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I was born as what would probably now be considered "poor white trash". I didn't realize it at the time because my parents worked their butts off to provide for me and for my sister, and to see to it that we did well; it wasn't until I was an adult and living on my own for the first time that I really started to understand some of the sacrifices they made and some of the choices they had to face.

I have been poor. I have been soul-crushingly under water. I've had to do things I'm not proud of just to stay afloat. But now... I live comfortably, have a job with a decent salary, and have the respect of my peers.

Did that take a lot of work? Yes. Can anyone put in the work? Yes. Is that the only factor? Not by a long shot; the number of contingent factors along the road from where I started to where I am now is staggeringly huge. Much as I'd love to toot my own horn and talk about how I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, I know perfectly well how lucky I was, on multiple occasions, simply to be in the right place at the right time, or to make a decision -- on a whim, not on any sort of prescient wisdom -- that later paid off in ways I couldn't have imagined, much less anticipated.

I also don't know any "bootstrapper" who could honestly say anything different; achievement and advancement simply don't happen in a vacuum, and they don't happen unaided. I know it's popular in certain circles to pretend otherwise, but that's just the way it is, and posting demeaning screeds whose sole clear message is "it's your own fault if you're poor" always makes me think someone's ego has gotten in the way of actual understanding.

It's simplistic to think that "it's your own fault if you're poor" which is what tjic is implying.

I was irritated by the above post because I don't think the above poster has really been poor before. When you're 13 years old, with no home, no parents, perhaps in 70s Taiwan where government services were at a minimum, living off a bowl of white rice every day, trying to study and get into the best college because that's your only ticket out for 4 or 5 years, I don't think there is much you can do at all. To say that you can fix your situation in any state is insulting.

My father did get out. But he suffered for four years, which seemed like eternity. One bowl of rice, passing out because he didn't get enough nutrition. What would you have him do? Go work and forfeit a college education?

He didn't need anything, by the way. But to imply that there was more he could do about his situation is INSULTING.

When he said something like "Being low-class is not budgeting." You know he's just an ignoramus. He's never been poor and has absolutely no concept of what that means. He also doesn't know what it takes to claw and scratch your way out of poverty and I'd bet dollars to donuts that he wouldn't have what it takes to do it.

Clearly tjic is talking about life in the US now, not about life in Taiwan in the 70s.

When I was young (0-2 and 4-7), my family lived in a remote part of Alaska where we needed very little money and correspondingly earned very little money (~$3k/year for a family of 4). But we lived like kings, with hundreds of square miles for just us, moving around between different cabins my dad and a couple other people had built on a whim (public land, acceptable at the time), fishing and eating wild game as we pleased. Then we moved to the city because land regulations had changed and so that my younger brother and I would have more contact with people. I don't view either of these decisions as irresponsible.

Pretty much at the worst possible time, shortly after moving, my brother had some serious asthma issues (several emergency room visits), but of course we had no health insurance at that time. It took several years to recover from that debt despite long hours (e.g. 90+ hour weeks in wildfire) and good budgeting. Both my parents have Masters degrees and professional jobs now, but these kind of scenarios happen, it's not always laziness or poor fiscal planning.

"I feel bad for the poor, but in a rich, capitalist, free-market place like America, ALMOST ANYONE can become middle-class or better, if they just act like responsible adults."

"If you want to work two shifts, and save your money, and eat oatmeal, you can become a millionaire."

So let me get this straight -- being a responsible adult is working 16 hours per day, living off of oatmeal, having no disposable income?

I'll be perfectly honest with you. Morals aside, I'd be much more inclined to just rob you. In the off chance I go to jail, my life wouldn't be much worse.

I know in your idealized world people just do as their told. I think I'd make more calculated decisions... and I don't think they're likely to be decisions that you're a fan of.

> So let me get this straight -- being a responsible adult is working 16 hours per day, living off of oatmeal, having no disposable income?

If you want to own a house, or bootstrap yourself into new skills, or otherwise escape poverty, then yes.

That's what most of our ancestors did, and we're living in the society that they created and bequeathed to us.

That's stupid. I'm not doing that. No one I know who has escaped poverty has done that. No one. In fact pretty much everyone I know who has "escaped" poverty has done so through their kids. I know a few NFL, NBA players. And some that went the academic route.

Of the couple of adults I know who escaped poverty. They did so by less legal means.

