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| 5/19 |
| 2004/5/23-24 [Finance] UID:30383 Activity:insanely high |
5/22 This is related to the uneducated bus driver lawsuit post below.
What you believe, what values you hold, what you think is
right/wrong is really a reflection of how you were
raised up as a kid. What most of you don't realize is that
most people in this world never had a chance to have
the kind of social/economic background, education, and moral
values you grew up with that you take for granted. Should these
poor/uneducated people be treated with less respect because they
grew up in a hostile environment that fosters lying, cheating,
threats, and other traits that you deem negative, but allows
them to survive? Furthermore do you think it was their choice to
grow up in such an environment? If you take all the wonderful
things you've taken for granted, I bet you'd think and
do the exact same thing as these people too. So *please*,
have more empathy for those people who are less fortunate than
you. And PS while I think the bus driver is a bad person, the
self-righteous op is a total asshole and should just pay for
the damages because he has a bad attitude.
-guy who grew up poor, absolutely no sympathy for the op
\- just out of curiosity, does Affirmative Action
fill you with hate? How about legacy admissions?
Which do you hate more? --psb
\_ Whichever one takes up more spots from those who
earned a seat the hard way. You can add sports
admits to the list while you're at it.
\- well let's ask it this way, between A, B and C
who are identical except A is AlumniFamily,
B is Black and C is a BasketBall Center, how
do you rate A,B,C in terms of admission order?--psb
\_ DCBA, D=SES (ie poorness). C because it's kinda
like maintaining a part time job, then B
because A is worthless.
\_ I assign zero extra points to all three.
\_ I'd assign a little to the Basketball player
because he has less free time for academics
but managed the same grades, and he'll help the
school raise money. -!op, doesn't like sports.
\_ Sports are a talent, like art or dance,
and deserve to be recognized.
\_ Agreed, but they should not be valued
above academic achievement.
\_ says who? they are all equally
important. quit discrimintating!
\_ fuck no, you know there are other things that
take time from academics. basketball doesn't
make you a better person than a violinist or
whatever. or a video game junkie ;)
\_ I don't believe in the 'Tolkien Orc' theory of moral development.
I believe people have an intuitive understanding of right and wrong,
and growing up around immoral people does not, ultimately, excuse
immoral behavior. You are going to tell me I was better off in
lovely USSR than people here in inner cities? You don't know what
bad is. -- ilyas
\- while the circumstances of your upbringing do affect
your deportment and values, first of all, there is more
to it than "economic class". i suppose it is a bit of a
cliche but you dont need to buy into any kind of model
minority myth to appreciate many not-especually welloff
asian/indian children do have more "respect for authority",
whether that is school teachers or parents or elders in
general than those from certain other minotiries. next,
by the time you are in your 20s, especially if you left
your parents sphere for a cosmopolitan place like
berkeley, you have some additional factors to influence
independent development. third, why cultural factors
independent development. third, while cultural factors
may explain certain behaviors, it doenst necessarily
justify them ... relativism observed in sociology or
anthopology dont ness lead to philosophical relativism.
to use a "low" example, it may be the norm in chinese
dimsum places to push your way to the front rather
than take a number, but the macdonals practice of
lining up [one line or n?] is more "civilized". --psb
\_ So you're saying there's something wrong with black kids?
\_ I am sure you were better off growing up in the USSR than
\- the ones who push in front of you while you are in
the middle of a transaction at mcdonalds? yes. --psb
\_ I believe you were better off growing up in the USSR than
really poor people in America are. I don't think you realize
how violent and dangerous the Housing Projects really are.
Something like 1 in 5 young men end up injured or dead and
3 out of 4 in prison. -ausman
3 out of 4 in prison. Having said that, there are -ausman
3 out of 4 in prison. Having said that, there might be more
options or at least the notion of more options for poor
in the US. Poverty is almost as much a state of mind
as a physical condition, at least after the basic needs
are met. -ausman
\_ This is such bullshit. "Oh woe, I'm poor so it's ok that I
totally work the system to totally fuck over some other guy I
hit with my vehicle". Survive? What a bunch of total bullshit.
This isn't some hard scrabble third world nation where one must
kill to get food on the table that night. Our poor live better
than the middle-classes (when they exist) in other countries.
