Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.
The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.
You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.
Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.
We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds.
> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effort and sell it below market price.
> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
They probably needed it. You try doing food deliveries without a vehicle. Now their job's gone.
> it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
Well obviously. Being poor is excruciating; nobody would choose to be poor. The ones who are capable of helping themselves do—in fact, they help themselves when they're broke, and they never become truly poor in the first place (per the article's definitions).
The point is that, before the bike was collected and put up for auction, the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts. Then, once the bike was put up for auction, buyers could have bid on it if it was really worth more.
Multiple people in this story had a financial incentive to profit from the bike, yet no one did. The only evidence we have of the bike's value is OP's claim. Does it not seem more likely that OP is simply wrong about the bike's value?
Oh hohoho but that would imply that the auction is inefficient and so surely rational actors would descend upon these auctions thereby converging this discount onto the true fair value of things.
Heaven forbid we admit that markets are not comprised of spherical chickens and that disconnects exist...
Again, the debtor could have sold the bike themselves and they didn't. Bidders could have recognized the bike's value but they didn't. This is a story about OP overvaluing a bike and nothing else.
I get your point but there are more factors at play here that you might not be aware of.
The debt in question was council tax, every household in the UK pays this at a monthly rate, something like £140 a month. But what most people don't know is that these monthly payments are technically a "gesture of goodwill" from the council, and if you are late for a payment they will really quickly take it to court and send bailiffs for the full yearly amount so you're looking at £1500 plus court fees plus bailiff fees for attending immediately. Easily £2000 from missing £150.
Next another little known fact - if you don't let the bailiffs in, they can't take anything. They can come back with the police if you let them in once. However they can levy on things that are outside, like a vehicle.
So that's what happened here, and once they levy on the vehicle you are not legally allowed to sell it if you sign the levy.
So the debtor in all likelihood ended up in this situation very quickly and could not sell the motorbike himself once the bailiff visited. As for the over valuation, I give you that but only in a very specific scenario - for the market where they sold it.
Now as for why they sold it so cheap, why would they care? They only care about their fees. It they can visit three times by only pretending to knock on the door and charge three times, they will. When it came to this motorbike, they got paid the fees for selling it, the auctioneer got their fee, and nobody involved had motivation to market it. We're not talking ebay or well marketed property auctions here.
In fact, the bailiff now gets to go back to tell them the debt isn't cleared and charge them for this visit as well.
That sounds absolutely draconian and horrible. But the issue doesn’t seem to be the debt collection. Rather, the issue seems to be a total lack of due process.
If you don't have a vehicle you can't do anything, if this person was anywhere other than a large east coast city losing your vehicle is death. Have you ever tried to go somewhere in the south without a car? Pick two points even a couple miles away from each other around Kansas City, Kansas and genuinely think about how you would physically do it. You can't go anywhere so you can't work so you can't pay rent, you can't do anything. What is even the point of not going to prison except the fact you would have to stay in jail for a few months and you might be literally devoured by bedbugs?
OP's central claim was that the bike should have been able to cover the debt, but, due to systemic malice on the bailiff's part, the bike only covered small fraction of the debt. My point is that OP is simply over-valuing the bike. If you change OP's story to: the bailiff got a decent price for the bike and took a small fee for the service, it becomes a lot less outrageous.
> [The bike] was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt.
If this claim is true, then I think most people will still find this conduct outrageous: How is it in the public interest for the baliff to take actions that harm both the debtor (by taking the personally valuable bike) and the public (by wasting from $15 to $50 of the public's money) to the benefit of only the baliff ($35) and auctioneer ($15)?
Those fees don’t seem unreasonably high to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bailiff was operating at a loss given the time it takes to take possession and bring the goods to auction.
It’s in the public’s interest to have mechanisms to quickly process insolvency in a way that attempts to fairly value property. Auctions solve that. If debtors don’t like the outcome, then they should sell the good themselves before it comes to that. Having others sell your property for you is always going to incur an additional cost.
The point is that, regardless of whether the bailiff’s and auctioneer’s fees are eminently reasonable, it will always result in net-negative benefit to society (excepting the bailiff and auctioneer) whenever the bailiff confiscates property whose auction proceeds are less than the sum of those fees. It is therefore contrary to the public interest for the bailiff to confiscate property unless it can reasonably be expected to substantially clear those fees when auctioned.
1. The debtor probably need the motorbike, badly. He probably should have sold it to cover the debt but didn't think of that as an option. Not the smartest choice but again, he's there probably because of another set of similar choices.
2. The parent seems from the UK and I am not sure how things work there. But many auctions are "closed off" in shady ways. In one of the countries I (and some friends) have contemplated going, gangs with knives were putting people off. The gov. employees involved knew about it and do nothing.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
3. Many of the times, they are not exactly bad or lazy people but they might not have made the optimal choices. They should, probably, be penalized for it; but not by completely wrecking their life and sodomizing them for a good many years. Also back to 2, and the parent you are replying to, many times the system is designed to over-screw them in the process.
Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.
A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.
Money psychology is interesting in that people often end up being traumatized by their parents into behaving identically when the circumstances no longer warrant it, OR have a knee-jerk reaction living their life completely the opposite way because growing up that way drove them insane.
A similar thing happens with children of parents who came out of war zones or famines. Sometimes the children are explicitly taught that violence or starvation can come at any moment. Often they learn to feel under threat implicitly by picking up their parents’ affect, without any message or lesson being clearly stated.
I find myself doing that. I'm not sure if it's just a silly habit I have because I don't like to run out of anything even if it is not important or if I picked it up from my dad who lived through the "great" depression as a child.
Conversely, I had an acquaintance that grew poor, and would finish 95% of the cookies in a bag, but always leave the almost empty bag to the next person to find out, even if it had to stay that way for months.
The 'blank in the firing squad' technique of snacking is a pretty typical girl thing.
Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable.
But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).
I do this, but it's not really about if it's "gross" to eat a whole bag or not. I don't feel like doing that anyway. It's mostly that if you share food, I think it's considerate to leave one if there's more than one left. Someone else might be having a really bad day, but a small consolation could be that they didn't get home to discover there aren't any cookies left.
I do it to avoid being blamed, I don't know what you're on about. I've never cared that much about the semantics of how many cookies I ate (then again, I'm on hacker news so I might not be the best representation of the female populace)
I remember watching something on BBC about minimalism years ago when I was doing my PhD and earning £13k a year and thinking that I just couldn’t do it because it relies on you having the money to repurchase something you need that you threw away
Exactly. And there's a complicating related situation that, if you have housing instability, there can also be pressure not to own anything more than you need, in terms of difficulty and cost having to move it or lose it on short notice.
Keeping stuff around and refusing to fix things are not necessarily correlated to being poor.
Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income.
It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
> they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
Yes they are poor because they make bad decisions. If you are unable to avoid repeatedly making bad purchasing decision, you are poor not just because of unfortunate circumstance but because you are unable to not be poor because of personal limitation (sometimes I may be stupidity, sometimes addictions or other bad behaviors).
My father manages employees that constantly have garnishment on their salaries because of some unpaid debt. Yet they make decent wage and could afford an OK life if they didn't blow most of it on stupid stuff.
So what I mean is that you cannot put all the blame on the "system" and the marketers selling appetising food or whatnot. Those people keep making those choices themselves and outside out of taking their liberty there is not much you can do about it.
I actually think the current system affords them a better life than they could otherwise.
Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.
Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.
All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
Specially because occasionally the usefulness of such saved junk appeared to prove the thought right, the rest of the unused pile of junk notwithstanding.
And the more skilled and richer and better tooled up you get over time the more potentially useful everything is so the more you feel like you have to save it.
As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.
When I was younger, I've spent an entire summer working here and there, with the explicit goal to buy an 8MB stick of ram, so I can play Quake. Got the biggest ballacking from my dad about "wasting" all that moneis. Since then, storage and memory, the only things I'm actively trying to save.
I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.
Definitely agree on the mentality it creates and how long it lasts. I’m fairly well off now, but grew up very poor. First developing world poor where running water and toilets were shared with the whole building, the whole family crammed into a single room. Then western world poor, where my parents and some friends that lived together (to save money) would walk to get groceries, buy one bus ticket to have one person carry the groceries on the bus most of the way back, and the rest of the group walk to the bus station and help to carry the groceries the rest of the way home.
Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
Something I find interesting is that my mother grew up in similar conditions - poor in Borneo in the 50s, my aunt was literally born in the jungle while hiding from the Japanese
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
I think also perhaps the reasons for being poor. My family was poor but so was everyone else. It was structural. So as a result (my hypothesis), there wasn’t even the hope of being rich, just not so poor. So for instance the mentality was always to save, not invest, because no one has the money to invest could afford to lose whatever meager savings there was.
As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.
> its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
I think its more about having enough that you don’t spend all your cycles worrying about money; and more importantly that there’s a way to get on some kind of positive reinforcement treadmill whereby effort is rewarded financially.
That makes sense, but I was trying to figure out something else: if there's someone in this situation I want to help, what (at minimum) could I expect to have to do to get them out of that situation?
I think a better way of thinking about it is to be a lifeline instead of monetary amount.
Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.
If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.
Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.
Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?
Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.
We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).
There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.
but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else
I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
Ah but if only it were so simple. In my woodworking shop, in pretty much every project I end up using odd scraps for either temporary scaffolding or jigs or what have you that would be difficult to buy. You would have to go out of your way to buy a large board, and cut it up intentionally. Even then you would not have as rich a set of scraps. Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
> When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need
What I need is time. Whereas buying things is stupidly time consuming, running completely counter to what is needed.
I don't have it all. Sometimes I have no choice but to go buy parts when a breakdown occurs, but that's never a welcome experience. You're looking at a good hour or more to source even if it is available locally, and often you have to travel far and wide to find someone who has it in stock. Worse, sometimes the only stock available is on the other side of the world in who knows where, leaving you down for days while you wait for it to show up...
Once someone invents a magical teleporter that can spit out what you need in a split second on demand, then money to spend when you need it becomes more powerful than already having what you need, but we're a long way from seeing that become reality.
It's a lifestyle that snowballs. You can't "just start throwing things away" because your life has grown up around the assumptions of having your brand of junk around.
Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture
> a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
it’s not terribly uncommon even in the UK to be generationally unemployable.
Homelife being bad = bad grades
bad grades = no support for further education
no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs
no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).
The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.
I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.
I don't know if it would be useful to you, but perhaps try reading some of the blog posts on earlyretirementextreme.com. Lots of good ideas there on how to save money, be frugal, etc.
He’s indicated in a sibling thread that he’s not looking for sympathy.
He’s trying to help you empathise that in reality these kinds of holes are really difficult to escape from; moreso than you think on first glance. It’s also very easy to fall into them even if you think you’re immune. Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
1) The nature of interest in unsecured loans is high interest (almost by definition) and increasingly so if you are seen as a credit risk. Thus small debts compound over time making them unbearable for longer.
2) Our friend is merely Keeping up with the Jones’ despite never going above a zero balance.
One of these is uncharitable and ridiculous- the other is a known issue that keeps people in poverty.
I guess I wasn't being clear: I wasn't talking about the person from this thread!
You said:
> Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
My reaction was to this. I agreed with you, and added the cause: utter financial recklessness. People spending money on things they don't need instead of saving say a quarter of their salary.
For some time I was earning a couple times the average salary in my region of the world. Yet I found that spending about the average salary was more than enough to live a very comfortable life. I feel this is not the norm for whatever reason: most people inflate spending to match their income, and then they're 2 bad decisions (or even some bad luck) from poverty.
No consolation needed - if I come across as woe is me it's not the intention. It is what it is and all that. I've got food, I've got shelter. It'll do.
You're born, you keep your head down, and you die - if you're lucky.
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
I recently got yelled at by a schizophrenic homeless man with serious anger issues that was hungry. And he’s better off than a large percentage of the world. Poor is relational.
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
> I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success).
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution. I would never, personally, defend such worldviews.
This doesn't alter anything about what I said. It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources in this world. Justice would look like actions that are not legal to advocate for in this country.
Most resources go to average people, how is that bad? Wealth is not resource distribution, consumption is, and by far the most consumption is done by the middle class.
Consumption tax is said to be regressive since it doesn't work on rich people since they invest, that should tell you that consumption is much more evenly distributed than wealth is.
> It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources
How. How on earth is it evil if you or I have a bit more wealth than the other? Who gives a flying fuck, except... except those who seek power. Total power. You can't have peace as long as you or your preferred leaders are not in total power, and you won't let the rest of us have peace either.
> Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution.
What do you care about wealth distribution? Why should anyone? As long as we each can a) not be poor, b) prosper, c) live our lives in peace, none of us should care that someone else is wealthier (or less so) than us.
"But wealth inequality!!" is just moving the goal posts: so poverty has gone down and has been going down, but you can't be satisfied with that, not even if it goes to zero. No, you want something else: power -- total power.
Sounds like the optimism rhetoric of Steven Pinker. I suggest you read up on the numerous criticisms of his work. Most of the optimism is based on a ridiculously low global poverty line conjured out of thin air, and other nonsense like GDP.
What you're saying is nonsense. I don't even know who Steven Pinker is. Poverty two hundred years ago was way worse than poverty today in most of the world -- this is a self-evident fact to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history. No running water, no water mains, no sewers -- these things meant death from cholera and other diseases for many children, and that's just for starters.
Odd how you counter claims as fictional with zero evidence just speculation. I realize this is a discussion forum and not a policy office but I pisses me off when feelings is met with feelings and not explanation or examples. Now’s your chance to really prove your point.
That we're all less poor today that our ancestors 200 years ago is absolutely, totally self-evident. No additional evidence needed. Indeed, the inverse claim would require evidence, and extraordinary evidence at that.
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
I agree. I also don't know how that could realistically be achieved, with everything nowadays being lowest common denominator, aid budgets being slashed and drawbridges being raised. It would take an extraordinary initiative by an extraordinary person or group.
My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed.
then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
It's perfectly normal for a person to complain about being screwed over even if the person next to him is being screwed even harder. There will always be somebody somewhere who has it worse than you, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't expect better for yourself than what you have, especially in a country like the US where a small number of people with more money than they could ever spend relentlessly exploit others and take from them.
Starting from nothing, it's easy to gain income and then double it, but most people eventually hit a wall and find that they can't improve their circumstances no matter what they do. Our society will conspire against them to keep them in their place. It will lay out traps for them to hold them back. Some of those traps, like payday loans, you might be able to avoid. For other traps, like our healthcare system, you will have to depend on luck to limit the number of times you are caught. Medical expenses are the reason most people in the US fall into bankruptcy.
Wealth inequality, and a lack of social mobility are huge problems in the US.
In the "wealthiest nation on Earth" 1 out of every 8 Americans can't make enough money to feed themselves without government assistance, but even for the others it's easy to gain a false sense of comfort where you are well feed and entertained, but still live paycheck to paycheck and don't have savings to protect yourself from sudden unavoidable expenses. 'Today you are fine, but always one bad day from ruin' is not a comfortable way to live.
Americans complain because even though things can always be worse, they should also be better than they are. I hope Americans never stop trying to improve their situation and the situation of those around them.
> Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury)
Using this as an example to illustrate a broader point: Most Americans can't afford not to have a car. Public transit in the US is next to non-existent in many places. If you want a job, you probably need a car to drive to work every day. So you take out huge loans to pay for the cheapest car you can find: now your financial situation is precarious because you're in debt. Because you bought a bad car, you're constantly at risk of having it break down and having to pay to repair it, which is another layer of precarity.
Similarly, poor Americans do not have the latest iPhone—they have a cheap, used iPhone which could break any day, and they're extremely dependant on it. I can't speak to what life is like in the developing world, but living in poverty in the US is extremely stressful.
To be fair to iPhone point, that's sort of like saying they have a used Gucci bag. A new Motorola phone is cheaper than a 5 year old used iPhone ($130 for a new 2024 moto g vs ~$150-200 for an iPhone 12). A used Motorola is even cheaper (sub $100). Apple has always been a luxury brand. It's basically trivial next to housing, but I still can't imagine buying an Apple product.
I'll have to think harder to come up with the exact number, but I've had approximately 3 Android phones and 3 iPhones in my smartphone-career (changed phones more often in the beginning than at the end).
iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
A smart phone is increasingly required to do things like banking, pay bills, order things.
I live within a bike ride of a lot of places, but it would still add up to hours more a week. And for 3 months of the year there's ice and snow that are rough on the equipment.
In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
> It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
This is only a half-truth. Complaints are only worth respecting if people hold their governments accountable. There's a reason why single-payer healthcare polls higher than either party in the US. Inflation gets attention because it affects a minority of the population that matters more.
Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).
The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...
Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public.
This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct.
People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
American living standards have declined from their peak in the mid-to-late 20th century. If you’re under 40 you will likely be materially worse off than your parents even if you are better educated than they are. It isn’t like this in the developing world, so there is still an optimism there for the young professionals benefitting from the development.
It's not so much the absolute amount you have, but rather your situation in comparison with your country men.
Yes, I know what 3rd-world poverty looks like, but, in a sense health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US). Also, the morale-destroying aspect of poverty hits harder in advanced countries, because people assume you're poor because of what TFA talks about: being lazy, dumb, etc.
Poverty exists people think it ought to, that's the simple reason it exists. People think a world where some deemed unworthy have to experience crushing poverty is a more meaningful world, that's it. Certainly there is absolutely no reason that any person has to go to bed hungry, as a lot more food is produced in the world than is needed.
But the difference is that I can respect people who complain about having absolutely nothing, but I can't take seriously the complaints of rich people that they aren't richer.
You misunderstood my response. Let me explain better: I'm not saying what matters is the relative amount of money you have in relation to your peers; it is about the relative claim you have on resources, power, respect, mental health, etc.
Money and those other things may be correlated, but focusing on those things emphasizes how much money is a proxy for them.
So for example, even if you earn 100k, but many/most people are earning 500k, it cause a huge power imbalance that enables them to easily make your life miserable on a whim. It also causes society to see you as a failure, causing mental/emotional distress that further pull you into a spiral of despair.
> health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US).
Do you seriously believe it's even remotely comparable? In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
> In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
I know for sure this is totally wrong, because I have lived in 3rd world countries, and I was born in one. You're just imagining stuff.
I visited a few rural cities in the Central African republic ~15 years ago and this situation definitely exists (existed?) there. Your best bet is to try to get care in a monastery, but it's not like they have glasses or anything other than basic medicine.
The root of your disagreement lies in the fact that "The Third World" isn't really a useful abstraction anymore.
Plenty of former 3rd world countries are middle-income now. There is just no comparison between living in Thailand vs. South Sudan, even though there might be in the 1950s.
Time to toss the expression entirely, it doesn't really describe anything concrete anymore. The world has changed.
That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
> I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
It is a maths problem, not one of economic theory, and a well-understood limitation of "social mobility" as a measure in this context. Social mobility between two countries is only meaningfully comparable if their income distributions also have a similar degree of compression since it is a rank statistic. The large differences in wage compression between e.g. Scandinavia and the US are well documented, such as this[0] recent NBER paper, and not controversial.
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
Yeah, median income in the UK is about at the level of Mississippi, as is much of Western Europe (Western, not Eastern!). The US is just ridiculously wealthy, and our income inequality is largely a matter of the absurd heights reached at the top, with wide distributions. OTOH, wealth disparity (or even just the perception of wealth disparity) can be politically destabilizing and lead to some pathological social issues. Greater relative social mobility and greater (perceived?) wealth equality seems to result in a better sense of fairness, a sense of fairness is key to social cohesion and trust, and social trust is key to producing wealth. Though, social trust is necessary but hardly sufficient. Likewise, perceived mobility and equality seems necessary but not sufficient for healthy political and civic culture.
That lady has some serious chops, but she said she had to leave the UK, as she was denied opportunities, because of her "Distinctive Northern Accent" (In the UK, the "North" is considered kind of "Redneck," like our South).
Trying hard not to be and using some flimsy pretext to justify it probably accounts for 3/4 of state laws that don't pertain to a) a procedural matter b) a matter with an identifiable victim, or at least that's how it looks by my unscientific observation.
> That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads.
Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
...
> An eight-year-old child was sitting on the stoop of one of the trailers. Below him a white pipe ran from his house, across the yard just a few feet away from a basketball hoop, and into a copse of pine and sweet gum trees.
> The pipe was cracked in several places and stopped just inside the copse, barely 30ft from the house, dripping ooze into a viscous pool the color of oil. Directly above the sewage pool, a separate narrow-gauge pipe ran up to the house, which turned out to be the main channel carrying drinking water to the residents.
> The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house. At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight – a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.
Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.
That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.
Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.
“Used to be” such a place. Stagnating minimum wage while inflation proceeds unchecked, the rise of marginal employment and contract work. Skyrocketing housing costs.
I don’t think the us is such a place anymore. It fast becoming a place that is not.
The US was never a place like that. Even in the mostly imagined "golden age" of the fifties, if you were the wrong family or color you would not be able to reliably get out of poverty no matter how much effort or guile you could afford
The bank did not care that you would be a profitable customer, they still weren't going to lend to you.
You're projecting the current onto the past. It was a problem, but it wasn't the show stopper it would be today. Not having access to credit wasn't as big a deal when there weren't subsidized credit products and you therefore weren't competing with people who had artificial access to cheap money.
The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).
Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.
Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
Yeah, and they probably had to spend money to make that happen. Night courses at a community college aren't free. A higher minimum wage makes it easier to get your foot in the door for something better.
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.
xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China.
What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution:
> Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled.
I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them."
Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here.
I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
Not sure why that comment got downvoted. I guess that "income inequality" is the Boogeyman Du Jour.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
Maybe splitting them is helpful, but why would you have to do them sequentially? Many of the things that reduce income inequality also help reduce poverty. Poverty isn't "low-hanging fruit" and it's something people have been trying to eradicate longer than we've been alive.
Saying "let's not even think about B until we've 100% sorted A" is just a way to ensure B never gets done.
I think I gave the impression that we should tackle them sequentially with my comment. My point was that I don't think it's controversial to eradicate poverty, but for whatever reason it is controversial to eradicate income inequality. We don't need to tackle them sequentially but we also don't need to wait for a silver policy bullet that solves income inequality while we try to solve poverty as well. It may be possible to do both, but in the event it's impossible to do B at least we can still try to do A.
Everyone worries about losing their job I think. Nowadays employment is a lot more unstable. Hell a large percentage of the workforce doesn't even have permanent employment.
Flexibility is great for companies but humans need stability.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
I’d say 99% of the poor are in the first two categories. So I don’t really care if the third category gets some stuff too if it means we help everyone else.
The spectre of the "wasteful welfare recipient" is invoked constantly, but I've never seen any of these people. The poor people I've known are, by necessity, quite careful with money.
Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
Our own countries could stop actively funding, supporting and even creating that corrupt elite, for a start. See e.g. the Françafrique system in Africa.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.
No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.
Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)
Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz.
Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.
I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.
These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
The story that photograph is from is about distance learning enforced by the COVID pandemic. https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom.... The family does not have internet access, and while they were issued a laptop and mobile hotspot, it only gets signal from the top of that hill.
OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.
What I meant was they fooled themselves. They had negative assumptions about how Native Americans live and are treated, then they see a photo of a dirt pit, and even though it is completely implausible, assume it is a school. It is so far off reality it is notable.
Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.
I used to have Hopi and Navajo friends and I have no idea what they are referring to.
One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at.
I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years.
But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
Why would you expect there to be cell service there? Large parts of that area of the Mountain West are virtually uninhabited and have no telecom infrastructure to connect the cellular service to. There is literally nothing out in much of it except the occasional building every 10-20 miles which isn't enough to sustain a cellular network.
These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.
Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).
If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.
If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment:
"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."
Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".
20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
I often find the loudest voices with this mentality either come from well off families, or were poor enough themselves in childhood to have benefited from the government programs they wish to destroy. The first is ignorance and the second is some sort of self hatred / shame.
I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.
It's always sickening to hear more educated people (compared to the average) repeating this inhumane bullshit.
Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.
It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
> If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.
I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
In 2024 over 700k people were homeless in the USA. That's a system failure. If you want to talk about personal failings you have to consider individual circumstances. But 700k being homeless is abjectly just not how a civil society should operate.
Yes, because human mind is famously known for being extraordinarily good at getting out of self-destructive spiraling without external help, and that help is famously known for being provided to everyone who needs it regardless of their economic status. Also, chronic lack of money has absolutely no way to contribute to that occurring in the first place. /s
I get it. Everybody gets it. For some months, even years. But after a decade or so in such a situation, you must arrive at some sort of epiphany, look at your life and say "what the fuck?".
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead]. That's the prevailing attitude towards poverty among the intellectuals. "Let's talk about them, not with them."
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
If you'd be actually experienced, you would realize that there's an autokill filter on HN and the comment in question contains the forbidden M word. Apparently my vouch wasn't enough to resurrect it.
Makes sense (I run showdead=no, so I never saw the original), but that doesn’t make my comment any less accurate. We all see this stuff happen on a regular basis.
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
No. After a decade the ‘what the fuck’ is just a distant memory. ‘It is what it is’, ‘nothing ever works out’, other kinds of depression just win by default.
If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
I wouldn't say so. A large percentage of the population - double digits - have never had any job security in their lives, or any guarantees whatsoever. We've learnt to adapt and know we can do it again. People aren't allocated 1 job per person for life and if we loose that job we're in the shit for life. Most people know they can get another job.
Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains.
Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.
It's difficult to find trustworthy statistics quickly, but the penetration of electricity and running water in US households is only about 99%. At the scale of the US (~130 million households), 1% of households lacking electricity equates to over a million households and somewhat more in terms of number of people. So yeah, there's probably about 1-2 million people in the US without running water and/or electricity.
Where are these people? Probably the largest concentration of such people are on the various Native American reservations (I believe ~15% of the Navajo Reservation lacks running water). The hinterlands of Alaska also likely has a high number of these houses.
"Energy insecurity" transforms the problem from lack of "energy" into an emotional problem. The problem isn't feelings of insecurity, it's lacking electricity. But now we can feel all self-righteous that we're making people feel better because we don't call them homeless and hungry and in the dark. Now they "have housing insecurity" and "have food insecurity" and are suffering from "energy insecurity".
I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".
I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.
I'm not saying literally everyone in America has electricity/running water. I'm saying it's a rare exception, not "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people".
And when it is a problem, it's usually a problem with the system denying people access rather than literal inability to afford.
Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
You are disconnected from reality.
I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years.
The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
I guess the DOJ saying not to fine these people is a nice gesture but in practice local fines don't mean anything in a situation like this unless the poors on the property are unlucky enough to be on a property that the municipality wants to lien and take for whatever reason.
Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).
This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.
They're called sewage "lagoons" and work basically the same as septic systems from a environmental impact perspective.
They only really work well in certain climates and even then you need to have enough spare land to just locate a sewage pond somewhere. Even in richer areas it was dirt common for schools and prisons (which aren't likely to be located in the center of town like other government stuff is) to have them way deeper into the 20th century than you'd expect since it's not like they were short on land (just use more taxpayer money).
Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.
The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself
I’m not saying running a small business is easy. But they previously worked a corporate job and chose to start a landscaping business partly for lifestyle reasons.
It's not as well written as it could be. He's using the first person, but he's not actually referring to himself. It's a hypothetical. Pretend he put the word "Suppose" in front of the first word, as in "Suppose I have a van that's falling apart."
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
There are definitely people in Louisiana who just dispense with having a driver's license and tell the police to arrest them and they will bail themselves out with cash (and keep the cash around!)
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
It's honestly amazing how many people hold a powerful a conviction that the world is essentially fair; that the poor must have some moral failing which justifies their poverty. If it's happened to thousands of people—if you see the afflicted every day—then it must just be a plague of poor morals. We'll believe anything before we accept that we're lucky, and that we owe something to those who aren't.
I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty.
There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?
I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
While I understand the sentiment, you stated it yourself, "It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?". This is a puzzling question to ask and it shouldn't stop there. The post is very much trying to add some depth here, however it isn't targeting solutions for "poor" people, it is hoping to provoke those who are not to take the problem more seriously.
> I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
Go ahead and just talk about it, I want to hear it. This isn't so easy a problem, even on an individual level as you put it.
My solution is boring, but it works for the individual who is in that situation: Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary. Not only do you physically get yourself out of the environment which has dragged you down, you can also cut out expenses such as rent and even transportation. Which is huge.
Yes, it's not a fun solution. It won't make you rich. But it will take you out of being dirt poor, which the article is about. One example of those kind of places is the merchant navy. You're on a ship, so you don't have to spend any money and you can't even spend it. Instead of going on shore leave like the other people, just get extra days, or work on another ship on your leave days. I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
While you're at it, you have the opportunity for a career or education. And entry level jobs are available for those who have the work ethic.
Monastic life is another such example, where you are at least provided for. And traditionally the monasteries have swallowed up millions of people who would have been dirt poor, and given them an alternative. Just like the merchant navy and the military has done the same for millions. You can arrive to these places with nothing but the clothes on your back, and start putting together your life again.
My suggestions can help some people, but not everybody. Because everybody is different. Let's continue complaining instead then?
But I've worked in places like this with people who were deaf and people who had limps, and people with a ton of other problems. And hundreds of thousands of people who have families work in the merchant navy to support them, or in other similar work places.
Sometimes (almost all the time) trying to talk about things on HN feels like having to argue that it is indeed possible to fry an egg or boil a cup of coffee...
Well I don’t think anyone is browsing this thread because they need a solution to their own poverty.