> That's stupid. I'm not doing that. No one I know who has escaped poverty has done that. No one.

I was born with a net worth of $0.

I now own two companies, and a house with no mortgage.

I did it by working hard, and by working smart.

If you spent most of your life working two jobs for 16 hours per day, eating oatmeal, I quite frankly don't think you worked very smart.

But each to their own, and what they want to spend their time on Earth doing.

The point he is making, and that you don't seem to understand is that you need to live within your means. If your means consist of $8 an hour, $320 a week, $1000 a month after taxes, that means buying bulk oatmeal instead of Raisin Bran. That might mean eating beans and rice instead of stealing steak.

Having been a poor, starving college student before, and living off of ramen noodles, mac and cheese, hot dogs, etc, I know this reality. I wasn't smart enough at the time to realize how unhealthy a lot of cheap food is, and if I had to do it over again I'd eat beans and rice and oatmeal as they're much more healthy.

Anyway, the point he's trying to make is that even if you are extremely poor, making $8 an hour, you can choose to live on a budget. Rent a room somewhere for a few hundred dollars a month, buy cheap food for a hundred bucks a month. If you're smart and live within your means, you can be saving 10% of your income even with only $1,000 a month. Work a second job, pick up more income. Maybe splurge and buy some meat once in a while now that you can afford it.

If you're getting a $200 payday loan every week and paying $250 a few days later, you're just plain stupid. That ends up taking $200 a month out of your money. And $200 a month can buy a lot of oatmeal...

The point he is really making is work hard, read your bible, and shut up. Everyone can make it, just do those three things. And if you end up broke and having wasted your life, like so many others, at least you have heaven to look forward to.

For some reason here I'm reminded of Malcolm X's autobiography...

And apparently by not acknowledging any single person who helped you along the way. Way to spit on all of those people with such shameless self-aggrandizing pomposity.

How can you make such a statement knowing nothing about how he achieved his success?

Because he attributes his success to his own singular superhumanity. Nobody makes their way in this world completely on their own.

Sure, but there's no basis for knowing whether he had more or less help than any other human gets from just being a member of society.

This post reminds me of an interesting phenomenon I keep noticing in my friends-- those who are the least sympathetic to the poor (in the 'those poor darlings never had a chance' sense) are those which came from the most modest backgrounds and have achieved some measure of success.

The sympathy seems to be inversely proportional to the modesty of the background and the level of current financial success.

Similarly, it's those who had everything handed to them who are most sympathetic (at least, vocally so).

tjic said they were born with $0 net worth, which is generally true of all newborns, no?

Your assumption that they bootstrapped themselves up seems misplaced. I would very strongly guess that they had a comfortable middle-class existence. Only such a person thinks it's just a matter of work hard versus laziness.

> I'll be perfectly honest with you. Morals aside, I'd be much more inclined to just rob you. In the off chance I go to jail

As I sit here typing I've got my Sigpro 2340 and 10 rounds of Federal hollowpoint in a concealed holster under my t-shirt.

Poor decision making is another hallmark of people who opt into the low class.

I support the second amendment and all; I think its a more important part of the American psyche than most people realize.

Sorry to riff on your meme, but dude, typing at your computer with your gun in your belt, that's seriously low-class. Almost as much as telling everyone about it.

You pull the gun. He pulls one.

Stalemate? Double homoicide? Flight? You survive but get injured? Or worse yet you injure yourself?

Have you ever been in a situation where you pulled a gun on someone in a moment of fear? Are you sure you can? Have you trained? Or do you just have a permit?

There's a very good reason why the police recommend letting the burgler get his money and leave. Macho posing about hollowpoint bullets aside, the money isn't worth anything compared to your life and your general well-being. If you haven't figured that out yet, you haven't escaped poverty yet.

Yes, you need to work 16 hours and, at the same time, make sure your kids go to the library instead of watching TV. He sounds like an expert.

Oy, all I can say is that grinding poverty changes your mental state. I've seen both sides: my father grew up middle class and my mother grew up poor. My grandparents were the "frugal poor" that you think about -- my grandfather ended up having a heart attack in his 30s and never quite recovered. The difference is that both of them were intelligent, in spite of not having a high school education, and they lived in an era where you could get a job in that environment. (My grandfather grew up in a farming community where people were taken out of school after the 4th grade to work the fields.)

