A Guide to Debating Ben Shapiro on Poverty in America

Shapiro's Stance:

1. Class and income mobility exists in our society
2. Anyone can succeed in America by simply: a) finishing high school, b) waiting until married to have kids, c) getting a job
3. Poor people are poor because they "suck at managing their money"
4. We don’t need to worry about poverty in America because being poor here is better than being poor in most places in the world

Opening Question:

Student: There’s a popular Youtube video of you speaking at a public school, with many low-income students in the audience and you say something along the lines of: “if you are permanently poor in the United States it’s because you suck with money” (video, DailyWire article).

Shapiro: Yes, and then the principal of the school interrupted me and said I "went too far" and told the kids they were all free to leave.

Student: Right. What does it mean to "suck with money"? What is this skill that all poor people lack? 

Shapiro: It means you make poor financial decisions, you don't save money, you buy unnecessary crap and you don't apply yourself toward finding and keeping a job. If you walk down the streets of Manhattan you will see homeless people with expensive iPhones and expensive shoes...

Student: There are many books that document/describe the experience of being poor in America. These books follow some poor people, trace every dollar they earn and spend and the image you get is very different from the one you describe (“Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” is a recent example). When you read about the experiences of real poor people you realize that the working poor need to be absurdly careful with their money just to survive. Poverty is a crippling source of stress and anxiety. Anyone with young kids on a salary around the minimum wage is constantly rationing food stamps, trying to supplement their income with odd-jobs, skipping meals, just barely making rent, skipping heat in the winter, and cannot waste a single penny. Surviving with kids on a low-income is a perilous and frightening balancing act that boggles the mind and I think is worthy of our respect and admiration. 

If anything happens to go wrong – someone gets sick, a car breaks down, a crime is committed on your property, etc. you can instantly lose your job, your home and your kids.

That’s not to say you can’t find examples of poor people who are not careful with money, but when you appreciate how difficult is it for the hardest working families to survive in miserable health-code violation conditions with barely enough food for the family, it’s easy to see why some people fall into despair and escapism.

Potential Exchanges:

Shapiro: There’s no one who care enough about you in this country to try to hold you back.

Obviously not, but regressive laws and a regressive tax system make it needlessly expensive to be poor - that’s the problem. Poverty in America is extremely expensive. Poor people pay a higher percentage of their income in state and local taxes than wealthy people, poor people rely on old cars that are constantly breaking down and cost more to fix, insurance is more expensive in poor neighborhoods, poor people pay more in rent as a fraction of the value of their apartment than wealthy people, food is more expensive in poor neighborhoods and poor people can’t afford to buy in bulk, poor people can’t afford to use a bank because of low-balance and overdraft fees so poor people cash their checks at places that take a cut, there are also debt traps, etc.

Shapiro: The reality you’re describing is simply free-market capitalism. Any attempt to do price-fixing or redistribute money to people that didn’t earn that money will undermine the incentives that drive our economy and cause a Venezuela-style economic collapse.

Addressing the heavy costs of being poor does not mean abandoning a free-market economy. The American tax payer pays tens of millions of dollars to finance roads to benefit people with cars, but does not give a fraction of that to fund public transportation for the people who can’t afford cars. Trump's plan to give a tax deduction for childcare is a great tax-break for rich people but does nothing to help low income people who are spending a much larger percentage of their income for child care. Adjusting welfare benefits for inflation will not lead to economic collapse.

Shapiro: That’s why we have entitlement programs and welfare

The United States ranks second to last in the developed world when it comes to child poverty. Our social safety net is better than the social safety net in Sudan, but compared to any other wealthy nation it’s grotesque. Millions of families are forced to survive on a few dollars a day and can’t even afford diapers for their kids. It’s shameful and totally unnecessary.

Shapiro: If a poor person wins the lottery they invariably end up poor again soon.

That’s because the financial habits that a person develops in poverty are not transferable to the habits that a person develops when they are making a comfortable income. The skill of scraping together ten dollars a month in savings doesn’t prepare you for picking out the best Roth IRA. The adjustment from spending 100% of your disposable income to saving money takes some time but that is just a side-effect of being poor, not the other way around.

