Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

princeton.edu

274 pointsknown166 comments

Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success.

When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think about your resources.

When you're given wealth, you don't feel like you've earned it, you have no buy-in, and you feel like a burden to those around you. You can see the difference starkly with those who earn wealth and those who inherit it. All to often the next generation squanders it.

I think we should give money to those in need, in fact I think it's a moral imperative. But I also think it's important to remember the more complex human psychology behind the scenes. In addition to satisfying basic needs how can we get this person a meaningful way to contribute and feel like they're earning what they're given in the future. How can we plug them into a community that can sustain them through tough times, and likewise that they can support?

Consider http://streetsteam.org/model which supplies the homeless with work cleaning city streets:

> We believe that treating people with dignity and empowering them to be a part of the solution to their struggles is a major factor in their ultimate success.

Note that Streets Team doesn't pay anybody - nobody's earning anything. I see people forced into "volunteering" or working below minimum wage regularly in the UK in order to receive benefits.

Forcing people to work for near-nothing is detrimental to their health - it doesn't help anyone feel like they're earning a living, since they're not, and in fact in practice this practice is just the Government giving companies near-free human labour, with the threat to said humans of killing them (by removing the resources they need to survive). There's also a remarkable amount of people who can't work and maintain their health at the same time (mental illness), who should be on disability benefits but have been denied them, who are badly affected by policies like this one.

Go far enough down this line and we have the workhouses of the past.

By all means - provide people with the opportunity to access work (The Big Issue et al), or the ability to volunteer and develop their skills and resume. But don't force them to in order to access the money they need to survive.

Working menial jobs isn't the same as success either. Giving someone shelter, food, and other basic things that society expect folks to have - such as transportation, for example, or clothes that are up to par - isn't exactly wealth to be squandered.

These are the sorts of things that help. We aren't talking riches, just an actual safety net. That way, when your employer decides to close shop, you get sick and miss work, have a low-paying job.. you can actually devote resources into the things that will make a tight situation better rather than trying to decide if you need to eat one less meal a day to be able to afford a doctor's appointment. Things alike that.

I'll even argue that menial work set aside for poor folks has its own stigma, one similar to working at a fast food place. Not only does the public treat you badly for working there, but management often treats you as disposable as well.

> Poverty can also be a trap because...

Actually there is contrary evidence. A study was carried out on the streets of London where they gave larger sums of cash no-strings-attached, and it showed that people in general took that money and used it to set themselves up in a job. One started a gardening business, for instance [0]. The idea that work is what people need is very Victorian, and reminds me of the tread-mill in the workhouse. Surely we should be looking for ways to remove the tyranny of physical labour. I most certainly do not need to be working in a regular job to feel successful.

On the matter of terminology the poverty trap as I have seen it looks very different. There is a trap that means in the UK if I am out of work I can get job-seekers allowance and housing benefit and child benefit. If I can find a single days work I lose all of it (although I may get some working tax credit it will not cover the loss), so anything other than a full time job has to be avoided at all costs. That is the poverty trap, benefits systems that penalise attempts to get off them.

[0] : https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/providing-personalised-support...

> If I can find a single days work I lose all of it.

I can't speak to social programs outside of the US, but here, most of our programs (SNAP, Section-8, unemployment benefits) are on a sliding scale. This allows for benefits to somewhat decrease as earnings increase.

That said, I anecdotally have noticed a couple things:

1. Many low income people actually aspire to be accepted into these programs, especially Section-8 (US housing assistance).

2. Once people are accepted into these programs, they never leave.

I own dozens of rental properties, some of them low income where we accept tenants who receive housing assistance. I've never seen a singe person lose this benefit or have it decreased because they start earning more.

Now, I'm not sure whether these programs are a trap or not. I think it is waaay more complicated than that. Some people need help. Some people will leverage this assistance to climb up or make it through a tough time. Some people will take advantage.

I can recall two students I knew at Stuyvesant who lived in a couple of the more violent public housing projects who went on to college. My anecdote proves your anecdote wrong. That said I will need for you to come with studies and real data that show you are not wrong. This is because what you are saying has very real world implications that will hurt children who do need sometime up to 18 years of housing assistance so that they can also go on to college and become productive members of society.

> This is because what you are saying has very real world implications that will hurt children who do need sometime up to 18 years of housing assistance so that they can also go on to college and become productive members of society.

What exactly am I saying?

They're sorta on a sliding scale. I have a friend here in Texas who lost $900 a month in family benefits for finding a job that paid $4 an hour better.

In the UK they are on a stepped scale. So you hit a trigger point a lose a lot, especially housing benefit. In some benefits you have to be out of work so-long to get them again, so a day's work can lose you a whole weeks benefit.

I was out of work for a few weeks during the recession. It took a month to receive any housing benefit and two weeks to get unemployment by which time I was behind on my rent. I took the first job I could find at a little over minimum (with best intentions) and applied for working tax credits which were sorted a few weeks later. The tax credits were back-dated to when I started earning so now I had 'earned too much' in a prior period to have claimed housing benefit and I got a bill to pay it all back. Then because I had claimed a benefit I was not entitled to I was pulled in for an interview under-caution for benefit fraud! I was read my rights and they put two tapes in a machine just like in the films and started questioning me. We got to the end of the first tape before they accepted that their chronology was rather unfair.

So yes UK benefits are a severe poverty trap

I have a relation who was manager of a number of low waged workers and none of them would take extra hours for fear of upsetting their tax credits. Something about 16 hours a week, but I don't know whether it was a time or a wage limit. Imagine a society incentivising people not to work?

This is largely not true. Most housing assistance in most places is in bands. For example to receive low income housing you need to have income below a certain fixed level or else you’re not eligible at all.

Many other benefits are lost entirely if you get a job.

This is based on the myth that poor people don't contribute, while rich people contribute more.

Perhaps you don't understand that many people in poverty have jobs. In fact many have multiple jobs, because it's the only way they can stay afloat financially.

Workfare is not a solution. The economy either needs to be reinvented with stable jobs and financial democracy, or essentials - not just cash, but education, health-care, and housing - need to be provided for free, and the cost of economic self-development made so low that anyone with an idea and a hint of a work ethic can try it out without being terrorised by the prospect of absolute economic failure and destruction.

