Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyAghands | Hacker News Reader

I hope data like this can help society in ridding this disease -- poverty is a disease. Looking at the results and anecdotal evidence it feels like this is obvious.. but the fact of the matter is unless you've been through it, it's very unlikely you can truly appreciate the magnitude of the results.

I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on this complicated problem.

What still seems unknown to me is what specific environmental traits of "poverty" have the strongest negative impact? I mean, we've all heard of "rags to riches" stories --- how do they differ?

View on HN

I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.

I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.

You think it's possible to "eradicate" poverty?

Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.

The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.

Sort of true but there are so many problems with food insecurity and other things, the relative poverty dwarfs.

> Poverty is relative, not absolute

That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.

That's not how the government measures it. They either assume some percentile of income is poverty, or they put together a bundle of things (home, food, etc) to see if income covers it. However, that bundle always gets updated to include more and more.

do you understand the difference between a government definition and a human experience? I'm talking about making it so everyone has the basic needs of their life met - food, shelter, water, medicine, clean environment, leisure time, sleep time.

your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"

[0] https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/30089090699366400

Eliminating extreme poverty would be nice, but unfortunately overreactions to COVID-19 in some countries are currently driving the world economy into a depression and increasing poverty. While the pandemic is clearly a terrible public health crisis, poverty also kills people. It just takes longer than the virus. Expect to see higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease in the next few years.

There's going to be a lot of homeless people as soon as the various state's eviction bans are lifted.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Who are landlords going to find to replace their tenants that didn't have a job for 6 months? Another unemployed tenant?

That's a rational look at things. But if they believe they can (find replacement tenants), they will try, possibly making things worse.

Well if the owner of the property can't balance out their own finances, they could just sell it. Super anecdotal, but I'm hearing a lot of people are looking to invest in the real estate market now.

I suppose that a lot of economic activity isn't really essential and can be shut down without problems. E.g., cruise ships no longer sailing, or making gold watches. Lack of these kinds of goods and services is unlikely to do any damage to cognitive functions.

It would be interesting to refine "poverty" to identify exactly what the minimum healthy level of "consumption" for a typical human is going to be. It doesn't seem to me that it's very high: food, clean water, safe housing, a bit of electricity for cooking etc., and ideally connectivity to the wider world, e.g., a computer with an internet connection. I suppose you could say that that's actually quite a lot, and brings you up to Western industrial society standards. But I suspect that with an industrial economy, all of that can be provided to the entire population with relatively little effort, e.g., if people were working a couple of days a week.

Any medical requirements would be on top of that of course.

Its being surrounded by other poor people who produce fresh drama every day. Horrific drama.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com