Poverty hurts children in ways we're beginning to understand
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We're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents to appease this view and severely reducing these children's potential, and in doing so reducing the potential of the country. As this article shows, the cost to a country's society and economy of poverty and low standards of living is very large and over a long time span. Our governments should be doing more to tackle child poverty as whilst it's not as bad as it used to be, we can certainly do better.
Also, this belittles the cases where one parent was making a great choice, by leaving the other.
Treat every child in poverty as a societal responsibility. Everything will stem from there.
a.k.a. start with societal empathy.
Where will you find enough qualified teachers and nursing staff as the parents are obviously unsuitable? Cooks? Farmers? State would literally have to order at least some of those people to take such jobs.
Maximum of factor is perhaps 10 per person, likely much less than that to provide proper quality. Unless you will invest heavily in teaching and nursing staff.
It is an interesting model of a society halfway ran like military. Ultimately not too bad and orderly, but the problems of allocation are hard to solve and corruption is still likely.
The old adage is that the more you want to control, the more you have to control. (Providing strong incentives might be enough.)
Mind you EU socialdemocratic model is only halfway there, and thus limited in results. (Orphanages and nursing are too few, poor people are not relieved off parenthood. Free housing and food is very limited using merit as allocation through social services.)
A perfect example is when one of the parents succumbs to addiction that wasn't present before the child.
What's the consequence for being deemed unsuitable? Who determines that you are unworthy of reproduction? What other fundamental rights should unsuitable people be deprived of?
When you consider that the type of family (highly educated) that can actually afford to have children is deciding against having children then your proposal to consider every child as a hobby is just plain stupid. Who's going to have children then? Not the upper class? not the middle class? Not the poor? Nobody?
Plenty of people are still going to have children, anyway; if we at some point find ourselves short of children, we can bring the incentives back (or just have more immigration). But I don't think it's likely to happen over the long term... the days of needing to make the maximum number of factory workers and cannot fodder for the motherland are over, at least for a time. Having children is totally a hobby.
The same exact reasoning applies to having children. I don't see any good explicit reason to produce more children across the board, in fact I see the reverse (be it global warming and the per capita emissions in the first world, the recent electoral successes based on the plight of poor workers suffering due to globalism, automation, whatever); plus there's also plenty of willing immigrants that would solve the governments/societies problem, if there even was one. So, the government has no good reason whatsoever to subsidize child-making. If someone wants to do it as a hobby, all power to them!
It’s not perfect, and I don’t think “fix poverty” is necessarily main reason for the plans, but the effect has been to reduce it greatly compared to bygone times.
</armchair>
I agree with you 100%.
Is it really unexpected/surprising?
Ever since population sizes grew large enough for paternity to matter, where children didn't just fall into a common pool, we've cared more about our resources contributing to our own children's outcomes and not those of others.
Children born in poverty are just at the extreme low end of the spectrum, but anywhere on that spectrum there's economic disparity between families affecting the probabilities of outcomes for their respective children.
It's arguably irrational to care about someone else's children in this scenario, when you have your own. They're competitors, you want to give your children as much advantage as possible and disadvantage everyone else's, if you're playing aggressively. As the population continues to grow larger, there's only increasing pressure on parents to be aggressive, if they're paying attention.
Many of the decisions made by impoverished people are either somewhat sensible for their situation in the short-term (e.g., asking a 16 or 17 year old child to drop out and start working) or are sensible when viewed through certain forms of skewed perspectives (e.g., spending a small windfall immediately because 'that money will just be gone soon anyway'). Children of impoverished parents overwhelmingly learn these lessons, and the stress of poverty is an ever-present part of their lives, so they are often debilitated by it from the very start.
So just to be clear on some points before I get accused of holding positions I do not hold. I am all for helping children who were let down by their parents. I don't think they should be condemned. I also grew up very poor, my parents had to go into debt to buy basic necessities and I still have to support my parents financially and will likely always have to do this.
When it comes to this issue, you need to pick a lane and stay in it. Either people have agency and are responsible for their actions and ultimate responsibility lays with the parents - or people do not have agency and nobody is responsible for anything and concepts like democracy makes no sense.
I personally pick the lane that people do have agency and do bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. I do make exception for those who are severely mentally ill but this is not the root of poverty.
