Making this conditional is basically saying, "You don't know what you need, and we can't trust you to do what is best for yourself"
People know what they need. If we have money to give them, just give them the money.
Poverty was a series of choices, not something forced upon my family. Of course you eventually get to a point where you can't "better choice" your way out of it, but I think the truth needs to be said, as that reality isn't very PC it seems.
Every time my family had any money, they bought stuff. Not stuff we needed, but stupid crap. Definitely not calculated decisions to make progress to getting out of poverty.
As a technology professional, I make good money, and my income has about quadrupled since I started in 1999. I still struggle with that same poor mentality even so.
At best, it's a spray-and-pray approach. Many will fail. Maybe the few that use the money to improve will make it all worth, kind of like the "Just Say No" campaign. The real question is what level of efficiency do we demand?
You're refuting an anecdotal example with an unsubstantiated claim.
That’s a huge statement. How would you back that up? “Most” people? Who? When? Why?
The only reason the counterargument is slightly more palatable is because it conforms to Occam's Razor.
> because they consciously and continuously choose to be poor is ridiculous on its face
This is a blatant straw man. We are saying they don't make wise choices for a myriad of reasons, not that they intentionally choose to be poor.
Edit:
If you make bad choices in life the end result will be poverty. That doesn't mean you chose poverty consciously.
You can also make good choices and end up poor. A great example of this is anyone who got a law degree before the recession.
Totally. And then dismissing something as "ridiculous on its face" without following up as to why? :(
We would have gone from poor five year olds to wealthy 30 year olds by force of will.
We would have had the energy and resources and parental support to source our food, health, shelter, and education for our first 18 years because we make such great decisions.
Or: we believe we _are_ good because we _have_ it good.
Tell me again about Occam?
When I was younger I managed to have a very low income for a while, but perhaps still (kind of) middle class sensibilities. I had college educated hippie parents, and was generally expected to succeed in some loose sense.
While I was wondering around on my own for several years getting fired from minimum wage jobs and such, I was sometimes surprised by how the people around me had different expectations and priorities then I did, and I think they were surprised by mine. (Actually, the interest in even talking about shit like this was one of those things that most people I knew mostly didn’t expect or share.) I was surprised when people I knew would settle for what I thought were bad deals they couldn’t afford like rentals, convenience food, pawn, or getting out of a jam with other expensive credit services.
So my friends made fun of me, and my girlfriend resented me because I wouldn’t buy a reasonable car, or a TV or cable, or a phone, for repairing things other people cast off, digging stuff out of the trash, and so on.
I felt like there was a real stigma attached to living within my pathetic means. Meanwhile, people seemed more worried about feeling or looking poor then actually being poor. It seemed like people with kids didn’t want them experience deprivation or stigma, and they especially tended to over-reach. In retrospect, I think I expected upward mobility, at least eventually, but the people around me didn’t.
Yes, that's one of the big problems. If you take someone from an environment where they're taught to make the right decisions and put them in a situation of poverty, they will often be able to make the right decisions and improve their situation. If you take someone that's never learned how to make the right decisions (or that there are even decisions to be made) there's little hope that they will do the right thing. That's what makes poverty a tough problem.
Giving her small amounts of cash would have done nothing, it was just a mindset. She's a good person, the money she was spending on crap was largely for me and my siblings - but she can't handle money and has a very distorted view of how it works.
There has been research into why this happens. I don't remember the author I read but the gist of it is, poverty conditions a person never to think long term. You spend all your mental energy on immediate needs. Food for today. Rent for this week. Money is never around for long. You know next week is going to suck no matter what, so if you come into some extra money you spend it on something immediately gratifying. Not necessarily alcohol or drugs, but like you say, stupid crap -- something that provides some immediate entertainment or escape but has no other benefit.
Growing up my family did the same (waste money), but frankly, it didn't matter. It's not like a $300 check can do much to help a person, let alone a family, progress out of poverty. From my experience education is pretty much the only thing that works to move people out of poverty, and it is very expensive and exclusive.