But not everyone is lucky like that. Poor people often grow up malnourished, and their IQ suffers. Everyone here is blessed with above average intelligence, but many don't have the educational foundation to develop the skills to make the right choices, and we don't exactly have frugality shows on TV to explain how to be an informed consumer.

Being poor is having the nearest grocery store a 30 minute bus ride and walk away from you and your kid. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/news/grocery_gap.html

The thing is, everyone agrees that poor people should do all those things. But, like most things in life, the reality is harder than the ideal. My grandparents were able to do it.

In IT, we talk about stupid users. Many of the people we complain about are IQ 100, and many of the poor we're talking about are as close to them in intelligence as the average IT worker to the clueless worker.

How do you teach an 80 IQ mother the skills necessary? (Remember, the malnourishment throughout her own childhood, combined with the poor decisions of her parents, contributed to this problem - it's environmental, not genetic.)

That's the rationale behind spending money on WIC programs - if you can get the children proper nourishment, they can be attentive enough in their education that they can escape the problem.

I agree with a lot of this. Too often we promote a victim mentality. While that may help people feel better, it doesn't actually do much in the long run, it just makes everyone think they are victims of the inescapable Man and therefore have no hope or opportunity. So your counterpoints about low-class are somewhat helpful.

That said, I think you are way too extreme about some of it, especially the points about not marrying someone who will run away and not having "more kids than space". Seriously. I know several people intimately who grew in a "more kids than space" situation and I can assure that none of them would rather delete a sibling than have a little more space. It is nice to give lots of space to people if you can; if you can't, it is better to have people than space.

As far as a spouse running off or going crazy, that happens sometimes. Nobody marries someone thinking that they are just going to end up divorced. Things happen to people, including things beyond their own control. My father-in-law is bipolar and ultimately left his family and gave them no money. He was normal the first ten years and then started acting strangely ... is my mother-in-law at fault for not detecting this illness that did not manifest until ten years post-marriage?

You should cool it on the really personal family stuff, not only because it's offensive and uncouth but also because it is incorrect and ignorant.

My father's mother died when he was 13. His father abandoned his family around the same time and later died of a stroke. My dad lived in a slum for five bitter years in Taipei living off US$20 a month, and never let anyone know how poor he was or that he ate white rice every night. His only ticket out was betting it on the College Entrance Exams.

What saved him was that in Chinese culture, you have the ability to move up through tests and exams. So while I have a lot of problems with standardized exams, he was also able to move up because he was smart.

However, my main beef with your post is that you seem to think that anyone can fix their problems at any time. I don't know why you turned this into a pro-Capitalism article, or why you turned this into a you-can-fix-this-yourself article, because I don't think my Dad needed help from anyone, but the empathy to understand that when both your parents are effectively dead and you're trying to get an education and basically enough food to subsist, it's more than about leftism. It's about being a human being. When you're 13, and have no parents, what choice do you really have? There is no easy fix until you have that degree.

And for your information, my Dad relied on no government help, other than what was provided to everyone, public schools. But to think that anyone can make decisions to be move up is foolish thinking.

Should he have dropped out of school and "fixed" the problem as you proposed by working long days? My Dad didn't need any help from anyone. And he worked hard getting into the best university in Taiwan, National Taiwan University. But don't imply that poor people have control over their situation. That is arrogant and wrong.

When you're faced with a Hobson's choice--to drop out of school and forfeit a future with maybe a bit of comfort, or to stay in school but have little comfort--I think you'll agree with me that there's little choice at all. But it is insulting to assume that there were better choices he could have made. Save money on food? He's already eating white rice on 67 cents a day! "Being poor is not budgeting" -- how is this even possible, being a high school student, with no sources of income or parents?

Moving up, as a young kid before even having the opportunity to be in college, isn't as easy as you think.

Scalzi also replied in case anybody missed it.

And once again, I’ll note that when one is poor, one can take perfect care of one’s teeth — and despite that still get a toothache. Some people have bad teeth naturally. Some people my bite down on something too hard and crack their enamel. Lots of things can happen in spite of doing something conscientiously. And that’s where being poor is a problem. However one got the toothache, when one is poor, one hopes it simply goes away.

As with the toothache example, are probably quite a few other examples here that you would ascribe to “being white trash” which are equally ascribable to bad luck or event to which the person has no control.

What is interesting is that you choose to imagine a simple desciption of a toothache as an example of someone being low-class, when in fact, it’s just about a toothache, and what having one means when one is poor.

