How poverty changes your mindset
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review.chicagobooth.edu
The ramifications of that happening to my dad will probably last multiple generations. He went from a loving father to a loathsome troll of a creature working nights in a oil refinery (I thought at the time) finally. From that my mom and dad divorced. My wife doesn't understand why I have severe dentals problems now in life, or other health issues that doctors told me are from stress. She doesn't understand why I stress so much about money and stay up at night.
I don't know why I'm saying all this the solution is simple but the problem is hard to acknowledge. The poor and destitute simply need help. We live in a society though that thinks someone else is going to take care of the problems. When we do finally give help it's so conditional and shamed that the hole of guilt someone fell in is practically inescapable.
I'd lived in Atlanta for several years before but the attitude of the well do to the poor was obscene.
When I left, I vowed I would never live in coastal California again.
When I see people screaming and walking down the streets talking to themselves, I see people that need love. I see people that need to be taken in, not just for a night, but for a year or longer... so they can stop stressing about where they'll get their next meal, or if they'll have someplace warm and safe to sleep at night.
It is so easy for people to judge them.. say that it is their fault for being down on their luck. When you're homeless, you just get used to people assuming the worse... heck you even start to assume the worse about yourself. You say, why is it that no one cares to see that I'm hurting inside. People judge them for not taking whatever work is available for the day, because they assume... hey, one day helps, right... well when you're homeless, the help of one person is kind and does help for a bit, but what what people need in America are communities helping them.
Unfortunately, you will likely have to go to religious services and pretend to care about religion enough to get the help you need, because that is who America has designated as their community support system.
If they're talking to themselves, they need more than that. They probably need to be cared for in a mental institution. Unfortunately the overall national trend has been funding cuts, with the irony being that it doesn't save money overall; since the costs are just shifted over to hospitals and other emergency services.
This isn't a new subject. For those without severe mental issues, the end result is the same when we provide housing: it costs less
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/its-three-times-cheape...
This may be a free country, but we shouldn't use that to neglect our duty to our neighbors.
> And unless they’re a danger to themselves or others (and
> not just in the sense of making bad life decisions), they
> can’t be held against their will.
We just choose not to. AFAIU, the Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s that, arguably, precipitated the dismantling of the archaic mental health institutions never even came close to suggesting that such people couldn't be forced off the street. For example, in the famous case of O'Connor v. Donaldson the patient, Donaldson, had actually been living in an apartment of his own in Philadelphia. He traveled to Florida to visit his parents, and it was his parents who had him committed after he shared paranoid delusions about his neighbors in Philadelphia. I've seen people use that case to argue against forcing people off the streets as-if we had no legal choice, but it's just plain wrong. Donaldson wasn't living on the streets; his ramblings notwithstanding he was clearly capable of taking care of himself, and in any event the case was never about his initial confinement but his continued confinement 15 years later.
We choose to let people live on the streets because we've somehow internalized the perverse logic that to do otherwise would result in a tyrannic state oppressing the mentally ill. (Myths about SCOTUS opinions come into being to bolster the logic.) That such an approach happens to require little or no budget outlays while simultaneously absolving us from moral blame is, I'm sure, merely coincidental....
Bullshit. There are many people capable of losing touch with reality who live normal lives thanks to medication.
The statement that they should probably need to be cared for in a mental institution isn't true. That some or several may need to be cared for is true, yes, but the probability of that need is less well know. Schizophrenia and other schizophrenia-related disorders can often 'mellow out' on their own over time. [1] It is important to give someone a stable and loving and validating environment for them to be able to recover. There are several kinds of people who, while they talk to themselves, really just have their symptoms exacerbated by stress (e.g. schizotypal personality disorder can have quasi-psychotic symptoms triggered by stress).
1. https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/schizophren... (I will also note that this has been anecdotally determined, though I understand anecdotes are not data.)
> It is important to give someone a stable and loving and validating environment for them to be able to recover. There are several kinds of people who, while they talk to themselves, really just have their symptoms exacerbated by stress
Yes, which is why a mental institution is a good starting point for a homeless person with mental issues. Let's not confuse these institutions with the mental asylums of the past. Are there better alternatives for the mentally ill homeless that I'm not aware of? I don't feel that most if not all homeless shelters are equiped to fully deal with individuals suffering from schizophrenia.
A short-term stay in a mental hospital might be necessary while getting the patient adjusted to their medication. But once someone is stable, there is no need for such things. Even though the institutions have changed, they are still pretty horrible places to stay in, with all sorts of lifestyle restrictions that aren't generally needed.
A small apartment is appropriate for most folks once they are stable, along with access to someone to call. Some communities have social workers that visit once or twice a week and help with grocery shopping, bill paying, and general "how are you" sorts of things. Group homes are another option if someone chooses it: Private space with shared kitchen and whatnot, staffed with someone to help with cooking and cleaning. My ex, diagnosed with schizophrenia, would have been a candidate for such a thing. I was his primary caregiver, fair or not, and his doctor didn't want him living alone for his own protection.
Give support for family members as well - this is something seriously lacking in the US system. He had help, I didn't.
A small amount of folks might need some help for substance abuse, but many short-term mental health facilities are equipped to do this. A fair amount of folks would be helped by police that are capable of helping mentally ill folks with training and a marker on their ID so the cops know what to change in their approach.
I would like to see more options here for medicine and research. Truly, recovery can be a long process for many and it takes time for the brain and body to heal from trauma. Some of that may be emotional trauma as well. I would love to see more options for preventive mental health services in the United States.
What is available for drug users, I'm not sure. It seems one of the major problems in the states is that substance abuse help is difficult. Some charities help folks by donating things like hygiene items and things like that. As you said, some folks nearly forget how to take care of themselves, having fallen out of the habit for such a long time. The same can happen with some mentally ill folks.
Most importantly, though, these programs need funding. Some of these things nearly need laws to happen (like police training). Having worker protection laws that allow folks to take care of themselves would help. One of the better ways to do this is by contacting your state and local government.
if the mental illness is as serious as schizophrenia, a home isn't enough. The issue isn't just about the mentally ill person's welfare, but also if that person poses a danger to others who live nearby. There is a strong correlation between schizophrenia and violent crime. Without treatment in a controlled environment like a mental hospital, it's hard to see a mentally ill homeless person being able to safely integrate with society when they also lack a family and friends support network.
> I was his primary caregiver, fair or not, and his doctor didn't want him living alone for his own protection.
This is the issue. The homeless will not have the luxury of having a caregiver to be able to live independently at least initially. I'm sure why it's so hard for people to accept that the homeless people, who also have mental issues, just don't have access to the same resources that a non-homeless person with mental issues has access to.
I’m not saying “you are wrong and I have the answers”, merely that thmakes perception that anyone who talks to themselves needs inpatient and medication may not be necessarily true. They could just need some time in a safe place, while inpatient treatment can actually not be safe and incredibly traumatic.
This seems unjustified. Your statement assumes (a) Support systems in the community are run only by religious people. This implies (b) Non-religious people do not run any community programs.
Assuming (b) is true (which it may very well not be), the question that needs to be asked is, why do non-religious people and institutions not run more community programs. Not rail against the religious people who do.
Disclaimer: I am not American.
This explains it. You probably live somewhere with a reasonable social safety net. Our government safety net is full of holes, and religious people build webs to catch people who fall through.
Not all of them are bad. Some of them will just help people and not make it conditional on joining their religion. In my experience and from accounts by other LGBTQ+ people, these are the outliers.
Ouch, that's kind of an uncalled for jab at religion.
Why don't atheists band together and form communities to show the religious how it's done...?
Could you explain why that is?
I can't see the explanation you say exists.
I suspect that there's a missing qualifier to parent's comment --something like 'from people who haven't lived what I have lived' -- but absent that it sounds like other people's experiences are of no or negative value.
I'm curious which way you interpreted TFA, as it may inform why you believe I'm missing the point of the parent post.
Easy by the rest of my comment maybe I didn't illustrate it enough but a lot of people share ideas on how to fix it without truly understand it. Poverty is easy to fix. It's the giving up personal wealth to prevent it that's the hard part. As per the link it basically says the same crap everyone says, the "Helping the homeless is hopeless" narrative. Now saying that once you're screwed you'll never be able to think 'normal' again... c'mon man.
Is that really how you interpreted TFA?
I read it entirely opposite to that interpretation. It explained why helping those suffering scarcity is necessary and why society needs to revisit attitudes and mechanisms to do so.
how does giving up personal wealth fix poverty?
See perspective:: http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html
Wealth and safety nets give families chances where those in poverty can't afford to take. "Move across the country and change jobs or risk dying of starvation with your family in the car because once you got there the job's gone" "Spend all your savings going to college at the expense of your kids when there are no jobs right now" "It'll cost hundreds of thousands for chemotherapy but on average patients with your diagnosis get 3 more years typically of life"... these are called risks. The wealthy get more rewards because they can afford more risks. Most who are in poverty are in poverty because they themselves or their family could not afford the risk. If those who are high lend a hand it could help immensely.
> http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html
riddled with fallacies and calculated to produce envy. totally irrelevant to our discussion.
That is a non sequitur.
It's about income distribution.
It's true that the economy is not a cake you can split in several parts, so it's not a zero sum game, but I think that inequalities should be reduced, and that means taking from the ones who have, to give to those who have less.
And if you take from the ones who have the most, you are not creating poor people, you are just improving the balance.
And again, it's about the extremes, there is less need to touch the incomes of those in the middle.
I don't understand how taking from the rich to give to the poor would be a bad thing.
so you've got some people who (for whatever reason) are prevented from making a decent income. how are you proposing to solve that problem by routing an income that is contingent on their inability to generate their own? We have tried that for 3 generations and poverty is worse than ever, inequality is worse than ever, the food stamps go to buy drugs, and the only solution you people have is to take more money from "the rich" and pour it into the same failed social programs.
> I think that inequalities should be reduced, and that means taking from the ones who have, to give to those who have less.
people who generate their own income are going to have whatever they generate less whatever you take. people who cannot generate their own income are going to have whatever you take less your operating costs, and spend it on non-discretionary consumption items like food, rent, healthcare. which are provided by people who don't need your welfare. so you're simultaneously creating a dependent class or poor people and a guaranteed income stream for the wealthy. this is why your idea has always failed.
>And if you take from the ones who have the most, you are not creating poor people, you are just improving the balance.
you'll observe that the ones who have the most are the ones who write the tax code. good luck taking from them.
>I don't understand how taking from the rich to give to the poor would be a bad thing.
1. creates a class of poor people who are dependent on social programs for survival.
2. "Taking from the rich" happens through a political system that is designed to protect the interests of a subset of rich people. so the rules are manipulated to take a lot from rich people without political connections, and route money towards rich people with political connections.
My family came to this country with absolutely _nothing_ and my parents saved and saved and saved to accumulate a safety net. The point of saving is so that when you lose our job you don’t face imminent castrophe. If you lose your job and you’ve saved you can migrate and find a job elsewhere. But millions of Americans don’t do this. It’s hard to feel bad for them when you put so much hard work and deny yourself so much just to save.
But I’m not saying anything new: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
In my families historical situation the big issue is you're poor because of debts. You can't move because you're stuck in a mortgage or farm loan. You can't go to college because you owe money. You can't better yourself without help from the outside essentially. Imagine owing 2k+ a month but only making 1800 for a few years that will drain your savings.. imagine then it gets worse and worse and eventually you get laid off.
Being upside down causes the blood to go to your brain and like the article implies makes some people continue to make bad decisions. Say you get out of being upside down for just a small time you then rationalize spending over what you were like before because you think your ship finally came in... but in today's society that can change in a heartbeat.
This works because we end up sharing the disproportionate costs which sometimes fall on those who are unfortunate (they lose their job, they get sick, etc). It's much more efficient than everyone having to have individual savings.
This sentence is contradictory: since individuals are told these lies/take this bait when they're minors--ie, not 'free' in any legal sense--they in fact are off the hook. When most minors, particularly those closer to the left-hand side of the privilege bell curve, do not have parents with the necessary social/economic background to teach them 'not to take loans from creeps', they are precluded from assessments such as the above.
If you work in a median-income job and are miserly for a long time and save up a year's income, you will have around $60k in the bank. Since you don't have a pension, materially all of this will be in mutual funds or the like if retirement is in your plans. But great, you have savings!
Now let anything happen that requires you to visit a hospital unexpectedly. Let's say your appendix bursts, so you couldn't meaningfully have avoided this calamity.
