Poverty is an intersectional issue

There has been some discussion recently about the drivers of poverty, and I thought it would be useful to reproduce some important things I’ve said in comments on this blog.

mickysavage said this over at The Standard:

I use the phrase [equity of outcome] as a counter to the Nats’ “equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome” line.  That is a phrase that Nikki Kaye for instance uses all the time.

Their line essentially says that there can be winners and losers.  The concept of “equity of outcome” suggests to me there should be some minimum standards required so everyone has enough.  It does not require complete equality but a reasonable distribution of income and resources.

And he’s right, it’s really not permissible to just leave our economy at the harsh and intolerable level of “well, some people are winners, and others are losers,” because often, “winners” didn’t do anything to merit winning, and “losers” didn’t make the decisions responsible for their poverty. Here’s my reply:

Besides, to some degree inequality of outcome is an indicator of inequality of opportunity- for instance, if people of different demographics really do have functionally equal opportunity, you’d expect the differences in poverty rates between those demographics to be statistically negligible. As that’s not the case, we have a very strong indicator that people who fall into privileged groups in our society really do have more and better opportunities, which isn’t very democratic.

Now, if said inequality actually made everyone better off, I don’t think we’d have a problem with it. But it doesn’t- it just seems to enrich the already wealthy, as seen by our ballooning wealth disparities all around the world.

There is a systemic problem here, and it’s happening in all capitalist economies. Likely it’s our attempts to mix familial policies with capitalist ones (inheritance, treating kids as individual charges not community ones, etc…) that are driving a lot of this problem- that doesn’t mean these are bad things to do, just that they do not mix well with capitalism if you want everyone to get a fair go.

The other post, which was also guest-posted in a shorter form at The Standard, claims that because negative indicators track with poverty, this is a problem of poverty, not of race. That misses the point that poverty is an intersectional issue- that is, it tangles itself up in other social problems, and is better seen not as a cause or symptom but as part of a reinforcing cycle- way back in the day, colonial New Zealanders did some racist things, that set off a self-reinforcing cycle of racism and disproportionate poverty. Even for Maori people who climb out of poverty, there’s the perception that they are exceptional, rather than just very skilled and fortunate, and likely to have been in a much better situation had they been born into a family that suffered less from discrimination. Breaking out of poverty while so many still remain in it only suppresses the poverty part of the cycle, which is still reinforced for other Maori, and still associated mentally with all Maori in so many people’s heads.

Even if we eliminate poverty altogether, there will still be racial discrimination, and it will still carry some of the same symptoms. Just like when we largely ended open discrimination, however, the discrimination would still exist, underground, in our subconscious decisions- both of the victims of discrimination to sometimes see themselves as less than, and in the actions of people who want to reinforce that idea. Here’s the comment I made in reply to this point:

Poverty is a huge part of the problem- racism, sexism, and other types of discrimination are much easier to deal with when they don’t intersect with poverty.

But it’s actually scientifically confirmed (using tests that measure stress) that lifting people out of poverty doesn’t always relieve the stress they feel from discrimination. For example, if you take a white woman and a black woman in the USA, and they both climb out of poverty, the white woman will feel a relief of the stress that she felt from being poor, but the black woman won’t- which is likely to be due to people engaging in what’s called “high-stakes coping”, where they try and power through the problem by just being that much better than everyone else.

I’m not very elegant at explaining why poverty doesn’t explain away racism yet, but you can hear excellent talks on that subject at http://www.timwise.org/ – he’s a great anti-racism advocate.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely support fighting poverty, (and prioritising that fight) but what we’re likely to find even if we largely eliminate poverty is that discrimination still happens, but it might be a bit easier to deal with, and many of the related statistical problems will likely shrink significantly.

Finally, there’s also some discussion as to the drivers of poverty and whether it’s relatively simple or difficult to eliminate. I come down on the difficult side, as evidenced by this comment:

Well if we’re going to reduce things to absurd simplicity, throwing money at poor people solves poverty if you throw enough of it. By definition it cures their poverty (or if you throw too many sacks of coins it kills them – but they won’t die poor).

But then if you don’t want to be simplistic, it still needs money – social workers, benefits, law enforcement, education, infrastructure, civic development, business development units, investors. It all needs money.

and my reply elaborating on that point:

Well, perhaps it cures their poverty. This is going to sound similar to some beneficiary-bashing stuff, but I don’t mean it to demonise the poor, I mean it to say that the problem isn’t quite that simple to solve. In some ways poverty is actually quite similar to coping with mental illness.

