Ok, so what else do you think are the goals of the society?

If we're talking what I'd consider mainstream American society - and keep in mind America is extremely diverse - I would have to say the main messages are graduate high school, find a stable job, and get married/have kids. I should mention that these are largely middle class values. The poor and the rich are sort of in their own little worlds.

2) What are the social controls in place to make this happen?

Keeping up with the Jones', for one (the natural human tendency to compete.) Also the pressure to not disappoint your parents or friends. At least those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head although there are probably more.

3) Are society's goals at odds with the interests/rights of the individual?

They may be or they may not be. It's iffy in my mind to talk about the individual's struggle with some abstract "western society." It makes much more sense to me to talk about an individual's struggle with an actual existing community. Some small towns in the US are known for being more close minded or rigid than others. Towns and communities call certainly impress values on individuals, and I think that deserves more attention than an abstraction we can western society. Personally, I've lived in rural Texas and consumerism/commercialism you tend to be stressing just isn't that present there. The pressures are different.

Education, the market system itself, marketing, the government, attitudes of the working/middle class, media, and almost everything can provide evidence. If you need me to pull articles to see this, then you definitely are arguing from bad faith.

Lets examine two claims here:

"Western society is largely concerned with wealth, production, and consumption." - Ok. I think most people would find this reasonable. Note that this is true in other cultures as well.

"All services in western culture are ultimately concerned with making people better producers and consumers above all else whether the service providers recognize this or not." - This claim takes one facet of life (production & consumption) and elevates it above all the rest. That's why I cited my sex example. I wasn't intending on actually arguing it, I was citing it as a parallel to this type of claim.

Similarly, drinking 8 beers may be due to thinking you will get plastered and have a good time, but it functions to blow off steam so you can get back to work and produce and consume your daily living items.

I feel like you're just viewing everything through this one lens. I could be equally dogmatic and say "the real function is to get you loosened up so you can have a better shot at having sex and procreating." There have been theorists who view everything through the lens of sex.

But most importantly, sex can lead to procreation which means making more people who can produce and consume.

I could say that people go out and get wealth and consume to heighten their sexual prospects even if they don't realize it. See, once I start making claims about things which aren't really provable it becomes difficult to have a discussion or an argument with me.

So part of my premise is occupations like pastors and therapists are Western society's way of making people well-adjusted (or feel meaning enough) to keep producing and consuming.

I don't know how I would be able to disprove this statement if I were to try to attack it. There are plenty of therapists and religious leaders who are not materialistic. I think if you were to ask these professions in a survey whether their goal was ultimately to produce better consumers and producers the overwhelming majority would say no. But then you could just say "well it's still true, but they don't recognize it."

I can accept that economics and wealth plays a very significant role in our society. But so does sex. So does physical appearance.

Anyways, the question was, what is society trying to do here? Our goal as a society is to increase production and consumption. Thus, when we are born into the world, we are not just here to "pursue happiness" or any other self-interested act really. As far as the public is concerned, it is how much production and consumption we can provide. Not having children will prevent them from contributing to this goal of being laborers and consumers.

Maybe if you asked a businessman that would be what he says is the goal of society. If you asked a pastor or some other religious leader he'd probably give a different answer if you asked him about our social goals. If you asked a therapist or mental health expert he'd probably frame the issue in his own way.

Yes, if you have children they'll be subject to people's expectations.

It's still your choice. Yes,this is all social control. Society rewards what it wants out of the individual.

...I guess it depends how you define social control. If someone provides a service for a paycheck and that paycheck allows the one who provides the service to put food on the table and a roof over his head then I'd be more inclined to call that providing basic necessities. If you want to call it social control fine, but then I guess everything is social control.

So what are we trying to do here?

Could you clarify what you're asking?

But then there is humans. You can choose to leave work in the middle of the day and never come back. You can choose to do any number of things. You are radically free (as the existentialists might say) to do any choice you want. Yet we choose to do what we do.

Now these choices do not come from out of nowhere. We decide to keep working because we are enculturated through social controls and internalizing values from society. We think it will look bad. We lose status. We can't find other ways to survive.

I cannot just leave work in the middle of the day and never come back. I would be AWOL and subject to arrest. Other people would lose their paychecks and means of buying food or their ability to save. If you lose your job many people wouldn't be able to afford groceries or daycare or car insurance etc.

