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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

The question is: why do you let your car have many dents?

Why some people fall deeper into poverty and some other get out of it? Is it just a question of luck? Of help? Of energy? Of will?

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First, let us correct your assumptions: Very few Americans get out of poverty. Social mobility rates are surprisingly small in the United States. The American Everyman is very likely to die in the class into which he was born.

Secondly, not falling into poverty in the first place really is a question of help. Wealthy people (read: almost all HN users) have networks of wealthy people to assist them when times get hard -- parents, children, siblings, friends.

The poor do not. Poor folks have networks of other poor folks. If I lose my job and my house, I have a year of cash and goodwill to live on, couch-surfing and stretching savings. If a member of the working poor suffers a setback on the way out of poverty, he could be back to square one, or worse, in a matter of weeks.

Very few Americans get out of poverty. Social mobility rates are surprisingly small in the United States. The American Everyman is very likely to die in the class into which he was born.

Not true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#Economic_mobi...

Moving between quintiles is more frequent in the middle quintiles (2-4) than in the lowest and highest quintiles. Of those in one of the quintiles 2-4 in 1996, approximately 35% stayed in the same quintile; and approximately 22% went up one quintile or down one quintile (moves of more than one quintile are rarer). However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 39% of those who were born into the top quintile as children in 1968 are likely to stay there, and 23% end up in the fourth quintile. Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%. On the other hand, the children of wealthy families have a 22% chance of reaching the top 5%.

According to one study, the income of a person's parents is a great deal more predictive of their own income in the United States than other countries. France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility.

It's a point of contention, at any rate.

However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile.

In other words, if you're born in the bottom quintile, you probably will not stay there.

This statement is deceptive -- it conflates movement into the second and middle quintiles.

The second quintile of American income is still very, very poor: $18k-$35k of household income. The median household is three people, with only one wage earner. (The second quintile of individual, wage-earner, income tops out at less than $25k.)

Movement from abject poverty into the second quintile is quite common. (Movement in the other direction is also common.) Going from zero to one wage-earner in a household can make that difference. Moving from destitution up to the middle (3rd) quintile is a much more difficult road.

> he second quintile of American income is still very, very poor

My brother lived a middle-class lifestyle in Michigan on $25k/year. There's plenty of frugal people living in the sticks who do just fine.

$25k/year is pretty close to the poverty line. What exactly do you call "middle-class lifestyle"?

In the USA I think $2k/month for a single person, who had the foresight and willpower to not get married (yet) and not make babies (yet) is actually quite livable and hardly poverty.

Of course you can live on that, but I wouldn't call such a situation middle class.

I guess that's only true if you already own a place to live in.

I would do really well on my current wage if I owned a place, but since I don't, I have to spend between a quarter and half my earnings on a place to live in (I still live way better than the average Uruguayan).

It seems like you're using a fairly mutable definition of "poverty" that you can push around to suit your needs. Now people have to move from the lowest quintile to the middle quintile to meet your definition of "escaping poverty"?

I also find it interesting that almost 50% of households in the lowest quintile own their own homes. And the 2nd and 3rd quintiles have nearly 60% and 70% home ownership rates, respectively. Now, I'm not arguing that owning your home means you're not poor, but I think characterizing the 1st or 2nd quintile as "abject poverty" is a bit of a stretch. Here's an interesting paper on what poverty in America actually looks like:

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/08/How-Poor-Ar...

Source for quintile data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

I have friends in the second quintile and they're anything but destitute. $35k is only impoverished if you live in a city or urban area. Living expenses are much lower in most of America.

The exact degree of economic mobility might be a point of contention, but I see very little merit in the statement that "very few Americans get out of poverty" or "The American Everyman is very likely to die in the class into which he was born." The data says otherwise.

Perhaps more likely than in much of the developed world, however. There doesn't seem to be any reason to think the US has high economic mobility.

From saying "very few" to requiring "high mobility" seems like a change of goal posts.

Again, how is this relevant in the context of the claim that there is almost no economic mobility in the US?

This is sort of like claiming that we have hardly any people in the US because China and India have so many more. We still have hundreds of millions.

It's relevant because we're talking about poverty in the context of policy and values, and if the US is falling short on poverty metrics compared to the rest of the developed world, then it's evidence we're doing something wrong.

Might be worth noting that if you look at a place where a person's income is a function of their productivity (i.e., smart, hard working people make more money on average) then you should expect some stickiness, because one's intelligence and work ethic surely is correlated with the same qualities in their parents (and that's regardless of whether you believe in genes or nurture).

No, that is true. Canada is comparable in almost every way to the USA, and yet social mobility is much higher in Canada. And it is higher still in the Scandinavian countries.

It's tempting to attribute this to social programs like medicare (which explains Canada and Norway), but England has a similarly lower rate of social mobility, despite being very comparable to Canada.

This is just my speculation, but social class systems may also be a factor. The English class system is legendary, but Americans may not appreciate how stratified their society really is.

http://books.google.com/books?id=qnPOqwsR5UsC&pg=PA239#v...

http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/IntergenerationalMobility...

(For what it's worth, I just happened to have these references because I was arguing on Reddit with an anarchist who asserted there was no social mobility under capitalism. There is, but not as much as there can be, especially in the USA.)

This strikes me as very poignant, and makes me wonder about how we form our networks. Why is it that the wealthy know the wealthy and the poor know the poor? Is it usually as simple as the existing networks of your parents that you are born into and then expand upon? Is it school, either college or high school or those who drop out of high school becoming your network depending on how far you go? Is it the who you work with? Is it out and out classist snobbery? Probably all of these things and more wrapped up in one...

Family, friends, school, jobs and culture. (Where culture serves to strengthen group ties formed by family, friends, school and jobs.)

Re: help networks -> poor people might not have a network that can make a house payment for them, but their networks are (IME) more likely to give a hand via couch-surfing and the like.

As a person who grew up poor and made it out of the bottom quintile, I can tell you that the number of my poor friends who had the talent and opportunity to do the same but didn't actually do it is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who did.

So why don't they actually make it out? The theory in the article sounds interesting, and I hope to see more research done to test it.

Wealthy people (read: almost all HN users)

By the metric where almost all HN users count as "wealthy", the US hardly has any poverty at all. I don't know that that's inaccurate, but it's not the usual assumption.

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