Question

What was the role and possibility of urban housing in the industrial age? What was the state’s responsibility to its poorest citizens (if it had any)? How did capital, labor and form interact to meet or fail to meet the needs of citizens for shelter?

Answer 1

Prior to the industrial revolution, people lived a rural agrarian lifestyle with cottage industry and many homemade goods being the primary sources for products. After the industrial revolution, the opposite societal changes start to unfold. People start to live in urban centers, leaving the family farm. They get a paycheck for the first time (people used to be paid once or twice a year at harvest times and there was no wide spread use of cash before). Products are begin machine made. The sewing machine makes clothes more affordable and more people start to own more than one outfit. More goods are factory made and people buy goods instead of make them at home. Basically a shift toward a more modern way of life.

                               Think about what that Yahoo poster said about the poor, and leave aside the morality and hatefulness of that sort of comment. Look instead at what this poster, so "sick of these folks whining", proposes as a solution:

1--Get another job on top of the Walmart job.

Many do. Others simply can't, do to circumstance; who takes care of that workers children, or helps them with homework, or cares for the aging parent at home? As many posters have mentioned, circumstance and bad luck play a HUGE role in the outcomes of the poor. A single mother, most often "working poor", can't do the two jobs thing. If she does, this same poster is chastising her for her out-of-control kids.

Most importantly, please remember that the poor work harder than the rich. The CEO usually does not work as hard as the maid who cleans his office; when he does, its his choice and his schedule, and that's an important distinction. I am in the managerial class now, but have been an entry-level employee before, and the biggest difference (other than pay) is the control and discretion I have over my life and hours. I can get up and leave to tend to some emergency, or simply run some crucial errands. As a bottom-level, working poor employee, I couldn't go to the bathroom without say so. Imagine if all the times you leave work, or telecommute, or put out personal fires on office time, cost you your job.

2 and 3--Get more education/trade school.

Completely ignorant in most cases. Right now, college degrees are devalued b/c so many people have them. We have a surfeit of people with BA's, and no use for all of them, so some serve coffee. What makes someone think that "trade school" will be any more a panacea? The "skills mismatch" theory of unemployment (that unemployment is high/economy is weak due to potential workers lacking the skills to get jobs) is mostly a myth. Unemployment is high due to weak demand. A person working at Walmart, coming freshly out of a "trade school", will likely find no new options on the horizon. Worse still, most of these trade schools are for-profit scams, deluding the poor and unemployed with promises of work in fields that are unusually tough to enter, and in no way short of potential employees.

And who pays? A person making below-poverty wages, or us? Are you planning to support all these upwardly bound poor with generous welfare to live on while they complete school?


To conclude, blaming the poor for being poor is one of the most universal, and most shameful, things that people do. Nobody chooses to be poor. Instead, the poor live day to day, crisis to crisis, and settle for the way things are, rather than how they might have been.