If you're at a point where you actually have that independence you need to ask yourself "what do you really want to do?" It's not always clear, and it's different for different people so I don't really prescribe. My dad is one example of that type of person - he has his own small business and he could retire and stop working but then he'd be kind of lost. He actually likes what he does and it keeps him occupied. I'm certainly not going to tell him that he needs to stop. His work has become a part of him, and I think that's fine.

The reality exists and the teacher passes it down.
— BitconnectCarlos
No. The future does not exist as reality but as possibility. Sartre called it the nothingness that is within being. It is beautiful.

I wasn't talking about potential futures here in terms of exploring potential variations. I was talking about an evaluation of the actual position (i.e. evaluating the board as it is.) This is a crucial skill because even if you have deep foresight into potential variations if you can't evaluate the position afterwards it's kind of useless. A layman and an expert will evaluate a position differently. Chess teaching is often the expert helping the layman grasp a higher version of that reality (what's really going on on the board.)

I'm not trying to say that.
First of all, you have too much confidence in the absolute exactitude of chess computers. The possibilities for the development of the Sicilian Defense are endless. At one point in the '85 confrontation between Karpov and Kasparov the Whites played Bg2. Experts disagree as to whether this was a basic error or why. Neither do the chess computers. Therefore, if the best solution exists it is not in anyone's brain, artificial or otherwise. We have two options: whether it exists as a mere possibility of a current set of conditions of a conventional symbolic system or it exists in another world.

I wasn't talking about chess computers being able to solve perfectly for every position on the board. I'm not saying that there's an objectively best first move or best move in every position. I was simply saying that the patterns and geometry inhere within the game whether they are recognized or not.

Imagine this: A universe where no one understands the 4 move checkmate. White gets the first 3 move sequence a billion times, but he never grasps that he can take on f7 and the game is over. The solution doesn't exist in anyone's mind and therefore.... doesn't exist? But the second someone does grasp it he hasn't discovered a pre-existing possibility (because discovery implies that it was there all along)... he has made it a truth because he, the subject, has grasped it. That's how I would view something to be a 'subjective truth.' It would make sense if I were to ask you what your favorite color or food was.... not about something concerning an external reality like a chessboard.

We have two options: whether it exists as a mere possibility of a current set of conditions of a conventional symbolic system or it exists in another world.

A move sequence can certainly exist as a possibility. These possibilities can be evaluated and a solution can be found. It's easier in some cases than others.

Don't forget the notion of evaluating a position just as it is. A certain position can exist on a board and it is likely experts and laymen will view it differently. It's up to the experts to provide a greater understanding; that's basically chess teaching in a nutshell. The reality exists and the teacher passes it down.

What kind of objectivity are you talking about? You seem to believe that even if humanity, the planet, the galaxy and the known universe disappeared, the Sicilian Defence would still exist. Is that so? In what kind of reality?

That's not what I'm saying. The sicilian defense is the sicilian defense merely by convention. It's just what we call 1.e4 followed by black playing c5. You could call that opening any number of things. Naming that the sicilian defense only helps us talk about chess/a common opening.

I'm saying patterns and geometry inhere in the game. It doesn't matter if the players don't see it - it's still there. There was certainly a time when players just didn't grasp certain patterns but now that certain players (minds) do grasp them we'd say that these patterns were discovered, not invented. In other words, they didn't just spring into existence when they were first consciously grasped.

That's basically what I mean by "objective." If you want to argue that everything is mind-dependent and ultimately dependent on some type of universal mind that grounds all existence that's fine with me and your view is credible to me.

Really? What is better? For some 'better' is winning in the shortest amount of moves possible. For others 'better' is the ingenuity of play. If you mean 'better' as simply winning the game, then isn't that merely the performance of a logic that is fundamentally a subjective framework? Winning a game invented by humans; whereby the semantics and rules are collectively agreed upon, acting as a kind of subjective constraint.

"Better" is about winning games. If I ask you who is the better tennis player - you or Roger Federer I feel like there wouldn't be this kind of confusion.

I'd like to keep the focus on chess strategy. I know the rules were invented and sometimes even changed over time. But when we talk about chess we're not talking about chess as it was played in the 1500s. I shouldn't have to specify that.