The op certainly should *not* have to pay his own damages that
were inflicted upon him by another party. The op can be the
biggest asshole in the universe but if he was wronged, in this
country, he has the legal right to seek justice. He has done
so. The bus driver made every effort to avoid justice and
thankfully the op was persistent and finally nailed him. Your
whole line of reasoning is insulting and offensive and holier
than thou. Being poor does not in any way relieve one of the
moral duties and obligations the rest of us have. It's called
"being responsible". There was a time I was so poor I couldn't
afford to eat. I owed more than I owned and was in desperate
need of a paycheck but I didn't go out and ruin other people's
lives over it. And, as if mattered, how do you know the bus
driver doesn't make more than the op? If the op is a student,
he's making nothing. Boo hoo, let's all reduce the standards
for poor people because they're subhuman and just can't hack it.
Let's feel superior to them and look down on them and make
exuses for them. Pity the poor and feel better about yourself
at the same time! What a grand philosophy!
\_ I agree with most of what you say but I still think that
calling someone pathetic for making $1600/month as a bus driver
is just wrong. You can call him whatever you want for wrongdoing
the OP but I don't see how making $1600/month through a hard
work automatically makes someone pathetic.
\_ It is obvious to me you have never really been poor and probably
don't even know any genuinely poor people. The middle class
in say, Mexico, have a much better life than poor people
in the US, even if their standards of living are comparable.
But I agree with you on the morality rant. I think that growing
up poor saved me from the materialism that afflicts to many
Americans.
\_ I agree with OP. I was kind of poor growing up and it had a
detrimental effect on my morality. Luckily some of my friends
parents were really good people and their example taught me to
try to be a good person. Furthermore, I'm sure I was much
better off than the 25% of children who lived under the poverty
line in 1994 (source Herbert, B. : "One in Four,"
The New York Times, 16 December 1996 cited from
http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/ams3/rich1.html This does not
mean that we should excuse criminal or anti-social behavior from
the poor. Instead, we should realize that if we want to reduce
crime and generally make society better for everyone we should
focus on the crippling effect of poverty on children. -!OP
\_ Being poor did not have a detrimental effect on your morality.
There are plenty of poor people with high moral standards. If
there weren't, the streets would be running in blood. You had
no morals because your parents didn't instill any in you. If
wealth == higher morals then why are so many rich people such
complete scumbags? There's no correlation between moral
standards and wealth. The effect of poverty on children is they
don't get enough decent food and are surrounded by drug dealers
who are often their own parents. If you want to reduce crime,
government handouts are not the answer. Instilling moral values
in people will increase moral standards, not government cheese
and section 8 housing.
\_ well, gov't cheese was a result of handouts for the rich.
Cheney got handouts for his pals at Haliburton. The rich have
been getting all kinds of handouts. I guess they earned it
by donating so much money for politicians like Bush, etc.
The moral of the story: milking the system happens at all
levels by every class and ethnicity.
\_ In Japan, kids are required to take ethics class. They're
taught to respect the elderly, to treat others the way
they like to be treated, to observe then act, etc etc.
While I know that many Japanese people still grow up to be
dirty scumbags, I think it really has some effect. Every
JTown in every city I've been to seems a lot cleaner than
Chinatown.
\_ For whatever reasons, Japan is a much more comformist
culture than China. |
| 5/19 |
|
| falcon.arts.cornell.edu/ams3/rich1.html Memo: Inequality in the United States Professor Anna Marie Smith The following is a summary of reports on the distribution of income and wealth in contemporary American society. There are of course substantial debates among academics about this data. This is the case, first of all, because the enormous and enduring gap between the rich and the poor in this country challenges the very foundation of cherished American ideals and raises serious moral questions. However, virtually every single one of the significant truth claims that are made in the social sciences are, by their very nature, subject to contestation. No data comes to us in its "natural" or "a-political" form; information is always already shaped by the frameworks that we necessarily use to make otherwise inaccessible forces comprehensible for us. Further, all frameworks -- especially the ones that are called "objective" and "scientific" in positivistic social science disciplinary discourse -- are always shaped by political struggles and diverse ethical and moral perspectives. The advanced student is encouraged to trace the figures cited here back to their sources and to investigate the controversies behind their conceptual definitions, statistical methods, and so on. Back to Anna Marie Smith's Home Page 1 Distribution of wealth -- general (Note: Income -- wages, salaries, etc. Any discussion of inequality must address the distribution of both income and wealth. The rate of increase was greatest for those families with the largest family income. Families with incomes between $10,000 and $100,000 enjoyed rates of increase in their net worth between 66% and 92% on average. In 1998, the net worth for families earning more than $100,000 was 432 times greater than the net worth for families earning less than $10,000 a year on average. Meanwhile, the share of wealth held by the bottom 80% fell by more than 20% between 1976 and 1989; by 1989, the bottom 80% of American families owned only 15% of the net worth in the US Financial net worth is distributed even more