I see poverty as kind of the backside of the power curve (various examples exist, I'll use airplanes): When an airplane is in slow flight on the backside of the power curve, drag is extremely high, and it takes a lot of power to get out of it, although merely just adding power doesn't guarantee you'll get out either. You need power and you have to change the flight profile (nose down a bit).
It's entirely possible UBI (and variant) trials in other countries where poverty is already low, will show higher efficacy than in the U.S. where poverty is higher and inherited, just like wealth.
This is a pretty well-known phenomenon among people with unreliable income. Their default state is that they have no money, because they keep ending up there. So when there's a windfall, they don't think long-term, they just know it will be gone. So they spend it on something that provides immediate gratification.
I came from pretty dirt poor too, and saw this among my own family and friends for years.
https://www.si.com/vault/2009/03/23/105789480/how-and-why-at...
was on HN recently. Seems to give some credence to the claim that those of us who are dealing with poverty, are conditioned to stay that way. As a child of someone from a poor family of 9, it always seemed like there were so many traps to overcome.
It has to be a massive societal commitment.
It's a bit more complicated than just "poor people make bad decisions"; there are confounding factors in mental health (https://www.nature.com/news/poverty-linked-to-epigenetic-cha...), relative education, and human psychology (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...).
However, there's an entire class of politics around the notion that people are wealthy or poor only on the basis of their qualities as a person (and therefore social programs should be eliminated and people left to fend for themselves), and so people who are trying to experiment with effective social programs for the poor are quick to counter any arguments that imply that individual decision-making is a factor. (Myself included.)
I've seen this repeated by most everyone who's been poor, including seeing my GF do that. There is a psychological difference in how people look at a windfall. I was always middle class, give me $10k and I'll stash it for 'later' because I assume there will be a later. Poor people think they'd better use now it before it 'disappears'
Willpower, knowledge, and just plain old wherewithal aren't free and can't just be assumed.
Even if 50% of recipients go buy drugs with the money, does it really matter? It probably costs more to enforce these conditions than the percent of funding that would go to drugs. It also creates bureaucratic overhead at the point of distribution.
Further, it’s unlikely enforcing criteria even filters out more drug users than non-restricted payouts do. These criteria are unlikey to be mutually exclusive with drug use. Someone can take drugs and also check all the boxes to meet the “criteria.” Given this consideration, it is clear that attaching conditions to a payout contributes little to no marginal gain in savings or efficency of individual outcomes.
But as other comments note, the conditions themselves are beneficial to both the recipient and those around them. If one person gets preventive healthcare who would not have otherwise, isn’t that a good outcome? Is it a better outcome than if one drug user does not seek or get access to disbursements?
Perhaps a better solution would create tiered payouts that get higher the more conditions you meet. The lowest payout would have no strings attached, but higher payouts would be available to those who fulfill certain criteria.
> Even if 50% of recipients go buy drugs with the money, does it really matter?
The libertarian dream, however the unfortunate reality is that where the money is supposed to do things like feed your children, you instead squander it on drugs. If the presumption of drugs is too harsh, replace it with something equally stupid like cigarettes, lottery tickets, rent-to-own furniture or some other predatory service that the poor disproportionately participate in. This is not a behavior beneficial to anybody or worth enabling.
This is why we have systems like food stamps (disbursements that can only be spent on food), WIC (disbursements that can only be spent on fresh vegetables, baby food/formula, etc) and so on. Handing cash to people who don't know how to use it responsibly does not spontaneously teach them otherwise.
Yes--I know regulations are not liked.
Rent-to-own is basically extorsion.
My biggest gripe is the payday loan type companies.
Oh yea, federally insured banks should be required to cash checks, without a consumer being a customer.
We have so many laws/regulations that protect businesses; While the poor have the BBC. This is not the America I put my hand over my heart as a kid. I ashamed at what we have become.
People use payday loans because nobody else lends them money. If you want to help them, offer them loans with better conditions, and you'll see most of those payday shops go out of business.
There is another way to view this. We might think of these programs as encouraging people to do things that society needs, instead of what they need. Then the payment is there to offset the personal cost.
Note. I've thought about this for all of 10 seconds. I might be 'way off.