Consequently, while social support for those who were let down by their parents is good - this alone cannot fix all problems. Maybe in a place like Norway with very low unemployment it is enough, but it will never be able solve the problems in places like South Africa where the unemployment is ~30% (calculated in the same way as unemployment reported for US and EU economies is calculated).
So sure, lets help the children - but lets stop making excuses for those who put the children in that position to begin with. I don't think it is okay to run cover for absolutely horrible human beings who bring children into this world that they cannot adequately provide for.
This is a good example where black and white thinking is dangerous. Some people have more control over their circumstances than others. That includes parents providing (or not) for their children. You don't need to be an apologist for bad parenting to acknowledge that human circumstances are due to some combination of choices, intrinsic nature, and environment.
I don't think the majority of the poverty problem comes from otherwise well to do parents falling on hard luck. At least in South Africa and I would think most of the rest of Africa this is not the case. If people just made sure to be in a position where they have the capability to provide for children at the point in time when they have them the poverty issue will be almost entirely gone.
And already just something as simple as providing a two parent household and not having children before 25 already virtually guarantees that they will not be impoverished:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-deny-the-link-b...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
I don't disagree - competent people, who have learned successful strategies, are unlikely to be reduced to permanent poverty except in extreme cases.
However, for those born into poverty, growing up surrounded by ignorance and lack of stimulation does make it exceedingly difficult to learn necessary life strategies to begin the slow, often times multigenerational climb out of poverty. First and foremost, what no one is willing to admit, combating poverty, at least in first world nations, really comes down to combating culture. And because a large proportion of certain (not all) minorities live within this culture, the idea of changing their way of life, even if you think it's ostensibly for the better, is understandably a sensitive subject.
But the way we dance around it isn't doing anyone any favors.
Either people have agency ...
Would one of those actions be the urge to have sex? If not then not sure what we are talking about here.
I think the majority of people who have children they can't provide for bear the responsibility for that and I don't really see where in that you want to plug your nuance - but if you have something more than "there is nuance" I would love to hear it.
1) They have always been struggling, a didn't have a reasonable plan originally, and/or
2) They didn't take reasonable precautions to avoid pregnancy but still end up pregnant, and believe their best option was to raise the child
Both of these assumptions are clearly false in general although I don't know enough about the issues to hesitate a guess on percentages.
I was mostly thinking about (1). Someone with a partner and a solid household income can easily become a struggling single parent, for example, without having made any obviously bad decisions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
> The researchers further suggest that the "fraction of children living in single-parent households is the strongest correlation of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored."
See also: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/single-mothers-new-yo...
The black/white thinking espoused above, though: I doubt it leads to real insight or improvements.
It is very difficult to look at a random average person and predict whether they will become poor within the next 2 decades.
Okay stupid comments aside... I had a convo with a guy arguing that "I don't have kids and shouldn't pay to support the kids of others. If you can't afford to send kids to school don't have em."
Nobody thinks: "Those unschooled kids will then grab a knife or a gun and go and rob you or your very well educated kids out of desperation and end up killing occasionally." also... "why are you pro having a lifelong torturing of kids?"
People really lack empathy for the pain of others, as if their suffering will lessen one's own.
It's also a curious way to characterize it that "we're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents." Seeing as "we" had nothing to do with creating the plight of these children, "us" not acting to change it is not us condemning them. That's like saying "we" are responsible for that child that fell into the well and drowned recently as we didn't save him. Or that "we" are condemning that fat guy to an early death because "we" aren't forcing him to eat salad and go to the gym.
Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?
I will agree that it's a very unfortunately situation, but I'm not going to lower the standard of living of my own family that limits their chances of having their best life so as to provide for the child of a stranger who doesn't give the same care and thought to me and mine.
Yes you can. Why not? Not to mention your (implicit) assertion that [poor] people, "have as many children anytime they want" is also ridiculous.
> Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?
This is true, but irrelevant to the USA's own government policies. Presumably other countries should do the same with their own children.
Of course, we can take your line of thought and cut off the supply of public services to children and adults alike. Then see how quickly your own quality of life erodes. Indeed it's this very philosophy you hold that will explain why humanity will never take action on climate change or any global scale catastrophe that isn't imminent.
