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The problem with "just literally walk out of the hood" is something that applies not just to African-Americans, but poor people of various stripes around the world: family. One of the major reasons given for why poorer people have poor spending habits is that if you are known to have any money available, your kin will come to prevail upon you as to why they need some. If you "make it big," every auntie and half-sibling and unemployed cousin is going to come begging for a little help. Unless you're willing to simply cut ties with your entire family — not an easy ask for anyone (save maybe the most atomistic of WEIRDs) — your success is mostly going to be eaten up by your extended clan, often making it not worth the effort.
Plus, there's also violence affecting family as well. You can work your way up, get into a top university, get married, become a respected judge or an english professor, live in a nice LA neighborhood, send your kids to private school… and then, one day, your nephew back in "the hood" in Philly has pissed off the wrong bunch and now has to come live with you for awhile.
To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.
It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.
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I never saw Fresh Prince from Uncle Phil’s perspective like that. A superb illustration of your point!
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This makes me wonder if the WASP superpower really was the nuclear family, in which the only "close" family to which you owe substantial loyalty is your parents, children, spouse, and maybe siblings. This is often criticized as being excessively atomistic and promoting anti-social attitudes around individualism and intergenerational social responsibility, but the contrast as described above seems like it has even worse tradeoffs.
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I’ve heard this expressed pithily as “one of the worst things about being poor is having to live alongside other poor people.” It sounds cruel and god knows there are plenty of rich arseholes but my friends from genuinely deprived backgrounds seem to have to endure a huge amount of interpersonal drama with family, from people needing to be bailed out (literally) to female relatives or friends needing help after getting beaten up by abusive boyfriends or spouses or friends stealing from them. Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.
Years ago I had reason to hear a one-hour job overview, from the head of security of a vast consumer goods warehouse. Security...they're worried about stealing stuff, right? Somewhat, but mostly it was the employees creating a giant, ongoing soap opera.
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There is also, I think, a psychological addiction many people have to familiar environments, so a person who grows up around the physical and emotional chaos of poverty will in some way continue to crave that chaos in their life even if they have the will power and conscientiousness to move themselves out of that environment. It will be a constant struggle for them to not fall back into the "comfort food" of the bad life decisions that were normal during their formative years.
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One of the worst things? It is absolutely by and large the worst thing if you're living in the west. There is like no comparison at all.
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Yes, it was likely different when 95% of people were ‘poor’ and only 5% had any money at all, but in the developed world where ‘poor’ generally refers to the bottom 20% you’re going to see very high correlation with low conscientiousness, high time preference etc.
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