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TygrBright

(20,733 posts)
Tue Jul 29, 2014, 12:51 PM Jul 2014

"Social Engineering": Why and How it CAN Reduce Poverty

It's gotten something of a bad name, thanks to dedicated opposition from Our Beloved Oligarchs and their shills, who've ginned up the "Evil Gubmint" and "Nanny State" memes to prevent any discussion except what happens behind closed doors at Bohemian Grove or wherever.

But social engineering is just a descriptor for conscious effort to effect social change on a large scale, using institutional tools. And it's something humans have been doing since forever. It's part of how we evolve. The change from wandering clan-based bands of hunter-gatherers to sessile agrarian tribes, to cities with central authority, etc.-- all represent social engineering.

A good deal of the animosity to the social engineering concept is based on a lack of understanding of social engineering tools and methods.

Basically, they all devolve to three categories:

1. Make it POSSIBLE for humans to do something
2. Make it EASY for humans to do something
3. Make it DESIRABLE for humans to do something

It's that last category-- making it desirable-- that gets a lot of the fallout, because we're not as good at it as we'd like to be. It's a fine balancing act, for example, between providing incentives for male parents to form tight family bonds and contribute emotional and material support on a daily basis to their children, and reinforcing the most pernicious traits of patriarchy and/or infringing on equitable access to economic and social resources to a destructive extent.

Lately, however, we've been losing sight even of the first two: Making it possible and making it easy. In fact, in the context of addressing poverty in America, we've pretty much lost sight of both of them.

In the "making it possible" for people to escape poverty category, we have few remaining tools operating. So many aspects of our social fabric have become segregated by wealth level that it's far beyond just "challenging" to take the actions required to move out of poverty. It doesn't help that a whole cultural mythos of Horatio Alger bootstrap bullshit still pervades the dialog, without respect to real conditions.

How is it possible for a single parent with one or two children to escape poverty today? Looking at simple logistics?

Well, if you are lucky enough to have a supportive family with resources to help you with child care, occasional financial assistance, etc., AND you are willing to work more than one full-time minimum wage job, lucky enough to live in an area where such jobs are available, and have been both lucky AND motivated enough to avoid disqualifying mistakes to obtain such jobs, and can pursue them WHILE having the energy, health, resources and motivation to seek and obtain additional education, skills, certification, etc. that will qualify you for something beyond minimum wage work, and you can keep all of this up for several years AND be lucky enough to dodge a whole slew of poverty-related bullets like health problems, major transportation problems, problems finding affordable and safe places to live, etc., you MIGHT do it.

You might.

You might "marry up," if you can find a spouse with good financial resources who is willing to make that commitment. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere where it's possible to find and socialize with such folks, and if they're not skeevy assholes just looking to exploit you as a sex/housework laborer, etc.

You might.

You might try military service, if you're young and healthy enough, and willing to take the risk that you won't get your ass shot off, your brain fried, etc., and that you'll get some kind of useful skill training other than "shooting people" in the military and some access to benefits and hiring preferences when you get out. Which is a fast-diminishing chance these days, but still slightly possible.

You might.

None of those, however, are surefire routes out of poverty. And the sad reality is that we have used NEGATIVE social engineering to engineer all such routes out of existence altogether. There used to be a few of them, back in the 1970s, when the minimum wage was barely livable, and an array of social safety net programs helped with housing and other logistics, and there were actual jobs available, and actual education you could access that would both benefit you AND be reasonably affordable.

While I'd like to cover the issues of "making it desirable" for people to make choices that will help them out of poverty, we can't really be effective with that until we have a foundation of "possible" and "easy" to build on.

And while it may be reasonable to debate the extent to which a strategy has the effect of making it "easy" rather than making it "possible" (the ghost of the never-existed Horatio Alger attends every planning session...) at the level of challenge we're currently facing, it's largely a matter of degree, and we're so far from success that such discussions are unrealistic and frivolous.