> it's important to remember the more complex human psychology

Yes, and it's important to remember that it is complex, not reduce it to simplistic formulae. Your theory is pretty much exactly contrary to empirical evidence. When you've earned money through hard work it can create a reward cycle, but it can also create a feeling of completion, of having done enough and having the right to stop. When you haven't earned money it can make you feel like a burden, but that doesn't necessarily lead to defeatism. Feeling indebted can also motivate someone to pay it back or pay it forward.

There are plenty of theories leading in all directions. Where does the evidence point? There's plenty of evidence that unconditional cash transfers (the term you should Google for) work just as well as in-kind or strings-attached aid[1][2]. Often better, and easier to administer too. Maybe the problem isn't that poor people lack motivation or work ethics. Maybe that's just an ugly stereotype. What they seem to lack is, obviously, money - or not money itself but the time and security and opportunity that even a little bit of money can provide. One of the most important things money can provide (especially in the absence of universal health care) is better health, including mental health, which is in a sense what the OP addresses. Giving people a small temporary opportunity without addressing these more permanent limiters to their success might be putting the cart before the horse. Preference for such approaches might have more to do with the givers' attitudes and biases than with results.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/unco...

I think providing assistance with no strings attached is a good thing. I just don't think its sufficient and a more holistic approach would work better.

I also don't think this kind of program can scale though. It needs to be local and involve the community, not a faceless bureaucracy. To your point, you may feel indebted to a friend who helps you with some cash. But no one feels indebted to the federal government.

To add to your point, I think there would be ways to give more granular, specific assistance instead of just throwing money at people. Buying things like housing, food, and healthcare at scale makes sense for a government to do, as it should be cheaper. (The level of corruption in the current U.S. government might negate that, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's society's responsibility to hold its government to account, or change how elections are done if the system is broken. Democratic elections are the least bad idea for governance that we've come up with.) If the basic essentials can be provided (the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy), then it would probably be better to provide opportunities for community and achievement beyond that point. That could be through funding community programs that can pay people for work to improve their neighborhood or city, or vocational training, or other indirect avenues. Maybe a small amount of direct money, but just to cover gaps in essentials. You also have to pay a significant amount for auditors and social workers to make sure the system is working sanely. Spending money intelligently can save money, just like you wouldn't buy an expensive car and then run it with the cheapest, shittiest oil and never change it.

The necessary but not sufficient conditions for someone to succeed are to be: not homeless, not starving, and not sick. After that point, it's up to the person. There will be free riders and slackers. It's impossible to avoid those, so you can only mitigate their impact. That bothers people in a moral sense, but financially it's not crippling at all if you're properly controlling costs and fraud. Just because that bottom percentile of human vice exists should not doom the many people who would be talented, motivated, and contribute to society if they were simply given some basic security.

> just throwing money at people

That's an overly emotive phrase that misrepresents what anyone has suggested.

> Maybe a small amount of direct money, but just to cover gaps in essentials. You also have to pay a significant amount for auditors and social workers to make sure the system is working sanely.

In other words, do exactly what the research shows does not work as well. Attach strings, maintain tight control, etc. Never grant agency to poor people. Pretend that they can't make wise decisions, unlike people who might inherit millions and of course we can trust them to act wisely because meritocracy.

I think you misunderstand how I'm aiming this. I would honestly rather explore more socialist approaches, or at least worker co-ops, because I feel that corporate capitalism carries within its nature its own destabilization through regulatory capture and social discord.

However, because I am speaking about the U.S. we're facing a hyper-moralized work culture, at least in part from its Protestant origins, where just being nice or generous to people because that's what humans deserve isn't enough. I am trying to make the argument from pragmatism and efficiency. Human motivation is also complicated and not everyone reacts to incentives uniformly. The current attempts to moralize through means testing of benefits hold a grain of truth but are mostly misguided and costly.

There are major perspective, educational, and ideological barriers to contend with. I'm not advocating means testing as other people in this post have been referring to. I am advocating making freely available, to anyone who needs it, shelter, food, or healthcare and having support from social workers at that point to guide them towards work, school, or other activities with the goal of actualizing their talents. Generally any sum given in UBI would face being whittled down to an (inaccurate) estimate for providing those same things anyways, unless the UBI was a direct dividend from the overall productivity of the country, or perhaps from a dedicated carbon tax.

Currently, social workers dealing with low socioeconomic status folks spend a huge amount of their time helping people find programs, fill out paperwork for benefits, and navigate intricate bureaucratic mazes that contain massive gaps in coverage. (A patchwork, as someone else commented) They could instead be spending that time helping people achieve a place in society, and correct multiple generations of neglect, ignorance, and trauma. Just handing money to people doesn't give them much agency by itself. They are still usually in a massive information asymmetry and in sick communities with addiction, trauma, crime, and ignorance. People need a sense of belonging and purpose to bring out their talents and motivation, and you have to raise up whole communities at once. Our current system alienates the hell out of people instead. The often depressing fates of lottery winners are exemplar of what happens when ordinary folks receive lots of money in isolation. Rich people also often do very stupid things, but their surrounding wealthy community and armies of assistants usually prevent that from spiraling into ruin. That's a key difference.

UBI without addressing those community factors is likely to end badly or not do nearly what people expect it to do, and will just stoke the status resentment that's already reaching critical mass here. Our current political situation was by and large affected by level of educational attainment and status resentment. You can't cut that Gordian Knot by just giving everyone an allowance and calling it done.

I would be interested in the research you're referring to though, and whether it applies specifically to the intergenerational poverty in the U.S. I wonder whether it's representative of all the communities it would affect. I don't doubt that some people would deal with free money in a positive way, especially people who have just fallen from the previous middle class and don't have layers and layers of barriers and trauma, but saying that just giving money, at country scale, to all poor communities would just fix their problems is a very idealistic claim to make. The socio part of socio-economic status exists for a reason: it's not just a distribution problem but the secondary effects of that compounded generationally with many other tricky cultural issues.

> Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success.

Taking a pill when you are ill is also not the same as doing your own medical research. I just never heard that used as a reason for denying people pills.

I can imagine good reasons for not giving poor people money (such as: the money is needed somewhere else), but "then they would not feel what my pet psychological theory says is the optimal state of mind" is not among them.