The average cost for an appendectomy in the US is $33k[1]. That's just the surgery, so assume you'll be out $40k or more. Now let your boss be a miser (like yourself) who decides to fire you because you can't come in. Depending on how quickly you find another job, how much it pays, and your ability to avoid another unexpected disaster (car trouble, sick kid, etc.) you could quite easily burn through the entire $60k of your savings from this one incident. So the very next time this happens, you're no better off than the folks who saved nothing.
But wait, it gets worse! Since your $60k was primarily in retirement savings, you will likely end up paying penalties and taxes for early withdrawal. So you will end up spending thousands of dollars to access your money. The rules are designed to kick you while you're down in this respect. And now you have no retirement savings, so people can talk about what a freeloader you are in your dotage.
(The probabilities get worse as you get older. For an example of how bad, check pricing for long-term care coverage or long-term disability coverage. Basically -- you can't reliably out-grasshopper biology.)
Our healthcare system in general makes the grasshopper approach more about luck than is apparent at first glance.
1 - Obviously, insurance currently will pay a large portion of the $33k, as the ACA mandates that health insurers sell a useful product. But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, and may not be the case again in the near future. It would be foolish to expect health insurance to function as "health insurance" in America for any extended period of time.
Useful health insurance existed before the ACA.
It shared the market with a lot more useless health insurance, and whether the useful plans were actually available to any given individual was not necessarily a function of how hardworking and conscientious they were.
From my more cynical older viewpoint, I was never going to get decent coverage on the private market and that was simply a viable reason to present for rejection.
It sucks ruining your credit with a bankruptcy event, but it beats out draining your retirement plans.
The flip side is this is a contributing factor in everyone's healthcare costs being so high.
You’re saying that because catastrophes happen there’s no point in saving? Yes health insurance was problematic before the ACA, but it definitely served its purpose for simple things like appendectomies. Not every single instance of needing savings is one that is financially ruinous, aka pre-ACA healthcare issue that involved preexisting conditions etc.
No, nothing in what I wrote says that. Literally nothing I wrote should lead to that conclusion. (Good thing you brought up straw man though!)
The point is that saving doesn't guarantee insulation from poverty, and that in America medical costs are historically a leading reason why that is the case. This is in the context of a discussion around how we treat poor and homeless people.
So if you wanted to take one bullet point from what I wrote, you could do worse than "it's not morally okay to look down on poor people in the US because if you're not relatively lucky, that could also be you" or something similar.
Hope that helps!
I live in a Texas city. Rent here for a 2 bedroom apartment is over $1K a month. If you're a single mother of 2, you can expect $500 a month for EBT if you make $9 an hour. So after you get through paying your taxes, social security, medicare, etc... you're stuck with pocket change (that still has to go to electricity, gas for the car / maintenance) and use EBT to pay for your food.
Please spare the empathy bit. When you're working odd shifts, you KNOW the kids will eat the pizza rolls, so you buy the damned pizza rolls.
But let's say single mom gets a $4 raise. Guess what happens? EBT evaporates. Completely. Not only that, but she starts getting charged $160+ a month for the daycare that she sends her kids to so that she can work those odd hours. $3 more bucks? Her daycare subsidy evaporates. She's making $16 an hour, but now she can't afford to pay her bills.
Yeah, please lecture us again on why they can't save money.
The size of income is not the only difference between people. People can have different families, get different informal education at home, etc.
If you are poor but smart, and so is your family, and you love and help each other... there is a chance you will sooner or later get out of poverty somehow; as long as one succeeds, they can provide help and advice to others, etc.
It is a completely different situation if e.g. someone in your poor family is crazy. Crazy people can create all kinds of difficulties, whether interpersonal or financial, which can consume all your energy and savings.
I know people who have decent income, but can't save any of it, because they have relatives who regularly get themselves in all kinds of financial trouble, knowing that they can always ask Joe to save them. For example, they don't pay their bills, and then call Joe for help when a collector comes and wants the money back with some extra interest. And Joe doesn't know how to tell them "no" and just watch them lose the roofs above their heads. Therefore, no matter how many years of decent income will Joe have, he will never have savings.
I know people who spend a lot of their attention mitigating various problems that their crazy relatives with too much free time created. The amount of energy someone else spends on building a startup, they spend solving artificially created problems which wouldn't exist if their crazy relatives wouldn't make up things, or if the rest of the family wouldn't believe them.
I guess what I am trying to say is that people are connected; and some of them start connected to decent people, and others start connected to huge heaps of shit. Social capital is also a form of capital, and it can be negative.
Both are strategies that can be valid and work in different sceneries. When you spend some money you create a social net, maybe you have more friends or hang with more people that could help you in troubled times. For the "ant" people, the colony (family) is all. Can't trust anybody out of that circle, so saving the money is the correct and only option. For solitary "grasshopper" people, without strong family bonds, spending money and being generous with their money can pay more in the future if they make wise choices about whom to spend the money. Safety net can be made with money or with social bonds. Both can fail and no one is more virtuous than the other. The best is probably having a mix of both.
Thoughts and prayers: the air guitar of helping.
Honestly, the whole bash-the-poor perception is becoming more prevalent in Australia too (I'm from the UK too), it's becoming more and more the norm but as a whole, I find Australia to be very Americanised.
Have you never been to London? There are homeless literally everywhere, and London is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. The money in London is much, much older as well, so if anyone should have it "sorted" it should be London.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/25/rough-sleepe... [1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-...
I live in London currently. There are almost no homeless people. What are you talking about? It's one of the largest city I've been to where I've seen the least amount of poverty.
I'll also say that London is super safe, you'll almost never see crazy people in the streets or public transport. I regularly take the bus or the subway at late hours and I've never seen anyone dangerous or looking for trouble.
You definitely picked the wrong city.
You don't get out much. Walk on any high street and you will see plenty of homeless people.
America has a political tradition of Don't tread on me. This influences our policies and attitudes regarding a great many things, sometimes in ways that are not positive.
I'm a woman who was one of the top high school students of my entire state and I failed to get the two career couple upper class outcome I expected. I spent my twenties reading boatloads of stuff trying to figure out what went wrong.
I concluded that European women asked society to help them carry the burden of being the one who carries a child to term. American women took the Don't tread on me position and basically told men to fuck off and get the fuck out of my way. The European approach has a much better track record of closing the wage gap and raising quality of life for both women and children.
On the other hand, I spent nearly 6 years homeless in order to get healthier when doctors say it cannot be done, so I am pretty Don't tread on me to good effect. So I don't actually think America is simply dysfunctional and needs to give up its silly ways. But we certainly have room for improvement on quite a lot of metrics.
I'm pretty sure most of that influx of people predates the European wealthfare states and modern democracies.
We moved to a small rural town when I was young out of fears that my father’s work for an oil company’s union (refinery construction and maintenance) would place him out of jurisdiction where we were.
He is and was a very talented fitter/welder and has even taught courses in college. He did however spend most of the best years of his life after his athletic career with some ugly-souled people who seemed to have it out for mankind in general. Somehow he endured decades of that to look after us. I wish he could have been more enlightened to the world as it would have helped my siblings and I out when we were young. Ultimately we were on our own financially and otherwise even though my parents offered whatever support they could.
I’ve spent time living on $5 a week for food. Some flour, sugar, water, butter, salt, baking soda, and on good weeks milk, can go a long way if you need them too. I forget how many times I had to live on homemade soda bread for weeks at a time, but it wasn’t fun—maybe that’s why I can’t remember it too well.
Im doing so much better than a lot of people who have never had a chance. I’m lucky I was a little bright. I’ve also been to school and worked alongside people who have no idea what it is to have no such luck, money, or otherwise—it’s enlightening and sometimes disheartening to speak to people in those positions about that.
I couldn’t agree more with what you’ve said. I think if most people took a moment to imagine how bad their own life could be, and compound that by a few orders of magnitude, you might get close to just how it feels to be in such a position and how hard it is to ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’— so to speak. Your points on dignity are a topic too large to address in this forum. But you’re right.
I don't know how much canned chili you keep, but FEMA recommends keeping at least a 3 day supply of non-perishable food on hand. I don't think FEMA has a reputation for having borderline paranoia.
If anything, FEMA tends to grossly underestimate the impact of the incidents they may respond to; the public tends to grossly overestimate FEMA's capacity and interests in doing what is ultimately, for every animal and man since the dawn of time, their own job and no one else's.
I think that's a bit harsh. Civilization gives us infrastructure to live safely in very densely populated areas. When that infrastructure fails it doesn't seem fair to just say: "Now it's up to you like it was up to your ancestors. It doesn't matter that they didn't live in a spot where they had 100k other homo sapience specimens within half an hour walk, now competing for resources that stopped flowing in."
It's so insanely densely populated that even leaving this place in a car could take you days.
Civilization allowing you to live without regular incidents is different from it allowing you to live safely. The marks of civilization (namely density) become liabilities when things go very wrong. In many ways, it's up to you in ways your ancestors never had to deal with: more things in civilization burn, crush, lacerate, and impale people when they fail than in nature, and nature had plenty of these to begin with.
A sense of safety built on the responsibilities of others is false, I think. Ideally we all do our jobs when the going gets tough, but in reality, you're surrounded by cowards who would rather watch you and yours die than put themselves in danger (see the recent mass shooting, where four deputies basically just stood outside for the duration of the attack), and in some sense, who could blame them?
What’s the political philosophy that means you can help others as much as they need? Maybe we should talk about that one more.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" - Karl Marx.
It's misleading to say that it would be a-ok to start a socialist society in a libertarian society. It (like many aspects of libertarian analysis, in my opinion) ignores the reality of a political situation like the one described.
More to the point, the notion that communes are a threat to libertarianism is flat out false. Libertarianism is about freedom to associate with and do business with people as you please. That includes pooling ones' interests in a commune.
What you cannot do under libertarianism is force someone to join, or prevent someone from leaving.
My point is that if these things are natural, it is likely that we'd reach a similar structure if we started from scratch.
I don't really think that the true premise of capitalism is going away until we reach a Star Trek post-scarcity level of wealth. I do think we can - and should - combat the ill-effects that come from the exercise of a capitalist system for billions of people.
I think we need to make it better, not a do over
That's because forcible communism's track record is simply horrific. You can create or join a commune as you please, I have no problem with that. But when you try to force people into one, or prevent them from leaving, a lot of people are going to fight you.
What do you think wealthy people do with their money?
> the only thing that makes sense
If you want to end human progress. Me, I'm excited about Musk's progress in space exploration, for one example.
But I rarely (never?) see any rhetoric in DNC politics about party members donating of their own free will to anything other than the Democratic party.
It affects your thinking forever. Even when doing consulting gigs, I still spent sparingly like it all could go away. Even after Dad got a decent job elsewhere, it took a few years to feel comfortable again.
I grew up during the tail years of communism and everybody was dirt poor. The interesting thing is, nobody was financially stressed, starvation and homelessness was not a thing. I ended up developing an abundance mentality and terrible money management skills.
Looking even further back, my parents experienced the height of policy stupidity and barely survived the great famine which killed millions. It scarred them for life, but also pushed them to make more money and live frugally even after achieving financial security.
Another point is back in those days the majority of population are poor, which means the social structure are build around poor people. Food, cloths, education, haircut, all of them targeted poor people. You don't need to live in the corner of the city and go great length to find products suited for you.
"Chinese poverty is different from American poverty because we weren't worried about starving."
Mentions a mass starvation event in China only a generation before which probably killed the equivalent of 10% of the US population at the time.
People often comment on the 1958 famine as some singular event, but it actually was the 6th and last in the 20th century.
It's just so far from true I don't understand why they are getting upvoted (and me downvoted).
The most recent UNICEF data[1] puts malnutrition to the point of stunting at 8.1% in China.
In the US it was 2.1%.
In the case of a famine, it's still the haves and the have-nots.
Even now, people in China are not concerned with or at risk of famine. It doesn't matter how many famines there were 50+ years ago, it won't make that untrue unless you can point to a credible reason why Chinese people today should fear famine.
Of course, I only see residue effects long after it happened, so maybe time does heal all wounds.
8.1% of China's population is still malnourished to the point of stunting[1].
It's only 2.1% in the US.
I'm a bit confused; is China not still communist?
I think it's just the opposite problem. I simply don't know what to spend money on. I feel like I spend a lot of money, but somehow everyone is in deeper debt than I am. I just don't want to have all those expensive things. I grew up living out of a duffel bag and lost everything I owned in that multiple times in my life. I just don't want anything.
