Taking apart people who feel that inequality boils down to personal choices

[entfaltend]

So I've run into a couple people at work and on IRC who argue that the reasons for economic inequality boil down to personal, individual choices on the part of exploited people. I'm confident these guys are full of shit, and I want to be able to rip them a new one in a debate, but I don't have a strong enough foundation of theory and examples to be able to fare as well as I would like.

My general counter argument is that yes, choice affects where one ends up in the world, but for a great many people the deck is effectively stacked against them. A choice made by a well connected, privileged person can have a much different result than the same avenue pursued by someone with a marginalized position in society.

Additionally, the opportunities and choices that are available, or perceived to be available, has a lot to do with the circumstances a given person is in and how they are connected in their community. I flesh it out with various examples of institutionalized biases and the like that have an immense effect and are absolutely not the result of individual choice, nor within the means of a given individual to change.

What other points can I use against this sort of argument? What flaws do I have in my reasoning, or where can I shore it up with better language or examples?

Anyone else run into this sort of view and how do you approach combating it?

[ContrarianLemming]

To put it simply, no one wants to be poor, and everyone is willing to try get rich, but there not rich, which to me, makes pretty bottom line sense that capitalism isn't as fair as people think it is.
I think it takes very special self deception to actually say to yourself "that black/latino is only begging for change because he's lazy", that's just rediculious, it is harder and far more stressful to live the life of a begger or worker, you really have to be very self delusional to believe that it's there choice to be like that.
Are these people you talk to rich? why not? why arn't they trying harder? what do you think they would say if you asked them why they weren't rich yet? after all, apperently, if we all try hard we can all be succesful.
It is, in fact, a sick joke, like the idea that workers have a "choice" to work for capitalists, okay, fine, i have a choice to either live off m boss or starve to death.
But i wouldn't starve, why? Because there is minor public sector service in my country to help me, a product of socialism.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

This can be very easily countered, and should be, not just by Socialists but even those Social Democrats/'Liberals' within the Capitalist sphere.

Do a bit of research on rational choice theory. I remember in 2008-09, in the midst of the recession, many people hastily disowning rational choice theory (the idea that individuals make rational choices, but completely ignores the fact that individuals make choices with an inherent personal bias towards themselves, thus the collective suffers, not gains, from a mass of individual choices. Really was a shit theory tbh), simply because they realised their mistake. Now that they feel that Capitalism is not going to die just yet, they are all back on the 'personal responsbility' and 'individual freedom' bandwagon.

I'd simply remind people what 'rational choice theory' has meant for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, in terms of the effects of this recession. Or give them a couple of examples closer to home, i'm sure that'll hurt;)

[Robocommie]

Furthermore, the idea that our economic fates and fortunes rely on personal choice also rely on the idea that we have perfect knowledge of all possible choices and their ramifications as well as a world in which we ourselves are solely responsible for everything that happens to us - but we live in a world in which forces greater than what we can perceive are constantly in motion due largely to the choices made by others, as well as simple happenstance or "luck."

[mikelepore]

When you have many choices, but some feature is in common among all of the choices, that feature is forced on you.

Capitalism presents the individual worker with a menu something like this: Do you want to be paid one-fifth of what you produce by working for Exxon, or do you want to be paid one-fifth of what you produce by working for General Electric, or do you want to be paid one-fifth of what you produce by working for Johnson & Johnson, or do you want to be paid one-fifth of what you produce by working for IBM, etc.

The supporters of capitalism say, "Look at the many choices you have! Your whole future is a matter of free choice!"

What is certainly not a choice, because it is standard characteristic of capitalist production, is that the workers are robbed.

The capitalist class tries to conceals the robbery by the trick of accounting for all work hours on a paycheck stub. They are using an optical illusion. As Marx said, during every hour that you work, you are working a fraction of the hour for your wages, and then working the rest of the hour unpaid to profit someone else.

[Jimmie Higgins]

This is racism for people in denial of their own racism. If someone thinks that inquality comes from "poor choices" and then looks at incarceration rates, povery rates, the unemployment rate then essentially they are saying that people of color are culturally or biologically "inferior".

I wouldn't take this tact though unless you are sure the person you are talking with is an unrepentant racist.