Feeling that you earned money is nice, but it is not the most important feeling in the world. People can feel good about doing stuff they can't easily convert to money. For example, poor people helping each other is in my opinion a good thing, but usually not very profitable. Or taking care of your kids... okay, one could argue that this will bring some profit in the future... yeah, maybe, but you and the kids need to eat something today.

(Also, it feels unfair to blame people fully for their inability to make money, when they live in a society where everything is regulated -- such as jobs they could hypothetically do, but they do not have the required education, or cannot pass some other artificial barrier to entry.)

At one point in the past I was most definitely dealing with poverty and I found it a lot more difficult to get development tasks done at work. The reduced mental capacity is really noticeable but importantly it's also temporary.

Since then I've kept an eye out for disadvantaged people who do good development work. If they are able to produce things despite having a reduced capacity it's such a good sign that they have real talent. Poverty can be dealt with more easily than a lack of talent.

There's a great book called "scarcity" by by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, that explains the mechanisms behind this, would highly recommend reading it.

Mullainathan and Shafir are indeed co-authors on the study cited in this article.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976

I also second the recommendation for 'Scarcity'.

"Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018?

This Princeton article is from 2013 and talking about the paper, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Here is some December 2013 commentary doubting the paper:

> Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor.

Comment on "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...

> "Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018?

The reason might be common sense. The evolution of the human brain was possible for a great part because humans started to cook their food. Poverty reduces nutritional intake. Therefore the studies make sense. This means that (imho) somebody should prove the opposite to make this completely logical meme go away.

That's not how science works.

This isn't just wrong, it's fundamentally wrong. The burden is on those who wish to forward a positive claim. The meme won't go away because it nicely confirms a popular and comforting narrative.

What we're talking about here isn't "a popular and comforting narrative," it's a description of a plausible model involving mechanisms that are at least partially understood.

Once you're at that point, whether a challenge to that model or the model itself constitutes a claim that bears the greater burden of proof isn't as clear as it might be for any arbitrary claim.

Analogy: somebody claims that gravity is 10% stronger in New York City. The popular and comforting meme is that gravity works just normally in NYC. Who needs to prove anything?

> Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018?

What do you mean? Why shouldn’t it be discussed? Criticism of methodology doesn’t necessarily mean the conclusions are wrong or not worth exploring or validating. One critique doesn’t disprove the hypothesis, and it’s certainly possible the critique is flawed as well. It only took a second to Google Mani’s rebuttal to the critique: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.5

very few results in the social sciences replicate well.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-...

In his influential book on Universal Income, "Utopia for Realists", Rutger Bregman discusses this at some length (referencing the same study).

I have to say I have experienced it myself, and not having enough money for the essentials is so all consuming that you cannot possibly perform well at work and make good life decisions. I have succeeded at work under these conditions, but I gave up everything else, hobbies, leisure time, and worse of all time with my children. Maybe my kids will do worse in their exams because I didn't have the mental capacity left to see where they needed help. Maybe this will make them poorer too.

I am sure you have given your kids a great example of succeeding in a tough situation and taking care of a family.

Edit: Don't know why was my post down-voted. My intention was only to give emotional support to a fellow human being that goes/went through pain that I personally have struggled with and know all too well.

Thank you for that, it was a nice comment and I up-voted. It is interesting, my eldest always seems to think we are poor now, since she was old enough to have remembered the worst of it. I earn above average wage now, but she is scarred by it. My reaction is not to victim-blame other poor people who didn't get through, but to campaign for a system which helps people succeed. And that system is not, categorically, anything with strings attached or any 'work-makes-you-free' Victorian BS. Working out of poverty is miserable and I don't feel a lot better for having done it, but I do bear plenty of scars.

All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.

Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.

This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological.

1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)?

2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps)

3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier

"It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.

Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)

"Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.

Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family.

Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.

As a developer, our job is making decisions (about code / requirements). This is directly related to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) - the "not wanting to think about other things when you get home.

If one has the resources to reduce the cognitive load of other decisions (eat out rather than have to do meal planning), well... that's the advantage of having a well paying job.

The flip side is where problems occur. When someone is dealing with other REALLY IMPORTANT decisions (pay rent? pay food? pay utilities? medical bills? - pick two or three), making other decisions for a white collar job becomes harder to get and harder to keep.

This then leads off into tangents of basic income, guaranteed housing, universal medical care, etc... All of those things reduce some of the difficulty of making those really important decisions.

Exactly my point. Thanks for adding more detail.

I think this is why social democracy works so well for reducing poverty. When I compare poverty relief programs in the US with how it works in Scandinavian countries (I live in Norway) I notice a very big difference in how it is delivered.

The US uses a large patchwork of a multitude of smaller means tested programs. You frequently read about how people are telling each other about what programs one can apply to and how. In short becoming poor in the US means navigating a maze of small programs and understanding and having the energy to apply to all of these.

In a social democratic system most of these small means tested programs are replaced by large non-means tested programs. They aren't really programs but rather universal rights for everyone. There is much less to navigate.

1) Everybody gets heavily subsidized child care. There is nothing to apply for. Which reduces the economic burden of having children.

2) Health care while pregnant or anything related to children is completely free. For grownups you only pay small fees for doctors visits. You can't get into financial ruin over cancer treatment e.g.

3) Once you pay above a certain level for medication you don't pay anymore. There is a cost roof to the patient. Which prevents financial ruin due to medication. There is nothing to apply for or be eligible for. It just kicks in automatically.

4) If you are unemployed and struggle with getting a job, you get government aid to retrain or get new skills. It is not means tested.

5) Education is free and you get very favorable loans and stipends, everybody get the same regardless of income. It is only the conditions of the study which affects it. E.g. if you live away from home you get more than if you live at home. If you chose to study abroad you get more e.g. to cover tuition. E.g. I studied in the US and the Norwegian government payed most of the tuition. It means even if you are poor getting a decent education is not a major obstacle. You don't have to hunt for scholarships and spend weeks filling them out.

6) Sick pay and unemployment benefits are quite generous so you don't go to economic ruin because you get sick or unemployed for a while.

Of course some people do fall between the cracks in social democracy as well. But it takes a lot more effort to end up in poverty. More things need to go wrong. Typically the ones who end up on the street are drug addicts and alcoholics. But even most of them are offered accommodations.