So we’re talking about general solutions for the country at large, and solution that only works for a few means there’s still the problem
of the rest of the poor to solve.
How do you know that? And how do you know that somebody reading here won't need a solution in the future? Or knows somebody who might?
But that was why I didn't want to write about it in the first place. People here don't take kindly to solutions, when it feels so good complaining about problems.
> What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
They do, various and sundry, e.g. making license plates.
I'm being glib, which is probably unforgivable under the circumstances, but people do this. Sometimes intentionally -- and, granted, there are often other issues in play -- but it's heartbreaking.
Right, and I can construct theoretical models where this works well!
But they're all ripe for abuse, and that makes them politically untenable.
As a layperson in such social matters, I'd guess the real-world abuse rate would be something like 10%. This is mathematically tolerable, and socially beneficial.
But even at 0% real-world abuse, there would be righteous opposition. And at 0% + 1 predictable example, it'd be politically toxic in most of the country.
These are not boring solutions, they are incredibly difficult, and unfair solutions for a poor individual to take. You may find this all very annoying and we hear you, thank you for expanding upon your earlier vague notions.
Unfair is being poor in the first place. Almost nobody in this world gets a fair hand. But is that reason not to change your situation and get out of the hell which is poverty?
I have to ask what you mean by incredibly difficult? These are just normal jobs, with no skill required to start.
> The vast majority of mariners these days are third world nationals getting paid third world wages.
So? Is the third world not included in the original article? And also, that's like saying that you can't become a farmer or a teacher, because the vast majority of farmers or teachers in the world are third world nationals getting third world wages. The merchant navy also has many ships which only hire nationally.
As per the article, we are talking about being dirt poor. In that case, in the merchant navy you get food, board, medical attention and on top of that a salary. Which may be good or very small. If you have better options, please feel free to ignore my advice. It is for those who don't have any better option, but it is always impossible among hackers to get this through. Maybe we should discuss a few hundred miles of text more about how to change the system, rather than talk about real and actionable advice?
> Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
> Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary
Where can I easily sign up for such a situation? And mind you I mean the average person signing up, not that `anyone` could sign up.
I've looked at downgrading myself in the economy and the standard reaction is that the employers at that level dont like the idea that I know whats going on or have skills and dont want to take me on as "overqualified"
You might as well say, "let them eat cake" when your argument is just to find a job. Employers arent hiring.
Food, board and $1500 per month. That's a life line out of absolute poverty for any person who is willing to take it.
I know that hackers hate it, because the truth is that deep down most of you have a caste mentality and think that people who are born poor should stay poor, and dependent on government handouts. All discussion about "changing the system" is just for show so you can feel good about yourself and pat each other on the back, while things remain the same.
So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour. How dare they leave the ghetto behind, when they belong there?
Oh, so you mean be driftless as well. I thought you meant room and board in a community.
It is ridiculous of you think this sort of job is the solution to poverty at any amount of scale.
> So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour.
Hackers on this board are provoked when people suggest ways of taking destiny into their own hands that removes power from the tech billionaires, they are not provoked when someone finds a job
* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor
* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.
Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.
If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
* People who have successfully clawed and scratched themselves out of poverty are almost never taken into consideration in discussions about poverty.
At most modern culture appreciates a rags-to-riches story. But rags-to-normal stories are unheard of. When was the last time you heard about people going from poverty to having just decent lives? Doesn't really pique the interest of people, perhaps.
But that's what countless people have done, they're just not considered in the perspective of poverty. At most you just see them as some everyday guy in the supermarket or on the bus.
Getting out of poverty and back on your feet again is very close to a miracle. That's how it feels for those who experience it. But hackers spit on it with contempt, because that was not the solution they would have preferred. Or that was not a solution which was applicable to every single person on earth. And in that case, I guess we should file a formal complaint also against all the saints who cured the blind but didn't cure the deaf.
1. There are solutions to organization and staying on task, that person can use, to successfully manage their lives, or
2. Those solutions actually aren't. They only work for people who would have been organized anyway.
Casting this dichotomy into a different area that I understand better helps me to see what you are saying. I think that it also gives me an idea that this is not a dichotomy. There are solutions to poverty for the individual. The individual must be aware of them, use them, and keep using them, until they are no longer poor. Then, they have to have a system to avoid returning to poverty. The sum total of this is much harder than it seems, so to many people it seems like those solutions cannot work. Sure, to a person for whom these approaches work, who has become broke and homeless, they can do it, but that is cold comfort for those who cannot escape poverty.
There's a clear 3rd option where the poor are self destructive shit heads.
IMHO this is one of those areas where lots of things can be true. If you're sick or catch bad breaks then yep poverty is a grinding cycle. If you're not then the American Dream is still alive. But the "American Dream" always kinda sucked. In that you never got a ton of luxuries and it was all somewhat precarious.
There are solutions to poverty and the majority of people do follow them successfully. However there are always people getting into poverty and so there is always poverty. Worse there are people who cannot follow the solutions we have to poverty - this is a small minority, but it is the ones that are hardest to deal with.
There are also a tiny number (less than 1 in 1000) who have a lot of wealth but choose to live in poverty because that is freedom. If you look close you see they are the ones who have a warm coat and working heat in their tent. This is not poverty, but they try to be counted in your poverty numbers because it helps them. When you have wealth living in poverty is not that bad. (the above is a story a homeless man told me this week while I was helping out at our local food shelf. The homeless man is in poverty and I get the impression his divorce settlement is the problem and as soon as his kids are out of school he plans on getting a real job)
Gee. I wonder why people find a blogpost telling them to fuck off and acting like they don't know that quitting Starbucks is only relevant to those who go to Starbucks annoying?
He right. I’ve seen poverty in India, but I misunderstood it.
There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money.
I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night.
He said no. Just give me what you owe me.
He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him. Poverty is not a single static state. It’s a negative feedback loop that requires systemic change to get out of.
My experience with the kids working in Laos was similar but I have a different interpretation.
Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.
Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.
What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.
I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.
It is also that, at 12 years of age, that kid may have had enough of harsh life lessons already, like when he was promised something instead of being rewarded on the spot and later it turned out he was just being tricked. I imagine that something like that may have had a much more direct impact on his OP described decision - that hard earned "street smarts" keeping him grounded in his (undesirable) reality.
I watched a 13-16 year old Lao girl come to that realization in a very upset Facebook story. While I don’t fully understand the context, she was crying and venting that her mother doesn’t love her.
Prior to this fb story, the girl’s mother sold her older 16yo sister to Chinese guy for marriage. And frequently leaves her daughter to sleep on the street, because the girl isn’t able to get home by herself.
Despite all of that, she still felt her mother loved her and just then was when she realized it? I don’t know.
Unfortunately Youre correct, but also it takes years for these kids to process these realities. They’re just isn’t one moment where it’s like “maybe my parents don’t love me” time to change my behavior.
Sometimes, a visible example does that. I know of numerous people in Mumbai who do servant jobs, whose kids have gone to engineering schools and gotten corporate jobs. This sort of story - 1st in my family to go college - needs to be prominent for a parent to want to aspire to that for their kids.
Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.
> He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him.
I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
Everything else was self-taught/learned.
There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).
And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.
> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.
You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.
I feel that this experience can cause us to have less patience for the poor in the developed world. Something like, "How poor can you be in the USA? In Mexico, just outside a major city, there is a town without electricity, where people eat corn and raise cows, and they send their children to the city at night to beg because they don't have any cash and no way to make it." How many people live in that level of poverty in the US?
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
Poverty is a spectrum. Naturally, abject poverty is worse than regular poverty. I see too many people say "you're not poor, you have a phone" or "you're not homeless, you aren't sleeping on the sidewalk" (both of these have been said to me). There is a mismatch between what people imagine as poor and what poverty is, and of course, things could always be worse.
If I was in poverty a phone would be early on my list of things to get. First is enough food to eat, followed closely be enough shelter to live (sleeping outside in the snow is fine so long as you have a warm bed in the tend). There might be a few other things as well (I'm not in this condition), but a phone would be high on my list if I could afford it (including the monthly bill) just because of all the things you can do once you have one. For the price they are a great investment.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
> Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.
You're getting at what I was hinting at. It's not the literal distance between houses (or lack thereof) that cause this. It's the people and what they think and how they act.
Suburbs have a self-selection bias for antisocial behavior and folks who lean that way.
It’s not a 100% thing, but I’ve noticed a strong correlation having lived in a number of suburbs and in city cores. I’ve also spent a decent amount of time in rural parts of America and I totally get what you’re saying. The average rural person likely has a much larger local support network (aka community) than the average suburbanite.
Yes, same. Online I hear people bemoan how things are these days and stuff like that and then my SOMA high rise works well in the form that I want civil interactions to be.
> "Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
They’re selling the stolen merchandise to a fence who then resells it to stores with looser procurement requirements at a discount or they box it and ship it to an Amazon fulfillment center and flip the stolen merch on Amazon.
Poor people don’t have enough cash liquidity to make stealing and selling toiletries worth it, it’s loosely organized crime.
The same sort of marker exists for diabetic test strips, people on Medicare get them for free, sell them for a discount for cash to someone who resells them for a profit.
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".
And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".
Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges.
My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
This makes me wonder if being told I was a smart kid (instead of "Good job kid!") wasn't such a bad thing after all. (Educators say tell kids "Good job!" instead of "You're so smart!", because the kids will fear losing that status and then not dare try hard problems).
I always think I'm lucky I was born with a pretty good brain.
This definitely comes up a lot and I've never found a satisfactory way to get through to these people that you can both work hard and be lucky.
The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.
The problem is the world isn’t clean, statistics aren’t clean, it’s all mosaic. You can have noble, moral poors and rich. You can have absolute dirt bags both rich and poor.
I grew up in a take of two households, with parents divorced at a young age. Father grows up in a picture perfect well-to-do family and ends up a classic party-hard drug addled dirt bag. He died last year living alone, homeless in a tent off an interstate motel town. Mother grows up in a stereotypical “dad went out for milk” family that descended into (and rose above) poverty.
While my father just kind of floated around and lived life, my mother remembered the poverty she experienced growing up, worked her ass off in university, and worked two jobs (one professional, one as a weekend cahsier) until she retired.
Nothing any of us can write here on a forum from on high will counter lived reality.
All this is to say, I agree about empathy being needed on society, poverty can still be moral failure. Pretending it can’t is just as in constructive as any other moral argument in this topic.
Having seen the above I would be cautious about believing it.
In divorce courts will often emotionally and monetarily abuse men. (divorce itself if you love the other party is emotional abuse, though I don't know what to do about this. Abusive men do love their wives despite the abuse). As such die of a drug overdose while living in a homeless tent is probably the only option seen left.
I'm not saying there are not lazy losers in the real world. However the picture is often more complex and few people will admit that.
My MAGA dad grew up dirt poor in a house with literal dirt floors in some rooms. Four kids. No dad. Government support. He got a job as a cop and raised me and thinks anyone can get out of poverty if they work hard. He’s a corner case but he’ll never see it tha way because he literally bootstrapped himself. How do I tell him he didn’t and just got lucky? He kinda has a point.
Well if you work hard enough silently lives out the important part: in a high demand area like say construction. But this applies to even high paying fields like IT. If you work really hard on things none cares about in IT you are not gonna make much ...
Yeah... and the basis of how to Make America Great Again: make the poor's lives miserable and they'll be forced to work hard. They'll be successful, problem solved! If they stay poor, that must mean they're still lazy, let them rot!
I dunno. People put too much stock in Max Weber, who cherry-picked his evidence: he literally used Benjamin Franklin, a deist who'd abandoned Christian doctrine, as his model "Protestant." He created a compelling just-so story that is now picked up by people who never check the actual sources.
I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:
> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.
> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.
> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.
> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."
Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:
If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
The most sinister part of it is that today many Americans are not doing well, but because they believe that meritocracy exists, they believe they must have no merit. Cue the graph of deaths of despair.
> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.
I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.
Culture is important, but it's widespread enough that there's probably a biological basis. Humans are wired to hate the idea of "good/bad things just happen", we're always creating stories about causation even when they might not be very accurate stories.
Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."
if you want to go down a rabbit hole, lots of its roots stem from protestantism, especially calvinism. that cultural influence is not unique to the us, but i don’t really subscribe to any evolutionary behavior explanations to attitudes like this, personally
Right. At least when I was growing up we were all constantly told stuff like "you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it". The corollary is that if you aren't able to accomplish something, it's because you didn't set your mind to it.
I was also of the naive impression we had collectively moved from this thinking and it was more so just a difficult problem to attack inherently. The comments here are very sobering.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
This view of the world puts everything on the individual. It might be worth reading up on structuralism to balance that perspective out a bit. I'm somewhere in the middle of the two extremes myself, but surely one must acknowledge that there are larger systems at play that can constrain an individual's ability to "optimize".
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
I imagine there's an even "earlier" starting point most people don't have to begin at, which goes:
"My own circumstances are too different to truly empathize and understand, and I'm not too proud/delusional to admit it. The presence of that gap in comprehension is itself a reason for action."
I grew up poor, but with two competing narratives about poverty filling our ears at home. You see, my mother came from a well-off upper middle class ("prep") family, and my father came from generational poverty in Appalachia ("trailer trash"). They met in D.C. where he was a soldier and she worked at the Treasury.
Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.
His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."
I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.
I grew up poor as dirt. My mom has four kids with three dads. Eventually we were a family of six. I think we had about 100 euros a month for food, clothing and recreation. My mom and stepdad did not work one day in their lives (welfare in NL).
Right now I’m still recovering. It’s my fifth year making over 150K and I have zero to show for it because I did a poor job managing my finances.
To help me (in general, but also productivity wise) I have a coach and coincidentally today exerpeinced a breakthrough. I am still afraid of being poor. Of being made fun of. And not being enough.
I’m operating out of a ‘it’s not enough’ mentality, because I don’t feel enough.
It feels like a life sentence, but some hope shimmers at the end of the tunnel.
What it’s like being poor: even buying a simple football in a supermarket felt leagues out of reach.
Being sent back home because a teacher told me my clothes did not cut it. And my parents just sent me back.
I never thought there was a path for me to become a doctor. Or any other noble job.
Growing up or being poor is not being able to see a way out. Recognising opportunity.
Forgive me my language. Super tired and on my phone.
I was just lucky that I started programming when I was about 32, and when I started freelancing (35) money started flowing.
But tbh I am still managing the holes my upbringing left me (financial habits, attachment issues, focus and productivity). I know I’m responsible for my action, but it does not make it easier.
It kind of feels it’s never enough. So it does not feel I am helped in the sense that I left my problems behind me. Just traded some problems for better (but also bigger) ones.
The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
Thanks for being skeptical, looked it up because of that. Looks like the primary study people cite is this one, which indicates around 65% of people filing for bankruptcy cite a medical contributor of their bankruptcy. That includes medical bills (highest contributor overall) and loss of income due to medical issues.
While we are not at the same state in history, there is a reason why Usury was illegal in many societies. Interest on loans can end up crushing one part of society while enriching another that any feel didn't deserve it. It can actively produce inequality.
Growing up with a single mother we've vacillated between being poor, broke and "getting by".
It was always a reverse slide down.
First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.
If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.
But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.
The answer is just ... luck.
When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
Luck really can’t be overstated imo. I was genuinely just lucky to be interested in computer programming as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking about careers, I just wanted to make games. If my interest was basketball my life would have been very different.
Don't forget the luck of living in a country where programming was a viable career path that could lead to a decent job, the luck of having the opportunity (and/or money) to attain the higher education that's usually required for it and the luck of living in a time when the tech industry was in an upswing that would allow a person to find a job in this industry. Really, having any of these puts most of us well above the amount of luck an average person gets (at least on a worldwide scale).
You were lucky to have the genetics that allowed you to have cognitive capabilities to understand computers and programming.
Many people don't and never will.
There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, some of us will be short, have bad looks, be unappealing to women, etc. And some of us will not have the cognitive capacity to have a job that keeps you above water, forever.
The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out. Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability.
>There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
There's a lot of dumb rich people, too. Sometimes the wield a lot of power and are indeed bad people.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society" in which case I suggest you step off your tech pedestal and look around you.
> The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.
OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".
Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?
[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The only reason people like you or me can sit on their lazy arses typing for a living is because there's a small army of people that take care of things like food and other boring tasks. The people keeping the Tesco running. The drivers delivering stuff there. The distribution centre. The farmers. The people building roads. The people maintaining roads. People maintaining water. People maintaining electricity. People maintaining gas.
All of that is just to keep the local supermarket running. I probably forgot some. It expands even more if you include other things.
A lot of this is what is generally known as "low skilled labour". But it's all needed. It's all contributing. I did this kind of work until my 20s and I definitely had a share of coworkers who were dumb, for lack of a better term. Most were not, but some were, a few to the point of being clinically handicapped. But they were all contributing.
Without them one couldn't make privileged elitist statements on internet forums being derisive of an entire class of people. Snobby comments like this is why people hate "the elite".
People don't need your compassion or help. They need a roughly fair system where working a full-time job gives you a decent standard of living. Lets start with that. And I'm not even going to start how the entire post stinks of eugenics. The only way to eliminate poverty is to genetically engineer out the people you been too dumb to exist? Really?
I take your broader point. I didn’t choose my genetics, my parents, or the conditions I was raised in. That’s why I don’t believe in moralizing social class.
I do believe in the idea of meritocracy and competition in general to motivate people. We are far from a meritocratic society unfortunately.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
Things that are pretty much out of those peoples' control can include health problems, dependents such as kids or needy older relatives, accidents, a long tail of other kinds of bad luck (fires, victim of fraud, etc)
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
This is a massively broad brush with a huge filter bias applied.
1. Many immigrants not from the contiguous countries next to yours were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
2. Immigrants from close countries typically are the ones that are more motivated in the first place (bias filter). It's also common they have relations and contacts in the country they are going to as a means to gain a foothold in the place they are going.
> Many immigrants [...] were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
But they're not wealthy here, and they can't buy the cost of living in NYC or LA with that level of wealth.
With the education point, you're gesturing at something like the real reasons they often outperform very poor Americans (if we compare only equivalent capacity for the sake of argument), I believe: habit, work ethic, drive, belief in improvement. Dom's article about what "poor" looks like makes sense from the inside, but after making it out one looks back and sees all the opportunities everyone around them had to get out of poverty, and it looks a little different, then. Not everyone has all the same opportunities, but a key driver is being open to those that appear, and conducting your life such that they are more likely.
The despair of believing they can't get out of the rut they're in is one of the causes of not getting out of the rut they are in. It's not that the despair isn't real, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (and this is true even if they win the lottery, looking at outcomes there).
Well if the poster is not doing drugs and is taking care of their health the odds are overwhelmingly against this scenario even if it would satisfy your schadenfreude.
Oh really? Please cite the sources. I didn't say I hoped it happened. Just that it does happen. And it's an extremely myopic and callous way to look at the state of the world.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Yes, the article says that, but I have direct experience which says the article is not telling the whole story. Some people are making all the right decisions and are still poor due to bad luck trapping them in a cycle of financial ruin. But also, some people really are poor due to their own crappy decisions. I've known them! They exist and must be accounted for in any productive discussion about poverty.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
> You make all your food from scratch all the time. [...] You fix everything yourself.
What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.
Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?
> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.
If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.
> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.
Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.
> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.
One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.
> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.
Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.
But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.
That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.
> Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people.
Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.
Anyway, I see what you're driving at.
Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.
Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?
It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
Yes, there were always fat people around in history, but not at the same rates and severity as modern Americans.
Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.
What consumerism? Someone falling into the "poor" category the OP describes has already forgone all of that out of necessity. There is no money for consumerism.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
> Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
I don’t think you understand how little some people have. Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas, where you have to have a car for transportation, because public transit doesn’t exist.
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
> Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas
What isn't urban but also not rural?
I've seen disagreement over exactly where urban begins. A density of ~400 people per km², with a minimum of 1-2,000 people is a common definition, although the OECD targets a density of 1,500 people per km², with a minimum of 7,000 people, to capture all the variation throughout the nations it tracks. Regardless, in all those cases "rural" always encompasses that which falls short of what constitutes urban.
I've never heard of this alternate state you speak of.
The sub-urban regions. All the suburbs I've been in (and I'd wager nearly all of the US suburbs in existence) require you to have a vehicle to go about your day... unless you work from home and have everything delivered to you, I guess.
Correct, but irrelevant. Suburban is a subset of urban, not the other way around — originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
Like you said, this is irrelevant. Cities aren't planned or built like that, and really haven't been... since the founding of the USA, at the very latest. (If they were, the Brits would have had a much more difficult time capturing D.C. than they did.)
Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason, but we still don't know what there is other than rural and urban. Pointlessly pointing out obvious things like that there can be suburbs within urban areas, like there can be hamlets in rural areas, does not answer the question or serve any purpose whatsoever.
> Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason…
This you?
> …originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
> I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
Yes they would. Absolutely. Which means that they clearly see it as being outskirts of a city or town, not the outskirts of an urban area. You even say so yourself. It is literally written as such.
> There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
You did the same thing again: Outside a city, not outside of an urban area. Of course there are different community types within urban areas, just as there different community types within rural areas: e.g. hamlets, villages, small towns, it is even technically possible, albeit unusual, for a city to be rural! For example, Greenwood, British Columbia is both a city and rural.
Dude, take it from someone who is mildly autistic, and spent a very long time being staunchly prescriptivist: you’re being ridiculously pedantic, and no one cares.
If you don't care, why take time out of your day to formulate a message?
But, regardless, it is quite delusional to think that I would write for anyone but myself. Nobody is paying me to be here. It can only ever be for myself. As I care, that is more than satisfactory. It makes absolutely no difference what other people have to say about it. It was never for them.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I am answering this question.
Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.
> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.
I take it you really mean:
"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
You should feel embarrassed for “thinking” so callously and uncritically. Do you need everything handed to you? Family issues, natural disasters, medical events, house fires, abuse, wage theft, fate. I’ve worked with the destitute, there is no safety net.
Poor people don’t have control of their situation. You are literally victim blaming and surprised that rubs people the wrong way. Victim blaming is rude, offering your flippant two cents is rude. There, your ideas are challenged, rather than tone police go think about it.
suggestion: give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they are out to get you, trying to blame you, or trying to attack you. Especially on hacker news.
Was it a “dumb” question? Yes. Maybe they are dumb. Maybe they are just totally out of touch because they don’t know any poor people. I don’t know because i’m not a mind reader.
I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do).
No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
I'm not sure what this contributes? Not being rich and experiencing absolute poverty are radically different things. Of course, in America as everywhere else, there are millions who work sixty hour weeks and remain in poverty, often extreme poverty. Especially those undocumented, incarcerated or working in circumstances where minimum wages do not apply.
I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
No they think "its bullshit that you can't get out of it, since I did it myself". The argument from the left is not "we should help poor people since they are miserable" its that "its impossible for poor people to help themselves", why do left wing people try to make that bullshit claim that will just create more oponents?
I think we should help poor people, but I also think that its not hard for poor people to work hard and stop being poor today. If you want my support just say you wanna help poor people, don't try to tell me that its impossible for poor people to help themselves because then I will argue against you.
Like, why equate the two opinions "you can work yourself out of poverty" and "we shouldn't help poor people", those are two entirely different kinds of opinions.
If you had actually been impoverished, you'd have worked 60 hour weeks, and still be working 60 hour weeks with nothing to show for it. If you think "didn't take a vacation that wasn't a long weekend" is poverty, you're delusional.
The "prosperity bible" turn that America has taken is truly saddening.
Such bullshit. Don't continue to glamorize the mentally and physically harmful hustle culture that invades this country, and ignores the very real factor of both luck and privilege that not everyone is blessed with.
What's the point of society if everyone needs to bust their ass 70+ hours a week to get by? Might as well go homestead in the woods and be a subsistence farmer and do it on your own at that point.
Just fuck having time for creative pursuits and hobbies outside of working and making someone else rich?
Most Americans don't understand real poverty. It exists outside their reality. They've never seen it, let alone experienced it.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.
It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
His comment that you can get out- two people did- may either be a claim that his own escape doesn’t prove that escape is possible for all, or a batman reference. I lack the media literacy to be sure which.
Bruce Wayne (Batman's public-facing identity) was imprisoned in a pit where he was the second person to ever escape.
What I find a bit ironic, is this allegory can be used to reach the opposite perspective OP is trying to dispel. The bit about the "hopefulness" doesn't only refer to the light at the opening of the pit, but also in that the "escape" mechanism was actually being facilitated by the prison. This "escape" was supposedly designed to enact the "true despair" the OP was highlighting. The element they left out, was the fact this was done by extending a "support" rope from the opening which was deliberately too short to be useful. This causes Bruce to muster his own raw physical and mental strength to make the climb without the rope and ultimately prevail through personal will-power.
I guess OP would say Bruce is actually only "broke" here and not "poor".
System thinking please. Can every person in poverty become IT employed? Start a landscaping business? If they did would that likely cause a whole brand new set of problems? What jobs are these people currently doing? Don't those jobs need to be done? Can our society afford them to be done? Shouldn't anyone contributing to society (or legitimately unable to) be permitted to thrive? What could we do that would permit that? What do we do currently which harms it?
If there are jobs are legitimately not worth doing or paying someone to thrive while doing, why do those jobs exist? If these people aren't capable (or even willing) to do these jobs (or better jobs), why? How can we motivate or train people. (Lots of education, healthcare and especially psychotherapy are missing, I can tell you that.)
We can't solve poverty by thinking "well, some individuals might be able to solve theirs". It's a whole population, we have to solve for the whole population.
You're not going to make any money in this unless you have a ton of tools. Working for someone else with the tools generally doesn't pay crap. Also in the US it is/was common to use undeclared immigrant labor for these kinds of jobs.
Also, I imagine if you live in the middle of nowhere, landscaping skills would be all but useless. You need to be within reasonable distance of enough people willing to pay you a living wage.
I poked around their blog some more out of curiosity and I can't figure out what his situation is. In a year-old article about burnout and vacation, he mentions burning out from a job in marketing, and ends by saying therapy isn't an option because he lives under the poverty line and can't even afford to get vital blood work done. Maybe this hit so hard that it actually made him unable to do more remunerative work. But it sure feels like he's poor by choice. Which is odd because this article seems like a pretty good description of what it's like to be poor not by choice. There is an almost throwaway line that stands out at me now:
"Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?"
The rest of the article is about how you can't just choose to stop being poor. And in the middle of all this is something that boils down to, "I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff." Which is certainly his right, but it makes this whole thing feel like poverty cosplay.
"I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff."
I feel like this is an ugly truth, but still a truth. It's also very ugly.
For some people there's no tradeoff on how much they have to suffer to get some financial security because they already have it. Some people have to suffer a bit but quickly hit escape velocity. Some people never stop suffering. It's terrible.
I think Dave Ramsey has many annoying qualities but his "sometimes you have to act crazy to get out of it" is basically correct even if it's very, very uncomfortable IMO.
It's one of those difficult topics that people like to take to extremes.
Many poor people are in difficult situations with no clear way out. They're already working the best paying job they can find, as much as they can, and doing as much as they can to advance. Learning new skills requires time and energy they don't have.
Some are poor by choice. They could put in more hours, get a second job, or learn new skills, and escape the trap. But they don't want to. This might be "lazy," or it might be "prioritizes family time," or whatever.
But as soon as you say that some people are really stuck no matter how hard they try to get out, it's taken as saying nobody can ever get out of it. And if you say that some people can get out of it and don't, it's taken as saying every poor person is just lazy.
What's curious about this post is that it seems like a pretty good insider description of being completely stuck, except the author isn't.
I have a lot of empathy for people that are struggling financially, especially with how hard things are now. I grew up in a way that most would consider to be "poor", though I mostly never felt that way.
I do well for myself now, better than I ever thought I could, and yet still I had to think very hard about the financial implications and compromises that come with choosing to have kids. Making 6 babies then complaining that you're poor, come on man, wtf? If you're going to do that, you have to do absolutely whatever you can to bring resources in for your family. That means working the "boring desk job" if it pays more, even if you prefer to be outside wiring up sprinklers.
Where is the accountability, the locus of self control? Sorry, but I don't buy any of this.
This gets me too. I generally agree that success is basically luck * effort, so I don't judge people who haven't been able to "make it." Similarly, I don't really admire people for having "made it"... If I don't know them personally, there's no way for me to gauge the ratio of luck and effort.
However, I do judge adults who aren't in good circumstances who also decide to bring children into their hardship. I have two kids, which is the most I felt I could provide for (time, money, attention, energy, etc).
Poor people should have Amazon prime because it doubles as fast delivery, and zero other streaming services. Staying in is always going to be cheaper than going out so some entertainment at home is a good idea.
”It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping”
cf.
”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
> The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
There are more options than the "mindsets" given in the article. It is legitimate to ask someone who believes they are poor why they are poor. Maybe they truly are. But maybe they aren't and they just don't know it.
Questioning whether or not someone has a higher earning potential does not imply they are currently lazy.
Why is anyone assuming this? It was the GP of this chain who was providing this assumption. The OP was commenting on the condition of being poor and the meaningful difference between the commonly experienced condition of being "broke". This entire digression is likely a reflection of what motivated OP to put this post together.
He asserts that being poor is different from being broke. The former being tied to a permanent state.
But, if you have the skills and opportunity to make better-than-poor money, then in most cases, I presume, you aren't really poor. It's only a matter of time until you can make additional money. And if you need to charge the $300 of parts to your credit card, on the presumption that if you have a running vehicle you can go to an interview of do the next landscaping job, you have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay it off. It's an investment in that case.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might find yourself poor anyway for reasons outside your control. Health issues, weird economic situations, whatever. I'm not discounting them. And maybe they apply here.
