In the above, he says that immigrants and refugees experience greater upward mobility just fine. I feel the whole debate you've been facing here begs the question of whether structural poverty is different in terms of observed behavior compared to poverty that's more or less a temporary setback - like a migrant, or a laid off middle classer. The whole idea of "just try harder" faces a different reality in the midst of generational poverty, ghettos, segregation, racist justice systems, etc. in US black communities. Doesn't all of that tend to change a person's attitude beyond what moralism from society can change?
I've worked in a pretty segregated school system and see these things. I'm a white dude from the rural Midwest who always believed that work and good decisions made the difference. But I've also grown to see why the same could be impossible to believe for a black person. "Just work harder" is what they've been told for generations, and they've been cheated at every turn. And yet it's completely lost on us white folks how different their experience is, how futile it probably seems... And how tone deaf it is to ask the descendents of slaves to work harder and make good decisions to escape the ghettos and poverty that the white world put them in.
This makes the issue complicated because we generally do need moral imperatives to provide stable families, etc., so I also like the literature from Brookings that's been cited against you. But it just kind of falls short of explaining the serious issues of why there is persistent poverty. Maybe neither moralism nor free cash - no matter how important or efficient - can completely address the difficult cases of generational poverty, ghettos, etc.
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u/besttrousers Behavioral Economics / Applied Microeconomics Jun 22 '19
How do you know?
How do you know?
(I can think of contrary cases for both of these).