On Sat, 18 May 1996, Duncan Frissell wrote:

It was understandable to be poor when all the world was poor. It is understandable to be poor in those nations today that make the accumulation of wealth a crime for most people. It is not understandable to be poor (for long) in the US where one can reliably get out of poverty simply by doing three simple things:

1) get a high school diploma

While "basic skills" come in useful, is the much touted high school diploma really a competent measure of these? The diplomas are handed out to pretty much anyone who sits through 13 years of public schooling without complaining too loudly, shooting a teacher, or blowing up the school. Reading and the ability to do simple math are not much of a requirement anymore. The NEA would love to have a system where ones public school experience follows one everywhere like an unofficial government dossier, and employers are free to examine grades and the opinions of teachers on ones good citizen-unit-ness, denying employment to everyone who doesn't toe the line. I think the privacy implications of a vicious education-based class system, rather than a web of providers of educational services, held accountable by demanding clients, are fairly apparent to everyone.

2) get married

Well, of course one gets a certain amount of economic power by breeding and then sending the wife and the kiddies out to work in the mines. Not my cup of tea, however.

3) get any job

Oh come now. There are plenty of toothless rural people who can read and write, and even have families and jobs. They don't have much of anything else. You have heard of the "working poor", haven't you? Permit me to make a giant leap here and suggest that whether one is poor pretty much depends upon the market which competes for ones services. The major problem (or feature, if you are an employer) of the jobs market is that one is essentially competing with a large number of other people to see who will take the least amount of money to work themselves into an early grave. No matter what the value added by ones work to the product being produced, such a market is essentially a bottomless pit, especially if others doing the competing are hungry and desperate. It's kind of like Harlan Ellison's description of the ultimate television game show. You bring out a small boy and a dog, and the contestants vie amongst each other to see who will take the least amount of money to shoot the dog in front of the boy. The key to escaping poverty would therefore seem to be to compete in a market based on the value of what one produces (i.e. entrepreneurship, small business, consulting), or to compete in a market where the others competing with one are all fat, happy, and fairly affluent (i.e. very specialized technical skills). The success of the Asian community in stressing small business and higher education would seem to be an excellent example of this model in action. I'm not convinced one can escape poverty by simply being a high school educated hard-working person who is eager to please. Perhaps this was once the case, but I think the economy is a bit too tightly stretched these days for such truisms to have any validity. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $