…This is a strange state of affairs. Everyone – even the original researchers – insists that the success sequence sheds little or no light on who to blame for poverty. And since I’m writing a book called Poverty: Who To Blame, I beg to differ.
Consider this hypothetical. Suppose the success sequence discovered that people could only reliably avoid poverty by finishing a Ph.D. in engineering, working 80 hours a week, and practicing lifelong celibacy. What would be the right reaction? Something along the lines of, “Then we shouldn’t blame people for their own poverty, because self-help is just too damn hard.”
The underlying moral principle: You shouldn’t blame people for problems they have no reasonable way to avoid. You shouldn’t blame them if avoiding the problem is literally impossible; nor should you blame them if they can only avoid the problem by enduring years of abject misery.
The flip side, though, is that you should blame people for problems they do have a reasonable way to avoid. And the steps of the success sequence are eminently reasonable. This is especially clear in the U.S. American high schools have low standards, so almost any student who puts in a little effort will graduate. Outside of severe recessions, American labor markets offer ample opportunities for full-time work. And since cheap, effective contraception is available, people can easily avoid having children before they are ready to support them.
These realizations are probably the main reason why talking about the success sequence so agitates the critics. The success sequence isn’t merely a powerful recipe for avoiding poverty. It is a recipe easy enough for almost any adult to understand and follow.
But can’t we still blame society for failing to foster the bourgeois values necessary to actually adhere to the success sequence? Despite the popularity of this rhetorical question, my answer is an unequivocal no. In ordinary moral reasoning, virtually no one buys such attempts to shift blame for individual misdeeds to “society.”
Suppose, for example, that your spouse cheats on you. When caught, he objects, “I come from a broken home, so I didn’t have a good role model for fidelity, so you shouldn’t blame me.” Not very morally convincing, is it?
Similarly, suppose you hire a worker, and he steals from you. When you catch him, he protests, “Don’t blame me. Blame racism.” How do you react? Poorly, I bet.
Or imagine that you brother drinks his way into homelessness. When you tell him he has to reform if he wants your help, he denounces your “bloodless moralism.” Are you still obliged to help him? Really?
Finally, imagine you’re a juror on a war crimes trial. A soldier accused of murdering a dozen children says, “It was war, I’m a product of my violent circumstances.” Could you in good conscience exonerate him?
So what? We should place much greater confidence in our concrete moral judgments than in grand moral theories. This is moral reasoning 101. And virtually all of our concrete moral judgments say that we should blame individuals – not “society” – for their own bad behavior. When wrong-doers point to broad social forces that influenced their behavior, the right response is, “Social forces influence us all, but that’s no excuse. You can and should have done the right thing despite your upbringing, racism, love of drink, or violent circumstances.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that we should pretend that individuals are morally responsible for their own actions to give better incentives. What I’m saying, rather, is that individuals really are morally responsible for their actions. Better incentives are just icing on the cake.
This is not my eccentric opinion. As long as we stick to concrete cases, virtually everyone agrees with me. Each of my little moral vignettes is a forceful counter-example to the grand moral theory that invokes “broad social forces” to excuse wrong-doing. And retaining a grand moral theory in the face of multitudinous counter-examples is practically the definition of bad philosophy.
Does empirical research on the success sequence really show that the poor are entirely to blame for their own poverty? Of course not! In rich countries, following the success sequence is normally easy for able-bodied adults, but not for children or the severely handicapped. In poor countries, even able-bodied adults often find that the success sequence falls short (though this would be far less true under open borders). Haitians who follow the success sequence usually remain quite poor because economic conditions in Haiti are grim. Though even there, we can properly blame Haitians who stray from the success sequence for making a bad situation worse.
Research on the success sequence clearly makes people nervous. Few modern thinkers, left or right, want to declare: “Despite numerous bad economic policies, responsible behavior is virtually a sufficient condition for avoiding poverty in the First World. And we have every right to blame individuals for the predictable consequences of their own irresponsible behavior.” Yet if you combine the rather obvious empirics of the success sequence with common-sense morality, this is exactly what you will end up believing.
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Carroll
Feb 23 2021 at 10:22am
As you said, I think virtually everyone agrees that we should hold individuals accountable for their own behavior, within reasonable boundaries. At a minimum, it provides proper incentives.