Where does this argument end? For example if you end up needing to live in a rest home and your family can't afford or refuses to take care of you, why should my tax dollars go to help you out? You should just be thrown out into the streets until you die to reduce the burden you put on society.
As many countries have justifiably chosen, they consider this to be an extremely barbaric approach.
Your tax dollars shouldn't. I would have to be a real asshole who has no empathy and care for you to live my life in a way that I end up destitute in my old age and expect you to sacrifice your family's well being so I can live my life selfishly and greedily.
>As many countries have justifiably chosen, they consider this to be an extremely barbaric approach.
You might phrase it like that, but every single day in every single country that provides a generous safety net someone dies whose life could have been extended by some amount of time if only the country had spent more money on doing so.
This is a nonsensical argument. Said safety net is often the reason why people don't die, because as a whole it's cheaper to prevent people from getting to the point of destitution than it is to pull them out of it.
And your first argument is nonsensical too. Because a lot of the time it's simply a roll of the dice whether or not our health nosedives. By your argument if you get in an accident, you would be an asshole to expect other people to help you out in a time of crisis.
That's not having no empathy, that's having a nihilistic worldview and expecting everyone to subscribe to your 'every person for themselves' mentality.
Well, the direct answer is: these are all Americans, and all pay some kind of tax to their city, county, state, and ultimately the country, in theory so they can draw on the shared resources of the nation. That's how you justify supporting the kid in Mississippi and not the kid in Cambodia.
As for rationally holding the belief that people can have as many kids as they want, and those kids will be cared for, yes, you can hold those simultaneously. I don't want any kids in my country to go hungry; how many siblings they have or what choices their parents have made are irrelevant to those individual kids' needs being met. There's no conflict there.
We live, as they say, in a society.
I also want to point out that they don't pay taxes to their city, county, state, and country. There have been several studies by the CBO[0 - see the chart on page 31] that show that the lower 60% of households are not net tax payers at the federal level to such an extent that their entire non-federal tax payments offset by the transfers and benefits they receive from the federal government.
0 - https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
You're also forgetting that those workers exist. Beyond taxes the benefit of workers is also in the products and services they provide. When you're a retiree you still need someone to stock shelves in the supermarkets and sit in front of the cash register or someone to work on a farm and pick up the harvest.
When these discussions come up, I often think about this simple chart:
https://i.redd.it/pg5w8ws3b0o31.jpg
If the distribution of wealth, i.e. access to resources, were what 92% of Americans considered ideal, we'd need the minimal social programs you seem to want, and your low-wage worker in Renton would probably pay nothing to support a poor kid in Mississippi.
The current wealth scheme in the US is very much a consequence of US politics, i.e. taxation, wage laws, etc., it's not a natural state of being. (There is no natural state of being for a society.) What we have now is the result of choices made over a long time; getting different results, so you'd never be on the hook for someone in Mississippi, would take different choices from society, not just you declaring that we cannot afford and therefore should end social programs.
Changing post-tax income distribution is fairly straightforward (in theory), but it's less clear to me how to change wealth distribution.
> Such parents have shown they have no limiting factor...
You make it sound like there’s an infinite loop of childbirth which will eventually use up every last dollar in the world, but that’s not what happens in reality when people have enough money to keep having children. There are also potential options to combat this, through incentives, support, education, etc...
Your point about it being worse in other countries is common enough. My reply tends to be that for every problem in the world we don’t find the worse example out of all 7.6 billion of us and start there. We start where we can and then try to keep going as much as we can.
> I'm not going to lower the standard of living of my own family
Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a lot of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle and income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out there which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical taxpayer’s lifestyle. Even then it would be minimal compared to the overall improvements to the country.
It's not infinite, but we cannot provide every child in the world with the same standard of living as that had by the average Norwegian, for example. And given that a couple chose to give birth to a kid even though they could easily see that they can't provide for the child and society can't provide for the child. E: It shows they don't have a limiting factor.
>Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a lot of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle and income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out there which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical taxpayer’s lifestyle.
Life is certainly zero sum in many ways. If you take ten thousand dollars from me this year and pay it back to me fifteen years later by saying "hey, the average productivity, prosperity, happiness went up by 30%" that doesn't undo the fact that you prevented me from sending my child to a better school. I will never have the opportunity again to send my five year old to a great preschool because next year that kid will be six and that one year of more nurtured development will never be able to be regained.
