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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Single father and consultant of 5 years here. It's easy if you're conservative/responsible with your money. Buy health insurance, get short and long term disability. Keep 6 months of expenses in your emergency fund. Don't have any consumer debt. I think the hardest part for most people is being able to not burn through their money as fast as they get it.

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It's also expensive, inconvenient, time-consuming, and risky to be poor. None of the suggestions you make are "easy" for poor people.

Consider how much time, energy, and expertise it takes even to research disability insurance and buy the appropriate product.

There are basically two options for disability insurance, 50% or 75% of what you currently make. I'm sure there's other options, but those are the default choices. The minutia of what's covered basically the same across the industry and if you just choose the first provider you talk to it's not really different than getting it from your employer where you had no choice of providers or coverage. The big barrier is realizing you have personal agency and can do basic things like shop.

> The big barrier is realizing you have personal agency and can do basic things like shop.

This argument reminds me of web designers who blame users for the mistakes they make when presented with a horrible user interface -- that there is no system so terrible that the user can't be a moral failure, 100% responsible for their own misfortune.

The difference between you and me is that you believe poor people are stupid and I don't. Otherwise you wouldn't have felt the need to qualify how difficult it would be for "poor people" to figure out how to buy disability insurance, a product that's largely off the shelf.

No, the difference is that I factor in structural factors that keep people poor, while you pretend they don't exist.

What structural factors, specifically, stop poor people from attaining the level of "expertise" necessary to buy disability insurance?

Fundamentally it's lack of time due to having to work 2+ gigs likely while juggling child care or elder care. People with money can pay people to do things for them, freeing up time. Even if they do it themselves, they likely have a more comfortable life so it's easier to devote an evening or a weekend to figuring out complicated medical/legal/financial scenarios.

Do you similarly feel that it's impossible for poor people to buy car insurance? Disability insurance is LESS complicated than that. Do you want the 50% of your current salary or 75% of your current salary option? That's it. Maybe you can pay a few extra bucks for a rider that increases your disability coverage each year as you get a raise. This is not complicated stuff and any insurance agent is going to be happy to walk you through it if you have questions.

Nobody's saying it's impossible or even difficult. But if I'm rushing from my shift at McDonald's to pick up my kid and drop them off at home with some dinner before heading to the late shift at Home Depot, I'm not going to be able to talk to an insurance agent who might very well be happy to walk me through it, let alone spend time actively thinking about what coverage I need.

You dodged my first question. Apply the same thing to car insurance. Are poor people generally incapable of attaining the "expertise" to be able to purchase car insurance?

Car insurance is much simpler than health insurance. Still, I expect most people without car insurance are poor, and the reason they don't have it is not simply a lack of money but also (and relatedly) a lack of time.

Generally yes, poor people are less capable of gaining the "expertise" to do many things, because they are busy trying to stay alive. It's textbook hierarchy of needs.

Noticed other replies; why the fixation on car insurance? I thought we were talking about structural impediments to poor people?

This is the comment I'm responding to:

>Consider how much time, energy, and expertise it takes even to research disability insurance and buy the appropriate product.

This is in the context of a discussion about starting your own business. If you're on the tier of hierarchy of needs where you're struggling for food, then sure, maybe you shouldn't be starting your own business at this point. However, if you have the intellectual capacity to buy car insurance, and also are in a position to be starting your own business, you almost certainly have the cognitive ability to purchase disability insurance.

Poverty impedes cognitive functioning: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0103...

i.e., being poor is harder than it looks ...

Poor people seem perfectly capable of buying car insurance as evidenced by the fact that millions of poor people have car insurance. What makes you think that purchasing disability insurance is so much more difficult?

They are certainly capable of buying it (at least, when regulation means that it is something you often are compelled and assisted to do before taking a newly-purchased car home, and reminded you must do under penalty of law when registering a car, and actually cited for if you fail to do it and are pulled over driving a car—which is a whole lot of pressure taken together), and many do; whether they are capable of making good decisions and weighing alternatives in that process is...unsupported by the evidence you've cited, as is the question of how this is germane to disability insurance absent a similar regulatory environment.

This discussion started out with me saying that you can start your own business even without another person in the house backing you up financially.

Somehow we've gotten from there to a point where you're suggesting that a poor person who is somehow capable of starting their own small business is, by the very nature of being poor, fundamentally incapable of making a good decision regarding disability insurance options. And it is because of this fundamental lack of cognitive ability that we need a regulatory environment demanding that the business owner (who is themself) must purchase disability insurance on their behalf?

I'm sorry, but you've just gotten to the point of nonsense.

> Somehow we've gotten from there to a point where you're suggesting that a poor person who is somehow capable of starting their own small business is, by the very nature of being poor, fundamentally incapable of making a good decision regarding disability insurance options.

I don't think anyone is actually suggesting that.

I was suggesting, essentially, that poverty is a vicious cycle. That, to quote the movie Hell or High Water, "I been poor my whole life. So were my parents, an their parents before 'em ... It's like a disease, passing from generation to generation. Becomes, a sickness, that's what it is ... Infects every person you know"

And obviously this isn't a universal. There are always exceptions, that goes without saying.