Where the argument comes is the definition of “reasonable boundaries” and the direction of causation as an explanation of behavior. Does poverty result from dropping out of school, or does poverty lead to high dropout rates? Would you agree that schools in poor neighborhoods are inferior than schools in wealthy neighborhoods? Do poor women have more babies out of wedlock, or does having babies out of wedlock lead to poverty? And who blames the baby for its poverty? If a teenage black is arrested and locked up on a minor or even trumped up charge, who is to blame for his resulting poverty? What about his younger brother?
I realize that in academic settings, children often parade grievances. But most of these children aren’t poor. I imagine you don’t really see many poor students from bad neighborhoods in your college classrooms. The ones that do make it there are more likely to keep their heads down and work hard, because the road they have traveled has been much more difficult.
Daniel Carroll
Feb 23 2021 at 10:32am
I also forgot to mention the impact that trauma has on child brain development, and the direct impact it has on subsequent behavior. There is a significant volume of research on childhood trauma and the direct link to dropout rates and subsequent criminal behavior. Trauma starts before birth in the womb, and can involve missing parents or neglect, exposure to drugs and violence, as well as direct experience with violence. It is a form of PTSD that rewires the developing brain.
Tyler Wells
Feb 23 2021 at 10:47am
As someone who has lived, worked, and volunteered in poor American neighborhoods I can attest that following the success sequence is hugely more difficult there than in suburbia. There are many reasons for this but the primary one is cultural norms, the success sequence is the exception there, not the rule. I say this as someone who absolutely believes that most people in poor American neighborhoods could absolutely be much better off had they grown up in different circumstances.
From a policy perspective, it is important because any poverty alleviation strategy that disincentives people from following the success sequence will have negative effects on the people it purports to help.
Floccina
Feb 24 2021 at 12:25pm
But when basically middle-class people live in poverty for religious reason they seem to not do so bad. So it looks like it may not be poverty of money that drags people down but their behavior and the behavior around them. So how do you change that without assessing blame?
der Wienermeister
Feb 23 2021 at 11:16am
Bryan Caplan – How did you decide on the title of your book? What alternatives did you consider?
Clint
Feb 23 2021 at 11:43am
You are much too quick to let society off the hook here. All your examples of our commonsense moral judgments are about *adult* choices and behaviors, and at least three of the four (excluding the drunkard brother) involve blame for a specific, discrete incident of wrongdoing: spouse cheats; worker steals; soldier murders. But whether someone successfully finishes high school is very different! It is, first of all, based on choices and actions they take as a child and in the teen years, before they are fully morally and psychologically developed and when they also have little direct say over their own lives and decisions. And rather than avoiding discrete wrongdoings, succeeding to graduate high school involves a years-long sustained positive effort composed of many diverse and challenging subtasks and campaigns (aka “required courses”). Many things can go wrong over a significant period of time — and that’s before taking into account that many students are, through no fault of their own, rather dim, yet we expect them to complete Algebra 2 and write essays on classic literature!
The example of a brother drinking himself into ruin is a little closer to the mark, perhaps, but it is also the one for which I am most inclined to refrain from assigning moral blame, and to think I (and society at large) should attempt to help him! Treating addiction as an individual moral failure that must be overcome by one’s own personal resolve (or worse yet, addressed by the criminal justice system) has an awful track record, and if I care about my brother I’m going to try to help him break his addiction if I can… even if he has made poor decisions that led to this point, and doesn’t clearly see his own role yet.
These considerations interact with the casual objection, which you dismiss by saying that the success sequence leading to non-poverty is just OBVIOUSLY causal. But consider this: if many students who are in badly failing schools correctly realize they are learning very little of value — little that will help them succeed in a job later on — and then quite rationally drop out, they will likely have a hard time landing and keeping a full time job and may well end up in poverty… But this outcome would not have been much different if they had stayed in their failing school and learned nothing of value to prepare them for the job market!
Or consider: if a HS student has a single parent in chronic poor health and misses school frequently to care for them, and later on misses work frequently and can’t hold down a job because they are still caring for them, and ends up in poverty… Are they morally to blame for their own poverty because they theoretically could have chosen to let their ill parent suffer immensely more, or have the parent’s health deteriorate much further, so the child could stay in school, do well, and keep a full time job?