Currently the US doesn't pay for everything it does on an annual basis. Approximately 25% of spending is borrowed. And of the total four trillion dollars in spending, around sixty percent of that is for social security, medicare, medicaid, social safety net programs, chip, snap, and etc. Additionally, less than 40% of households are net tax payers. You really can't make dramatic changes in social programs without also dramatically impacting people's lives.
That's a straw man - that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about much more achievable aims, such as children not being hungry and not living in unhealthy housing. Many interventions to reduce poverty are relatively low cost. We’re certainly not talking Teslas & Scandinavian design for all.
On zero sum games, you’re talking about economics here and if anything is an example of non-zero-sum game, it’s economics and monetary theory. Large amounts of wealth and economic potential are created pretty much every minute.
Your example of sending your child to a better school isn’t really accurate for a few reasons. There is a practical, real world limit on school fees. At a certain level of income you would have been able to afford the best school possible, hired tutors, etc… and any further earning would not make a difference. You personally might not be at that level, but a lot of the progressive ideas for taxation target those who are exactly in that situation.
The wealth taxes being proposed by a couple of the US Democratic nominees would kick in at the level of millionaires, who are far removed from scraping together every last dollar for the college fund. Other tax changes would certainly not have “dramatic” negative impacts on tax payers, many might see gains.
The preschool/school example is great, especially as you brought up Norway! You have a problem of having to pay to send children to school. That’s the problem, not that any tax changes might jeopardise that. So let’s solve that problem!
In Norway you wouldn’t have to worry about affording preschool as they are all state funded, even the private ones. You pay a small additional contribution at most, if you can afford to, but that’s capped by the local government and about $350 a month. The schools are free (you pay a similar amount for after school babysitting if you need it) and all roughly a similar good standard. University is similar. So your problem of having to afford 20 years or so of education disappears entirely. Which is pretty awesome, plus your healthcare costs also don't exist and you have much more money for discretionary spending. A lot of Norwegians have cabins in the mountains and boats in the fjords, and it's not because they pay low taxes and ignore child poverty.
A naive idea is, have a baby penalty. A baby penalty would make would be parents think twice about having children, and more about family planning and contraception. It would suck to be a child in a family that cannot afford to raise children (this really needs to be emphasized). To offset this people can be paid to bring up a child that their parents cannot afford, this works great as the people who raise the other parents children are less likely to have children themselves. Now this is naive, is not fleshed out, and has all sorts of things that can go wrong, but conversations about these things has to start. Take China, without their 'Family Planning Policy", the place would be a much worse place to live in than today. What was described is something much softer than the Family Planning Policy, but countries may have to move to something like China's policies to have any hope.
"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now." - David Attenborough
You didn't think that through. They are less likely to have children because they have decided against children. A female lawyer isn't going to give up her career to take care of other people's children. She has much better options.
What may happen is that poor people get their children taken away and sent to another poor family that now gets paid for taking care of the child. It's basically a very "unorthodox" form of childcare/adoption without class mobility.
Think about it like how the courts view jury nullification. They really don't like that the idea exists, but because it is a natural consequence of principles they follow concerning a jurors right to vote how they feel, they cannot stop it as long as the juror doesn't openly admit to it.
In the same way, a solution to childhood poverty has to be a solution to poverty for a portion of the population, and thus one has to accept a bias in which adult we solve poverty for or extend the solution to all adults, at which point we are now discussing general solutions to poverty.
This ultimately means that giving to the poor deprives another.
The question then becomes should the parents and children of parents who make more sustainable choices be forced to support the parents and children those who don't. This is generally the current state of our welfare system. Tax burden and impact is predominantly on the middle class.
The result is dysgenic, i.e. Better outcomes are punished, worse outcomes are rewarded.
Its also a classic trolley problem, and thus both action (wealth distribution) and inaction are immoral.
The next argument will be that we should lift everyone to a minimum standard. However this still fails the test above and fails to realise that wealth is unfortunately relative.
Couple that with the dead-weight loss of the tax system and you actually create a spiral of poverty that starts to consume all except the richest.