Buying furniture for the first time was the most stressful thing I ever went through. When I bought my first bed, I just laid on a bed in the shop and just stayed there having a mental breakdown. I walked out nearly in tears and slept on my floor for a full week before I finally called and ordered the bed. It was $700 and felt like I took a nose dive off a cliff.
The biggest effect is my appetite. No one understands why I'm so underweight. If you ever go a week without eating, believe me, your desire to eat food goes out the window. Those first bites of food makes you incredibly ill. I eat everyday now, but three meals is overkill.
If I want a book in English, I either have to special order it at the library and wait for a week to get it, or I have to buy it myself.
The effect it had on me is quite wierd. On one hand, I always wish to earn more so as to not have to go through that phase again, while on the other hand, I never care about spending money. Even now that we have more money, I rarely spend on clothes, fancy food, gadgets or whatever that is not necessity. That phase of borderline poverty has made me frugal for life.
It isn't frugality for me, it's just that I can't stand clutter and really, what I consider. I think I missed whatever the definition of having things means.
OTOH, If I see nice clothes or shoes I definitely do consider getting them if I don't have something similar already, or different enough from existing clothes to give a different look. I won't say no to a road trip, or a weekend trip with my gf/friends. Or to eating at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
Anyway, the prices kind of scale together. If you bought a twenty-year-old Spark/Matiz it would be cheaper than the comparable Civic. Also, I don't know where the OP lives, but the US has pretty lax regulations that let people drive around old cars for longer than many countries.
But cars are expansive, specially considering the average income, and having a Civic or a Corolla puts you in the top, with Audis being the "I'll never afford to have one of those".
Needing a loan ≠ can afford to. Many people do not understand this simple fact.
You need a place to live. A fancy car as opposed to one you can buy outright? Not so much.
My ideal living situation is an empty house; my wife feels most comfortable surrounded by things.
What a profound statement. Thanks for sharing.
On the other hand, for a long time in my life, when I saved some money, I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. That was a kind of a problem no one around me had during my childhood. I wish I had found websites like "early retirement extreme" a few decades ago, because I was the kind of person who could quite simply achieve it. (Instead I lost the extra money taking bad investment advice from various "financial advisors".) Other people seem to have an irresistible urge to increase their expenses when their income increases; I don't feel this urge.
I actually worry about not having enough vacation, because experiencing other people's cultures and mindsets are the most important things to me. What else would I really need?
To each his own. Some people care about looking good or commuting comfortably. Most people exaggerate these costs - that's another matter.
Ah yes, the infamous two weeks where for a huge GHG release, we can experience other cultures and come back home changed.
I know my priorities and I've optimized my work/life balance for them.
The Community Health Act of 1963 was supposed to transfer mentally-ill patients from psychiatric hospitals to community-based centers, but "only half of the proposed centers were ever built; none were fully funded, and the act didn’t provide money to operate them long-term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act
During the 80s "HUD's budget authority was reduced from $74 billion to $19 billion. Such alleged changes is claimed to have resulted in an inadequate supply of affordable housing to meet the growing demand of low-income populations. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985, the advocacy group claimed that the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
If you would like entertaining reading to assist in your own building of a new mental model around money:
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
(written by a programmer who retired early and is part of the "financial independence" movement/blogosphere)
I don't think about money at all either. I realize it's important, but it's importance has never consumed me. If I don't think about it, I actually spend less. If I think about it, I totally panic. I've saved money by not thinking about it.
I also have trouble eating! I just buy a week's worth of food at a time, twice a month, so typically I have only two week's worth of food per month, and that results in about 2 meals per day-- small ones. Sometimes I don't eat at all because of my appetite issues. I just take multivitamins to supplement those days, as well as extra Vitamin D3 and Magnesium.
Upvote for the story but "simply need help" is not a policy a government can use to solve the problem. Granted, solving this problem for everyone is nigh impossible but maybe you can give us an example of a policy that would have helped out your individual family to give us some ideas?
Then "simply need help" would be a significant policy change.
Lots of other developed countries have made inroads on poverty. Just look.
I have never heard of that term before. What does that mean?
> Then "simply need help" would be a significant policy change.
Again, governments are based on policies and rules. "simply need help" is way to abstract.
> Lots of other developed countries have made inroads on poverty. Just look.
Which policies and rules used by other governments do you recommend?
To be fair, the poor have a high tax burden in the US compared to other industrialized countries. And they get fairly little for their taxes... Still an Uber driver who complains about taxes being high is sad, because lower taxes will only hurt him.
And yes, I didn't say they were rational players :)
Which the article says, we shouldn't expect.
Let's not pick "sides" here.
But complaining about taxes doesn't reduce poverty.
Helping the poor is big business, which creates a backwards incentive structure. No one is willing to press these companies to the wall, but hey, they can have rewards ceremonies and drive nice cars. They must be doing something great with all those accolades even though more dead bodies are dumped in the bay each year, right?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10737824
examined a program that ran for five years with a high success rate.
There is a readable article on this at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/housing-first-s...
Many comments in this thread mention the disparity between the Haves and Have-nots in San Francisco. Imagine the impact if all those Haves decided to use their own time and money to aid the homeless/hungry/needy/destitute? Instead, we fall back to blaming the other side's politicians and policies and we hope that someday Big Brother will take care of everything.
Do you think the problem is, or can be, competently handled by government? I think government can get results by brute-forcing with massive amounts of money, but history shows that it's still terrible at it (hello War on Poverty). Now, I don't mean to say government should have no role/do nothing. I'm saying that it should not be the -default- entity to take care of things because it allows the citizenry to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Government isn't some wise entity - it's just people. And oftentimes those people are thousands of miles away, working with incentive structures poorly aligned with the issue at hand.
One benefit of transforming this issue into a matter of personal responsibility is that the incentives are much stronger - if it's MY money being used, I'm far more likely to strive for efficiency. If your charity gobbles up my donation with admin costs, I'm "shopping elsewhere". A somewhat-related example of this strategy was a method used in Africa to combat elephant poaching. I can't find the reference now, but basically the government decided to "give" land areas to citizens, who would be responsible for poaching issues. It ended up working much better than when the government sought to directly reduce poaching.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. - Steve Jobs
It's worse than this. Now society thinks that government is going to take care of the problems. The past fifty years and the War on Poverty have shown us how well that works. I wish that, instead of spending more untold billions on new programs and bureaucracies, government would switch to facilitating citizens to create, man, and implement the help that is so sorely needed by the poor and helpless. Encourage the citizenry to take personal responsibility for helping others, instead of offering an easy out to do nothing.
I really don't understand why this is so controversial in North America. The 'Fuck You All, I've Got Mine' mentality is a sign of a morally dead society.
Mine was the opposite, really. Grew up as a welfare-kid in Western-Europe with a disabled dad and a sibling. The state provided for us, the three of us made do with about $1200 (roughly the $7.50 minimum wage in the US at a 40h 52w work schedule) or so in today's money, living in the capital city so rent and insurance ate up quite a bit of our budget. Still, we had a great childhood, went to university, always did sports, vacations, had books and computers at home. Everything was always a few generations old, everything was second hand, I still have clothes that are 15 years old. I always worked to buy my own clothes, phone, trips etc, such that my dad was 'only' paying rent/food from age 14, and eventually we chipped in there as well. I feel tremendously grateful for having been born here, socio-economic mobility is a lot higher here than elsewhere (the American dream irony). I've got a postgrad degree, steady job, traveled the world etc. I never wanted for anything, honestly. The government helped us out with tuition fees, insurance, rent, and I happily pay my fair share back in taxes. Most importantly perhaps, I never felt the damage of stress of being poor, we were never scared for our future, if anything, it looked bright. I don't feel any less than others, not ashamed or fearful. I owe a lot of this to the state and my fellow citizens.
When I was 17 I went through a period of near destitute. I was living on my own, my father had passed away, and I had dropped out of school. Yet, I found myself with some very good jobs, such as GE Capital, a big Oil and Gas companies IT department, etc.
Regardless of the opportunity, my arrogance, ambivalence, or immaturity (take your pick) cost me a series of good jobs in short order. The result was I had no money, no electricity, no gas for my car, and not much to do. Eating cold beans out of a can in the dark tends to force you to re-think your priorities.
In my case, I got very motivated very quickly and dug myself out of that hole after a few months. I think that's the point Orrin Hatch was trying to make. If I had a fallback, I would have, without a doubt, kept coasting along from job to job. I've never looked at work or money the same way since as I never want to find myself there again.
So long story short, being poor (by my own doing) didn't necessarily motivate me, but looking into oblivion sure as hell did.
being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education.
i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately.
we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.
I'm aghast when I see well off people just burn money. There is an entire population of people who find success via a different road than intelligence or intrinsic value.
I've seen things that would make your blood boil.
I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.
The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?
The more money you have, the dumber you can be with it and still be guaranteed survival. At a certain level of poverty, you have to operate at peak financial efficiency to live a mean lifespan.
50,000$ properly spent could change the course of human history. It could supply the nearby treatment center for children with behavioral/emotional problems for years!
I could buy a few mig welders, some angle grinders, associated PPE, several hundred pounds of scrap metal, and still have enough left over to pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.
The above is my goofballs, no thought business plan for 50k. I'm not even trying and the ROI on that hairbrained stupid plan is better than atleast 10 different decisions I've seen made over 50k.
I'm not even being creative or thoughtful. For someone like me to see someone be told "We don't need this." and them respond "eh fuck it, it's just 50k" is...
It's astounding. It's mind altering. It's the name brand bread vs. human lives metaphor in your face and on fire.
So yeah there is a difference.
Wait... what?
Most people I meet are literally stereotypical consumers and couldn't come up with a unique idea to save themselves.
On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.
Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.
One of my cars is terrible (2000 Mazda). I waste, but not much. I'm repairing it quite often. A single $500 repair is one (very cheap) car payment on a new one. I'm way ahead keeping the old beast going. I can replace the whole car 3 to 6 times over before I get to the price of a new one.
What I do pay with is inconvenience and my time to drag it into the shop. That's value too, but purely financial costs I'm winning.
Overall in the end, I'm going to pickup a cheap (15K), affordable car to replace it with. Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra range of vehicles. At those prices, the financial gain is outweighed by convenience for me. So we all "have a price". At least until more of those Tesla Model 3's have been out a while, I'll spend more than I normally would on one of those beauties. :)
A lot of people say it's not worth fixing a car that's worth less than the repair. I disagree, it's money in vs money out. Same concept as calories in calories out. Obviously, the comment you quoted would be correct when you start dealing with outliers/extremes. There's money pits, then there's real money pits.
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...
I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...
The problem is that an unreliable car is far more likely to cause sudden "emergency" events that require a lot of liquid money upfront and if you don't have that money this might cause a chain reaction so you lose your job and then your home.
Rational thinking under stress is hard. It can be a trap, and often is.
But I do suspect that, like myself, you are well-educated and probably from a stable home with parents that were good role models.
Someone whose home life was chaos probably wasn't lucky enough to been demonstrated those life skills.
It's sad, but I don't want to pay for people making totally avoidable bad decisions. I don't know the solution but whatever we can do to avoid kids being raised in chaotic home situations would help in the future.
My extended family, grandparents, cousins, etc, are mostly doctors, holding PHDs or otherwise very wealthy from successful businesses. I was motivated out of a sense of feeling unworthy, thanks to my narcissistic dad. For education I was marked as a genius in junior high, that fell apart at 13 though, just no guidance at all. College, I loaded up my stuff myself into a borrowed pickup truck, carried it into the dorm myself, organized my loans myself, organized classes and how to graduate myself. Worked 30 hours a week throughout to pay my bills. I never had help for anything. For someone my age to be raised in cloth diapers as I was, and growing up in a house with no air conditioning, gives you an idea on how it was. I'm a product of the 1930s, not 80s. Had they not had a Commodore they initially bought for taxes in the house, I would've been screwed like these other kids. I've also worked nonstop since 12 years of age. I'm tired, and not even that old today. I'm not complaining, others have it worse, just explaining that no, I'm not one of the well-connected, pampered white boys. It sounds odd, but I barely identify with being white as a social class. The way I see life is that we're born alone, and we die alone. It's just the way it really is, the rest is someone who loves you blowing smoke up your ass.