I think you (Bryan) will perceive these as isolated, unfortunate stories… But if so I think that you are wrong, and that similar disadvantages and hard choices abound. It’s just not as easy as you suggest to follow the success sequence, for many people. As a well-educated economics professor, you probably don’t have occasion to meet a lot of these people. Psychiatrists are more likely to… So I would be interested to hear your thoughts on Scott Alexander’s post “Burdens” in this regard. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
Joel Pollen
Mar 1 2021 at 1:20pm
Your comment has much that is interesting, and I’ve not the time to digest and respond to it all. But I object to your statement that
I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. Isn’t Alcoholics Anonymous all about taking personal responsibility for one’s addiction and overcoming it by personal resolve? Granted, there is a great deal of emphasis on the need for community and help outside yourself, but that’s in no way incompatible with taking personal responsibility for getting better, or anything Bryan has said.
You may not be the program’s biggest fan but it’s clearly had a significant impact on addiction in the United States, and its reputation is definitely better than awful (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous#Effectiveness).
John Alcorn
Feb 23 2021 at 11:46am
Here is the rub:
The first step in the “Success Sequence” is completion of high school — which coincides with adolescence, a transitional, developmental state between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents must learn adult responsibility.
I submit that we should rethink high school. Presently, high school is too ‘one size fits all.’ Think Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education — and double down on the critique. Adolescents who fail at high school might well succeed in other tracks for human-capital formation and for maturing into adulthood.
We shouldn’t write off adolescents who fail high school as ‘purely irresponsible’ or as personalities destined for poor decision-making. We should learn from selection effects (personality effects) in high-school completion, and should harness entrepreneurship to develop alternative institutions to prepare adolescents to meet the market and to become adults.
Other commenters have mentioned that adverse peer norms pull down many adolescents in poor neighborhoods. I submit that alternatives to high school (especially for ‘at-risk’ adolescents) would immerse adolescents amid workplace norms in productive environments (firms, orgs, studios, workshops, etc), mentorships, apprenticeships, internships, training programs. The psychological keys are awareness of being productive, a sense of being part of a team, and a sense of potential growth. Adolescents in alternatives to high school would spend more time with adults and less with other adolescents.
In a nutshell, radical vouchers, valid for any human-capital-formation immersion that fits the adolescent. Taxpayer funding of education should be harnessed to radical choice. If incentives matter, then firms, orgs, studios, workshops, artisans, skilled tradesmen, professionals, tutors, mentors would respond to the demand.
John Alcorn
Feb 23 2021 at 12:28pm
Perhaps a philanthropic foundation could be a first-mover in this direction, by funding some rigorous local experiments in radical vouchers for immersive human-capital formation.
Daniel
Feb 23 2021 at 11:52am
There seem to be a few problems here. First, suppose that we know, after controlling for confounding variables, that the poverty rate among a racial minority is 10 percentage points higher than it would be otherwise. Should we blame everyone in poverty in that group? If yes, then you seem to just be denying that social forces are efficacious at all, and that would be a weird position. But if no, then you’re making the same discriminations based on circumstance that the rest of us do, and your position is pretty empty. Second, taking a full-time job is a two place relation. If we’re looking for someone to blame when an individual is not working full-time, why should we not blame employers? This would not be the same as blaming society as a whole. And yet you never consider this option. Also, joblessness as a moral failing is a very weird position for someone who claims to believe in markets! Presumably it would inefficient for people to take jobs that they don’t actually want to take. There is a tension in this piece — if it’s so easy and desirable for people to work full-time, then why don’t some people? You can simply say that it’s a moral failing, but that’s a terrible economic explanation.
Daniel
Feb 23 2021 at 12:11pm
Also, your counter examples hold very little force once you realize that “reasons for action” and “true statements” are not the same thing. For example, if my spouse told me that she cheated on me due to interactions between subatomic particles, that would unequivocally correct, but it wouldn’t be an acceptable reason for action. The same holds true in all of your examples. This is a pretty elementary distinction in moral philosophy, roughly the same as the distinction between causation and responsibility.
Michael Carey
Feb 23 2021 at 12:01pm
The problem is that ‘blame’ is a concept that works best in the context of a micro-community. I can blame my brother, my co-worker, or my spouse. But blaming strangers for their poverty is completely pointless. Blame is a tool for exerting social pressure. So if you are not close enough to exert pressure, don’t bother blaming.