I just feel like there is a disconnect between the earning potential of the skills he has and being truly "permanently" poor. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate reason, just that it wasn't clear to me what that reason would be.
You may not like the reasoning or think I'm being too critical, but it's hardly fallacious.
I don’t want to live in a world where anything resembling wilful ignorance of systemic inequality is propagated uncontested. Chalk it up to wilful ignorance if you must.
The article directly mentions that the author has done complete engine rebuilds. Mechanics who can do things like engine rebuilds (efficiently) can crack six figures in a MCOL area although this industry does tend to expect quite a bit of work (e.g. 50 hours a week probably and not just M-F). Similarly the about page of the author mentions that they didn't like working in tech and left. The author seems to have all of the tools to make well above the median national salary and afford the proverbial white picket fence house with a wife and two kids. Therefore it seems that the author is making a choice to be poor and many of us would find this choice questionable. Coupled with the author stating things like "Should I kill myself for capitalism" this reads like a fairly typical far-left rant against the inhumanity of actually having to work for a living. The author should check their privilege. There are many rungs below what the author describes and people in this environment would kill for the job of doing engine rebuilds 50 hours per week to earn a six figure salary and support their family.
Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.
I'm privileged to have never had to worry about this, growing up comfortably middle to upper middle class.
With that said, I have a perpetual point of confusion here, likely due to my own blindspots and something I don't want to ask in person because it's not nice: is it an issue of budgeting?
Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, etc. But theoretically, couldn't the latter person live exactly like the first one, and save $2000/yr?
Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
> Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, etc. But theoretically, couldn't the latter person live exactly like the first one, and save $2000/yr?
Emergency expenses are generally not the same for different people
> Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
If you need $x per year and only earn $x-y per year... you're going to end up with $0 at the end of the year and not have your needs met.
> The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
Saving is difficult - as mentioned before, emergency expenses come up. And it's very hard to break that mindset ("I could buy this more expensive version but I need this money for other things too")
> They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0.
Or they're dead.
If you save an extra $2000/year, what are you supposed to do with the money if you're always hungry, if you're always cold? I'm guessing you could buy food and clothes; you'd end up at $0, just slightly better off. If there's no safety net to rely on, you'd save to be able to face the next problem, and maybe pay it less with your health (which is a kind of invisible debt).
And that's even assuming there's some certain income you can rely on. In my case, I know that for the next few months, I'd at least get unemployment benefits if I lost my job. Not everyone get that, and if you don't, the income floor is $0 and it's way harder to budget.
Another aspect to consider is that maybe the case of a single person who would be in poverty throughout a long life is not representative of poverty. Some people get out of poverty, some fall into it, some die early from it. If we're considering a single person always starting at $0 and always ending up at $0, several years in a row, we already dismiss these nuances. I'm sure you can find such examples, someone who lived to be 80 with a constant wealth of $0, but how common are they really?
They didn't earn the exact amount of money they needed—they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely. And likewise one therefore can't save and buy better stuff. And thus the cycle of poverty continues.
> they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely
What does this mean, exactly? I think that's the core of my question, and something I don't understand since I lack the experience. If someone can live like this for, say, 10 years then in some sense it is meeting their expenses exactly.
I understand a situation of accumulating debt - that's a state that's not in equilibrium. But a lot of poor people can't really obtain credit, I believe.
I'm confused whether the author is poor, has been poor, has never been poor but has deep understanding of what it's like for other reasons (friends, family, etc.). He writes
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
I think the ambiguity is leading to a better discussion. Many commenters are struggling mightily with the urge to dismiss the author as a lazy moral failure, which would allow them to ignore his arguments as originating from an unreliable source. Since there's not enough information to do that, we're getting a certain amount of discussion of the actual ideas.
Hmm, possibly, but from my point of view the fact that he might not be speaking from experience, or at the very least from the experience of someone he has been close to, makes me disinclined to put a lot of weight on his opinions.
I once saw people start their month with 0 on their bank account, and live in the negative monthly credit their bank allows.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
I had a roommate who was taking payday loans to support his brother for a while. I saw how ridiculous the interest was, paid it off for him, then had him pay me back. It got him out of the constant cycle of debt.
> A lot of poor folks are having to stand in line for hours and hours to get food at a food bank due to [government] ineptitude
This is an element of the argument for dismantling the nanny bureaucracy and instead going to UBI / cash payments.
1. It doesn't waste time, both of the gov't employee, but also of the recipient.
2. The author could buy better food, or car parts, or a bus pass, or ... with what otherwise might have been a more or less forced purchase in a single category. The flexibility returns agency and self-help behavior into the hands of the recipient.
All this needs to be tempered against the progress[1] we are making against poverty. I know it's a lot to ask the poor to be patient, but I do think there's an element of knowing that a lot of good people are trying really hard to alleviate the situation can help with the mostly mental elements of the article
> No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving.
eg: this statement is not actually a fact, it's a mindset
Overall, this is a big big testament to the overall worldview that I think is missing, just how impactful choices actually are. Some of these kinds of stories start generations ago, some of them start with the individual themselves having spent excess in the past that could have taken them through the low times (kind of "a waste not, want not" scenario). Some folks had opportunity and squandered it. Some flipped tails (failing scenario) 20 times in a row... People don't really want to help the former, but definitely the latter.
Now do homelessness and make it over the past 20 years.
Now do chances a child makes it to their 20s over the past 20 years.
Now do suicides.
No, we are not making progress on poverty, at least not in the United States. We are simply trading one problem for another. Progress has entirely stopped since essentially the 1990s, and things have gotten much much worse in the past 5 years.
Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment
Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like
The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all
> Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time.
Because it was an immigration policy that selected for that Pakistani gentleman to be in your general vicinity at that moment. But it was something more akin to Math.rand() that chose the American.
If your purpose were to post the same complaint about someone drawn at random from Pakistan, you could try using Math.rand() to pick (on) one of them, too.
Well, if you grew up with a certain standard of living and you went off and did the right things and studied the right subjects and got the good jobs - only to find out you cannot achieve anything close to what your parents and grandparents have l, there is a certain part of you that’s going to be resentful and hurt and angry.
As others have said “Happiness = Reality - Expectations.”
For the Pakistani or Mexican man coming from poverty stricken, crime riddled, violent places in the world to America that’s a major step up in quality of life. Whereas I, an American, making $150k per year as a software engineer literally cannot afford a house within two counties of my mother because the costs of housing in those areas are so sky high that I would have to squeeze my wife and three children into a small 2/2 condo in a rough part of town. This would effectively revert me back to the standard of living my poor immigrant grandparents had when they came to America.
In any case I work remote and instead live in a reasonable home in a moderate income area instead so I’m just fine. But that right there is a large part of modern generational bitterness among the youth. Even those that on paper have made it often haven’t.
Reading your comment as a foreigner is crazy - I don't even claim to understand half of your situation. What is so bad about living in another county? Did your county look like it does now when your parents bought property there? Maybe back in the day, they would've rather lived somewhere else and couldn't afford it?
You make enough money to afford rent on a small villa in very livable parts of the United States - the richest nation on earth - as far as I an tell. How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?
It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.
I've seen the sentiment several times right here on HN that $250k is "basically poverty" in San Francisco. It's unbelievable to me how out of touch and spoiled one would have to be to reach that conclusion.
If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.
But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.
I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.
Because humans compare against their previous situation. If humans don't advance against their previous situation and against their peers, even very slowly is enough but if they don't, best of luck motivating them to do anything.
I do not remember where I read this, but it has struck with me for the last 35+ years - "Poverty is a crime, but the poor are not guilty of it".
I have seen abject poverty growing up in India.. It is right in your face most of the times. I have friends from the other side of the street and pretty much, you live in very different realities.
Not all poor people are poor in the same way, that is, there are different reasons you might be poor. This is explained pretty well in this classic book:
> You can’t afford to go to the movies, but will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.
If you're a family it's much cheaper to have Netflix, spread these $20 over 4 people a month than going to the movie theater for $100+ every time. These $20/month are already out of reach for many, I realize that.
If you're a poor family you're better off with not having Netflix or go to the movies; you just watch DVDs and stay home.
The underlying problem not talked about in all this is how our entire financial system is built around charging you a bit more than you can bear, but not actually driving you into bankruptcy.
Then a huge percentage of your income goes to interest payments.
Or you can do without both - as a large number of people do. Taking that family to the movie theater once per year is a lot cheaper than a monthly netflix subscription, which is another option.
> There is this mindset from folks that poor people must not be smart.
Ever since I was a child, that idea has been shoved down my throat. "The American Dream", "they're lazy", "they should work harder".
Spending some serious time in developing countries fixed that mentality up real quick. Being able to escape the circumstances you're born into is a rare privilege in any culture. And that aspect of life in USA seemed to end in the late 90s/early 2000s.
It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache.
I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are just kind of annoying. I have an LG electric stove. Instead of modulating heat, it pulses the burner top. So you can't effectively lower the heat, just extend the time it takes to cook. The oven timer doesn't turn off, it tries to keep the food warm, and plays chime every minute. Exactly opposite of what I want, since I cook food for my dog and want the food to cool off. And it's stuff like that, the constant annoyance of dealing with badly designed products, and things breaking. I had 2 driers break (all plastic parts), and a washing machine that started leaking oil inside that damaged the clothes in the last year. It's the cumulative effect of dealign with lower quality things.
I've heard it described that being poor is expensive. The poorer you are the more expensive it is. Being poor in a poor country is the most expensive. You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee. So per gram you're paying double. You can't afford medical care, so the condition gets worse and thus more expensive to do something about. You're in debt most of the time, which is expensive. You have to travel for work, again expensive. You rent, expensive. It must be awful.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
When I think of so many people who can least afford to do so buying everyday items at dollar stores, CVS, gas stations, and other convenience stores with such high unit prices it bums me out.
I think its some sort of decline thats happening
Some of is dumb environmental policy. Showerheads that don't spray enough water. Dishwashers that don't wash properly so you need to wash dishes before you put them in and after you take them out. Time of use pricing that means you need to cook at inconvenient times, and even still most of the bill is fixed charges. It's just going on. The decline in Canada seems like its mostly targeted towards poor people. I know a family friend that has a broken bone leg is waiting months for a specialist when anytime he could get an infection and die from infection. Totally preventable even in a third world country, yet it is what it is. My mom also know somone thats waiting for a proecdure too, and they asked hime multiple times if he wants to do Maid. It's almost cynical.
How much would you save yearly if you didn't have a dog?
A few accumulated years of those savings would let you buy a better-quality drier or washing machine - saving you from replacing them regularly, or replacing your damaged clothes.
Pets are a choice that's fairly high up the Maslow hierarchy. Get rid of them, get into a better position, build up some reserves, and leave your family in a better place than you started.
Also raise your family so they have the same mindset - they need to leave their children in a better place than they started.
$1,360 a year. Use it to buy higher quality goods that will save you more in the long run. Use the ongoing $1,360 a year PLUS the accumulating savings gained from the higher quality goods to repeat at higher levels.
A lot of the discourse about poverty reminds me of this:
> I do occasional work for my hospital’s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way.
> My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.
> The patient freaks out. “A hundred dollars a week? There’s no way I can get that much money!”
> My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.
> The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.
> My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a “profit” of $110.
> At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he’s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn’t mean that after getting rid of that she’d have $210 to spend on medication. Sure, these fancy doctors think they’re so smart, what with their “mathematics” and their “subtracting numbers from other numbers”, but they’re not going to fool her.
> At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs – and I don’t want to know – it’s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don’t even think it’s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Poor people also can use a washboard and line dry their clothing. Not as convenient as having machines but just about everyone did it like this till the ‘40s & ‘50s.
I remember an interview with some billionaire talking about how people should grow their own food. He underpays his workers. One the surface great idea. Aside for the fact that it's hugely inefficient and why we have massive farms to take care of the inefficiency problem. Innovation was supposed to take care of this so poor people don't have to substance farm in cities. I mean by all means do that as a hobby. But keep im mind many cities have contaminated soil. People doing their own laundry also had a stay at home parent back than yo do these chores. Now 2 people need to work jobs to pay a mortgage. So don't feel its really a viable alternative
When I was a broke college student I don’t have access to a washer and dryer, so I either went to a laundromat or on occasion just washed clothing in a tub and put them up to dry. Wear jeans; they don’t need frequent washing -some manufacturers indeed recommend very infrequent washing.
It’s totally doable. Growing your own fruits and veggies is out of the question. It’s stupid -the only ones that make sense are herbs and only because when fresh they are better.
Sorry I don't. Guy looked kind of like Dan Gilbert but somewhat like a Bill O Riley personality. Maybe 2012 or 2013 interview. Possibly 60 minutes. It was in major network. I tried searching it too but couldn't find it. I remember watching an interview about an attractive female pilot that was flying to Epstain Island and can't find that interview now either. So I'm thinking maybe it got scrubbed
I have in fact when I was a student. Granted they were only my clothes and I tried not to dirty them but also used a laundromat in most instances. Sometimes would ask a friend for access to a machine.
I have had to do actual loads of laundry (for a household, and not just clothes - towels, beddings, and more), entirely by hand, no laundromat or friend with access to a machine, which is why I ask.
It is both back-breaking and time-intensive especially if you are trying to get clean laundry not just "smells of detergent" laundry. And especially if there's someone who does manual labour in the household - getting heavy stains out effectively doubles your workload. There are many people who cannot just "try not to dirty" their clothes.
I am not trying to downplay your experience. But student poverty and poverty in the adult world without all the cushioning of a campus are very different kettles of fish.
It is —but there are also the Amish and others like them who do lots of things manually and try to avoid many modern conveniences. I don’t think they live poor lives. Definitely better than the poor in the countryside who don’t have the same ingrained customs who often need government help.
That is higher than I thought --however, they are not using modern ones, they use the wringer type where you have to wring the water from the washed clothes a couple of times.
This sounds more than legit for many places outside of US and maybe some places in US, but in general US does give you an opportunity to move up. So unless it's health issue or family issue it really is in one's own hands here. I know a ton of people who came here with no $/legal status/english and are doing really well. If you are a US citizen you already have a huge asset.
I understand the sentiment. I grew up lower middle class but with financially illiterate and neglectful parents and had a great deal of food scarcity and other things that caused me to leave home at 17. It was really difficult. The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.
And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.
Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
That's a really good point about the free stuff people with wealth get.
Free objects are an easy to understand example. If you're in an expensive neighborhood you can walk down the street and really good get free stuff because people are throwing it out - like the nice 42" Samsung screen I'm using right now. In a poorer neighborhood that just doesn't happen.
I see a lot of musing and wondering here about the cause of poverty.
One thing that's missing that I have seen a fair bit is crime and scams. People who are victims of crime can get dumped into the poverty trap through no fault of their own. For a while I was living in my car because my signature was forged by and an employer decided to simply opt out of payment. I took the employer to arbitration and won but that took 2.5 years - that's obviously a structural problem when eviction happens in 30 days.
Sure. That’s the theory. Then I read the book Evicted and I understood. One of the people gets a small windfall. Enough to stop the treadmill. What she does is buy something nice for herself because she “deserves a treat”.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
Even the US median household income is "only" $83k. Looking at stuff like this + the rest of the blog I'm not convinced the author is any less out of touch than the people this post is criticizing.
I actually thought this was going to make the point that just because you are poor, doesn't mean that you have the skills to fix things on your own. It's great that the author is able to work on their own cars (but doesn't have the money). I think probably more common is that you don't have the money AND you don't have the skills.
And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.
There's a tension between descriptive and prescriptive claims here.
Descriptively, the author is (worthily!) conveying the real, lived experience of resource scarcity so complete that standard budgeting advice is useless, tone-deaf, etc.
But prescriptively, he goes much further than "useless": advice "doesn't work". The endless runner, The Pit, eternal poverty with "no relief in sight."
This language of inescapability creates a framework where "poor" is effectively defined as "people for whom interventions don't work." This is unfalsifiable! If someone escapes, they were never really "poor".
And if that's true, then what? We can't identify what interventions help, we can't learn from success stories, we can't reason about different causes needing different solutions. The framework meant to defend the poor actually makes it impossible to help them effectively.
The author almost certainly wants to avoid victim-blaming, which is respectable. But defining poverty as this inescapable, almost metaphysical state removes all agency from both people in poverty and those who'd want to help them.
Poverty is a funnel with slippery sides and no bottom. You can struggle your entire life just not to slide downwards even further. The post's author understands this and so do I.
I climbed out of extreme adolescent poverty (for the U.S.) brought on by my mother's cancer diagnosis pre-ACA to become a top 1% earner in my cohort.
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
If repairing auto at shop costs $1000 one should op out to spend $300 in parts and own labor.....
Paying for the wrong utility makes you remain poor as the down car repair has a very low utility to you earning that higher wage while the shop repairs your car.
It would only make high value utility sense if you did that several times and then open your own car repair shop as business owner.
Warren Buffet implies this obliquely in his writing about the choices he has made.
That only makes sense if you have the opportunity to make more money than you'd be paying the mechanic with the time you spent fixing the car. I'd venture to say that's true less often than not. Even if you day job makes more per hour than you're saving by repairing the car, it doesn't necessarily mean you can just choose to book more hours on the job. To make it more concrete, let's use the given example. Let's say the repair is $300 in parts, and $700 in labor. Let's call the shop rate $100/hour, to be conservative. So in order for it to make sense for me financially, I have to a) have a job that makes at least $100/hour and b) have the choice to work an extra 7 hours.
As a child, I went from firmly middle-class (dad was a firefighter in San Diego, CA) to pretty damn poor (we moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska). I joined the U.S. Navy, and got a B.S. while I was in, then an M.S. in SWE afterwards on the government’s dime thanks to the GI Bill. I did the latter while working nights. I now make more money than I ever thought would be possible.
I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.
If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.
I grew up lower middle class because for most of my life my parents both had full-time jobs. (By the definition, you are not "poor" in the US if you have a full-time job) However, we grew up what I would call educationally poor. My parents struggled with financial woes constantly. In my mind, we were broke due to their ineptness but they were poor as far as this writer is concerned. That said, I grew up around much more poverty than most in the US can imagine. I went to (public) school four days a week because the local district couldn't afford the fifth day. My parents had no thoughts about college or me getting ahead. There was no planning for my future. I had to entirely self-drive everything. There's obviously a lot more dark parts of this that come with being educationally poor as well but no need to elaborate.
Anyway, my point about all that is that I think it's really a mindset more than anything else. I don't think everyone can do what I did but I came from such a bad background with no hope at all and I still managed to be early eng for an IPO, FAANG, competitive university, etc.
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.
You, presumably, worked extremely hard at things you thought would help you long term. You also, presumably, got lucky at some points. One does not diminish the other.
And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
> And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
Yes. I'm very far left. Landlords going under the guillotine wouldn't be a bad thing in my book.
> I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.
In some woke circles, a lot will say it's impossible. Also, I don't know anyone who has managed something similar as to what I've done, especially from where I grew up or similar. I hear of random stories online but random stories online come with a lot of missing details.
It's even more annoying when you consider that most proposals that gain any type of traction can't even ever approach the "I have everything now so I'm not going to work because I'm so lazy"-type abundance that the fear-mongers try to sell you. If we just were able to use some of all this wealth to create an absolute baseline of "enough money to not starve, have any kind of roof over your head and not be trapped in your current situation", I wonder what society could've looked like.
Never thought about this difference before. It has given me a lot of new ground to explore. Thanks for the effort.
Found the post to be Shockingly true.
"You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever. "
In India there is a concept of "Langar" at Sikh temples where you get free hygienic vegeterian food.
The weather is also a lot forgiving ( as of this year you will not die of cold or a heatstroke in summers - but this situation is changing with extremes weathers due to climate change)
I do not have a solution .. but am looking on this problem of poverty due to job losses since a long time.
If you know of some good pointers to look at pls share.
The article resonated but I disagree with his terminology. To me, broke and poor are exactly the same thing. He can define them differently if he wants, of course, but what he calls "broke" I would call "feeling poor" and what he calls "poor" I would call "being poor".
I grew up in circumstances that were very much "broke"/"feeling poor" and it took a long time to learn that we really weren't poor. Some of the simple actions that are mis-directed towards the truly poor (second job, DIY car/home maintenance, better financial planning) would have elevated our circumstances quite a bit. Not to the point of being rich, but definitely to less precarious circumstances. And, selfishly, I would likely not have spent my childhood feeling like an impoverished outcast from my peers.
I have trouble understanding how someone really can be poor.
I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough.
If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary.
This is possible because we live in an era of abundance. This wasn't possible for most of history.
So to me, being poor, for those without major health issues and with the ability to work full time, is either a skills issue, or a mindset issue.
This guy has a car. I don't think we need to look further than that.
I live in Canada. Minimum wage is 16$/hr where I live, that gives around 32k$/yr. At 3200$/yr 10% might be stretch, but I could probably make it work without relying too much on social services. It wouldn't be comfortable, but I would survive.
For example working in a place where I can get some free food, 500$ for food is manageable. 2400$ rent/services (e.g. rural areas with roommates) and 300$ misc. Always walk for transportation. Yes, it's a stretch.
Exactly. There are many ways to make things work even if you’re earning very little. People don’t think about giving up the nice things they feel they’re entitled to. But you have to be willing to change where you live, what kind of food you eat, who you share a roof with, what you drive (if at all), and all of that. If you haven’t done those things, you can’t claim you’re poor in my opinion, because you haven’t made the life changes you could make to make ends meet.
Telling poor people we're living in an era of abundance is not a little bit tone deaf. Also, having a car doesn't make one not poor— A car in America is not a luxury, it's a requirement to have a job in most places.
I'm "low-rich" (middle class?) poor eg. I have a six-fig job but I also have almost six-fig of debt, so I have after paying all my bills (mostly debt) almost nothing left. But I have an apt/cool cheap car, toys like 2nd hand computers/cameras. I've been in debt for the last 15 years since I went into college. I don't eat canned food often actually trying to fast as it's hard to not gain weight when I spend most of my time sitting in a chair in front of a computer. I do recreational drinking so it's not like I'm absolutely poor.
To me it's still insane that education (the implied reason for your debt? correct me if I'm wrong) is so absurdly expensive in the US. Mind you, I'm saying that from another country where education isn't free, but most people will never be able to have anything remotely approaching six figure debt. You presumably work in a professional field, judging by your salary, yet you have an enormous anchor that's been dragging behind you for all your life. In some ways, the high-lower-class person that has a poor salary but isn't indebted might have it better than you.
I wonder how much society would change if that system of student loans was reformed to offload the burden from young people, how much more growth there could be if these people weren't stuck in debt.
My student loans weren't as bad $30K, the rest is from other things eg. CC debt/car loan (28% APR). I also help out my own blood-related family eg. I have given away over $100K over the course of a few years.
But mostly I'm dumb, buying things I can't afford. The six-fig jobs come and go also but in general I've had at least $75-$83K jobs aside from the couple six-fig jobs I've had. I only started to have that kind of money in 2019 to now. I spent 2023 working in a warehouse/my own fault that time I went down to the $50K range or so with side gig work added in to warehouse work.
I did pay $3K for an MRI one time, well not yet it's on a defaulted card.
Oh and loneliness eg. I spent $1.2K at a strip club one time.
It's crazy how you go up in levels though like in 2016 I was living on $20K+ a year, now it's $100K+ a year
That is the way it should be. Well more or less, you didn't state what your debt is from, some are better than others. College debt can be a good investment long term (depends on the degree). Buying a house is a good long term investment if you live there for a long time.
You should save for retirement and a "rainy day". However remember you can't take it with you. If you have the above savings, an extra penny, and something to spend a penny on spend it. You can't take it with you, so you should be at 0 at the end of every month (again ignoring retirement and rainy day savings)
In the book "Starling House", being poor is defined as: you make a list for what you need, another for what you want, and then you throw away the second list.
The author of this post goes even further than that: He says to make a list of only what you need, and then flounder while you fail to acquire the items on that list.
This is kind of a good way to understand that people who never really struggled in life aren't able to understand, step into struggling's person's shoes. It's simply an unknown concept for them. Everyone's values, perspective, actions are dictated by the past experience. I made my way from a poor country to a western-European wealthy one. And the question that amuses me is "So, how do you like here?". I fucking LOVE it here. People don't even understand that I can compare these nice streets to an absolute shithole. And they either have never lived abroad or just been to some neighboring countries. And they talk about food, views, sea, whatever. Oh man, they don't understand that just going outside is already a nice experience for me. Going to a doctor, using public transport, taking my kid to a nice school. Ha! I just tell them that yeah, it's nice, I like it. But there's a huge gap between our concepts of nice places.
Think growing up middle class is possibly a sort of sweet spot on this, especially combined with a slight jump up the ladder as one ages. Not burdened by the mental challenges described here but also not so disconnected from reality for "let them eat cake" syndrome of the really rich
While I get it, I disagree with some of the premise... especially the idea of working two jobs. My dad has worked multiple jobs at a time when I was growing up... I've worked multiple jobs at a time as recently as this year. Now, I'm getting old (50yo) and really couldn't handle it as well as I could in my 20s, but I still did it.
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
Lots of low skill jobs have constantly shifting schedules given at the last possible minute (day by day sometimes) that don’t necessarily allow the time luxury of juggling multiple jobs. Fast food is a great example.
Not sure about that even.. in my late teens I worked fast food and as a clerical temp worker (I could type fast) for data entry/processing. The fast food job didn't have an issue scheduling me just in the evenings/weekends.
A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
>in my late teens I worked fast food and as a clerical temp worker
Yes and the world you experienced decades ago doesn't exist anymore.
>a clerical temp worker (I could type fast) for data entry/processing
Rarely available as a job anymore in the US. People in other countries can do it for cheaper, or local people who are so thoroughly disabled that it's legal to pay them almost nothing just to give them something to do as the government pays them to survive.
"Just walk in with a firm handshake" hasn't been a thing in forever.
>A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
No they wont, because they can just tell you to deal with it or find someone else.
If you aren't willing to take exactly the hours they give you, exactly the shifts they give you, or figure out how to cover those shifts yourself, they'll just stop giving you hours and pay someone else.
Even if you have a friendly manager, corporate will fire him if he isn't pushing you hard enough. First level "managers" don't even get to manage anymore, they just follow whatever policy or some algorithms tell them they have to do.
I know the above may not be a popular opinion... maybe it comes from me being older than a lot of people here (50yo) and having grandparents that lived through the Great Depression. I just don't see the point in being defeatist.
The first mention I've seen of The Great Depression.
I guess most folks are too young to have had direct contact with people who lived through it.
It caused decades of collective trauma. Almost the entire nation became devastatingly poor, overnight. Many folks that lived through it became compulsive hoarders.
My great grandparents and grandparents weren't hoarders... But they were careful not to be wasreful. They would never have bought into Rubbermaid containers when there's margarine or cool whip containers that can be cleaned and reused.
Another point the author doesn't make but probably should is the home economics of DIY: A solo person gets 24h a day, just like everybody else. Ideally 8 are spent asleep. Another 8 (minimum) are probably spent working. That leaves a person 8 hours to do their whole life. It eats away at personal time, it bleeds into work and sleep, often by interrupting or occluding the ability to do either.
Well written. Straight to the point. When poor is a rat race and no room for risk. Any mistake and you're done. Even if you see opportunity you can't afford to try. And hopelessness.
The author complains about the cost of fixing their car. I come from a country where vehicle ownership puts you in the top 20% in terms of wealth. A motorbike is often the farthest most get.
I can appreciate the totally different perspective that must bring. I would also add that living in a car-centered society where you are expected to have a car presents its own set of challenges, namely that you can't afford to live near food sources (grocery stores, etc.) or jobs because it's expected that people drive to those things. For people in those situations struggling to make ends meet, I think they view their car more as a required liability they struggle to maintain rather than a privilege.
95% of American commuters get to work in a personal vehicle.
The distance Americans drive is very high. Driving 30 minutes to work might mean traveling ~45km because the infrastructure is heavily reliant on highways. The average daily travel is about 65km.
Many motorbikes aren’t legal or fast enough for the interstate.
America is just built in a way intended car infrastructure. The poorest in America have above average access to cars compared to the rest of the world as a whole, but that doesn’t make them wealthy.
Owning an operating a car in the US is more affordable than many other countries, and things like gas prices, the car industry itself, and road maintenance are heavily subsidized/supported by the government.
The US basically chose personal vehicles as the primary way to get around and structured society around it, with only a small amount of exceptions.
A functioning car in the US is not really much more money than a motorbike, especially because it’s far more common and popular. Motorbikes are more like a niche product.
It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
What stopped the baltimore kid from getting any valuable/marketable skills? Why did he drop school? In the end, it's a sum of all their little personal decisions. Sure, family and environment play their important role, but it's still personal fault.
with respect to food i wanted to ask HN here, what if a bunch of people came together. Let us say 10000 americans who are poor decide to pool in money and import groceries from a country with much cheaper prices (say India) would this cost less after shipping? What if there was a startup that groups people like this in a bunch and does weekly shipping of groceries from a low cost country? Would that help?
I feel like the author tells us that being poor means worrying about problems you can’t fix all the time? Or at least, that you believe you can never fix them?
If you don’t have the $300 for the own part repair on your truck, there’s no point in worrying about it. If you truck breaks it breaks, it’s never going to recover unless you think of something else. Complaining that you don’t have $300 for even the home repair doesn’t do anything to improve the situation. Better figure out a way to live if the truck breaks.