You have to remember that part of what causes poverty is that it creates perverse incentives that perpetuate it. (hence the comparison) For instance you can’t afford healthy food, so you buy whatever’s cheapest, which is often junk food from large corporations that leaves you not much better off than before you ate or drank it, which can make it hard to concentrate because your body isn’t getting what it needs, which makes it hard to stay calm or make good decisions, which might mean you miss opportunities to improve your life in all sorts of subtle ways.

Even if we directly redistribute wealth with an aim to reduce poverty, these reinforcing behaviors don’t instantly go away- much like when someone wins the lotto, it depends on their outlook whether they’ll blow the money in a couple of years, or use it carefully and wisely. We’d certainly bump a lot of people directly out of poverty, but some would need a different kind of help, because, to use my earlier example, they’d still think that Coke is what you drink, and junk food is what you eat.

Many of the things you listed couch that investment in a secondary force that helps break poverty-reinforcing behavior- education and infrastructure being the key examples, but sometimes social workers, benefits, and law enforcement can be very helpful, too. I don’t really have much faith in business or investors to do anything about poverty unless they’re getting tax incentives to do it, and even then they’ll try to cut corners.

Fighting poverty is such a crucial piece of improving our society, that it’s a shame that people have so much difficulty understanding the nature of the problem. Having suffered from a different, but nonetheless equally self-reinforcing problem, I very much understand that it’s an incredibly difficult thing to defeat, it requires a lot of support, and even afterwards, these types of problems never fully leave you, you just shrink them to the point that they’re easy enough to cope with.

On strike

While SOPA has been stalled by popular opposition, PIPA is still going ahead, so due to the inability to shut the blog down for the day, I’m simply going silent and linking you to the SOPA Strike redirect, which is actually really good.

President Obama punches SOPA and PIPA in the nose

For those of you that don’t follow tech news or American Politics, let alone the intersection of them, we’ve had some great news recently: the President of the USA, who has been barely sufficient on so many issues, has finally come out swinging on the side of free speech and innovation against the two twins of censorship, the Protect IP Act of the US Senate, and the House of Representatives’ “Stop Online Piracy Act.” He hasn’t outright threatened that the laws will get vetoed no matter what, but he’s implied that they’re heavily flawed and he can’t support them as-is. Hopefully he will expand on that and avoid the devils on his shoulder that so often prompt President Obama to compromise for the detriment of his country and the world.

While I oppose piracy in general, (as an amateur programmer I have a cat in this YouTube video, to switch up a popular metaphor) I think that to some degree it’s a necessary evil to allow us to have national sovereignty, freedom of speech, and innovation on the internet, and laws like SOPA and PIPA reinforce that impression. I also like to combat it or support people who fight it by investing their customers in the continued development and success of a product in the case of software. I can understand the film industry at least is unable to take a more creative approach here, simply due to the nature of their product. And so of course both of these bills have massive support from entertainment industries, with most of the push coming from large film makers, but there are also some technology traitors, including the ESA and several domain registry companies. (I recall GoDaddy was on this list for a while, who you should already be switching away from if you use, because they are a terrible company for other reasons)

What SOPA and PIPA propose, essentially, is that the government be allowed to censor any site containing pirated material with extreme prejudice, stripping away their DNS, (the ability of you to reach their site with a .com address the way everyone normally uses the internet, as opposed to entering an IP number you had bookmarked) and then heaping on an extra helping of economic sanctions, barring advertisers in the USA from using those sites, and cutting off payments through online services like Paypal, much like was done to Wikileaks through right-wing pressure. It gets worse from here, but I’ve already told you enough that you should see the core of the problem.

The US government having an infrastructure to censor the internet is an incredibly scary proposition. It’s this whole notion of building walls and fences again, but in the name of profits for movie tycoons, the USA would be doing it with information, effectively putting them in a position where they could become the thought police, or at least shut down independent media, after it only just started up again with podcasts, YouTube videos, and blogs.

Let’s get into the truly Orwellian stuff: To be considered a pirate under these laws, you don’t have to host a significant amount of pirated material. (There’s an amendment to PIPA that redefines the law down to that, which would make it merely objectionable as opposed to horrendous) You don’t even need to have someone uploading pirated data to a video or file sharing site that you’ve missed. You don’t even need to, personally, write a link to a site with pirated material. No, it’s much easier than that. You can simply fail to take down a link in a comment to a site that may contain a single, obscure pirated file somewhere.