Or, for another example, let’s take the “stealing meat” thing. If a kid steals the meat and cooks it up before his mother gets home because he knows his mother is a day away from a paycheck and doesn’t have enough food in the house to feed both herself and her kid and he doesn’t want to see her go hungry, where does that rank on your empathy scale? I ask, because, being the kid in question, and having done it, I’d like to know what’s inherently “low class” about wanting one’s mother to be able to eat when she gets home from work. Bear in mind the mother was doing all the right things — job, maintaining a house, raising her child adequately — and yet, for whatever reason, at the end of the day, she would have had to skip a meal.

I don’t think all the examples you would choose to list are orthogonal as you think. Or more to the point, most of the things on this list could be ascribable to people being trashy and wallowing in their own loserdom and they are equally ascribable to people doing everything right who are unable to catch a break.

As I’ve noted before, people seem take out of this list what they put into it. You seem to want make this list examples of how people can’t, don’t or won’t help themselves. Interestingly, this is one of the reasons I put this one in the list:

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

It's posts like these that make me want to stop reading HN comments.

It's articles like these that attract them. You've got to flag them or they'll keep creeping up.

> Enjoy this article about how a 37 year old manual laborer who came to the country at 21 just bought a condo in NYC for $1.4 million.

They wrote an article about that and published it in a newspaper precisely _because_ it is so vanishingly unlikely that it could happen, for the same reason that a dog biting a man is no story, but a man biting a dog is. Boring stories don't make it into newspapers!

Poor people face a vastly different set and far more constricted set of choices than the rest of us do and are armed with much less knowledge. Be nice if more people realized that.

It's much more complicated than that.

There's so much to say about your post that I'm not even going to start.

As written by a person who's never been poor.

Your position is completely uninspired, unintelligent, uncreative, and boring. It's the standard simpleton fare that has continued the circle of poverty for decades.

Just out of curiosity: You a Glen Beck fan by chance? I'm going to guess yes.

I wrote a long post refuting your points, but ended up erasing it because I don't think you can reach sociopaths. Let's just leave it as sometimes shit happens to people in life, and folks with money and financial resources have a much easier time of it. Also, you're an asshole.

> I don't think you can reach sociopaths.

Wonderful ad-hominem attack: "I can't make a convincing argument, therefore I'm going to write the other party off as not a true human being".

I salute you.

Maybe this is just a nit, but calling someone a sociopath isn't necessarily calling them 'not a true human being,' so I wouldn't put words into his/her mouth. Saying, "You can't argue with a sociopath," could simply mean: "Any argument that I could pose, couldn't be rightly understood by the other party, so I would be wasting my time."

Sorry, how is this being upvoted? He doesn't present any coherent argument other than "shit happens" and calls the guy an asshole.

It is upvoted because:

1) the subject is politics. People have such strong feelings about it that HN policies about downvoting and name calling aren't followed as usual.

Compare to discussions about, say, web design issues, programming languages or copyright law. While articles on these topics tend to lead to heated debates, most people still follow the policies.

2) the majority of HN readers have liberal-leaning beliefs, and being judgemental about certain topics is frowned upon.

2) the majority of HN readers have liberal-leaning beliefs

Really?

What I tend to see around here is that people are liberal socially (homophobia, anti-drug sentiment, religious fundamentalism and bigotry seem to be mostly absent here), but rather conservative economically - most people are very free-market, in favor of lower taxes, and believe that almost all government meddling is bad. Classic libertarian stuff.

And they're doubly conservative when we get to personal finance, which is especially surprising to me - based on the investment advice most people around these parts give (which tends to be vastly more conservative than even the stuffiest investment adviser would suggest), you'd think this was a community of 75 year codgers, not risk-seeking young'ns shooting the moon with their crazy business schemes.

Sociopath? Asshole?

Let's at least try and keep the discussion civil.

A lot of what was said was right. Don't buy expensive, name brand cereal...it doesn't matter if you're Bill Gates or Tiny Tim, spending more than you have to on food is just stupid. Now, Bill Gates can afford to be stupid. He can float around on a boat that is made for 200 people, he can drive around in a race car, he can fly around in an airplane made for the same 200 people, and he can spend far, far more than he should be on food.

Don't keep people who would steal from you as friends, spend time reading books instead of watching TV.

This is all good advice.