So for me, good genes, bad immediate family. Most of these poor folks have bad genes and a bad family. So I may have escaped, but I know what you mean with your comment. I will say I'm probably more sympathetic than you are, I will pay for others' mistakes. Due to my experiences, I probably have more legit, heartfelt sympathy for the underclass than these fly-by-night liberal types that do lots of virtue signaling on social media. It may be why I married a Mexican woman, she's very smart and being how I view life, she's my reason I don't just say ciao and put a bullet in my head. She brings some emotion out of me, I love her, and we were both tossed out. It's all good and easy when half your needs are handled for you by someone else. I'd settle to just have someone to talk to that cared about me (my wife fills that void, but I mean in my family otherwise). When times get tough and they're truly on their own, a lot of these people, who are weak, will be goosestepping or whatever is the next easiest grease they can walk on. We're seeing the rise of that already, for another class, who thinks they're forgotten.
To fix the home solution that you mention, I have a bit of experience there. I think the turn key easy fix is making parents criminally liable for their children until 21 or 25 years of age. They'll either pay attention like good parents and raise them right, or at least turn them in to mental health when they're building bombs or amassing an arsenal. It's what I came to, given my experiences and what I hear from my wife, who is a public school teacher.
Of course, that's not a real, holistic fix for a failed society like mine (USA). Most people are interested in quick solutions to problems (take the guns etc), and more parental responsibility should solve a lot of problems at once for a society that clearly isn't civilized and has a smorgasbord of issues to address. If you read this far, congrats.
Do you have any data, studies, or real references as to why this is, or do you simply call them lazy to feel better about yourself?
You've clearly outlined a trend-are we really to believe that the poor are simply more cognitively lazy than every other population? That is why they are poor? Quite the claim.
My stance is close to what you're getting at. I don't think they're purposefully lazy most of the time. Though I agree with the OP that some have to be, there's no way. I'm intellectually lazy oftentimes, why wouldn't a discouraged, down on their luck poor person be? Makes zero sense that they wouldn't.
Being paid less and less in my life, while others around me make more, has been extremely demotivating. I can't imagine how the life gets sucked out of people with lesser will-power than others have.
I think it's not a claim that some people simply can't be bothered to go to school and better themselves. They just don't care. It's either stemming from their psychological profile, childhood abuse, or other factors that took down their motivation and self-esteem. They're giving themselves what they deserve, in their mind, accepted their social status.
Many of us do it. I accepted that I'm "working class" long ago and strongly identify with it. Even forgoing clothing that is outside of my class status. I'm a sturdy rural guy that even though I live in one of the largest cities in the US, prefer my blue jeans and work shirts (old fashioned Scottish plaid button ups for a country boy like myself) with work boots (think a black pair of Doc Martens). So I can completely see how others adopt their possibly lower socio-economic status as well. I like mine, it's part of my identity and I'm comfortable in my own skin that way. Maybe they are too, even if it doesn't benefit them.
Now that I'm 40 and poor again (lost my job due to cutbacks), it is impossible for me to recover. Getting new jobs are much harder and people are pretty discriminative towards my age. Nowadays, even employers choose younger people for part-time jobs, since I'm over the hill agewise and overqualified.
Why is the social pressure overwhelming? Socially sometimes it seems that it's better to crawl into a cave and never be seen in your poverty, than be seen as a 40-45+ year old doing janitorial work (or other kinds of jobs most people find degrading, despite the fact that to your face they will deny it), by your friends and family. Also a lot of people can't accept the downturn in their lives. That's how you get alcoholism, depression, drug abuse. It's much harder to wake up and say: I've failed all these years, I need to start over.
I think that's why all the trimmings of a "socialist" society are so attractive to me.
I hear what you're saying. You felt motivated because there was nothing to enable your coasting. But it can also work in the other direction.
Those who do not have the capital cannot take risks in the first place.
Unless we are going to avoid widely classifing a "risk" as something "scary" or "hard", then isn't changing jobs risky?
I'm not going to pretend that some people don't thrive when looking at the poverty void -- they are the exception to the rule. There are also those who coast on gov't funding. There's probably many reasons why someone would coast, but if I'm in a system that has so thoroughly forgotten about me since birth (e.g. not having any opportunities for better education for one), why would I want to partake in it? I think the cost of a few people not trying to make changes for the better is by far outweighed by helping those you need support in their most desperate time.
It's not about giving people a safety net when the have moonshot ideas to start a business. It's to have a safety net when they need a bit of time to improve themselves, which when you have little time and money is a huge risk.
That was part of my point, though I worded it poorly.
>then taking time to educate themselves (a vocation school, getting resources on how to stretch a dollar, etc.) may seem like a risk.
I think the biggest issue here is kids. I taught at a local community college, and I can say that almost everyone there was taking a risk of some kind to get through school. But the moms that had to leave class early to pick up their kid from one place and bring them to another place and then go to Walmart for work to make ends meet.
I had a student who was homeless, and now has a good job. He worked harder than 99% of the other students. (I taught for about 12 years)
I also had a student that was watching porn and left his baby in the tub and it drowned.
These are the people that would benefit from help, but the problems that I see are that they have help right now. I know this because I was a homeless teen on the streets for a while. And there's help all over the place.
I think people that have never been homeless don't understand it at all. It's a totally foreign world. But half the people that were my friends were trying to get off the streets, and the other half were not. Drugs were pervasive, and one friend was this happy, carefree kid, and a year later when I was back in town, he was on meth and was mugging people.
What people are missing is good parents that could teach their kids how to live, especially when it gets hard. Save money, don't waste your life on drugs, work hard, be decent to people.
Many of my friends were happy being on the streets (I was for a time) because home life was so wretched.
What would happen if all these kids got a chunk of money every month? Drugs and entertainment, I gurantee you that. Why? Because they saw no hope in spending it wisely when many couldn't look further than a day in the future. Misery an hopelessness was their daily life.
Some kids would get some money, and they go to a fancy restaurant for a single meal. One time a bunch of kids spanged (spare changing) for a whole day just to get a night at the Hilton hotel and bunch of them took showers there. (there are showers at the shelter, and they still did this) And yes, the shelter was totally safe (some theft) but it was kids, not crazed adults. I think the adults lives are just an extension of what the teens experience, but a more realistic outlook, and hopelessness is spread out over time differently. (I was homeless as an adult for awhile as well)
The kids that made it out were the ones looking for jobs and housing, even when all they had was a local shelter and general mailbox and phone service provided by a local volunteer house for homeless kids.
Risk plays no part in helping any of these kids, or me when I was there. There daily life is full of risk. There were kids selling drugs, a few prostituted themselves in various ways. (though this gets worse the longer you are out there) I finally got a job, but had nothing to spend money on. I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket at one point, and was still homeless.
Unless you have 10k or more, what "risk" could you possibly take without family or a huge support network? And if you did have that money, but no support, it would be insane to take a risk. I think talking about risks in regards to helping the needing is red herring, a strawman, and distraction.
What these people need is real hope, so that when they change from spending $30 a day at McDonalds, to spending $100 a week at a grociery store, that they truly believe and understand they are making their future better.
I have so much more to say about this, but I will pause. I find many comments about the poor and downtrodden to be based on faulty understanding of these people's reality. It reminds me of white people arguing about what black people experience. Can they? Of course, but they often sound silly and misinformed.
Why can’t minimum wage be raised to provide a better standard of living?
That’s why in some other countries, instead of a minimum wage, which is the government forcing businesses to pay a certain wage, the government itself makes up the difference between the actual wage and a desired wage. So if the government decides that everyone should earn at least $15/h but the market price for flipping burgers is only $10/h, the government itself will provide the additional $5/h. This effectively raises the standard of living without pressuring businesses and also without the adverse effects like pushing up prices or creating more unemployment.
Keeping minimum wage low is $153B/year "corporate welfare" check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/1...
No, it also means those people are paid a liveable wage, as opposed to a pittance.
The lowest minimum wage I remember hearing about as a kid was $1.50/hr. I thought that sounded like a lot of money at the time, but I probably was not even 10 years old.
That would have been in the first half of the 1970's when the federal poverty line was around $2,500. So working full time, you'd make $3,000 or about 120% of the poverty level.
Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the poverty level (2016) is $12,200. So still, a full-time minimum wage worker earns nearly 120% of the poverty level.
Source: Table 1, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p....
But jobs are just means to an end for most people. Why can't government aim to simply provide those ends?
The obvious counterargument is that the free market is more efficient. But the US government has shown itself to be very capable in providing some services to the entire country. The military has done a great job keep the country safe. There just doesn't seem to be the willpower to create the navy/army/airforce of food, shelter, healthcare and education.
I guess the issue is that it's hard to get elected if you promise to make things better 20 years from now.
I think you could interpret the US military's success despite "waste" to mean that a federal government can get away with a lot of inefficiency and still beat the "free market."
History already showed us what private military is like. I believe it's essentially feudalism and warlords. I.e. true poverty for 90% of the population. A powerful federal millitary that follows the laws of democratically elected officials gives people in the US historically unprecedented safety.
It's not clear to me why the federal government couldn't build a military-like organizations for addressing food, shelter, health care, and education.
The fundamental issue seems to be that the free market is the best means for deciding resource allocation towards those other goals. So why not simply implement UBI pegged to prices in LCOL areas?
Your explanation of what's going on at the micro level contradicts my experience as a business owner who's been signing paychecks for many years. All businesses have inefficiencies, and in general the larger the check, the more scrutiny the expense will receive. Internally this manifests as having higher expectations for a higher paid employee, and prioritizing automation, offshoring, or other business decisions when labor costs get too high. Externally, when we expand our relationship with a client, we fully expect that it will receive more scrutiny from various stakeholders at the company simply because the check getting written to us is bigger, even if we deliver proportionately more value.
There is a better answer - keep the minimum wage where it is until it becomes meaningless because of inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and make it easier for employers to pass it on to workers each month. They already take out taxes, it shouldn't be hard to do the opposite.
The EITC has historically been supported by both Republican and Democratic presidents.
As those jobs are automated, who will patronize those businesses? eg what fraction of McDonalds customers are high-income high-skill laborers vs lower-wage low-skill?
The companies will evolve or die as they always have if their customer base disappears.
Human cognitive abilities follow a normal distribution. Some low-skilled laborers never had an opportunity to reach their potential, others lack the capacity to perform higher skill jobs... and some people are incapable of even "low-skill" labor.
Is automation maintaining or reducing the number of jobs for less capable people? Are we slowly raising the unemployable-threshold?
However, if you define poverty in absolute terms, then there is no fundamental reason why we cannot reach 100% non poverty. All that is necessary is for society to produce enough "stuff" that, when divided by the total population, is still greater than the poverty threshold.
In practice, the much harder problem is distributing that stuff such that everyone actually gets enough to put them beyond the poverty threshold. This is certainly a hard problem, but I don't see any reason to think that it is fundamentally unsolvable.
This is indeed how it is defined in many wellfare states eg in Europe.
"People are considered at risk of monetary poverty when their equivalised disposable income (after social transfers) is below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. This is set at 60 % of the national median equivalised disposable income after social transfers."
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
There will always be poor people with this definition.
For example, in a country with ten people whose incomes are 7, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10, 12, 50, 47212 and 4000000000000000, there is no poverty after that definition (the median would be 10). As you can see, it doesn't even need to be a very egalitarian society!
In this case, median means "sorted by income, at which point have we divided the entire dataset in half". For a dataset with more than 2 elements (so 3 elements minimum), you can construct a dataset for which any below-100% of the median of the dataset is not represented in the dataset.
The easiest example would be using "99% of the median" and [9.999, 10, 11]. Median is 10, 99% of the median is 9.9, the smallest sample is 9.999.
60% of the median income basically means "the lowest 50% income bracket should not have more than 40% deviation". Or rather; the lowest possible income is bigger than 60% of the lowest earner of the top 50% of society.
Look at Walmart, they aren't raising wages out of the goodness of their hearts, they need to raise wages to keep good employees. (and probably a little PR and politics too)
Good thing it is not true at all, and has been debunked and ridiculed by economists over a century ago.
The Malthusian argument is a thermodynamic argument. If we grow without bound (either by number or per capita consumption) we will run out of resources like any other biological system.
The only thing that allows us to escape this is human's unique ability to transcend our biological nature - i.e. breed responsibly (Gd I hate that) and consume less.
Mainstream economics is enamored with boundless growth, therefore, we're on a crash course.
