Using the hunger I experienced as a kid to teach mine about generosity (2019)

I have given about 50 old cell phones I collected to the battered woman's shelter here. Even if they don't have cell service they can still call 9-1-1.

I'm sorry if I misinterpret, but if only angels could handle such welfare works, there wouldn't be many shelters. I sometimes hear people say, in various ways, that a big heart is necessary and sufficient for these situations. It isn't. I believe a professional worker with little empathy helps more than most a purely nice persons. Even worse, some kind gestures can hurt precarious people. Of course, wonderful persons exist in the Welfare sector, either experienced or not. And even professional humanitarians can hurt more than they help, as it has been documented in Haiti or Thailand.

I've seen this play out over couple years between my younger brother (after I'd moved out) and my parents. I see the pattern repeat with my sister and her son. He, my nephew (13), stayed with my wife and me over Christmas. He said he had been making money with after school jobs and hoped to be able to save enough for a car when he's 16, but wasn't sure if that was going to be possible because his Mom and step Dad have to borrow (or "borrow") money from him every month.

I didn't tell him yet but I decided there that in 2 or 3 years I'm going to start fixing up a good 1st car for him.

If you start any one pay period in a hole due to an unexpected expense; or if your bills become due earlier in the week/month than your paycheck arrives, you can cover your monthly expenses with your income but not with your cash on hand.

It’s the same as how a business can be making a profit but still go out of business due to cash flow problems.

You talk about "bet on another life", so maybe you're talking about reincarnation though?

Giving people money is a pretty good way to do that. Money that they can choose to spend as they wish.

Euthanasia should be available for people who suffer an illness that makes the life not worth living anymore.

I had a neighbour once that made the boldest claim about "what must be in the universe", never empathizing with others but just making the wildest claims about supernatural phenomena. She ended up being committed at an institution.

From your perspective that psychological dimension can be explained without much interiority (i.e. makes you do stupid things) but for the OP it needs explaining from the inside in terms of feelings.

You are both saying very similar things except you are applying very different value judgements to them.

If I had to guess I would say you have a rather more deterministic / mechanistic view of the human experience than the OP.

What do you mean by personal experience? That you were poor and made the named stupid decisions? Or that you know of poor people who made the named decisions?

I can't agree or disagree with most of it, since it wasn't my experience, but I do want to change your mind on one point:

" And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil."

Perhaps it does make some people make stupid decisions, but I'm become very careful in what I label "stupid". When you've got un-met needs, you do what you have to in order to fulfill that need. If you can get free bread and money in return for a promise to vote a certain way, that's basic incentives.

Steps after poverty:

1. Buy a GTI

2. Pay the installment at the end of the month

3. Have no money until next pay day

There are even memes about it: salary R 18 000, debit order SMS R 17 990, remaining balance R 10.

On one hand I still have this fear, but on the other it also is a bit comforting. I know I can survive on much much less because I have before.

It has definitely made me live simpler than others I know though.

That's interesting.

What I take from the psychological aspect of poverty is this:

Poverty makes one care a lot about the future. As in worry. Worry about the next meal, the next rent payment, paying that bill, how to socialise without paying for anything, keeping up appearances because you think getting a job (or a better one) depends on appearing successful, being scared to go to the doctor about that lump because you might end up homeless and still can't afford treatment anyway, wanting to not worry your family but not wanting to hide things, etc.

The problem is this occurs continuously - you can't afford a break from thinking about near-future needs, because some of them affect you every day (e.g. skipping meals to save cash, while making sure your coworkers don't notice), and some of them feel like threats every day (e.g. you never know when late rent will turn to an eviction, you don't answer phone calls from unknown numbers because you don't want to acknowledge contact if it's a debt collector).

This is a high, continuous cognitive load and that makes it harder to make good planning decisions. Both because there are more immediate needs, and because simply thinking clearly needs the luxury of a decent stretch of time not worry about other things. It's not even enough to have a short break, as it takes a long time to wind down from a state of perpetual back-of-the-mind worrying and juggling problems.

If anything, people who are reasonably well off and safe economically care less about the future, because they don't have to care, it'll be fine.

> For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply

I think it does apply but in a less obvious way.

People born to poor homes are still shown what they could aspire to: A higher standard of living than they started in, and greater opportunities to aspire to.

If anything, they see more of that than the middle classes, because they start from a relatively disadvantaged position, but are seeing the same things on TV (say) as everyone else.

