Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

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Having lived in the US and three different European countries, I now live in what is supposedly one of the poorest European countries, Bulgaria.

Apart from the few third world countries I had visited, I had never seen real poverty until I went to the US. I had expected the US to be like Western Europe with bigger cars and more fast food, but I found infrastructure such as roads, airports, bridges, railroads that were seemingly left unrepaired for decades, public institutions like schools or government agencies were in worse shape than in the better Eastern European countries. They even had power outs not unlike the Eastern European ones. And just about everywhere we drove, even in wealthy areas such as Orange County or Manhattan, one wrong turn would take us to neighborhoods where we literally felt unsafe.

A few months ago I visited the poorest regions of Bulgaria, which happen to be (one of) the poorest region(s) of the entire European Union, Severozapaden Region, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severozapaden_Planning_Region. It's just South of the Danube, in the North western part of Bulgaria. And yes, it is poor, barely any businesses, and young people are moving out of there to find a future elsewhere. But a regular lower middle class suburb in America feels vastly more hopeless, rundown and outright dangerous.

I love the US and the US is a great place to be wealthy and I still believe your chances of making it really big are better in the US than in Europe as a whole. But Europe provides for a better life right now, not only for the poor, but also for most of us regular folks with no or little wealth and with lower or upper middle class income.

Thanks for sharing that. I've had similar experiences.

I grew up in Seattle, went to school in Philly, and just spent a year traveling through 14 countries in Asia (incl 6mo in India). The poverty on the streets of my hometown when I returned was absolutely shocking. And I found the poverty in Philadelphia to seem so much more crushing than what I saw in far poorer areas, like Indian slums or Laotian villages (I'm really struggling to deconstruct exactly why I had this feeling).

I live in a relatively poor village in Laos and have visited many villages way poorer than the one I live in and I think a big part of the reason people can stay happy and have hope on a budget of a few dollar a day is the strong sense of family and community in these villages. The poor in the western world seem much more isolated in comparison.

I think part of the reason for that contrast is that at least from my POV (being raised in poverty early on and only getting out of that that situation when my parents found work at Raytheon Beechcraft) is that poor people in the US will try to buy a the appearance of not being poor but never really save anything for things that really matter like healthcare and education. It's not that poor people can't save for it, but that it seems that US society puts an emphasis appearances rather than on the actual condition of one's economic standing. So, I've seen friends of mine (similarly poor or lower-middle-class) own nice clothes but have zip in terms of savings or things that could make their lives easier (ex. a well maintained car).

I want to emphasize that this isn't an attempt to convict people in those economic situations as bad, but that as a society we're really superficial in terms of taking care of poverty itself. Having a house, a car, and etc doesn't mean you can't be poor or have no economic safety net to even maintain that standard of living which my parents still don't (even at 57 years of age). What makes this worse is the fact that some people snub anyone that is perceptibly "poor". It's something that irks me because I've known very bright and capable people of the same economic standing as I started with getting rejected from job opportunities and even social occasions purely based on their economic standing. Then people wonder why poor people stay poor.

I have a very good friend that lives in one of Romania's largest cities. She regularly shows me photos of her city, and her surroundings, and I know what the economic prospects are of the people that live there. My opinion is the exact opposite of yours. I can't imagine the despair, the poverty, the lack of potential, that nations such as Bulgaria (median income of about $300-$400 / month) or Romania face. She just watched her grandmother die, with 'free' healthcare, because the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her, and the local hospital had no MRI or CT machines - as she got worse, they wanted to take her to another hospital in another city, but the family - which has an average income in Romania - had no car to make the trips. So the grandmother died, at about 67 years old, while the family never even found out what she died of. Must be that universal healthcare I hear so much about that everyone but Americans have.

I think you're completely off base, and obviously so. Americans have among the highest disposable incomes on earth, falling household to income debt levels, and a jobs picture that has been improving non-stop for five years. Americans also have among the highest median household net wealth levels of any nation, and the best universities by far. Bulgaria? That claim almost comes across more as propaganda, when you understand that even Romanians look down upon the poverty in Bulgaria.

I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia. My experience is the exact opposite of what you describe. Where I lived there were no homeless; wages were half the national average, and we had great public schools, with some of the best rated teachers in the state; everyone had a home, and a car; a nearly zero murder rate; the standard of living was on par with the US median because the cost of living was very low; unemployment was higher, and people lived relatively simple lives when it comes to materialism. This is all mostly still true there today. Compared to the childhood of real poverty my Romanian friend endured growing up there in the 1990s, I grew up in paradise. Where I grew up, the poor there today have access to medical care and routine medical tech via medicaid, which the median household in her Romanian city can't get access to without going to Bucharest.

But don't take my word for it -

OECD better life index:

http://cdn.dejanseo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/better...

And

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fu...

You could also run a dozen other economic metrics like long-term unemployed, unemployment rate, median income, median household net worth, household debt to income, health outcomes from medical care, access to the latest medical technology and drugs. You could compare classic markers for materialism for the poverty line and what it's defined by in say the US vs Bulgaria. The US does extremely well in most comparisons. There are perhaps eight countries on earth that produce better quality of life outcomes than the US, and for the top 75% maybe only five countries do better.

I don't want to belittle your experience, but we just had something similar happen within our family, in the United States.

My wife's grandmother was on the decline due to dementia. Her care requirements were so high that we had to put her into a care facility. The problem is, because her symptoms didn't require putting her into a $6k a month facility, insurance wouldn't cover it. So for the remaining year of her life, we had to come up with the $4.5k a month for her care.

The care for people here is expensive, so much so that it can destroy families.

> the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her

That happens here too, unless you have the ability to pay for a trip to the Mayo clinic.

> the local hospital had no MRI or CT machines

Ours does, and the costs for using it are prohibitive if you have no insurance. In fact if you have no insurance, you aren't welcome at the hospital unless you have a life threatening problem, like actively bleeding out.

> I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia.

That doesn't describe even my hometown, a relatively rich corner of Montana with lots of disposable income coming in from California expats. We have homeless, folks who can't afford a car, a few murders a year... in a town with a population around 40k.

I'm now curious of where you lived in Appalachia and of what economic background you came.

I too grew up in Appalachia and quite poor ($6000 / year for a family of 5), and aside from the camaraderie of poorness, I wouldn't want to inflict that hardship on anyone: few jobs, poor food, poor housing, poor schools, poor hospitals, poor infrastructure.

Where I grew up there were two classes of people: the 'professional class' and the 'working class'. The professional class were multi-generational groups of irresponsible doctors, preying lawyers, slum lords, land owners, government cronies, and other sorts of con men. Their spouses, children, and cousins took most of the other middle class occupations. The rest of us were left with the scraps of broken 100 year economies of iron, coal, and steel. And, these two group rarely mingled.

When people ask me what it was like to live in Appalachia in the 80s and 90s, I tell them to rent Gummo http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/.

> camaraderie of poorness

Would you mind expanding on that?

The bond low income families form in a local area due to their shared struggle.

Yeah I got that, I wanted to hear more about it

"the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her"

Yeah, unfortunately a lot of our good doctors are swept by the offers made by the western countries. It's sad, but true.

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