Shapiro: That’s just wrong. If you work hard in this country, you will succeed. Period.

If you think that's true then tell your audience to go to the library, take-out a book on poverty in America, see the experience for themselves so they can make their own determination. People who have read about poverty in America or have seen it firsthand see you as trafficking in cruel and self-serving stereotypes - not facts.

See also: A Guide for Debating Ben Shapiro on Institutional Racism

If you have any criticisms, additions, or suggestions, please leave a comment and I will update this document with any thoughts that I think are useful.

A Guide for Debating Ben Shapiro on Institutional Racism

Shapiro's Stance:

1. Racists exists, but institutional racism does not exist. There are even advantages to being black in America today (scholarships, affirmative action, etc.).
2. Institutional racism existed as late as the 70s and 80s, but has since been resolved
3. Ben Shapiro: “point me to an example of an institution that is racist and we can fight that racism together.”
4. Ben Shapiro: “if someone has been the target of institutional racism they can find a good lawyer and sue that institution.”
5. For anyone to “make it” in America they need to: a) finish high school, b) wait for marriage to have children, c) get a job - this has nothing to do with race. Failure to “make it” in America, reflects a moral failing on the part of the person who failed to make it.
6. Claims of institutional racism reflects a failure to appreciate how wonderful and prosperous life in America is today.
7. Institutional racism is a tool of "the left" for invoking government action and curtailing freedoms.
8. People are only incarcerated in this country if they deserve it.

Opening Question:

Student: You minimize the significance of institutional racism in our society, but there’s a lot of academic literature on that topic. I want to understand what you think about that literature. Is it all BS?

Shapiro: Yes, most of it is BS.

Student: Okay, that's fair. But just to be clear, we're talking about conclusions in reputable academic journals and the conclusions of data scientists who are doing simple data-analysis on loan interest rate data and government sentencing data. You flatly reject the validity of all those results? Do you think our nation's academics are dishonest? Misled?

Shapiro: Firstly, I don't think it's really a consensus in the academic world. Secondly, yes I think the academic community has a very distorting liberal bias. But I'm not really sure what findings you're referring to so it's impossible for me to respond.

Student: Okay, so let's be very specific. I have here written a few specific examples of institutional racism that are frequently cited in the academic literature:

1. When controlling for credit score, Blacks and Latinos pay higher interest rates for home loans than Whites
2. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be turned down for a bank loan than Whites
3. Black students get harsher punishments in school than White students for the exact same infractions from as early as preschool
4. Americans see Black boys as being older and less innocent than White boys of the same age and this discrepancy gets exaggerated when the person making that judgement is told that the boy under inspection was suspected of a crime
5. On average, Blacks receive sentences 20% longer than Whites for the exact same crimes
6. People with black sounding names and a strong resume are less likely to be called for a job interview than people with white sounding names and a weak resume
7. Blacks are far more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes than Whites and the project of mass incarceration has resulted in America being the most highly incarcerated country in the world and has completely destroyed Black communities in this country
8. Defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white person than killing a black person
9. A report by the National Registry of Exonerations found innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people and that black people convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers

Potential Exchanges:

Shapiro: Wrong, felonies are under-prosecuted in the Black community.

Okay, that's an interesting statistic, but not really relevant to what I'm talking about. More relevant statistics include: how does the severity of the sentence meted out change by race? How does prosecution depend on whether we're talking about Black-on-Black crime or Black-on-White crime?

Shapiro: That statistic may be correct, but it doesn't imply racism. There is no one you can point to and say ‘you’re a racist.’

Great! so you’re just saying that the whole issue here is one of terminology. You recognize that Blacks face barriers to success, but you're caught up on the question of whether or not we can identify a particular bigot. The whole point of term "institutional racism" as distinct from regular racism is that there is no individual racist. These are barriers to success that exist as part of an institutional biases and practice. If you want, we can pick a different term for it, but it's nice that we can agree that the phenomena exists and now maybe we can have a conversation about what to do about it.