You don’t get to work if your car or truck breaks. Now knowing that, what are your best options if it does?
You can spend time finding solutions, or spend time worrying, or writing blog posts saying that people don’t know what it’s like to be poor. I do plenty of spiraling myself, but I try to recognize that it’s not very productive.
Worrying or complaining about the fact that you won’t have any food tomorrow is not going to fill your belly.
I don’t think the blog post is written by an author thar is currently poor and is therefore wasting their precious time writing blog posts instead of figuring out their life.
I think the point it’s trying to convey is that people too often blame the poor without stepping in their shoes.
If you think that conversation isn’t “very productive” I’m not sure what planet you’re living on. Certainly not the same planet where the world’s richest country is trying to cut food assistance, add work requirements to social safety net programs, refuse to make even the most basic healthcare services universal, cut the basic healthcare services that it does provide the poorest, and generally has a cultural zeitgeist actively hostile to people in poverty.
You say that the poor person whose car broke down should just magically stop worrying and do something productive like find a solution, but don’t you think that having to do that constantly sounds a bit exhausting?
As someone who is not poor you have no need to train your brain to ignore survival alarms like that. If your car breaks down you have ample options, just throw your uber ride on a credit card, take your car to the fancy dealership that will give you a courtesy car, own a second or third car, or own a nice new car that will never strand you in the first place.
Your belly never feels hunger for too long, your body never feels excessive cold or heat, you don’t feel the pain of untreated preventable health conditions, you don’t feel your body aching from working multiple physical jobs, you don’t feel the adrenaline rush of being mugged or hearing bullets fly in your neighborhood, the police don’t work with a heavy hand because of where you live and they don’t harass you for how you look, you don’t breathe the pollution and don’t hear the noise that disproportionately impacts lower income neighborhoods, [1] you don’t have the government coming to move you and take your house because it’s cheap and convenient to do so. [2]
Those are actual physical survival feelings that you’re just telling the poor to stop worrying about.
[1] Interstate highways don’t tend to cut through/demolish established wealthy neighborhoods.
[2] Here’s a random example: the LA Dodgers stadium was built on the site of a working class neighborhood where the residents were kicked out in a fiasco that can only be described as an abuse of eminent domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chavez_Ravine
No, I said to stop worrying about stuff you can’t fix. That’s easier said than done, but entirely wealth independent. It’s like worrying about impending death when you are a 90 year old billionaire.
Imagine you can get 20 rolls of toilet paper at Costco for $20. Or one roll at your corner store for $5.
However, you need a car to get to Costco, which you don't have, so now you're looking at riding the bus there. But you just worked two back-to-back 8 hour shits, and you're a zombie so that's not happening. Besides, $20 is a stretch, you really might need that $15 to cover a few meals until your next paycheck if you can't get enough hours this month.
So, you have to pay $5 for what should be a $1 roll of TP.
Now imagine that for everything - food, rent, everything.
To quote a song, "having money is not everything, not having it is"
The geographic variation on the semantics of poverty always amaze me.
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
That is a great point and probably the most valuable take out of this discussion.
We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
On Reddit, I once saw someone saying something like “You never hear about the Chinese having to live out of their cars.” with respect to a pro-communist take. Forgetting the politics, it really brought home to me how mind-blowingly wealthy Americans are. The poor man this guy conceives of has a motor vehicle.
> Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?
This part gets me. I once saw someone on Twitter who was like "I was poor, I worked a bazillion hours a week and never saw my wife and kids, just so I could put food on the table! If I could do it, anyone can!"
And one response was just like, "if you need to do that just to make ends meet, the system is obviously broken. If I'm gonna work that hard, there better be a private jet at the end of that road"
Yeah, just because one CAN kill themselves for capitalism, doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to.
One way to imagine being poor: imagine lots of slow leaks. Your bank account leaks, your car's engine leaks, your mental health leaks. Everything is slowly getting worse, and you know it. Every time you try to fix one leak, the other leaks start leaking more.
You might think, hooray, I fixed the engine leak! And then suddenly your wife is leaving you and taking the kids. So you rush to court to deal with that, and park in the wrong place, and your car gets impounded; getting it out costs money you don't have. In trying to deal with all that, your mental health suffers, so you're rude at work, and now your job is at risk. So then you work on being more positive at work, you finally get dual custody of the kids, and pay for the car to be returned... and then the transmission dies.
I feel like the target audience is this is people who have zero sympathy for the poor, but the thing is that's generally not an opinion they reasoned themselves into. They don't want to spend the money helping anybody so they rationalize that a decide nobody deserves help. So don't expect any minds to change based on facts and logic.
(For the record I give no money to charity because I'm completely selfish; I make no assumptions about the people I don't help)
I worked at a media company that used to track time the users spent watching TV, so they could charge advertisers accordingly. "Hundred million watched the Super Bowl", things like that.
The way they measured that was by having devices installed on peoples homes, that tracked TV usage, and all of it was planned around demographics as well. People would get a few bucks for having the device installed. But hey, if you wanted to measure the top 1% of income, what would you do? A few bucks meanth nothing, so it was always in terms of 'favors' and 'gifts'. A nice champagne here and there.
What about the bottom 5, 10%? Well, you can't give them any money, because that could effectively move them from one social class to another (not the US, but locally this would be moving them from Class E to Class D). So you took them to lunch.
This Dickensian pastiche ignores the difference between being "poor" and being part of a client population, which covers a substantial part of the same nominal income bracket.
I’ve ridden the spectrum, as it were. I grew up upper middle class, with a sprawling McMansion, a car for each sibling, a country club membership, the works. I’ve been broke, squandering money and racking up debt, but finding enough escape hatches to avoid irreparable harm. I’ve been homeless, getting by through the good graces of friends and family until I got back on my feet through the help of a good friend and wildly risky move to a place I’d never been, sight unseen. I’ve spent years being poor in a food desert, stretching pizza deliveries across a week of meals because the nearest store was a ten mile walk down an interstate highway. And now, through luck, work, and the help of friends (but mostly luck, statistically speaking), I’m eking out a good life in a good apartment with extortionate rent and a toxic job.
This author lays out the experience of being “poor” perfectly. It’s a case of doing all the right things, and still failing. It’s being constantly stuck in survival mode no matter how hard you work, because there’s always a new expense, a new hurdle, a new obstacle to reset your progress - because being poor means you can’t even afford the “save point” of insurance or redundancies or savings to fall back on.
It’s why even when I was scraping above the $200k mark at PriorCo in TC, I was championing more social services. More healthcare support, more housing assistance, more compensation. We could afford it, but shareholder returns came first. It was sickening knowing colleagues who lived in vans because despite pulling down six figure salaries, it simply wasn’t enough for rent when expenses continued to pile up for injuries or illnesses.
Those of means and privilege simply do not grasp how hard it is to exist in America without large sums of cash behind you. I was struggling on less when rent was still considered reasonable, in one of the cheapest states to live in. In the fifteen-odd years since, it’s just gotten exponentially worse, even as the stock market has exploded in value.
It’s why I never stop arguing for better, because I know how bad it can get.
> "What happened to society? I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision. That came from my education".
Conservatives have three explanations for why people are poor:
1) they are all stupid and lazy because they have absorbed liberal values
2) they are smart enough to get ahead but can't because liberal governmental policies have ruined the economy.
3) they are mentally inferior due to belonging to the wrong race.
Particularly the numerous variations of 2 have found widespread success when explaining to the poor the reasons for why they are poor:
2.a) the foreigners / jews / muslims invading and pillaging our glorious, Christian home country are stealing their jobs
2.b) the socialists / communists / antifa bureaucrats are stealing their wages
This can be tailored and highly specific towards the target audience (e.g., Facebook Ads, Twitter Bots, in a small town with abandoned industry), alternatively keeping it broad and widely accessible (for Podcasts, banners, or national TV). What really matters for explaining this with impact though is the tone. It is imperative to be loud and angry, ideally you are yelling at your audience. Repeat yourself often and use the most limited vocabulary possible. You need to empathize with the anger of the poor for the clear and obvious injustice that has happened to them. Leaning into that emotion will make anyone happily abandon any remains of rationality and critical thinking, which they have experienced as being completely futile in advancing their own quality of life, or improving their family's living situation. Which is of course the reason why Conservatives would like to have as many poor people as possible amongst their constituencies, and are fighting hard to actively push more people into poverty. They know those people will be their most faithful voters.
Im not rich, but i get by, and can say i live a decent life (in terms of what i can get "with fiat"). Im from a totally normal middle class-ish family. I always worked (since like 14-15) and got my own savings started when i was young.
I really cant think of why you could not get out of beeing poor, IF you have the wits and willpower. If you grind some shithole job for 6 bucks/hour you should think really hard on your choices. Where did you spend your check? Do you live in a too expensive appartment? Did you have kids without being absolutely fucking sure you can support them? Did you fuck up something like foolish debts? Do you drive a car when you can take the bus?
Im not really sure what to say, but i know what I would do if things webt south.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but considering how imperfect humans are, it’s easy to make a mistake or two (or to basically inherit mistakes from parents, in many cases), and I think one of the problems is, it’s very, very difficult to claw your way back after that. It would be ideal if a small screw-up could be more feasibly repaired, but tbh I don’t know a fair and good way to do that that didn’t generate dependence and a bailout cycle.
"Im from a totally normal middle class-ish family."
Maybe that's why you can't comprehend the idea of being poor in a fashion that doesn't let you escape, even working as hard as you possibly can and making all the right choices.
I have seen kids from poor families make it. Many have been highly successful in life, even we should not measure it by pay-check.
It usually boils down to alcohol/drugs, idiotic credit card debts and/or living way beyond your actual capability to sustain that lifestyle, and having zero savings, and possibly having children way too young.
Sorry, but poverty is also a spectrum. Many people who have never been poor cannot understand that, but even if you have been poor, you still cannot fully understand someone else’s poverty.
The point of disagreement here seems to be about poverty itself. The author (and many in these comments) seem aghast at the very idea of poverty: how can this state be allowed to exist?!
The truth is that humanity’s default state is one of “poverty”. It should evoke no surprise or confusion whatsoever, and yet it does.
Poverty is an entirely valid and normal state for a person to be in. There isn’t a vast shadowy conspiracy trying to keep you down; you’re just at the default state of humanity.
Humans improving their situation, now THAT is surprising and interesting, and it’s the thing we should be focusing our curiosity on. If you’re poor, emulate those who aren’t. Maybe they’re onto something.
The alternative is to blame the vast shadowy conspiracy, “capitalism”, etc, and remain poor. That’s an entirely valid mode of being. Nobody owes you anything.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
Whose goal? Seriously. My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
>This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
Did you read the article? The vein here is that liberalism, the official ideology of capital, is what is used to engage with analyzing other peoples lives. They use the tennets of liberalism to judge what others make of themselves. They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all. People who thrive or support the status quo idealize the material conditions in the world. That reasoning gets passed onto the poor. It is essentially an ideology of the rich.
> My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
Classical liberalism understands the word "equality" to mean something different from what you think it means.
> Did you read the article?
I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant. You're saying that classical liberalism says things that it does not say. The article is also not about classical liberalism.
> They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all.
None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
Wait, I'm talking about liberalism and classical/social liberalism as extensions of that. Im referring to the overarching philosophy and parts of its derivatives.
>I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant.
You didnt read it. I said that the group of ideas that are talked about in the article belong to liberalism, the philosophy. That they are derived from philosophical liberalism, the overarching philosophy of capitalist countries.
> None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
I am specifically saying that these ideals cannot be attained. The philosophy is in negation of itself. That they are unworkable and cannot be practiced while there are classes within society. Moreso that they are how the rich defend their own rule, knowing that they are unworkable ideals. Its a philosophy analogous to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
Pfffff, you're basically saying "you're not saying anything relevant", but never actually contributing anything to the conversation.
Alright lets do an exercise...
Please look at any of the widely accepted tenets of liberalism. Okay? Got em? Keep them in mind for this next part...
Now I will distill my argument into one sentence for you:
I claim this article is a critique of the widespread notion that it is possible to figuratively "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", I claim that this notion is founded on the assumption that liberalism has attained its goals or that it is in progress of that.
And I promise you that if you put an ounce of effort you can see what I'm saying. In fact I'll help you more.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstrap" people are either in a financially stable position or support the status quo. They use this phrase to signify that, through a liberal lens of liberty, you are wholly responsible for your condition, and not only that, but that you should be capable of such feat BY VIRTUE OF the benefits bestowed upon you by a liberal economy/country. These benefits that they claim ARE the tenets of liberalism, such as: the right to private property, political equality, rule of law, freedom of assembly, economic freedom, etc.
Do you see? This is, fundamentally, a critique of liberalism.
Please don't reply if you don't have anything to contribute.
> It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
IMO good government (i.e. the government that I would want to live under) treats all citizens equally under the law, not because everyone is equally lucky or everyone who is poor is a terrible person or something but because it's not the government's business to do anything but enforce the law. Good government is not a caretaker and is not a bank. Communities should look after their needy members and give them a lift up, not the government. If our communities aren't tightly knit enough for that, then that's a different and IMO deeper problem.
The problem isn't that there is equality in the eyes of the law. The problem is what that means in practice.
A poor citizen has the right to use their money as they see fit. <spoiler>A poor citizen has the right to:
lobby, to fund think tanks, to advertise their interests, to sway research through funding, to fund the careers of politicians, to gift resources to local police departments, to fund ballot initiatives and referendums, to acquire media outlets, to fund documentary films, to buy bots online, to fund lawsuits against the corporations, to host fundraisers with high net-worth individuals.</spoiler>
How many poor people are able to do this? Very very very tiny amounts. These rights are nearly exclusively actionable by a certain class of people.
And you may argue about the philosophical implications of 'equality of opportunity' vs 'equality of outcome'. But the thing is this so called "neutral legal framework" leads to a monopoly of power by the rich, because the law pretends both of these kinds of people are the same.
The very framework is in negation of itself because it leads power in the hands of a few.
That is the true problem of this framework. And to suggest that the alternative must be "equality of outcome" is a false dichotomy. The "neutrality of the government" is more like "a broken clock is right twice a day" kind of thing.
The founding fathers were already aware of this, in fact I think they made the state in their own interests seeing as during the founding of the US the vast majority of Americans at the time were illiterate farmers/workers and/or slaves. In a very real sense the state was made for the rich by the rich, but with lingo that pretended it was for everyone.
This is why class politics is the most important aspect of politics in our lives. We live in class society where there are fundamental differences between classes of people. This difference is not strictly and categorically based on the amount of money they have, but on HOW they fund their lives which allows them to have extra rights. Effectively we can't afford all the rights. This is the classic "All animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others".
OK, one of my clients is a payday lender in a wealthy country. I have the complete banking histories of 10s of thousands of low income people in front of me.
I insist that the distinguishment proposed in the article is BS.
There is a small subset of clients with disabilities AND absense of insurance/government pensions, whose situation is permanent for all intents and purposes. But everyone else, one-off clients as well as regulars have ups and downs, and get through defaults or manage to repay their debt at times.
Gambling and alcohol are a clear factor (drug abuse is harder to identify on someone's bank statement), but cases such as divorce from a partner with abuse problems bring relief most of the time. Children grow up or grow older and require less work or even generate income of their own.
I know it's different, when you live in a low income country and everyone around is poor and scamming people on the internet or marine piracy are the only possible access options to wealth, but that's a different topic.
another thing the op doesn't mention is a pro-risk attitude,
when you are poor it is rational to take risks, or even seek them out, because there is very little to loose...
Half of the poor voted for Trump who has been doing everything in his power to make them poorer. Speaking of the people as a whole, you get what you vote for.
I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.
In the terminology of the article - which I enjoyed and recommend that you read when you get time - these friends of yours are not 'poor', they are 'broke'.
article says broke for temporary, these people poor 10-20 years. that doesnt sounds like temporary. they get government or familiy support, and rarely work short term here and there.
I see this all the time in developed countries. The “poor” in a place like America are different from the poor elsewhere. Often times, the poor in America are just people making bad decisions, living beyond their means. You see it in the places they choose to live in, the cars they own, the number of children they have, etc.
All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).
"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.
Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.
You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.
> Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help.
It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.
On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.
Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder.
Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.
I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
I grew up in an ultra rural part of Pennsylvania. I honestly thought my life was pretty good, and I had great parents and a great school with teachers who cared. My parents were(/are) great, but I later found out my school was ranked D- in the state. I think my parents didn't have huge earnings potential, but were really good at saving. So, my thoughts come directly from my life. A grade school friend of mine came home one day and told his parents that his little sister lost her retainer at school, and his parents were wailing and moaning for literally days over the $150 replacement. Meanwhile, my little brother did the same exact thing a few months earlier and my parents were able to deal with the issue, even though my mom and dad worked the exact same jobs as my friends parents.
My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.
> You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
Very true but I also think that being poor is a mindset to change. I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor. We knew, they knew, that at anytime they could turn it around, and they did. They wanted to do things that were not the norm so they chose not to follow society's norms so they lacked money and they lived day to day. Once they changed their mind set they were able to work their way to an American middle class. It was not easy but they did it. They had little money but they were never poor.
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
I can give you an example. Single divorced mother with two kids. Working in social care for minimal wage, often earning lower amounts than the people she cares for.
There are no savings, no relatives to help. Job change is an uncertainty that could introduce homelessness for the whole family if it doesn't work out. Not many options there. Now if you move this scenario out of rich countries it will get even worse
My mental poster child for "poor" is exactly this person. She had three kids (all in public school), lived in section 8 and worked part-time bagging groceries. The kids had nothing nice, clothes were all hand-me-down or donations with holes in them from being so old. No car, no health care, horrible dentistry to the point of becoming an emergency.
They had a bigger TV than my middle class family, a premium channel package, and ordered pizza not infrequently. I get all the arguments, but when you're working 20 hours a week and living off food stamps and subsidized housing you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor. The person described in TFA as being poor is rare at best.
> you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor.
Some people might be inclined to try to drag you for the first half of that statement, and honestly I'm inclined to try to not judge poor people for what I usually assume is one or two small splurges that raise their moods just high enough to not slit their wrists, you know?
But I think the second half of the sentence is kinda fair. IF they are self-aware that they are choosing to divert money from more important things, it's their life and I don't really want to pass judgment. If they whine constantly that "the system" is keeping them down while continuously making "unforced" errors with their money, that's when it makes me start to roll my eyes.
I don't think I would criticize those decisions for someone working 40+ hours a week either, even if they are on assistance programs. I think it's foolish but you kind of get to make foolish decisions to a degree when you're putting in the effort. It was the combination of all of the factors.
> I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor.
I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.
For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".
Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.
The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.
You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
It’s like a bunch of apes took over our society and worked as hard as possible to make everything as cruel as possible for no particular reason.
Hah!
Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.
Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.
We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
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you can convince people to give up anything as long as it's in service of punishing "the bad ones"
Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
I was chatting with a buddy about this. Older, libertarian fellow. He was in this situation, several times. And he was able to pull himself out of it.
That was all the "proof" he needed to be against helping the poor, because if he could do it, anyone could do it.
HN folks ought to watch Good Fortune ft. Keanu Reeves [0]. Still out in theaters.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ
It looks like a good movie and in looking forward to its arrival on streaming but I'm curious the relevance of it to parent comment.
Curiosity denied; it would spoil the plot!
Not even on my radar. Thanks looks like a good time
Thanks for the reco
I don’t make it a habit to curse out loud at my phone as I read things, but this did it for me.
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I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds.
> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effort and sell it below market price.
> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
They probably needed it. You try doing food deliveries without a vehicle. Now their job's gone.
> it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
Well obviously. Being poor is excruciating; nobody would choose to be poor. The ones who are capable of helping themselves do—in fact, they help themselves when they're broke, and they never become truly poor in the first place (per the article's definitions).
The point is that, before the bike was collected and put up for auction, the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts. Then, once the bike was put up for auction, buyers could have bid on it if it was really worth more.
Multiple people in this story had a financial incentive to profit from the bike, yet no one did. The only evidence we have of the bike's value is OP's claim. Does it not seem more likely that OP is simply wrong about the bike's value?
> the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts
…so clearly the bike was worth more to them than its cash value.
Again: They probably needed that bike for work. Losing their job will easily cost them more than $400.
> yet no one did.
The bailiff did, and the buyer did, and they were the only parties with agency in the situation. Doesn't surprise me.
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Dude, some skeezy used car salesman type bought the bike and made a 350 pound profit.
Literally no one involved cared about getting the best price except the bottom-feeders attending the auction.
> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
You know that isn't true. Auctions are noisy and poorly conducted auctions are worse. This is about some combination of sadism and negligence.
Oh hohoho but that would imply that the auction is inefficient and so surely rational actors would descend upon these auctions thereby converging this discount onto the true fair value of things.
Heaven forbid we admit that markets are not comprised of spherical chickens and that disconnects exist...
Again, the debtor could have sold the bike themselves and they didn't. Bidders could have recognized the bike's value but they didn't. This is a story about OP overvaluing a bike and nothing else.
I get your point but there are more factors at play here that you might not be aware of.
The debt in question was council tax, every household in the UK pays this at a monthly rate, something like £140 a month. But what most people don't know is that these monthly payments are technically a "gesture of goodwill" from the council, and if you are late for a payment they will really quickly take it to court and send bailiffs for the full yearly amount so you're looking at £1500 plus court fees plus bailiff fees for attending immediately. Easily £2000 from missing £150.
Next another little known fact - if you don't let the bailiffs in, they can't take anything. They can come back with the police if you let them in once. However they can levy on things that are outside, like a vehicle.
So that's what happened here, and once they levy on the vehicle you are not legally allowed to sell it if you sign the levy.
So the debtor in all likelihood ended up in this situation very quickly and could not sell the motorbike himself once the bailiff visited. As for the over valuation, I give you that but only in a very specific scenario - for the market where they sold it.
Now as for why they sold it so cheap, why would they care? They only care about their fees. It they can visit three times by only pretending to knock on the door and charge three times, they will. When it came to this motorbike, they got paid the fees for selling it, the auctioneer got their fee, and nobody involved had motivation to market it. We're not talking ebay or well marketed property auctions here.
In fact, the bailiff now gets to go back to tell them the debt isn't cleared and charge them for this visit as well.
That sounds absolutely draconian and horrible. But the issue doesn’t seem to be the debt collection. Rather, the issue seems to be a total lack of due process.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
The point isn’t that you’re incapable of helping yourself, it is disproportionately harder to help yourself when you’re poor.
If you don't have a vehicle you can't do anything, if this person was anywhere other than a large east coast city losing your vehicle is death. Have you ever tried to go somewhere in the south without a car? Pick two points even a couple miles away from each other around Kansas City, Kansas and genuinely think about how you would physically do it. You can't go anywhere so you can't work so you can't pay rent, you can't do anything. What is even the point of not going to prison except the fact you would have to stay in jail for a few months and you might be literally devoured by bedbugs?
This story clearly occurs in the UK.
The UK suffers from car dependence pretty much everywhere outside of London.
It’s very far from its european cousins in this regard.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
You just argued the bike wouldn’t have been sufficient to pay the debt. How would the owner have helped himself by selling it?
OP's central claim was that the bike should have been able to cover the debt, but, due to systemic malice on the bailiff's part, the bike only covered small fraction of the debt. My point is that OP is simply over-valuing the bike. If you change OP's story to: the bailiff got a decent price for the bike and took a small fee for the service, it becomes a lot less outrageous.
The OP wrote that:
> [The bike] was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt.
If this claim is true, then I think most people will still find this conduct outrageous: How is it in the public interest for the baliff to take actions that harm both the debtor (by taking the personally valuable bike) and the public (by wasting from $15 to $50 of the public's money) to the benefit of only the baliff ($35) and auctioneer ($15)?
Those fees don’t seem unreasonably high to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bailiff was operating at a loss given the time it takes to take possession and bring the goods to auction.
It’s in the public’s interest to have mechanisms to quickly process insolvency in a way that attempts to fairly value property. Auctions solve that. If debtors don’t like the outcome, then they should sell the good themselves before it comes to that. Having others sell your property for you is always going to incur an additional cost.
The point is that, regardless of whether the bailiff’s and auctioneer’s fees are eminently reasonable, it will always result in net-negative benefit to society (excepting the bailiff and auctioneer) whenever the bailiff confiscates property whose auction proceeds are less than the sum of those fees. It is therefore contrary to the public interest for the bailiff to confiscate property unless it can reasonably be expected to substantially clear those fees when auctioned.
> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
Because (it seems from OP story) that the court blatantly stole it from them, so they never had a chance.
1. The debtor probably need the motorbike, badly. He probably should have sold it to cover the debt but didn't think of that as an option. Not the smartest choice but again, he's there probably because of another set of similar choices.
2. The parent seems from the UK and I am not sure how things work there. But many auctions are "closed off" in shady ways. In one of the countries I (and some friends) have contemplated going, gangs with knives were putting people off. The gov. employees involved knew about it and do nothing.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
3. Many of the times, they are not exactly bad or lazy people but they might not have made the optimal choices. They should, probably, be penalized for it; but not by completely wrecking their life and sodomizing them for a good many years. Also back to 2, and the parent you are replying to, many times the system is designed to over-screw them in the process.
This is one of the more patronising comments I've ever read on HN, which is saying something.
Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.
A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.
Money psychology is interesting in that people often end up being traumatized by their parents into behaving identically when the circumstances no longer warrant it, OR have a knee-jerk reaction living their life completely the opposite way because growing up that way drove them insane.
A similar thing happens with children of parents who came out of war zones or famines. Sometimes the children are explicitly taught that violence or starvation can come at any moment. Often they learn to feel under threat implicitly by picking up their parents’ affect, without any message or lesson being clearly stated.
I wonder how much of this is "I'm saving it for a rainy day" vs "I was conditioned that eating the last one of a treat leads to conflict".
Yes.
I find myself doing that. I'm not sure if it's just a silly habit I have because I don't like to run out of anything even if it is not important or if I picked it up from my dad who lived through the "great" depression as a child.
Conversely, I had an acquaintance that grew poor, and would finish 95% of the cookies in a bag, but always leave the almost empty bag to the next person to find out, even if it had to stay that way for months.
Strangely, she did that only with comfort foods.
My wife grew up very poor and does the same stuff. And then she’ll get mad at me if I finish the stale cookie from 6 months ago.
Yea this is exactly what I’m describing
The 'blank in the firing squad' technique of snacking is a pretty typical girl thing.
Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable.
But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).
Additional anecdata, and also a woman:
I do this for any or all of the following reasons:
* (culture) it is polite to leave something for the next person
* (I have roommates) I don't want to be the last person who finished something. I would be obliged to replace it.
For the typical girl thing, I haven't seen this behavior in real life with my family members or friends. I have heard of the concept on social media.
I do this, but it's not really about if it's "gross" to eat a whole bag or not. I don't feel like doing that anyway. It's mostly that if you share food, I think it's considerate to leave one if there's more than one left. Someone else might be having a really bad day, but a small consolation could be that they didn't get home to discover there aren't any cookies left.
I do it to avoid being blamed, I don't know what you're on about. I've never cared that much about the semantics of how many cookies I ate (then again, I'm on hacker news so I might not be the best representation of the female populace)
I tend to do the cookie baking, so it'd be a little silly for me to be mad over someone eating them.
And for what it's worth, no one deserves blame for their cookie habits.
Gotta maintain that figure if you ever wanna escape poverty. Reba McEntire wrote a whole song about it.
(joking, but not nearly as much as I wish I was)
I remember watching something on BBC about minimalism years ago when I was doing my PhD and earning £13k a year and thinking that I just couldn’t do it because it relies on you having the money to repurchase something you need that you threw away
Exactly. And there's a complicating related situation that, if you have housing instability, there can also be pressure not to own anything more than you need, in terms of difficulty and cost having to move it or lose it on short notice.
Absolutely. Our disposable society is a privilege for those who can afford it and an absolute curse for those who can't.
Keeping stuff around and refusing to fix things are not necessarily correlated to being poor.
Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income. It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
> they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
Yes they are poor because they make bad decisions. If you are unable to avoid repeatedly making bad purchasing decision, you are poor not just because of unfortunate circumstance but because you are unable to not be poor because of personal limitation (sometimes I may be stupidity, sometimes addictions or other bad behaviors).
My father manages employees that constantly have garnishment on their salaries because of some unpaid debt. Yet they make decent wage and could afford an OK life if they didn't blow most of it on stupid stuff.
So what I mean is that you cannot put all the blame on the "system" and the marketers selling appetising food or whatnot. Those people keep making those choices themselves and outside out of taking their liberty there is not much you can do about it. I actually think the current system affords them a better life than they could otherwise.
What an oblivious statement.
Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.
Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.
All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.
Thanks for the correction.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
I spent years getting over the idea of saving some half broken thing because “I might need a part from that later”
Specially because occasionally the usefulness of such saved junk appeared to prove the thought right, the rest of the unused pile of junk notwithstanding.
And the more skilled and richer and better tooled up you get over time the more potentially useful everything is so the more you feel like you have to save it.
As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.
When I was younger, I've spent an entire summer working here and there, with the explicit goal to buy an 8MB stick of ram, so I can play Quake. Got the biggest ballacking from my dad about "wasting" all that moneis. Since then, storage and memory, the only things I'm actively trying to save.
I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.