However I still think universal basic income is worth exploring. Our system is by no means perfect. A significant problem is that because the welfare services are so generous, they are expensive and there is a lot of worry about abuse, especially from foreigners who have a more cynical view towards welfare programs because they have grown up in states where the common man in screwed over in every possible way. Exploiting the system then does not seem unfair. This lead to more monitoring and a harder push towards means testing and requiring certain actions by the recipient. They are very pushy on unemployed people e.g. They have to demonstrate that they are actively seeking work. If you are sick for longer periods you need meetings with a medical professional and the employer to come up with possible arrangements that could allow you to function at work.

Norway is extremely wealthy though. Your benefits don't apply to citizens of Greece or other countries in the EU so it's not clear that it's a scalable solution.

The US is very large, comparing it to a single country in Europe makes little sense. If you compare it to the EU itself you will see why there are so many disparate systems throughout the country.

The US is more wealthy. Moreover, perhaps Norway is wealthier because of its support systems.

Norway is wealthy because of oil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_N...

Lots of countries have abundant natural resources. Most of those resources are exploited by private interests though.

Norway is wealthy because of oil

Right; you wouldn't compare Norway to the entire US, you'd compare it to Alaska.

People forget this about the US. You wouldn't compare "California" to "the EU" because that wouldn't make sense.

I said wealthier. And yes, as other state, the US had and has significantly more natural resources per capita.

I'm a fairly strong believer in the second-order positive economic effects of social programs, but in the case of Norway, it's wealth is much more directly attributable to resource wealth in a first-world region.

> [..] it's not clear that it's a scalable solution.

What a big word. `s/scalable/reproducible`.

"Norway is extremely wealthy though. Your benefits don't apply to citizens of Greece or other countries in the EU so it's not clear that it's a scalable solution."

That very much depends on your immigration status, honestly. I'm American and my spouse is Norwegian: I'm eligible for most of these benefits. The same is true for my friend who is British married to a Norwegian woman - and their child gets all benefits. And again, the same is true for the friend from Poland who is here raising her Norwegian son (father has died). Most folks that are here for work aren't as eligible for certain things. Levels depend on where they are from, but there are ways to earn similar rights as well, if you go through immigration. Of course these won't apply to folks living in other countries.

"The US is very large..."

Sure, but they also aren't poor overall and this is just an excuse. If it is a constitutional issue about federal government powers, well, that document was meant to be changed. The instructions on changing it are in the document itself, after all.

Canada is very large and manages to have healthcare. There isn't a good reason why government agencies in different states cannot have an easy-to-navigate system for a safety net that actually works while meeting basic threshholds set up by the national government. Norway itself has municipalities administer many of the benefits, such as language courses for immigrants and adult education. This way the folks up north can meet the needs of its people, which can differ from the needs of folks down south.

Most (all?) of GP's points also apply to Finland, which is nowhere near as wealthy as Norway. Their government is able to provide their citizens with these services because it is massively invested in the country's economy; as of 2012, total market capitalization of state holdings in Finnish companies is $115 billion, against $256.7 billion GDP. For the United States in 2012, the figures are $6 billion in SOEs against $16 trillion GDP.

source: https://www.oecd.org/corporate/oecd-dataset-size-composition...

Even if you apply Norway's policies to any other country, it will not magically become as prosperous as Norway.

It's a resource-rich nation, highly homogenous and part of EEA. Norway is able to ship low-value hazardous work to poor European countries without paying for their welfare/infra expenditure. Imports janitors and healthcare (the work which local aren't willing to do like wiping the ass of disabled people) workers from East Europe.

It's equivalent is of Uncle scourge swimming in gold and attributing his wealth to his ability to swim in gold.

Open your doors for third world low skilled immigrants then we'll see how much progress Norway is able to retain.

As someone else pointed out: The US is wealthier. If it was down to wealth alone, we'd expect the US to have far fewer problems.

Wealth, relatively small population and homogeneity (cultural/religious/economic) does make a lot of difference, See: Qatar.

US might be wealthier (I've not vetted this statement) but it still doesn't have many of the above.

Well, yes, because you've just included a significant part of the solution (economic homogeneity) as one of the criteria. When you look back at Norwegian history over the last century, a lot of the shift happened in line with the rise of the labour movement and the rise of the welfare system, and a lot of the beneficial outcomes were visible before the oil revenue even started.

Norway as a result got one of the flattest income distributions in the world, and has relatively high degrees of social mobility, and a culture where the labour movement combined with religious groups (in what some might call a rather unholy alliance) promoted the ideal of modesty. E.g. in Norway sending your schools to private schools long held a significant stigma.

At the same time the US started moving in the exact opposite direction: Executive salaries as a multiple of workers salaries started skyrocketing etc..

I would be very careful about applying anything Norway does to a wildly different, much larger country, while expecting similar positive results.

At the moment there is post at #1 about people's notions of an ideal life. It seems to contrast with this article. People want a simple life with good health not to acumulate stuff.

But really you have to think what is poverty? It's such a vague word as is the word poor.

There are people who live a subsistence lifestyle and they're happy. But there are people with mobile phones, big screen TV, computers, in an apartment who are poor.

From my perspective we in a western society require more things to live too many things. For example Internet access for basic government services, by your employer and schools.

Wages haven't kept pace with life. Costs seems to be rising faster than the lowest pay can cope with.

My father is from a generation where you work long hours to make more money, simple as that. But these days the wage from any paying job may not be enough even working overtime.

Even 20 years ago most people didn't have a cell phone, Internet was not widespread, you weren't paying for Netflix or a dozen other things eating away at your paycheque.

To me it seems technology plus stagnant low skill job wages have amplified poverty.

Can't we derive this conclusion from Maslow's theory of needs? It's all there.

Scrolled down looking for this. My thoughts exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

This is discriminating.

Articles with a similar sentiment have been posted here recently, authored by people on the other end of the capital spectrum. So count in that bias.

One doesn't really need a study to show that accumulating more problems, one needs more brain power to deal with that. In fact it's part of the collective common sense things are like that.

I'd rather like to see articles that summarize hiring and admission biases based on socio economic background. Especially also when it comes to management positions, there the gap is even more extreme. Ironically people there earn extra money, so they can buy the problems away...

Such other articles would also be helpful. But as it is too many people still don't understand that poverty is __not__ their relatively easy life with less money. Poverty is not merely a financial condition.

