On Being Broke | Hacker News Reader

On Being Broke

thomasjbevan.substack.com

107 pointsvitabenes131 comments

> the amount of sheer will, determination and delayed gratification needed to stay on the path for long enough to leave penury is beyond the realm of most peoples ability.

I don't think it is just delayed gratification that is a challenge, I think it is how a little bit of saved or scrounged up money can't change your circumstances.

When you're behind on rent two months, about to get an eviction court mark on your record, have collections hounding you or an impending bankruptcy proceeding, doing things like buying a pleasurable consumer electronic or pricy clothes doesn't change that, it doesn't make a dent in that. Your money either goes in a black hole of interest payments and mounting obligations, or it goes into a nice escape that even the bankruptcy judge can't take from you. They probably won't even bother with your consumer goods.

So until the utility of the money amounts changes, along with the speed the money amounts come in, there is no point in pretending that the circumstance will change due to your own discipline.

People are going to be just as apathetic and critical of your circumstance either way if you have blemishes on your credit or have trouble keeping a lease for a home. It doesn't matter whether you saved marvelously or spent frivolously.

Yes. It is true that some people just need to live within their means. But for people who are poor in the traditional sense, the cash flow is just too low. There’s no way to live well on that income. Finding ways to save cash isn’t really an endgame, other than perhaps tactically preventing going bankrupt from an extra medical expense, etc. What you need is more income. The most reliable vehicle to this is to go to college and make plans to go into a healthcare/engineering/accounting etc career, but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life.

> but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life.

or while the cash flow is just too low at any point in life

There's something seriously wrong with a society where nobody can live comfortably without a white-collar job while at the same time there's no way we would survive if we were all accountants.

I agree. How do you see us fixing this? Maybe universal basic income? Over the last century we've eliminated many of the positions in agriculture and manufacturing that were traditionally considered good blue collar jobs. Automation on that front is only going to increase. Obviously the gig jobs - Uber, Lyft, DoorDash - are a really poor substitute...

Here are some solutions I can think of. No telling if any would work, these are just conversation starters.

1. Socialism. I don't need to describe this because you've already heard of it. :)

2. Extremely general insurance. You don't know how successful you're going to be before you're born, so you have insurance policies for lifetime income. If we can insure against the treatment costs of cystic fibrosis (parent's insurance covers dependents, then they get their own insurance when they grow up) then we can insure against the costs incurred by being born with an IQ less than 160 in an economy that's out to get you if you so much as blink. Is having 159 IQ a pathological deficiency? Well, pathology is relative to your environment. ;)

3. By fixing our existing system. Maybe all of these pointless wars, intelligence agency black budgets and the dead weight overhead incurred by structuring government projects to allocate funding according to the influence of representative districts, adds up and costs us in a way that puts the lower income 50% underwater first. Maybe there's enough to go around, but we're wasting it.

Plenty of blue collar jobs pay enough to live comfortably

A society consisting exclusively of highly specialized welders and accountants can't operate either. We do actually need someone to deliver packages for example.

The jobs that don't pay a living wage are oftentimes more essential than some that do.

Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot. There's no point streamlining a process at a cost of e.g. $35k/year if you can pay someone $30k/year to do it.

If people are walking to the depot, the delivery work is still being done, but for $0/hour.

>Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot.

Do we need someone to farm food for us? If farming was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to grow their own vegetable garden.

And then you might decide to pay some one to help you in your vegetable garden part time, and before you know it...

The point here is that jobs are elastic and can be automated or shuffled around, we just choose not to do so because we don't value the time of the worker enough. When you get a package delivered for $2 instead of $3 you're implicitly putting a lower value on the time of someone else.

We will always need someone to deliver packages. However, maybe we do not need someone to deliver a package of rice from Amazon for an unlivably low wage to a recipient who could have just gone to the supermarket.

The same thing applies to the agricultural industry, which abuses immigrant labourers doing backbreaking work for low pay to provide you cheaper luxury goods. Maybe if strawberries reflected a livable wage you'd choose to eat more easily harvestable crops, like apples.

>we just choose not to do so because we don't value the time of the worker enough. When you get a package delivered for $2 instead of $3 you're implicitly putting a lower value on the time of someone else.

Is that bad? Like it or not, different types of work provide different value to the economy.

>maybe we do not need someone to deliver a package of rice from Amazon for an unlivably low wage to a recipient who could have just gone to the supermarket.

Sure, that MANGA programmer could have gone to the supermarket himself, but why should we stop him from spreading the wealth around by paying someone else to do it for them? Would the delivery guy be better off if he had 20 minutes of his time back but was $5 poorer?

It's a reply to the claim that "a society consisting exclusively of highly specialized welders and accountants can't operate." I don't think it's bad that labour has a market value, but I do think it's bad that we can't imagine a future where most or all of the jobs are higher paid.

