If Books Could Kill - April 13, 2023


Ben Shapiro's Plan To End Poverty [TEASER]

Topics
The Success Sequence success sequence
Rich Dad Poor Dad The 5 Love Languages

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

171.8

Word count

2,092

Sentence count

157

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Michael. Peter. What do you know about the success sequence? All I know is that I never
00:00:04.440 learned about it because I got pregnant too young to stay in school.
00:00:20.300 If you're a patron of ours paying four dollars for access to our bonus episodes and you're not
00:00:27.880 sure whether you can afford it due to your financial situation, you can stop worrying
00:00:33.360 right now. I am about to provide everyone with the secret to escaping poverty and perhaps even
00:00:41.320 enjoying a lavish life. Rich podcast, poor podcast. It is called The Success Sequence.
00:00:50.120 And I'm going to have Ben Shapiro explain it to you, Michael. Oh, hell yeah.
00:00:54.920 so here are the three rules you want to you want to be rich in america you want to do well in
00:01:01.080 america you want to put aside the whining about the system again you point out to me an individual
00:01:05.820 instance of racism i will stand next to you and fight it but if you want to whine about america
00:01:08.900 no good okay here are the three rules that you need to fill as a person before you can start
00:01:13.440 complaining about your life failures being the result of somebody else's actions number one
00:01:17.660 you need to finish high school number two you need to get married before you have babies number
00:01:21.400 three, you need to get a job. That's it. You do those things, you will not be permanently poor
00:01:25.360 in the United States of America. Yeah, first of all, his voice, man, just a razor blade across
00:01:31.760 your frontal lobe. Just the assault on my eyes and ears of his entire personality. I feel like
00:01:37.900 there's been other right wingers that I've like spent more time debunking. But honestly, the idea
00:01:43.240 of watching his videos or like listening to his little rodent voice for longer than like three
00:01:50.020 minutes at a time. It's baffling that he's so popular because he's so visibly a whiny little
00:01:56.360 bitch to be a little bit problematic about it. But I guess that's the conservative kid, right? 0.99
00:02:02.160 So that's why he's so popular. Also, I now have in my right hand bar, the suggested clip is how
00:02:07.940 feminism ruined marriage. So thank you. Yeah, sorry. I just ruined your YouTube algorithm 1.00
00:02:12.460 forever. I feel like the YouTube algorithm is like you watch one left wing video and it just
00:02:18.140 doesn't care yeah but if you watch like a single like right wing adjacent video you get nothing
00:02:24.240 but like skull measuring in your right hand bar for weeks not only that but one of the things i
00:02:29.300 watch youtube for is like sports highlights and that will like actually directly get you
00:02:35.420 right wing content yeah yeah just because i think that the demographics overlap dude i've watched
00:02:41.120 like two bodybuilding videos and got right wing shit fed to me like literal jordan peterson videos
00:02:46.240 fed to me for weeks. Do you want to be carved up and beautiful like Jordan Peterson? Follow these 0.99
00:02:51.820 steps. So that was Ben Shapiro explaining the success sequence, although he did not call it
00:03:00.860 that. Yes. Now, different people articulate the success sequence in different ways, but in its
00:03:06.800 most basic form, it is one, graduate high school, two, get a full-time job, and three, wait until
00:03:15.500 marriage to have children. If you do these things, you are very, very likely to escape poverty.
00:03:21.500 I'm interested in this because this is something my parents told me pretty frequently as a kid.
00:03:26.700 I feel like this has been bouncing around the culture for a while.
00:03:28.960 Yeah. Different people present different iterations of it. There's one version that
00:03:33.560 adds that you should also wait until you're 21 to get married and have kids. Okay. But the core
00:03:39.960 concept almost always revolves around these three things. Get your high school diploma,
00:03:44.380 get a full-time job, don't have kids out of wedlock. The Wall Street Journal has written
00:03:48.960 about it. National Review has written about it both directly and indirectly. There are right-wing
00:03:56.060 nonprofit organizations that promote it. The big one is AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.