There are better and worse strategies - in other words, strategies more apt to win games and strategies that perform poorly towards this end. This can be demonstrated repeatedly in real life to point where no one even argues it anymore.

Also keep in mind that "invented" doesn't mean "subjective." The English language was invented and evolved over time, but if it were truly subjective then I could use it or write it however I wanted and it would be fine but that's not the case. For something to be subjective the truth resides 'in the subject' which is not true for the English language or chess strategy.

I would say that strict objectivity is possible. An example would be chess strategies, or even just strategy in general. No one argues that humans are better players than computers nowadays; computers just have the better strategies and this has been demonstrated repeatedly to the point where it's no longer even an argument.

I'm aware that chess is a construction, or, in other words, an invention. Yet the strategies within chess are objective - they exist regardless of whether a mind grasps them or not. The physical component of chess isn't relevant either: Chess can be played without a physical board and without physical pieces. In a nutshell, chess or war or poker maybe "constructions" or "inventions" but the strategies utilized within these frameworks can either be better or worse and this is not a matter of subjective opinion.

For example, when discussing physics, we're not interested in simply defining what "work" or "heat" mean out in space, so to speak. Likewise, we keep our "gut feelings" and "personal" semantics out of terms like being, mind, nature, universe, reference, event, meaning, etc.

Yeah, different fields use specialized, technical language. The difference is these terms are often heuristics (in other words, they're more just useful concepts for helping us understand other concepts as opposed to a statement about the nature of ultimate reality) or they're just little unique quirks within the field (in the military we use all sorts of weird language but again, no one takes it to be a reflection of ultimate reality.)

The difference in a nutshell is that philosophy often claims to be a reflection of ultimate reality - and when you use words like "mind" you're already seemingly presupposing non-physicalism (you could have just used "brain" which everyone understands) and you're invoking a concept that I don't even know how to approach that is your way of making a claim about ultimate reality - it's a little tyrannical, if you think about it. Definitions in themselves can be a little tyrannical it often comes down the nature of these definitions - i.e. whether one claims they are a facet of ultimate reality or not.

There's got to be some answers to deal with the underlying, long-term issues. The crisis right now is certainly overshadowed by the many cases/deaths occurring. But when this is all done, is ANYTHING going to change regarding how these diseases start in the first place? Certainly, it is great to have better emergency action if a contagion spreads, but how about preventing as much as possible the origins of the contagion?

I don't think we know how to just prevent viruses in the first place. Honestly, the bulk of my knowledge from this subject comes from this two minute video on the origins of the virus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clNkJGqTIJo

I don't work in healthcare and I'm not going to pretend to be a medical expert. It looks like we could approach this from two angles: Either speeding up the approval/creation process for new vaccines or from curtailing human-animal contact. I suppose we could take steps to regulate human-animal contact but realistically we're talking about people's livelihoods and pets here.

I think trade embargoes and such can be enforced perhaps? Shut down wet markets or higher tariffs? Or, perhaps UN third-party sources monitor the monitoring of the trade. Guidelines and enforcement could be overviewed.

Sure, we could do a trade embargo in protest of a cultural practice. I think that's fine. In the case of China the disease arouse from wet markets and the some of the animals being used there. In any case sanitation has always been a problem and it's not clear how to fix that. Sure we can talk about regulation, but we're talking about countless of these markets all across the world in both rural and urban areas. I don't think we can just shut down wet markets because that's how millions of people earn their living.

I think it's a pitfall of globalization; what at one point would have been a localized health threat is now a global pandemic.

1) Is it right to ask another culture to change its practices, when those practices affect the health of the whole world, or would this be just cultural insensitivity played out as public health missionizing?

It's fine to criticize cultural practices even if the harm were only to be localized to that culture or society.

It's not just about having the idea though; it's about our actual ability to implement it. Sure, we can tell the Chinese to stop eating bats. Maybe the CCP is even on board with the idea, but how does this then filter down to municipal governments? How strict will enforcement be? What is the history of this cultural practice in China and how deeply is in entrenched? Didn't another epidemic originate from a pig?

It's more fruitful to take the focus away from whether something is okay in the abstract to instead ask "how is this issue best addressed in a way that can keep intact the pride and dignity of the culture we're asking the change from and how is it best approached?" and this is just speaking to cultural criticism in general.

