Speaker by Various Artists

I still love the fact that giving poor people money is a very effective way to get them out of poverty. It's sounds so superficial and facile, but it actually works. Who knew?

(that's a rhetorical question)

Bryce Wilkinson comes across as wilfully ignorant to the role his ideological world-view has played in laying the foundations for Brexitrump-ist illiberal democracy.

Scandi-style active labour market policies - as mentioned in my guest post on the topic - would do far more to fix poverty than any neo-Victorian finger-wagging. This old Hard News post also comes to mind:

Yes, folks, it was me. I called Doug Myers an arsehole and I would cheerfully do so again. He had written a smug little essay about local government for the Herald, in which he declared that libraries were not a public good, and it didn’t benefit him if some poor sod read a book for free. Coming, as it did, from someone who had never wanted for anything, I found that not only foolish, but unspeakably arrogant.

I recall a similar response when Alan Gibbs made a speech to a conference on the family in which he advanced the neo-Victorian view that poor people’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of money as a lack of morals. He even went so far as to blame the contraceptive pill for this moral decline. But only for the poor, presumably. Rich people can handle contraception, right? I used some stronger words than “arsehole” in that case.

Who knew indeed.
http://www.scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq

I should add that middle/upper middle-class affluence is no ironclad guarantee of success in life. People from such affluence can still end up on the wrong side of the labour market due to disability, mental illness or neuro-deviance. I'm one of them, as well as a few others in my inner circle.