60% of poor adults (age 18-64) don't work at all. In contrast, 81% of non-poor adults do. 58% of non-poor adults worked full time year round, whereas only 11% of poor adults did.

http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 on page 21.

Why is this a remotely controversial claim, as opposed to simply standard knowledge that all educated people know? Would you also require a citation that proves Trump is a Republican, or that rich people don't commit much violent crime?

> 60% of poor adults (age 18-64) don't work at all. In contrast, 81% of non-poor adults do.

I'm having trouble believing that it is possible to make an argument that % of people in a group who are employed is a good representation of the degree to which people in the group are hardworkers seriously, no matter what the group in question is.

But when its poor vs. non-poor -- that is, when the groups are divided up by an attribute which is fairly strongly influenced by whether or not you have the income derived from a job -- its even harder to believe.

> Why is this a remotely controversial claim, as opposed to simply standard knowledge that all educated people know?

That poor people are less likely to be employed is not a controversial claim, nor was it the claim at issue. That they are less "hard-working" was the claim at issue, which is not one which can be resolved by looking at the degree to which they are employed.

(To get that number, I took 10.5M in labor force / (45.3M poor people - 16M poor children).)

So yes, I think it's fair to characterize a group of people who don't work, and aren't even looking for work, as "less hard working" than a group that disproportionately is working.

What does "hard working" mean to you? And why do you believe poor people are comparably hard working to the non-poor?

Lower labor force participation could mean they are less hard working -- or it could mean that they have less opinion of their ability to be gainfully employed, or it could mean that working has a high cost (because, e.g., they have children to take care of, childcare isn't free, and the jobs they could reasonably secure wouldn't provide a net gain before considering child care that's enough to pay for childcare.)

Or lots of other things.

> What does "hard working" mean to you?

Willing to expend effort to improve one's condition, essentially.

> And why do you believe poor people are comparably hard working to the non-poor?

I haven't argued that they are. I've argued that the evidence that you've presented to prove that they are not has virtually no probative value on the point it is offered to support.

It's true - I can't rule out that the poor aren't sitting at home praying for a job while taking no action to find one.

But what I've presented is strong evidence that the poor are not hard working.

Suppose your prior is P(!hardworking) = A, P(working) = B, P(looking for work) = C, P(hard work in non-labor force activities) = D. Of course, A + B + C + D must add up to 1.

I've just shown B and C to be false. So P(!hardworking|evidence I've presented) = A / (A + D) > A. Feel free to tweak this and try a more complicated model, I don't think you'll get a different result.

What evidence - if any - would cause you to acknowledge that the poor actually aren't hardworking?

(because, e.g., they have children to take care of, childcare isn't free, and the jobs they could reasonably secure wouldn't provide a net gain before considering child care that's enough to pay for childcare.)

Strangely, poor Indians have solved this problem. One poor person looks after multiple children while the others work. But poor Indians, unlike poor Americans, are actually hard working.

If done outside of the formal economy, that would produce, ceteris paribus, lower labor-force participation among the poor, which is, surprise-surprise, exactly the result you said indicated that American poor are not hard working.

So, thank you for illustrating one of the reasons your "evidence" doesn't justify the conclusion you've drawn from it.

Suppose that the 65% of poor adults who aren't in the labor force decided to enter into such an arrangement. Then 3 of them would work (or look for work) while the 4'th watched their children. The labor force participation rate of the poor would increase from 35% to 83.75%.

Can you name any piece of evidence or measurement which would cause you to believe the poor are not hardworking? Or is your doubt more religious in nature?

If you assume thatpoor people are more likely to have to resort to mutual aid outside the formal economy for that while non-poor people are more likely to be able to be either consumers or suppliers (or both) of childcare in the formal economy and that is the only factor affecting differences in labor force participation between the groups (which is, no doubt, an oversimplification), then you'd expect -- no matter what the mutual aid ratio is -- a lower labor force participation rate for the poor.

If you more generally assume that this is hardly unique, and that regulatory costs force those with less means out of the formal economy in other ways, you'd expect the labor force participation rate of the poor to be even further depressed.

> Can you name any piece of evidence or measurement which would cause you to believe the poor are not hardworking?

I'm not convinced that the character trait of "hard-workingness" has a good objectively-measurable proxy, but then since I'm not the one making a positive claim about it, its not my obligation to present and justify a valid measure of the trait.

> Or is your doubt more religious in nature?

False dichotomy much? Thinking you are making a positive fact claim about something for which no good objective evidence exists and which, while it might in principle be measurable, it is unlikely that objective evidence could exist in practice, isn't a "religious" objection -- if anything, its skepticism that you are making what is essentially a claim of a religious nature (that is, one that is held as true statement of material fact about the world without being either objectively justified nor even necessarily practically objectively justifiable.)

Here's a great blog post that reviews the academic literature: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

Since you seem to believe there is some confounding factor that causes the census to incorrectly count the number of poor people who work, feel free to expand on it.