[nradov]

Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted but they forget that there are a large number of fellow citizens in the economically disconnected underclass who never had a good opportunity to learn those basics. As a society we've never done a good job of lifting those people up.

[rightbyte]

> On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted

I don't see your point.

Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.

[jimbokun]

That comes from growing up in a two parent family where both parents are responsible and hard working and willing to discipline their children.

Government can’t really do much to help with that.

[tbrownaw]

This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?

[philipallstar]

There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.

If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.

As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time

[varnaud]

The productive decline of the farms is because of the fast-track land reform. Before 2000-2001, there were no effective national programs to prepare the people to run the farms. The opposition party was gaining ground, and so to stay in power, the ruling party rushed the land reform with no preparation.

Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.

[philipallstar]

Well, for the reason I said. You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility from everyone involved, but that's just an example of how to reframe things. It's not actually useful.

[tbrownaw]

> You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility

No, the comment you're replying to pretty clearly put the responsibility on the party that "rushed the land reform with no preparation".

And also accurately noted that a nation seizing capital and redistributing it to people who don't know how to use it is rather different from what had been the thread topic of personal skills / useful habits being purportedly unattainable by the lower classes without explicit instruction.

[moduspol]

The alternative view would be that differences of culture and values do not materially impact one's chances of becoming financially successful, right?

[tbrownaw]

"The alternative"... no, one of those proposals being false does not require that the other be true.

[jrjeksjd8d]

The existence of an upper class necessitates the existence of a lower class. You can't just pull everyone up to be above average.

[nradov]

What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.

[Ferret7446]

But we have. The underclass today has much better lives in many aspects than the highest class from many decades ago. The absolute level of wealth has increased, it's simply that the delta between the high and the low is widening.

Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter

[user____name]

This is the sort of reductio ad absurdum inverse relationship that never survives a reality check.

[jimbokun]

You do have to go back several decades for that to be true, though.

In the US at least, progress in life expectancy and real wages has really stagnated in recent decades.