00:04:02.520 The Institute for Family Studies is one that appears to be like exclusively dedicated to
00:04:08.400 promoting the success sequence. Like that is their purpose. Yeah. Any org with family in the name,
00:04:13.600 I'm just like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
00:04:16.240 Yeah.
00:04:16.600 So basically I saw the output in conservative media and then I dug into it a little bit
00:04:21.660 a few years back.
00:04:22.700 And once you notice it, you see it popping up in conservative media and talking points
00:04:29.560 all the time because it's a way of promoting the concept of individual responsibility.
00:04:37.880 Yeah.
00:04:38.280 You don't have to worry about systemic racism.
00:04:42.980 You don't have to worry about systemic injustice at all.
00:04:45.640 All you need to do is follow these three steps.
00:04:49.100 In that little Ben Shapiro speech, what he's doing is pushing back against the idea that
00:04:55.400 systemic concerns matter.
00:04:57.720 It's just like, no, no, no, your fate's in your own hands.
00:05:01.020 All you have to do is follow these simple steps.
00:05:03.100 I think it also is important that all of these steps seem kind of easy. 0.99
00:05:06.780 Okay, graduate high school, get a job, don't get pregnant. 0.90
00:05:10.380 Exactly. 0.95
00:05:10.640 That seems like a fairly low bar. And so that also allows you to then cast every poor person
00:05:16.860 as like they made these like egregiously bad decisions.
00:05:20.380 Exactly. Right. And once you've identified this, one of the things you'll see is that
00:05:25.380 conservatives talk about out of wedlock children all the time.
00:05:29.240 Yeah.
00:05:29.720 All the time. It wasn't until I was researching this a bit that I realized how much they're
00:05:33.720 talking about it. And it serves, I think, two purposes. Like one is just to shame poor people.
00:05:39.040 Right.
00:05:40.020 The other, though, is to sort of talk indirectly about feminism and the sexual revolution, right?
00:05:45.740 They've been arguing for decades that feminism is misguided and has led to the disintegration of the family unit. 0.98
00:05:52.980 Whereas if feminists had said, would you destroy the patriarchy, they would have had no problem with it. 1.00
00:05:58.000 Yeah, that would have made us feel like we're participating.
00:06:00.540 Yeah, I want to help.
00:06:01.400 So yeah, I think that this is sort of the success sequence is sort of the result of the fact that
00:06:08.280 moralizing about sex and gender doesn't always work. So they need to lean on arguments that
00:06:15.320 highlight the logistical benefits of marriage, for example. And then downstream of that are
00:06:21.520 real policy decisions, real policy proposals. Ross Douthat in 2014 was talking about how
00:06:29.420 family instability can cause poverty and therefore we should question the widespread availability of
00:06:35.260 no fault divorce. Oh, because it reduces marriage rates. This isn't merely some like debate nerd
00:06:41.200 talking point. Right. Right. It's this cornerstone in a way of modern American reactionary ideology.
00:06:47.920 Right. It's something they leverage when they are drafting statutes and passing regulations and all
00:06:54.000 that. Right. It's like this serious thing that they can point to. Right. We have data that shows
00:06:59.080 that this is important. It's not just us imposing our morality on you. Probably what you're about
00:07:03.720 to get to, and I'm potentially spoiling, is that they're basically taking these like statistical
00:07:08.240 correlates of people who are not poor, and they're basically calling those causal.
00:07:13.740 Am I so predictable that you know exactly where the episode is going?
00:07:19.380 I got this lecture from my parents like 400 times, so I had some responses to it ready.
00:07:23.780 so because of like how much i've seen this pop up i thought it would be useful to sort of trace 0.66
00:07:30.460 the origins of it and then yeah talk a little bit about why it's dumb other than listening 0.97
00:07:37.640 to ben shapiro say it where everything just sounds dumb that's true yeah fucking guy so the concept 0.74
00:07:42.540 in its current form dates back to 2003 when two brookings institution fellows ron haskins and 0.96
00:07:50.200 Isabel Sawhill, published a report titled Work and Marriage, The Way to End Poverty and Welfare.
00:07:57.700 Oh, wait, really? Poverty and welfare?
00:08:02.620 It's a spoiler about what's to come here.