Human behavior is not thermodynamics. To the very least, the day were all the resources in the universe have been consumed by its living beings is so far away that it is absolutely irrelevant and inapplicable to our society.
Malthusian economics are garbage.
"Right, because food today is more expensive than food yesterday" Love the sarcasm, not the shallow argument (I appreciate that food is, seemingly, cheaper than yesterday).
Human behavior is not thermodynamics. Agriculture is. Food is cheaper today because:
1) N2 fixation thanks to Dr. Haber 2) Large scale potash mining and shipping. 3) Unsustainable use of other necessary agricultural inputs
Point 1) is fairly stable in the medium term (i.e. my daughter's potential children's life span ~ next 100 years to 400 years) because energy is cheap and effectively getting cheaper. Population won't grow too fast as to run out of energy, if it did we're really f.ed, and global energy use has stabilized and might decline.
Point 2), however, is a nasty one. Run out of potash, then you run out of K and therefore food production above carrying capacity. You can turn to (say) oceans to mine K, but that's expensive.
I appreciate the econ argument that "you can't run out of resources because the price goes up until you don't want to use them" but that ultimately trash. You won't go hungry, because you might afford a doubling in price of your groceries. It's the Ethiopian kids whose lives balance everything out.
Point 3) Acquirers are running out so, for example, California's agricultural production is in peril.
See... thermo!
Are there alternatives that are more "sustainable"? Sure. But they all come with (an unknown to me) maximum carrying capacity.
As to human behavior not being modeled by thermo... that's irrelevant. People will shift preferences to eat lower quality, higher yield crops due to prices changes and all.
Of course those prices changes are (partly) due to... thermodynamics!
That isn't poverty.
But does that mean I deserve that experience? Should I be put in a situation where I have to fight to survive? I think that is unreasonable.
There exist better motivations. I am capable of work that is much more attractive to me than entry-level labor jobs. The idea that I am less valuable as a person because I am dependent; or that I ought to be compelled by my social situation to do stressful unfulfilling work does not sit well with me. That is where I strongly disagree with Sen. Hatch.
We are capable as a society of helping more than the most destitute. We should promote individual liberty, so that people can do work they are passionate about. I don't believe that those living on welfare should be compelled to do work that they have no desire to do. We should instead work to provide them opportunity and counsel so that they can find their passion and follow it.
Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself.
I don't understand how you can hold this view in light of what you said before that paragraph. How do you suppose we come up with creative solutions to social problems, and of helping the destitute and others, without any wealth or income? Our taxes are what fund those programs.
I believe taxation is theft, but that that fact is no excuse for allocating spending of tax dollars unwisely.
What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious.
You can disagree with me on the fine point of taxes being immoral in the first place, but that is precisely not my point.
So your position is: Oh its stealing money, but lets spend the stolen money better?
> What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious.
No they don't. Its a talking point that they've conveniently latched on to since you need to have a reason for doing the terrible things that they do without admitting it explicitly. I'll give them credit for exploiting the worst parts of individualism in the US to convince many (seemingly you included) of the "evil of taxation and government". But it is not an ideology that they believe in. Nor, I will point out, are any of their solutions backed by any kind of experience or evidence.
So your position is: If I find the source (taxation) to be unethical, I am not allowed to have any opinion on spending?
My point is that that is absurd.
> But it is not an ideology that they believe in
That is my point: It's a vain representation of ideology that is used as an excuse. You don't need to fight the ideology itself to understand that.
Rather than freaking out every time you read the phase "taxation is theft", maybe you could actually read what I am saying, and understand that we are in violent agreement on every other point.
Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on.
But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?
The author of the original article is probably not currently poor, and yet she is writing about it. Do you see this as a problem too?
Considering my response has already gotten one "Well you're obviously not poor if you read this", and another asking for clarification of my opinions on non-poor people, I guess this wasn't the place to make that point. Sorry.
But what does this mean? Unless someone is specifically arguing that poor people should not comment, how is anyone not "making room for" the perspectives of poor people?
If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
Like I said, I know what website I am on.
I'm not sure where your second criterion comes from. I don't think "poverty" excludes anyone who aspires to someday leave poverty.
I thought some more about part of your earlier post:
> If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
This really doesn't make sense. I've known at least one desperately poor and depressed person who found escape and satisfaction in scavenging and programming discarded hardware. There's no reason people in poverty can't be hackers. Arguably they've got more motivation to hack than people who can just buy the latest widgets off-the-shelf.
Maybe you should double-check those usernames.
I eat exclusively off of foodstamps. I am uninsured and partially disabled. I have been able to pay rent for the past few months by working off the books for a couple places, and cashing in on a very limited amount of goodwill that I accumulated in my youth. I have no reason to believe that this will last into the future, or even rent for March.
Anyway, if you have any questions, ask away!
As an aside, I am not great at Angry Birds.
Edited for clarity and typos.
My e-mail is in my profile.
PS: Chances aren't in our favour but are you by any chance living in Australia?
2. What is your disability?
3. Do you have access to the internet?
4. Are you on disability?
5. You say you're self taught, in what?
6. What careers have you tried?
7. Do you have family or friends?
7. Are you depressed?
1. This is kind of open ended, so I'll give it a shot. Both of my parents were janitors. I went to a private school in middle school on a work scholarship (we had to drive an hour each way, open and close the school every day). I dropped out of high school and have a few community college credits.
2. PTSD unrelated to anything I would care to discuss on HN.
3. ?
4. No. I have applied multiple times over the past six years, but long periods of being uninsured makes people wary of making any decision based off of medical data.
5. When I was 14, I founded and ran a hosting company, so I learned how to use PuTTY, maintain PHP installations, run cPanel, etc. I guess you can say I am "Okay with computers"
6. I have worked in construction, customer service, and sales across a few different industries, but all for very short periods of time. This relates to my disability.
7. I do have a small group of friends that I am very thankful for, but not to the extent that it doesn't scare me when it is snowing outside.
8. I would love to know how my answer to this matters to your estimation.
Edited for a typo.
I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income.
I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand experience often turns into a pile on of people pretending to care and pretending to want to help while mostly virtue signaling, doing nothing for me and dragging my name through the mud by insinuating that I somehow must have made poor choices and it must be all my fault, never mind the larger societal forces under discussion.
I often worry that if I speak up too much, I will eventually be banned for disruptive behavior, never mind that I feel that a lot of the problem behaviors are due to how other people choose to react to me. When enough people pile on with problematic replies I can eventually get frustrated and lose my cool and then I feel like that will all be blamed on me and an excuse to say I am just badly behaved. I get a lot of downvotes and flags when I finally lose my cool. This tends to not happen to people talking at me like I am not really a victim of circumstances, I just am stupid, incompetent and not trying hard enough.
I try to then give it a rest for a while and avoid such topics because I would prefer to not wind up rate limited, banned or otherwise penalized for daring to be the token poor person giving my two cents. Privileged people tend to have no idea how to help me. They tend to say really shitty things to me. They often want me to shut up because I make them uncomfortable.
I am pretty thick skinned, well educated and come from a much more privileged background than I realized for most of my life. Most poor people are not going to stick their neck out like that. They are too vulnerable and can't afford more trouble and are very well aware that expecting rich people to be genuinely respectful and caring towards them is simply a bridge too far.
It generally works better overall for the formerly poor to try to cast a little light on such subjects. It is much less of a shitshow.
Edit: Your Karma given your account is only 3 days old is quite contradicting of your views of HN
I have been here 8.5 years. I just recently changed my name cuz reasons.
Overall, I get pretty well received. That doesn't mean I don't stress about it, etc. I am at times characterized by commenters as just having a chip on my shoulder about one thing or another and simply harping on it. So it isn't just me being paranoid. My concerns are based on observations of how others perceive me at times.
To be clear, it is not a criticism of the mods. They have been incredible. But I have been thrown off (or run off) of other sites. It would just be easier to remove me than to tell everyone else they need to figure out how to behave better towards me.
Critical thinking is paramount to any argument to be made, if an argument is weak or else lacks fundamental building blocks required for reasoning through it to a conclusion, no amount of "I've been there take my word" should give it any weight.
If we're doing social experiments and not reason-based arguments then perhaps there is room for evidence-based arguments, but this forum not being such scientific lab I hesitate to accept such arguments.
I often get insane amounts of attention. This has long been true and I have spent many years trying to figure out how to open my mouth in public without it being a train wreck waiting to happen.
Part of the problem is that when someone is a demographic outlier or otherwise special case, other people give it a great deal of attention. Then that gets interpreted as the person intentionally derailing the discussion, making it about them, etc.
It is really common for people to completely ignore whatever point I am trying to make so they can talk about me and for me to wind up trying hard to combat that and possibly just finally say "I'm done here" and stop replying. When I do that, the people focusing on me swear it is all my fault, I was going out of my way to make it about me, etc.
I post as openly female here. It is common for that fact to become the focus of discussion and I am often told that if I did not want people to talk about it, I should not have mentioned my gender at all. The burden winds up being hung on me to anticipate the reactions of everyone else and to go out of my way to avoid mentioning anything that might get weird reactions.
It is an excessive and unrealistic burden to hang on me and it is the essence of sexism, classism, etc.
In this case, what speech is privileged over the rest? I read the article, her post, your post, and so on. I will continue to do so.
If your issue is with tone, great! Tone is an important discussion to have!
Are you OK? Do you need some financial support? Can you afford to eat? I can offer to buy food and have it delivered to you, or a near by shop (or something) if need be.
I find the entire thing annoying in the extreme because I have a Patreon account to help fund my blogging and I completely suck at promoting that. I also do freelance writing and resume editing and I can't get traction with that.
I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
And goodness forbid you need more than the bare essentials, like a car, home, etc.
And it's like, hello? 2+2=4. Can you not see how these issues are related? Geez.
* My apologies to the generous souls who have compassionately given me money at times so I could eat. But the reality is I would not need such gifts if I had enough regular income, but all efforts to establish an earned income fall on deaf ears.
I would rather be at the beach, but instead I'm stuck here in an office.
> I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
I have no idea who you are. I've never heard of you. I've never seen your blog, YouTube channel, Twitch streaming account, or whatever else it is you have. I didn't read your profile or historical comments here in Hacker News to try and track you down or identify you because...
> People genuinely looking to help have zero problem finding my PayPal account or emailing me.
... I'm not going to run around the Internet looking for you.
I think I was well within my rights to offer you assistance using the most direct communication means that was available to me at the time of offering it: the comment box directly under your post. I made a safe assumption, in my opinion, that this would (and it did) reach you directly and now I'm being hosed down in public for trying to care about another human being.
I don't care about magical karma points. I'm 33 years old: I don't have the time, energy or the f--ks to give with regards to some magical Internet points that amount to sweet F/A.
I'm being sincere in my offer and it still stands. I'll email you to get further details from you about how you might want the money, if any, being sent.
Good luck.
Open discussion will not necessarily reinforce anything, people have the ability to draw their own conclusions. Personally I would rather that OP stated their opinion explicitly.
Also I actually don't know what the stereotype was that was being implied.
I think that welfare in the US is about philanthropy, charity and "good will", and not about "social rights" as in Europe.
And that comment showed exactly that attitude: the guy is kinda confused on why that woman refuses his "good will". She is asking for rights, he is offering "good will".
In my opinion, her answer created a cognitive dissonance in his mind, and that's why he answers back so angrily. I find that attitude to social welfare super American.
I think that the American approach to welfare has ethical and practical limits. Welfare based on philanthropy and good will is not an efficient welfare: it won’t change much. It also adds a moral dimension that (imho) shouldn't be there…
Sorry for the late answer!
I've got nothing for or against either poster, but so many assumptions were made about someone who may have been just trying to help. Why is that fair? Why try to help anyone if you're gonna get treated like that?
It puts me in an incredibly awkward position because there is absolutely no good way for me to respond to it. If I publicly say yes and they actually help, there is a danger that this will become a running theme on the site. This would be a serious problem for me and for the moderators.
It's an inherently disrespectful way to handle the problem. The lack of real respect is one of the things that keeps certain classes of people trapped in poverty.
I have been commenting on my poverty on this site for years. I get lots of compliments on my writing here. I also get consistently told that trying to make a middle class income from my writing is a batshit insane deluded unrealistic desire.
If people genuinely respected me and genuinely cared, they could help me figure out how to turn my writing skill into a middle class income. I am not asking for charity here. I am asking to be taken seriously as someone who has a valuable skill that I would like to make a career out of. I can get no traction on finding a means to turn that into a middle class income. I have zero desire for my participation here to turn into some circus of me begging for money publicly. I see that as counter to my goal to get taken seriously and establish a career.