Definitely agree on the mentality it creates and how long it lasts. I’m fairly well off now, but grew up very poor. First developing world poor where running water and toilets were shared with the whole building, the whole family crammed into a single room. Then western world poor, where my parents and some friends that lived together (to save money) would walk to get groceries, buy one bus ticket to have one person carry the groceries on the bus most of the way back, and the rest of the group walk to the bus station and help to carry the groceries the rest of the way home.
Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
Something I find interesting is that my mother grew up in similar conditions - poor in Borneo in the 50s, my aunt was literally born in the jungle while hiding from the Japanese
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
I think also perhaps the reasons for being poor. My family was poor but so was everyone else. It was structural. So as a result (my hypothesis), there wasn’t even the hope of being rich, just not so poor. So for instance the mentality was always to save, not invest, because no one has the money to invest could afford to lose whatever meager savings there was.
As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.
Same here.
Its interesting that the same mentalities that get us out of poverty are not the same ones that make people rich.
You could naively assume that competence around money would be universal.
> its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
I think its more about having enough that you don’t spend all your cycles worrying about money; and more importantly that there’s a way to get on some kind of positive reinforcement treadmill whereby effort is rewarded financially.
That makes sense, but I was trying to figure out something else: if there's someone in this situation I want to help, what (at minimum) could I expect to have to do to get them out of that situation?
I think a better way of thinking about it is to be a lifeline instead of monetary amount.
Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.
If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.
Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.
What does "be a lifeline" mean? If it means "rescue them every time they have a financial emergency", is that an infinite commitment?
absent sufficient income, basically yes.
Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?
Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.
We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).
There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.
but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.
Thank you!
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else
I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
> I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile
When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need, instead of hoarding five metric tonnes of crap that you'll never use.
If you haven't used something in the past 5 years, you can almost certainly toss it.
> you can just buy the thing you need
Ah but if only it were so simple. In my woodworking shop, in pretty much every project I end up using odd scraps for either temporary scaffolding or jigs or what have you that would be difficult to buy. You would have to go out of your way to buy a large board, and cut it up intentionally. Even then you would not have as rich a set of scraps. Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
> Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7Fw7bZoPyVU
> When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need
What I need is time. Whereas buying things is stupidly time consuming, running completely counter to what is needed.
I don't have it all. Sometimes I have no choice but to go buy parts when a breakdown occurs, but that's never a welcome experience. You're looking at a good hour or more to source even if it is available locally, and often you have to travel far and wide to find someone who has it in stock. Worse, sometimes the only stock available is on the other side of the world in who knows where, leaving you down for days while you wait for it to show up...
Once someone invents a magical teleporter that can spit out what you need in a split second on demand, then money to spend when you need it becomes more powerful than already having what you need, but we're a long way from seeing that become reality.
It's a lifestyle that snowballs. You can't "just start throwing things away" because your life has grown up around the assumptions of having your brand of junk around.
If people lived like this the vectrex would have fewer units left alive and no one is making new vector displays anymore.
I for one welcome out capitalist induced pack rat disorders for the elderly as it guarantees that vintage and retro survives.
Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture
> a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
it’s not terribly uncommon even in the UK to be generationally unemployable.
Homelife being bad = bad grades
bad grades = no support for further education
no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs
no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).
The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.
I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.
It's amazing how much upward mobility software development has provided to countless people that didn't finish high school or university.
Story of my life.
I work and earn money, my balance has never been above zero. Worded it clumsily maybe.
I don't know if it would be useful to you, but perhaps try reading some of the blog posts on earlyretirementextreme.com. Lots of good ideas there on how to save money, be frugal, etc.
Or read a book like "Your money or your life"
> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care.
You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?
Low salary for the role in my local area and not moving to a city when I still had the ability to take credit out
It sounds to me like you don't need income from labor. I'm not going to cry for you.
He’s indicated in a sibling thread that he’s not looking for sympathy.
He’s trying to help you empathise that in reality these kinds of holes are really difficult to escape from; moreso than you think on first glance. It’s also very easy to fall into them even if you think you’re immune. Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
In light of that, your response is just horrible.
Most people spend insane amounts of money on things they don't need to impress the people they don't like.
Two hypothesis:
1) The nature of interest in unsecured loans is high interest (almost by definition) and increasingly so if you are seen as a credit risk. Thus small debts compound over time making them unbearable for longer.
2) Our friend is merely Keeping up with the Jones’ despite never going above a zero balance.
One of these is uncharitable and ridiculous- the other is a known issue that keeps people in poverty.
I’ll let you figure out which.
I guess I wasn't being clear: I wasn't talking about the person from this thread!
You said:
> Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
My reaction was to this. I agreed with you, and added the cause: utter financial recklessness. People spending money on things they don't need instead of saving say a quarter of their salary.
For some time I was earning a couple times the average salary in my region of the world. Yet I found that spending about the average salary was more than enough to live a very comfortable life. I feel this is not the norm for whatever reason: most people inflate spending to match their income, and then they're 2 bad decisions (or even some bad luck) from poverty.
If it's any consolation that's how finances work for most governments.
No consolation needed - if I come across as woe is me it's not the intention. It is what it is and all that. I've got food, I've got shelter. It'll do.
You're born, you keep your head down, and you die - if you're lucky.
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
I recently got yelled at by a schizophrenic homeless man with serious anger issues that was hungry. And he’s better off than a large percentage of the world. Poor is relational.
[dead]
I like this guy’s backstory[0].
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
[0] https://blog.ctms.me/about/
> I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success).
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution. I would never, personally, defend such worldviews.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Global_c...
This doesn't alter anything about what I said. It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources in this world. Justice would look like actions that are not legal to advocate for in this country.
Most resources go to average people, how is that bad? Wealth is not resource distribution, consumption is, and by far the most consumption is done by the middle class.
Consumption tax is said to be regressive since it doesn't work on rich people since they invest, that should tell you that consumption is much more evenly distributed than wealth is.
> It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources
How. How on earth is it evil if you or I have a bit more wealth than the other? Who gives a flying fuck, except... except those who seek power. Total power. You can't have peace as long as you or your preferred leaders are not in total power, and you won't let the rest of us have peace either.
> Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution.
What do you care about wealth distribution? Why should anyone? As long as we each can a) not be poor, b) prosper, c) live our lives in peace, none of us should care that someone else is wealthier (or less so) than us.
"But wealth inequality!!" is just moving the goal posts: so poverty has gone down and has been going down, but you can't be satisfied with that, not even if it goes to zero. No, you want something else: power -- total power.
Sounds like the optimism rhetoric of Steven Pinker. I suggest you read up on the numerous criticisms of his work. Most of the optimism is based on a ridiculously low global poverty line conjured out of thin air, and other nonsense like GDP.
What you're saying is nonsense. I don't even know who Steven Pinker is. Poverty two hundred years ago was way worse than poverty today in most of the world -- this is a self-evident fact to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history. No running water, no water mains, no sewers -- these things meant death from cholera and other diseases for many children, and that's just for starters.
Odd how you counter claims as fictional with zero evidence just speculation. I realize this is a discussion forum and not a policy office but I pisses me off when feelings is met with feelings and not explanation or examples. Now’s your chance to really prove your point.
That we're all less poor today that our ancestors 200 years ago is absolutely, totally self-evident. No additional evidence needed. Indeed, the inverse claim would require evidence, and extraordinary evidence at that.
>and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.
We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.
But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.
update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
I agree. I also don't know how that could realistically be achieved, with everything nowadays being lowest common denominator, aid budgets being slashed and drawbridges being raised. It would take an extraordinary initiative by an extraordinary person or group.
My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed. then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
It's perfectly normal for a person to complain about being screwed over even if the person next to him is being screwed even harder. There will always be somebody somewhere who has it worse than you, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't expect better for yourself than what you have, especially in a country like the US where a small number of people with more money than they could ever spend relentlessly exploit others and take from them.
Starting from nothing, it's easy to gain income and then double it, but most people eventually hit a wall and find that they can't improve their circumstances no matter what they do. Our society will conspire against them to keep them in their place. It will lay out traps for them to hold them back. Some of those traps, like payday loans, you might be able to avoid. For other traps, like our healthcare system, you will have to depend on luck to limit the number of times you are caught. Medical expenses are the reason most people in the US fall into bankruptcy.
Wealth inequality, and a lack of social mobility are huge problems in the US. In the "wealthiest nation on Earth" 1 out of every 8 Americans can't make enough money to feed themselves without government assistance, but even for the others it's easy to gain a false sense of comfort where you are well feed and entertained, but still live paycheck to paycheck and don't have savings to protect yourself from sudden unavoidable expenses. 'Today you are fine, but always one bad day from ruin' is not a comfortable way to live.
Americans complain because even though things can always be worse, they should also be better than they are. I hope Americans never stop trying to improve their situation and the situation of those around them.
> Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury)
Using this as an example to illustrate a broader point: Most Americans can't afford not to have a car. Public transit in the US is next to non-existent in many places. If you want a job, you probably need a car to drive to work every day. So you take out huge loans to pay for the cheapest car you can find: now your financial situation is precarious because you're in debt. Because you bought a bad car, you're constantly at risk of having it break down and having to pay to repair it, which is another layer of precarity.
Similarly, poor Americans do not have the latest iPhone—they have a cheap, used iPhone which could break any day, and they're extremely dependant on it. I can't speak to what life is like in the developing world, but living in poverty in the US is extremely stressful.
To be fair to iPhone point, that's sort of like saying they have a used Gucci bag. A new Motorola phone is cheaper than a 5 year old used iPhone ($130 for a new 2024 moto g vs ~$150-200 for an iPhone 12). A used Motorola is even cheaper (sub $100). Apple has always been a luxury brand. It's basically trivial next to housing, but I still can't imagine buying an Apple product.
I'll have to think harder to come up with the exact number, but I've had approximately 3 Android phones and 3 iPhones in my smartphone-career (changed phones more often in the beginning than at the end).
iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
A smart phone is increasingly required to do things like banking, pay bills, order things.
I live within a bike ride of a lot of places, but it would still add up to hours more a week. And for 3 months of the year there's ice and snow that are rough on the equipment.
That's not my experience in the US, but in any case the phone I mentioned is a smart phone.
In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
> It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
This is only a half-truth. Complaints are only worth respecting if people hold their governments accountable. There's a reason why single-payer healthcare polls higher than either party in the US. Inflation gets attention because it affects a minority of the population that matters more.
Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).
The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk
Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public.
This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct.
People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
American living standards have declined from their peak in the mid-to-late 20th century. If you’re under 40 you will likely be materially worse off than your parents even if you are better educated than they are. It isn’t like this in the developing world, so there is still an optimism there for the young professionals benefitting from the development.
It's not so much the absolute amount you have, but rather your situation in comparison with your country men.
Yes, I know what 3rd-world poverty looks like, but, in a sense health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US). Also, the morale-destroying aspect of poverty hits harder in advanced countries, because people assume you're poor because of what TFA talks about: being lazy, dumb, etc.
Poverty exists people think it ought to, that's the simple reason it exists. People think a world where some deemed unworthy have to experience crushing poverty is a more meaningful world, that's it. Certainly there is absolutely no reason that any person has to go to bed hungry, as a lot more food is produced in the world than is needed.
But the difference is that I can respect people who complain about having absolutely nothing, but I can't take seriously the complaints of rich people that they aren't richer.
You misunderstood my response. Let me explain better: I'm not saying what matters is the relative amount of money you have in relation to your peers; it is about the relative claim you have on resources, power, respect, mental health, etc.
Money and those other things may be correlated, but focusing on those things emphasizes how much money is a proxy for them.
So for example, even if you earn 100k, but many/most people are earning 500k, it cause a huge power imbalance that enables them to easily make your life miserable on a whim. It also causes society to see you as a failure, causing mental/emotional distress that further pull you into a spiral of despair.
> health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US).
Do you seriously believe it's even remotely comparable? In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
> In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
I know for sure this is totally wrong, because I have lived in 3rd world countries, and I was born in one. You're just imagining stuff.
I visited a few rural cities in the Central African republic ~15 years ago and this situation definitely exists (existed?) there. Your best bet is to try to get care in a monastery, but it's not like they have glasses or anything other than basic medicine.
The Central African Republic is among the poorest of countries in the world, so that situation might exist there.
But many (most?) 3rd world countries, like Ghana where I was born, are nowhere near this level of misery.
The root of your disagreement lies in the fact that "The Third World" isn't really a useful abstraction anymore.
Plenty of former 3rd world countries are middle-income now. There is just no comparison between living in Thailand vs. South Sudan, even though there might be in the 1950s.
Time to toss the expression entirely, it doesn't really describe anything concrete anymore. The world has changed.
That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
> I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
> Absolute economic mobility matters much more
The US does poorly on this metric too: https://i.imgur.com/eYHUysQ.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/vLz5iUz.png [2]
(Note that the x-axis is "birth year.")
[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/04282...
[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20200631
Your statement doesn't really make sense and contradicts what research [1] is saying so you really back that up with a good argument and evidence.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
It is a maths problem, not one of economic theory, and a well-understood limitation of "social mobility" as a measure in this context. Social mobility between two countries is only meaningfully comparable if their income distributions also have a similar degree of compression since it is a rank statistic. The large differences in wage compression between e.g. Scandinavia and the US are well documented, such as this[0] recent NBER paper, and not controversial.
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/202505/wage-compression-drives-n...
Yeah, median income in the UK is about at the level of Mississippi, as is much of Western Europe (Western, not Eastern!). The US is just ridiculously wealthy, and our income inequality is largely a matter of the absurd heights reached at the top, with wide distributions. OTOH, wealth disparity (or even just the perception of wealth disparity) can be politically destabilizing and lead to some pathological social issues. Greater relative social mobility and greater (perceived?) wealth equality seems to result in a better sense of fairness, a sense of fairness is key to social cohesion and trust, and social trust is key to producing wealth. Though, social trust is necessary but hardly sufficient. Likewise, perceived mobility and equality seems necessary but not sufficient for healthy political and civic culture.
I remember watching Fiona Hill's testimony.
That lady has some serious chops, but she said she had to leave the UK, as she was denied opportunities, because of her "Distinctive Northern Accent" (In the UK, the "North" is considered kind of "Redneck," like our South).
>For all its faults, the US is just such a place.
Trying hard not to be and using some flimsy pretext to justify it probably accounts for 3/4 of state laws that don't pertain to a) a procedural matter b) a matter with an identifiable victim, or at least that's how it looks by my unscientific observation.
> That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads.
Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.
You're not wrong. We routinely ignore things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
...
> An eight-year-old child was sitting on the stoop of one of the trailers. Below him a white pipe ran from his house, across the yard just a few feet away from a basketball hoop, and into a copse of pine and sweet gum trees.
> The pipe was cracked in several places and stopped just inside the copse, barely 30ft from the house, dripping ooze into a viscous pool the color of oil. Directly above the sewage pool, a separate narrow-gauge pipe ran up to the house, which turned out to be the main channel carrying drinking water to the residents.
> The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house. At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight – a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.
Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.
That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.
Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.
People are paying attention.
Don't forget who was President during the time and sold us the idea it was fixed that year.
I had no idea it wasn't all fixed until someone there told sometime in the last two years.
“Used to be” such a place. Stagnating minimum wage while inflation proceeds unchecked, the rise of marginal employment and contract work. Skyrocketing housing costs. I don’t think the us is such a place anymore. It fast becoming a place that is not.
The US was never a place like that. Even in the mostly imagined "golden age" of the fifties, if you were the wrong family or color you would not be able to reliably get out of poverty no matter how much effort or guile you could afford
The bank did not care that you would be a profitable customer, they still weren't going to lend to you.
You're projecting the current onto the past. It was a problem, but it wasn't the show stopper it would be today. Not having access to credit wasn't as big a deal when there weren't subsidized credit products and you therefore weren't competing with people who had artificial access to cheap money.
The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).
Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.
Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
Minimum almost doesn't matter in a discussion of mobility. Nobody ever escaped poverty working minimum wage. They found a way to move up.
Minimum wage provides breathing room for other opportunities including self-advancement. Just survivorship bias nonsense.
> They found a way to move up.
Yeah, and they probably had to spend money to make that happen. Night courses at a community college aren't free. A higher minimum wage makes it easier to get your foot in the door for something better.
Most community colleges have some sort of tuition waiver or scholarship program for low income students.
https://www.westvalley.edu/admissions/free-tuition.html
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
Sadly many kids (college graduates) start out with -250k$ and the clothes they're wearing.
Of course, they often have family they can fall back on, and education, but debt creates an entirely new class of 'less than dirt' poor.
You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
Totally different from my lived experience.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
>its just hard work and grit
Which country, though?
Because that's like 90% of the solution.
The other 9% is good health.
The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.
china 1962
> china 1962
that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
Credit where credit is due.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.
xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China.
What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution:
> Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled.
I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them."
Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
> they always remind me that its just hard work and grit
Copium for poors.
Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
I don't know how to tell you that some people have war in their country.
Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here.
I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
Not sure why that comment got downvoted. I guess that "income inequality" is the Boogeyman Du Jour.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
Maybe splitting them is helpful, but why would you have to do them sequentially? Many of the things that reduce income inequality also help reduce poverty. Poverty isn't "low-hanging fruit" and it's something people have been trying to eradicate longer than we've been alive.
Saying "let's not even think about B until we've 100% sorted A" is just a way to ensure B never gets done.
I think I gave the impression that we should tackle them sequentially with my comment. My point was that I don't think it's controversial to eradicate poverty, but for whatever reason it is controversial to eradicate income inequality. We don't need to tackle them sequentially but we also don't need to wait for a silver policy bullet that solves income inequality while we try to solve poverty as well. It may be possible to do both, but in the event it's impossible to do B at least we can still try to do A.
Is that what I said?
I apologize. That was not what I meant.
I simply stated they should be decoupled, and approached concurrently.
I live comfortably in the United States. I consider myself middle class. I worry about my job and increasing costs. But I’m okay.
I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.
Everyone worries about losing their job I think. Nowadays employment is a lot more unstable. Hell a large percentage of the workforce doesn't even have permanent employment. Flexibility is great for companies but humans need stability.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
Not all poverty is created equal.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
I’d say 99% of the poor are in the first two categories. So I don’t really care if the third category gets some stuff too if it means we help everyone else.
I sure see a lot of people in category 3
Oh really? Where? How can you tell they're reckless or lazy and not (e.g.) disabled?
It's pretty easy to see when someone spends money like an idiot
The spectre of the "wasteful welfare recipient" is invoked constantly, but I've never seen any of these people. The poor people I've known are, by necessity, quite careful with money.
Agreed. I was nodding along with the GP right up until their ending statement, yikes.
Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
Our own countries could stop actively funding, supporting and even creating that corrupt elite, for a start. See e.g. the Françafrique system in Africa.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.
No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.
Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)
Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.
I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.
These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like.
https://cds.bie.edu/
Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
The story that photograph is from is about distance learning enforced by the COVID pandemic. https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom.... The family does not have internet access, and while they were issued a laptop and mobile hotspot, it only gets signal from the top of that hill.
OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.
What I meant was they fooled themselves. They had negative assumptions about how Native Americans live and are treated, then they see a photo of a dirt pit, and even though it is completely implausible, assume it is a school. It is so far off reality it is notable.
I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
Not American born so there is some obvious thing here that’s not so obvious to me. What’s the ref? Is it a race thing
Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.
I used to have Hopi and Navajo friends and I have no idea what they are referring to.
One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at.
I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
Is this the photo? https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wif...
Not the exact photo, but it looks like it's another angle from the same photo shoot.
Thanks for finding that.
The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years.
But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
Why would you expect there to be cell service there? Large parts of that area of the Mountain West are virtually uninhabited and have no telecom infrastructure to connect the cellular service to. There is literally nothing out in much of it except the occasional building every 10-20 miles which isn't enough to sustain a cellular network.
These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.
It was during the pandemic, the family did not have good phone service at their home...
https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
Why is cellular signal required for lessons?
Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).
If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.
> Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment:
"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."
Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".
20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
I often find the loudest voices with this mentality either come from well off families, or were poor enough themselves in childhood to have benefited from the government programs they wish to destroy. The first is ignorance and the second is some sort of self hatred / shame.
I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.
>or were poor enough themselves in childhood to have benefited from the government programs they wish to destroy
or, are currently benefiting, but they're just getting what's owed to them, unlike all the other moochers taking handouts
It's always sickening to hear more educated people (compared to the average) repeating this inhumane bullshit.
Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.
It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
> If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.
I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.
No.
So far as I know, every single UBI trial has had consistently positive outcomes. People get jobs, get training, get a roof over their heads.
Giving people money does in fact give people more choices, and helps make the poor less poor.
Which UBI trials do you know about? There's a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
But only six of the listed pilots mention the results.
1970s NIT pilots: no noticeable improvements.
Mincome: significant reduction in hospitalization. Slight decrease in work?
Tribal profit sharing: better homelife for children, parents on the booze less.
Madhya Pradesh: great success.
Netherlands: increased employment slightly, not health.
Finland: improved health slightly, not employment (employment was the goal).
So, I don't know. I suppose it helps, but mostly in Madhya Pradesh.
Everyone over 65 gets a state pension in NZ. And they hardly contribute to the tax take. I’d say that’s a partial UBI.
> It's nobody's fault
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
In 2024 over 700k people were homeless in the USA. That's a system failure. If you want to talk about personal failings you have to consider individual circumstances. But 700k being homeless is abjectly just not how a civil society should operate.
Yes, because human mind is famously known for being extraordinarily good at getting out of self-destructive spiraling without external help, and that help is famously known for being provided to everyone who needs it regardless of their economic status. Also, chronic lack of money has absolutely no way to contribute to that occurring in the first place. /s
I get it. Everybody gets it. For some months, even years. But after a decade or so in such a situation, you must arrive at some sort of epiphany, look at your life and say "what the fuck?".
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead]. That's the prevailing attitude towards poverty among the intellectuals. "Let's talk about them, not with them."
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
> Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead].
I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.
*See what I did, there?
If you'd be actually experienced, you would realize that there's an autokill filter on HN and the comment in question contains the forbidden M word. Apparently my vouch wasn't enough to resurrect it.
Makes sense (I run showdead=no, so I never saw the original), but that doesn’t make my comment any less accurate. We all see this stuff happen on a regular basis.
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
No. After a decade the ‘what the fuck’ is just a distant memory. ‘It is what it is’, ‘nothing ever works out’, other kinds of depression just win by default.
Looks like you don't.
[dead]
If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
It looks like the times are changing thanks to AI, so we'll see what happens when the petite-bourgeoisie stop being quite so bougie.
If that were true, the Vice President wouldn't be trying to convince us that housing costs are high because of illegal immigration.
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
You're right of course. The problem is that such institution no longer exist in North America.
[dead]
You are one major sickness and one layoff away from getting into the same situation, often to the point of no return.
No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
> What's your proposal here?
There is no proposal, and that's the point.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fox-news-brian-kilmeade-apologi...
> a couple weeks and then what?
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
I wouldn't say so. A large percentage of the population - double digits - have never had any job security in their lives, or any guarantees whatsoever. We've learnt to adapt and know we can do it again. People aren't allocated 1 job per person for life and if we loose that job we're in the shit for life. Most people know they can get another job.
Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains.
Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
[dead]
>There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity
I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?
I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.
> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
It's difficult to find trustworthy statistics quickly, but the penetration of electricity and running water in US households is only about 99%. At the scale of the US (~130 million households), 1% of households lacking electricity equates to over a million households and somewhat more in terms of number of people. So yeah, there's probably about 1-2 million people in the US without running water and/or electricity.
Where are these people? Probably the largest concentration of such people are on the various Native American reservations (I believe ~15% of the Navajo Reservation lacks running water). The hinterlands of Alaska also likely has a high number of these houses.
It's less an issue of access than affordability. The term is "energy insecurity" - https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/energy-in...
"Energy insecurity" transforms the problem from lack of "energy" into an emotional problem. The problem isn't feelings of insecurity, it's lacking electricity. But now we can feel all self-righteous that we're making people feel better because we don't call them homeless and hungry and in the dark. Now they "have housing insecurity" and "have food insecurity" and are suffering from "energy insecurity".
I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".
I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.
The US still has some really remote backwaters. Not too many but you can find them if you know where to look.
I'm not saying literally everyone in America has electricity/running water. I'm saying it's a rare exception, not "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people".
And when it is a problem, it's usually a problem with the system denying people access rather than literal inability to afford.
Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
I know people without running water in their house right now in America . In fact I know multiple families in this situation .
I know some people living in their car. It doesn't have running water or electricity.
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
You are disconnected from reality.
I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
No one in this thread has any evidence of these "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people" and just falls back to "well I met a guy".
The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.
There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-...
1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...
What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years.
The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
I guess the DOJ saying not to fine these people is a nice gesture but in practice local fines don't mean anything in a situation like this unless the poors on the property are unlucky enough to be on a property that the municipality wants to lien and take for whatever reason.
Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).
This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.
[flagged]
I do not care.
One half-hour later the post is unflagged and not greyed at all.
There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.
well it looks grey on my screen
They're called sewage "lagoons" and work basically the same as septic systems from a environmental impact perspective. They only really work well in certain climates and even then you need to have enough spare land to just locate a sewage pond somewhere. Even in richer areas it was dirt common for schools and prisons (which aren't likely to be located in the center of town like other government stuff is) to have them way deeper into the 20th century than you'd expect since it's not like they were short on land (just use more taxpayer money).
Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.
The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
The US desperately needs another version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives to become virally popular.
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
These people are gross.
> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
I don't think he is. That's sort of his point.
am i misreading the article?
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself
I’m not saying running a small business is easy. But they previously worked a corporate job and chose to start a landscaping business partly for lifestyle reasons.
It's not as well written as it could be. He's using the first person, but he's not actually referring to himself. It's a hypothetical. Pretend he put the word "Suppose" in front of the first word, as in "Suppose I have a van that's falling apart."
I live in New Orleans. I see this sort of thing around me every single day.
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
I am lucky to get out of the cycle.
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
There are definitely people in Louisiana who just dispense with having a driver's license and tell the police to arrest them and they will bail themselves out with cash (and keep the cash around!)
> He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
Don’t forget that it will be there forever no matter how many millions you make.
This. It is hard to not have that chip on your shoulder.
Louis CK had this line that was far too close to me "Have you ever been so poor that the bank charges you for being poor?".
If you have been there, you feel that one.
Related: "You can't tell people anything"[1]
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188
It's honestly amazing how many people hold a powerful a conviction that the world is essentially fair; that the poor must have some moral failing which justifies their poverty. If it's happened to thousands of people—if you see the afflicted every day—then it must just be a plague of poor morals. We'll believe anything before we accept that we're lucky, and that we owe something to those who aren't.
I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty.
There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?
I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
While I understand the sentiment, you stated it yourself, "It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?". This is a puzzling question to ask and it shouldn't stop there. The post is very much trying to add some depth here, however it isn't targeting solutions for "poor" people, it is hoping to provoke those who are not to take the problem more seriously.
> I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
Go ahead and just talk about it, I want to hear it. This isn't so easy a problem, even on an individual level as you put it.
My solution is boring, but it works for the individual who is in that situation: Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary. Not only do you physically get yourself out of the environment which has dragged you down, you can also cut out expenses such as rent and even transportation. Which is huge.
Yes, it's not a fun solution. It won't make you rich. But it will take you out of being dirt poor, which the article is about. One example of those kind of places is the merchant navy. You're on a ship, so you don't have to spend any money and you can't even spend it. Instead of going on shore leave like the other people, just get extra days, or work on another ship on your leave days. I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
While you're at it, you have the opportunity for a career or education. And entry level jobs are available for those who have the work ethic.
Monastic life is another such example, where you are at least provided for. And traditionally the monasteries have swallowed up millions of people who would have been dirt poor, and given them an alternative. Just like the merchant navy and the military has done the same for millions. You can arrive to these places with nothing but the clothes on your back, and start putting together your life again.
I think implicit in the anti-poverty argument is individuals shouldn’t have to take a vow of poverty. So the monastery is out.
Not everyone is physically cut out for the merchant marines. This is also inconveniently ignores OP’s family.
Not everyone wants to join the military, but that feels like it’s getting somewhere… What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
My suggestions can help some people, but not everybody. Because everybody is different. Let's continue complaining instead then?
But I've worked in places like this with people who were deaf and people who had limps, and people with a ton of other problems. And hundreds of thousands of people who have families work in the merchant navy to support them, or in other similar work places.
Sometimes (almost all the time) trying to talk about things on HN feels like having to argue that it is indeed possible to fry an egg or boil a cup of coffee...
Well I don’t think anyone is browsing this thread because they need a solution to their own poverty.
So we’re talking about general solutions for the country at large, and solution that only works for a few means there’s still the problem of the rest of the poor to solve.
How do you know that? And how do you know that somebody reading here won't need a solution in the future? Or knows somebody who might?
But that was why I didn't want to write about it in the first place. People here don't take kindly to solutions, when it feels so good complaining about problems.
> What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
They do, various and sundry, e.g. making license plates.
I'm being glib, which is probably unforgivable under the circumstances, but people do this. Sometimes intentionally -- and, granted, there are often other issues in play -- but it's heartbreaking.
Ok, hear me out: jail, but you can walk right out again as soon as you are in…
Right, and I can construct theoretical models where this works well!
But they're all ripe for abuse, and that makes them politically untenable.
As a layperson in such social matters, I'd guess the real-world abuse rate would be something like 10%. This is mathematically tolerable, and socially beneficial.
But even at 0% real-world abuse, there would be righteous opposition. And at 0% + 1 predictable example, it'd be politically toxic in most of the country.
These are not boring solutions, they are incredibly difficult, and unfair solutions for a poor individual to take. You may find this all very annoying and we hear you, thank you for expanding upon your earlier vague notions.
