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Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

How do these people survive if they have no income?

In addition to the other answers here, there is a large informal economy that essentially caters for the poor. This both provides them with informal means of income but also allows the poor to access essentials cheaply. For example a typical middle class corporate worker may earn a salary and live a lifestyle that is comparable to European counterpart. This same person may employ a full time housekeeper for $350 a month and this housekeeper somehow gets by because she exists in a parallel economy of sorts.

There's minor versions of the same thing in the wealthier urban areas in the US so this shouldn't be a foreign concept to HN.

Yeah, I think what makes SA different is most people in the middle class economy can afford domestic staff.

Almost everyone in the American middle class economy can afford domestic staff.

They might be able to afford to have a company cut their grass, have maids come by once a month to clean, and have food delivered on occasion, but they can't afford to pay a person full time to do all of those things.

Even paying minimum wage, that would be something like $20,000 after taxes. Given that the median household income is something like $60k gross; no, they can't afford domestic staff.

My point was that the vast majority of Americans are lower class.

No they can't.

Middle class by the classical "very rich people who are still technically commoners" definition yes.

Middle class by the colloquial "everyone who makes more than a kid flipping burgers but not enough to buy an apartment in Manhattan" definition no.

nope

Maybe it's because I live near DC but $350 isn't bad at all if you're not paying rent. Also this is pretty common in the US as well.

$350 per month full time (albeit with accommodation sometimes included). Surely this would be unheard of in the US?

Only people stuck in exploitative situations would make $350/mo for full time work in the United States, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people living on ~$350/mo (including rent) is in the six or seven figures.

The economic inequality between the poorer parts of the South, Appalachia, urban projects, etc and wealthy cities can be staggering. The latter subsidize national infrastructure so it's hard to find a town with extremely unreliable electricity like one might find in South Africa, but that's it - we've even got similar segregated parallel economies.

For example, Sudhir Venkatesh from UofC did a study (mentioned in the Freakanomics book) on drug dealers and their income: he found that the rank and file made less than half of minimum wage, working out to under $800 a month full time. Now spread that across the family members that the dealer has to support and $350/mo per adult is not unrealistic.

How could anyone live on that kind of money in the US?

You don't. Your employer is paying for all the necessities because you can benefit from economies of scale (There are tons of empty spare bedrooms in the US but building extra housing is impossible in most places for example.)

Welfare. A single person would pay no tax and indeed receive several hundred dollars a year in tax rebates. They would qualify for ~$200/month in food stamps and likely get health insurance for free. They would also qualify for low income subsidized housing. With kids the benefits (tax rebates and food stamps) increase by thousands.

People are employed, just not formally, and they're paid in cash.

https://theconversation.com/informal-economies-are-diverse-s...

It's the same situation in many developing countries.

Its still a huge problem. Informal jobs are probably low paying and unstable.

It really depends on the job, the boss and the social context.

As a quick example: the son of a restaurant owner can get informally hired as the waiter/bartender. He would get a fair share of the profits, possibly inherit the restaurant or its management, and will probably never be fired.

I can't speak to SA, but worked in Namibia which is adjacent and culturally quite similar. The various tribes own most of the land which is parceled up into farms which is then worked by massive extended families. Life outside of the cities out in the village is actually pretty good. There's basically 0 hunger since its all farms and lots of opportunities for people to run small one-off businesses to make side money. And since families are so extended, there's always a farm you can go work at. If you manage to avoid AIDS and alcolholism the life expectancy is easily 80+. Downside of course is that there's very little opportunity to move out, but the government is pushing rural education programs hard so I'm not sure how else they could deal with that.

Point being, rural unemployment really isn't that big a problem, its the urban unemployment that is brutal.

Odd jobs, unofficial employment, family, welfare. South Africa is also well known for high crime levels.

Surviving in different places in the world requires different amount of work.

If you live in Brazil or Cuba cold weather does not exist and you can wear a t-shirt swinsuit all year long and survive.

If you live in Germany,Japan, Norway or Boston you can't do that. You need to prepare for Winter, and not just you, but your house needs to be prepared, your means of transport needs to be prepared, and so on.

While Winter exist in SA, it is pretty mild for European, Asian or American standards.

