If You’ve Never Lived in Poverty, Don’t Tell Poor People What They Should Do

I get it; a lot of people are dealt a shit hand and it's a given that nobody on this Earth has perfect foresight. The zinger here is that the writer is throwing stones in a glass room, and does nothing but prove the (misguided) point she's trying to refute.

In case you didn't read it, the article is written by somebody who payed her own way through an appreciably expensive college for an English literature degree and student debt, and seriously considered pouring coffee in Seattle for a living a viable option. Unfortunately, the follow-your-dreams approach generally doesn't pan out well when you took on debt for an education of arguably limited use and end up living in a city with an exorbitant cost of living. In many respects, the author had it made in a way that most impoverished people never will; she had reliable access to higher education at a college that feeds most of its graduates into Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon. At that point, you just have to put two and two together, even if you don't like that the result is four.

She's right, many people often prescribe things that are what middle and upperclass people do to reduce debt in their lives rather than what poor people can do to get out of poverty, and don't understand how life changes.

A big example is how much not having a stable, 40 hour a week job can work over a person. A lot of lower paying jobs are part time, with variable schedules and hours that often flux from 4-32 hours a week. This hurts things like planning for the future or attending college, because there's no stability to plan for; you may have to skip a semester because work suddenly dropped you to 8 hours a week in one of your jobs, or they called you in and the choice is either to skip class, or lose even more hours since they tend to punish people in these jobs by reducing their schedule.

A big part of being poor is having large amounts of unchosen instability in your life. Even a low wage of $10 an hour is survivable if you can count on 40 hours a week and long term employment, but if you can't rely on even working the same hours or you constantly need to rely on contractor or temp services that churn you out of a job every few months or weeks, that instability prevents you from getting into a stable, affordable life.

She claims her rent was half her income, but dismisses the suggestion she should have gotten a roommate. When I was poor and in college, I shared a one-bedroom apartment with 2 other students to cut expenses. We took turns sleeping on the couch. I also worked in restaurants where your compensation usually includes a free meal. But, I feel sympathy for the author. Those years, and the years just after that were tough financially. I can say that your later years will be much better financially.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-age

The author has either not read "Nickeled and Dimed" or else has read it and summarized it in this article. I truly hope she is not simply plagiarizing the book. As for the title, it reminds me of the attitude displayed by callers to the Dave Ramsey show. They would rather flood you with anecdotes justifying their condition than listen to a word of advice. Having been poor myself, and having emerged from it through my own learning and through following the advice and example of people who were not poor, I would urge anyone who is poor to know the things in this article but to also listen to any well-meaning advice and see if any part of it, taken as is or modified to suit your situation, can help at all. You are most likely to get out of poverty in increments, so don't hermetically seal your mind inside a bubble of justification and victimization.

There are many assumptions made by this article in an attempt to build a straw man.

First, there are many places where the author references children. Yes people in poverty have children, but the points she makes, also assume that the individual is a single parent.

>Cost of an extra hour of childcare to account for the commute time (at $13/hour, as well): $260 per month

>Which equals $800 – and doesn’t take into account the fact that grocery shopping by bus is not ideal for someone with kids in tow.

If you have a partner, both of these scenarios are likely a complete non-issue.

Second, the author uses incredibly avoidable financial decisions as justification as to why poverty is expensive.

>Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between paychecks – ends up paying more than 300% interest on their initial amount.

Why are these necessary components of poverty? This is making wild assumptions that a payday loan is the only option when short.

>Banks also find ways to capitalize on people without money. Many checking accounts require that a person carry a minimum balance – and fine customers for every month that they don’t meet the requirement.

Checking accounts are free for anyone that can provide a consistent direct deposit, regardless of balance. If the job does not offer a direct deposit, its worth noting that many Credit Unions also offer free checking just for having an account.

>Each year, immigrants pay billions into our tax coffers, only to get the short end of the economic stick.

I would pay to see factual evidence backing this statement up.

I could go on, but this is only halfway through the article...

A good summary of the article's thesis comes at the end: "instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system that’s leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people."

I think this thesis is well supported by the rest of the article, which is much more measured than the somewhat click-baity title suggests. I also think that it's generally a bad idea to tell people what they should do without understanding their circumstances in general, and even worse when you don't experience their circumstances. This article doesn't claim that people who haven't lived in poverty can't study it or have an opinion.

I would be interested in the writer's opinion of JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and similar work.

This has to be some sort of fallacy. After all, I don't expect my cardiologist to have a heart attack before he can tell me how to recover.

I have to say that I'm a little confused about the point of this article.

In my experience, the people who make the type of argument she describes tend to advocate hard work, education and financial prudence. In fact the sort of attributes that the author exhibited to remove herself from poverty. If anything she's a good advert for the kind of advice that tends to be foisted on people in poverty.

My pet theory is that the key issue is really about time horizon. If you live your life day to day then you're much more likely to be poor in the long term than if you have a time horizon of years or decades. This time horizon is largely culturally determined i.e. if your parents/peer group didn't think about the future then you are less likely to. But it can be substantially affected by personal characteristics e.g. the dissolute rich kid as well as illness e.g. depression.

Interestingly, I came to this conclusion because of a conversation with someone at the other end of the time horizon spectrum. I was chatting to a member of an English aristocratic family about farm husbandry (a subject about which I know absolutely nothing). It occurred to me that he made decisions that had a time horizon of a century or more. Something completely alien to my way of thinking but entirely natural to him.

I realised that my time horizon, which has always been oto 20-30 years, was just a point on a spectrum. Probably typical of a child of professional parents but not special in any way. And if you have a substantially different horizon than me then you're very likely to make substantially different life decisions than me.