I grew up on welfare, and I can't tell you how often my mom would talk about section 8 housing and how that would change everything. Having to move was my parents greatest nightmare - they would barely afford day-to-day things, nonetheless first/last/deposit.
[0] not American, so I had to Google “section 8 housing”
Sorry can you clarify - do you mean she wanted to be eligible? Or was eligible but couldn't find a suitable place. I've always wondered if buying a property to rent to section 8 tenants is a good idea or not. (investment wise or charity wise)
Ok I’ll spoil it a bit: first, you still have to do maintenance on these places like fixing the roof, plumbing, etc. and it doesn’t matter if you bought it for pennies, it still has to be livable to rent. Second, section 8 doesn’t cover everything (at least for some) so your tenants will often not make rent: the decision whether to continually take losses on renting or to evict a family (possibly making them homeless) is up to you. And among poor people you will have higher rates of things like hoarding or drugs so your likelihood of dealing with that is high (approaching near certainty as number of properties grows).
He ended up selling off his real estate “empire” in less than 5 years after being threatened with a gun, evicting a family, and having one house get entirely gutted one night (including wires and toilets)
I think the answer is to find a way to drag up a limited group of people as high as possible and then use the gains from those people to drag up the rest to a medium level of wealth. The conventional theory of trickle down economics completely ignores the second step. It's just an excuse to not do anything.
From what I can tell changing an existing community gradually is possible but it will take much longer than creating an entirely new but also well designed community. Find (or slowly create) a highly successful city and try to build another city that follows the same success model. This is probably a good answer for many developing countries but may not be enough in an already developed country.
But food? Rice and beans is one of the healthiest things you can eat, and it's very cheap.
Okay, well rice and beans might bore you to death, but you won't starve. Add some frozen vegetables and fruit and I should think that most people would do just fine nutritionally.
Of course, a lot of people might not know this, and that could be a problem.
I mentioned the issues of housing and community, etc., that are required to actually obtain and cook food. I don't see how subsidies to farmers to grow healthier foods are going to solve the problems that you mention.
I.e., I'm not denying that people living in poverty don't end up malnourished, but that would seem to stem from lack of good housing and community, not with healthy food itself being too expensive.
When I go shopping for example apples are quite expensive compared to a bag of frozen French fries. Lettuce is also very expensive. We could change this with smarter subsidies.
Regarding corn syrup being put into everything, this seems to be a much more general health issue than for the poor alone. Obesity in the US is an epidemic that is much more widespread than amongst just the poor.
I agree that this means that surely we are doing something very wrong in this country!
I have the time to spend an hour feeding myself dinner every day, plus the time for the other meals. Not a lot of people do, however.
If you are working two jobs and have to make two shifts in a day, it's a lot easier to just grab food from the McDonalds you were passing by anyway, cram a handful into your mouth on your way home, drop a happy meal in front of the kids before changing out then in to your uniform, and heading to the next job across town, especially if the bus is slow.
This would be much less crazy than it sounds if we also required open financial records and publicly registered contracts for all businesses.
So why don't you remind us specifically which needs you're talking about? Then it becomes "that specific need".. Strange you didn't mention what it is. Why?
I even went to the bother of trying to look up what it is you'd be referencing, and came up blank.
I think you are severely overestimating the likelihood that anyone knows what you are talking about.
With the exception of housing and healthcare, which are supply side restricted, aren't most consumer goods already pretty fierce markets?
This doesn’t work and Europe already figured out social democracy. Trying to reinvent the wheel with the “more Capitalism” approach is why poverty persists like it does in America.
There needs to be a large scale public working class housing build, taking profit margin out of the equation. The market hasn't built new working class housing stock since the roll out of suburbia nearly a century ago, and can't be expected to do so anytime soon if it stands to amass profit from the status quo.
For the rich, spouses can fight over the choice between buying a pro sports team and buying a private island, or between buying a customized 747-8 and buying a made-to-order yacht with helipad.
For the poor, spouses can be in full agreement that dinner is soup made with ketchup packets, slugs, and dandelions.
The solution is not for the poor to eat slugs...
If it’s the former, I can understand — e.g. frustration from a personality difference where one of them wanted to spend money on something nice so that life wasn’t just an endless pointless slog of dull grey, while the other wanted to save the money for an emergency.
Not all kids want to grow up and be something. There used to be an avenue (future) for those kids. I don’t think that exists much any more.