Shapiro: There's nothing that can be done about that, that's just the way markets/systems/institutions work.

Okay, so maybe we agree that institutional racism exists, but we disagree about whether or not anything that can be done. That’s perfectly fair. What to do about systemic racism is a very different discussion than does systemic racism exist. 

Here are the kinds of solutions people who talk about this issue want to see: fix our nation's highly discriminatory peremptory strike laws that allows lawyers to eliminate jurors based on skin color, rollback our country’s draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws for non-violent drug offences, demand better oversight and training for law enforcement, invest in our nation’s public school system and fight any legislation which seeks to de-fund our nation’s public schools under the guise of school-choice and private-school voucherization, call for a moratorium on the death penalty until our society address the systemic racial bias in the way it currently gets applied, pass that laws that allow people who were those convicted of non-violent crimes access to government housing, the right to vote, and fair employment procedures, etc.

Shapiro: If a bank is discriminating against Blacks in their loan offerings, someone should just sue that bank.

I’m really glad you raised that point, because that is the crux of the issue and is exactly the reason that the concept of institutional racism is so important. In our country you cannot sue under the equal protection clause in unless you prove discriminatory intent, in other words, the only racism protected by our country’s laws is the racism of a bigot and not the institutional racism that we are talking about. The famous example is the Supreme Court case McClesky v. Kemp. In that case, the prosecutor showed that killers of Whites were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of Blacks and the court agreed with that finding but found that there was no discriminatory intent so the prosecution lost that case. This is exactly why the notion of institutional racism exists and is important - there are still grotesque forms of racism that cannot be addressed by our legal system.

Shapiro: It’s a myth that our justice system disproportionately targets Blacks, and the reason Blacks are more likely to receive the death penalty is because they are far more likely to commit violent crime.

The whole world of academia disagrees with you, and the supreme court of the United States disagrees with you. See McClesky v. Kemp (in that case the Supreme Court acknowledged major racial disparities in the application of the death penalty). Denying these racial disparities is such a joke because all this government data is publicly available and anyone who knows how to use Excel can do their own analysis and confirm these results for themselves. 

Shapiro: Universities are a bastion of liberal ideology and shouldn’t be trusted.

Okay, so you’re saying that if institutional racism of that kind existed, you agree that we should stand-up and fight against, but you just don't believe the people who say it exists. When data-scientists explore open government data about mortgage rate information or sentencing data - you will automatically assume those data-scientists are dishonest? What if I do that data analysis myself? If we sat down together and analyzed government sentencing/home mortgage data and found the discrepancies on our own, would you change your mind then?

Shapiro: You have it backward. This notion of institutional racism promotes a narrative of victimhood that causes people to be held back in our society.

If you read any book or news article about poverty in the inner-city, you would know that every teacher and counselor and parent trying to raise a kid in that environment hammers home a mantra of “no excuses” - if you don't succeed you have only yourself to blame. So the idea that poor people are reveling in their victimhood is patently false.

More to the point, these teachers and students do not know about or do not care about institutional racism. The message to these kids is that they shouldn’t be held back by the fact that: a) they don’t have enough calories in their stomach to focus in math class, or b) their father is in jail for drug possession, or c) their younger brother got shot by a stray bullet while walking home from school the other day. The idea that affluent people like me reading books about institutional racism written by other successful academics is the barrier to success preventing these kids from escaping a miserable and grinding poverty is just laughable.

Shapiro: The reason Black communities have so much drug abuse and violent crime is because of 'Black culture.'

I think that’s a very simplistic and self-serving theory, but I’m not going to debate that with you because it’s completely irrelevant to the question of institutional racism that I'm talking about. I'm arguing that Blacks and Whites should be treated equally in our society and I'm arguing that they're not treated equally in our society. You're welcome imagine the average Black person as a delinquent, but that is unrelated to my argument that Black people deserved to be sentenced the same way Whites are sentenced and get the same interest rate on a loan as a white person in the same socio-economic circumstance.

