Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 feeder wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Even if they only worked one day a week that's still $432,000 a year.

Is this going to be one of those threads where white people who have so much disposable income that they blow thousands of dollars annually on toys show their complete ignorance of what it's like to be poor by assuming that drug dealing is a lucrative career and serial-convicts commit crimes because they're just inherently immoral and love going to prison?

Well, the alternative is to accept that my current worldview is flawed and that everyone can't just bootstrap themselves into a comfortable life. Poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy, right?

Hey, I'll happily say that if a person is so lazy that they don't want to work at all, are above the age of it being appropriate to live with parents, and don't suffer mental illness...hell yes! They do deserve to be poor. If it's mental illness or a kid, then that's different. But a normal, healthy adult who just doesn't want to work? Yup. Sucks to be them if they're poor.*

*does not apply to the following:
People who want to work and can't get jobs
Children
People with mental illness
Soldiers who returned from war with PTSD and can't handle certain situations
Etc


Which I realize is different from your sarcastic "blame the victim" moment. After rereading. It's too early.

Perhaps the Richmond one only seems to be successful.

A problem of most social policy is that it is very difficult to define and measure success, correlate it to factors, and even more difficult to show a good degree of confidence in causation.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I wonder why the Richmond one has been successful while others have not

Note that the Baltimore program your article mentioned has had contraversies, but there's nothing there to show its been unsuccessful. Now I'm not saying it has been successful, I don't know, I'm just making the distinction between a program having a contraversy and a program actually failing.

Those contraversies might make program politically unsustainable, but they don't necessarily mean the program is failing on a case by case basis.

So maybe Richmond has some unique quality, better and harder working staff, better support or something. Maybe there's a better economy or a better society so people on the program have a real opportunity to get work and turn their lives around.

Or maybe Richmond's singular success is just a matter of a stats quirk, as Killkrazy suggests. The gentrification or some other thing is affecting numbers more than this program. Or possibly the opposite is true, the programs are effective but the effect isn't well captured in the collected stats.