What I mean is a blue collar family could provide enough to produce another content blue collar worker. If you graduated high school today to be a content blue collar worker your options are kind of limited.
I think some of this structural reality results in the appeal of Bernie to many young voters.
The subject being interviewed is a Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman. The starting point was noting that people who get a GED (on average) score just as well on IQ tests as those getting an ordinary HS diploma. However, their life outcomes tend to be much worse than those who got a HS diploma the ordinary way. Why?
The economist said that 150 years ago schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but spent as much time on "character building" lessons: diligence, persistence, working well with others, etc, but that mostly was removed by the mid 20th century for a couple of reasons. One was that the character building exercises were cast in terms of Protestantism, and as the US became more diverse, there was a push against it. Second, psychology was in the thrall of things that could be machine scored like IQ tests and looked down on squishy character traits.
Anyway, although the GED students did as well on IQ tests, they did substantially worse than normal HS graduates when scored on those other personality skills (not traits, the economist said, since those things can be taught to a large degree).
In the mid 60s a controlled experiment was run where a preschool for impoverished kids were split into the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group's teachers did non-standard stuff, eg, simply exposing the kids to the larger world by taking them on field trips to parts of the city they would never otherwise experience. They were read stories with those character building traits about fairness, persistence, etc. The teachers built relationships with the parents and emphasized how important the parent-child relationship was and not to expect that learning is simply the teacher's job. They provided child care for single/working mothers. This intervention lasted two years of preschool, so basically ages 3-5.
The kids were tested at age 10 and everyone was disappointed that there was no difference. But the economist (and others) revisited the test subjects decades later and found there was a profound difference in outcomes. The treatment group attained higher levels of education, had better incomes, better health, and lower crime involvement. The children of the treatment group were substantially better off in those regards than those of the control group.
Does an impoverished 17 year old assume responsibility for their poverty on their 18th birthday? What about their 20th? 25th? At what age can we expect their lifetime of accumulated knowledge, experience, habits, etc. to deliver them from poverty? Is it simply the age when they decide that they no longer want to be poor and, thus, take the requisite actions to ensure their escape from poverty?
Instead of basing our (American) assumptions about moral responsibility, as it relates to poverty, on our religious heritage (i.e. the atavistic Protestant ethic), why don’t we abandon our assumptions altogether and simply consult the data (as the author of the linked book excerpt suggests)?
Emergent fields of research such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and so forth offer a far different perspective than the simplistic view I alluded to above. It’s understandable that some might prefer a worldview that justifies the status quo and assuages the cognitive dissonance associated with life in a highly stratified society, but that’s no longer an empirically-defensible position. We should all work to make that fact known, as is the OP’s source.
We moved from our multi million dollar house to live in a trailer park where I slept in a bed with my brother and ate shitty food throughout middle and high school.
I would be really interested to have someone study the long term effects of it on me, because I think it's actually made me extremely ambitious and a little crazy. I'm the only person who made it out of that shithole, and I have very high standards for myself now. I just never stopped fighting, and probably will never stop. I'm 22 and my blood pressure is off the charts, but I guess that's the price you pay!
I guess I wonder how situational poverty (rich -> poor) affects you differently than just normal poverty. I've never met another person in a similar situation. Can anyone else relate?
My ambition is (was) borne out of my absolute drive to never be in the same situation I was when I was younger. Also allowed me to dig myself unapologetically into my work and it was a way of escaping when I was younger too.
But I’m 30 now, my ambition is waning. And a lot of what I learned during my “hot passion” years is already sort of old and nothing is truly fundamental in my area (devops/SRE/sysadmin).
If I had one bit of advice, it would be to try pacing yourself and think long term, I wish I’d done university and bitten the bullet of it. I recently failed a google interview for instance because I didn’t think about something foundational in sorting. And that really struck me hard. If I’d gone to university and actually focused on studying I would have been much better. But I’m so risk averse that I would never risk taking time off working to study.
I think eventually you’ll settle. Based on my single data point. I’d prepare for that.
There is nothing else to this article other than this tautology.
(Of course meaning "poverty" in this relative sense, as opposed to the very real material deprivation that's common in least-developed countries, which often is addressed to a surprising extent simply by providing more financial capital.)