00:08:05.240 Brookings is just like, let's feed conservatives the thing that supports their ideology for the next two decades.
00:08:10.720 So the report outlines three notable differences between poor and rich people when you look at census data.
00:08:16.460 Richer people worked more, were more likely to be married, higher educational attainment.
00:08:21.800 And they deduced that this meant that you could solve poverty by promoting these behaviors.
00:08:27.500 The term success sequence itself gets coined a few years later, 2006, when there is a report published by Barbara Whitehead and Marlene Pearson for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which I looked up and isn't as reactionary as it sounds like it might be.
00:08:43.880 And they basically argued that modern teens would benefit from getting at least a high school degree, waiting until their 20s to get married, and waiting until you're married to have kids.
00:08:53.960 Not exactly the same steps, but the term success sequence catches on.
00:08:58.660 The Brookings Fellows, Haskins and Sawhill, they end up publishing a book on this in 2009.
00:09:04.080 And from there, you see it sort of gain a lot of steam.
00:09:07.100 Other scholars jump into the mix, most notably W. Bradford Wilcox, who's a fellow at AEI.
00:09:13.220 and that's when it starts trickling into conservative and mainstream media a little
00:09:18.020 bit more and sort of morphs into this talking point we're finally going to tell poor people
00:09:23.260 to get a job yeah we've tried everything else when you see someone who's poor you scream get
00:09:28.480 a job at them as a public service so all right i want to talk a little bit about what exactly
00:09:36.380 they're doing here from a data analytics malpractice perspective right because what's
00:09:42.340 happening here is basically a series of data manipulations. Okay. So blatant that like your
00:09:47.020 average high schooler should be able to pick up on what they're doing. Again, the three steps are
00:09:51.700 get a high school diploma, get a full-time job, and don't have kids before marriage. If you follow
00:09:57.280 these, they're claiming that you are almost guaranteed to avoid poverty. The way that the
00:10:01.860 latest AEI report puts it, because they put out a report on this about every two years from what I
00:10:07.180 can gather, is that 97% of millennials who follow those steps are above the poverty line by
00:10:13.740 adulthood.
00:10:14.540 Oh, okay.
00:10:15.660 Now, if you look at those steps, though, one of them should stand out to you, right?
00:10:20.440 The outcome we're trying to achieve here is escaping poverty.
00:10:24.160 Right.
00:10:24.440 How do you escape poverty?
00:10:25.520 By reaching an income level above the poverty threshold.
00:10:30.260 Which is very low.
00:10:31.400 I think it's like 15,000 a year or something like that.
00:10:33.260 The federal poverty line in 2021 was $13,788 for a single person.
00:10:41.380 Work a minimum wage job with minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage.
00:10:47.460 Which is what I made working at a video store when I was like 15.
00:10:50.040 Yeah, I swept floors at a nursing home when I was 15 for $7.15 an hour. 0.60
00:10:55.720 Unbelievable.
00:10:56.260 If you work a minimum wage job and take two weeks off, you make $14.05.
00:11:00.720 You're not out of poverty.
00:11:01.900 you're just above the poverty line. Right. I mean, the basic like formulation is poverty,
00:11:08.860 lower class and then middle class. So like all this does is propel you to the very bottom of
00:11:14.980 the lower class. Right. Now, only one of those three steps actually gets you income.
00:11:20.460 Yeah. Get a full time job. Right. The other two high school diploma and don't have kids
00:11:26.140 before marriage. They don't get you any money. Right. So this is important because 1.00
00:11:30.900 get a full-time job is doing 99% of the work here. So if you're a single person without kids,
00:11:39.380 the success sequence is not three steps long. It's one step. Get a full-time job. That's it.
00:11:44.620 Take out all of like the extra words. It's basically just like, if you have a job that
00:11:50.660 pays more than the poverty line, you'll be above the poverty line. We're like, yeah,
00:11:55.060 if you earn more than $14,000 a year, you will be earning more than $14,000 a year.
00:12:00.120 Yeah. You can't argue with a man. Make enough money that you're not in poverty.
00:12:04.500 I mean, to be fair, that is extremely good advice.
00:12:06.420 It's crucial advice. You basically have to do it if you want to escape poverty.