Cause and Effect

I had to go to wiki to look up the war on poverty. My impression was that the money Johnson wanted to spend on the war on poverty ended up being sucked up by the war. Well a lot of different opinions. Some say it helped, some say it made it worse, hard to tell though because there are so many other factors going on at the same time. One thing I didn’t know before, that’s where we got Medicare, which I guess is something we both appreciate, but I don’t recall that we set our oldsters out on ice floes before that came about.

But I guess I will repeat myself, I don’t think it is logical to blame current rates of rising poverty, on something that happened fifty years ago and has been largely mutated since then. Are you saying we would now have decreasing rates of poverty if the war on poverty had never happened.

Cause and effect were formalized by the Greeks way back. It is maybe the most important fixture of logic. But you can’t just take any event and declare it the cause, and then pick something else and call it the effect. The way this is usually done, and people do it all the time, is they pick something they don’t like in the past and pick something else that’s bad in the present and declare a cause and effect, when all that really says is something happened before and then something happened later. It’s just not logical.

And the way it is usually used is that somebody doesn’t want to spend money on something. Welfare doesn’t work, let’s stop spending money on it, education doesn’t work, let’s stop spending money on it. How about the damn army hasn’t done us any good since maybe Korea, so let’s stop spending money on that.

That was Einstein that said that about doing the same thing and not getting results. Seems like I hear that quote twice a day anymore. It’s like that knowing you are getting hanged tomorrow clears up your mind, used to be you couldn’t go more than a day without hearing that.

Einstein was a very smart guy (actually I think you don’t like him because he invented what you call ‘modern physics’), but he made two big mistakes. One of them was the cosmological constant, and the other is he briefly got into politics, thinking people would listen to a smart guy like him. They didn’t.

Anyway the thing is we will always have poverty, and we will always have stupid kids, and we will always have enemies, but that doesn’t mean we should eliminate welfare or public education or the army. Some poor people use the help, some kids learn something, and who knows, we may win a war someday.