I also see that as a development that the mods would be fools to not ban me over. I have spent time as a moderator. That's a shitshow I would not tolerate in a community under my care.
Consider video. It's out pacing written material by a long shot and fast becoming how people consume knowledge. Not everyone is suited for it, but it's worth considering. The systems in place for publishing video content are also better and have a much bigger reach (without any work)
I only want people to see the human in the suffering. The helpers are human too but are in a position of power and also have a more stable life and ability to cope. When I was working and being yelled at and unappreciated by people in severe distress I worked to never take it personally and did my very best for them. It was never about me..they had simply lost their ability to cope and needed help back to normality. It's terrifying to think about but can happen to anyone, any time.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." It isn't enough to mean well. Some ways of handling things simply do not work well.
More importantly, people like us need sustainable situations, not a wad of cash that will be gone with next month's expenses and leave us right back where we were. We need to be helped get a base under our feet to grow from as the muddy pit we live in just keeps collapsing, we also need to "learn how to fish" as the saying goes and be reintegrated into the whole. Not have scraps of fish thrown at us, no matter how well meaning the thrower is.
When poor people get things for "free" (like charity, I hate charity) they actually pay with pride and dignity.
Give me basic income, and I will feel no loss of dignity.
Make me stand in a line for a few hours (what's the problem wasting my time, if I am unemployed anyway, right?), fill out a ton of paperwork, send me back to collect signatures from my former employers that I really did work for them three years ago (because everyone deserves to be told that I have a problem now, especially my former employers), and so on... then I will consider not eating for a few weeks a more dignified option.
Without going into too much detail: I am exactly one semester away from a degree in the natural sciences but can no longer afford to attend classes - I am a single father with 3 children (two of which live with me) and I pay child support every month to my ex-wife who makes ~$80K per annum. I played her way through graduate school but she left and we divorced very soon after she finished school.
I am almost 40 years old and I have been looking for a steady job for months...but imagine trying to convince someone to hire you for a job with the schedule restrictions that come with having multiple children in a lackluster economy.
I could go on but the message here is simply that poverty can easily be a self-perpetuating condition that becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract oneself from. It often seems like I am caught between multiple Catch-22 situations like some sort of 6-dimensional Chinese finger-trap.The amount of inertia that the self-perpetuating condition, as you aptly put it, is staggering to many that aren't actively experiencing it.
It is difficult to know what aspects of being poor are seen as urgent --or even actionable at all-- by others. Communicating this is complicated, and I haven't been satisfied by the general discourse on the subject, personally.
Yeah, you're right on the time management part for sure. I was the most efficient with my time during that period of my life than I've ever been. Basically work, class, study in library, repeat. It's not that bad, people are capable of more if they choose to. Best time of my life. It doesn't get better for sure. I've worked like a slave since then, with zero intellectual stimulation as I had at school other than what I seek out on sites like HN.
My advice is to stop school, work a bit, save up, then finish off that last semester class by class while working.
I worked 30 hours a week while going to college, not because I had a wife or kids, but because no one was helping me and I had to pay rent/bills on top of the loans.
I did a bachelors in a social science at a cheap non-elite state school, so most people will say I deserve a life of crushing poverty. I suppose that's possible. I did try to make myself relevant to the economy by doing a coding bootcamp, and an associates in design, and put apps into the iOS and Android appstores. Of course I would have rather done a masters, but that is about as realistic as buying a house at this point.
Everyone says they can't find programmers, but I have yet to see one job that I meet the on-paper requirements to even apply to, and I'm willing to relocate anywhere in the country (obviously I can't afford property or a family) Even if I did get an interview I'm sure I won't do well answering trick questions about data structures on a white board anyways.
Other than the constant stress, being impoverished for so long has definitely given me a negative attitude. I know, you guys went through the same thing that time you had to sleep on your buddies couch after you finished your MBA at Stanford and Goldman Sachs didn't have an opening, but for some reason I'm just not handling it as well.
Anyway, I'm just going to keep writing apps and pushing them out to the appstore, and maybe one day one of them will make enough money to poke my head out above the poverty level. See you then.
It's extremely difficult to fill those positions because people looking for their first tech job don't want to start off in QA, and they'd rather just be unemployed for months or years instead. There's not enough experienced people to go around if you don't want to overpay significantly to poach them.
They pay very well, easily on par with developer positions in many cases. Average where I live for entry level seems to be over $70k, and I've seen postings for $200k+ for people with experience.
You could probably spend a week or two messing around with UI Automation and XCTest (if you don't already use them) and be more qualified than most of the people applying to those positions with prior QA experience but no prior iOS experience.
Your point about the difference between being on a couch after a high value MBA vs being on the couch --full stop, end of sentence-- being a total chasm is totally correct.
I think that it is interesting that another poster posited that poverty is truly informed by hopelessness, with the implication that HN readers can't be hopeless. The idea that the concept of poverty is definable only by those far enough away from it to say "That is another group of people than I am in." is problematic in my view.
That is the whole point: no one in this situation has either of these things. That is the group of people Sen. Hatch thinks does not deserve financial help.
So is there anything we can do? Protesting, running for public office etc makes the most sense but I am not built for it. What is the second best thing that an individual with a few dollars and few hours a week to spare do to help?
I’ve for long pondered how I could set up a 100 studio apartment complex with some counselors, training materials, and a supportive non profit. It seems doable.
okay, how would that work? Unless one is really rich, where do we find the money to run such a place?
If such a place exists, I can see myself going there to teach, help organize etc. But I don't know what more I can do, given my own limited resources.
We have a culture that is trained against this group of people; trained against helping each other succeed, against promoting others' individual liberty. I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, and that seems to be the only kind this culture will accept.
I think an important first step is empathy: understand how people feel stuck and why. Understand that the bare necessities are not enough. Understand the heightened stress that comes with this situation: inability to take risks, inability to recover from failed ventures, etc.
The next step is sympathy. Sympathy is closely related to empathy, but there is an important distinction: the difference between comprehension and understanding.
After that, I really don't know. I haven't ever been in a situation where I have the capital to significantly change another person's situation. Because I have never had the perspective, I don't see a solution. That is probably the most frustrating part of the problem: not knowing how someone can help you.
Sure, I could beg for food and rent, but that wouldn't be enough to be independent. In our society, it's difficult to ask for even the bare necessities, let alone ask for things like a car, enough capital to move to the city, out of state, or even out of country.
Some see debt as a solution: Get a student loan and an education, and then get into a better situation. But that assumes that college education is well suited for everyone, which is simply untrue. Loans require judgment by lenders; and if the path that you are most passionate about does not explicitly follow the "normal" routine - school, internship, temp job, career, etc. - those who lend money are likely to deny you your dreams.
The most frustrating thing to me is that because I don't have a perfect solution, the entire subject gets dropped. Solutions are found with effort and progress, not simply stumbled upon.
It’s endemic, everyone interviewing no one hiring, waiting for unicorns with beards and sock hats. Don’t take it personally.
My advice is to pick a niche other than the one everyone and their mom is doing.
Basic mobile apps are simply not a niche.
(assuming you haven't already been doing that)
Culturally this is happening in a number of areas. Victimhood has become such a powerful status to claim that we increasingly refuse to listen to so-called 'privileged' voice, regardless of how solid their advice may be.
My wife's brother drives all over the state looking for work, then once he finds a job he has to expect be laid off any day. On a recent job one of his team members stole something and didn't confess so the foreman fired the whole team. He pays child support for kids he doesn't see often and getting laid off can set him back months.
I have cousins who made dumb decisions when young and now have criminal records. A childhood friend reached out to me asking for money because his wife became addicted to heroin, ruined him financially and emotionally, and left him for another guy, taking his daughter with her. He had to spend a ton of money he didn't have on the court battle to get his daughter back from his heroin-addicted wife. Some of my best friends in high school were gifted but had great difficulty focusing on schoolwork and ended up coping with drug cocktails and are now working part time minimum wage jobs. I also know some dumb people who simply made bad choices and ended up putting themselves in holes they can't dig themselves out of. And they aren't even minorities, which are so statistically differentiated from white communities that when I build market models I have to remove ethnicity as an explanatory factor because it predicts nearly everything on its own and I don't want to reinforce stereotypes or abstracted discrimination among my customers.
On the other side, I know a wealthy international businessman who takes risks that would land anyone else in jail, like speeding around the city while driving drunk/high and crashing into a parked car. He broke his neck doing that but still drives drunk. For my wife's family that would have become a life crushing healthcare debt and at minimum a significant amount of time off work if not a life of disability, but for him it was a nuisance. He pays his workers under the table and his daughter just won a medal in the winter Olympics.
I work with several wealthy people who are working solely to make more money or have something to do. That's great but none of them have no understanding of the life of a poor person in this country, and they make assetions on how things should work based on how it impacts them and based on opinions they've heard from even wealthier people. I am related to people who have worked hard to become wealthy, and that is again great but now they claim anyone who is poor is lazy when that is not the case. They donate to causes that espouse the same.
I work in the real estate space so I also encounter a lot of lazy wealthy people who don't want to do any work but feel entitled to money because a piece of paper says they own a property. Legally and through market forces they usually are though they usually don't add any real value to society.
I've personally experienced both sides and my opinion is the poor need more help, whether that means education, healthcare, legal expenses, or just a voice in discussion. Successful people have their voice and are capable of amplifying it to the point where it reaches every voter in the US with little effort. The stories of millions of poor and working class are lost in the noise every day. It's not victimhood to describe your problems and explain why a certain ideology or policy will impact your life negatively. The wealthy in this country so often overlook real issues at lower levels that generally they will impact the lives of the poor whether they intend it or not. People are resilient, adaptable, and hard-working but sometimes they have a boot on their head keeping them dow and need help getting it off.
Also personally, I feel fortunate to have have lived and worked among many income classes in my life. I'm young, smart, hungry, skilled and effective so there is a high probability that I'll never have to worry about money again. I feel obliged to do what I can to change the balance of wealthy in this country to something that reduces suffering on a broad scale. I am working to get to the point where I can do that full time.
Here is an article:
http://www.economist.com/node/988818
And a video on it:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2016/06/24/mormon-...
Find a meeting house. Just tell a bishop you need help and he'll hook you up:
Then traditional economics is a fool. Rich people value their time and their headspace. I’ve seen this again and again with someone close to me: they assign the same priority to tiny financial decisions as to big ones. They do make very optimized decisions but it is within a very small context. In the meantime they don’t realise the world of opportunity they are not seeing because of their obsessive focus on small items.
Authors set out to demonstrate qualitative cognitive differences between people suffering with scarcity (primarily cash) and those not.
People suffering with scarcity have a cognitive load that the 'not' category does not -- I don't think that translates to reduced IQ, but was demonstrated to translate to 'more bad decisions' via heightened and persistent cognitive load.
ADDENDA: From the outside looking in, that phenomenon may be misunderstood by an observer to indicate a causal relationship between bad decision making and poverty. TFA makes the case that causality is inverse to common (by governments, elites, etc) interpretation.
In either situation, the question is "is half an hour of transit worth $50 to you." Whether it's $50 saved on a $300 item or a $1000 item has no impact on the $ saved per minute.
Anyway and meanwhile, $50 off of $1000 is a 1/20 or 5% discount. Now it's still the same $50 they don't give a shit about, but it's also now an insignificant discount. Would they spend extra time on what to them is a rounding error on a $1000 purchase? They're not really getting a "deal" anymore, it's a bore, and they decide to spend the extra $50 just to buy back their half-hour. So long as the price is still "about $1000" they're OK with it.
Adversity and scarcity breeds a precision and a ruthless attention to detail that prevents that $50 from escaping. Meanwhile abundance leads to a relaxing of all such, and maybe even a dulling of that skill. Being born into wealth I imagine would put you at an even bigger disadvantage in that regard... though I might be okay with having such problems...
[0] I'm paraphrasing of course and I changed Law to Economics. http://www.bartleby.com/73/1002.html
Let's make it more extreme. A $50 item for free or $50 off a $5000 purchase. Discounts as big as 100% off don't come every day. Maybe you'll never see that deal again in your life. You should jump on it. Where as a 1% discount is something you see every day at dozens of stores. There will probably be a bigger discount next week, so don't bother going out of your way.