Whenever I open up about some of the hard times I've been through (usually trying to motivate or encourage a freelancer who is experiencing a rough patch) somebody inevitably pipes up claiming I don't _really_ know what it's like to be poor, one time somebody told me "You don't know anything, you only have the backs of your eyelids to go off of". I'm not even sure what that means, but it can be frustrating for those of us who HAVE been to rock bottom and found a way up again to try to show the ropes to others if every time you get questioned, disbelieved, and even shouted down because somewhere at this moment there's somebody poorer than you, or a spectator doesn't truly think you've experienced hardship.

When somebody says they've been through hard times and is trying to help another person out - that's NOT the time to interrogate them and try to disprove them, it's the time to focus on the person presently in need, and to find ways to help them get back on their feet or at least get their wits back.

Please don't be a 'poverty skeptic', it's a little hurtful and a lot unhelpful.

The author was poor because the author chose to get a degree in English lit and rather than getting a full time job in Starbucks she chose to get an internship. Her experience demonstrates that it is largely a choice.

Experience of truly poor people is also largely a choice. I used to be very poor. It is called "crap happens". And it was a choice during those years to put one's head down and do it over again and again and again and again regardless of how helpless it felt.

The biggest issue that poor people have is misallocation of time. They have a crapload of time and very little money. Unfortunately, instead of leveraging their time, they try to leverage the money the way those who are not poor do. That's a mistake.

By this logic Elizabeth Taylor would have been a great marriage councilor and anyone with a great marriage should STFU about it.

Often I have the feeling some people are just magnets for bad luck.

My ex girlfriend for example. Failed two degrees, started a badly paid apprenticeship, lived in a few flats with bad roommates and bad land-lords and had always bad bosses at work. She came from a upper-middle-class family, but somehow everything she touched went bad.

I met a bunch of such people, they fail the moment they start something and I just don't know how or why.

I know many people who started out with little money, then saved a percentage of not much for decades to build wealth.

There's power in time. Warren Buffet knows this and other things. It's why he makes 'Secret Millionaire Club' for kids.

Poverty can be overcome. Definitely.

Some of the issues discussed in this thread evolve quickly, or may be highly situational. As a consequence, problems that appear to result from negligence may be difficult even for reasonably conscientious people to avoid.

For example, overdraft of a bank account may have been more difficult to predict in some periods than others. When I was younger, I was payed by check (direct deposit was not available from some of my employers), I payed my rent with a check, had automatic bill pay for a small utility bill, and used a debit/check-card to buy food and sundry necessities. The timing to post these transactions was inconsistent; the time to clear the checks varied, and the auto bill pay occasionally failed. One month my rent check cleared quickly, but my paycheck took a few days. I bought a small amount of groceries with my checkcard, which authorized, but overdrew my account by a few dollars. It was not my intent to overdraw my account, and I thought that “authorized” meant that sufficient funds were available. Even one or two NSF or overdraft fees would not have been a huge problem, but because the bank reordered transactions from largest to smallest, I had several hundred dollars in bank fees which consumed my income for the rest of the month.

The account was free, and as far as I can understand and recall, the transaction reordering was mandatory, and “Overdraft Protection” was offered as a value added opt-in service for higher cost account types. I made at least some effort to understand the account documentation I was given when I signed the contract, but I failed to understand that transactions were reordered, let alone recognize the risk implications of that policy. When I told my dad about this story, he thought it was just a mistake, and that the bank might fix it if I called them. He hadn’t found out about transaction reordering because he had ample savings since before it was invented.

Another example: prepaid cellphones were extremely expensive at that time and place, pay phones were disappearing, and I was not able to have a home phone for practical reasons (moved too much, installation delays, not on the lease, etc). I needed a contact phone number for employment reasons, and I accepted a contract cell phone plan because it was so much less expensive then prepaid.

The contract plans available changed occasionally, and to save money I changed my plan a couple of times; eventually, I was erroneously told by an agent of the provider that unlimited “off peak” hours of my plan began at 7pm, but in fact they started at 8pm. My efforts to cut my expenses resulted in a surprise bill for several hundred dollars. I couldn’t even take my business elsewhere because the contract had a deposit and a $500 cancellation fee. (In general, I have learned to suspect that when services are predicated on a mandatory line of credit, it is in order to drive up consumption using price obfuscation.)

I’m offering these as examples of cases where consumers must make a poorly understood cost/risk trade off in order to access basic financial or utility services. It seems to me that this disproportionately affects people with less money because they are more price sensitive and less resilient to unexpected costs.

The rules and conventions tend to change overtime, so depending on our circumstances we might have no idea of the details of these kinds of problems as they exist now if we aren’t having them. Since I can now easily keep several thousand dollars cash in a back account, I wouldn’t know first hand about transaction reordering if it had been introduced more recently. Similarly, the pricing structure for phones has changed completely since I had “bill shock”, and I can now easily afford more service then I ever use in any case.

A few members of my extended family grew up poor enough to have serious problems securing food and housing; sometimes they lived in a barn and survived on wild game. These options were totally unavailable to me when I needed them. They are now middle class retirees, and they have no more current experience then I do with the kinds of financial issues discussed here.

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine who lost his job was advised by his grandmother to try selling oranges by the freeway. He was an adult man with bills to pay and an estranged family – his grandma offered a simple, well meaning suggestion that demonstrated her total misapprehension of the nature of the problem. If my experiences with financial distress are not in the same place and time as another person, I assume that I am probably somewhere on the knowledge spectrum between that person, and my friend’s grandma.

The point I mean to make is that if people seem to have problems that could be trivially avoided, it could be due to negligence, or it could be that we don’t fully understand the problems.

Poor people, how does this proposal sound: I won't tell you what you should do, and you don't demand any unearned transfer payments that are subsidized by the taxes I pay. Fair enough?