More Info:

See also: A Guide to Debating Ben Shapiro on Poverty in America

If you have any criticisms, additions, or suggestions, please leave a comment and I will update this document with any thoughts that I think are useful.

Mr. Smeds and Mr. Spats

From Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic:

From Wikipedia's Great Famine (Ireland) article, about food exports from Ireland during the famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Irish_food_exports_during_Famine):

Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine. The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor. 

A contemporary example of the same phenomena:
http://www.irinnews.org/news/2006/03/21/lowland-districts-face-water-shortages

What "Left" Means to Me

Contrary to the characterizations I most often hear, I don’t care about diversity, I don’t care about inclusion or love or tolerance. I don't want government to orchestrate our economy, and I don’t want to live in a society where everyone is equal or everyone is treated the same.

For me, being on the left means I am interested in the ways institutions operate, wield power, and whether or not that power is being abused. There are two major themes in my world of progressive thinking and reading: 1) what evidence can we find that suggests the existence of systemic disenfranchisement, 2) what are the specific mechanisms of disenfranchisement and oppression that explain this evidence. Below I will give specific examples from each of these two themes.

Theme I - Evidence of Systemic Disenfranchisement:

• In 2013, the net worth of the median black household in the United States was $11,000. The net worth of the median white household was $141,900¹. This wealth gap between the races is greater than the wealth gap between the races in South Africa during apartheid. This suggests some major barriers to success that affect people based on the color of their skin.
• Even after controlling for income and education level, whites live five years longer on average than blacks.
• 1 in 3 black men will go to prison in his lifetime.
• America is the most highly incarcerated country in the world - we have more people behind bars per-capita than Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc.
• Child poverty in America is the second to worst in the whole developed world.

Theme II – Mechanisms of Power and Disenfranchisement:

• Progressives are interested in understanding the role money plays in our political system and the way our laws are often determined by the donors, corporations and special interest groups that fund political campaigns.
• Progressives are interested in understanding how our nation’s drug laws, policing, and legal system disproportionately criminalize and destroy black communities and how our laws permanently disenfranchise people who get caught up in our legal system. Netflix’s Documentary “13th” deals with this issue, and an excerpt from Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” is pasted below.
• Having a gay friend in helpful for better appreciating LGBT issues, but America is so profoundly segregated than the average white person doesn’t have more than one black friend out of a hundred.²
• Progressives are interested in understanding the mechanisms that created the modern crime-ridden slum. Excerpts from “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” about the evolution of the modern “inner-city ghetto” below.
• Progressives are interested in the ways it’s much more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. For example: poor people pay more for public transportation because they can’t afford to buy a monthly pass. Poor people rely on old cars that are constantly breaking down and cost more to fix. Insurance is more expensive in poor than non-poor neighborhoods. Poor people pay in rent much more than their apartments or trailers are worth. Poor people eat less healthy, because healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food. All food is more expensive in poor neighborhoods and poor people can’t afford to save money by buying in bulk. Poor people can’t afford to own a washing machine so they pay more over time at the laundromat. Poor people can’t afford to keep their money in a bank because of heavy low-balance and over-draft fees. Therefore, poor people have to cash their checks at places that take a cut. Poor people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than wealthy people. This list goes on.

Examples of Progressive-Style Thinking/Writing:

Trailer for Netflix's Documentary 13th:

From Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City:




From Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:

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1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/

2 http://www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politics-americans-social-networks/

My Favorite Scene From the Book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Contains minor spoilers.

For me, Philp K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep speaks directly to this political moment. The book deals extensively with themes of empathy, compassion, law enforcement, our thinking about illegal immigrants and criminals, and what it means to be human. Even though it was published in 1968, the book anticipates virtual reality, and the desire to broadcast our experiences and emotions and tap into the experiences and emotions of other strangers in a way that evokes how Facebook and Twitter are used today.