SOPA and PIPA consider site owners responsible for what their users post. All a big business needs to do is continuously post links to pirated content until they flood the ability of the site to moderate their comments, and tip off the rights holders to get their competitors embargoed and censored. This is taking that childhood game of “stop punching yourself!” to a whole new level. It is not exaggerating to say that this could kill the internet as we know it- under these laws, tech giants like Facebook and Google wouldn’t be able to get started.

Some major sites are still planning on going dark this Wednesday (US time, naturally) to raise awareness that these bills are still under consideration by the US congress. (congress temporarily backed off both of them previously due to public opposition) I thought it might make more sense to just talk about it in advance, as I’m running a blog and all.

edit: Wikipedia, one of the most searched sites on the internet, has agreed to join the blackout tommorow.

Why I became vegetarian

When the fact that I don’t eat meat comes up, practically the first question I always get asked is “Why did you become vegetarian?” I’ve always respected people who were vegetarian, at least after I understood the reasons to go vegetarian, but for the longest time I never thought that could be me. I used to be the king of bacon and sausages.

I’m always careful to say that my decision to change my diet was based on a lot of things, but there were two things that convinced me:

1. Hearing how easy it was to be vegetarian, not just from other vegetarians, but from vegans, who would often sum up vegetarianism as “the least you could do.” I had already started sporadically cooking without meat, so I thought to myself, why not just step it up until I eliminate meat altogether?
2. I firmly believe that we need to do more to improve the environment we live in, and mitigate the damage that global climate destabilization will cause, and I was challenged in a rather friendly way.

Those challenges were really rather simple- the first was that one person stopping eating meat does more for the environment than taking a car off the road. Then I heard someone ask why everyone who supported environmentalism wasn’t vegetarian, and I knew I had to do this. (I’m continuously amazed that the mainstream environmental movement does not ask people to become vegetarian if they care about the planet) If agricultural emissions are such a huge problem, everyone eating less meat seems like a really simple answer. And from there the reasons started multiplying- eating less meat isn’t only good for the environment, it’s cheaper! It’s not only cheaper, it’s healthier! Not only do you feel better, you start to feel more connected to animals and other people, knowing that you don’t have to cause anything pain just to eat. (incidentally, this is why I don’t try to convince people to eat less meat for the animals, I think animal rights is a thing most people understand after they stop eating meat)

The change in attitude that comes from not eating meat is impossible to adequately describe, it’s something that has to be experienced. I’ve not been seriously tempted to eat meat since I stopped in December 2010. In fact, I don’t really like the smell of meat any more, and I’m actively teasing my friends and two thirds of my flatmates about eating corpses.

Now, this doesn’t happen overnight. When I first started being vegetarian, I ate a really unhealthy diet, heavy in falafel, chips, cheese, processed soy food, mayonnaise, chocolate, nuts, and pretty much everything high in fat a vegetarian can eat other than avocadoes. I hardly saved any money from quitting meat at that stage, and as you’ll see if you think about it, it’s incredibly possible to be an unhealthy vegetarian with all the processed vegetarian foods available now. More than a year in, and I had my first soy meat in months last week. I still eat too much cheese, but now my fat comes largely from avocado, peanuts, and nuts. I get plenty of beans, I eat mushrooms every week, giant eggplants cut into cubes fill out my pasta dishes, and I heap tomatoes into everything. I very seldom eat milk or eggs, and I feel better than I ever have before, and I can function on low sleep for the first time in my life. My love of chocolate hasn’t gone away, but now I don’t eat meat, I notice how bad I feel after eating any significant quantity of it. I toy with thoughts of going vegan once I get a day job. (Working nights interferes with your ability to shop if you don’t have a car.)

If you care about the environment, your health, or even your wallet, being vegetarian is the least you can do. It’s easier than living without a car, and I do both. It took me a month to get it figured out, and I didn’t research it nearly as much as I should have. You can still have “hearty” food, warm things, substantial things. You’ll just start thinking about food more- you’ll rediscover vegetables and fruits.

And the best part?

In over a year of being vegetarian, I haven’t prepared a single damn salad, and I never run out of ideas to cook. Salads are something I only end up eating when I go around for dinner with the omnivores.

