Washington Post: The remarkably high odds you’ll be poor at some point in your life

The remarkably high odds you’ll be poor at some point in your life

The poor in America are not a permanent class of people. Who's poor in any given year is different from who's poor a few years later.

Census data on who participates in assistance programs suggests as much. But Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University, has for several years been compiling far more comprehensive evidence of this pattern. He and colleagues have been studying the economic fortunes of several thousand families in the longest running longitudinal survey in America, going all the way back to 1968. Follow people over a really long period of time, they've found, and an incredible number of them experience economic insecurity at some point.

In fact, a vast majority do.

By the time they're 60 years old, Rank has found, nearly four in five people experience some kind of economic hardship: They've gone through a spell of unemployment, or spent time relying on a government program for the poor like food stamps, or lived at least one year in poverty or very close to it.

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"Rather than an uncommon event," Rank says, "poverty was much more common than many people had assumed once you looked over a long period of time."

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"The story of the American life course is marked by a surprising degree of economic movement and volatility," Rank says.

That means that the poor (or even the wealthy) are not some abstract other. The poor are, well, us — or us 10 or 15 years from now. If more people recognized this, Rank suggests, it's reasonable to think there'd be greater public support for programs that aid the poor. If you don't like food stamps because you think you'll never need them, maybe these probabilities would change your mind.

Here's the fucked-up thing though, regardless how how high someone may score on those EQ tests, their empathy tends to drop away to zero when it's someone they've never met.  (Understandably in part, as we'd go mad if we had to face up to all the suffering in this world)  And people, especially religious people, tend to have a rather distorted sense of what they face in their life/what they are likely to experience, and what is the norm. for others.

Hence: Others suffer economically, and need assistance, and they're all lazy moochers who deserve it because of their poor life-choices and sinful lifestyle.  I succeed in life, and it's just a result purely of my hard work and a reward of my inherent virtues, no luck involved, no external factors acknowledged.  I fall on hard times, and it's all a result of external factors that conspired against me, despite my hard work, and I deserve to be helped dammit 'cos I paid into the system with my hard-earned tax-dollars.

Most of those who never have fallen on hard times will likely simply assume it will never happen, and that those to whom it does happen deserve it somehow.  And many of those who have, still manage to look down on the economically less privileged, once they personally are back on their feet.

Basically, we're all delusional selfish assholes, who see ourselves as somehow inherently more moral and deserving than we really are.  We're kinda designed that way.  And if we weren't, how else to explain our elections ?

So, to answer the WaPo's question in that last sentence, no, it won't change people's minds.  Not a bit.



PS, if you were wondering about how this breaks down by 'racial privilege' as it were, well here you go:

Guess whites just work that much harder than everyone else, right ?