Cut in food stamps will hit retailers

[conuly]

One in five U.S. households is on food stamps, and many people could be rattled as their benefits are chopped.

I hate the phrase "is on food stamps". Why not simply "uses" food stamps or "needs" or "receives" food stamps instead? "Is on" makes food stamps sound vaguely like drugs.

http://lat.ms/HzPVV7

So here is one of the top level comments for that article, reproduced in all its vicious glory:

Liberals like to to think that poor people are poor through no fault of their own. They like to think the poor worked hard in school and got good grades, but just didn't get lucky enough to get the good jobs. They also think that poor kids are raised in households that have parents who each work 3 minimum wage jobs, or, if it is a single income family, the mom works 3 minimum wage jobs and left her husband because he was abusive.
Reality, these people screwed around in school and now feel like they should be paid for screwing up.

How is this bullshit, let me count the ways....

But seriously, let's just imagine for a second that every single person in the nation decided to agree with his proposition that you should be punished your whole life for the mistakes you made in childhood. And let's say that in response to that belief, students worked their little asses off, universally. Not just here and in Asia, all over the world! (Except maybe Finland.) Those kids at sucky schools had the insight to realize it and worked just that much harder, and the difference between the highest ranked student and the lowest at any large high school was only a matter of a few thousandths of a percentage point, if that.

And then what would happen? I can tell you what would happen. We would have an awful lot of doctors and lawyers and engineers, and none of them would get paid very well because supply would indeed have outstripped demand. We would have a lot of highly educated janitors and truck drivers and cashiers, and they wouldn't get paid well either because ANYbody can do those jobs. And we would have a very small number of mechanics and electricians and plumbers who would get paid pretty darn well, relatively speaking, though since nobody else would you would find a lot of people would just live with clogged up basement sinks.

Not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor. There really is a limit to how many of those the market needs. Everybody, even the ones with the stupid jobs that anybody can do, deserves to make a living wage from ONE job working REASONABLE hours. Because somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets.

Comments

[siderea]

I both strongly agree with you and strongly disagree with you.

I was with you right up to "supply would exceed demand".

Actually, no. You're right that "not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor", but the limiting factor is not "how many of those the market needs".

It's not actually the case that "somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets". We do not need anybody to sweep the streets. Or, shortly, do any a number of low-skill, noxious, dangerous or dirty jobs. We actually have the technology now to do that with automation.

For more than a hundred years we have been eliminating whole vast sectors of the job market with automation, and that process is only escalating. As a society, our mechanical ability is now adequate that most lower-end, unskilled jobs are disappearing.

No, the limiting factor is that not everybody can be a knowledge worker. Not everybody had the facility with abstraction, even with the best of educations (and we aren't really into providing the best of educations, but let's let the scenario stand). Even among those many who can in some sense do the remaining work that can't be automated, there will be those who can't both do it and be happy.

There will always be -- may there always be! -- people whose muses call them to work with their hands, to work out of doors, to be wise in their bodies. But our society has been disenfranchising them wholesale, demanding more and more of us spend our lives chained to desks, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for those not called to booklearning to earn honest livings.

I think in a decent society, people have ways to follow their gifts, whatever they may be. And I don't think we have a decent society.

[conuly]

The problem with cross posting, have you noticed, is that sometimes commenters who might want to read each others comments don't get to.

http://conuly.livejournal.com/2103883.html?thread=12710219#t12710219

With that said, what would you suggest a decent society do with those folks?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"How is this bullshit, let me count the ways...."

Ohhhh man!

Reminds me of a remark my daughter made this evening about her over-privileged frat-boy cousin: "He has a silver spoon wedged up his ass."

Actually, in the scenario you describe, we wouldn't have any more doctors, lawyers or engineers than we do now. The med schools, law schools and engineering schools would simply raise their requirements and their prices. They'd still be selecting the most ambitious students from the richest, best-connected families. It doesn't really matter whether the difference between the top 1% and the bottom 1% is 1000 points or .0001 point, as long as a difference exists, and a difference always will exist. The supply won't outstrip the demand, because it's not in the interest of those providing the supply to allow that.