Unfair is being poor in the first place. Almost nobody in this world gets a fair hand. But is that reason not to change your situation and get out of the hell which is poverty?
I have to ask what you mean by incredibly difficult? These are just normal jobs, with no skill required to start.
The vast majority of mariners these days are third world nationals getting paid third world wages.
Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
> The vast majority of mariners these days are third world nationals getting paid third world wages.
So? Is the third world not included in the original article? And also, that's like saying that you can't become a farmer or a teacher, because the vast majority of farmers or teachers in the world are third world nationals getting third world wages. The merchant navy also has many ships which only hire nationally.
As per the article, we are talking about being dirt poor. In that case, in the merchant navy you get food, board, medical attention and on top of that a salary. Which may be good or very small. If you have better options, please feel free to ignore my advice. It is for those who don't have any better option, but it is always impossible among hackers to get this through. Maybe we should discuss a few hundred miles of text more about how to change the system, rather than talk about real and actionable advice?
> Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
Have you tried?
You could definitely go live and work at a monastery in exchange for room and board. They usually won’t let you become a monk right away.
> Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary
Where can I easily sign up for such a situation? And mind you I mean the average person signing up, not that `anyone` could sign up.
I've looked at downgrading myself in the economy and the standard reaction is that the employers at that level dont like the idea that I know whats going on or have skills and dont want to take me on as "overqualified"
You might as well say, "let them eat cake" when your argument is just to find a job. Employers arent hiring.
Here is an example of an open mess boy position on an oil tanker: https://seacrew.net/vacancy/40763
And there's countless more similar vacancies.
Food, board and $1500 per month. That's a life line out of absolute poverty for any person who is willing to take it.
I know that hackers hate it, because the truth is that deep down most of you have a caste mentality and think that people who are born poor should stay poor, and dependent on government handouts. All discussion about "changing the system" is just for show so you can feel good about yourself and pat each other on the back, while things remain the same.
So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour. How dare they leave the ghetto behind, when they belong there?
Oh, so you mean be driftless as well. I thought you meant room and board in a community.
It is ridiculous of you think this sort of job is the solution to poverty at any amount of scale.
> So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour.
Hackers on this board are provoked when people suggest ways of taking destiny into their own hands that removes power from the tech billionaires, they are not provoked when someone finds a job
> I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
I don't know about the US services, but some militaries have non-combat roles which have no deployment and never see combat, but offer food and board.
Occam's razor. Either:
* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor
* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.
Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.
If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
You forgot with your razor the third option:
* People who have successfully clawed and scratched themselves out of poverty are almost never taken into consideration in discussions about poverty.
At most modern culture appreciates a rags-to-riches story. But rags-to-normal stories are unheard of. When was the last time you heard about people going from poverty to having just decent lives? Doesn't really pique the interest of people, perhaps.
But that's what countless people have done, they're just not considered in the perspective of poverty. At most you just see them as some everyday guy in the supermarket or on the bus.
Getting out of poverty and back on your feet again is very close to a miracle. That's how it feels for those who experience it. But hackers spit on it with contempt, because that was not the solution they would have preferred. Or that was not a solution which was applicable to every single person on earth. And in that case, I guess we should file a formal complaint also against all the saints who cured the blind but didn't cure the deaf.
Either:
1. There are solutions to organization and staying on task, that person can use, to successfully manage their lives, or
2. Those solutions actually aren't. They only work for people who would have been organized anyway.
Casting this dichotomy into a different area that I understand better helps me to see what you are saying. I think that it also gives me an idea that this is not a dichotomy. There are solutions to poverty for the individual. The individual must be aware of them, use them, and keep using them, until they are no longer poor. Then, they have to have a system to avoid returning to poverty. The sum total of this is much harder than it seems, so to many people it seems like those solutions cannot work. Sure, to a person for whom these approaches work, who has become broke and homeless, they can do it, but that is cold comfort for those who cannot escape poverty.
Thanks for the insight.
There's a clear 3rd option where the poor are self destructive shit heads.
IMHO this is one of those areas where lots of things can be true. If you're sick or catch bad breaks then yep poverty is a grinding cycle. If you're not then the American Dream is still alive. But the "American Dream" always kinda sucked. In that you never got a ton of luxuries and it was all somewhat precarious.
There are solutions to poverty and the majority of people do follow them successfully. However there are always people getting into poverty and so there is always poverty. Worse there are people who cannot follow the solutions we have to poverty - this is a small minority, but it is the ones that are hardest to deal with.
There are also a tiny number (less than 1 in 1000) who have a lot of wealth but choose to live in poverty because that is freedom. If you look close you see they are the ones who have a warm coat and working heat in their tent. This is not poverty, but they try to be counted in your poverty numbers because it helps them. When you have wealth living in poverty is not that bad. (the above is a story a homeless man told me this week while I was helping out at our local food shelf. The homeless man is in poverty and I get the impression his divorce settlement is the problem and as soon as his kids are out of school he plans on getting a real job)
Gee. I wonder why people find a blogpost telling them to fuck off and acting like they don't know that quitting Starbucks is only relevant to those who go to Starbucks annoying?
He right. I’ve seen poverty in India, but I misunderstood it.
There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money.
I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night.
He said no. Just give me what you owe me.
He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him. Poverty is not a single static state. It’s a negative feedback loop that requires systemic change to get out of.
My experience with the kids working in Laos was similar but I have a different interpretation.
Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.
Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.
What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.
I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.
It is also that, at 12 years of age, that kid may have had enough of harsh life lessons already, like when he was promised something instead of being rewarded on the spot and later it turned out he was just being tricked. I imagine that something like that may have had a much more direct impact on his OP described decision - that hard earned "street smarts" keeping him grounded in his (undesirable) reality.
I watched a 13-16 year old Lao girl come to that realization in a very upset Facebook story. While I don’t fully understand the context, she was crying and venting that her mother doesn’t love her.
Prior to this fb story, the girl’s mother sold her older 16yo sister to Chinese guy for marriage. And frequently leaves her daughter to sleep on the street, because the girl isn’t able to get home by herself.
Despite all of that, she still felt her mother loved her and just then was when she realized it? I don’t know.
Unfortunately Youre correct, but also it takes years for these kids to process these realities. They’re just isn’t one moment where it’s like “maybe my parents don’t love me” time to change my behavior.
Sometimes, a visible example does that. I know of numerous people in Mumbai who do servant jobs, whose kids have gone to engineering schools and gotten corporate jobs. This sort of story - 1st in my family to go college - needs to be prominent for a parent to want to aspire to that for their kids.
Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.
> He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him.
I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
Everything else was self-taught/learned.
There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).
And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.
> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.
You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.
I feel that this experience can cause us to have less patience for the poor in the developed world. Something like, "How poor can you be in the USA? In Mexico, just outside a major city, there is a town without electricity, where people eat corn and raise cows, and they send their children to the city at night to beg because they don't have any cash and no way to make it." How many people live in that level of poverty in the US?
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
Poverty is a spectrum. Naturally, abject poverty is worse than regular poverty. I see too many people say "you're not poor, you have a phone" or "you're not homeless, you aren't sleeping on the sidewalk" (both of these have been said to me). There is a mismatch between what people imagine as poor and what poverty is, and of course, things could always be worse.
If I was in poverty a phone would be early on my list of things to get. First is enough food to eat, followed closely be enough shelter to live (sleeping outside in the snow is fine so long as you have a warm bed in the tend). There might be a few other things as well (I'm not in this condition), but a phone would be high on my list if I could afford it (including the monthly bill) just because of all the things you can do once you have one. For the price they are a great investment.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
> Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.
Suburbia has little to no community these days.
You're getting at what I was hinting at. It's not the literal distance between houses (or lack thereof) that cause this. It's the people and what they think and how they act.
Suburbs have a self-selection bias for antisocial behavior and folks who lean that way.
It’s not a 100% thing, but I’ve noticed a strong correlation having lived in a number of suburbs and in city cores. I’ve also spent a decent amount of time in rural parts of America and I totally get what you’re saying. The average rural person likely has a much larger local support network (aka community) than the average suburbanite.
It also exists where the population is very dense; poor people live in cities, too, and form these kinds of relationships and networks as well.
I'm not poor, but I had more of this sort of network in the city than I do now in the burbs.
Yes, same. Online I hear people bemoan how things are these days and stuff like that and then my SOMA high rise works well in the form that I want civil interactions to be.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
> "Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
They’re selling the stolen merchandise to a fence who then resells it to stores with looser procurement requirements at a discount or they box it and ship it to an Amazon fulfillment center and flip the stolen merch on Amazon.
Poor people don’t have enough cash liquidity to make stealing and selling toiletries worth it, it’s loosely organized crime.
The same sort of marker exists for diabetic test strips, people on Medicare get them for free, sell them for a discount for cash to someone who resells them for a profit.
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".
And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".
Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
This 2+ hour documentary partly talks about it, in particular from ~28m: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1584
I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges.
My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
This makes me wonder if being told I was a smart kid (instead of "Good job kid!") wasn't such a bad thing after all. (Educators say tell kids "Good job!" instead of "You're so smart!", because the kids will fear losing that status and then not dare try hard problems).
I always think I'm lucky I was born with a pretty good brain.
This definitely comes up a lot and I've never found a satisfactory way to get through to these people that you can both work hard and be lucky.
The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.
The problem is the world isn’t clean, statistics aren’t clean, it’s all mosaic. You can have noble, moral poors and rich. You can have absolute dirt bags both rich and poor.
I grew up in a take of two households, with parents divorced at a young age. Father grows up in a picture perfect well-to-do family and ends up a classic party-hard drug addled dirt bag. He died last year living alone, homeless in a tent off an interstate motel town. Mother grows up in a stereotypical “dad went out for milk” family that descended into (and rose above) poverty.
While my father just kind of floated around and lived life, my mother remembered the poverty she experienced growing up, worked her ass off in university, and worked two jobs (one professional, one as a weekend cahsier) until she retired.
Nothing any of us can write here on a forum from on high will counter lived reality.
All this is to say, I agree about empathy being needed on society, poverty can still be moral failure. Pretending it can’t is just as in constructive as any other moral argument in this topic.
Of course it's possible for poverty to be a moral failure, but I think the point is to not be so quick to pass judgement on people you barely know.
Having seen the above I would be cautious about believing it.
In divorce courts will often emotionally and monetarily abuse men. (divorce itself if you love the other party is emotional abuse, though I don't know what to do about this. Abusive men do love their wives despite the abuse). As such die of a drug overdose while living in a homeless tent is probably the only option seen left.
I'm not saying there are not lazy losers in the real world. However the picture is often more complex and few people will admit that.
My MAGA dad grew up dirt poor in a house with literal dirt floors in some rooms. Four kids. No dad. Government support. He got a job as a cop and raised me and thinks anyone can get out of poverty if they work hard. He’s a corner case but he’ll never see it tha way because he literally bootstrapped himself. How do I tell him he didn’t and just got lucky? He kinda has a point.
Way to dismiss his life achievement as "being lucky"
Well if you work hard enough silently lives out the important part: in a high demand area like say construction. But this applies to even high paying fields like IT. If you work really hard on things none cares about in IT you are not gonna make much ...
>If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".
Calvinism. Your poor because you're bad. Interestingly enough Calvinism serves as a lot of the basis for what became Capitalism.
Yeah... and the basis of how to Make America Great Again: make the poor's lives miserable and they'll be forced to work hard. They'll be successful, problem solved! If they stay poor, that must mean they're still lazy, let them rot!
I dunno. People put too much stock in Max Weber, who cherry-picked his evidence: he literally used Benjamin Franklin, a deist who'd abandoned Christian doctrine, as his model "Protestant." He created a compelling just-so story that is now picked up by people who never check the actual sources.
I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:
> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.
> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.
> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.
> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."
Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-real-protestant-eth...
If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
where can I read more about it? I don't see the connection, but I could be wrong, so interested in some reading on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Christianity
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
It's one of the classic subjects in sociology,
https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151/lecture-16
I knew what Calvinism was... this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic is an interesting read, will explore the topic more. Thank you :)
I assume they're talking about this, which was mentioned elsewhere on HN yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
Homeless people are famously just temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.
The most sinister part of it is that today many Americans are not doing well, but because they believe that meritocracy exists, they believe they must have no merit. Cue the graph of deaths of despair.
> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.
I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.
I’d say a large percentage of americans do. It’s burned into the cultural mindset at a very young age.
Culture is important, but it's widespread enough that there's probably a biological basis. Humans are wired to hate the idea of "good/bad things just happen", we're always creating stories about causation even when they might not be very accurate stories.
Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."
if you want to go down a rabbit hole, lots of its roots stem from protestantism, especially calvinism. that cultural influence is not unique to the us, but i don’t really subscribe to any evolutionary behavior explanations to attitudes like this, personally
Right. At least when I was growing up we were all constantly told stuff like "you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it". The corollary is that if you aren't able to accomplish something, it's because you didn't set your mind to it.
You can see it elsewhere in the comments on this post!
I was also of the naive impression we had collectively moved from this thinking and it was more so just a difficult problem to attack inherently. The comments here are very sobering.
Never underestimate stupidity or ignorance. Especially when that ignorance directly benefits someone rich.
I envy your (former?) optimism
There's a comment here making exactly that claim.
How have you managed to literally never meet a conservative?
> Understanding poverty starts with empathy.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
>This isn't a math problem.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
This view of the world puts everything on the individual. It might be worth reading up on structuralism to balance that perspective out a bit. I'm somewhere in the middle of the two extremes myself, but surely one must acknowledge that there are larger systems at play that can constrain an individual's ability to "optimize".
Saying that something "is a mindset" does not imply that one could just "mind oneself" out of it, anyway. Brains don't work that way.
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
> starts with empathy
I imagine there's an even "earlier" starting point most people don't have to begin at, which goes:
"My own circumstances are too different to truly empathize and understand, and I'm not too proud/delusional to admit it. The presence of that gap in comprehension is itself a reason for action."
1,000%
I grew up poor, but with two competing narratives about poverty filling our ears at home. You see, my mother came from a well-off upper middle class ("prep") family, and my father came from generational poverty in Appalachia ("trailer trash"). They met in D.C. where he was a soldier and she worked at the Treasury.
Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.
His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."
I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.
I grew up poor as dirt. My mom has four kids with three dads. Eventually we were a family of six. I think we had about 100 euros a month for food, clothing and recreation. My mom and stepdad did not work one day in their lives (welfare in NL).
Right now I’m still recovering. It’s my fifth year making over 150K and I have zero to show for it because I did a poor job managing my finances. To help me (in general, but also productivity wise) I have a coach and coincidentally today exerpeinced a breakthrough. I am still afraid of being poor. Of being made fun of. And not being enough.
I’m operating out of a ‘it’s not enough’ mentality, because I don’t feel enough. It feels like a life sentence, but some hope shimmers at the end of the tunnel.
What it’s like being poor: even buying a simple football in a supermarket felt leagues out of reach. Being sent back home because a teacher told me my clothes did not cut it. And my parents just sent me back. I never thought there was a path for me to become a doctor. Or any other noble job. Growing up or being poor is not being able to see a way out. Recognising opportunity.
Forgive me my language. Super tired and on my phone.
If you don't mind telling about it, who or what helped you?
I was just lucky that I started programming when I was about 32, and when I started freelancing (35) money started flowing. But tbh I am still managing the holes my upbringing left me (financial habits, attachment issues, focus and productivity). I know I’m responsible for my action, but it does not make it easier.
It kind of feels it’s never enough. So it does not feel I am helped in the sense that I left my problems behind me. Just traded some problems for better (but also bigger) ones.
The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
> majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expense
I see this said over and over without actual unbiased stats. As quick google search tells me it's not.
I don't blame you for saying it, it's just said so casually and it seems true but isn't.
Thanks for being skeptical, looked it up because of that. Looks like the primary study people cite is this one, which indicates around 65% of people filing for bankruptcy cite a medical contributor of their bankruptcy. That includes medical bills (highest contributor overall) and loss of income due to medical issues.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
I’d like to see what information you have that’s different though.
Loss of income is #1 with medical being close #2.
https://www.debt.org/bankruptcy/statistics/
78% cited loss of income.
While we are not at the same state in history, there is a reason why Usury was illegal in many societies. Interest on loans can end up crushing one part of society while enriching another that any feel didn't deserve it. It can actively produce inequality.
Growing up with a single mother we've vacillated between being poor, broke and "getting by".
It was always a reverse slide down.
First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.
If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.
But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.
The answer is just ... luck.
When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
Luck really can’t be overstated imo. I was genuinely just lucky to be interested in computer programming as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking about careers, I just wanted to make games. If my interest was basketball my life would have been very different.
Don't forget the luck of living in a country where programming was a viable career path that could lead to a decent job, the luck of having the opportunity (and/or money) to attain the higher education that's usually required for it and the luck of living in a time when the tech industry was in an upswing that would allow a person to find a job in this industry. Really, having any of these puts most of us well above the amount of luck an average person gets (at least on a worldwide scale).
You were lucky to have the genetics that allowed you to have cognitive capabilities to understand computers and programming.
Many people don't and never will.
There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, some of us will be short, have bad looks, be unappealing to women, etc. And some of us will not have the cognitive capacity to have a job that keeps you above water, forever.
The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out. Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability.
>There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
There's a lot of dumb rich people, too. Sometimes the wield a lot of power and are indeed bad people.
Yes, inheritance is a thing, and having smart kids from smart parents is not a guarantee.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society" in which case I suggest you step off your tech pedestal and look around you.
> The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
It's in the single digits of %. Multiplied by the number of people in a country, it's millions.
It's definitely not "staggeringly low".
> Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society"
Classic fallacy of "it's either 0 or 50%".
> The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.
OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".
Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?
[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.
> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
The only reason people like you or me can sit on their lazy arses typing for a living is because there's a small army of people that take care of things like food and other boring tasks. The people keeping the Tesco running. The drivers delivering stuff there. The distribution centre. The farmers. The people building roads. The people maintaining roads. People maintaining water. People maintaining electricity. People maintaining gas.
All of that is just to keep the local supermarket running. I probably forgot some. It expands even more if you include other things.
A lot of this is what is generally known as "low skilled labour". But it's all needed. It's all contributing. I did this kind of work until my 20s and I definitely had a share of coworkers who were dumb, for lack of a better term. Most were not, but some were, a few to the point of being clinically handicapped. But they were all contributing.
Without them one couldn't make privileged elitist statements on internet forums being derisive of an entire class of people. Snobby comments like this is why people hate "the elite".
People don't need your compassion or help. They need a roughly fair system where working a full-time job gives you a decent standard of living. Lets start with that. And I'm not even going to start how the entire post stinks of eugenics. The only way to eliminate poverty is to genetically engineer out the people you been too dumb to exist? Really?
I take your broader point. I didn’t choose my genetics, my parents, or the conditions I was raised in. That’s why I don’t believe in moralizing social class.
I do believe in the idea of meritocracy and competition in general to motivate people. We are far from a meritocratic society unfortunately.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
Things that are pretty much out of those peoples' control can include health problems, dependents such as kids or needy older relatives, accidents, a long tail of other kinds of bad luck (fires, victim of fraud, etc)
think of this way, the less capital you have the more you depend on luck
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
[flagged]
>Immigrants arrive here
This is a massively broad brush with a huge filter bias applied.
1. Many immigrants not from the contiguous countries next to yours were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
2. Immigrants from close countries typically are the ones that are more motivated in the first place (bias filter). It's also common they have relations and contacts in the country they are going to as a means to gain a foothold in the place they are going.
> Many immigrants [...] were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.
But they're not wealthy here, and they can't buy the cost of living in NYC or LA with that level of wealth.
With the education point, you're gesturing at something like the real reasons they often outperform very poor Americans (if we compare only equivalent capacity for the sake of argument), I believe: habit, work ethic, drive, belief in improvement. Dom's article about what "poor" looks like makes sense from the inside, but after making it out one looks back and sees all the opportunities everyone around them had to get out of poverty, and it looks a little different, then. Not everyone has all the same opportunities, but a key driver is being open to those that appear, and conducting your life such that they are more likely.
The despair of believing they can't get out of the rut they're in is one of the causes of not getting out of the rut they are in. It's not that the despair isn't real, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (and this is true even if they win the lottery, looking at outcomes there).
Many immigrants who arrive with nothing are poor. And they work insanely hard in a desperate attempt to get their children out of it. Some succeed.
You haven't met a lot of poor people, then.
Maybe someday you'll be poor starving on the streets, and you can use your anecdotal bias to keep you warm and feeling full.
Well if the poster is not doing drugs and is taking care of their health the odds are overwhelmingly against this scenario even if it would satisfy your schadenfreude.
Oh really? Please cite the sources. I didn't say I hoped it happened. Just that it does happen. And it's an extremely myopic and callous way to look at the state of the world.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
From the article:
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Yes, the article says that, but I have direct experience which says the article is not telling the whole story. Some people are making all the right decisions and are still poor due to bad luck trapping them in a cycle of financial ruin. But also, some people really are poor due to their own crappy decisions. I've known them! They exist and must be accounted for in any productive discussion about poverty.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
> You make all your food from scratch all the time. [...] You fix everything yourself.
What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.
Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?
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> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
You can definitely be fat making food from scratch. Making it from scratch doesn't mean it is low calorie. See also: southern home cooking.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.
If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?
> There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.
> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.
Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.
> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.
One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.
> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.
Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.
But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.
That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.
> Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people.
Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.
Anyway, I see what you're driving at.
Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.
Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?
It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
> Me neither as it has never happened.
kek-a-roonie.
Yes, there were always fat people around in history, but not at the same rates and severity as modern Americans.
Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.
What consumerism? Someone falling into the "poor" category the OP describes has already forgone all of that out of necessity. There is no money for consumerism.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
> Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
I think that's a fair point.
Where in the country is that?
I don’t think you understand how little some people have. Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas, where you have to have a car for transportation, because public transit doesn’t exist.
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
> Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas
What isn't urban but also not rural?
I've seen disagreement over exactly where urban begins. A density of ~400 people per km², with a minimum of 1-2,000 people is a common definition, although the OECD targets a density of 1,500 people per km², with a minimum of 7,000 people, to capture all the variation throughout the nations it tracks. Regardless, in all those cases "rural" always encompasses that which falls short of what constitutes urban.
I've never heard of this alternate state you speak of.
> What isn't urban but also not rural?
The sub-urban regions. All the suburbs I've been in (and I'd wager nearly all of the US suburbs in existence) require you to have a vehicle to go about your day... unless you work from home and have everything delivered to you, I guess.
The particular urban subset that you speak of that is also literally named as such is still within the urban set, so that's clearly not it.
It's true that the word 'urban' is a substring match for the word 'suburban'. You're right about that.
Correct, but irrelevant. Suburban is a subset of urban, not the other way around — originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
> Suburban is ... originally referring to...
Like you said, this is irrelevant. Cities aren't planned or built like that, and really haven't been... since the founding of the USA, at the very latest. (If they were, the Brits would have had a much more difficult time capturing D.C. than they did.)
Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason, but we still don't know what there is other than rural and urban. Pointlessly pointing out obvious things like that there can be suburbs within urban areas, like there can be hamlets in rural areas, does not answer the question or serve any purpose whatsoever.
> Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason…
This you?
> …originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall. The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
From Merriam-Webster:
> suburb (noun):
> a: an outlying part of a city or town
> b: a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city
> c: suburbs plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town
I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
> a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and that often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families
> I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
Yes they would. Absolutely. Which means that they clearly see it as being outskirts of a city or town, not the outskirts of an urban area. You even say so yourself. It is literally written as such.
> There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
You did the same thing again: Outside a city, not outside of an urban area. Of course there are different community types within urban areas, just as there different community types within rural areas: e.g. hamlets, villages, small towns, it is even technically possible, albeit unusual, for a city to be rural! For example, Greenwood, British Columbia is both a city and rural.
Dude, take it from someone who is mildly autistic, and spent a very long time being staunchly prescriptivist: you’re being ridiculously pedantic, and no one cares.
Have a nice day.
If you don't care, why take time out of your day to formulate a message?
But, regardless, it is quite delusional to think that I would write for anyone but myself. Nobody is paying me to be here. It can only ever be for myself. As I care, that is more than satisfactory. It makes absolutely no difference what other people have to say about it. It was never for them.
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> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I am answering this question.
Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.
I think it was:
> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.
I take it you really mean:
"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
You should feel embarrassed for “thinking” so callously and uncritically. Do you need everything handed to you? Family issues, natural disasters, medical events, house fires, abuse, wage theft, fate. I’ve worked with the destitute, there is no safety net.
I'm not disputing those things happen or that luck plays a big part. I'm commenting on what people have control over.
I'm not sure what is compelling you to be so rude to a complete stranger on the internet. I'm here to discuss, have my ideas challenged, and learn.
Poor people don’t have control of their situation. You are literally victim blaming and surprised that rubs people the wrong way. Victim blaming is rude, offering your flippant two cents is rude. There, your ideas are challenged, rather than tone police go think about it.
suggestion: give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they are out to get you, trying to blame you, or trying to attack you. Especially on hacker news.
Was it a “dumb” question? Yes. Maybe they are dumb. Maybe they are just totally out of touch because they don’t know any poor people. I don’t know because i’m not a mind reader.
It’s not a crime to ask a dumb question.
Good day.
I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do).
No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
> No one “deserves” free time
Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
This is an excellent point. Especially because we often ascribe morality to hard work.
I'm not sure what this contributes? Not being rich and experiencing absolute poverty are radically different things. Of course, in America as everywhere else, there are millions who work sixty hour weeks and remain in poverty, often extreme poverty. Especially those undocumented, incarcerated or working in circumstances where minimum wages do not apply.
I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this and I hope no one else does."
Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this so everyone else should too."
No they think "its bullshit that you can't get out of it, since I did it myself". The argument from the left is not "we should help poor people since they are miserable" its that "its impossible for poor people to help themselves", why do left wing people try to make that bullshit claim that will just create more oponents?
I think we should help poor people, but I also think that its not hard for poor people to work hard and stop being poor today. If you want my support just say you wanna help poor people, don't try to tell me that its impossible for poor people to help themselves because then I will argue against you.
Like, why equate the two opinions "you can work yourself out of poverty" and "we shouldn't help poor people", those are two entirely different kinds of opinions.
>No one "deserves" free time.
I do! So does everyone I like.
I'm confused because the comment you're replying to didn't mention free time or Netflix.
If you had actually been impoverished, you'd have worked 60 hour weeks, and still be working 60 hour weeks with nothing to show for it. If you think "didn't take a vacation that wasn't a long weekend" is poverty, you're delusional.
The "prosperity bible" turn that America has taken is truly saddening.
Such bullshit. Don't continue to glamorize the mentally and physically harmful hustle culture that invades this country, and ignores the very real factor of both luck and privilege that not everyone is blessed with.
What's the point of society if everyone needs to bust their ass 70+ hours a week to get by? Might as well go homestead in the woods and be a subsistence farmer and do it on your own at that point.
Just fuck having time for creative pursuits and hobbies outside of working and making someone else rich?
What was your job at the time?
Most Americans don't understand real poverty. It exists outside their reality. They've never seen it, let alone experienced it.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.
https://blog.ctms.me/about/
It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
I was unconvinced he was writing about his current state, but a prior state / maybe his family background.
I hadn't considered that until reading comments like this. It's possible...probable even.
In that case, was he really poor? His whole argument is that being poor is a permanent state. If he's not poor now, was he ever?
His comment that you can get out- two people did- may either be a claim that his own escape doesn’t prove that escape is possible for all, or a batman reference. I lack the media literacy to be sure which.
It fits the Batman reference, somewhat.
Bruce Wayne (Batman's public-facing identity) was imprisoned in a pit where he was the second person to ever escape.
What I find a bit ironic, is this allegory can be used to reach the opposite perspective OP is trying to dispel. The bit about the "hopefulness" doesn't only refer to the light at the opening of the pit, but also in that the "escape" mechanism was actually being facilitated by the prison. This "escape" was supposedly designed to enact the "true despair" the OP was highlighting. The element they left out, was the fact this was done by extending a "support" rope from the opening which was deliberately too short to be useful. This causes Bruce to muster his own raw physical and mental strength to make the climb without the rope and ultimately prevail through personal will-power.
I guess OP would say Bruce is actually only "broke" here and not "poor".
System thinking please. Can every person in poverty become IT employed? Start a landscaping business? If they did would that likely cause a whole brand new set of problems? What jobs are these people currently doing? Don't those jobs need to be done? Can our society afford them to be done? Shouldn't anyone contributing to society (or legitimately unable to) be permitted to thrive? What could we do that would permit that? What do we do currently which harms it?
If there are jobs are legitimately not worth doing or paying someone to thrive while doing, why do those jobs exist? If these people aren't capable (or even willing) to do these jobs (or better jobs), why? How can we motivate or train people. (Lots of education, healthcare and especially psychotherapy are missing, I can tell you that.)
We can't solve poverty by thinking "well, some individuals might be able to solve theirs". It's a whole population, we have to solve for the whole population.
And people they work with and know
>landscaping
You're not going to make any money in this unless you have a ton of tools. Working for someone else with the tools generally doesn't pay crap. Also in the US it is/was common to use undeclared immigrant labor for these kinds of jobs.
Also, I imagine if you live in the middle of nowhere, landscaping skills would be all but useless. You need to be within reasonable distance of enough people willing to pay you a living wage.
I'm pretty sure the author's membership in the "poor" category is in the past tense.