________ is the opposite of pragmatic, but not in a pejorative way, just a way that means something like analytic/abstract/idealistic?

("Theoretic" occurs to me, but elsewhere I pair that with "Strategic", so I don't want to reuse that here too).

Personally, I would use theoretic as an opposite of pragmatic. I would never pair theoretic and strategic as opposites. The opposite of strategic would be, if I had to think of something, unthinking or reflexive (meaning - acting on reflexes) or short-term thinking or impulsive maybe. Honestly, I know it's boring, but unstrategic or poorly thought out work well here.

Good strategy often involves months and months of theoretical planning - take military plans.

My question remains: How can you enjoy with the repulsive passages of a great writer?

Because he's a really good writer. I'll tell you what I enjoy most about him: He's able to flush out different ideologies/viewpoints through certain characters in a thoroughly honest sense. Other writers try to do this but it just ends up being propaganda. What I really like about D is that I never felt like he came in with a set conclusion in mind and he wasn't trying to push an ideology on the viewer; instead he just lets the characters interact with the world in their own unique, but honest way (in that it's true to their nature/beliefs.) I'm talking about the Brothers Karamazov here.

Speaking of Dostoevsky, the "abstract system" that claims to have an exact answer for "everything in this world" is science.

In Notes from Underground the main character - who is not Dostoyevsky, it is kind of a crazy existentialist shut-in - rants against this type of thing and I generally took it to be rationalism - not science. He also certainly has in mind certain utopian political systems.

Do not confuse Dostoyevsky with the narrator in Notes from Underground. He is, again, flushing out a viewpoint like he does with his other characters.

Can aesthetic pleasure silence moral outrage?
— David Mo

I don't know if I would call the experience of reading Dostoevsky an esthetic pleasure. He was not a fine stylist in the usual sense (for that try someone like Turgenev). There is a wicked pleasure to be had in his caustic humor, but when Dostoevsky is in his more serious mood, reading him is about as pleasurable as a hallucinatory fever. — SophistiCat

Does anyone have the poems? The only info I could find on D's anti-semitism was from a letter where he responded to a Jew who accused him of anti-semitism:

"I am not an enemy of the Jews at all and never have been. But as you say, its 40-century existence proves that this tribe has exceptional vitality, which would not help, during the course of its history, taking the form of various Status in Statu .... how can they fail to find themselves, even if only partially, at variance with the indigenous population – the Russian tribe?"

There's probably some merit to the charge of him creating Jewish stereotypes with some of his characters, but are we really going to crucify him for this? Would we crucify Shakespeare for Shylock? Honestly, in Russia in the 1860s-1880s I would just expect a certain level of religiously based anti-semitism to be relatively normal. Devotion to a strong, centralized leadership is also more common in Russia given that the country has survived invasion after invasion due to these leaders being able to fight off these foreign invaders. I'm just providing historical context here.

"But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic."

On what grounds have Dostoyevsky made such a remark? Is there at all any truth in this?

Also, I wonder if we could have a general discussion on Dostoyevsky's Notes From The Underground. — Zeus

He's critiquing rationalism. I've felt the same way recently.

The world is a complex, messy place and system-builders often attempt to sort of gloss over this with a set of rationalistic rules that first and foremost guide their way of viewing this world. The problem is that this often results in creating a false sense of certainty and glossing over the subtleties of certain fields and proclaiming themselves experts in areas where they are not (for them experience and data is of secondary importance; a knowledge of the relevant a priori principles is.)

Such system-building, top-down approaches to the world were popular in Kant's time and remain popular in some fields today.

I was reading about this earlier. It happens across party lines and it's very glaring.

Obviously we have a stock market crisis on our hands, but the main reason is the virus and the day to day measures that we're taking to prevent it like not leaving our houses and economic activity coming to a halt. It's a bottom up issue rather than a top down one.

If performance is in the black then wealth will concentrate merely because most people have no position to begin with.

Actually according to Gallup 55% of Americans hold stock. But yes, stock gains tend to go towards those who have the most invested. Similarly, stock declines hit - in dollar amounts - those with the most invested.

There is risk and opportunity, but there is more opportunity for those who are already well positioned, and much more risk for those who are not.

