not tied to reality in the same way that westerns and gangster movies were. They are not calling back historical memories or family myths, or exploring truths about social forces that exist in the real world. They are more representative of timeless stories of heroes, bravery, and morality. They call back to the most ancient stories of finding the hero within you, standing strong in the face of terrible odds, and of facing evil. In that sense, I think they are relatively timeless.
Another reason I believe the well has not yet run dry is that I am intimately familiar with a huge swath of the classic Marvel canon, and simply from a storytelling perspective, I can assure you that there is an almost limitless supply of fantastic storylines in these comics that filmmakers can draw from, both in terms of stories for one hero or team that would make excellent movies, and in terms of long-term, multi-movie crossover stories, from the Mutant Massacre to Inferno to The Age Of Apocalypse to Onslaught (and that’s just the X-Men). I never miss an opportunity to point out that I have the first comic that introduced Thanos’s quest for the Infinity Gauntlet, where a confused and helpless Silver Surfer spent the issue listening to a philosophical monologue about the moral virtue of wiping out half the life in the universe, and gave us a terrifying glimpse of what that would look like, turning the Surfer into an unwitting accomplice in a planetary genocide. I collected every issue of The Infinity Gauntlet and every crossover issue in the Marvel universe in real time, and seeing that saga come to life on screen is definitely my peak experience as a film and comics nerd.
Lest I digress too much, my point is simply that Marvel has created a bottomless well of deep and interesting stories to tell that can be translated onscreen. And that is not even to mention the stories and characters screenwriters can develop on their own from the existing universe and source material.
This actually leads me to the one thing that I think could halt the cultural success of Marvel movies, and that would be what appears to be a drastic and alarming decrease in the writing skills of today’s Hollywood writers. This is a topic that deserves its own essay from someone much more qualified to write it than me, but the gist is that the quality and depth of storytelling in Hollywood, not just at Marvel, is on a drastic decline the last few years, with no signs of abating. On the contrary, it seems to be accelerating.
There are a lot of institutional and historical reasons for it, but the main thrust seems to be that screenwriters as a talent pool are coming from an increasingly homogeneous background, with ever less life experience as a whole, and with less diverse life experiences than ever. Artists as a class, whether musicians, screenwriters, authors, or anything else, in past decades came from all manner of wild and interesting backgrounds, having lived all kinds of crazy lives before becoming full-time artists. This variety of experience meant that they brought to the table not just those experiences, but the characters, situations, and lessons from those experiences, plus just the originality that interesting life experiences allow you to draw from. It just gives you a larger, deeper canvas of creative ideas and human depth to draw from to make your art. It gives you more to create, and deeper emotions to create it with. Writers in Hollywood, like other artists, were often weirdos with weird lives, and weird stories to tell.
Today the trend is that these writers are cookie-cutter, upper middle class kids from boring yet stable homes, whose parents raised them in good neighborhoods and sent them to expensive private schools. While that may indeed be what you want for your own kids or for your accountants and lawyers, it’s definitely not what you want for your artists. It’s just not the kind of experience that leads one to have really deep or interesting insights about mankind or human nature. It’s not the kind of background that teaches you about the tragedies and triumphs of life, about the highs and lows of human emotions, about the great and terrible things people can do to each other. It’s just not a way to learn about the profound aspects of life and being a human being. To do that, you need to live some sort of life of adventure, to experience loss, tragedy, or disaster. If you’re going to write about heroes, it probably helps to have experienced fear and bravery in your life. If you’re going to write about villains, it probably helps to have met some. All this is just beyond the experience of most people writing in Hollywood today, and it shows. It shows in the shallowness of their heroes, their villains, and their stories.
If anything is going to kill Marvel, it’s going to be this.
As for me, while I still remain a huge Marvel and comic book nerd, I’m agnostic as to whether any new movie is a “superhero movie” or a “Marvel movie.” I don’t think it makes much sense to have a strong opinion about whether you want to see another one of “those kinds of movies.” I always want to see another good Marvel movie. The stories are varied enough to provide a near endless supply of compelling movies. The only question that matters is whether or not the next movie is a “good” Marvel or superhero movie. I believe we are indeed getting fewer of them, and right now I’m not sure if that trend will continue, or continue to accelerate.
I came to the conclusion years ago that the quality of a movie depends almost entirely on the writing. If Marvel makes an effort to course correct and focus on quality writing, and finding interesting, quality writers, than perhaps there is still hope for the MCU.
If not, well, you know what they say: “In Hollywood, no one can hear you scream.”
The last couple of days I’ve been thinking a lot about how when I got out of the army in 1998, I had this huge goal and fantasy of being in Times Square for the millennial, either from 1999-2000, or from 2000-2001, perhaps (hopefully) celebrating a move and living there. I had no conceivable way to get to New York, nothing in front of me or in my world that would make me think that I might be there in any way, for any reason. But I fantasized about this constantly for 2 years, I don’t know why, I just WANTED it, to the bottom of my soul. I was obsessed with this idea that I knew wouldn’t come true. I lived my life the best I could, not in the slightest trying to plot and scheme to get to New York, just doing the best I could living my life day by day, in each moment.
And on December 28th, 2000, I moved to New York. 3 days later, I celebrated New Year’s in Times Square ringing in 2001, one block from that magical, glittering ball. Sometimes dreams do come true. I feel blessed to have had a couple of mine come true, and for New York City being one of them. It was as much of a transformative, life defining experience as I hoped it would be. Thank you, Universe.
Here’s to a blessed New Year to you all. May we all have a few dreams come true. And may some of them be as big as New York.
We all have a lot to be grateful for. Not only for what these men did, but that by the grace of god we are living through our times instead of theirs.
Whenever you think times are hard, society is collapsing, and the end of the world is near, just remember that people have thought that before…but they were much more right, and had far more reason.
Perspective is vital to understanding your life and society. That is why we all should study history.
Today. the world marks 104 years since the end of WWI.
Happy Veterans Day. Here is a movie I can’t recommend enough. I saw it in the theater when it came out. Powerful and moving don’t even begin to describe it. Real footage, of real men, often in their last moments on earth.
This is as good as it gets for film to convey history and historical meaning. Watch this movie, and take a moment to be grateful for how good you have it, because of men like this.
Symposium 