You get it. I get it. Most people, especially those in positions of power and control (e.g., hiring manager) still do not.

Poverty is like drowning.

It should be noted that this paper was published in 2013, and that there have been some subsequent comments/criticisms of it. While the original paper is behind a paywall (does anyone know of a place to read it?), this comment on the paper by Wicherts and Scholten raises questions about the study and analysis:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full

>[...]We note that a highly relevant potential confound in the field study presented by Mani et al. is the possibility of retesting effects. The lack of any retesting effect in Mani et al.’s field study involving Indian farmers is clearly at odds with one of the more robust findings in the literature on cognitive testing (9). Retesting effects on the Raven’s tests are particularly profound among test-takers with little education (10).

>Mani et al. go beyond the data by concluding that “The poor…are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty…impedes cognitive capacity.” We note that the correlation between income and IQ also appears in longitudinal studies in which IQ was measured years before incomes (11). Further research is needed to fully grasp whether poverty indeed affects cognitive performance, as proposed by Mani et al., or whether the effect found in their experiments is a test artifact. [...]

---

I had similar doubts when reading the Princeton press release (though of course my doubts are only based on hunches and not rigorous statistical analysis). The experiment testing farmers pre-harvest and post-harvest has the potential issue of retesting/learning effects, because they had the same participants take the test both before harvest and then later after harvest. If they end up seeing an increase in performance from pre-harvest to post-harvest, that could also be due to learning/familiarity with the test and not just from the independent variable of altered poverty. I would want to see a similar study done either with separate (large) groups of participants pre/post-harvest, or to repeat the test over several harvest cycles so we can see if there is an oscillating rise/fall as it goes pre/post/pre/post-harvest.

Basic income. The older I get the more I strongly hope that the future finds some version of the ideas currently in research and testing regarding basic life support to all peoples. There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyone, whether you personally need it or not.

> There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyon

Not for everyone. For young people.

The way we’ll get UBI is by repurposing Social Security and possibly Medicare funds for its purpose. That, in turn, requires millenials turn out to vote.

If UBI leads to increased productivity, everyone would benefit. Not just people who need it.

If we had UBI and a single payer system, I think we would see lots of productivity. And not just in direct monetary means, but also in terms of cultural output and people finally are free of being tied to a job and can take a chance. Same with new businesses that'll be popping up.

I think it would be simpler to repurpose the military budget.

Here's the thing about the "young people" argument: the young, because time, live in a world built by the old. Everything from the physical infrastructure to the social institutions. So if paying for pensions is a wealth transfer from young to old, usage of the built environment is the opposite flow.

In other words, the people who built say the roads did so for a package of renumeration that included a salary and a pension. Now you are proposing to renege on half of that deal. Fine - but stop using the roads you didn't pay to build in the first place. Stop using the technology that you didn't pay to do the basic research for. Not such an attractive deal now is it?

And debt is an intergenerational tax that fully offsets your argument. The young didn’t run deficits.

With a fiat money system, there's no requirement to ever pay it off. It isn't like credit card debt. The central bank just issues more money.

Except in the UK we have a government who think that you need to run the economy like a household budget. They have been trying to cut spending to reduce debt since 2010. This has decimated public services, yet the debt is still there and deepening!

A course on Modern Monetary Theory wouldn't go amiss...

Yes it is like a credit card. You have to make payments and it reduces your cash flow. The Federal Reserve prints money not the government. And payments aren’t made with printed money.

In modern fiat money, the money isn't printed. It's created by issuing bonds and then counting those bonds as an asset. The money is created when the bank loans out money based on those bond assets.

If you believe it needs to be ever paid back, it hasn't been paid back since 1914. It just grows ever larger.

The initial 1914 version pegged the fiat money to gold. Like all pegging systems, they eventually collapse catastrophically, and this one did in 1929.

I disagree with the theory that we can grow our debt forever without consequence. I never advocated pegging to anything.

Private banks create money through lending, correct. Lending is constrained by the supply of creditworthy customers. Money is not issued by decree by the Federal Reserve or the government.

Deficits are not an intergenerational tax. They are funded by issuing bonds, which are assets that will get passed down through the generations.

There is not really any such thing as an inter-generational wealth transfer. There are transfers from poor to rich that the rich are (successfully) scapegoating old people for.

The bonds/loans are spent and have to be repaid with future revenue. A bond is a liability to the issuer not an asset. There is a transfer and it’s current rich from future rich.

>A bond is a liability to the issuer not an asset.

From the issuer's (government) perspective it is a liability. From society's perspective it is both a liability and an asset.

If it’s used to invest then whatever is purchased is the offsetting asset. Sadly, it’s being used to fund current operations which has no offsetting asset. The offset is retained earnings. That can and needs to be fixed. It’s how state governments run and they do a lot of investing.

There's nothing sad about using it to heal the sick, house or feed the poor.

Moreover, there's not necessarily anything "good" about having taxes pay for operational costs if those operational costs are cluster bombs on yemeni children.

There's not even necessarily anything intrinsically good about paying back those bonds in dollars that are of equal or greater value. Sometimes (e.g. in times of great wealth inequality) letting inflation eat huge chunks out of the value of outstanding bonds is the best course of action for society as a whole.

Ummmm... you got a little sidetracked. We can do all of that without also going into debt. We shouldn't constrain future cash flow when we don't have to. And we don't have to. During a recession, we have to.

No, we don't. Constraining cash flow during a recession is the worst possible way to react to a recession in fact. That's when stimulus is required in order to make up the anemic demand coming from the private sector (e.g. how China reacted to 2008, where they fared better than the rest of us thanks to counter-cyclical fiscal spending).

Deficit spending only really needs to be constrained when inflation is around 9% (~11% is the point at which inflation has a negative impact on growth).

During a recession you borrow money, spend and that constrains future cash flow. During an expansion you repay what you borrowed - that's the constraint.

We're constraining future cash flow during an expansion. That is stupid.

I am not sure how you keep mis-reading me.

I'm not misreading you. You're saying that spending constrains future cash flow. This is simply false. The US won't run out of dollars, ever. Japan won't run out of ten, ever. They have a 0% risk that they won't be able to pay back their debts because they print the currency.

The only risk is inflation.

Everyone’s a Keynesian in a downcycle...