Series: FBM or “Feminism benefits men, too”

FBM is a common acronym in the online feminist movement, a quick reminder that feminism is for men too- not just in terms of solidarity, that we benefit indirectly by the lives of women we know improving, but also because there are direct benefits of feminism to men, and because radical feminists aim for men to learn from the things that have benefitted women in the past and prove they can do them just as well, much as women have proven their ability to take on what used to be called “men’s roles”.

A lot of the posts at my previous blog were intended to be illustrative of this idea, the various ways in which patriarchal systems (that’s feminist verbose for “unconscious sexism”) trip men up, and I’ll be continuing that trend over here, and as long as I come up with different forms of this idea to talk about, I’ll continue this series, tagging those posts with FBM and prefixing it to their titles.

FMB includes a number of broad topics:

• Why stereotypes and expectations of masculinity are harmful,
• Extending positive aspects of women’s sexuality to men, including birth control and having high standards,
• Creating equal expectations of men and women, rather than holding men to an insultingly low standard,
• Allowing space for differences between men and women without considering them mandatory or expected,
• Delaying or avoiding socialising young boys with unnecessary gender roles and letting them express their own desires,
• Criticising the policing of men’s decisions by both other men and women.

I hope to be able to continue doing feminist outreach to other men, and convincing them both online and offline that changing our culture is a good thing.

It’s Martin Luther King (Jr.) Day

One of my favourite international holidays, Martin Luther King (Jr.) left an amazing legacy to the civil rights community, and activists worldwide who practice non-violent protest. Arguably, #OccupyWallStreet is the first major heir to this style of protest, as the civil rights movement became the heir to it after the Indian independance movement.

I wonder a lot, when I listen or read about current events, what Dr. King would think about the Occupy movement. He would certainly be appalled by the continuing ghetto-isation of America, and would find no comfort in the fact that the ghettos have been integrated, with occasional poor white people suffering nearby.

I know he would certainly be right with the Occupation movement in their stance against poverty, and the excesses of capitalism- you don’t have to read very much of Dr. King’s work, or listen to many of his speeches, to know that he considered corporate oppression against the poor almost as large a problem in the America of his time as racism and segregation were, and corporate greed has become much, much worse since then. Would he commend their commitment to non-violence? Have Occupy done well enough in their protests for that? I like to hope they have. I won’t speculate too much more on this subject, before I start putting words in his mouth that we can’t easily hear from the tenor of his speeches.

He would certainly condemn the use of pepper spray and other police brutality, having seen similar brutality used against his own brothers and sisters fighting for civil rights. He would certainly commend the inspiration taken from the people of what is being labelled the Arab Spring, having learned his own lessons of solidarity in his visit to post-colonial India.

Would Dr. King have supported queer rights? It’s hard to say. He may have been more open to it than many Christians were, but it’s impossible in discussing Dr. King to forget that he was a minister, and even the most liberal of Christian ministers sometimes cannot extend their support for civil rights into the religious realm, supporting the rights of women or queers to be members in full of their religion. It is possibly a good sign that his wife, Coretta Scott King, thought that arguments against gay marriage were equivalent to the arguments used against interracial relationships and marriage, so if he had avoided his untimely death, maybe Dr. King would have been convinced by the same factors that led his wife to believe in queer rights.

I always find this day inspiring and heartening. While we still have to fight hard to maintain and expand our civil rights, there is an incredible legacy behind us, with people from all around the world, from all sorts of communities, involved in it, and engaging in extreme feats of solidarity with each other. There is so much that we, around the world, can learn from the legacy of Dr. King, that I think this day will still resonate around the world in a hundred years time.

 

Until we have learned those lessons, I’d like to extend my words in solidarity with anyone in the USA who is in need of their civil rights still. This day isn’t just for the legacy of Dr. King, it should be about you.

Shorter NYT: Should Journalists do their jobs?

Public editor of the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, asks their readership if:

…New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

and is then surprised and claims he was misunderstood when its readers essentially answer with a chorus of “yes, you moron” replies, and comments hopeful that this would result in a paper that actually reported the facts as facts and opinion as opinion. He went as far as to call this process being a “truth vigilante”.

Journalists must aggressively seek to ascertain and report the truth. It needs to be not just a profession, but more than that, a calling, to tell the truth about the powerful and what they’re saying. When someone makes a claim, it’s okay to fact-check it, and okay to tell us whether you found anything, or even if you couldn’t find anything. We like to know these things. You don’t need to hand us your conclusions, (that’s for the editorial pages) but please, for the sake of journalism, hand us all your evidence, and put your fact-checking next to the statements that are being fact-checked, so casual readers don’t miss them.