Generally speaking, aren’t poor people poor because either they don’t know how to be not poor or can’t execute being not poor? Yes, sometimes it’s impossible to execute being rich, like if there is a systematic bias against a certain cohort. But cases like that aside, isn’t it pretty obvious that poor people either cannot or do not know how to not be poor?
Your perspective seems to suggest being poor just happens randomly to random people. But that’s not true. Being poor happens to people who fail to get and keep money from other people. Any time someone talks about patronizing poor people it’s like: yeah either we’re not going to talk about them being poor like that’s a bad thing, or we’re going to talk about it like it’s a bad thing and so maybe then we should figure out what they’re doing wrong when there are other people who are not poor.
Pretending like everyone’s economic actions are equal is insensitive to people who get and keep money and patronizing to people who don’t. Not all economic actions are equally good. Setting money on fire is not a good economic action. It is offensive to the person whose labor created that value. Yet I see poor people doing all kinds of offensive economic actions with money given to them by the state. I see people using benefits cards to buy groceries that I would never buy because they are so expensive or unnecessary. If you don’t want to be judged, don’t take money from other people, because that is literally patronage, which is patronizing.
Louis CK has a whole bit about this, back from when he was still broke: https://youtu.be/Y_-1l_SlA7c
I guess time has done him well :)
"Hey, don't buy the two pack. We'll buy you the 8 pack if you pay us $1/month for the next 5 months." Client saves $3. Charity gets >50% annualized ROR. Perpetual virtuous cycle that ends all poverty.
Why do you think no one's been able to pull off such a charity? Probably because the bottleneck isn't getting the initial capital, but being unable to stick to a plan even when it could pay off long-term.
It sounds like the program in the story is trying to close that gap and give more immediate rewards.
It turns out there are numerous charities designed to provide liquidity to poor people through microloans. Many of them are very effective.
(I was originally going to give a caveat about Kiva, etc.)
But you don't end up in endless poverty by making the right decisions. The United States can be a pretty brutal place, but comparing to human history it's actually incredibly forgiving and full of opportunity.
There is also plenty of research that shows that poverty is detrimental to mental health in a way that reinforces poverty. The insecurity from not knowing where your next meal will come from or not knowing were to sleep is a direct cause of poor decision making.
Also the #1 reason people go into bankruptcy in this country is medical costs. That's not something that can be "executed".
Getting wiped out by a medical event means you didn’t have health insurance. Health insurance is generally affordable despite what the GOP says, especially if you’re in poverty then you can get some really good Obamacare for free. Not buying insurance is just about the poorest thing you can do. Yes, before the ACA there was the the whole preexisting condition thing. There’s all kind of whack ass stuff out there. But I’m not talking about corner cases. I’m talking big picture. Step one to not being poor is having insurance.
The sins of the father...
> It’s not random
But people cannot choose where, when, or to whom they are born.
It's funny your parents actions shouldn't dictate if you're poor, but God forbid your parents were rich: no one likes a rich kid.
> But people cannot choose where, when, or to whom they are born.
Life is not fair. It just isn't...
Unless you're in one of the many states that didn't expand medicaid coverage. Then you need to make above the poverty line to qualify for subsidies.
>Health insurance is generally affordable despite what the GOP says
Now that the GOP has revoked the individual mandate, the prices are going to keep going up for people on the exchange.
My Brother and his wife get coverage from the exchange and their cheapest plan went up 50%. Average out of pocket (after subsidy) insurance rates went up around the country this year, and they are expected to go up again next year.
No. Generally speaking, people are poor because their parents were poor and because they are in a system which works to make and keep them poor.
I hear people make claims like this frequently and I always wonder if it could possibly be true. I can't remember the last time I paid any attention whatsoever to what other people were buying in the grocery store, much less their mode of payment. This sounds more like the repetition of a certain strain of conservative mythology (with a strong family resemblance to the infamously fictional "welfare queen") than actual anecdote.
And if it is true: 1) Maybe consider giving your fellow shoppers a little privacy. And 2) I wonder: exactly what groceries are we talking about here that you can be so sure another person, whose life and preferences you know nothing about, is making not just a mistake, but being "economically offensive" by buying them? Voss bottled water is about the only thing I can think of that might fit the bill here.