Ben Shapiro's Plan To End Poverty [TEASER]
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Michael. Peter. What do you know about the success sequence? All I know is that I never learned about it because I got pregnant too young to stay in school.

If you're a patron of ours paying $4 for access to our bonus episodes and you're not sure whether you can afford it due to your financial situation, you can stop worrying right now. I am about to provide everyone with the secret to escaping poverty and perhaps even enjoying a lavish life. Rich podcast, poor podcast. Yeah.

It is called The Success Sequence. And I'm going to have Ben Shapiro explain it to you, Michael. Oh, hell yeah.

So here are the three rules. You want to be rich in America? You want to do well in America? You want to put aside the whining about the system? Again, you point out to me an individual instance of racism, I will stand next to you and fight it. But if you want to whine about America, no good. Okay, here are the three rules that you need to fulfill as a person before you can start complaining about your life failures being the result of somebody else's actions. Number one, you need to finish high school. Number two, you need to get married before you have babies. Number three, you need to get a job.

That's it. You do those things, you will not be permanently poor in the United States of America. Yeah, first of all, his voice, man, just a razor blade across your frontal lobe. Just the assault on my eyes and ears of his entire personality. I feel like there's been other right wingers that I've like spent more time debunking. But honestly, the idea of watching his videos or like listening to his little rodent voice for longer than like three minutes at a time. It's baffling that he's so popular.

because he's so visibly a whiny little bitch to be a little bit problematic about it. But I guess that's the conservative id, right? So that's why he's so popular. Also, I now have in my right hand bar, the suggested clip is how feminism ruined marriage. So thank you. Yeah, sorry. I just ruined your YouTube algorithm forever. Oh, God.

I feel like the YouTube algorithm is like you watch one left wing video and it just doesn't care. Yeah. But if you watch like a single like right wing adjacent video, you get nothing but like skull measuring in your right hand bar for weeks. Not only that, but one of the things I watch YouTube for is

is like sports highlights and that will like actually directly get you right wing content yeah yeah just because i think the the demographics overlap dude i've watched like two bodybuilding videos and got right wing shit fed to me like literal jordan peterson videos fed to me for weeks do you want to be carved up and beautiful like jordan peterson follow these steps

So that was Ben Shapiro explaining the success sequence, although he did not call it that. Yes. Now, different people articulate the success sequence in different ways, but in its most basic form, it is one, graduate high school, two, get a full-time job, and three, wait until marriage to have children.

If you do these things, you are very, very likely to escape poverty. I'm interested in this because this is something my parents told me pretty frequently as a kid. I feel like this has been bouncing around the culture for a while. Yeah. Different people present different iterations of it. There's one version that adds that you should also wait until you're 21 to get married and have kids. Okay. But the core concept...

almost always revolves around these three things. Get your high school diploma, get a full-time job, don't have kids, out of wedlock. The Wall Street Journal has written about it. National Review has written about it, both directly and indirectly. There are right-wing nonprofit organizations that promote it. The big one is AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. The Institute for Family Studies is one that appears to be like exclusive

exclusively dedicated to promoting the success sequence. Like that is their purpose. Yeah, any org with family in the name, I just like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Yeah. So basically I saw the output in conservative media and then I dug into it a little bit a few years back. And once you notice it, you see it popping up in conservative media and talking points all the time because it's a way of

promoting the concept of individual responsibility, right? Yeah. You don't have to worry about systemic racism. You don't have to worry about systemic injustice at all. Right. All you need to do is follow these three steps. Right. In that little Ben Shapiro speech, what he's doing is pushing back against the idea that systemic concerns matter.

Right. Right. It's just like, no, no, no. Your fate's in your own hands. All you have to do is follow these simple steps. I think it also is important that all of these steps seem kind of easy. OK, graduate high school, get a job, don't get pregnant. Exactly. That seems like a fairly low bar. And so that also allows you to then cast every poor person as like they made these like egregiously bad decisions. Exactly right. And once you've identified this, one of the things you'll see is that

Conservatives talk about out of wedlock children all the time. Yeah. All the time. It wasn't until I was researching this a bit that I realized how much they're talking about it. And it serves, I think, two purposes. Like one is just to shame poor people. Right. Right.

