I'm listening to a podcast, about poverty and mental health. It is based on an Irish perspective, but the issues they are talking about are generalizable to NZ. What do you think about poverty and the ways out of it?

A lot of what they are talking about is education, which resonates with me as I'm a firm believer in the power of education to transform society as a whole.

Where is my mind podcast https://pca.st/episode/5b707bf4-ba79-4a0c-97c6-fd383246c62a

[–] cloventt 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Education is really important. But you can lift people out of poverty just by straight-up giving them money too. A properly-funded welfare system (or a UBI) would go a long way to truly ending poverty. Childhood poverty is such a strong predictor for anti-social behaviours like gang membership, crime, unemployment, that it blows my mind we don't just funnel money to people to break them out of the inter-generational poverty loop.

[–] Splenetic@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

It is almost always cheaper and more humane to give poor people money when they need it (both directly and via services.) Than to mop up the mess with police, prisons, Healthcare etc etc.

People seem to think poverty is a choice, and maybe it is, but it's a choice by governments and citizens not to help those who need it.

[–] absGeekNZ 3 points 1 year ago

This is a very good point.

I can't believe that it took so long for a government to specifically measure child poverty; because as they say once you can measure it you can do something about it.

If we didn't have a housing crisis, then also simply putting homeless people in a home greatly reduces the burden on the other services (healthcare, police, drug rehab etc...) that they make use of.

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