Also in lots of places you could have a farm and you don't need to buy lot's of things if you just live a simple life.

And Africa is gigantic, with lots of resources for a population much smaller than Asia or Europe, and way younger.

> If you live in Brazil or Cuba cold weather does not exist and you can wear a t-shirt swinsuit all year long and survive.

As a Brazilian I have to say that you don't know what you're talking about.

It's specially very cold in the winter in the south, where I live, but even in the south-west can be very cold.

Only part of the country would be warm even in the winter as you said.

That's a bit harsh. From a quick google:

> The lowest temperature officially recorded in Brazil was −14 °C (7 °F) in Caçador, Santa Catarina state, on 11 June 1952. However, the summit of Morro da Igreja, a mountain situated in the municipality of Urubici, also in Santa Catarina, recorded a temperature of −17.8 °C (0.0 °F) on 30 June 1996 unofficially.

I googled the average winter temperature for those locales and they're all well above freezing - with the exception of the mountain summits - as high as 10-20C in January! Compared to Boston (daily winter lows below freezing) or Germany/Japan (record lows in the -40s), that's basically t-shirt weather.

Sure it's not as cold and the US and Europe, but saying Brazilians "use swinsuit all year" is inaccurate.

USA has similar unemployment stats with subsets of their population demographics. This subset largely survives and thrives due to section 8 and EBT/SNAP entitlements.

Well, survive maybe but certainly they're not thriving. The welfare state has all but ensured that those people will never get out of their situation. Maybe their kids have a chance but it's clearly a major contributing factor of generational poverty. It's unconscionable what it has done to black Americans. It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters as a way to help people but ultimately it only serves to make those people wards of the state.

So many people "make it" in the off the books economy that the welfare eligible rungs of the social ladder deal in but they can't get up to the next rung because they can't amass the capital to make a clean break and the state will screw them out of everything if they try and go legit slowly.

Imagine your a highly successful under the table mechanic. You have a few under the table employees and work out of a leased space where the owners look the other way. Everything is done in cash or similar. If you want to start a "real shop" you can't just get an LLC, rent a real garage space, put up a sign and move all your tools then slowly start a rolling upgrade process to get all your stuff on the books and above the table as you acquire more profitability to absorb the overhead that entails. The city or state would instantly show up and fuck you over twenty different ways for being off the books and out of compliance. The only way to go legit fast enough is to get a loan and you can't do that because you have no assets, no history, no credit, despite the fact that you are basically already running a successful business.

> It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters

Has it? I don't think I have talked to a single person who likes the current state of welfare in the USA. The problem is that some people think it is too generous, and others think it is not generous enough; so we end up with a clearly dysfunctional system as it accumulates changes changes born out of polar opposite views of the problem.

Yes. The well-meaning but ill-informed voters are the ones who think it isn't generous enough.

Seems like a pretty arbitrary way of framing things. You could support programs that would help poor people become more independent while framing this as being a more generous social program.

Partially through the informal economy described elsewhere, and a fairly robust welfare system that provides grants and other social support to about 18 million people.

Hidden non-criminal economy, community and/or family support, for some even criminal activities I presume

Their parents feed, house and clothe them.

Edit: not sure why this is being buried. I'm not judging, it's just the answer to the question isn't it?

Most likely because this answer is very wrong. You rarely have situations in developing countries where the parents are supporting adults in their mid 20s, and it's almost always the other way round.

The correct answer, as others have pointed out, is the informal economy, with them taking up a bunch of odd jobs one after the other.

To focus on a subset of 15-29 year olds, what do you think 15-18 year olds are doing without either being in school (which is free in South Africa) or holding jobs (which would probably be illegal)? Most likely, supplementing the family income by taking up jobs in the informal economy.

It does indeed happen in the developing world that adults in their mid 20s are supported by older members of their family, it just might not be their parents. In West Africa, for instance, it is common for entire families to be supported off of a couple of lucky relatives who managed to get to Europe.

Got a source, because I can't find one for that.

Instead people here seem to think they're on SNAP and EBT, things only available in America and unlikely to pay all of someone's expenses...

Seems like your explanation is only part of the truth, at least according to the other comments.

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