The other, though, is to sort of talk indirectly about feminism and the sexual revolution, right? They've been arguing for decades that feminism is misguided and has led to the disintegration of the family unit. Whereas if feminists had said, would you destroy the patriarchy, they would have had no problem with it. Yeah, that would have made us feel like we're participating. Yeah, I want to help. So, yeah, I think that this is sort of the success sequence is sort of

the result of the fact that moralizing about sex and gender doesn't always work. Right. So they need to lean on arguments that highlight the logistical benefits of marriage, for example. Right. And then downstream of that are like real policy decisions, real policy proposals that

Ross Douthat in 2014 was talking about how family instability can cause poverty and therefore we should question the widespread availability of no-fault divorce because it reduces marriage rates. Fuck.

This isn't merely some like debate nerd talking point. Right. Right. It's this cornerstone in a way of modern American reactionary ideology. Right. It's something they leverage when they are drafting statutes and passing regulations and all that. Right. It's like this serious thing that they can point to. Right. We have data that shows that this is important. It's not just us imposing our

on you. Probably what you're about to get to, and I'm potentially spoiling, is that they're basically taking these like statistical correlates of people who are not poor and they're basically calling those causal. Am I so predictable? You know exactly where the episode is going.

I got this lecture from my parents like 400 times. So I had some responses to it ready. So because of like how much I've seen this pop up, I thought it would be useful to sort of trace the origins of it. And then, yeah, talk a little bit about why it's dumb. Yeah.

Other than listening to Ben Shapiro say it where everything just sounds dumb. That's true. Yeah. Fucking guy. So the concept in its current form dates back to 2003 when two Brookings Institution fellows, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, published a report titled Work and Marriage, The Way to End Poverty and Welfare. Oh, wow.

Wait, really? Poverty and welfare? It's a spoiler about what's to come here. Brookings is just like, let's feed conservatives the thing that supports their ideology for the next two decades. So the report outlines three notable differences between poor and rich people when you look at census data. Richer people worked more, were more likely to be married, higher educational attainment. And they deduced that this meant that you could solve poverty by promoting these behaviors.

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. 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. Not exactly the same steps, but the term success sequence catches on. The Brookings Fellows, Haskins and Sawhill, they end up publishing a book on this in 2009. And from there, you see it sort of

gain a lot of steam. Other scholars jump into the mix, most notably W. Bradford Wilcox, who's a fellow at AEI. And that's when it starts trickling into conservative and mainstream media a little bit more and sort of morphs into this talking point. We're finally going to tell poor people to get a job. Yeah. We've tried everything else. When you see someone who's poor, you scream, get a job at them as a public service. Yeah.

So, all right. I want to talk a little bit about what exactly they're doing here from a data analytics malpractice perspective, right? Because what's happening here is basically a series of data manipulations. Okay. So blatant that like your average high schooler should be able to pick up on what they're doing. Again, the three steps are get a high school diploma, get a full-time job, and don't have kids before marriage. Okay.

If you follow these, they're claiming that you are almost guaranteed to avoid poverty. The way that the latest AEI report puts it, because they put out a report on this about every two years from what I can gather, is that 97% of millennials who follow those steps are above the poverty line by adulthood. Oh.

Okay. Now, if you look at those steps, though, one of them should stand out to you, right? The outcome we're trying to achieve here is escaping poverty. Right. How do you escape poverty? By reaching an income level above the poverty threshold. Which is very low. I think it's like $15,000 a year or something like that. The federal poverty line in 2021...

was $13,788 for a single person. Work a minimum wage job with minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage. Which is what I made working at a video store when I was like 15. Yeah, I swept floors at a nursing home when I was 15 for $7.15 an hour. If you work a minimum wage job and take two weeks off, you make

You're not out of poverty. You're just above the poverty line. Right. I mean, the basic like formulation is poverty, lower class and then middle class. So like all this does is propel you to the very bottom of the lower class. Right. Now, only one of those three steps actually gets you income.

Yeah. Get a full-time job. Right. The other two, high school diploma and don't have kids before marriage, they don't get you any money. Right. So this is important because get a full-time job is doing 99% of the work here. Right. So if you're a single person without kids...

The success sequence is not three steps long. It's one step. Get a full time job. That's it. Take out all of like the extra words. It's basically just like if you have a job that pays more than the poverty line, you'll be above the poverty line. Yeah. We're like, yeah, if you earn more than $14,000 a year, you will be earning more than $14,000 a year. Yeah. You can't argue with a man. Yeah.

make enough money that you're not in poverty. I mean, to be fair, that is extremely good advice. It's crucial advice. You basically have to do it if you want to escape poverty.