Like other Philip K. Dick novels, Do Androids Dream depicts Earth as a bleak post-apocalyptic dystopia. The plot follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard working for the San Francisco Police Department to hunt and kill androids living on planet Earth illegally. Deckard's work is complicated by the fact that androids are basically indistinguishable from human beings with only the following differentiators:

1. Androids are manufactured in factories (not born) and female androids cannot get pregnant
2. Androids can have memories implanted in their brains (humans cannot)
3. The lifespan of an android is about four years
4. Androids seem to lack an instinctive empathy-reflex that human beings exhibit

In the book, Deckard uses a “Voigt-Kampff” test to measure the empathy-reflex of a subject. To what extent this test measures something meaningful about the “inner-world” of the android and whether androids truly are deficient in their capacity for empathy is an ambiguity that I don’t think gets fully resolved.

Around the middle of the book, Deckard is sitting across from an acclaimed Opera singer named Luba Luft in her dressing room and preparing to administer a “Voigt-Kampff” test to determine if she is an android. Luft carefully evades the questions Deckard needs to administer the test, she suggests that Deckard might be an android himself and suddenly pulls a laser-gun on him:

"You're not from the police department; you're a sexual deviant."
"You can look at my identification." He reached toward his coat pocket. His hand, he saw, had again begun to shake, as it had with Polokov.
"If you reach in there," Luba Luft said, "I'll kill you."

 After more dialog:

Still holding the laser tube in his direction she crossed the room, picked up the vidphone, dialed the operator. "Connect me with the San Francisco Police Department," she said. "I need a policeman."
"What you're doing," Rick said, with relief, "is the best idea possible." Yet it seemed strange to him that Luba had decided to do this; why didn't she simply kill him? Once the patrolman arrived her chance would disappear and it all would go his way. She must think she's human, he decided. Obviously she doesn't know.

Soon a uniformed police officer named Officer Crams shows up at the dressing room and starts interrogating Luba Luft and Deckard. The officer is amazed to see Deckard’s police badge, but when they try to exchange names of bounty hunters and officers that they work with, they are surprised to find out that neither recognizes any of the names cited by the other. Deckard is cuffed and put into Crams police car to be taken to the “Hall of Justice,” but Deckard notices that they are traveling in the wrong direction:

"The Hall of justice," Rick said, "is north, on Lombard."
"That's the old Hall of Justice," Officer Crams said. "The new one is on Mission. That old building, it's disintegrating; it's a ruin. Nobody's used that for years. Has it been that long since you last got booked?"

 After more tense dialog:

Rick said, "Admit to me that you're an android."
"Why? I'm not an android. What do you do, roam around killing people and telling yourself they're androids? I can see why Miss Luft was scared. It's a good thing for her that she called us."
"Then take me to the Hall of Justice, on Lombard."
"Like I—"
"It'll take about three minutes," Rick said. "I want to see it. Every morning I check in for work, there; I want to see that it's been abandoned for years, as you say."
"Maybe you're an android," Officer Crams said. "With a false memory, like they give them. Had you thought of that?" He grinned frigidly as he continued to drive south.

To his astonishment and horror, Deckard is taken as a suspected criminal to a busy Hall of Justice that he has never seen, but not too dissimilar from the one he works at on the other side of town. The plot heightens when Deckard is interrogated by a police inspector named Garland who finds his own name on Deckard's list of androids to hunt. Garland to one of his bounty hunters:

"I don't think you understand the situation," Garland said. "This man—or android—Rick Deckard, comes to us from a phantom, hallucinatory, nonexistent police agency allegedly operating out of the old departmental headquarters on Lombard. He's never heard of us and we've never heard of him—yet ostensibly we're both working the same side of the street. He employs a test we've never heard of. The list he carries around isn't of androids; it's a list of human beings. He's already killed once—at least once. And if Miss Luft hand't gotten to a phone, he probably would have killed her and then eventually he would have come sniffing around after me."

The image of Deckard walking through the Hall of Justice thrown into the surreal and uncanny confrontation with an alternative, but parallel vision of reality has stuck with me for many years and feels particularly relevant in this political climate of "fake news" and alternative facts.