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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

Being poor must in part be not knowing how not to be poor or having felonies or depression holding you back. I failed out of college and barely scraped one month of rent for an apartment. I got a shit job working the dock in a light bulb warehouse. I made friends with the truck driver who picked up orders who told me about an opening on their better paying dock. After half a year my hard work caught the eye of HR who put me through driving school. And a few months later I was making $45k/year driving trucks and working the dock. I had rough times and missed a day or two of food every once in a while, But working your way up in trades is doable and straightforward. After paying back my $18k in school debt and seeing much of the country while driving, I went back to the cheapest college I could find and got a degree, from which it was all downhill from there.

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So, you got some tremendous help at a very key point and you were able to use that momentum to continue doing well for yourself. Now, imagine you are so poor that you need some help to move up in the world, but that help never arrives. How long would you have done that shit job if the truck driver didn't point you somewhere better. Or, how about if you weren't able to scrape up anything after that one month of rent and were thrown out on the street? I'm not saying you were the luckiest guy on the planet to get that help. Most people could count on some good fortune. But someone considerably more unfortunate than you may not have had that experience, or perhaps they had shitty situations happen to them, at a point when they were most vulnerable. Don't discount those things that you didn't have control over that helped you get somewhere, and recognize that someone may not have been that fortunate. Regardless, I hope you paid it forward.

Tremendous help my ass. I was sending out resumes all the time. I spent every break going over the help wanted adds in the paper. I made minimum wage, busting my ass in a mercury contaminated sweltering hellhole. Then I did the same thing on a freight dock, for a $1/more. And the reason I got "lucky" is I ran in between docks. I moved freight as fast as I could. I showed up on time. And I still spent my free time looking at the help wanted ads. If I wouldn't have gotten lucky there, I'd have gotten lucky somewhere else. Roll the dice enough and you win. Plus I had a strict budget, which kept me focused. Not many truck drivers pay off their $18K in student loans in 2.5 years, of which nearly a year was spent at minimum wage.

I applaud you for your success. I can relate, having found success in a career for which I am self-trained.

However, I don't use my personal anecdote to generalize that others should have the same abilities to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and just _not be poor_. Knowledge isn't enough, economical and educational opportunities are not distributed equally. This is an issue of conditions that precedes an individual's life.

It isn't rocket science to be middle class in America. Over my 2.5 years as a truck driver, every single person working the dock with a clean driving record and no recent felonies was put through the in house driving school, instantly becoming middle class with decent benefits. The only trick is finding a field where there isn't a massive oversupply of available help. Everyone would prefer serving coffee over roofing a house, but only one of those jobs leads to running a crew in a few months of hard, timely work.

After many decades of serious empirical analysis of poverty by tens of thousands of researchers in hundreds of research institutions in dozens of countries worldwide, I find it hard to believe people still trot out personal anecdotes as if they mean anything.

The roots of poverty are pretty well-known (and have nothing to do with self-chosen ignorance or indolence, regardless of the claims of these variants of Victorian-era propaganda). The effects of different political policies on poverty rates, from the most corrupt and least competent (the US) to the opposite pole (Nordic nations) have been understood for many years.

This anecdote is as relevant to poverty as war-stories of magical 'alternative' cancer therapies are to the effects of real medicine.

You got lucky.

You didn't have kids, you never got sick, you never had a relative get sick and require your help, you never got evicted, you never got arrested. You managed to find a job that required no experience that you could work but paid well. Those jobs are much rarer than they used to be. You were favored by management because they liked you (imagine if you were too different from them for that to happen).

Your success touched a nerve. Lots of people making excuses for how lucky you are, and how lucky others aren't.

It's been known for millennia that "luck" is actually being ready for opportunity and then acting decisively when presented with opportunities. Preparation and action is what seperates winners from losers. You cant help losers win, you can only buy them time.

My parents were small farmers in the 80s when it was "get big or get out". I remember a lot of kids in my 20-person grade level had shoes that were falling apart, myself included. Grandpa died in 94 and my dad tried to keep the farm going by himself but could only last 2 years before the farm went broke. He left home and trained to be a truck driver. He drove over the road for 2 weeks at a time, when he was home he'd sleep, then go back out. My parents declared personal bankruptcy and the bank took their property and we were evicted in April 1999. We moved not far away, my parents needed a co-signer. My grandmother lived in the same house as us because they couldn't afford to move her double wide trailer. My parents slept on a pull-out couch for a year. Nobody gave them hand-outs. Life began slowly to turn around soon after.

You do what you have to do. And in the meantime you get ready for the next move. America is the land of opportunity, don't forget that.

Some land of opportunity. You can help people win. Your distinction between winners and losers is arbitrary. At a different degree of adversity the line falls at a different point in the population. If you turn up the heat you would eventually fall on the losers side of the line. If you extend a hand and help your fellow man a lot more of them will end up on the right side of the line. Open your mind instead of your mouth.

What you call 'losers' I call 'my customers'. Why would I want to sell only to people who 'win'? Doing that means scorning perfectly good customers, and very likely perfectly good people.

Just because people aren't as brutally committed as you or I doesn't make them bad people. I would argue that we are the bad people, and they are more likely to be the good. We are driven, ruthless obsessives (well, me, anyway) and that's why we look so saintly to our socioeconomic system, but everyone clawing their way to the top of this heavily-clawed system of business savagery is by definition a lot meaner than the regular person.

And when we triumph, it's on top of a huge pile of nice regular people who couldn't or wouldn't fight as hard or as dirty. And I see that reflected all across society, with a disturbing lack of exceptions.

Love the losers. They're your customers, your userbase, plus it's good business sense. Try HARDER to help the losers, because if you mean to be a winner, you will have to be standing on top of them all, and you had best not be too heavy or unpleasant a burden ;)

My wife works for a LTL trucking company; no drivers there make anywhere near $45,000 a year. Most of them make around 2/3 of that, even with overtime. So yeah, I too think you got damned lucky.

Congratulations, just don't think that everybody can bad as lucky as you.

Or an unfortunately timed eviction because you were the victim of a crime and called the police and your landlord evicts anyone involved in a police incident. Or an ill-timed sickness that causes you to miss work and thus your job. Or a problem child or family member needing your time, forcing you to choose between them and continued minimum wage employment. Or any of a hundred other causes that are just shit luck or bad timing.

Are you a baby boomer? You sound like a baby boomer. You're basically saying, "I don't see why all these poor people don't just get a good job."

I have a friend who's here illegally. Last year he billed his largest customer $160K for concrete work. He stays so busy he never has time for anything. He has more odds stacked against him than any american who isn't sick, and he makes more profit on a 3 day job than most people make all month.

But first he spent nearly a decade working for a construction company learning the ropes and working his way up to #2. Then he quit to be his own #1.

How many americans griping about their minimum wage coffee job want to shovel concrete, dig holes, and do beautiful work for 8 years?

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