Economic study suggests a blade runner future awaits

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http://io9.com/economic-study-suggests- ... socialflow

interesting article.

^^^+1.

I live in the Mississippi Delta, which on the first map there appears to be the darkest red spot.

Yes, there are some important correlations to consider.

What the study doesn't take into account, since it's not about causation, is cultural attitudes within those areas. I've posted about this numerous times, so my apologies for the redundancy… We've worked very hard to get our income up, and I was PURPOSEFULLY unaware of the details of that until we filed taxes today, so things ALMOST are back up to where they were when I abandoned my classroom career some years ago (right around 2008) and my wife lost her job not long after. It's been a rough road, but we've never allowed ourselves to feel hopeless, not even when we were homeless with two kids.

Even now economically disaffected people customarily impress on their children and close relatives the imperative to depend as much on the government as they possibly can, while getting jobs is seen contemptuously with those who chose to move up in the job/career world are considered traitors. People within minority groups who are wealthy are almost ALWAYS those who do not wish to be defined by minority status and do not personally so closely with minorities that they choose to live in their neighborhoods.

I mean, my family is poor because of certain choices I and my wife made…by NO means has poverty taken away our education and life experiences; hopefully as our children grow they will adopt our same attitudes and have a better go at life than we did, but by no means do we want our kids to feel tethered to OUR (i.e. their parents') circumstances.

Poor people don't move for two main reasons: 1) They don't understand that they DO have the ability to get out, and 2) They have done something that caused them to get stuck in a certain impoverished geography. My wife and I, for example, own a plot and a trailer. If we sold everything we have, we'd still be stuck with over $100,000 mortgage payments we'd have to finance, which we're unwilling to do. We COULD just leave, but the economical loss would be too great considering we have nowhere else to go, and the risk of moving to an affluent location with no prospects is hardly worth losing everything over. So rather than risk it all, we're determined to make the most of what we have where we are, to bloom where we're planted, until we ARE financially independent enough to take those kinds of bold moves.

What nobody told us was that buying so much real property was a BAD idea. We looked at it as an investment, and we watched most of our money go up in flames because we didn't understand that owning the place where you live is NOT a good investment and never is (owning a house in which you do NOT live, on the other hand, IS an investment; we were too ignorant to see through the hype we were sold on…we thought it was better to have equity than make rent payments. It was financial risk that finally caught up with us when we both lost our jobs and hence our ability to make mortgage payments. We were just fortunate enough to get out in time before the bank could take EVERYTHING, and that doesn't even count the mess we got in getting sucked into a bad deal to pay off a medical debt).

Since we hadn't COMPLETELY figured this out yet, we took what we had left and bought an acre out in the country. However, that means we're STUCK here now because there's no way we can sell this place and get even half the money back we paid for it. I mean, MAYBE, it's getting to be a seller's market finally. But there's just nothing viable out there we can afford to take the risk on. Until we have that kind of certainty, we're totally stuck where we are.

I mean, I'm just telling OUR story here, and there are as many stories of why people are stuck here as there are poor people living here. I guess my point is there are all sorts of traps people can learn to avoid if they want to move up and out. For one, any kind of scholarship/loan-forgiveness program that involves working in an economically depressed area for x-number of years is a BAD IDEA. The reason why is they trap you in those conditions, and by the time you get through the program, you don't have many prospects elsewhere; you've lived too long in the area that it's difficult if not impossible to get out and all the "good jobs" are taken. Even worse, you can't earn much money in those situations. So you're stuck with a low income with little opportunity to grow income and build wealth. I'm in Income Based Repayment with my student loans, and will be for 20 years before they can be forgiven…and that all ASSUMES I make absolutely no more money than I am right now. The temptation, the easiest way to go, is to never grow income so you can keep more of your money. Which, well, is just STUPID, because if you increase your income to the point you can pay off ALL your debts, you get to KEEP all your money above that, and you don't have to wait 20+ years for that to happen. Little things like that make a huge difference, and the more young people are encouraged to NOT take jobs in economically depressed areas for the long-term or to NOT accept any kind of college aid that involves going into debt and enrolling in "critical needs areas" for quick or reduced payment, the more freedom they will have to move beyond whatever circumstances they came from.

The trouble is, few people are TELLING them this, and they'll all end up like my wife and myself. Now, we're not unhappy, either. We're fine. But we SHOULD be doing a lot better than we are. Had we known how to make those decisions, we'd have been better off. We just didn't know until we hit the real world and saw it for ourselves.

And we honestly are trying to make things better and get out of here. We have no loyalties here, so we're just making the best of it until we get the best opportunity to go.

MOST people here, though, are here for reasons that are culturally influenced. What can I say? We have poor people who'd rather stay poor and live a bare-bones lifestyle completely dependent on the government. They are TAUGHT to and are expert at manipulating the system. Spend a few hours at the health department in a rural or urban area and you won't have to wait for long to see exactly what I'm talking about. Or spend an evening in a hospital waiting room. There is just flat ZERO desire for any kind of self-determination. I personally worked with a guidance counselor who told high school kids they couldn't take college entrance exams (SAT, ACT) before the senior year and they were only allowed to take them ONCE. Um, I was in 7th grade the FIRST time I took the ACT (scored 19 composite, btw), and took it at least twice a year from 10th grade onward (highest composite was a 27). I was actually criticized for helping a girl get into a state-supported visual and performing arts boarding school. And any time I tried to use funds earmarked specifically to improve my classroom program, I was slammed with red tape. It took a visit from the local grand jury before ANYTHING positive changed, and that was a completely random event which, unbeknownst to me, had to do with the fact that a friend of mine was serving and made a very loud protest when confronted with the conditions I was working in…and then, of course, I actually got PUNISHED for trying to move garbage out of my classroom and for having no storage space for what was left.

Poor people are punished by thinking maybe they can improve their circumstances. More altruistic people like myself are punished for trying to help poor people not be poor anymore, or for honestly trying to educate people who simply with knowledge alone could be equipped to rise above their circumstances. The solutions to poverty where I live are, idk, st00pid-simple. They really are. I can see it. My wife/family can see it. And no matter how much I try to tell someone, "hey, all you have to do is X, Y, and Z," feelings of desperation and hopelessness are so deeply ingrained into the culture that common-sense kinds of things for most of us are intensely deep and ethereal concepts for most of them.

Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, but it's like some people just WANT to be poor and do NOT want to geographically separate from poverty. I look at my little 3-bedroom trailer as a temporary solution, not something that is permanent. I look at my student loan (non)repayment scheme as temporary, just to get by until I come up with a better income solution to knock it all out. It's like some people become lifers in our situation, the idea of increasing income through gainful employment is uncomfortable to the point their lives would end if they could lift themselves out of poverty. I don't have a solution for that, and it's heartbreaking to think they're raising their kids the same way.