I poked around their blog some more out of curiosity and I can't figure out what his situation is. In a year-old article about burnout and vacation, he mentions burning out from a job in marketing, and ends by saying therapy isn't an option because he lives under the poverty line and can't even afford to get vital blood work done. Maybe this hit so hard that it actually made him unable to do more remunerative work. But it sure feels like he's poor by choice. Which is odd because this article seems like a pretty good description of what it's like to be poor not by choice. There is an almost throwaway line that stands out at me now:
"Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?"
The rest of the article is about how you can't just choose to stop being poor. And in the middle of all this is something that boils down to, "I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff." Which is certainly his right, but it makes this whole thing feel like poverty cosplay.
"I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff."
I feel like this is an ugly truth, but still a truth. It's also very ugly.
For some people there's no tradeoff on how much they have to suffer to get some financial security because they already have it. Some people have to suffer a bit but quickly hit escape velocity. Some people never stop suffering. It's terrible.
I think Dave Ramsey has many annoying qualities but his "sometimes you have to act crazy to get out of it" is basically correct even if it's very, very uncomfortable IMO.
It's one of those difficult topics that people like to take to extremes.
Many poor people are in difficult situations with no clear way out. They're already working the best paying job they can find, as much as they can, and doing as much as they can to advance. Learning new skills requires time and energy they don't have.
Some are poor by choice. They could put in more hours, get a second job, or learn new skills, and escape the trap. But they don't want to. This might be "lazy," or it might be "prioritizes family time," or whatever.
But as soon as you say that some people are really stuck no matter how hard they try to get out, it's taken as saying nobody can ever get out of it. And if you say that some people can get out of it and don't, it's taken as saying every poor person is just lazy.
What's curious about this post is that it seems like a pretty good insider description of being completely stuck, except the author isn't.
Not just that, they appear to have 6 kids.
I have a lot of empathy for people that are struggling financially, especially with how hard things are now. I grew up in a way that most would consider to be "poor", though I mostly never felt that way.
I do well for myself now, better than I ever thought I could, and yet still I had to think very hard about the financial implications and compromises that come with choosing to have kids. Making 6 babies then complaining that you're poor, come on man, wtf? If you're going to do that, you have to do absolutely whatever you can to bring resources in for your family. That means working the "boring desk job" if it pays more, even if you prefer to be outside wiring up sprinklers.
Where is the accountability, the locus of self control? Sorry, but I don't buy any of this.
This gets me too. I generally agree that success is basically luck * effort, so I don't judge people who haven't been able to "make it." Similarly, I don't really admire people for having "made it"... If I don't know them personally, there's no way for me to gauge the ratio of luck and effort.
However, I do judge adults who aren't in good circumstances who also decide to bring children into their hardship. I have two kids, which is the most I felt I could provide for (time, money, attention, energy, etc).
I don't see how you can be "dirt poor" of the way explained if you live in the USA and have 6 kids.
Even the "worst" state in the USA will give tons of assistance quite high with 6 kids.
In the article he says those things are not really relevant, because he's already been doing them at 100% for a long time.
Poor people should have Amazon prime because it doubles as fast delivery, and zero other streaming services. Staying in is always going to be cheaper than going out so some entertainment at home is a good idea.
Poor people shouldn't be buying shit on Amazon, nor should they be spending money on Prime.
They'd be better off with DVDs from the library.
The problem is the same as with dieting; we do know what we need to do but the willpower required is quite high.
And the world is engineered to make it hard, because they want to separate us from what money we do have.
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I read every word of the article and the about page.
Then why did you present fallacious arguments which were already discussed over several paragraphs?
Perhaps you could elaborate, because I read the article and the About page too, and I don't understand what you're getting at.
”It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping”
cf.
”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
> The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
There are more options than the "mindsets" given in the article. It is legitimate to ask someone who believes they are poor why they are poor. Maybe they truly are. But maybe they aren't and they just don't know it.
Questioning whether or not someone has a higher earning potential does not imply they are currently lazy.
So is it your belief that the author currently considers himself poor? (FWIW, I don't think he does.)
Why is anyone assuming this? It was the GP of this chain who was providing this assumption. The OP was commenting on the condition of being poor and the meaningful difference between the commonly experienced condition of being "broke". This entire digression is likely a reflection of what motivated OP to put this post together.
I don't know, but it seems that rsyring and cluckindan are both assuming it, and at odds about a counterfactual.
I’m just pointing out the other is assuming it.
What was fallacious about my OP?
He asserts that being poor is different from being broke. The former being tied to a permanent state.
But, if you have the skills and opportunity to make better-than-poor money, then in most cases, I presume, you aren't really poor. It's only a matter of time until you can make additional money. And if you need to charge the $300 of parts to your credit card, on the presumption that if you have a running vehicle you can go to an interview of do the next landscaping job, you have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay it off. It's an investment in that case.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might find yourself poor anyway for reasons outside your control. Health issues, weird economic situations, whatever. I'm not discounting them. And maybe they apply here.
I just feel like there is a disconnect between the earning potential of the skills he has and being truly "permanently" poor. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate reason, just that it wasn't clear to me what that reason would be.
You may not like the reasoning or think I'm being too critical, but it's hardly fallacious.
It's an obvious conclusion to draw when folks seem to be unaware of the content of the article. But you're not supposed to say it.
I don’t want to live in a world where anything resembling wilful ignorance of systemic inequality is propagated uncontested. Chalk it up to wilful ignorance if you must.
The article directly mentions that the author has done complete engine rebuilds. Mechanics who can do things like engine rebuilds (efficiently) can crack six figures in a MCOL area although this industry does tend to expect quite a bit of work (e.g. 50 hours a week probably and not just M-F). Similarly the about page of the author mentions that they didn't like working in tech and left. The author seems to have all of the tools to make well above the median national salary and afford the proverbial white picket fence house with a wife and two kids. Therefore it seems that the author is making a choice to be poor and many of us would find this choice questionable. Coupled with the author stating things like "Should I kill myself for capitalism" this reads like a fairly typical far-left rant against the inhumanity of actually having to work for a living. The author should check their privilege. There are many rungs below what the author describes and people in this environment would kill for the job of doing engine rebuilds 50 hours per week to earn a six figure salary and support their family.
Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.
If you have six kids and a wife and don't work I'm pretty sure most states in the USA will pay you quite nicely.
Probably not a good life, but a great life by any historical standard.
But you'd have to write blogs convincing yourself that you're doing the right thing.
I'm privileged to have never had to worry about this, growing up comfortably middle to upper middle class.
With that said, I have a perpetual point of confusion here, likely due to my own blindspots and something I don't want to ask in person because it's not nice: is it an issue of budgeting?
Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, etc. But theoretically, couldn't the latter person live exactly like the first one, and save $2000/yr?
Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
Where am I going wrong in my thinking here?
> Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, etc. But theoretically, couldn't the latter person live exactly like the first one, and save $2000/yr?
Emergency expenses are generally not the same for different people
> Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
If you need $x per year and only earn $x-y per year... you're going to end up with $0 at the end of the year and not have your needs met.
> The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
Saving is difficult - as mentioned before, emergency expenses come up. And it's very hard to break that mindset ("I could buy this more expensive version but I need this money for other things too")
> They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0.
Or they're dead.
If you save an extra $2000/year, what are you supposed to do with the money if you're always hungry, if you're always cold? I'm guessing you could buy food and clothes; you'd end up at $0, just slightly better off. If there's no safety net to rely on, you'd save to be able to face the next problem, and maybe pay it less with your health (which is a kind of invisible debt).
And that's even assuming there's some certain income you can rely on. In my case, I know that for the next few months, I'd at least get unemployment benefits if I lost my job. Not everyone get that, and if you don't, the income floor is $0 and it's way harder to budget.
Another aspect to consider is that maybe the case of a single person who would be in poverty throughout a long life is not representative of poverty. Some people get out of poverty, some fall into it, some die early from it. If we're considering a single person always starting at $0 and always ending up at $0, several years in a row, we already dismiss these nuances. I'm sure you can find such examples, someone who lived to be 80 with a constant wealth of $0, but how common are they really?
They didn't earn the exact amount of money they needed—they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely. And likewise one therefore can't save and buy better stuff. And thus the cycle of poverty continues.
> they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely
What does this mean, exactly? I think that's the core of my question, and something I don't understand since I lack the experience. If someone can live like this for, say, 10 years then in some sense it is meeting their expenses exactly.
I understand a situation of accumulating debt - that's a state that's not in equilibrium. But a lot of poor people can't really obtain credit, I believe.
I'm confused whether the author is poor, has been poor, has never been poor but has deep understanding of what it's like for other reasons (friends, family, etc.). He writes
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
I think the ambiguity is leading to a better discussion. Many commenters are struggling mightily with the urge to dismiss the author as a lazy moral failure, which would allow them to ignore his arguments as originating from an unreliable source. Since there's not enough information to do that, we're getting a certain amount of discussion of the actual ideas.
Hmm, possibly, but from my point of view the fact that he might not be speaking from experience, or at the very least from the experience of someone he has been close to, makes me disinclined to put a lot of weight on his opinions.
I once saw people start their month with 0 on their bank account, and live in the negative monthly credit their bank allows.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
I had a roommate who was taking payday loans to support his brother for a while. I saw how ridiculous the interest was, paid it off for him, then had him pay me back. It got him out of the constant cycle of debt.
> A lot of poor folks are having to stand in line for hours and hours to get food at a food bank due to [government] ineptitude
This is an element of the argument for dismantling the nanny bureaucracy and instead going to UBI / cash payments.
1. It doesn't waste time, both of the gov't employee, but also of the recipient.
2. The author could buy better food, or car parts, or a bus pass, or ... with what otherwise might have been a more or less forced purchase in a single category. The flexibility returns agency and self-help behavior into the hands of the recipient.
All this needs to be tempered against the progress[1] we are making against poverty. I know it's a lot to ask the poor to be patient, but I do think there's an element of knowing that a lot of good people are trying really hard to alleviate the situation can help with the mostly mental elements of the article
> No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving.
eg: this statement is not actually a fact, it's a mindset
Overall, this is a big big testament to the overall worldview that I think is missing, just how impactful choices actually are. Some of these kinds of stories start generations ago, some of them start with the individual themselves having spent excess in the past that could have taken them through the low times (kind of "a waste not, want not" scenario). Some folks had opportunity and squandered it. Some flipped tails (failing scenario) 20 times in a row... People don't really want to help the former, but definitely the latter.
[1] - https://x.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072/photo/1
Now do homelessness and make it over the past 20 years.
Now do chances a child makes it to their 20s over the past 20 years.
Now do suicides.
No, we are not making progress on poverty, at least not in the United States. We are simply trading one problem for another. Progress has entirely stopped since essentially the 1990s, and things have gotten much much worse in the past 5 years.
Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment
Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like
The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all
> Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time.
Because it was an immigration policy that selected for that Pakistani gentleman to be in your general vicinity at that moment. But it was something more akin to Math.rand() that chose the American.
If your purpose were to post the same complaint about someone drawn at random from Pakistan, you could try using Math.rand() to pick (on) one of them, too.
Well, if you grew up with a certain standard of living and you went off and did the right things and studied the right subjects and got the good jobs - only to find out you cannot achieve anything close to what your parents and grandparents have l, there is a certain part of you that’s going to be resentful and hurt and angry.
As others have said “Happiness = Reality - Expectations.”
For the Pakistani or Mexican man coming from poverty stricken, crime riddled, violent places in the world to America that’s a major step up in quality of life. Whereas I, an American, making $150k per year as a software engineer literally cannot afford a house within two counties of my mother because the costs of housing in those areas are so sky high that I would have to squeeze my wife and three children into a small 2/2 condo in a rough part of town. This would effectively revert me back to the standard of living my poor immigrant grandparents had when they came to America.
In any case I work remote and instead live in a reasonable home in a moderate income area instead so I’m just fine. But that right there is a large part of modern generational bitterness among the youth. Even those that on paper have made it often haven’t.
Reading your comment as a foreigner is crazy - I don't even claim to understand half of your situation. What is so bad about living in another county? Did your county look like it does now when your parents bought property there? Maybe back in the day, they would've rather lived somewhere else and couldn't afford it?
You make enough money to afford rent on a small villa in very livable parts of the United States - the richest nation on earth - as far as I an tell. How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?
> How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?
They're not bitter about the situation.
They're bitter about the degradation of their situation relative to their parents' or grandparents' situations.
It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.
No I agree with that point in the article. The people I meet who complain are not standing in line at the food bank
I've seen the sentiment several times right here on HN that $250k is "basically poverty" in San Francisco. It's unbelievable to me how out of touch and spoiled one would have to be to reach that conclusion.
To my ears that just sounds like a mind trick.
If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.
But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.
I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.
Because humans compare against their previous situation. If humans don't advance against their previous situation and against their peers, even very slowly is enough but if they don't, best of luck motivating them to do anything.
Happiness = reality - expectations
I do not remember where I read this, but it has struck with me for the last 35+ years - "Poverty is a crime, but the poor are not guilty of it".
I have seen abject poverty growing up in India.. It is right in your face most of the times. I have friends from the other side of the street and pretty much, you live in very different realities.
Not all poor people are poor in the same way, that is, there are different reasons you might be poor. This is explained pretty well in this classic book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_America
> You can’t afford to go to the movies, but will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.
If you're a family it's much cheaper to have Netflix, spread these $20 over 4 people a month than going to the movie theater for $100+ every time. These $20/month are already out of reach for many, I realize that.
If you're a poor family you're better off with not having Netflix or go to the movies; you just watch DVDs and stay home.
The underlying problem not talked about in all this is how our entire financial system is built around charging you a bit more than you can bear, but not actually driving you into bankruptcy.
Then a huge percentage of your income goes to interest payments.
Or you can do without both - as a large number of people do. Taking that family to the movie theater once per year is a lot cheaper than a monthly netflix subscription, which is another option.
Or: they download movies and shows through BitTorrent, or just stream them from any of the thousands of ad-supported piracy streaming sites out there.
I see. Makes sense.
Past discussions on the topic about articles that explore the mindset:
1) John Scalzi's "Being Poor"
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712493
2) Meg Elison's "Poor in Tech"
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206899
> There is this mindset from folks that poor people must not be smart.
Ever since I was a child, that idea has been shoved down my throat. "The American Dream", "they're lazy", "they should work harder".
Spending some serious time in developing countries fixed that mentality up real quick. Being able to escape the circumstances you're born into is a rare privilege in any culture. And that aspect of life in USA seemed to end in the late 90s/early 2000s.
It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache. I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are just kind of annoying. I have an LG electric stove. Instead of modulating heat, it pulses the burner top. So you can't effectively lower the heat, just extend the time it takes to cook. The oven timer doesn't turn off, it tries to keep the food warm, and plays chime every minute. Exactly opposite of what I want, since I cook food for my dog and want the food to cool off. And it's stuff like that, the constant annoyance of dealing with badly designed products, and things breaking. I had 2 driers break (all plastic parts), and a washing machine that started leaking oil inside that damaged the clothes in the last year. It's the cumulative effect of dealign with lower quality things.
I've heard it described that being poor is expensive. The poorer you are the more expensive it is. Being poor in a poor country is the most expensive. You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee. So per gram you're paying double. You can't afford medical care, so the condition gets worse and thus more expensive to do something about. You're in debt most of the time, which is expensive. You have to travel for work, again expensive. You rent, expensive. It must be awful.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-575-0550...
When I think of so many people who can least afford to do so buying everyday items at dollar stores, CVS, gas stations, and other convenience stores with such high unit prices it bums me out.
I think its some sort of decline thats happening Some of is dumb environmental policy. Showerheads that don't spray enough water. Dishwashers that don't wash properly so you need to wash dishes before you put them in and after you take them out. Time of use pricing that means you need to cook at inconvenient times, and even still most of the bill is fixed charges. It's just going on. The decline in Canada seems like its mostly targeted towards poor people. I know a family friend that has a broken bone leg is waiting months for a specialist when anytime he could get an infection and die from infection. Totally preventable even in a third world country, yet it is what it is. My mom also know somone thats waiting for a proecdure too, and they asked hime multiple times if he wants to do Maid. It's almost cynical.
> You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee.
Imagine if they tried to do without coffee until they saved a few dollars for a can. It could take years!
How much would you save yearly if you didn't have a dog?
A few accumulated years of those savings would let you buy a better-quality drier or washing machine - saving you from replacing them regularly, or replacing your damaged clothes.
Pets are a choice that's fairly high up the Maslow hierarchy. Get rid of them, get into a better position, build up some reserves, and leave your family in a better place than you started.
Also raise your family so they have the same mindset - they need to leave their children in a better place than they started.
Dog food is about $30 a week.
$1,360 a year. Use it to buy higher quality goods that will save you more in the long run. Use the ongoing $1,360 a year PLUS the accumulating savings gained from the higher quality goods to repeat at higher levels.
A lot of the discourse about poverty reminds me of this:
> I do occasional work for my hospital’s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way.
> My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.
> The patient freaks out. “A hundred dollars a week? There’s no way I can get that much money!”
> My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.
> The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.
> My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a “profit” of $110.
> At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he’s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn’t mean that after getting rid of that she’d have $210 to spend on medication. Sure, these fancy doctors think they’re so smart, what with their “mathematics” and their “subtracting numbers from other numbers”, but they’re not going to fool her.
> At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs – and I don’t want to know – it’s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don’t even think it’s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.
From https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/25/apologia-pro-vita-sua/
It's been posted here before...Vime's boots.
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
This is basically the "Boots theory":
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Poor people also can use a washboard and line dry their clothing. Not as convenient as having machines but just about everyone did it like this till the ‘40s & ‘50s.
Most HOAs don't allow clotheslines because it makes it look as if poor people live there.
Not a lot of poor people live under onerous HOAs. HOAs are typically for middle class motgageholders.
I remember an interview with some billionaire talking about how people should grow their own food. He underpays his workers. One the surface great idea. Aside for the fact that it's hugely inefficient and why we have massive farms to take care of the inefficiency problem. Innovation was supposed to take care of this so poor people don't have to substance farm in cities. I mean by all means do that as a hobby. But keep im mind many cities have contaminated soil. People doing their own laundry also had a stay at home parent back than yo do these chores. Now 2 people need to work jobs to pay a mortgage. So don't feel its really a viable alternative
When I was a broke college student I don’t have access to a washer and dryer, so I either went to a laundromat or on occasion just washed clothing in a tub and put them up to dry. Wear jeans; they don’t need frequent washing -some manufacturers indeed recommend very infrequent washing.
It’s totally doable. Growing your own fruits and veggies is out of the question. It’s stupid -the only ones that make sense are herbs and only because when fresh they are better.
Sure, the point is that doing all of that is more expensive, in terms of time, money, flexibility and stress, than owning a washing machine.
The difference is that you need $x00 to invest into the washing machine to then benefit fromt over the next decade+
The Amish have no problem doing these things at all. It’s a mental block. People can do it.
The amish have a crappy life heavily subsidized by their surrounding neighbors. We can't all do that.
> I remember an interview with some billionaire talking about how people should grow their own food. He underpays his workers.
You don't happen to have link do you? I couldn't find any obvious hits on a search engine.
Sorry I don't. Guy looked kind of like Dan Gilbert but somewhat like a Bill O Riley personality. Maybe 2012 or 2013 interview. Possibly 60 minutes. It was in major network. I tried searching it too but couldn't find it. I remember watching an interview about an attractive female pilot that was flying to Epstain Island and can't find that interview now either. So I'm thinking maybe it got scrubbed
Have you ever in your life washed a load of laundry by hand?
I have in fact when I was a student. Granted they were only my clothes and I tried not to dirty them but also used a laundromat in most instances. Sometimes would ask a friend for access to a machine.
I have had to do actual loads of laundry (for a household, and not just clothes - towels, beddings, and more), entirely by hand, no laundromat or friend with access to a machine, which is why I ask.
It is both back-breaking and time-intensive especially if you are trying to get clean laundry not just "smells of detergent" laundry. And especially if there's someone who does manual labour in the household - getting heavy stains out effectively doubles your workload. There are many people who cannot just "try not to dirty" their clothes.
I am not trying to downplay your experience. But student poverty and poverty in the adult world without all the cushioning of a campus are very different kettles of fish.
It is —but there are also the Amish and others like them who do lots of things manually and try to avoid many modern conveniences. I don’t think they live poor lives. Definitely better than the poor in the countryside who don’t have the same ingrained customs who often need government help.
97% of amish use washing machines...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
There is a reason
See also Ted talk about best invention ever by factfulness guy
That is higher than I thought --however, they are not using modern ones, they use the wringer type where you have to wring the water from the washed clothes a couple of times.
This sounds more than legit for many places outside of US and maybe some places in US, but in general US does give you an opportunity to move up. So unless it's health issue or family issue it really is in one's own hands here. I know a ton of people who came here with no $/legal status/english and are doing really well. If you are a US citizen you already have a huge asset.
"All of the general guidance to escape being poor is actually advice for getting through being broke."
Paragraph level upvoting needs to be a thing.
I understand the sentiment. I grew up lower middle class but with financially illiterate and neglectful parents and had a great deal of food scarcity and other things that caused me to leave home at 17. It was really difficult. The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
Really great comment.
> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.
And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.
Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
That's a really good point about the free stuff people with wealth get.
Free objects are an easy to understand example. If you're in an expensive neighborhood you can walk down the street and really good get free stuff because people are throwing it out - like the nice 42" Samsung screen I'm using right now. In a poorer neighborhood that just doesn't happen.
This happened to me and I had upper middle class parents and went to a good university. Don't discount this story.
I see a lot of musing and wondering here about the cause of poverty.
One thing that's missing that I have seen a fair bit is crime and scams. People who are victims of crime can get dumped into the poverty trap through no fault of their own. For a while I was living in my car because my signature was forged by and an employer decided to simply opt out of payment. I took the employer to arbitration and won but that took 2.5 years - that's obviously a structural problem when eviction happens in 30 days.
Sure. That’s the theory. Then I read the book Evicted and I understood. One of the people gets a small windfall. Enough to stop the treadmill. What she does is buy something nice for herself because she “deserves a treat”.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
Even the US median household income is "only" $83k. Looking at stuff like this + the rest of the blog I'm not convinced the author is any less out of touch than the people this post is criticizing.
> This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
If you completely ignore cost of living and public services, then maaaybe, but still quite a stretch ;)
[dead]
I actually thought this was going to make the point that just because you are poor, doesn't mean that you have the skills to fix things on your own. It's great that the author is able to work on their own cars (but doesn't have the money). I think probably more common is that you don't have the money AND you don't have the skills.
And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.
One of the best charities that is fighting extreme poverty is GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/). Their cash transfers program (https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/gi...) have been evaluated by GiveWell who is probably the best at charity evaluation.
There's a tension between descriptive and prescriptive claims here.
Descriptively, the author is (worthily!) conveying the real, lived experience of resource scarcity so complete that standard budgeting advice is useless, tone-deaf, etc.
But prescriptively, he goes much further than "useless": advice "doesn't work". The endless runner, The Pit, eternal poverty with "no relief in sight."
This language of inescapability creates a framework where "poor" is effectively defined as "people for whom interventions don't work." This is unfalsifiable! If someone escapes, they were never really "poor".
And if that's true, then what? We can't identify what interventions help, we can't learn from success stories, we can't reason about different causes needing different solutions. The framework meant to defend the poor actually makes it impossible to help them effectively.
The author almost certainly wants to avoid victim-blaming, which is respectable. But defining poverty as this inescapable, almost metaphysical state removes all agency from both people in poverty and those who'd want to help them.
Poverty is a funnel with slippery sides and no bottom. You can struggle your entire life just not to slide downwards even further. The post's author understands this and so do I.
I climbed out of extreme adolescent poverty (for the U.S.) brought on by my mother's cancer diagnosis pre-ACA to become a top 1% earner in my cohort.
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
One of the common myths is...
If repairing auto at shop costs $1000 one should op out to spend $300 in parts and own labor.....
Paying for the wrong utility makes you remain poor as the down car repair has a very low utility to you earning that higher wage while the shop repairs your car.
It would only make high value utility sense if you did that several times and then open your own car repair shop as business owner.
Warren Buffet implies this obliquely in his writing about the choices he has made.
That only makes sense if you have the opportunity to make more money than you'd be paying the mechanic with the time you spent fixing the car. I'd venture to say that's true less often than not. Even if you day job makes more per hour than you're saving by repairing the car, it doesn't necessarily mean you can just choose to book more hours on the job. To make it more concrete, let's use the given example. Let's say the repair is $300 in parts, and $700 in labor. Let's call the shop rate $100/hour, to be conservative. So in order for it to make sense for me financially, I have to a) have a job that makes at least $100/hour and b) have the choice to work an extra 7 hours.
As a child, I went from firmly middle-class (dad was a firefighter in San Diego, CA) to pretty damn poor (we moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska). I joined the U.S. Navy, and got a B.S. while I was in, then an M.S. in SWE afterwards on the government’s dime thanks to the GI Bill. I did the latter while working nights. I now make more money than I ever thought would be possible.
I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.
If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.
> I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too
Sounds for me like "I could do it on my own, so nobody should have to help you".
I really hate this mentality of not helping others. Everybody gets better when everybody gets help.
I absolutely agree, and if my words didn’t convey that sentiment, I apologize.
The semantics here really suck.
I grew up lower middle class because for most of my life my parents both had full-time jobs. (By the definition, you are not "poor" in the US if you have a full-time job) However, we grew up what I would call educationally poor. My parents struggled with financial woes constantly. In my mind, we were broke due to their ineptness but they were poor as far as this writer is concerned. That said, I grew up around much more poverty than most in the US can imagine. I went to (public) school four days a week because the local district couldn't afford the fifth day. My parents had no thoughts about college or me getting ahead. There was no planning for my future. I had to entirely self-drive everything. There's obviously a lot more dark parts of this that come with being educationally poor as well but no need to elaborate.
Anyway, my point about all that is that I think it's really a mindset more than anything else. I don't think everyone can do what I did but I came from such a bad background with no hope at all and I still managed to be early eng for an IPO, FAANG, competitive university, etc.
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.
You, presumably, worked extremely hard at things you thought would help you long term. You also, presumably, got lucky at some points. One does not diminish the other.
And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
> And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
Yes. I'm very far left. Landlords going under the guillotine wouldn't be a bad thing in my book.
> I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.
In some woke circles, a lot will say it's impossible. Also, I don't know anyone who has managed something similar as to what I've done, especially from where I grew up or similar. I hear of random stories online but random stories online come with a lot of missing details.
> Everyone has experienced being broke.
No, they haven't.
I "like" when ppl talk about UBI and say "but ppl on UBI are not happy and lack purpose". Compare with being poor.
It's even more annoying when you consider that most proposals that gain any type of traction can't even ever approach the "I have everything now so I'm not going to work because I'm so lazy"-type abundance that the fear-mongers try to sell you. If we just were able to use some of all this wealth to create an absolute baseline of "enough money to not starve, have any kind of roof over your head and not be trapped in your current situation", I wonder what society could've looked like.
Never thought about this difference before. It has given me a lot of new ground to explore. Thanks for the effort.
Found the post to be Shockingly true.
"You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever. "
In India there is a concept of "Langar" at Sikh temples where you get free hygienic vegeterian food.
The weather is also a lot forgiving ( as of this year you will not die of cold or a heatstroke in summers - but this situation is changing with extremes weathers due to climate change)
I do not have a solution .. but am looking on this problem of poverty due to job losses since a long time.
If you know of some good pointers to look at pls share.
The article resonated but I disagree with his terminology. To me, broke and poor are exactly the same thing. He can define them differently if he wants, of course, but what he calls "broke" I would call "feeling poor" and what he calls "poor" I would call "being poor".
I grew up in circumstances that were very much "broke"/"feeling poor" and it took a long time to learn that we really weren't poor. Some of the simple actions that are mis-directed towards the truly poor (second job, DIY car/home maintenance, better financial planning) would have elevated our circumstances quite a bit. Not to the point of being rich, but definitely to less precarious circumstances. And, selfishly, I would likely not have spent my childhood feeling like an impoverished outcast from my peers.
I have trouble understanding how someone really can be poor.
I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough.
If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary.
This is possible because we live in an era of abundance. This wasn't possible for most of history.
So to me, being poor, for those without major health issues and with the ability to work full time, is either a skills issue, or a mindset issue.
This guy has a car. I don't think we need to look further than that.
> I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage
Your math might be wrong here.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, so if you have a FT job, that's $14.5K/yr, or $1200/mo.
10% of that is $1450/yr, or $120/mo.
I live in Canada. Minimum wage is 16$/hr where I live, that gives around 32k$/yr. At 3200$/yr 10% might be stretch, but I could probably make it work without relying too much on social services. It wouldn't be comfortable, but I would survive.
For example working in a place where I can get some free food, 500$ for food is manageable. 2400$ rent/services (e.g. rural areas with roommates) and 300$ misc. Always walk for transportation. Yes, it's a stretch.
Exactly. There are many ways to make things work even if you’re earning very little. People don’t think about giving up the nice things they feel they’re entitled to. But you have to be willing to change where you live, what kind of food you eat, who you share a roof with, what you drive (if at all), and all of that. If you haven’t done those things, you can’t claim you’re poor in my opinion, because you haven’t made the life changes you could make to make ends meet.
Telling poor people we're living in an era of abundance is not a little bit tone deaf. Also, having a car doesn't make one not poor— A car in America is not a luxury, it's a requirement to have a job in most places.