So imagine you are a member of congress, or someone writing a book about poverty. Does it make sense to blame your constituents (or audience) for being poor? No, not really. Your constituents are strangers. Blame isn’t really the right paradigm. Blame is a useful paradigm within small groups, but when it comes to policy we need something else.
robc
Feb 23 2021 at 12:18pm
Or, just maybe, policy should be at the small group level. I would suggest household level, but even if you wanted to go bigger, no larger than Dunbar’s number. Which would be the size of a small HOA (about 50 households, give or take).
Phil H
Feb 24 2021 at 1:48am
This guy beat me to it! I think BC made quite a good argument that some level of blame can be assigned to the poor. But blame is an interpersonal thing, and it doesn’t seem to be a very useful guide to public policy.
AMT
Feb 25 2021 at 1:01pm
I think you are missing a very important point. When we are talking about whether we should redistribute tax dollars to people, which is constantly at issue when talking about poverty, blame becomes very relevant.
Philo
Feb 23 2021 at 12:56pm
How hard is it to graduate from high school? I think that for some young people it is as hard as the “years of celibacy” that you acknowledge as excusing ordinary people from blame for their poverty, in your hypothetical scenario. As a critic of our educational system, you might suggest some improvements that would make high school more tolerable for the unbookish and undisciplined, while preserving its value as signal.
Biff_Ditt
Feb 23 2021 at 5:31pm
True. I recently became a high school teacher and its remarkable how relatively little work we ask students to do. Its also remarkable how burdensome they perceive that work. Further, I remember how burdensome it felt to me at the time. I think Bryan may be operating with a little curse of knowledge bias when he considers the finishing of high school reasonably easy with a little effort. Its both hard and fairly easy depending on the perspective. Also, dont forget the segment of people with low IQ, for who it is probably genuinely difficult.
Lastly, I think that hardest part about finishing high school is the day-after-day slog. I remember at the beginning of every school year, usually after a week or two, having this GET ME OUT OF HERE panic attack when I realized how far away June was and how I was gonna have get up every day, sit in these chairs, do these stupid assignments, hear these bells, ride this bus, etc. I just had these deep sense of I cant do this. I cant make it. I think some people are just more sensitive to The Grind, and people who dont find it difficult just cant understand why they cant just tough it out. It probably similiar to people who can public speak not being able to understand (literally, like cant figure a theory of mind) why people freak the hell over having to public speak.
MarkW
Feb 23 2021 at 2:22pm
And the steps of the success sequence are eminently reasonable.
I think actually, following the marriage first part of the success sequence is quite difficult for people growing up in certain U.S. subcultures where marriage before children is a rarity and has been so for many, many years. An entirely new, stable pattern of child rearing has become fixed, which is roughly that young women continue to live at home and have children much of whose care is provided for by their (relatively young) grandmother and other relatives. The children often have different (and uncertain) fathers, which is a strategy for diversifying the risk of receiving no support.
This is a known societal pattern characterized by ‘uncertain paternity’ and ‘matrilineal inheritance’ — it’s not easy for an individual in such a culture to decide to swim against the tide and decide that they, themselves, will follow the ‘high certainty of paternity’ / ‘high paternal investment’ model instead. They have to find a partner who is not only a good match in the usual ways but ALSO shares the same oddball commitment to go against the grain. Good luck. The most viable strategy is probably to leave the subculture entirely and seek a spouse elsewhere.
Nicholas Weininger
Feb 23 2021 at 2:53pm
I think you’re underestimating the effect of concentrated poverty on both the availability of full-time jobs and the availability and usability of cheap, effective contraception. There’s a whole bunch of issues bound up with this (transit to jobs, quality of sex education, employability of those with convictions for petty crimes that are overcriminalized in poor neighborhoods, etc) and maybe they’re not the obstacles to blameworthiness that they look to be, but your broad-brush generalizations here would be more convincing if you’d shown engagement with the scholarship on structural and institutional barriers faced by people growing up in areas of concentrated poverty.
A lot of the related issues have to do with conscientiousness as well, and it seems more blameworthy on its face to have low conscientiousness than low material resource endowments. But there are still complications here:
— to the extent conscientiousness is determined by factors beyond one’s control (genetics, lead exposure, etc), that presumably makes low conscientiousness less blameworthy
— to the extent development of conscientiousness is culturally influenced, that again presumably makes it less blameworthy to have low conscientiousness if you’ve grown up in an area of concentrated poverty where few people around you model the development of higher conscientiousness.
Again, maybe you can address these issues and still argue for blameworthiness but what you’ve said so far doesn’t really address them.