Yes, and this is key. What does it mean to be well positioned? Ideally, looking at it now - it means a large cash reserve that can come buy the bottom (whether that's in stocks or real estate or maybe starting a business) and basically timing things perfect. However, there are wealthy people who have most of their assets in real estate (I'd say that this is the case for a lot of wealthy people) - like an airbnb tycoon - who despite having millions in assets are also in quite a bit of debt and possibly over-leveraged and with tourism and travel on the decline these tycoons are in trouble. It's not like they can instantly sell their holdings like a stock either because it's real estate and it's less liquid. Real estate can take months to sell. Those airbnb tycoons or landlords might also have employees who could get laid off. Ripple effects.

I do believe that there is opportunity here and in a perfect world the wealthy would be able to buy the bottom and everything just turns green there. It would be the best for the lower classes as well because it would probably lead to a hiring boom if the wealthy could time it just right but it takes a lot of guts to put your money on the line after, say, 4 months of carnage.

Paycheck to Paycheck with no health insurance in America is not well positioned...

Agreed.

The closer someone is pushed toward the bottom, the exponentially worse their living conditions seem to get. Since basic nutrition is already on the concern-table for many American families, I'm confident that the breaking point isn't actually that far off.

The question is how do we solve it. I'm not going to complain if they start sending us $1000 checks every month. The proposals on how much to send have reached as high as $4500/month. There's no real limit to how much the government can print. Hell, they could send us $10k/month if they wanted but what happens to the value of the US dollar? Short term alleviation comes at a cost longer cost. I'm having serious doubts about the US dollar right now.

Don't get me wrong - this crisis does scare me. I'm fortunate enough to not be at the bottom, but I'm certainly not at the top either. The thing is, the crisis is with Main Street, not Wall Street. I'm in favor of implementing policies which help the poor or those in need during this time, we just need to make sure those policies come with an acceptable trade-off. As of now I tentatively support UBI. And yes, those without savings or an emergency fund will be hit hard. I personally have lost a pretty significant amount of money but I'm not threatened with homelessness or paying for expenses.

Stock purchasing is for day traders and portfolio managers

You know that you can also do this? I do this and I wouldn't really consider myself either unless I'm my own "portfolio manager."

but assuming that investors have insight on the whole, they will wait and begin buying when appropriate.

This is questionable. Traditional financial wisdom advises against timing the market, and instead riding out the storm. Of course in this case we may just need to make an exception (personally, I have sold most of my holdings). In any case, over the past few decades fund managers have not generally speaking outperformed the S&P.

but really my point is that the richer you are, the less you are affected, and the more you stand to gain, relatively speaking.

I feel like we need to define "affected" here a little better. On one hand, the wealthy have lost more than the poor in dollar terms this past week by far. Generally speaking, it seems like people are getting knocked down a peg - so everyone becomes less wealthy. On the very bottom of the social ladder you have the homeless who probably aren't affected by this very much at all. But above them are the poor who are now in a serious situation and threatened with homelessness. The middle class now risk becoming poor in a recession and the wealthy may risk becoming middle class or less wealthy.

If the rich are trying to time the market then they have more to gain and also more to lose if they mistime it. I think if everything were to crash we'd all be more equal, relatively speaking. You would just have a ton of wealth destroyed and everyone would be poor. Even if a rich person did time the market well who would buy his products?

And when stocks are at their lowest when we finally turn the corner on the covid, those who were strong enough to survive the squeeze will be left to buy

You would need to be able to call the bottom, which is easier said than done. There's nothing quite like "buying the bottom" only to have things drop another 15-20%. I also think it takes some guts to deploy capital after, say, the dow has been bleeding for 3-4 months.

I'll tell you my strategy - wait until covids cases maybe worldwide (or at least in the US) have started to decrease for 3 days or so then maybe jump back in.

So, I think some rich are gonna get wrecked and some will do well if they're able to time things perfectly. I don't have the exact breakdown nor do I quite know what you're referring to as rich.

Now, as I mentioned before, if you have more than you need, why not give it away? It seems most logically.

To save it in case some possible disaster scenario or to pass on children so they can start off life in a better place.

Ok, but then the point is trivial - and I don't mean that disparagingly.

I wouldn't consider personal finance trivial. When I hear trivial I think obvious and easy. I think it requires discipline and rejecting materialism. I also think it requires resourcefulness and being able to squeeze extra income sources out of places that many people wouldn't think to go to. It allows one to map out and be conscious/take control of their own future.