unequally: in 1989, the top 1 percent of families owned 48% of the total financial wealth; The holdings of those 500,000 families were worth $25 trillion in 1983. The holdings of those families grew by almost three times as much as the national debt grew during that same period. Those 500,000 families could have paid off the entire national debt, not just its growth, and still have owned 10% more wealth than they did in 1983." David Obey, The Nation, 8 April 1996, 7 More than 11 million American households had negative net worth in 1998. This was, therefore, a period in which income inequality tended to decrease. However, between 1978 and 1994, the real incomes of the poorest 20 percent declined 17 percent while those of the wealthiest 20 percent increased 18 percent. The average income for the top 20% of households increased 44% (in constant dollars) between 1968 and 1994, while that for the lowest 20% increased only 7%. In 1978: the typical CEO of a large corporation earned an income 60 times greater than that of an average worker; Earnings for the poorest fifth of American families rose less than 1% between 1988 and 1998 but jumped 15% for the richest fifth. The average family income for the poorest quarter of the population rose between 1989 and 1998 by 97%. However, average income only grew between 1995 and 1998 for families headed by individuals with at least some college education, and the rate of growth for non-white or Hispanic family income was lower than that for white non-Hispanic family income. The second quintile saw a 1% decrease in the US and a 4% decrease in New York. The third quintile saw a 5% increase in the US and a 4% increase in New York. The fourth quintile saw a 11% increase in the US and a 14% increase in New York. The wealthiest quintile enjoyed a 33% increase in the US and a 43% increase in New York. The richest five percent of the population saw even greater increases: 55% in the US and 67% in New York. For the people who did fall below the poverty line in 1999 and 2000, their incomes were so low that they fell further below this figure than in any other year since record-keeping began in 1979. Experts attributed the unprecedented drop in their incomes to cuts in food stamps and cash assistance programs, and to the declining participation in poverty programs as a whole. As much as 10% of income taxes is lost every year because of mis-reporting, evasion or fraud. Approximately thirty percent of the homeless are alcoholics and about a quarter of the homeless are addicted to crack. Some homeless individuals have histories of both mental illness and alcohol and drug abuse. On the other hand, the poor are more likely to get sick, while the people with the worst illnesses are more likely than others to be poor. In 1995, about 22% of households with an income of less than $15,000 reported fair or poor health, while only approximately 4% of households with an income of $50,000 or more did so. Across the world, about 70 percent of variation in national life expectancies can be explained in terms of differences in income. The Center for Disease Control estimates that as many as one in every fifty of black men was infected with the HIV virus in 2001, as compared to one in every 160 for black women; As a result, greater inequalities in the distribution of wealth can lead to a decrease in health for the population as a whole. Wealth inequality, and not simply the prevalence and depth of poverty alone, can become a major factor in terms of a decline in health indicators. The study also suggested that a map of schools attended by the average black or Hispanic student would almost perfectly match a map of high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools have a "more transient student bodies, fewer teachers qualified in their subject areas, parents lacking political power, more frequent health problems among students and lower test scores." In those decades, the gap in the test scores of the wealthy and the poor decreased by 50%. Key indicators such as teacher qualifications, expenditure per student, and student-teacher ratios indicate that there is a massive difference between the quality of education received by children in low poverty areas and that received by children in high poverty areas; and different levels of student performance correspond directly to these key indicators. Educational performance and occupational success are governed mainly by family background and non-school factors. Black/white income inequality Young blacks and young whites were equally likely to hold jobs in the 1950s, even in the segregated South. However, young blacks' hourly wages were roughly one-third less than that for white youths. By the late 1960s, this pay gap decreased to less than 10%, but the proportion of black youths who held jobs fell sharply. From the 1960s to the late 1990s, employment rates among young blacks in urban centers continued to decrease, and the pay gap between white youths and black youths peaked at more than 20% in the early 1990s. Throughout this period, black median household income was 58% that of white median household income. Average family income before tax for non-whites or Hispanics also grew by 8% from $31,100 to $33,500. However, average family income for white non-Hispanic families was 18 times greater than for non-whites or Hispanics in 1998. Average family net worth for non-whites or Hispanics also increased 23% from $82,500 to $101,700. In 1998, however, average white non-Hispanic family net worth was 33 times greater than for non-whites or Hispanics. About 60% of all African-Americans live in communities with abandoned toxic waste sites. In these boom areas, 74% of the total population of youths who were neither in school nor in prison was employed in 1992. Black youths who were neither in school nor in prison were also more likely to be employed, and the increase in the proportion of black youths employed was actually more significant than that for whites and youths as a whole: 52% of black youths held jobs in 1992 while 64% did so in 1998. Again, the employment rate for all youths incre... |