Anonymous asked:
Basically that poor people are partly responsible for their poverty, and that if they spend money on alcohol or cigarettes or lavish weddings that it’s their own fault they’re poor.
I disagree with this on a lot of levels.
One, I’m a utilitarian and I don’t really think desert and blame are very useful concepts. I think poverty is bad and we should alleviate it.
Two, to the extent that they are useful concepts, it’s because invoking them causes good things to happen. And talking about how it’s poor people’s fault that they’re poor just seems less likely to be effective than say, suggesting policy solutions to address poverty.
Three, there’s like an element of … I want to use the word privilege here? Tbh I don’t really know what Bryan Caplan’s background is like (though I’m going to guess he did not grow up as part of the global poor). So I’ll speak for myself and say that I’ve never been poor or faced anxiety over money and I don’t know what it’s like. I wish I could say that I would never choose beer or a lavish wedding over feeding my kids if that were the choice, but who knows? I think life on dollars or less a day isn’t easy, and I feel really lucky to never have been faced with that choice.