Preventing some arbitrary part of the population from having children is basically eradicating that population, long term. I just used "kill", for simplicity.
I find that equation of terms troubling. If I take that argument to its logical conclusion, we are all killers because we don't get as much children as previous generations. We're effectively killing our unborn offspring by refusing to procreate.
You're either a wonderful troll, and then: kudos! or you have a very misguided idea of poverty.
Poverty is not a disease, as Quarrelsome pointed out.
Poverty isn't even a constant, it's dynamic. People go in and out of poverty all the time.
We also don't know the correlation and the causation between poverty and various indicators such as IQ, achievements, etc. (are you poor because you have a low IQ or do you have a low IQ because you're poor? etc.)
On top of that, where do you draw the line for poverty? Is it the lowest 10%? 20%? 40%? What if the statistics change next year, and I go from 40% to 30%, am I allowed to have children this year? Are my children taken away from me?
Etc., etc.
You haven't thought this through, or as I said, you're a wonderful troll! :)
Your comment however leads me to ponder the rhetoric: poverty is indeed not a disease, but like diseases, in modern societies it is contagious. Patterns and behaviours that make poverty deeper and more destructive are spreading from person to person and family to family, in neighbourhoods and communities.
Here I mean things like appreciation of education, work, stability of families, etc.
What could we do to change these patterns? (Apart from the usual recipes like making schools better. FWIW I'm from a country which has one of the most equal distributions of both income and wealth, but even this does leave a lot of people quite unhappy.)
My guess is that the best investments are in education and social welfare. Basically try to get people who are down up and keep people who are up from falling down during their worst moments (temporary loss of income, depression due to loss of loved ones, etc.).
Besides this, I guess the next best investment is in refining democracy and its safeguards, as well as the actual government, so that:
a) lobbying by corporations and very rich and powerful individuals doesn't corrupt the system
b) the system is as efficient as possible (there's always going to be inefficiencies but you'd want most of the tax money to actually be used for what they're meant instead of administrative overhead)
More than that, there's not much we can do. After all, at some point we have to rely on free will :)
Exactly my kind of reasoning. To add a point: Since we don't know the exact kind of pathogen(s) leading to poverty, but we know that poverty of parents is a strong predictor of poverty of children, this delivers a way to at least partly quarantine the poverty disease.
Yes, poverty of parents is predictor of poverty of children, but for a large part, it isn't about money. It's about those contagious factors - for instance, how much the parents want their children to do well in school, how much they care about it. So fixing the poverty metric isn't going to change this, something else might.
At least what I read about the number of poor black American kids growing without a father: it's shocking. There seems to be a widespread collapse of culture of having a stable kernel family. What could be done about it?
Poverty is not a disease, its a happening. Like falling over or getting hit by a bus. It prays upon the less agile of us so pray that one day when your agility slows you're not unlucky enough to get hit by the proverbial bus.
Heck you might gain a bit of sympathy then so maybe it wouldn't be a completely bad thing...
> That sounds like killing the poor but with extra steps.
Doing quarantine does not kill the disease agent. That is not what quarantine is for. Quarantine is for preventing the further spread of the disease agent.
For killing the disease (agent) there is the immune system or drugs such as antibiotics or virostatic agents.