It doesn't fully offset it. Avoiding debt by not investing leads to lower future growth prospects, resulting in opportunity loss. Debt is contractual and can be restructured.

Debt isn’t being used to invest. It’s being used to fund current operations. Otherwise, yes, using debt to finance investment is a good thing. That isn’t what’s happening at Federal level.

This is an appealing argument, it's only flaw is that it is nonsensical.

The current 'old' also inherited a built environment and a great deal of basic research, and if you project back far enough (not far!) they barely paid anything for it either. Those working in the 40s and early 50s paid almost nothing (in terms of having to pay taxes for other people's benefits) for the infrastructure that they inherited.

It also somehow suggests that the bulk of historical economic activity was the development of long-lasting capital works that outlived the users, which is odd.

I think we already have enough spurious arguments for feather-bedding relatively well-off old people without inventing weird new ones. The monumental voting power of the old has ensured that they collectively do pretty well for themselves; astoundingly well, say, compared to children living in poverty.

The current 'old' also inherited a built environment and a great deal of basic research

The current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation of pensioners without quibbling.

It’s only millennials who take it all for granted and don’t want to pay what’s fair.

OK, now you're just ranting and/or making stuff up. It's not actually true that the current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation, as social security taxation didn't really exist back then or was trivial in comparison in terms of #s of dependents and amount paid out.

Every generation takes stuff for granted, true. Also, they play their music too loud and disregard the eternal verities (c.f. ancient Greeks).

> The current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation of pensioners

The gaping holes in public-sector pension funds beg to differ.

But the roads and that salary and pension are often paid for with debt - meaning that the younger generation is paying for it twice: both the taxes to pay that debt and the pensions for the people who did the work. Pensions that won't be there for the younger generation when they reach retirement age.

325 million people in the US. Give each person $10k so they can feed themselves and live in a tent.

That's 3.25 trillion dollars.

The total federal budget in 2015 was 3.8 trillion dollars [0]. After we disband the army, navy and air force, liquidate medicare, medicade and social security where do you think we should get the missing 1 trillion or so from?

[0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Do you really think everyone of the 325 million will be a recipient of the $10k income, or perhaps only the ones that earn the least? Is this a proposal any sane advocate of UBI has put forward, or are you perhaps strawmanning a slight bit?

I am not necessarily in agreement with everything UBI related, but adding noise to the conversation isn't going to get us to any insights any quicker.

Not to be glib but _Universal_ rather implies something.

Sure universal does imply everyone. However just because on paper someone recieved $10k that does necessarily translate into an expenditure or disbursement.

If it's only for poor people it's not UBI. It's just a less restricted form of welfare.

How many under 18s in that 325m? UBI would be for those of working age would it not?

I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.

About 24% under 18. Dropping them doesn't even begin to address the massive shortfall.

Surely it addresses 24% of the shortfall? That is nearly a quarter in one answer. You are making it look much more achievable.

A quarter is irrelevant when we are talking orders of magnitude compared to current social programs.

So if you only include 15-64 that is 200m [0]

But since you want to keep social security, medicaid and medicare you need to keep a budget that somehow has 2 trillion dollars for BUI and 2 trillion for pensioners and children.

Not much of an improvement really.

Which is my main issue with everyone who proposes UBI. Once they are shown the number you get by multiplying population by income they slowly start to reinvent the welfare state that somehow is so terrible it needs to be replaced with UBI.

As someone once said: Crypto-currencies are gods way of teaching libertarians why regulations exist in the financial sector. I would like to rephrase that: UBI is gods way of teaching libertarians why the welfare state was created.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

It’s not as simple as “just multiplying”, though.. You don’t just give everyone $X dollars. If you make $100,000 per year, you don’t get anything. But if you make below a certain amount, say $10,000, then you pay a negative income tax, which means you get some money.

Also I don’t know which version of libertarian you’re using, but I don’t think I’d classify libertarians as being super supportive of UBI...

I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors

It has to include pensioners. To make it work you need to take the cost of the bureaucracy out of the system, which means UBI supersedes all other welfare. There will be no pensions, no unemployment, no child benefits (children also get UBI, paid to their parents until they come of age), no means testing - everyone gets UBI, full stop. That's what the U is for!

It has been suggested that minors could get a reduced level of UBI to recognise that they are have less basic need. However it should certainly be high enough to get rid of child benefits.

Interestingly until recently Children in the UK got UBI in the form of family allowance (paid to the parents). x for first born, y for subsequent or something. The sweeping government cuts lead to it becoming means-tested and complicated.

One Conservative (sorry cannot find the quote) remarked that they spent theirs on Champangne, which caused horror in the press, but is money flowing into the economy at least...unlike tax benefits to land-owners

The best serious proposals I've seen tend to treat UBI as a form of "negative income tax". Say everyone gets $10k or $20k or whatever, enough to _live_, and then for every two dollars they earn they drop a dollar of "UBI".

If you get $10k guaranteed, then somebody earning $20k exactly thus has an effective income tax rate of 0%, neither recieving nor paying income tax to the government. Anything earned over that starts to be taxed as standard currently.

You'd need to fiddle with the specific numbers, the rates, et cetera, but most serious suggestions are not as trivial as "let's give everyone ten thousand dollars". The principle behind UBI is not that everyone should recieve the same chunk of money from the government, but to provide an income floor that cannot be gone under that should be sufficient to keep people healthy and able to manage. It's a "Universal Basic Income" in the sense that the basic income is universally set, and nobody can go beneath it - you absolutely can go _above_ it.

Relating it to the welfare state is a good comparison, I think. In the same way that socialised healthcare ensures that everyone's bare minimum healthcare is at least up to a good standard, UBI could ensure that everyone's bare minimum income is livable. That doesn't mean that somebody earning $150k/yr still needs that 10k of government assistance, because they are not in need of that income protection (at that moment - of course it immediately returns should they _stop_ earning that much).

Indeed, in the UK we have a personal allowance of around £10k of income which is not taxed. If you either remove that allowance or add the UBI to your earned income (same answer), you collect a lot more tax and the budget is now higher.

I think we have to be clear though, we are expecting to have to increase taxation to pay for UBI. If the need for UBI is driven by automation removing jobs, then the extra wealth that the automation creates is going to have to be re-distributed. It is also time to revisit the special treatment that capital (especially land) gets in the tax system. Land Value Tax is perhaps a much more socially aware approach.

