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DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican - The welfare mindset you're describing is the victim mentality. One study I read went like this:
Researchers studied a specific subset of the poorest women in India. These women would wake up and take a loan to buy flowers. The loan would come with a sky-high interest rate. They'd grind 12 hours a day or more, dawn to evening. They'd sell the flowers, and take only a tiny bit of profit back.
So the cycle went something like: Take out a loan for $100. Grind all day long - carrying flowers, begging people, utter poverty. Sell $120 worth of flowers. Pay back $100 plus $10 interest. Take $10 home.
Now, the researchers tried every way to help out these women. Such as giving them the principal to buy $100 of worth flowers everyday - they can take $10 home on half the work, or do the same amount of work and double their take-home to $20. There's plenty of things you can do to better the situation and not have to do hard labor dawn to dusk.
But no matter what the researchers did, the women always wound up back where they begun: getting daily loans, crushing work everyday, taking home only pennies. The researchers ended up concluding this was a deeply ingrained inability to believe their situation would ever change and named this the "victim mentality."
Parent Post:
James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames - I really think we need more people just making the practical and moral cases for profit. I'm not talking about profiteering or whatever, or the abuses of monopoly, but profit itself.
The profit motive is a rather amazing incentive. I'd say it's one of the most important innovations of human history except that it's also literally the law of all ecosystems (and humanity and society are actually ecosystems made of human beings, not some kind of single human meta-organism, which is a common but very wrong belief).
In nature, flowers produce costly sugar water (nectar) and plants produce costly fruits primarily to lure in pollinators and animals that will eat the fruits. The plant is expending resources to produce something it actually doesn't need so that insects, birds, and other animals will solve certain problems related to plant reproduction and dispersal, given that plants can't really move.
The plant is "motivated" to do these things because it profits from the interactions; that is, it gets more out of the exchanges than it puts into them relative to its underlying goals. The animals involved do these things because they, too, profit from the interactions; that is, they get more out of the exchanges (food) than they put into them relative to their underlying goals. Both do what they do because they have a net gain, profit, and both sides profit due to the exchange.
This is how it works, so it's how it works in human societies too.
Profit solves a crucial problem in ecosystems: it allows entities that don't care about each other to do things that satisfy the others' needs, and it does so by incentivizing an exchange that leaves both better off. It is in the plant's reproductive self-interest to produce nectar in flowers and fruits around their seeds. It is in the animals' self-interest to gather food in this way. The plant does not care about the animals; it just wants to reproduce. The animals do not care about the plants or their strange sexual behaviors; they just want a full belly. These exchanges happen constantly, everywhere you look because both sides benefit from the other without having to care about the other at all.
Societies are like this. They're made of lots of individual people who extend beyond the family unit or clan or even friends-network who simply don't care about each other except in the most abstract sense. They aren't motivated to work for others in the abstract, but they are motivated to work for themselves and their kin/network. This is human nature. It will not change by any amount of force or socialization.
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