A “truth vigilante” would be someone who runs around punching anyone who lies to them. A person who aggressively challenges the claims of the rich and powerful is a “journalist”, especially if they admit it when they are corrected after going either too far, or not far enough. Here’s hoping the New York Times will listen to the thousands of people around the world that are speaking truth to power, and start catering to the vast market for actual journalism that we’re all so thirsty for, because they really did understand what they read the first time, and they know what they want.

Back into the closet

For the first time since I re-entered the workforce, I’m in the closet at work again.

It didn’t happen intentionally. My work* is just mentally demanding enough that it’s distracting to talk, so there is very little opportunity to discuss love lives at work, and being the bisexual type of queer guy, it’s not surprising that I pass for straight very easily. I haven’t actively concealed anything, the only time this part of my life came up, it related to a woman, and now everyone assumes I’m straight.

I find myself pondering if I should pivot a conversation slightly so I can come out and stop wondering what people’s reactions would be. I think about what the one person at work who, by her connection to a guy I briefly dated, may actually know I’m queer already. It’s a very unsettling feeling to have this part of me, which is quite significant, be secret in a part of my life, and it makes me annoyed that the onus is on me to come out.

I would like to please live in a world where people don’t assume I’m straight. I try to do people the courtesy of not making assumptions about their sexuality, (and when I don’t, I’ve been wrong before, so it seems like a good policy!) and it would be nice if they wouldn’t do the same thing to me. I would like to live in a world where it’s never a calculation about coming out- I know, for instance, that anything I do related to being queer could potentially be disruptive to mention in a job application, even if it might qualify me more for a job, and even in liberal Wellington, where Green supporters outnumber Labour supporters. Not everyone is so considerate.

This sort of worrying isn’t healthy, it isn’t good, but then again, neither is blurting out parts of your private life to your coworkers without a reason, which is why I wish I didn’t have to.

 

* About which I won’t go into detail here. I have agreed to be careful with what I say about work online, and I think that’s actually the best thing to do anyway in this case, as I deal with people’s private information a lot.

Chris Trotter doesn’t understand Occupy

The other day, I had the distinct displeasure of tripping over, hitting my mouse, and accidentally clicking over to one of Chris Trotter’s articles, which as always, was large on opinion and short on research. In an earlier life, I have joined the chorus of voices on the populist left that point out that the old guard like Chris Trotter (and now I guess also Pagani) are vastly unrepresentative of the left, even among Labour supporters, and once again he proves our point for us.

I’m not going to wade into whether Occupy encampments in New Zealand have lived up to their American counterparts, or the legacy of other non-violent movements, such as the independence movement in India or the civil rights movement in the USA. Those sorts of questions are, I think, best answered by people who actually participated in those movements.

The truth is absolutely that they have not had as clear an impact or as easy a job as foreign occupations have. There are probably good reasons to this that are not the fault nor under the control of New Zealand occupiers. In that sense, there is some truth to the general thrust of his piece. That’s not what I want to object to.

I didn’t even write this post to address the spurious claim that the movement should go away, as if we don’t have freedom of political assembly in New Zealand. (constitutionally, there’s no question that we do. In practice, the ability of councils to evict Occupations has now relegated freedom of assembly in New Zealand to theory at best. A council should not be allowed to evict a protest)

No, what I want to object to is his stupid throwaway line near the end of his piece:

New Zealand’s Occupy Movement has fizzled for all of the above reasons, and more, but its single greatest failure has been its refusal to transform its manifestly untrue claim to represent 99 per cent of the New Zealand public into anything resembling reality.

Chris Trotter fails to understand the refrain of the Occupy movement. Occupiers haven’t claimed to represent the whole 99%. Their refrain, “We are the 99%!” is one of solidarity, something you would expect the old guard to understand- protestors pointing out that they are like you, regular people, and that you are welcome to join, that they are part of the majority and ignoring their opinions is undemocratic. They are pointing out that their opponents take positions which hurt the vast majority of society, and that what they want is populist reform that puts large corporations and the wealthy elite back in their place. Occupations don’t believe in representative politics, they are as horizontal a heirarchy as can be practically managed, and practice participatory democracy.

If you don’t understand that, Chris Trotter, you’re not qualified to comment on Occupy encampments.