If you have to make a choice between the two, you choose the item with the less-common discount.
But that's not what the study asked. The study said "you need to buy this item now, where will you buy it?" In this case it is illogical to prefer the higher percent discount, dollar value is the only thing that matters.
Without that added utility, saving $50 alone might not be worth 30 minutes to them.
They don't realise it's not worth focusing on saving a dollar here and there, if they then move ahead and overpay for a house or a car (e.g. by not negotiating).
Half the battle is getting a good (or great) deal on expensive, one off purchases, if possible (say everything above $2k). Don't worry about the rest. As with everything: 20% of the "work" gets you 80% of the way there.
You can then not worry about the smaller expenses -- the ones that are generally time consuming and annoying to track -- that tend to make your life miserable.
Yes, Starbucks is expensive, but you're not going to go bankrupt drinking their coffee. You're also not going to get rich by not drinking it.
I observed people spending 5$ both morning and lunch/day, but for arguments sake stick to 1/day. thats roughly 1300$/year. now imagine living paycheck to paycheck and spending that (very common). they end up taking on dept @20% interest.
in a 5 year window, just that spending on starbucks is effectively costing them nearly 10,000$.
edit: keep in mind, i heard the average 401k savings is ~5k
I spend about $50 on starbucks a month, mostly on weekends in the morning, $500/y would be not such a big gain. On the other hand the quality of life I'm getting without good morning coffee would be much, much worse.
If I would need extra $500 that bad, I would consider doing some side work or even changing the job.
It's very easy to go over the top of living frugal and forget what is the sole point of earning money and living your life in a first place.
They're correct. You should spend the same amount of time to save a dollar on A as you do to save a dollar on B. And you should spend 100x as much time to save $100.
If you're willing to spend 10 minutes to save $100, then you are only willing to spend 6 seconds to save $1. If you can't immediately identify a way to save $1 that would take less than 6 seconds, then don't try to save $1. Each person has a different time/dollar ratio. Some people might be willing to spend 2 minute to save $1, and thus willing to spend 1 hour to save $30.
But damn, people working 15 hours per day at minimum wage might also pay the $50, if they can't readily get time off work.
Edit: Upon realizing that you'd save the $50 every time you go / every 30 minutes spent regardless of how often, me (and presumably the parent) are wrong, and I'm going to bed. :)
An example: I was raised by a single mother in poverty, where she would try to scrape by and live on welfare without working, year after year after year. She would only think about tomorrow's expenses, and she'd do a great job budgeting to make sure we had enough food to eat and so forth. As a child, I would show her job listings, explain the value of utilizing her assets as well as she could (she had her inheritance invested terribly), and all that. She would never be able to understand it, as she couldn't think that far ahead with all her mental capacity being devoted to making the best decision to save $50, as mentioned in the other comment.
In conclusion, optimizing those tiny financial decisions often leads you to neglect the ones further out. That's the issue the parent comment was highlighting.
Also, traditional economics isn't a fool if you account for the limited economic reasoning capability, and consider that reasoning capability as a scarce resource to be allocated.
Either the article does a poor job describing the research, or I find it somewhat incomplete. I mean there is an inherent misconception that $1000 item/asset is much much better than a $300 equivalent. I am curious how that affects the valuation between different groups of individuals.
That's not how I read it -- the authors were not assigning a qualitative value to the items, only a quantitative one. They did not need to be the same 'type' of asset. It was just that when comparing the savings - 50/300 vs 50/1000 - some people considered the ratio more important than the numerator.
The study asked some rich people "would you spend 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 item". Some rich people said yes. Then they asked "would you spend 30 minutes to save $50 on a $1000 item". Some of the previous "yes" answers changed to "no". That is illogical, logically no one should have changed their answer.
Poor people didn't make this illogical answer change.
in addition, public policy tends to strip the poor of their agency, not to mention dignity: (1) their choices are dictated without the context of their situation (2) the actual risks they face are ignored or treated as if a wealthier person were to face these risks (3) their actual utility curve is discarded in place of the utility curve of the policymaker or the general public... and then should the poor continue to fail to make full use of these programs that are not only difficult for the target group to take up, but also humiliating and undermining confidence in helping themselves, they are chided for continuing to make poor decisions.
the article offers a few examples that overcame some problems affecting these people. but the story is very different between communities in which members are equally affected by limited resources and unequal communities. the separation of classes of people within a community with elevated inequality blinds the group to the myriad problems the poor face and leads to a caricature of the poor as incompetent - and it is this warped public perception and conversation that is holding back effective poverty programs.
Take a little stress off your staff, and instantly everyone starts making better decisions, their work seems more focused. As a manager, the best thing I can do for my team is try and shield them from scope creep, angry clients, and unreasonable deadlines. And make sure everyone has time off when they need it.
Take care of your team, team will take care of the work.
It's what, essentially, Adam Smith railed against in Wealth of Nations, arguing that wealth was not gold and silver (liquidity) but real produce and labour capacity. And yet much present economic theory and practice is only so much neomerchantilism.
This makes me suspect a real foundation, at least psychologically, to the behaviour.
The classic example of escaping a hungry lion translates into modern-day scenarios like meeting an important deadline.
It's when stress is sustained that major health problems arise.
An essay to drive home some aspects of living in poverty.
Sample: "Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.
Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt."
Combo of Homelessness and poverty is a cycle that is quite difficult to get out of. I took on programming work from nice folks while still homeless, which absolutely backfired. Lack of a normal safe routine and attempting to work from public when under such stress can be an effort in futility. Thus couldn’t work and couldn’t get back on my feet. It’s a vicious cycle
The other consequences are deteriorated mental state from isolation, paranoia, and depressive symptoms all of which serve to make digging out of any hole seemingly impossible.
Constant never ending stress, concerns about basic survival, concerns about physical safety change your mentality. Idgaf attitude prevails, to the point where crime including violence seem less unjustified.
I could go on, and obviously this is just an anectode
I am lucky having grown up in a middle class family. My father also grew up in poverty and it affected me as well. He was able to provide for us bery well but the specter of being poor was burned into my psyche to an extremely unhealthy level. It lead to a decade of fear and broken relationships because I was so paranoid about losing my money and my livelihood.
Now the combined income of my wife and I make us easy 1%ers and my perceptions of money have changed again. Instead of saving every penny we made smart financial decisions, like buying a house that was very affordable instead of getting as big a house as we could pay for. I’m reasonably comfortable that I will have a job until I retire and I’m very sure my wife will. This allows us the luxury of spending money on things that we never would have, like nannies and cleaners, and traveling business class instead of economy.
It’s something I never, ever, would have considered 20 years ago. When I was scared about money in my 20s and early 30s (never living in poverty,though) I felt vulnerable and that I could “fail”. Going through the dotcom bust reinforced these feelings to the point where I went to the hospital several times due to anxiety attacks. I felt like this wouldn’t last and “winter was coming” so I saved every penny and even ended relationships over money.
After a particularly bad breakup I realized I had a problem. My mindset now is I can always make more money if I lose my job. It might have to be something unpleasant but it can happen. I’m not wasteful with money but I don’t obsess over it anymore. I’m grateful for being in this position obviously, because all it takes is a really bad recession for things to get really bad. Aside from a couple of perks, like the cleaners and nannies, I generally save most of my money for “winter”. It’s a position that, as I said, I’m grateful having. I have friends who aren’t in the same position, and our mindsets in life are completely different.
I grew up in a quite poor family and my parents are terrible with money. One thing that frustrated me to no end is that they would almost never buy something ahead of time. An item would literally have to run out before they'd consider buying its replacement, which meant I'd regularly get in the shower in the morning to find there is no soap, no toothpaste, no toilet paper.
You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities. Also when you work on a system of buying one item only to replace the previous, you really miss out on bargains because you have to pay the full price it is at the time you need it, instead of a week or two earlier when the same product was BOGOF.
At the same time, they throw away tonnes of food which has gone off because they can't plan meals and shopping consists of "we might eat that." Food which has a long expiry date (canned foods, etc) always runs out.
I see this at a lot at my local 7-11, many poorer people do a lot of their grocery shopping there even though an aldi is 5 minutes walk away (so it's actually closer for some of them, literally across the road) and three other supermarkets are under 15 minutes walk. I suspect there is some sort of psychological effect (possibly from advertising) that is compelling them to go to 7-11 instead of somewhere cheaper and that they aren't making a conscious financial decision.
If they keep going to 7-11, they will not get any richer.
It doesn’t matter what’s on sale, the big purchase happens anyway. They aren’t shopping the sales.
It was hard adapting to the prosperity of the 60s. The young literally could not understand their parents attitudes.
The thing is, even with the tuition assistance, both of my parents had to work double shifts almost constantly to keep food on the table. I have many memories of my siblings and I coming home to an empty house in elementary school because my parents would be out working their ass off for us. Most weeks I wouldn't see them until the weekend. Now, as adults, my siblings and I are now living well enough in middle class.
Government programs and assistance for the poor can fail and can be taken advantage of by people who would rather squander that assistance, no doubt, but that doesn't mean all people are like that. It can and does work, but even with assistance, it is not enough. My dad was very fortunate to have a tuition free ride through law school, and we as a family were fortunate enough not to run into anything that derailed his desire or ability to finish law school. Without that tuition assistance, I doubt he could have secured the loans that were needed. Simply cutting assistance programs will not make poor people to 'get back to work' and dig themselves out of poverty. It was next to impossible to do so when I was growing up and it is even worse now.
Can those programs be better? Yes. Should we cut them because they aren't the best? Absolutely not. Please.
What qualifies me to talk about this issue? I was raised in the UK on income support, single mother, social housing, low income city etc;
Now the situation has changed somewhat in the UK; back then in the UK it was possible to get by without going into debt if you were smart about things and I believe this no longer to be the case, but I am no longer in this system and; to qualify my statement further: it was not possible to be poorer than my mother was. No family and no registered father on record. (He would have had to pay child maintenance if he was on record, the state does not supply this if there is an absence)
What I found to be true is that my mother will buy the cheapest thing that will do the job, she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money. She still trawls second-hand stores and will not buy anything that needs maintenance.
Her cars tend to be 1-step from the junk-yard (even though she has a steady well paying job now).
For myself, I select heavily for things that require less maintenance too. I buy extremely high quality things because I assume that my job is temporary and that I will once-again be plunged into poverty, and if anything needs to be replaced in that time I may not have the financial freedom to do so. I do not have anything that requires recurring costs (no netflix, no apple music.. I will not subscribe to anything that is not a utility), I do not take long-term contracts (if there is a choice between 12months at a cheaper rate or month-to-month for 10% more I will pay the 10% more not to be tied).
This is my anecdatum, of my mother who grew up working class and became poor through choice, and for me, who grew up poor and became middle-class.
I've found it almost impossible to enumerate the ways in which growing up poor wildly alters your mindset about money. It's literally mind altering and often nonsensical or hard to explain to people who haven't been through it.
My wife, who grew up in a fairly wealthy household (to parents who themselves escaped crushing poverty), has tried to train me to avoid many of those instincts now that I myself am in good financial status. But I still take a weird kind of comfort at least browsing local thrift stores, figuring out what we'd absolutely need in case of a major bankruptcy or working over scenarios on how to survive and get housing if we lost everything.
The industries that prey on the poor basically exist because they've managed to use these instincts against the poor rather than trying to get people out of poverty. They've always been there, but I'm afraid that they've become much more sophisticated at extracting pennies from people with mere dollars.
It is interesting you say this. I have a friend who struggles to get by. Single mom, two kids, a father who does the absolute bare minimum to provide support to his kids, and she is unemployed.
She does get support from the state (rent assistance, energy assistance, SNAP), but it is barely enough to squeak by and what little money is left over is quickly consumed with unexpected expenses.
With that said, I find she spends an exorbitant amount of time searching for "deals". It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something. While apps like ebates, ibotta, etc.. have made these quick deals better, they still don't cut down on the time she spends. With the apps she spends just as much time searching through the deals or trying to find the best store to get something.
While it can be frustrating at times as a third-party sitting back watching her do this, I can somewhat sympathize. The most frustrating part to me is that she will sometimes say that there is not enough time in the day to get things done. I try to convey to her that at some point time is money. Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.
If you don't have realistic prospects of finding a good full-time job and taking on part-time or casual work would result in a loss of welfare benefits, the value of your time is essentially nil. "Working" for 33 cents an hour to find good deals may be the best option available.