A political candidate for president is actually running on a UBI platform. The way he says we'll pay for it is this:

"Andrew proposes funding UBI by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 10%. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.

A Value-Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value-Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent."

Source: https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/

> whether you personally need it or not.

The point of basic income is that everyone needs it to be there. You personally may not need the added income as the head of a multinational hugely successful electronics company selling luxury mobile phones and reaping in billions. But who's going to have enough money to buy your phones when 50% of people are out of work because your companies like your own have cut workforce by 70%?

We are at a point where we have become too efficient at so many fields, which is not healthy in an idealistic capitalistic Society. All the wealth concentrates at few actors, and then it starts clogging the wheels instead of oiling them.

How does society prevent rioting when we reach 50% labor participation? How about 10% or 1%. Each will happen, possibly within our lifetimes, because of automation and extreme efficiency improvements.

The answer is right above you. Universal Income. However I suspect that instead society will let the owners of the automation become staggeringly wealthy while 50% of the working population are on the bread-line. Then there will be riots, then perhaps we will get a more equitable sharing of the value that society has created.

How do you know? Massive productivity increases over the last 40 years have not reduced labor participation in the slightest.

personally i hope with all my heart that your socialist nightmare will never come to pass.

Ycombinator is already doing active research in this area, and a few European countries have already put it into practice in test cities.

and at least one abandoned it - finland.

And I hope with all my heart that our current capitalist nightmare ends soon.

Agreed. Capitalism and the prioritized pursuit of profits have only created the problem of poverty and wealth gaps that we now find affecting everyone.

i wholeheartedly agree. the present crony capitalism and government interventionism into the market are damaging to the honest enterpreneur - one that doesn't have a senator's ear. the only way for free market to work is for goverment to back off. it's good that at least one other person understands that!

You can't just call something a nightmare. You have to point out to these blindly privileged rich knuckleheads that the garbage man won't be taking out the garbage if UBI comes to pass.

No shit. He won't. Not unless you pay him 300,000/year and that's a whole other kind of economic catastrophe.

It's no economic catastrophe. If the market price for garbage collection by people not threatened with starvation is 300000/collector/year then there is a very strong incentive to automate it.

It also rather depends on the level of UBI. If I can just live frugally on my UBI, but by getting a 20 hour-a-week job collecting rubbish I can afford to eat out and take foreign holidays then I would have a strong incentive to carry on doing it. I might demand that my boss treats me better in general though, which could lead to a labour market where the environment and conditions are as important as the pay

if the market price for garbage collection rises that high, every other job that seems 'better' will have to rise the pay too, else people will all go into garbage business. who will clean my seat at the peep shows then? and if every job costs that much, the product of it will have to cost accordingly. in the world of UBI, either a loaf of bread will cost 300000 of cold hard cash, or there will be no one to build the first generation of your precious robots. hence the nightmare. anyway, back in the 1960's some idiots already forewarned that factory automation was fast approaching and it would make everyone lose jobs. google automation hysteria. what they proposed was eerily similar to UBI. this new iteration is just history repeating itself. guess they didn't predict society just changing to find new jobs.

UBI is not a socialist invention. In fact you'll find a lot of opposition to it on the left for various reasons, ranging from opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others, to a belief it's a thin wedge to reduce welfare.

The socialist slogan is - as Marx pointedly remarked in "Critique of the Gotha Program" -, not an argument for equality but "from each according to ability, to each according to their need"; for substantial parts of the left, the idea of society paying people if they're not contributing is directly in opposition to a central concern of their ideologies to prevent people from doing just that.

As careful as one should be about talking for the dead: Had Marx been alive today, he'd probably join you in opposing UBI, for similar reasons.

Rather, the idea stems from people like Thomas Paine, and was bolstered by experiments in the US and Canada in the 60's.

Recently it was rediscovered first and foremost by liberals (in the European sense; in other words mostly centrists, again by European standard, followers of classical liberalism) explicitly as an alternative to left-wing welfare systems.

only if you subscribe to the notion that current social democracies are not socialist. "opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others"? strange, the left implements that everywhere already. and of course marx would be opposed, because his belief in LTV is an entirely different kind of wrong.

"opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others" almost sounds like that other -ism...

interventionism? communism? cronyism? statism? what do you mean?

Most current social democracies are not promoting UBI. Many social democratic parties are in fact opposed to it.

> "opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others"? strange, the left implements that everywhere already.

"The left" is not a single thing, but represented by dozens of ideologies that are wildly different.

Talk about socialist nightmares, look at the sun, all that energy hitting earth, and no one's paying for it, no one's responsible, and it's got nuclear power! We should nuke it!

Aren’t these “Poverty decreases IQ” studies providing a rational reason to discriminate against poor people in society. There is already discrimination against poor people due to their environment, why provide fodder to discriminate against their intellect?

I love HN.

Maybe you should be all consumed by not having enough money to eat, if you don't... What's the implication here... That we need to supply these underpowered brains with government money by means of redistribution? :P

I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.

I'm going to frame this comment and put it on a wall

This is the peak of hacker news

Holy shit, this not a joke comment, right?

It's cynical, funny and kind of true.

I might #hnwatch this one myself!

This needs to be on https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

Not sure whether to vote up or down

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17379724 and marked it off-topic.

I guess this turns the discussion around poverty into a 'chicken and egg' discussion. Which one was first? One's poverty or one's inability to make good life choices? So conservatives will say the latter and liberals will say the first, because you've probably been oppressed by someone and we are already back at square one.

There go those poor people with their defective brains making bad decisions again.

Bullshit. Poor people make bad decisions because they have more opportunities to do so, and less opportunities to make good decisions. Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS. Poor people don’t have any easy answers, and rich people would probably do a lot worse in their situation.

Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS

It's so true as a rich man, I never needed to study much. If I need to make a deal, I ask my rich friends/family members for a referral to a lawyer, most of the time the lawyer itself is a member of the extended family, at least that's what it feels like. So, if the task is outside his expertise, he recommends me a very good person. They completely dissect the problem and analyze it from multiple angles, I find their insights helpful much like the insights from Hacker news members.

Same way, we know most bankers by their face in our city. If I even see the slightest mark on my skin, I ask my family doctor and they offer me best recommendation.