Again, this isn't an attempt to dunk on anyone who gets a package delivered. It's a defence of the market's ability to stretch to accommodate rising wages in a sector, and an attack on the idea that a low-paid underclass is necessary.

>It's a defence of the market's ability to stretch to accommodate rising wages in a sector

I don't see how this can be solved by the market. At the marginal level, raising wages can do a little to push the income of the lowest earners slightly higher, but it's not really a solution to the general problem of "people who can't earn enough money to afford some minimum standard of living". For one, it actually doesn't increase overall earnings, because businesses end up cutting hours[1]. Second, it only affects people who are employed, so the policy does nothing for the unemployed/disabled. If society wants to guarantee a minimum standard of living to their members, they should just do it (ie. redistributive policies), rather than trying to coerce the labor market into doing so.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23532

Rising wages for the lowest earners are the consequence of more policy changes than just minimum wage increases: subsidised training programs, public infrastructure projects, lowering full employment rate targets for reserve banks, etc. Anything that increases competition for the pool of available workers.

I'm not even advocating for any of these things here, or in my earlier comments. I'm saying that if by some unspecified means the wages for last-mile delivery drivers doubled or quadrupled or more, society would absorb the difference instead of collapsing. It wouldn't fail to operate. Even agriculture would be survivable if it happened slowly enough to mitigate the sudden shock.

"The jobs that don't pay a living wage are oftentimes more essential than some that do"

Which was said before quite often, but still many people were surprised what qualified as a critical job - and what not, during the covid lockdowns.

And the shame is - the pay is still low for most of lowly regarded but critical work.

Criticality is not the only factor when it comes to pay. Supply of capable people also plays a part.

IE city garbage collection is critical, but finding staff to do it isn't too hard.

For me, when the salary/wage falls below living standards is the issue. Hence minimum wage should be a thing.

> Which was said before quite often, but still many people were surprised what qualified as a critical job - and what not, during the covid lockdowns.

And also what was considered to be a "non-critical" job, often by the workers themselves.

Pre-covid I don't think anyone would've predicted teachers standing up as a collective and saying "We are not essential!". But this was pretty much the case globally and I think it will have long-term impacts on the field.

Problem with teachers is that they are critical but there is about a 18 year gap in seeing the failure

Thats the funny thing about critical work. It pretty much has to become commoditized in order to be common enough to be critical Therefore it ends up in a cycle of depressed wages with no way back up.

"It's the [housing] economy stupid"

If we actually built an abundance of housing, where it would cease to be a vehicle to park stores of wealth, where there is no musical chairs competition to outcompete each other for the basic security of shelter, the deflationary cost savings that would percolate through the economy would be absolutely immense. I'm talking about even chipping away at the cost of education and healthcare immensely, because of how much of the cost goes into indirectly paying the housing of the huge amount of workers in those industry. In the world of mass housing at the cost of construction, everything is cheap, and we live with much more abundance.

At some point you're just hitting the raw material cost of roof+walls+insulation+labor built to code which--for a pretty basic structure--can easily be $120k no matter the location. Even if land was free this would still be unattainable for many under-homed people.

That's why I pointed to "mass housing at the cost of construction." $120k is the realm of minimums for SFH. For a bare necessities 432 Park Avenue[0], we should be able to do 3,000 residences within 85 stories of 800 sqft. apartments, at 50k per, amortized over 30 years and even cheaper after they're used. The Soviet Union couldn't give their people a lot but they could at least make some housing. 432 Park Ave's current prices are due to luxury amenities, Manhattan land, and inadequate housing supply.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

We can mass-produce mobile homes for $70k, but as personal property they depreciate and are harder to finance, and some people have been screwed on renting the land.

Its immigration policy too-- the 50 million or so foreign born living in the US today have overwhelmed our housing production.

Yes, that's true. But we also need them to build the housing.

Why??? Why not just pay a living wage to American citizens?

I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training.

He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out.

I still have no idea why he did it.

Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.)

The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him.

That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.

Without too much detail, he came from a really bad home environment. Ran away from home at 16 and was 22 when I was helping him out.

The only thing that made any sense to me was some type of loyalty to the place he was working (commercial HVAC company) but it always seemed like this place treated him badly. He’d been there for almost 3 years though with the prospect of a raise dangled in front of him like a carrot and never materializing.

If his current employer was a mom and pop, he may have owed the owner money on screwball terms, from deductions from his paycheck (unless he left) to "you don't have to pay this back unless you leave".

From my reviews of his finances, nothing like that ever came up.

I knew someone like that, and I always suspected he owed his boss money. Turned down a job with better benefits with a large, much more secure company to take a counteroffer from the entrepreneur who was going broke. He also had this weird bond with the employer that mistreated him and kept dangling a raise (real soon now) in front of him.

