Links

Thanks to ter369's link to the top ten blog posts of the year, I found a post about intelligent design that made me laugh out loud, and a post about what being poor is like in the US that made me cry. The latter gets particularly potent in the comments, in which it becomes clear that the post is an inkblot: What you think about poverty (or poor people) affects how you interpret a list of statements of the form "being poor means [doing or foregoing X]." Some see liberal condescension; others a cry for political reform, aka class warfare. My own reaction is that class warfare seems perfectly justified given the conditions described, but the post itself is descriptive, not normative. I really liked the clear articulation of this basic point: being poor means not being insulated from the consequences of bad luck and/or bad decisions, because there is no margin for error.

By contrast, being rich means that I can miss a credit card payment by accident and just curse my stupidity and pay the $100-odd in fees and penalties, without entering into a debt spiral; it means that my car insurance paid for a loaner car when my car was rear-ended, so I can get to work; it means that I can stock up on diapers by buying in bulk and pay a lot less per diaper than I would in a drugstore; it means I can send my child to a school that will give him lots of advantages, which he'll need in a country that increasingly abandons everyone to their own devices.