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Okay, I was looking to go somewhere new last year. No other company where I'd be working in the same field as I am now was willing to hire me...or at least not at the level of pay I'm already making. I probably checked into 7 or 8 places, and only two let me apply. For less money.
Only 7 or 8? No wonder you couldn't find anything! Send an application into 3-4 companies every day for a week and you will see results. And definitely don't wait until they say they are hiring! The majority of positions are not ever advertised. Companies wait for proactive people to come to them. When I was job hunting I sent out resumes with personalized cover letters to close to 50 companies in a two week period. Guess what? If I stopped at 8 guess what? I wouldn't have a job right now.
I don't have the time to read 18 pages of comments so if this has already been posted, I apologize.
The "poor", the "underclass"...whatever you wish to call them is not a static situation. Virtually everybody is poor at one time and works his way through that situation while obtaining education and experience to better himself.
If you could capture all the names of the poor, then do it again ten years later, you would find that very few names match up. People leave the class on their way up; people enter it on their way down.
We wring our hands constantly over "what to do about the poor" when very, very few people are in this situation permanently.
I don't consider it to be a problem worthy of anywhere near the amount attention it gets.
Only 7 or 8? No wonder you couldn't find anything! Send an application into 3-4 companies every day for a week and you will see results. And definitely don't wait until they say they are hiring! The majority of positions are not ever advertised. Companies wait for proactive people to come to them. When I was job hunting I sent out resumes with personalized cover letters to close to 50 companies in a two week period. Guess what? If I stopped at 8 guess what? I wouldn't have a job right now.
Not that many companies in this area to apply at. I'm limited geographically, because I do not drive. And even if I did drive, I might not want to leave the area I've "settled" in. I don't like changing, moving, I like to find a spot and stay in that spot. A nice comfortable groove.
I don't have the time to read 18 pages of comments so if this has already been posted, I apologize.
The "poor", the "underclass"...whatever you wish to call them is not a static situation. Virtually everybody is poor at one time and works his way through that situation while obtaining education and experience to better himself.
If you could capture all the names of the poor, then do it again ten years later, you would find that very few names match up. People leave the class on their way up; people enter it on their way down.
We wring our hands constantly over "what to do about the poor" when very, very few people are in this situation permanently.
I don't consider it to be a problem worthy of anywhere near the amount attention it gets.
This makes sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TKramar
Not that many companies in this area to apply at. I'm limited geographically, because I do not drive. And even if I did drive, I might not want to leave the area I've "settled" in. I don't like changing, moving, I like to find a spot and stay in that spot. A nice comfortable groove.
But hye does have a point in that even with teh failure rate the majority of new jobs and much of the wealth in this country is increasingly coming from people who start their own business.Many of them have started businesses and failed only to succeed later. Its just a fact and always has been that people who work for others rarely become wealthy.Small business is by7 far the most increasing area where jobs of all salaries are being created.
This discussion is NOT about devising strategies to enable a few smart people to get rich. They already know how. It is about enabling a LOT (tens of millions) of not-very-smart people to stop being poor. For a person in the cycle of poverty, trying to start your own small business is absolutely the wrongest thing he can possibly do. He will almost certainly fall.
Yes, small businesses create some jobs, but they are more likely to be short term jobs (half of all small businesses fail), and usually have very few benefits.
Not that many companies in this area to apply at. I'm limited geographically, because I do not drive. And even if I did drive, I might not want to leave the area I've "settled" in. I don't like changing, moving, I like to find a spot and stay in that spot. A nice comfortable groove.
If you shoot yourself in the foot, you can't complain that you have a limp.
If you could capture all the names of the poor, then do it again ten years later, you would find that very few names match up.
I don't know about that. From what I've seen in the smaller town where I grew up, the underclass is still the underclass, with a few exceptions. Income mobility has been declining in the US over time.
I don't know about that. From what I've seen in the smaller town where I grew up, the underclass is still the underclass, with a few exceptions. Income mobility has been declining in the US over time.
Where do you get that? Thomas Sowell, from whom I lifted my last post, discusses the "poor" situation at length in at least one of his books. Maybe it was Visions of the Annointed, I can't remember. Mr. Sowell, an economist, is orders of magnitude smarter than I am on this matter but what he writes is easily understandable and makes sense, at least to me.
From my own experience, almost everybody I know was poor at one point. Very few are now. Of course, I am aware of some families who seemed to be mired in the welfare benefits cycle, without which I am almost certain they would do something different. We enable a small underclass by giving people money who have to do nothing whatsoever in return for receiving it. For most (not all!), it is their choice to live that way, not any underlying fault of the system.
I really doubt your last statement that income mobility has been declining. The Forbes 400 list has changed tremendously over the last ten years. I myself went from grinding-poverty poor while in school to probably top 5% of incomes in my lifetime and in the end, I will return to the bottom when that income stops. Overall, income is a poor way to measure wealth. You could be sitting on a bunch of money or land and have very little income for an outsider to measure. I have a person in mind who is sitting on ~$6M worth of land (which she and her husband bought and paid for with thrift and sweat) but has very little cash income from it; in fact she works part time for my wife.
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