Once upon a time I applied for a credit card but I defaulted on payment, not because of lack of cash but because I never studied how a credit card works. So, what I did? I just hired a guy with employment contract set out to prevent such losses due to high interests on a credit card etc... He works with my financial planner now.

If you read through my comments, you'll see how dumb I really am. But navigating life, making friends, marrying a beautiful woman is a lot easier for me than understanding credit card rules.

My sympathy with people who are stuck with same issues as me. In my family also there are only a few truly smart people, rest have inherited most of their wealth.

> Once upon a time I applied for a credit card but I defaulted on payment, not because of lack of cash but because I never studied how a credit card works.

> But navigating life, making friends, marrying a beautiful woman is a lot easier for me than understanding credit card rules.

I mean this nicely: if you don’t know how a credit card works to the point of default, you shouldn’t have a credit card. I mean, it’s in the name: credit. You say you don’t understand credit card rules, but that’s not even a rule, that’s just the basic function of the card. It doesn’t take study, it takes three seconds of grabbing someone off the street and asking “how does a credit card work?” As someone not from money, it is incredibly frustrating to read that you hired someone to deal with a basic problem that we all learn how to manage in high school, when some of us have ACTUAL problems that we can’t afford to just make vanish.

> If I even see the slightest mark on my skin, I ask my family doctor and they offer me best recommendation.

Please learn when to see a doctor. Most marks on your skin are benign or normal, and when something is really wrong you can tell (e.g. infection, irregular mole/growth, etc.) Everything else is a waste of healthcare time and dollars.

Rich people have it easier, that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. But on the other hand it shouldn't come as a surprise either, that if you make decisions that propagate poverty, you will be more likely to end up poor.

More importantly: your children will end up poor through no fault of their own, and once you're there, the increased cognitive load of having to get by on less makes it much harder to break the cycle. The association between poverty and things like poor nutrition, fewer school choices, etc. certainly does not help, either.

Not to mention that, as others said, making the "right" choices may not be financially feasible; when you're poor, you're more often than not stuck in a "lesser of evils" situation.

Again, yes, people start their lives from different positions and it is obviously much easier to win the race if you have pole position in your dad-sponsored car than when you are the water boy. Still I'm not willing to just assume that the distribution of capital in western countries is purely due to luck and some kind of capitalistic malevolence by "the rich" and that if you are poor your life is completely out of your hands, because of some kind of "structural oppression".

In the US, one serious medical crisis can simultaneously make you exhausted and unable to think straight while plunging you into poverty that is nigh impossible to escape. For many Americans, the only bad life choice they made was being born here, then routine attrition took care of the rest because if you live long enough, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a serious health issue. It's just a matter of time.

In the US, one serious medical crisis can simultaneously make you exhausted and unable to think straight while plunging you into poverty that is nigh impossible to escape.

In Europe, we've don't have healthcare issues - it's free here.

Still, the people are unhappy and poor. Society as a whole is a lot more equal tho, I've friends who are very poor and ones who are very rich and I never sensed a discrimination.

I'm not sure someone from Europe can really grasp the kind of horrifying desperation of an American with a medical crisis. Americans have to wrestle with questions like "If I go and it's not serious, I'm screwed financially. If I don't go and it is serious, I'm screwed financially and in other ways." Especially if you are a parent. Not taking your kid for medical treatment can get you charged with neglect potentially.

It's just a really ugly situation that I have never actually faced and it puts me in a weird position. I've lived more like a European in some ways, because my father and ex were both career military.

Yes, bad things happen to people. I absolutely agree. I fail to see how that statement is related to the article or my comment on it though.

It means it isn't a chicken and egg problem. It isn't a question of which came first: bad decisions or poverty? You can be comfortably well off, do all the right things and find your life suddenly coming unraveled through no fault of your own.

You can also be uncomfortably poor, win the lottery and find your life suddenly becoming amazing through no fault of your own.

You shouldn't use edge cases to discuss a general rule.

I think the argument people are making is that it's a lot less of an edge case than people think.

Yes. It seems like never having a serious health problem in your life would be the "edge case," at least if you live to be elderly.

With life expectancy getting longer and longer I think this is increasingly the case.

The last statistics I saw indicated that more than half of all US bankruptcies were due to high medical bills and even having "good" insurance by American standards was no guarantee of protection. That hardly constitutes an edge case.

Maybe edge case wasn't the right wording. What I meant was that in a discussion about whether x leads to y, saying "z could happen to you though" isn't exactly on the point.

Last I checked, it's significantly more likely to become poor through no fault of one's own than to become rich through no fault of one's own.

If it's true then...

Obviously, if a person's brain is affected by poverty, the market isn't going to offer them the equal opportunity when that opportunity can go to the person (rich) whose brain is not limited by poverty.

UBI won't help them much! They'll still feel poor even if they've money to meet the absolute basics for a good quality of life.

I think a possible solution is to make it a law that a marriage is "must" and "can only" take place between a rich and poor person.

That way you can keep forcing equality at generation level till inequality is eradicated.

Achieving equality completely at "economic level" isn't possible unless you get done with the social signaling and things like class which can even stop a poor but smart person from rising faster to the top rung.

Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them. These marriages have not magically resulted in gender equality.

Your premise flat out doesn't work, even before we get into how ridiculous this proposal is.

Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them.

Maybe back in the 1950s when a doctor married a nurse and a businessman married his secretary. Nowadays it is far more likely that two doctors will marry, or two business executives.

Everything I have read indicates that female doctors still typically make less than male doctors, etc. The gap is smaller, not gone.

Instead of the doctor marrying the nurse it's now the surgeon marrying the pediatrician.

People tend to marry others of similar status, not necessarily income level.

People have certain beliefs, ego pride, choices and many more.

If you're not going to choose your life partner and you are being forced, what kind of life it is.

It's better to stay unmarried than to be with someone you don't like (that constant struggle from the time you wake up).

A human being accustomed to certain ways in their life, find unpleasant to see any kind deviation.

If you're not going to choose your life partner and you are being forced, what kind of life it is.

Then why are there efforts to force economic equality through taxation which also affects a human being accustomed to certain ways in their life?

If you want to punish the rich, I've suggested a vastly superior way which is unlikely to be gamed.

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