And so when they grow up to be responsible for themselves, if they believe it's not fixed and depends on themselves but they are still dirt poor, the question becomes "What haven't I done with my life that I should have?"

The ultimate state of being in the US is one of higher freedom.

What happens at the bottom end is neither here nor there.

I prefer the European model as well - but let's be clear about this - most socialist countries don't really care about this either from a moral perspective, it's more of a law and order thing and a different way of running a society internally.

The UK is leaving the EU in large part because a lot of people think immigration from other reasonably-developed countries is too high. The actually poor parts of the world are like a massive blind spot that we wave away into the category of 'asylum seekers' as if they're subhuman.

Everywhere and everyone has a blind spot somewhere.

How do you propose making it happen? Note that by saying this, i dont mean “how do you convince him to do it”. I mean, what would be the process for doing that, assuming everyone is already on board with it.

99% (or close to it) of those billions of Jeff Bezos’ worth are in Amazon stock. How do you propose making his net worth only $50bil and making use of the rest? Making him give up half of the ownership in the company by giving his shares to the government, thus making the government a major shareholder in the company?

This is a genuine question, because i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold. And there is no way Jeff would be able to sell half of them, i bet there are rules that don’t even allow major shareholders cash out like that, since it would crash the value of Amazon overnight. And by the time he is done selling, he would have made way less than that, as the value of shares will be continuously dropping as he sells. Not even the mentioning the whole aspect of forcing someone to sell their shares and, thus, giving up their ownership in the company.

All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone and we still haven't addressed the cost of education or healthcare, or even started to address the fact that the poor in the U.S. are not particularly poor by worldwide standards.

From a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of perspective, there mostly needs to be a lot more wealth, period, in the form of more housing, more energy (hopefully renewable), more food (though we waste a lot in the US), more healthcare, more everything. From a basic math perspective, it seem like redistribution gets us like 1% of the way there, and only in the U.S. Once you start redistributing around the world, you run into the problem that a whole lot of people are really desperately poor in a way that can just devour redistributed dollars unless those dollars are creating growth. This isn't to say that redistribution isn't a very useful tool, and I'm actually a fan of lots of spending on infrastructure and a social safety net, but I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty.

That's an exaggerated and misleading description. Per person government spending in the U.S. ($22,500 per year adjusted for purchasing power) is well above the OECD average, and right between Switzerland and Germany: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/reg_cit_glance-2018-41-e.... (Factoring out the difference in military spending, about $2,000 per person in the U.S. versus $600 in Germany, doesn't change the ranking. The next country below Germany is Ireland, at under $20,000.) Four of the largest five EU countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, U.K.) spend less per person -- again, adjusted for purchasing power -- than the U.S. France is only a little higher, around $23,500. Excluding Norway (oil money) and Luxembourg (tax haven), the highest is Denmark, at $26,000.

We have a big government in the U.S. It's often not very efficient. We consistently spend more to get less in terms of education or healthcare. But that's a very different issue.

> I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned

These statements seem self-contradictory.

My bigger concern now is how to raise up my four kids so that they come out motivated, hungry, willing to work, etc. I believe struggled makes great people, my kids won't know that type of struggle - fingers crossed. I ran the crucible, they won't... what does that mean for them?

Yet also as a reasonably successful adult, I still never entirely feel secure in my class position. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell whether I'm being responsibly frugal or still living in a mindset that I can't afford nice things. Or if I do buy something high end then I question if I actually splurged because of a mindset of not being able to hold onto money, if that makes sense.

Give to nonprofits that focus on helping the homeless - they will be able to distribute the benefits in a way that is better in the long-term for the homeless themselves.

It'd sure be lucky to have such an inclination

Anything can happen to anybody, so that isn't saying anything.

We know that a stable two-parent household is one of the best predictors of the child's future success.

I mean it's not anywhere near the level of worrying about where the next meal is coming from, but it is a reminder of one of the many stressors that the poor are constantly dealing with.

Budgeting is always stressful. Having to exert that effort every day on every purchase, instead of weekly/monthly (and only on larger purchases) is a lot of mental energy that could be spent in more productive ways.

That becomes easy to forget sometimes.

Edit: I didn't think this would be controversial... I'm honestly asking, why?

Same. Carving up $20 between food for the family and gas was a common occurrence growing up. Even 20 years later I feel a satisfaction when I fill the car up with gas without much care to the cost.

And that people rarely miss the opportunity to criticize others.