Your friend isn't necessarily acting rationally, but she isn't necessarily acting irrationally either. If you've never been poor, it's difficult to understand just how many practical obstacles poor people face on a daily basis.
If your friend comes up a dollar short, she'll miss paying for something. She'll have to choose among food, gas, electricity, rent, meds - all the things & basic services with nonnegotiable prices.
The stress of missing a payment for something critical is enormous. Your friend may be spending 2-3 hours saving a dollar in part to avoid that hard cash cliff and its stress.
Years of that sort of stress will likely degrade one's cognition in ways described in the posted article.
That's not a far-fetched thing for a poor person to do. $1 can buy a can of beans and add nutrition to an otherwise hungry day.
> Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.
Opportunities aren't unlimited, and the closer to poverty one is the shorter their term.
So she needs short term opportunities that beat $1 savings for the 2-3 hour period. Short term here means the amount of time it would take her to spend the saved $1-- let's be optimistic and say two days.
What do you have for her that beats the $1 savings and beats it with the same (or better)predictability of success as searching for deals?
edit: clarification
I think another way to put what I wrote is that opportunity costs are a luxury one can afford once one has saved enough to move on from focusing solely on catastrophic costs like losing food, shelter, electricity, etc.
OP's friend probably started searching for deals because it returned predictable savings and-- most importantly-- carried very little risk. The fact that she's filling lots of idle time with the same behavior is evidence of her poverty as she is probably not able to take on any greater risk for fear of catastrophic failure.
Thus it is suspicious when the OP analyzes only in terms of opportunity costs. It would be more persuasive to convey ideas in terms of catastrophic risk. But that's a more difficult problem to address and an area where the OP-- like most people-- has little expertise.
If you're unemployed and on benefits, it tends to be zero and could even be negative, until you reach a full workweek and/or something above minimum wage.
For example, I know people who receive about $1k a month and don't work. If they worked 20 hours, they'd lose their entire $1k assistance and earn about $650 (at $7.5 minimum wage). If they work 40 hours, they earn about $1300, which ends up slightly above $1k after-tax. They effectively earn the same but now have full-time employment and need to pay someone to take care of the kids. Financially, she's better off saving $100 a month with a 15 hour discount-seeking occupation and taking care of her kids.
It really depends on the welfare system how all of this works, but there's this idea of the benefits/welfare cliff:
http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-m...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/20/benefits-cliff...
For a while (my mind says 'for now'), I'm able to make about 100k in 6 months in the midwest. My formative memory combined with the local prices make this a nearly unimaginable sum. My "resting expenses" coalesce to no more than 90$ a day at the extreme. At 90$ a day I feel like i'm spending my face off. Any more and it'd feel like I was buying a jetski while unemployed with loan shark money.
58$ a month is $7,000 over a decade. Most things aren't worth that when I think of it in those terms.
To expand my consulting services I bought a unity3d license for $1500 a few years ago. As soon as they decided MRR was the way I pivoted hard towards selling webgl to interested customers instead. Recommended the last company I worked for stay away from AWS Lambda for similar rent averse lock-in reasons. Locking yourself in to something like that reduces your degrees of freedom.
In some ways I'm definitely hamstrung by this attitude. I will never own a home unless I save up enough to buy one in cash (I'm trying!). I rolled my truck a few months after graduating and had to get an auto loan then. I paid it and my student loans off like I was on fire and had to spit myself out. Last time I checked my credit, the "not enough lines of credit" penalties had me in the basement, which is hilarious.
I'm just glad I can life like this, for now.
Regarding your AWS lambda aversion, I am also guilty of aggressively avoiding lock-in with cloud vendors... Now I wonder if that is related to my upbringing.
Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance.
What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers.
lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that takes more discipline than I can ascribe to your average team that's willing to use AWS Lambda.
If AWS tripled its prices tomorrow, how long would it take you to migrate? Is it instantaneous? Does lambda linearly correlate with increased migration times? What if aws-sdk dropped support for all non lambda applications. Are you screwed?
Even if you don't subscribe to it, the aversion should be obvious.
It really doesn't take any more discipline to separate out your Lambda interface from your code logic than it dors not to have business logic in your controller. I treat the lambda interface method like I would treat a controller. My business modules don't know anything about lambda - just like they don't know anything about http for REST services.
For us, to move from lambda, it would be a matter of putting all of our lambda functions in one big solution and creating the appropriate REST endpoints.
Our consuming code wouldn't change at all for lambdas triggered by http. We use Consul + Fabio for service discovery and URL lookups. We would just change the service registrations.
We have a few message based triggers, but all of our messaging is abstracted into a library. We have a hybrid lambda, raw executable system. When an "event" is triggered it either triggers a real SQS message or the method submits a job to run on one of our app servers using Hashicorp's Nomad (what to do for an event is configured in Consul). I chose Nomad because it gave us the flexibility of not having to use Docker containers but we can when we need to.
I would love to move to AWS Fargate so we could have serverless longer running processes with Docker containers.
I'm the dev lead so I see most code that gets put into production. I try to both tie us to AWS services as tightly as possible and put facades over the services to allow portability.
They are looking into several forms of scarcity (e.g. time scarcity of busy academics) and how this similarly affects the behaviour, creating a "focus" on the immediate scarcity that distracts from everything else, and prevents seeing the "big picture".
One interesting conclusion being that poverty is a "root" scarcity that begets other forms of scarcity.
Interesting was also the observation that scarcity-behaviour can have desirable outcomes and can be put to use (e.g. using budgeting as a form of artificial scarcity in personal finance).
>The researchers asked real people of various socioeconomic strata if they were willing to travel an extra 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 tablet. Some said they were. But when asked if they’d drive that far to save the same amount on a $1,000 tablet, some of the respondents changed their minds. Their answer depended on their income.
I wouldn't even think to ask such a question about buying a $300 (let alone $ 1,000) tablet to someone who clearly cannot afford it (the actual poor people).
I mean, when you are dealing with someone who is homeless or that is on foodstamps (or similar assistance for the very basic needs) are you really going to ask them about the $50 savings on a completely voluptuary item such as a tablet, particularly a $ 1,000 one?
And the question is about "driving" (implying that the "poor" has a car).
The only 3 books you will ever need to break out of the cycle are these. ·THINK AND GROW RICH ·GRIT ·A PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE
They are all fundamentally written for you to find the answer on the first page, on the front cover, in every chapter, and of course within YOURSELF. Go now, Be rich.
"Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you." - Jim Rohn, http://www.bquot.es/s/1023
Is this a fair comparison? I thought that the poverty line in the US was defined relative to median income. If the definition is changed to $X per day after inflation then maybe the US doesn't look so bad?
Also I would like to see some kind of adjustment for immigration. Imagine that the US lifts 10 million citizens out of poverty and at the same time accepts 10 million poor immigrants. Is it fair to say the US has made no progress on poverty?
Most US welfare spending is explicitly excluded from measures of poverty; if you're measuring "the values of X excluding Y", increasing Y isn't going to move the needle.
"The U.S. Census Bureau determines poverty status by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold..."
American anti-poverty measures overwhelmingly take the form of tax credits (eg, the EITC program), food stamps (SNAP), housing vouchers (section 8 vouchers), and health care (eg, Medicaid). All four are excluded when looking at pre-tax cash incomes. For good or ill, we don't give the poor cash.
I know that's not really the point of the article, but it was a bit jarring.
My girlfriend, a russian who lived in USSR, is the complete opposite. She rely heavily on consumption to be "happy" and to fill an insecurity. It might be genetically cultural, but the communism sadness/deprivation has created generations of Russians who love consumption and luxury lifestyle.
The structural issue is unequal distribution of resources. It's not a personal mental health problem or weakness or other BS used to cover for racism.
Also since I have had less money I have made better decisions not worse. Because I have to.
So now that I have money, I don't spend a dime of it. I use the same clothes, same cycle, the only thing I spend money on is books: I buy lots of it.
salary - rent - transport - food * 30 < 0 is stressful. And this doesn't account for any incidental expenses.
I was blessed enough to have education, a social support circle, a safety net from parents, and some growth to look forward to. Despite that, the stress caused almost daily headaches.
Its a vicious cycle.
Before that I spent my first years in a trailer park where my mom had my older brother and I in her teens, living in a single wide with my biological father and his mother. My dad's mother and both of my parents were addicts and alcoholics. I was taken out of custody and lived with family members until I was about 5 before I could live with my mom again on food stamps when she was single. She found a job as a medical transcriptionist and living in a two bedroom sharing a bunk bed with my brother. She met my stepfather at a church when he was a trucker.
Noone in my family including my older brother graduated high school.
I made straight A's was bored as public schools in the south are notorously bad mine was no different with the exception of overcrowding, riots etc, and after my parents foreclosed on their house we moved into yet another tiny apartment but this one was closed to a bookstore. I walked to Barnes and nobles everyday after school and one day after reading the alchemist in one sitting I picked up a teen vogue (I'm a girl) in the 9th grade in highschool, and read a fashion edition on boarding school fashion ($350 Tori Birch flats) and I thought hmm boarding school sounds like it might be challenging....
I went home and applied to every boarding school in the northeast, got accepted into three and a scholarship to 2. I went to one and cried for three weeks when I made an unweighted 3.96gpa because I wanted a 4.0 and needed to get a good scholarship to afford college.
I went to an engineering school and got a degree in Electrical Engineering, I have worked my ass off and dealt with all of the nonsense of going to school with spoiled rich white boys who did engineering because their dad did engineering and spent their weekends on expensive getaway trips, binge drinking at frat houses with jobs waiting for them at their dads big engineering firm.
Luckily for me I met alot of great kids in college as well who were genuinely geeky and there for the experience, but it has not been fun being a girl in engineering and dealing with the nonsense with that plus all of the ignirnace associated with how easy some people have it relative to me and many people who have it way worse than me. I consider myself lucky to be curious and enjoy hard work, and grateful for all the rich people in my life who have donated literally hundreds of thousands of dollars so people like me could afford to have a good education. I am not slighted or bitter in any regard when it comes to understanding how lucky I am (I could have been a girl trying to go to school in a third world country with no rights money etc) in the grand scheme of things and I truly believe gratitude is a healthy attitude to have in life.
That being said, I genuinely think so many people, particularly young white males whose mother's baby them to not end through their 20s have never struggled a day in their life and cannot understand what it's like to have to budget for a vacation, or food for that matter, buy their own first car and not be able to afford.to fly home on the holidays in college.
When I interned in Manhattan in college I actually met guys who tried to impress me by saying they came from nothing because their dad "only gave me $10,000 to invest when they were 18 and wouldn't give me anything else after that" (accept.of course all the luxuries in their life up to that point, including a good education, summer camps at ivy leagues, a brand new car and a fully paid for $200k tuition with no loans, but I digress...). I sat next to a kid at orientation at the company I was working for complaining about his stock options being limited for 10 weeks due to conflict of interest for the company we were working for. Stock? Wow, I was excited to get my first paycheck so I could pay rent. But these kids swear they "came from nothing".
And many girls I went out with I ended up not being able to hang out with because they would go shopping for Jimmy choose ($600 heels) and to clubs where shots are $50 a pop. I couldn't afford to socialize with them and it never occurred to any of them an $80 sushimi dinner with cocktails could be an affordability issue. They were living in Soho, I was in the Bronx living paycheck to paycheck. It was the first income I had ever had.
I genuinely think there is a level of non intentional ignorance about what it really means to come from nothing and it's a big deal considering politics plays into inner city education, taxes etc.
I'd honestly love to see some of these guys I worked with walk a day in my shoes and try to show up in Manhattan at the age of 21 with $300k to liquidate, no debt and a sports car with my background, and try to lecture me about how I'm not "confident" enough and that's my issue when it comes to advocating for myself in the business world.....
I will cry them a river
Most young people are quite sheltered, and many old ones as well. Ignorance is rampant. Wouldn’t take it personally.
Despite a lack of resources at least you got some brains, some in the same situation aren’t so lucky.
Is this because $1.90 is 2008 money is equivalent to $2.50 now?
At some point this transformed into looking at the poor and thinking, "Loser."
Governments should lean on our media to mediate this message.
Read these 3 books, even if its just one chapter of each book in any order, but READ them!
They will change your mind more than any money ever can.
·THINK AND GROW RICH - Napoleon Hill · GRIT - Angela Duckworth · THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE - Rick Warren
- Examples: health, abortion, addiction, debt, bad money management, etc.