As of 5/20/09, for the first time in its history, Compassion International is ministering to 1 million sponsored children at one time! This is incredible.
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Notes
posted 6 / 12 / 2009
Why not distinguish between lifestyle problems and catastrophe problems?— Marvin Olasky
Lifestyle poverty comes about when people don’t do four things: Stay sober, stay in school at least through high school graduation, stay out of bed in situations likely to lead to pregnancy or abortion, and stay with a job even if it lacks thrills. When people don’t follow these basics, the result is often alcoholism and addiction, single parenting, and lack of the skills or perseverance needed to get and hold a job.
Lifestyle poverty arises out of messy lives, and sending a government check does nothing to clean up the mess. That’s different from catastrophe poverty: A plant closes, a person is injured, or—right now—a person is laid off when recession begins and doesn’t get new opportunities, as economic blight drags on year after year.
Catastrophe poverty is not like lifestyle poverty. Those who suffer through catastrophe poverty are often work-oriented. They have not fallen into joblessness: Situations beyond their control have pushed them into it. They may need financial help to bridge the gap until they are ready and able to work again, but their values do not need realignment.
With lifestyle poverty, though, a government check can hurt rather than help, because it may just further a non-work psychology. Those sunk into lifestyle poverty need challenging, personal, and spiritual help, rather than cold, enabling, entitling, by-the-numbers bureaucratic aid. We should not treat them the way we treat pet dogs: In the morning put some food and water in their bowls, and in the evening take them out for walks.
Using some sophisticated statistical techniques, Burkhauser, Larrimore, and Simon then correct for these factors, and find that, using this more accurate measure of economic resources, the American middle class has done quite well over time, including during the last business cycle of 2000-2007. They write, “When using our broadest measure of available resources—post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits—median income growth of individual Americans improves to 36.7 percent over the period from 1979 to 2007, and by 4.8 percent between 2000 and 2007.” In other words, contra Stiglitz, middle class Americans have made substantial gains over the relevant periods. They have gotten richer—in fact, quite a bit richer—and not poorer.
This is one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read in a while.
Lim Miller had come to believe that the American social welfare system focused too much on poor people’s needs and deficits, while overlooking — and even inhibiting — their strengths. A safety net is crucial when people are in crisis, he said. But most poor families are not in free fall. They don’t need nets to catch them so much as they need springboards to jump higher. In a conversation with Oakland’s mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor), Brown challenged Lim Miller to try something different and gave him broad scope to be creative.
Lim Miller wanted to see what families would do if they came together in a context that supported their initiative. He began by identifying families in low-income communities who were surviving, but who had “given up hope” of aspiring to more. He asked them to pull together six to eight other families. He offered them a challenge. The country had been waging a war on poverty for 40 years, he said, but the problem remained unsolved. “What we’re going to do is give you some resources and connections and we’re going to trust that you’ll do something,” he said. “You guys are in the power position. If you do nothing we’ll fail. If you do something we’ll all learn.”
They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. F.I.I. asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.
Miller was very strict about his employees not providing suggestions or encouragement to the families. He uncovers a profound insight about the fundamental failure of many government safety net programs:
Miller gave his staff strict instructions that they could not offer any advice — not even friendly suggestions. For some, this proved too difficult; he had to fire people who couldn’t help but be helpful. Lim Miller was convinced that the assumption of incapacity behind the helpfulness was a big part of the problem.
The results thus far have been mind-blowing. Read the rest.
…studies have shown that much poverty in the U.S. is sexually driven. That is, many children are poor because they were born out of wedlock. And as Robert Rector and Melissa G. Pardue write on the Heritage Foundation website, “The collapse of marriage is the principal cause of child poverty in the United States. Children raised by never-married mothers are seven times more likely to live in poverty than children raised” by married parents. I’ve seen this close-up in the prisons over the years, where almost 90 percent of the inmates have no father role model.— BreakPoint (via whatismarriage)
Finally, and most important—we can’t predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it. What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.— MichaelCrichton.com | The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming
As of 5/20/09, for the first time in its history, Compassion International is ministering to 1 million sponsored children at one time! This is incredible.
When I wrote: “Spiritually you’re better off a little mixed up about economics than indifferent to human suffering. Economically, though, only what you do is important, whatever your reason,” I was trying to balance but capture Gilson’s “Piety is no substitute for technique.” To me, this is one of most important points I’ve tried to make. Motivation IS important when we’re considering our spiritual state before God. It’s just that our motivation for a policy has nothing to do with the real world effects of the policy. I think that Christians often weight our (and others’) motivations far too heavily on economic matters. It’s as if we think feeling bad about poverty is more obligatory than actually doing something that helps the poor. For instance, several times in churches I’ve pointed out why minimum wage laws don’t really help the poor in the long run. I’ve never had anyone try to debunk the argument, but several times I’ve received the complaint that my argument shows that I’m not really concerned about the poor. It doesn’t of course. But even if it were evidence that I weren’t concerned about the poor, the argument’s validity (or lack thereof) would remain the same.— Jay Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, as interviewed by Kevin DeYoung.
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