Why scrap it? -- life is just unfair, and that's the way it is. No?

I may have been unclear; I'm not just "on board" with all unfairness. In the case of the war on drugs I believe the government is overstepping its bounds. A lot of technological advancement isn't "fair" - workers get put out of work, but ultimately it is for the better. The war on drugs is just overwhelmingly negative... the only people who "win" I guess would be the agencies that receive federal funding, but "the people" certainly don't. At least the consumers win when we get lower prices as a result of better technology and other jobs are created elsewhere.

I'll have to pull a Socrates and pick on the word "fair," in this case. You're sounding a bit like Thomas Hobbes to me, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.

I mean human life. This point should be pretty uncontentious - some of us have full, wonderful lives and others have short and terrible lives. Even if you were to put people in some sort of utopia I'd still consider this a facet of human existence... you would still have miserable people. You will always have miserable people unless your utopia involves drugging people up until they're zombies. There's always winners and losers in society. I'm not judging the losers; I'm just stating how it is.

But regardless, we're discussing politics, which is something we've created, not a factual claim about life itself. Within that specific domain, I just don't think we can observe unfair policies, laws, etc., and say "well lots of things are unfair."

This is fine, with the exception that you need to be careful in cases where you disenfranchise one group to empower another. I'm fine with making plenty of things more fair, but we just need to talk about the specifics and how its implemented.

I do notice this though: People tend to push for equality in areas where they're disenfranchised. If genetic scientists were able to come up with a way to control human height or good looks who do you think would be pushing for equality in that area? Probably short and ugly people. People tend to be interested in equalizing the playing field in areas where they're disadvantaged and then they ignore other ones where they're fine. However, equalizing all playing field just isn't a remotely reasonable option (my reference point here is disability communities.)

Politics, additionally, does have the potential to touch every domain of human affairs. This is of course not what the founding fathers had in mind, but we both know this idea has been demonstrated.

It's how I view things too, Carlos. But, as you know, it's only one part of an important issue. The other part is to ask what effect the environment has on individual choices and responsibility. The environment includes: housing, income, access to healthcare, education, food, etc., and the quality of these resources, filtering systems, laws, discrimination, tax codes, judicial bias (if you're rich, it's a slap on the wrist; if you're poor [whether white or black] you get 10 years), drug polices (and others) that disproportionately effect poor and minority communities, and on and on.

We could spend a billion years on each one of these topics. The one that stuck out at me the most drug policies which I do have sympathy for. I've always been against the war on drugs and I do believe it disproportionately affects minorities and the poor. Yes, legislation can certainly cause damage.

When it comes to housing and income there is still a personal factor. I understand this is not the case with children, but when people buy houses there's a ton of decisions there that can either be made well or poorly. Income can also be changed. I don't feel like you're in disagreement with any of what I've said here, so I'll just go ahead and reiterate my point:

If we're looking to actually help individuals our focus should tend to be on microeconomic decisions as opposed to macroeconomic ones. If you're a financial advisor and a struggling person comes into your office it makes more sense to have them write up a budget and analyze their goals than to blame NAFTA or deregulation. I'm not discounting these... but again, start with the small first and then work your way up. Do not gloss over the small and immediately resort to the big when analyzing individuals.

you'll find that the game we're playing isn't equal or fair but, in fact, tilted in many ways towards certain groups.

Oh of course it is but so is life itself. There's no "system" on earth that's fair and I don't quite know what fair would look like. Sure, I'm with you that the war on drugs is unfair. Lets scrap it. But on a deeper level life itself absent any system whatsoever is horribly unfair. I think this could be an interesting point of discussion; what do you do with this fact concerning the unfairness of life itself?

If someone loses in chess its because they've made a mistake, no question about it. This doesn't disprove game theory; two game theory optimal actors would just be drawing against each other in the long run. The minute one of them deviates from that they'd now be losing.

I'm not asking about the nationwide prevalence as compared to 30 years ago. I was asking if it happens is it a problem for that particular family? Similarly, when people marry younger those marriages tend not to last and divorce can be very expensive especially when there's kids. I'm in the military so we deal with these issues of young men wanting to get married super young and have kids extremely often and we advise them to hold off and get their finances in order as has been the advice for decades if not centuries now.

