Notice how, instead of honorable thriftiness and hard work, the man relies on taking advantage of the system and other peoples' hard work.
It's not romantic to acknowledge this, but it is the truth. I'm hard pressed to find some thing which I can learn from this man.
> But since most of the collecting was done after midnight and is arduous, I tired of the relationship and severed it. If I ever care to return to scavenging, I am assured an extra $1248 a year-my 40 percent share of the gross.
> ...began selling two pints of my plasma a week-the limit-for $6 a pint. This source could add $624 to my annual income. But I found the 90-minute sessions, luring which time I was affixed to a needle, utterly boring, and I stopped.
(Never mind that he would have had to stop giving blood for other reasons.)
In at least those two instances, he says quit the job because it was hard work or boring. (If you're going to point out that these aren't "real" jobs, then neither is running a startup.) The author also mentioned that there were other ways he could supplement his income, but deigned not to.
He comes to the conclusion, at the end of the 3rd paragraph from the end, that he could "still pass... into the sort of life I once took for granted, when all the institutions of upper middle-class life in the suburbs meant something", but that it was futile, just a wait for death; unsatisfactory. The sham that punk rock holds up: drive to work to pay for the nice car; so you can drive the nice car to work; to pay for the nice car. More eloquently coached perhaps, but I get the same sort of ennui from it as in the last paragraph - he admits to wanting to live it, without wanting to work for it.
In any case, both jobs don't sound as if they had made a big difference to his well-being.
$1248 from cans, or $624 from plasma is a bigger deal if you look at them as a percentage of his budget. maxawaytoolong asked for examples of any job, which is what I gave.
But you are of course right, he did mention jobs in his article. (donating blood really isn't a job, but collecting bottles might be OK).
It's more than a bit callous to suggest a senior citizen is not doing his part for society because he's decided to live off the benefits afforded to him by paying into taxes his whole life, instead of wallowing in the trash and selling his own bodily fluids.
If you're going to point out that these aren't "real" jobs, then neither is running a startup.
Previously, I thought the guy who suggested seeding the southern border of the US with landmines to keep the scourge of underpriced gardeners and line cooks out of the country had made the stupidest statement ever on Hacker News, but this is a close rival. Hopefully none of the more impressionable readers of this forum take this to heart and decide to apply for YC funding with their sperm donation startup idea. I'd hate to be the one screening the application videos.
Most people would argue everyone else has a moral obligation to not let our veterans starve to death after they paid taxes their whole lives, especially when you consider how little his existence actually costs us.
The poor have their needs met. Once you reach that level, why spend precious leisure time just to become marginally wealthier?
How long were you homeless? How long did you go unemployed with neither savings nor education, being turned away for even the lowest things, like shelf-stacking in supermarkets? It's hard to judge another man without walking a mile in his shoes.
One of the most valuable things youth have is option value: you don't know how much they'll amount to, how good they'll end up being. It gets other people to take chances on them. Come 60, you have a lot less of that; you're a known quantity.
It's not that hard, thanks to the power of statistics. For four of every five poor people, the answer is less than 26 weeks. Of the poor who spent at least 27 weeks/year searching for work, the answer is also less than 27 weeks.
More than 9 in 10 of the poor who actually searched for a job for at least 27 weeks found one - just over half of worked full time, one quarter voluntarily part time, and one quarter involuntarily part time [1].
[1] The precise numbers are in this report: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf I cite 2008 because the 2009 report isn't yet released, and 2010 isn't over.
[edit: Hi downmodders. Sorry for injecting facts into this discussion.]
They might have had good reasons for assuming they would not get a job, for example. Or maybe the searched 40 weeks in vain in the previous year and didn't have it in them anymore.
There may be an additional source term of people who were unemployed but not poor in year N-1. But since the number of people in poverty remains roughly stable over time, this source must also be balanced by a sink of people who were poor in year N-1 but not poor in year N. I.e., for every person who becomes unemployed and enters poverty, there must be another person who leaves poverty (the exact balance varies a bit from year to year). Numbers on this are somewhat harder to come by (most surveys don't track the movement of individuals throughout categories).
(Again, rough numbers, these fluctuate a bit from year to year. )
This has the effect of juicing the BLS statistics over time by reducing the unemployment by definition. (i.e. if you've been unemployed long enough, you're no longer considered a part of the labor force, regardless of what efforts you may be making to find a job.)
"Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work."
""Discouraged workers" are a subset of the marginally attached. Discouraged workers report they are not currently looking for work..."
A discouraged worker is one who has looked for work at some point in the last 12 months, but is no longer looking because they believe there is no work to be found. (and are often correct in aggregate)
Where the BLS further skews the statistics is that discouraged workers who have been discouraged longer than 12 months just drop from the labor force completely, they are a hidden statistic. (I believe this definition was changed under the Clinton Administration)
It seems rather to me looking at marginal improvements or as you call it would pose a better explanation. If you know that if you work really hard, you can afford a house and a nice car, it might motivate you to work hard. If all that working harder gives you is money for an extra bottle of beer, the motivation is not quite that great.
The jobs mentioned in the article are not really set up to changing anything fundamental about the guys situation. You can't get rich by donating blood.
Also there seem to be other problems he had, like depression, that prevented him from seeking a better paying job (also his age, of course).
How old are you? After a certain age you begin to notice that working actually tends to take a toll. So you think twice about trading your health for money.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...
As for aging, that was an issue in the past, particularly when most work was manual labor. Luckily, the present and future are much better - projections suggest most old people will be capable of working well past 65. Here is the hot paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/329/5997/1287
If you are on the wrong side of the academic paywall (my NYU library account still works), here is a press release: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/PR/2010/2010-09-09.html
So that when you are too feeble to care for yourself, you can afford care that doesn't involve turning you into a blob by overfeeding you or conveniently killing you off with a negligently spread staph infection after years of soul destroying institutional care by the embittered and underpaid. Becoming marginally wealthier than poor wouldn't do this, but I suspect this is the real goal of most 9to5for40 life plans in the US.