re: #276 SanFranciscoZionist

Exceptional or lucky people can make their way out of poverty. But that doesn’t change the basic suck-you-down-in-the-mud nature of poverty.

This is, I think, a particularly good point. It touches on a phenomenon that is often misinterpreted: luck.

Given a pool of N people, finding the subset M (which may have only 1 element) and then trying to base a conclusion on that subset M while under appreciating the N-M remainder.

For every Bill Cosby there are dozens to hundreds of black men who have ended up in perpetual poverty and/or prison.

Yes, Cosby and other success stories are inspirations but that does not mean that others will necessarily be able to end up like the “winners”.

Certainly the destruction of a healthy family unit plays the key role in what we see in so many places of poverty across this country. Yet I don’t see how to reconstruct those communities with any simple prescription, though many are written about.

“Culture” is a squishy concept, and whole academic fields spend mental effort in trying to understand it.

What works in one place doesn’t necessarily work in another, with a different set of people in a different geography.

I came from a very poor family… and I did not end up rich. Yet I also did not end up like so many in my childhood neighborhood, caught in no-future jobs and victims of alcoholism, etc. Some of us just get by without any great glory but also without ending up in a prison or in perpetual rehab.