Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I grew up dirt poor. Filthy home, no family car, head lice, "food or electricity this week?" poor.

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?

View on HN

This right here - raised in a family of 6, was starvation poor at some points (eg. memories of not eating for days and throwing up when I got food - at like 5) and regular poor at others growing up. When my grandparents died mom inherited some land - enough to kick off a long term quality of life increase - sold off at a shitty price and spent in a year 'living like a tourist' - in my mother's words. Went back to being dirt poor and now me and my siblings need to support her.

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.

> Every time my family had any money, they bought stuff

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.

This article on most professional athletes going broke

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.

> Every time my family had any money, they bought stuff. Not stuff we needed, but stupid crap.

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.

This may be able to point you in the right direction: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...

> Definitely not calculated decisions to make progress to getting out of poverty.

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.

> 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.

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'

Thank you for speaking up. I have seen the same time and time again growing up. Yet people can’t believe it is true. Poverty is not just a lack of money.

Yeah. I get pretty vocal in threads about poverty, and I'm a big fan of effective social programs intended to reduce poverty, but I have to agree with you (on the basis of personal experience) to some extent.

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.)

>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.

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.

It sounds circular to me: poverty itself incentivizes poverty. Are you less likely to grow up learning ambition, saving for a rainy day, and postponing gratification if your family grows up in poverty? I think the answer is, unquestionably, yes. You've gotten out of it by some combination of life experience that caused you to realize the bad choices, but also to have the ambition and imagination that better is possible.

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.

Do you mind if I ask what you mean by "stupid crap"?

Electronics, toys, clothes, food we wouldn't normally buy. Just stuff we wanted, even though the next month, a utility might get paid late. We didn't comprehend the concept of saving anything.

Thanks. I asked because I used to think people I knew were buying stupid shit, and at the same time a lot of my friends made fun of me for being a cheapskate.

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.

I think it's dangerous to take your situation and apply it to everyone in poverty. Most people are there because they don't have a way out even if in your specific circumstance that wasn't the case.

> Most people are there because they don't have a way out ...

You're refuting an anecdotal example with an unsubstantiated claim.

Then they should get equal weight. I know poor people who are there do to uncontrollable circumstance - bad schools, sick family members, take your pick. I think if you exist in a western country and you don't know a single person who is poor by virtue of circumstance and not by choice then you're not doing near enough to leave your bubble.

> Most people are there because they don't have a way out even if in your specific circumstance that wasn't the case.

That’s a huge statement. How would you back that up? “Most” people? Who? When? Why?

It's not a huge statement. The counterargument, that most poor people are there because they consciously and continuously choose to be poor is ridiculous on its face.

No, it's a massive statement, and I think you're being intellectually dishonest to assert it's not. The counterargument is also a huge statement, none of us are saying it's not.

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 make bad choices and still end up rich. That's the entire premise behind the lottery.

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.

> This is a blatant straw man.

Totally. And then dismissing something as "ridiculous on its face" without following up as to why? :(

No one wishes poverty on themselves.

Sure. All of us here would have made the correct hundred thousand or so choices and avoided the enormous number of traps and inherent dangers of poverty.

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?

I think you're mischaracterizing. No one chooses poverty; poverty is an aggregate result of other choices.

I agree, there will always be exceptions. My bigger point is that you must accept N% of failure if all you're addressing is the money part of the equation. My opinion is that N is a much higher number than is socially acceptable.

It's extremely dangerous and rather divorced from reality. Just an anti-PC self-congratulatory tirade. Why posts like this get upvoted is truly beyond me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com