Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

I think the question should not be "Why are there so many poor in USA", but "Why does it suck so much to be poor in USA". I believe that the urban layout and exorbitant healthcare costs are the main issues. If poor neighborhoods were walkable and had cheap supermarkets with fresh produce then you wouldn't need a car, and the density would mean that you have plenty of potential friends within walking distance so you wont be bored. If healthcare was cheap like in Europe then it could have been government funded so that poor people wouldn't have to worry about getting sick more than anyone else. Also with free healthcare and no car there are basically no big large random expenditures, so you don't have to worry about anything on the economic front.

That style of life is not a dream, that is how most poor people live in Europe and I assume also in Japan. There are therefore a lot of people who could pull themselves out of poverty, but they don't since they are fine with doing a simpler job or work less for less pay since it doesn't suck to be poor. I am one of them, I have lived below the poverty line most of my life. I didn't chase money, but I happened to get a good job and started making loads of it. But I still continued that lifestyle even when I began making lots of money. I see no reason to spend more, I wasn't unhappy when I didn't have money so all it would result in is me having to work more years before I can retire.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans want it to suck to be poor just to ensure that people like me work harder. Neither the left nor the right seems to want to fix this.

> If poor neighborhoods were walkable and had cheap supermarkets with fresh produce

I don’t know about walkable but poor neighbourhoods full of recent immigrants have cheap supermarkets with fresh produce in the US. The poor neighbourhoods with no fresh produce don’t have it because the people living there don’t want it.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...

> THE GEOGRAPHY OF POVERTY AND NUTRITION: FOOD DESERTS AND FOOD CHOICES ACROSS THE UNITED STATES

> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using event study designs exploiting supermarket entry and households' moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same availability and prices experienced by high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side factors such as food deserts.

Spear son of Dread?

The food desert thing is a big problem in areas populated by the native-born American poor.

It should be noted that their findings come entirely from a model they built, and the model was built using existing purchase data. They did no empirical work to verify the model results.

Your point about urban planning is an important one, and one I often point out when trying to explain the difference between being poor in the US and e.g. in western Europe.

Urban (and rural!) sprawl makes the economic burden of car ownership universal and unavoidable.

Changing course on urban planning and zoning could do a lot of good.

Once again the rural poor get ignored and have their existence denied.

The rural poor face some of the same problems as the urban poor (such as car dependency), combined with a whole host of problems unique to rural life. You're right to point out that rural development is widely overlooked, as is the plight of the rural poor.

It sucks to be poor because it sucks to be at the bottom of social hierarchies. This is an evolutionary feature of society, not a bug.

Many countries try to decrease the difference between being at the top (or at least in the upper quartile or so) of the social hierarchy and being at the bottom, resulting in less suck for the poor.

My biological grandfather (long story) is considered poor in the US, and is at the very bottom of the social hierarchy (you know, early 70 hippies that got stuck in the past?).

Yet he lives way better than at least half the US population imo, and would never trade his place with the other half. He live in a cabin in West Virginia, share 100 acres with two other people, have access to a natural gaz well for 100$ a year (shared with 4 other people). Free food, almost free gaz, free beer, and he make 20 to 50 bucks a month from playing banjo at local jam/bars. Well, winter sucks up there in the hills, but still. I think that the most he have worked in a year was 3 month doing odd construction jobs (I think the town name was Akron).

Being poor doesn't suck because you're poor, it sucks because you don't live well enough and you can't really enjoy life. If you're poor but live well enough, it doesn't really matter.

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