We’ve restricted the ability of ‘survival of the fittest’ to do its thing. Instead, we award stupid.
OT: Pray for the young men of Jackson.
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Here's my position/argument:
If a young father decides to stay at home with the mother of his child, then the child will be better off and will come out better in the long term.
By deciding to stay at home, the father is accepting responsibility (at least to some degree) for the wellfare of his child and the child's mother.
Hopefully, because the child witnessed his/her mother and father staying at home and raising him/her, the child will also choose to stay at home and raise his/her children.
It might take multiple generations to get such families back into "normal" family life, but it would eventually happen.
There is no quick fix for this problem.
Again, rats respond to incentives. People in the US aren't too dumb to respond to incentives. If it's easier to work than not, people will work. If it's easier to not work than to work, a large number of people will not work, and also engage in other socially destructive activities.
And the demographic with the highest suicide rate by a wide margin in the country is the one that is commonly referred to as the most privileged.
I say that to say that I agree with you. There is a lot of *** backwards thinking in today’s society
Especially when the lack of a father figure is not the only problem. Many don’t have a mother figure either, regardless of whether they’re physically present or not
Whether people respond to incentives or not is not up for debate. The ultimate question is how do you provide the incentives?
Looking specifically at Jackson as an example. All numbers referenced are from the 2020 census.
153,701 people
23.5% are below the poverty line. That’s 36,120 people. That’s more people in Jackson - in poverty - than there are TOTAL residents in every single other city in Mississippi except Tupelo (which is about equal), Olive Branch, Biloxi, Hattiesburg, Southaven, and Gulfport. Let that sink in.
Of that 36,120, over half of them (50.6%) are working age (18-64). That’s 18,277 working age residents in poverty, which is more than the total residents than you’d find in Hernando, Laurel, Corinth, Natchez, Greenwood, and other mid-sized cities by Mississippi standards. Again…..scary.
Percentage wise, 60% of Jackson residents overall are in the 18-64 demographic overall. That’s around 92,000 people. 20.1% of those people are in poverty. The national average for ages 18-64 is 11.7%. The Mississippi statewide average is 17.6%.
So what has to be done to bring Jackson just to the national average? Well, you need to pull about 8.4% of the 18-64 demographic out of poverty. That means you need around 7,700 jobs for Jackson residents that pay something along the lines of at least $45,000-$50,000 a year or so. As stated elsewhere in the thread, that’s about where the tradeoff becomes more favorable as it relates to working vs. not working. And those jobs need to be available to workers who don’t even have a diploma or GED in many cases.
But that’s not all. 75% of the Jackson MSA lives outside of Jackson itself. So even if you assumed that Jackson residents were just as qualified as those in the suburbs for those same jobs (which would be a terrible assumption), you still need at least 4x as many jobs as people who you need to fill them, because those jobs will be hiring from the entire MSA and beyond. So, you now need over 30,000 new jobs in the MSA, all paying around that $45k ~ $50k range at minimum, and at the same time all requiring very little formal training or education. So you can quickly see its a total pipe dream to get to the national average.
So what about just getting to the Mississippi average? In other words, just getting to the statewide average of the poorest 17ing state in the country? Not a very high bar. You need 2.5% to come out of poverty. Following the same math as above, you need around 9,200 jobs to come to the Jackson MSA….each paying in that $45-$50k range. Who is bringing almost 10,000 middle class jobs like that to Jackson in its current climate? Nobody. And again, that’s whats required just to get to the average of the poorest state. Not even to excel or get to just mediocre.
That’s the scale of what it would take for productive incentives to outweigh the current ones. It truly is a death spiral situation. The number of jobs coming in of any kind is currently negative. Jobs are leaving because productive people are leaving. Tax revenue gets even lower, city gets even more unsafe, taxes raised even more to cover shortfall which raises COL even more, which causes more people to leave, and on and on. Businesses are going to continue to avoid that situation like the plague. There’s simply no way for the “incentives” to ever catch up, as far as Jackson is concerned. Other parts of the country? Maybe the jury is still out. Not sure.
bingo bingo bingo….solution to all the country’s problem. don’t 17 with mother nature
My dad always said the next Civil War will be between the haves and have-nots.
When the takers finally outnumber the providers will the the deciding time
every historical war has been tied to a hungry belly.
I say this all the time, we should be getting smarter as a society, but we're getting dumber. It's playing out just like the movie Idiocracy. I think it's because life is so easy, even for the poorest, we don't have to develop the skills of learning and figuring stuff out. Idiocracy was set 500 years in the future, I think we'll get there much quicker than that.
Throughout human history, rich folks have been fat and poor folks have been skinny. Like is so easy now that poor folks are fat and rick folks are skinny.
while we fight over chicks with d*cks they spent another trillion last quarter and traded stocks to capitalize on it
You missed the point, which was that violence could quickly follow the gravy train running dry.
It provided some steroids to the problems but Jackson started it's path down the toilet a hell of a lot longer than 4 years ago.
That was high comedy. The wiggers "stackin" scene still stands out as one of the more pathetic things Ive ever seen with my own two eyes.
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