I'm "low-rich" (middle class?) poor eg. I have a six-fig job but I also have almost six-fig of debt, so I have after paying all my bills (mostly debt) almost nothing left. But I have an apt/cool cheap car, toys like 2nd hand computers/cameras. I've been in debt for the last 15 years since I went into college. I don't eat canned food often actually trying to fast as it's hard to not gain weight when I spend most of my time sitting in a chair in front of a computer. I do recreational drinking so it's not like I'm absolutely poor.
To me it's still insane that education (the implied reason for your debt? correct me if I'm wrong) is so absurdly expensive in the US. Mind you, I'm saying that from another country where education isn't free, but most people will never be able to have anything remotely approaching six figure debt. You presumably work in a professional field, judging by your salary, yet you have an enormous anchor that's been dragging behind you for all your life. In some ways, the high-lower-class person that has a poor salary but isn't indebted might have it better than you.
I wonder how much society would change if that system of student loans was reformed to offload the burden from young people, how much more growth there could be if these people weren't stuck in debt.
My student loans weren't as bad $30K, the rest is from other things eg. CC debt/car loan (28% APR). I also help out my own blood-related family eg. I have given away over $100K over the course of a few years.
But mostly I'm dumb, buying things I can't afford. The six-fig jobs come and go also but in general I've had at least $75-$83K jobs aside from the couple six-fig jobs I've had. I only started to have that kind of money in 2019 to now. I spent 2023 working in a warehouse/my own fault that time I went down to the $50K range or so with side gig work added in to warehouse work.
I did pay $3K for an MRI one time, well not yet it's on a defaulted card.
Oh and loneliness eg. I spent $1.2K at a strip club one time.
It's crazy how you go up in levels though like in 2016 I was living on $20K+ a year, now it's $100K+ a year
That is the way it should be. Well more or less, you didn't state what your debt is from, some are better than others. College debt can be a good investment long term (depends on the degree). Buying a house is a good long term investment if you live there for a long time.
You should save for retirement and a "rainy day". However remember you can't take it with you. If you have the above savings, an extra penny, and something to spend a penny on spend it. You can't take it with you, so you should be at 0 at the end of every month (again ignoring retirement and rainy day savings)
I didn't finish my degree but I got lucky I picked up programming/built up a good work history
yeah once I get to $0 net worth I'll start saving/investing
In the book "Starling House", being poor is defined as: you make a list for what you need, another for what you want, and then you throw away the second list.
The author of this post goes even further than that: He says to make a list of only what you need, and then flounder while you fail to acquire the items on that list.
This is kind of a good way to understand that people who never really struggled in life aren't able to understand, step into struggling's person's shoes. It's simply an unknown concept for them. Everyone's values, perspective, actions are dictated by the past experience. I made my way from a poor country to a western-European wealthy one. And the question that amuses me is "So, how do you like here?". I fucking LOVE it here. People don't even understand that I can compare these nice streets to an absolute shithole. And they either have never lived abroad or just been to some neighboring countries. And they talk about food, views, sea, whatever. Oh man, they don't understand that just going outside is already a nice experience for me. Going to a doctor, using public transport, taking my kid to a nice school. Ha! I just tell them that yeah, it's nice, I like it. But there's a huge gap between our concepts of nice places.
Think growing up middle class is possibly a sort of sweet spot on this, especially combined with a slight jump up the ladder as one ages. Not burdened by the mental challenges described here but also not so disconnected from reality for "let them eat cake" syndrome of the really rich
While I get it, I disagree with some of the premise... especially the idea of working two jobs. My dad has worked multiple jobs at a time when I was growing up... I've worked multiple jobs at a time as recently as this year. Now, I'm getting old (50yo) and really couldn't handle it as well as I could in my 20s, but I still did it.
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
Lots of low skill jobs have constantly shifting schedules given at the last possible minute (day by day sometimes) that don’t necessarily allow the time luxury of juggling multiple jobs. Fast food is a great example.
Not sure about that even.. in my late teens I worked fast food and as a clerical temp worker (I could type fast) for data entry/processing. The fast food job didn't have an issue scheduling me just in the evenings/weekends.
A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
>in my late teens I worked fast food and as a clerical temp worker
Yes and the world you experienced decades ago doesn't exist anymore.
>a clerical temp worker (I could type fast) for data entry/processing
Rarely available as a job anymore in the US. People in other countries can do it for cheaper, or local people who are so thoroughly disabled that it's legal to pay them almost nothing just to give them something to do as the government pays them to survive.
"Just walk in with a firm handshake" hasn't been a thing in forever.
>A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
No they wont, because they can just tell you to deal with it or find someone else.
If you aren't willing to take exactly the hours they give you, exactly the shifts they give you, or figure out how to cover those shifts yourself, they'll just stop giving you hours and pay someone else.
Even if you have a friendly manager, corporate will fire him if he isn't pushing you hard enough. First level "managers" don't even get to manage anymore, they just follow whatever policy or some algorithms tell them they have to do.
Well my daughter is juggling 3 part time jobs... But hey, cope however you choose.
I mean, you can not be sure all you want, but I promise you it’s this way - know from personal experience.
it’s even been written about: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/economy/retail-fast-food-work...
I know the above may not be a popular opinion... maybe it comes from me being older than a lot of people here (50yo) and having grandparents that lived through the Great Depression. I just don't see the point in being defeatist.
The first mention I've seen of The Great Depression.
I guess most folks are too young to have had direct contact with people who lived through it.
It caused decades of collective trauma. Almost the entire nation became devastatingly poor, overnight. Many folks that lived through it became compulsive hoarders.
My great grandparents and grandparents weren't hoarders... But they were careful not to be wasreful. They would never have bought into Rubbermaid containers when there's margarine or cool whip containers that can be cleaned and reused.
Another point the author doesn't make but probably should is the home economics of DIY: A solo person gets 24h a day, just like everybody else. Ideally 8 are spent asleep. Another 8 (minimum) are probably spent working. That leaves a person 8 hours to do their whole life. It eats away at personal time, it bleeds into work and sleep, often by interrupting or occluding the ability to do either.
> It eats away at personal time, it bleeds into work and sleep
And, most significantly, eats away at time which could be allocated for retraining/career-advancement.
Well written. Straight to the point. When poor is a rat race and no room for risk. Any mistake and you're done. Even if you see opportunity you can't afford to try. And hopelessness.
The author complains about the cost of fixing their car. I come from a country where vehicle ownership puts you in the top 20% in terms of wealth. A motorbike is often the farthest most get.
I can appreciate the totally different perspective that must bring. I would also add that living in a car-centered society where you are expected to have a car presents its own set of challenges, namely that you can't afford to live near food sources (grocery stores, etc.) or jobs because it's expected that people drive to those things. For people in those situations struggling to make ends meet, I think they view their car more as a required liability they struggle to maintain rather than a privilege.
95% of American commuters get to work in a personal vehicle.
The distance Americans drive is very high. Driving 30 minutes to work might mean traveling ~45km because the infrastructure is heavily reliant on highways. The average daily travel is about 65km.
Many motorbikes aren’t legal or fast enough for the interstate.
America is just built in a way intended car infrastructure. The poorest in America have above average access to cars compared to the rest of the world as a whole, but that doesn’t make them wealthy.
Owning an operating a car in the US is more affordable than many other countries, and things like gas prices, the car industry itself, and road maintenance are heavily subsidized/supported by the government.
The US basically chose personal vehicles as the primary way to get around and structured society around it, with only a small amount of exceptions.
A functioning car in the US is not really much more money than a motorbike, especially because it’s far more common and popular. Motorbikes are more like a niche product.
It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
What stopped the baltimore kid from getting any valuable/marketable skills? Why did he drop school? In the end, it's a sum of all their little personal decisions. Sure, family and environment play their important role, but it's still personal fault.
> The high(er) paying jobs
What about low paying jobs? I’m sure some people on minimum wage have netflix - which automatically makes them non-poor according to TFA.
I see the steps. What if they have no family members or they do not give a damn?
Start again please from the state of being homeless but assume this person has no family members, or has relatives, but they do not give a damn.
It crumbles, IMO.
Maybe you didn't read the whole comment?
I dunno if that last sentence was there when I made the comment...
with respect to food i wanted to ask HN here, what if a bunch of people came together. Let us say 10000 americans who are poor decide to pool in money and import groceries from a country with much cheaper prices (say India) would this cost less after shipping? What if there was a startup that groups people like this in a bunch and does weekly shipping of groceries from a low cost country? Would that help?
I feel like the author tells us that being poor means worrying about problems you can’t fix all the time? Or at least, that you believe you can never fix them?
If you don’t have the $300 for the own part repair on your truck, there’s no point in worrying about it. If you truck breaks it breaks, it’s never going to recover unless you think of something else. Complaining that you don’t have $300 for even the home repair doesn’t do anything to improve the situation. Better figure out a way to live if the truck breaks.
How do you get to work if your car/truck breaks? 95% of American commuters are using personal vehicles.
“Fixing your car” is just one example and not anywhere close to the worst imaginable one.
“Just don’t worry about skipping meals”
“Just don’t worry about that abscess”
“Just don’t worry about getting evicted”
You don’t get to work if your car or truck breaks. Now knowing that, what are your best options if it does?
You can spend time finding solutions, or spend time worrying, or writing blog posts saying that people don’t know what it’s like to be poor. I do plenty of spiraling myself, but I try to recognize that it’s not very productive.
Worrying or complaining about the fact that you won’t have any food tomorrow is not going to fill your belly.
I don’t think the blog post is written by an author thar is currently poor and is therefore wasting their precious time writing blog posts instead of figuring out their life.
I think the point it’s trying to convey is that people too often blame the poor without stepping in their shoes.
If you think that conversation isn’t “very productive” I’m not sure what planet you’re living on. Certainly not the same planet where the world’s richest country is trying to cut food assistance, add work requirements to social safety net programs, refuse to make even the most basic healthcare services universal, cut the basic healthcare services that it does provide the poorest, and generally has a cultural zeitgeist actively hostile to people in poverty.
You say that the poor person whose car broke down should just magically stop worrying and do something productive like find a solution, but don’t you think that having to do that constantly sounds a bit exhausting?
As someone who is not poor you have no need to train your brain to ignore survival alarms like that. If your car breaks down you have ample options, just throw your uber ride on a credit card, take your car to the fancy dealership that will give you a courtesy car, own a second or third car, or own a nice new car that will never strand you in the first place.
Your belly never feels hunger for too long, your body never feels excessive cold or heat, you don’t feel the pain of untreated preventable health conditions, you don’t feel your body aching from working multiple physical jobs, you don’t feel the adrenaline rush of being mugged or hearing bullets fly in your neighborhood, the police don’t work with a heavy hand because of where you live and they don’t harass you for how you look, you don’t breathe the pollution and don’t hear the noise that disproportionately impacts lower income neighborhoods, [1] you don’t have the government coming to move you and take your house because it’s cheap and convenient to do so. [2]
Those are actual physical survival feelings that you’re just telling the poor to stop worrying about.
[1] Interstate highways don’t tend to cut through/demolish established wealthy neighborhoods.
[2] Here’s a random example: the LA Dodgers stadium was built on the site of a working class neighborhood where the residents were kicked out in a fiasco that can only be described as an abuse of eminent domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chavez_Ravine
We know complaining doesn't fix any problem, but we can't help it.
Easier said to tell people to get on with their lives.
That’s as true for the weather as anything else xD
I just feel people always say ‘I have no options’, when they eminently have tons of them. They’re just all bad ones.
Yeah, this right here has never been poor.
“Just don’t worry”
“Just pull yourself by your bootstraps”
“Just stop being poor”
No, I said to stop worrying about stuff you can’t fix. That’s easier said than done, but entirely wealth independent. It’s like worrying about impending death when you are a 90 year old billionaire.
Imagine you can get 20 rolls of toilet paper at Costco for $20. Or one roll at your corner store for $5.
However, you need a car to get to Costco, which you don't have, so now you're looking at riding the bus there. But you just worked two back-to-back 8 hour shits, and you're a zombie so that's not happening. Besides, $20 is a stretch, you really might need that $15 to cover a few meals until your next paycheck if you can't get enough hours this month.
So, you have to pay $5 for what should be a $1 roll of TP.
Now imagine that for everything - food, rent, everything.
To quote a song, "having money is not everything, not having it is"
The geographic variation on the semantics of poverty always amaze me.
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
There are countries where you can have none of those, but still visit a doctor and not worry about violent crime. The dynamics vary.
That is a great point and probably the most valuable take out of this discussion.
We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
On Reddit, I once saw someone saying something like “You never hear about the Chinese having to live out of their cars.” with respect to a pro-communist take. Forgetting the politics, it really brought home to me how mind-blowingly wealthy Americans are. The poor man this guy conceives of has a motor vehicle.
> Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?
This part gets me. I once saw someone on Twitter who was like "I was poor, I worked a bazillion hours a week and never saw my wife and kids, just so I could put food on the table! If I could do it, anyone can!"
And one response was just like, "if you need to do that just to make ends meet, the system is obviously broken. If I'm gonna work that hard, there better be a private jet at the end of that road"
Yeah, just because one CAN kill themselves for capitalism, doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to.
One way to imagine being poor: imagine lots of slow leaks. Your bank account leaks, your car's engine leaks, your mental health leaks. Everything is slowly getting worse, and you know it. Every time you try to fix one leak, the other leaks start leaking more.
You might think, hooray, I fixed the engine leak! And then suddenly your wife is leaving you and taking the kids. So you rush to court to deal with that, and park in the wrong place, and your car gets impounded; getting it out costs money you don't have. In trying to deal with all that, your mental health suffers, so you're rude at work, and now your job is at risk. So then you work on being more positive at work, you finally get dual custody of the kids, and pay for the car to be returned... and then the transmission dies.
It's that, but your entire life.
I feel like the target audience is this is people who have zero sympathy for the poor, but the thing is that's generally not an opinion they reasoned themselves into. They don't want to spend the money helping anybody so they rationalize that a decide nobody deserves help. So don't expect any minds to change based on facts and logic.
(For the record I give no money to charity because I'm completely selfish; I make no assumptions about the people I don't help)
I've been there as a young man. It wasn't very nice.
I always seemed to find the money for beer and smokes somehow though.
I don't understand what am I supposed to do with this information.
Now that I know what it means to be poor what should I do?
This information should inform your political and personal decisions relating to poverty going forward.
You are now educated about being poor. Enjoy!
Go back to reading man pages for fun - your venture into non-technical writing was a failed experiment.
Remember it before considering giving advice to the poor and... just don't.
I worked at a media company that used to track time the users spent watching TV, so they could charge advertisers accordingly. "Hundred million watched the Super Bowl", things like that.
The way they measured that was by having devices installed on peoples homes, that tracked TV usage, and all of it was planned around demographics as well. People would get a few bucks for having the device installed. But hey, if you wanted to measure the top 1% of income, what would you do? A few bucks meanth nothing, so it was always in terms of 'favors' and 'gifts'. A nice champagne here and there.
What about the bottom 5, 10%? Well, you can't give them any money, because that could effectively move them from one social class to another (not the US, but locally this would be moving them from Class E to Class D). So you took them to lunch.
I thought it was wild once I learned that.
This Dickensian pastiche ignores the difference between being "poor" and being part of a client population, which covers a substantial part of the same nominal income bracket.
> never see my wife? My kids?
It seems you have what matters man.
I’ve ridden the spectrum, as it were. I grew up upper middle class, with a sprawling McMansion, a car for each sibling, a country club membership, the works. I’ve been broke, squandering money and racking up debt, but finding enough escape hatches to avoid irreparable harm. I’ve been homeless, getting by through the good graces of friends and family until I got back on my feet through the help of a good friend and wildly risky move to a place I’d never been, sight unseen. I’ve spent years being poor in a food desert, stretching pizza deliveries across a week of meals because the nearest store was a ten mile walk down an interstate highway. And now, through luck, work, and the help of friends (but mostly luck, statistically speaking), I’m eking out a good life in a good apartment with extortionate rent and a toxic job.
This author lays out the experience of being “poor” perfectly. It’s a case of doing all the right things, and still failing. It’s being constantly stuck in survival mode no matter how hard you work, because there’s always a new expense, a new hurdle, a new obstacle to reset your progress - because being poor means you can’t even afford the “save point” of insurance or redundancies or savings to fall back on.
It’s why even when I was scraping above the $200k mark at PriorCo in TC, I was championing more social services. More healthcare support, more housing assistance, more compensation. We could afford it, but shareholder returns came first. It was sickening knowing colleagues who lived in vans because despite pulling down six figure salaries, it simply wasn’t enough for rent when expenses continued to pile up for injuries or illnesses.
Those of means and privilege simply do not grasp how hard it is to exist in America without large sums of cash behind you. I was struggling on less when rent was still considered reasonable, in one of the cheapest states to live in. In the fifteen-odd years since, it’s just gotten exponentially worse, even as the stock market has exploded in value.
It’s why I never stop arguing for better, because I know how bad it can get.
I was just lucky enough to escape.
> "What happened to society? I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision. That came from my education".
Conservatives have three explanations for why people are poor:
Particularly the numerous variations of 2 have found widespread success when explaining to the poor the reasons for why they are poor:
2.a) the foreigners / jews / muslims invading and pillaging our glorious, Christian home country are stealing their jobs
2.b) the socialists / communists / antifa bureaucrats are stealing their wages
This can be tailored and highly specific towards the target audience (e.g., Facebook Ads, Twitter Bots, in a small town with abandoned industry), alternatively keeping it broad and widely accessible (for Podcasts, banners, or national TV). What really matters for explaining this with impact though is the tone. It is imperative to be loud and angry, ideally you are yelling at your audience. Repeat yourself often and use the most limited vocabulary possible. You need to empathize with the anger of the poor for the clear and obvious injustice that has happened to them. Leaning into that emotion will make anyone happily abandon any remains of rationality and critical thinking, which they have experienced as being completely futile in advancing their own quality of life, or improving their family's living situation. Which is of course the reason why Conservatives would like to have as many poor people as possible amongst their constituencies, and are fighting hard to actively push more people into poverty. They know those people will be their most faithful voters.
Im not rich, but i get by, and can say i live a decent life (in terms of what i can get "with fiat"). Im from a totally normal middle class-ish family. I always worked (since like 14-15) and got my own savings started when i was young.
I really cant think of why you could not get out of beeing poor, IF you have the wits and willpower. If you grind some shithole job for 6 bucks/hour you should think really hard on your choices. Where did you spend your check? Do you live in a too expensive appartment? Did you have kids without being absolutely fucking sure you can support them? Did you fuck up something like foolish debts? Do you drive a car when you can take the bus?
Im not really sure what to say, but i know what I would do if things webt south.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but considering how imperfect humans are, it’s easy to make a mistake or two (or to basically inherit mistakes from parents, in many cases), and I think one of the problems is, it’s very, very difficult to claw your way back after that. It would be ideal if a small screw-up could be more feasibly repaired, but tbh I don’t know a fair and good way to do that that didn’t generate dependence and a bailout cycle.
"Im from a totally normal middle class-ish family."
Maybe that's why you can't comprehend the idea of being poor in a fashion that doesn't let you escape, even working as hard as you possibly can and making all the right choices.
I have seen kids from poor families make it. Many have been highly successful in life, even we should not measure it by pay-check.
It usually boils down to alcohol/drugs, idiotic credit card debts and/or living way beyond your actual capability to sustain that lifestyle, and having zero savings, and possibly having children way too young.
Sorry, but poverty is also a spectrum. Many people who have never been poor cannot understand that, but even if you have been poor, you still cannot fully understand someone else’s poverty.
People will say anything to justify stealing another person's earnings or work product.
The point of disagreement here seems to be about poverty itself. The author (and many in these comments) seem aghast at the very idea of poverty: how can this state be allowed to exist?!
The truth is that humanity’s default state is one of “poverty”. It should evoke no surprise or confusion whatsoever, and yet it does.
Poverty is an entirely valid and normal state for a person to be in. There isn’t a vast shadowy conspiracy trying to keep you down; you’re just at the default state of humanity.
Humans improving their situation, now THAT is surprising and interesting, and it’s the thing we should be focusing our curiosity on. If you’re poor, emulate those who aren’t. Maybe they’re onto something.
The alternative is to blame the vast shadowy conspiracy, “capitalism”, etc, and remain poor. That’s an entirely valid mode of being. Nobody owes you anything.
This is talking about philosophical liberalism.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
> to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt
This is a goal, not a claim.
> and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
> This is a goal, not a claim.
Whose goal? Seriously. My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
>This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
Did you read the article? The vein here is that liberalism, the official ideology of capital, is what is used to engage with analyzing other peoples lives. They use the tennets of liberalism to judge what others make of themselves. They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all. People who thrive or support the status quo idealize the material conditions in the world. That reasoning gets passed onto the poor. It is essentially an ideology of the rich.
> Whose goal? Seriously.
The goal of classical liberalism, obviously.
> My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
Classical liberalism understands the word "equality" to mean something different from what you think it means.
> Did you read the article?
I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant. You're saying that classical liberalism says things that it does not say. The article is also not about classical liberalism.
> They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all.
None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
Wait, I'm talking about liberalism and classical/social liberalism as extensions of that. Im referring to the overarching philosophy and parts of its derivatives.
>I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant.
You didnt read it. I said that the group of ideas that are talked about in the article belong to liberalism, the philosophy. That they are derived from philosophical liberalism, the overarching philosophy of capitalist countries.
> None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
I am specifically saying that these ideals cannot be attained. The philosophy is in negation of itself. That they are unworkable and cannot be practiced while there are classes within society. Moreso that they are how the rich defend their own rule, knowing that they are unworkable ideals. Its a philosophy analogous to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
> You didnt read it.
I did, and it's against guidelines to make such a charge anyway.
The article is irrelevant to the point your making. There is nothing it could say, in principle, that would rescue your argument.
Because your argument is of the form "liberalism says X", but liberalism does not, in fact, say X.
Therefore, whether
> the group of ideas that are talked about in the article belong to liberalism, the philosophy.
is completely irrelevant.
> I am specifically saying
And you are incorrect in this.
Pfffff, you're basically saying "you're not saying anything relevant", but never actually contributing anything to the conversation.
Alright lets do an exercise...
Please look at any of the widely accepted tenets of liberalism. Okay? Got em? Keep them in mind for this next part...
Now I will distill my argument into one sentence for you:
I claim this article is a critique of the widespread notion that it is possible to figuratively "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", I claim that this notion is founded on the assumption that liberalism has attained its goals or that it is in progress of that.
And I promise you that if you put an ounce of effort you can see what I'm saying. In fact I'll help you more.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstrap" people are either in a financially stable position or support the status quo. They use this phrase to signify that, through a liberal lens of liberty, you are wholly responsible for your condition, and not only that, but that you should be capable of such feat BY VIRTUE OF the benefits bestowed upon you by a liberal economy/country. These benefits that they claim ARE the tenets of liberalism, such as: the right to private property, political equality, rule of law, freedom of assembly, economic freedom, etc.
Do you see? This is, fundamentally, a critique of liberalism.
Please don't reply if you don't have anything to contribute.
> It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
IMO good government (i.e. the government that I would want to live under) treats all citizens equally under the law, not because everyone is equally lucky or everyone who is poor is a terrible person or something but because it's not the government's business to do anything but enforce the law. Good government is not a caretaker and is not a bank. Communities should look after their needy members and give them a lift up, not the government. If our communities aren't tightly knit enough for that, then that's a different and IMO deeper problem.
This is a false dichotomy.
The problem isn't that there is equality in the eyes of the law. The problem is what that means in practice.
A poor citizen has the right to use their money as they see fit. <spoiler>A poor citizen has the right to: lobby, to fund think tanks, to advertise their interests, to sway research through funding, to fund the careers of politicians, to gift resources to local police departments, to fund ballot initiatives and referendums, to acquire media outlets, to fund documentary films, to buy bots online, to fund lawsuits against the corporations, to host fundraisers with high net-worth individuals.</spoiler>
How many poor people are able to do this? Very very very tiny amounts. These rights are nearly exclusively actionable by a certain class of people.
And you may argue about the philosophical implications of 'equality of opportunity' vs 'equality of outcome'. But the thing is this so called "neutral legal framework" leads to a monopoly of power by the rich, because the law pretends both of these kinds of people are the same.
The very framework is in negation of itself because it leads power in the hands of a few.
That is the true problem of this framework. And to suggest that the alternative must be "equality of outcome" is a false dichotomy. The "neutrality of the government" is more like "a broken clock is right twice a day" kind of thing.
The founding fathers were already aware of this, in fact I think they made the state in their own interests seeing as during the founding of the US the vast majority of Americans at the time were illiterate farmers/workers and/or slaves. In a very real sense the state was made for the rich by the rich, but with lingo that pretended it was for everyone.
This is why class politics is the most important aspect of politics in our lives. We live in class society where there are fundamental differences between classes of people. This difference is not strictly and categorically based on the amount of money they have, but on HOW they fund their lives which allows them to have extra rights. Effectively we can't afford all the rights. This is the classic "All animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others".
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OK, one of my clients is a payday lender in a wealthy country. I have the complete banking histories of 10s of thousands of low income people in front of me.
I insist that the distinguishment proposed in the article is BS.
There is a small subset of clients with disabilities AND absense of insurance/government pensions, whose situation is permanent for all intents and purposes. But everyone else, one-off clients as well as regulars have ups and downs, and get through defaults or manage to repay their debt at times. Gambling and alcohol are a clear factor (drug abuse is harder to identify on someone's bank statement), but cases such as divorce from a partner with abuse problems bring relief most of the time. Children grow up or grow older and require less work or even generate income of their own.
I know it's different, when you live in a low income country and everyone around is poor and scamming people on the internet or marine piracy are the only possible access options to wealth, but that's a different topic.
another thing the op doesn't mention is a pro-risk attitude, when you are poor it is rational to take risks, or even seek them out, because there is very little to loose...
Half of the poor voted for Trump who has been doing everything in his power to make them poorer. Speaking of the people as a whole, you get what you vote for.
I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.
In the terminology of the article - which I enjoyed and recommend that you read when you get time - these friends of yours are not 'poor', they are 'broke'.
article says broke for temporary, these people poor 10-20 years. that doesnt sounds like temporary. they get government or familiy support, and rarely work short term here and there.
That still doesn't make them poor.
I see this all the time in developed countries. The “poor” in a place like America are different from the poor elsewhere. Often times, the poor in America are just people making bad decisions, living beyond their means. You see it in the places they choose to live in, the cars they own, the number of children they have, etc.
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Ah all you had to do was mention avocados and we had boomer bingo.
This argument is baseless.
All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).
"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.
Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.
You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.
> Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help.
It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.
On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.
Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder.
Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.
I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
Just curious. What is your experience with poverty in your own life?
I grew up in an ultra rural part of Pennsylvania. I honestly thought my life was pretty good, and I had great parents and a great school with teachers who cared. My parents were(/are) great, but I later found out my school was ranked D- in the state. I think my parents didn't have huge earnings potential, but were really good at saving. So, my thoughts come directly from my life. A grade school friend of mine came home one day and told his parents that his little sister lost her retainer at school, and his parents were wailing and moaning for literally days over the $150 replacement. Meanwhile, my little brother did the same exact thing a few months earlier and my parents were able to deal with the issue, even though my mom and dad worked the exact same jobs as my friends parents.
My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.
> You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
I feel like this is an AI summary of https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-the-experience-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26300139)
Not an summary, I think.
TFA said something cancel Netflix as "advice for getting through being broke". This is not in the "original" article you linked.
Could be AI (I honestly don't know), but it is not a "summary".
Well the other article is 10 times better, so everyone should go read that one instead :-)
If it is then his AI policy lies..
Very true but I also think that being poor is a mindset to change. I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor. We knew, they knew, that at anytime they could turn it around, and they did. They wanted to do things that were not the norm so they chose not to follow society's norms so they lacked money and they lived day to day. Once they changed their mind set they were able to work their way to an American middle class. It was not easy but they did it. They had little money but they were never poor.
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
I can give you an example. Single divorced mother with two kids. Working in social care for minimal wage, often earning lower amounts than the people she cares for. There are no savings, no relatives to help. Job change is an uncertainty that could introduce homelessness for the whole family if it doesn't work out. Not many options there. Now if you move this scenario out of rich countries it will get even worse
My mental poster child for "poor" is exactly this person. She had three kids (all in public school), lived in section 8 and worked part-time bagging groceries. The kids had nothing nice, clothes were all hand-me-down or donations with holes in them from being so old. No car, no health care, horrible dentistry to the point of becoming an emergency.
They had a bigger TV than my middle class family, a premium channel package, and ordered pizza not infrequently. I get all the arguments, but when you're working 20 hours a week and living off food stamps and subsidized housing you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor. The person described in TFA as being poor is rare at best.
> you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor.
Some people might be inclined to try to drag you for the first half of that statement, and honestly I'm inclined to try to not judge poor people for what I usually assume is one or two small splurges that raise their moods just high enough to not slit their wrists, you know?
But I think the second half of the sentence is kinda fair. IF they are self-aware that they are choosing to divert money from more important things, it's their life and I don't really want to pass judgment. If they whine constantly that "the system" is keeping them down while continuously making "unforced" errors with their money, that's when it makes me start to roll my eyes.
I don't think I would criticize those decisions for someone working 40+ hours a week either, even if they are on assistance programs. I think it's foolish but you kind of get to make foolish decisions to a degree when you're putting in the effort. It was the combination of all of the factors.
> I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor.
I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.
For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".