I can tell none of this matters to you and it's entirely theoretical. Try coming back to the issue when an issue like this actually matters in reality.

Do you have a child? Would you like them getting pregnant at 17? Clearly since this is a non-issue you should be fine with it.

A significant chunk of those without a high school education are immigrants who moved here. We're not just counting high school drop outs in that figure.

I'm also not entirely sure if I'm hearing you right when you say that waiting until 21 to get married and have a kid is "superfluous." Are you saying teenage pregnancy is not a problem? The overarching idea here - and this really shouldn't be particularly contentious - is that people should wait until they're older and more financially secure (and ideally married as well) - before they commit to having children. Even 21 seems very young to me.

18k/year is a bit more doable when you're childless.

The cost might not be your primary concern, but for a single parent or two parents working low wage, dead end jobs paying for daycare and all those little expenses can add up. There is a significant cost and it's felt more and more the closer you are to the edge.

If money's their aim, they should never have kids, never marry, and never hire Hanover to do their taxes. But no, the point you just made isn't objectionable to me.

I think this is questionable. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but kids will often help support you in old age and can certainly help build family wealth in the long term. A marriage can also potentially help cement a second stream of income or at the very least free up time for one of the partners as the other focuses on the chores or raising kids. Of course both of these things can go wrong too.

There's no reason to get mad. You've spent a lot of time and energy talking about the brookings institute when my main point all along is just that people should wait to have kids.... presumably until they're a little more financially secure. Is this point really that offensive?

This isn't about ideology either. I'm asking you a direct question.

If you wait until you can afford children, you'll never have them

Sure, then go have 3 kids when you're a single mom working as a part time barista. Those are tomorrow's problems anyways.

I'm obviously not saying you need 250k in the bank right then and there.

The point I'm making is a simple one: your emphasis, when looking at class, poverty, income, etc., tends to be the personal responsibility of the poor and working classes. You place the onus on them while largely ignoring (but not denying) the role of the system in which they live, learn and grow. But that's a very narrow analysis.

The reason why I do this is because microeconomic and personal decisions (say, regarding addiction for instance) affect everyone. They do so in often a direct and concrete way. There is also way, way more consensus on personal finance. The choices are an every day thing, and everyone must deal with them. This is just how I view things. I find it odd when people immediately point to complex, big picture items which may only affect some small part of the population in an unclear way and point that that above all else.

If you're raised in severe poverty, can't focus in school and so drop out, have parents that are abusive drug addicts, surrounded by gang violence and police discrimination, etc., do you have a level of personal responsibility? Absolutely. Even here. And it's also important to say, because it's not about convincing people they're helpless or that they're victims. But again, these factors aren't simply "excuses" either.

I absolutely acknowledge that some people are dealt bad hands. In this case their goal isn't to become rich... it's to survive. Maybe by the time they're an adult they could make it to the lower middle or middle class but note that if it's not a priority for them then it's not a priority... that's perfectly fine. Not everyone defines success with wealth and that's fine. I'm not here to push the idea that wealth = success across the board.

I am not saying that everybody is directly responsible for their own poverty. I'm not even saying that people are morally obliged to try to climb out of it/that poor people are morally inferior. I'm just saying that if you're seriously looking to help people it helps to first focus on individual life choices and decisions and then we can move onto systemic factors.

I will acknowledge systemic factors, by the way. But there is many of these and instead of trying to, I don't know... ban charging interest or something ridiculous like that which would have enormous economy-wide effects... maybe instead focus on the small and gradually build up.

What happens in poor inner city communities, or what happens in Wuhan, China,

In the case of inner city schools the issue is complex. It's not just a simple matter of giving them more money. Is there gang violence in the area? Could these kids even afford to go to college if they made it? What is their parents role in their life? With China we have even less actual control when we live in the US. We might have some nice ideas about what they should do but our actual ability to enact change is not high.

The study was done by brookings institute... it's a left wing think tank.

And not having children would save you a ton of money obviously, but that's a tall order for a lot of people, so if you're planning on having children (which most people are) it makes sense to say at least wait until you're financially secure.

It should be clear that having children - especially many of them - before one is financially stable should be avoided if your priority is to avoid poverty. I don't know how you can argue against that. Same thing with high school education.