That's exactly what started this conversation. /u/rectang made the following statement:

>It's also expensive, inconvenient, time-consuming, and risky to be poor. None of the suggestions you make are "easy" for poor people.

>Consider how much time, energy, and expertise it takes even to research disability insurance and buy the appropriate product.

This whole thing is about me calling out rectang for suggesting that poor people are too stupid to buy disability insurance.

Me: "People don't run fast on broken legs."

You: "The soft bigotry of low expectations..."

Me: It's possible to start a small business without having another person in the house backing you financially.

You: But what if you're mentally disabled?

Me: Tarzan

You: Jane

;)

The short answer to this question is that they're individually insignificant and Atlus-like in aggregate.

The long answer to this question is, in fact, extremely long.

Nice platitudes. Do you believe that poor people are similarly incapable of buying car insurance?

That wasn't a platitude. That was a suggestion that the smart place to end the conversation was there. If you'd like to continue it, we can, it's just not easy over text.

Poor people seem perfectly capable of purchasing car insurance, as evidenced by the fact that millions of poor people have car insurance. What is it, specifically, about being poor that leads you to believe they lack the cognitive ability to purchase disability insurance? Or did you understand something other than cognitive ability when you read they couldn't attain "expertise?"

yes sometimes they are - because they are poor. The reason many poor contractors can't afford things like disability insurance is because they don't have the money. They have sub optimal spending habits thanks to poverty traps when they have much less income to begin with.

Please read the full context of the conversation. This is not a discussion about whether a specific poor person might have enough dollars in their pocket to buy disability insurance. This is a discussion about whether or not poor people have the cognitive ability to purchase disability insurance. The OP suggested that by the very nature of being poor a person should not be expected to be able to attain the "expertise" required to purchase disability insurance.

My contention is that this is a disgustingly classist view against poor people. Poor people, by and large, seem perfectly capable of purchasing car insurance, and disability insurance is generally less complicated.

It's not a lack of "expertise" that is keeping poor people from buying disability insurance. It is a lack of money.

But possibly not easy for an Uber driver, rather than a highly skilled tech worker.

The national average income for Uber drivers is about $20/hr. That's plenty to live off of. The average in Detroit is only $9/hr. That's a tough place to be, but not unique to consulting or gig jobs.

Are you factoring business expenses into that $20/hr, or are you confusing raw revenue with income, and failing to take into account all the risk that Uber offloads onto its contractors?

If you're confused, then you have a lot in common with many Uber drivers!

Yes, that national average of $20/hr is after expenses.

That language, offloads, is loaded. This idea that it's someone else's responsibility to handle even the most trivial of life's decisions for us is toxic. If you don't understand the basic concepts around running a small business, there's plenty of books on the subject in the library.

> Yes, that national average of $20/hr is after expenses.

Where on earth is that number coming from? Uber?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/internal-uber-driv...

"In early 2015, a study commissioned by Uber found that drivers in 20 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, were grossing around $17 an hour.... But the $17-an-hour figure was based on data from 2014, when Uber rates in most cities were higher than they were in late 2015. It was also based on gross earnings and did not account for driver expenses."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/27...

This is from an article complaining about how little Uber drivers make...

>But in three large metropolitan cities, drivers make far less than the national average, about $20 per hour, after expenses.

That Washington Post article is garbage. It cites as the source of its numbers, the Buzzfeed article I quoted. But the only place the number "$20" appears in the Buzzfeed article is this:

"None of these advertisements mention driver expenses. The same goes for the alerts Uber sends to drivers — sometimes five times a day or more — telling them that other drivers on the road were making $20 or $30 an hour in gross fares."

Okay, so the first google result I found had an inflated number. I don't really get what point you're trying to get to. If you think I'm arguing Uber is a good/lucrative place to work, I'm not.

You do seem to be arguing that Uber drivers should have sufficient money to do a variety of things based on completely erroneous information about how much money they have.

Let's put some context on this. Disability insurance is $30/mo. And that amount is generally tax deductible for the self employed.

Yes, if you're poor it will be harder to buy health insurance, but you can avoid consumer debt at virtually any income. You can save up an emergency fund at virtually any income level. The fact that it might get more difficult to do any of these things as you get closer and closer to the lowest end of the poverty spectrum... is that really the argument we're trying to have? Because that seems like a silly thing to interject in a conversation about people who are going to be starting and running small businesses.

Disability insurance is $30/month for you, a person whose job has a near zero risk of causing a disability and whose job can still be performed even with many forms of disabilities. It is dramatically more for people with riskier jobs.

$30/mo is the national average. Yes, if you're a trapeze artist it is probably going to be higher. But usually, so will your income.

Keep 6 months of expenses in your emergency fund.

You have to have sufficient income to consistently cover basics with money leftover. Some people simply don't have that.

It's so easy. All you have to do is make plenty of money. Why didn't those stupid poor people think of that?

You are making a lot of assumptions about my current income and how much I have made historically. I did all of those things except buy my own health insurance when I was working inside at a pizza place, that means I was making less than people who deliver pizzas for a living.

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