I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.
One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.
I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?
As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.
I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to the point of being actively hostile.)
Comments
I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.
One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.
I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?
Thanks for the feedback on the book.
As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.
I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to the point of being actively hostile.)