Let's simply focus on "possible." We're not "trying to help people in poverty." We're simply trying to structure a society, an amalgamation of communities into a greater community, that makes it POSSIBLE for people to escape poverty.

What does that look like?

I think it requires a cluster of strategies, and as far as I can tell, we're currently trying to implement many of them, over powerful obstructionism from Our Beloved Oligarchs and their helots.

Those strategies start with avoiding large-scale further disruption of the social and economic fabric. This is a controversial strategy as many of us think that such disruption would have better long-term effects than trying to hold things together while we build and repair and improve. Be that as it may, it's the current choice and I think a sound one-- the track record on such disruption is ambiguous, and that ambiguity tends to reduce the broader level of support that helps institutionalize change over the long haul.

The next level of strategies involves repairing and rebuilding the economic infrastructure: Bringing back jobs from offshore. Restructuring the tax burden. Re-shaping and restoring the infrastructure of resource development, transport, communication, knowledge and skills development, etc. that allows people to create economic sustenance. (This is a multi-benefit group of strategies as the implementation also begins the process of creating access to opportunity through the job creation involved.)

At more or less the same level of urgency with the economic infrastructure are a group of strategies focused on cost control related to the deteriorating well-being of the population. Simply put, the larger the population of distressed/disadvantaged individuals in our society, the more costs we ALL pay through attempts to control crime, remediate infrastructure deterioration and damage, deal with public health threats, etc. Ending the pernicious War on Drugs, implementing access to basic health care, and closing down the various opportunities for Our Beloved Oligarchs to profiteer from the misery of the poor are not easy strategies to implement, but we're making tiny increments of progress in the constant tug-or-war.

Finally, the strategies that begin to directly address the abilities of a member of our community to live well and build modest prosperity for themselves and their family members-- and in some ways, these are the easiest ones: Raising the minimum wage to a livable level. Assuring access to decent housing. Removing financial predators and parasites from the tank and providing access to functional financial, communications, and other resource management tools.

These are not bleeding-heart nanny-state burdens on the middle class. They are not unreasonable mollycoddling of morally degenerate undesirables.

Social engineering, yes, they are. For EVERYONE'S benefit.

Making it possible for people do do what our social species have it hard-wired into us to do: Form family units, build security and prosperity for ourselves, and build the overall well-being of the communities that allow us to prosper.

academically,
Bright

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"Social Engineering": Why and How it CAN Reduce Poverty (Original Post) TygrBright Jul 2014 OP
Some of the opposition to social engineering is the result of the I got mine attitude toward others. jwirr Jul 2014 #1
That's not really new. TygrBright Jul 2014 #2
Totally agree. As someone who has been poor most of my life and who worked as a social worker jwirr Jul 2014 #3

jwirr

(39,215 posts)
1. Some of the opposition to social engineering is the result of the I got mine attitude toward others.
Tue Jul 29, 2014, 01:04 PM
Jul 2014

I especially see that in the make up of our American citizens today.

TygrBright

(20,733 posts)
2. That's not really new.
Tue Jul 29, 2014, 01:12 PM
Jul 2014

It's waxed and waned throughout our history. But when it's fanned by the helots of Our Beloved Oligarchs, who are the only ones who REALLY "got mine" (and yours, and everyone else's, for that matter...) it does become a powerful, powerful force.

I think what we're seeing right now is a powerful backlash against the successful social engineering of the period between 1930 and about 1975 or thereabouts.

Add in what they learned about propaganda from J Goebbels and co., with the resources that allowed them to gather in and monopolize all the channels of public discourse, and it's easy to see why we've been so thoroughly fucked.

Time to take a shot of penicillin, kick their asses to the curb, and get back to work.

persistently,
Bright

jwirr

(39,215 posts)
3. Totally agree. As someone who has been poor most of my life and who worked as a social worker
Tue Jul 29, 2014, 01:17 PM
Jul 2014

and advocate for persons with developmental disabilities I have been involved in the building of the success during that era. One thing the upper class does not like is equality and that is what we were building.

I agree that we need to fight back. This new era is not working for most of us.

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