Y'know, I never see anybody asking any more what education is for. It's like it's just taken as axiomatic that the purpose of going to school is to be graded, and that the best opportunities are awarded to those with the best grades. If you're not born rich, clawing your way up the grade-point average is the best way - often the only way - to avoid a life of poverty.

Not that it's guaranteed to work, of course. Unless one's in a high-enough percentile to be in the running to compete for scholarships, grades alone won't get one to college; there's still the money to be found. How is one to pay for college when one can hardly find a job that pays a living wage?

"Everybody, even the ones with the stupid jobs that anybody can do, deserves to make a living wage from ONE job working REASONABLE hours. Because somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets."

Absolutely. And there is no good reason to force people who'll spend their lives in jobs anyone can do to write compositions, do quadratic equations or memorize the Krebs Cycle. Let's face it, most people are just not very intellectual by nature, and being more intellectual wouldn't be any benefit to them - it's not even something they want. Why waste their teen years making them jump through hoops, competing for grades in college-prep courses instead of learning useful skills like kitchen and garden management, home and auto maintenance, household and small-business finance, computer skills, health self-care and medical systems, safety and first aid, responsible sexuality and reproduction, child care and development, diversity and nonviolent negotiation, legal and criminal systems, government and participatory democracy, global and environmental issues? They come out of high school as ignorant as they went in, having been taught almost nothing that will ever be any use to them, or that they'll even remember past the last exam.

[conuly]

Well, I linked siderea to your comment, so now I guess I can link you to hers.

http://conuly.dreamwidth.org/2080435.html?thread=21538483#cmt21538483

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Automation, well... two things spring to mind. One is a quote from Robert Sheckley's book Mindswap (http://www.scribd.com/doc/35996274/Robert-Sheckley-Mindswap):

'I know,' McHonnery said, sighing. 'You're unskilled; it's written all over you. Kid, it may interest you to know that unskilled minds are common as dirt, commoner. The market's glutted with them, the universe is crammed to overflowing with them. It may interest you to know that there is nothing you can do that a machine can't do better, faster, and a damn sight more cheerfully.

''I'm sorry to hear that, sir.' Marvin said, sadly but with dignity. He turned to go.

'Just a minute,' McHonnery said. 'I thought you wanted to work.

''But you said--'

'I said you were unskilled, which you are. And I said that a machine can do anything you can do better, faster, and more cheerfully, but not more cheaply.

''Oh.' Marvin said.

"'Yep, in the cheapness department, you still got an edge over the gadgets. And that's quite an achievement in this day and age. I have always considered it one of the glories of mankind that, despite its best efforts, it has never completely succeeded in rendering itself superfluous. You see, kid, our instincts order us to multiply, while our intelligence commands us to conserve. We are like a father who bears many sons, but contrives to dispossess all but the eldest. We call instinct blind, but intelligence is equally so. Intelligence has its passions, its loves and its hates; woe to the logician whose superbly rational system does not rest upon a solid base of raw feeling. Lacking such a base, we call that man - irrational!

''I never knew that,' Marvin said.

'Well, hell, it's obvious enough,' McHonnery said. 'The aim of intelligence is to put the whole goddamned human race out of work. Luckily, it can never be done. A man will outwork a machine any day in the week. In the brute-labour department, there'll always be opportunities for the unwanted.'

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

And the other thing is: y'know how I used to build the wonderful PC Quilter (http://www.pcquilter.com/): truly an excellent example of a labor-saving robot. I used to think, sometimes, as I was unloading and putting away the shipments of parts - hundreds of different kinds of parts - about how many different human hands had contributed work to each quilter I built.

Every box of screws, even: how many machines did it take just to make the cardboard box, which started out as pulp from scrap from cut-down trees? Who ran the machine that dug the ore out of the ground, to make the steel that was cast into screws? Every single part of every single machine has to be fabricated out of Nature by humans running other machines, that had to be fabricated...

Literally thousands of people were directly involved in the making of every single robot I constructed. Hundreds of thousands were indirectly involved, helping to run and operate the businesses that employed the people whose hands actually touched the items my hands touched as I assembled and packed the final product. An automaton doesn't 'save' labor; it just stores it up - human beings still have to put the labor into it in the first place.