Brandon Berg
Feb 24 2021 at 3:39am
Concentrated urban poverty is usually within walking distance of concentrated urban prosperity, and the jobs that come with it. My understanding is that teenage pregnancy in subcultures where it’s the norm is a matter of choice, not lack of knowledge of or access to contraceptives. Rural poverty is a different story in both respects, and probably should be analyzed differently, although there are likely some shared causes.
If we’re just rejecting free will entirely, then the normative conception of blame loses all meaning, but a purely positive notion of “blame” (i.e. who is the least cost avoider in terms of preventing or alleviating these outcomes) still has value.
Floccina
Feb 24 2021 at 12:48pm
What percent of people in those areas are working full time? Using contraceptives, marrying etc? You might be making those areas out to be worse than they are.
This documentary illustrates that. These places have churches that often help and other organizations willing to help those willing to put in effort.
AMT
Feb 23 2021 at 7:30pm
I am in agreement with Bryan.
I read the first post and initially found myself somewhat disagreeing with:
What if the real causes of “success” are intelligence and conscientiousness, which happen to correlate very closely with finishing high school, working full time, and avoiding children out of wedlock (or cause those things)? (Sumner also makes a good critique in his post) If you are trying to create optimal policies, you might struggle thinking the solution is just telling people to follow certain steps, if they lack the capability.
However, Bryan is right because as he explains, no one actually buys most of the excuses for failing to achieve these very modest steps, so capability is not the issue. Even complete idiots can make it through high school if they just show up and put in 10% effort. (Oh, inner city schools are very bad? That makes this point even stronger because if you put in just some work you can be ahead of your peers. How much you actually learn is completely irrelevant to this argument.) Simply working full time at a low-skill job after finishing high school is attainable by anyone who honestly tries. And birth control is not too expensive for anyone, even a high school teenager working a few hours a week. If you believe someone who tells you they can’t afford condoms (or get them for free somewhere), you’re incredibly gullible. Further, if you want to make an argument about culture…do you also accept your child’s excuse that all their friends were doing it? Peer pressure nudges (perhaps strongly), but doesn’t force them to do something. Of course some people come from a background that is much more difficult than others, but the vast majority can still follow those very modest steps. To believe they cannot is an incredibly snobbish insult!
Even if Bryan or I underestimate just how much pressure there is for a reasonably conscientious person from a very troubled household to help keep things together (I’m reminded of the tv show Shameless, which I think offers some good arguments for both sides), we are honestly talking about a very low bar for “success” here.
jj
Feb 24 2021 at 1:17am
Considering these two points together reveals the crux of the issue:
“And the steps of the success sequence are eminently reasonable.” – Caplan
“The first step in the “Success Sequence” is completion of high school — which coincides with adolescence” – John Alcorn (comment above)
The child can hardly be blamed for failing the first step of the sequence; it’s probably their parents’ fault. They will in turn become the parent responsible for the failure of their own children, so I’m not saying anybody is blameless here. But to be practical: how is the cycle of failure to be escaped?
Mark
Feb 24 2021 at 11:28am
I think the war crimes hypothetical is controversial; there was a lot of pushback against the recent report about Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, for example.
Also, the line between blaming individuals and blaming society isn’t so clear. My moral intuition is that a poor person who was born poor and remains poor through mild irresponsibility is more deserving of help than a poor person who was born into great privilege but became poor through epically bad choices. You could frame that intuition is being about individual responsibility—i.e. the born-rich person had more irresponsible choices so is less deserving of help. But you could also frame it as being about society—i.e. the born-poor person was treated worse by society so should be held to a lower standard of individual responsibility and is more deserving of help.
Floccina
Feb 24 2021 at 12:12pm
Interestingly in Bible Jesus says,
Matt 26:11 The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.
AND Jesus story of the Good Samaritan the guy who needs help is NOT poor.
So this issue seems to have been around for a long time. Maybe even then the poor were often partly to blame. I lived in Honduras for about 6 months, it looked the same to me there that some of the poor were not doing what they could and should.
I still give to charity to reduce poverty but I see it in many cases as pure charity not so much that we owe them as if they are not always not at all blameless.
LEB
Feb 24 2021 at 11:45pm
I’m sympathetic to the overall argument but have one quibble.
You said:
“And since cheap, effective contraception is available, people can easily avoid having children before they are ready to support them.”