Number one: get off the individual explanations for social phenomena: it's like trying to understand tides in the ocean by looking at the migration of a single fish. Individual actions can have all sorts of motivations or consaquences. You can do everything right and fail or conversely you can be George W. Bush.

I think you can look at statistics to debunk this bullshit pretty easily. Do people who live in Detroit make more poor choices than people who live in Pheonix Arizona? Unemployment is what 50% of the population there, the city had 1/3 of their homes unoccupied which covers about the same square mileage as the city of San Francisco... so material objective factors like moving industry to the sun belt has nothing to do with this?

A second example is that the finance capital sector has done nothing but "poor choices" for the last how-ever-long and they have been rewarded for it! Inequality has increased across the board and is at Victorian-era levels now - the new guilded age... personal choices have nothing to do with it.

[Red Commissar]

From my experience they generally say these things to make themselves feel more successful. The homeless and unemployed to them are lower than them, and thus they are more successful and ultimately, "higher" in the social ladder. They like to delude themselves into thinking that the current system favors their type, and fed the occasional "rags to riches" story.

I doubt you can reason them against it though. This is a defense mechanism they're using to cope with the realities of the workplace, built up over the years by social norms, and as such is deeply embroiled into them.

[RadioRaheem84]

Nothing pisses me off more about the conservative movement than the whole ambiguous, "personal responsibility" canard. They act as if poverty simply stems from poor choices or that crimes just comes out of a vacuum. I especially hate that idea that there are no excuses in regard to your present situation.

Yet funny how its tough love for us but its ok for the rich to be subsidized, given large amounts of political clout and for rich people to pay less taxes. What personal responsibility do the rich have for anything?

[Dr Mindbender]

i crawled out of a working class vagina. Of course its my fault i'm not equal.

[Robocommie]

i crawled out of a working class vagina. Of course its my fault i'm not equal.

What, you didn't pull yourself out by your bootstraps?

[the last donut of the night]

I have too often come across these people, and there are several ways to counter their bullshit. First, you must make vital observations: their opinions reek of racism and elitism. They reek of racism because their reason for the greater level of poverty among minorities is not that capitalism produces these through various ways, but that these communities somehow chose to be poor, or didn't work enough. This basically means that Latinos, Blacks, etc. are somehow too stupid, lazy, or inferior to work as hard as whites. It also means that poverty internationally can be explained by some groups being lazier, or dumber, or what have you, than the whites of Europe. Basically, it goes back to the 19th century without all the defunct terminology. Then these peoples' arguments also reek of elitism because they also imply that workers don't work enough, unlike those smart capitalists. We all can attest to this fact reeking of more bullshit, because we all know how workers work in order to barely scrape by. I mean, does the CEO of Exxon work harder than a Black mother working double-shifts in McDonald's over in Harlem? I seriously doubt so. Does the CEO of any company have to pick vegetables under the California sun, fearing that the migra will come at any time to divide their families. I don't think so. In the end, you see that all these peoples' bullshit can be amounted to such an extent that we are left with the SS Bullshit, otherwise known as most of the arguments from the right.

[MarxSchmarx]

Ask them to explain why there are so many unemployed PhDs in literature.

[RadioRaheem84]

Ask them to explain why there are so many unemployed PhDs in literature.


They should've chosen a field that its in higher demand; engineering, math, etc.

Poor choices.

Look, it's pointless, the people who harbor the "poor choice", "personal responsibility" feelings are always going to have a stupid answer to anything you ask them.

[MarxSchmarx]

Quote:
Originally Posted by MarxSchmarx

Ask them to explain why there are so many unemployed PhDs in literature.

They should've chosen a field that its in higher demand; engineering, math, etc.

Poor choices.

Look, it's pointless, the people who harbor the "poor choice", "personal responsibility" feelings are always going to have a stupid answer to anything you ask them.
So it's not really effort that's the issue, it's judicious selection, right?

If so, why aren't these people, or very smart mathematicians and bankers, making gazillions in the stock market by avoiding "poor choices" and making the "right choices" of what to buy low and sell high?

It maybe pointless but you have to expose their absurdity to any 3rd party that may be eavesdropping.