In Tim Harford’s first book of fifty inventions, he quotes a stat that says 18% of sexually actively women who use condoms for a year will become pregnant. That seems like a much higher rate than your quote suggests, particularly if you infer that poor women are especially likely to use condoms rather than the pill.
LauraM
Feb 25 2021 at 9:05pm
Great essay, and so countercultural!
The only criticism I would make is that Caplan underplays the undeniable role of cultural forces (about which libertarians are sometimes clueless) in shaping individual conduct. The elite denigration of respectability and “bourgeois virtues,” and the erosion of a society-wide consensus on the importance of exercising moral responsibility and individual agency regardless of the hand you are dealt, has weakened people’s ability to follow the success sequence.
Colin Haller
Feb 26 2021 at 11:13am
In the absence of a Job Guarantee, the fault for joblessness is “the employer of last resort” which is the government. We’ve known since Keynes that “the market” does not settle at full employment.
Toby
Feb 26 2021 at 2:00pm
Bryan,
Reading through your two posts the following questions popped up in my mind:
1. Aren’t the people who complete the success sequence different from those who don’t? (I saw Scott Sumner make the same or similar argument)
2. How does this argument relate to the argument in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? In particular, how does this relate to the twin adoption studies? Aren’t some people simply disposed to not complete the success sequence?
3. If you look at the people who do not complete the success sequence what characteristics do they have? And what proportion of people with these characteristics have completed the success sequence?
I don’t find the success sequence as an antidote to poverty as convincing.
Although, I am also reminded of the argument by someone such as Thomas Sowell of the effect of the welfare state on black families. The effect of the welfare state on families seems to argue in favor of the success sequence.
Looking forward to read more from you on this.
Olga
Feb 28 2021 at 6:35am
Problem is, even if one graduates a good school (and even one of the best universities in the country), uses contraception well and even can afford a good therapist, the success sequence is still out of reach, if one lacks confidence and communication skills. Both in Russia, my home country, or US. (We’re not talking about mental illnesses or autism or handicapped people or anything of the sort). If one can’t form connections (any connections, be it friends, co-workers, even friends on Facebook), they are going to have a problem in the modern world. Even finding a job will be a difficult, stressful and painful feat indeed, and changing countries would be an impossible thing completely. Would their poverty still be their fault?
And it’s not always possible (not to mention expensive) to acquire communication skills or any level of confidence through school, youtube, online lessons, coaching or professional therapy (including medical therapy). Sometimes even loving parents would be powerless here.
Jose Pablo
Feb 28 2021 at 5:58pm
Peter has a significant lack of social skills. He is nice, respectful, and well educated but has extreme difficulties overcoming his shyness. As a consequence, he has no friends and lives a live of “friendship poverty” extremely painful to him. He is also aware (by watching TV programs, which he does frequently, and reading about Facebook) that some other people have a lot (but a lot) of friends. Peter finds this very unjust.
There is little doubt that Peter is not to blame for his “friendship poverty” and little doubt that the situation is making his life almost unbearable. Has “society” any obligation to help him? For instance, forcing some people with a lot of friends to be Peter’s friends?
John has a total lack of sexual appeal. He showers twice a day and keeps himself fit (despite his natural tendency to obesity). As a result, he has not had any sexual intercourse in his life. His “sexual intercourse poverty” is killing him. Particularly since he has the sensation (thru movies and the media) that everybody is having a lot (but a lot) of sex.
There is little doubt that Peter is not to blame for his “sexual intercourse poverty” and little doubt that the situation is making his life almost unbearable. Has “society” any obligation to help him? For instance, forcing some people with significant sexual success, to have sexual intercourse with John?
What is so different in material poverty (versus friendship or sexual poverty) that makes the role of “Society” so different in this case?
Why we can’t not even imagine “Society” “forcing” its members to help Peter and John but have no problem with Society “forcing” its members (resorting to coercion if required) to help “material poor” even if they are to blame for their situation (which, I guess, is, very likely, the case for, at least, some part of the individuals in poverty)
tidbit
Mar 5 2021 at 10:56am
Hi Bryan. Looking forward to your next book. Looks like you’re anticipating a fight against behavioural determinism. Here’s another data point for that fight. This podcast is an excellent example of determinism: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robert-sapolsky-on-why-we-behave-the-way-we-do/id1406534739?i=1000509120392 The science is fascinating and people will attempt to use it against you.
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