All we can do is try hard not hurt people with our version of good will. I've done the same with the same outcome, one of those people went on and made an impact and is cited frequently here, but not because of any help from me.

You gotta give everyone a chance if you can. I don't see why anyone should feel bad for giving someone an opportunity that is later thrown away. You did the right thing by giving someone that opportunity; whether he takes it or not is up to him.

If everyone in the world thought like you, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, this world is full of nepotism and tribalism. But people like you (and the parent commenter) help balance it out.

I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc.

Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.

That makes some sense to me.

I started my pivot from a trade background into tech by going to university when I was 30. I'm 36 now and about to graduate while I've also been working in the field now for over two years. I've done this while being a single father to two young children (they were 1 and 3 when I started night univeristy). It was certainly not easy. I nearly burnt out hard multiple times.

I think people miss how expensive it is to be poor.

All the free lunches are served to those with a high ROI.

There is no free lunch.

I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time.

I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times.

I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.

I’ve had to juggle that in periods of my life too, on the polar opposite side I love how fast things can be.

Buying a car with a cashier’s check after negotiating lower means no financing charges, interest, credit pulls and just having stored value for a little while. So much cheaper both financially and in time.

Right now my used car is worth more than when I bought it.

I helped a kid at my church pay off a title loan that he got when he was desperate to make rent. The interest rate was 212%.

the poverty tax is real

There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) related to the gift culture of extreme poverty as an adaptive behavior for survival, but that paradoxically keeps people in poverty poor.

The basic idea is that you and all your friends are poor and someone comes into some amount of money, all of that money is pretty much immediately spent on helping friends or just material purchases rather than saving or planning. Partly this is because there's some feedback loop to expecting money not to last long, but also because then everyone in the community is spending money on everyone else. When you need to rely on the help of friends to survive at that level, being generous when you come into money makes it more likely your friends will help you in the same way.

This gets taken to an extreme where there's pressure to not save. If you're found out to have money and have not immediately spent it you'll get shamed by your peers for being greedy or for acting better than them. Then if you end up needing financial help later maybe they won't want to help you (which at poverty level could be existential).

These kind of social local maxima are really hard to break out of.

That’s why saving clubs are an awesome solution. Every month you and 12 of your neighbors put in money and take turns taking it out. You can make big life changing purchases without the stigma of holding on you cash. Also it eliminates the need for banking

> There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too)

I heard it from a youtube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4

British author, chef and campaigner Jack Monroe's been saying some interesting things recently regarding poverty and food price inflation [0]. She argues that those at the bottom of the income spectrum suffer a far higher percentage rate of inflation, in part because supermarkets just withdraw their cheapest priced ranges forcing the less well-off to spend more, even if the next highest price product has remained roughly the same price. She's working on a new measure of food price inflation named in honour of Terry Pratchett and with the blessing of his estate [1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/22/were-pricing...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchet...

The irony is that Ghrelin the hunger hormone increases intelligence. Its nature's way of helping mammals become innovative in obtaining food.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805706/ "Ghrelin also promotes rapid reorganization of synaptic terminals in the hypothalamus28, and in the hippocampus it promotes synapse formation in dendritic spines and LTP, which are paralleled by enhanced spatial learning and memory formation29."

I am amazed at how much the financial system imitates what life would be like living in the wild 1000's of years ago.

While that may be true, I would caution about thinking that hunger promotes intelligence in the long term in any way.

I'm not an expert but I would confidently bet that the effects of malnutrition on cognitive ability FAR outweigh this hormonal effect.

Note that they're talking about a hormone that gives the feeling of hunger, rather than hunger as a result of malnutrition

Benzoic Acid and its derivatives (Sodium/Potassium/Calcium) Benzoate affect Leptin, another hunger/satiety hormone.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/fat-people-have-less-b...

Considering how obese the West is, is it any wonder why the West is losing its edge, especially the US?

Now malnutrition is different to being hungry, you can be obese and suffering from malnutrition. A purified diet is malnutrition.

Its why if you are in the US army and you get slammed in the can for punishment, you only get bottled water and a multi vitamin pill as your nutrition for the time you spend in there. Thats all you need to know to get your fighting spirit back!

> Considering how obese the West is, is it any wonder why the West is losing its edge...?

Correlation doesn't equal causation. Fisher would go ballistic at such assertions.

Why do you think this is correlation?

Obesity trending upwards since X

West in decline since X+c

Voilà, obesity = decline.

Yes but there is science that backs it up and I'm not paid to convince you otherwise.

Except it doesn't because what actually happens when people are in poverty is they can't escape for a whole litany of reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence: the stress of being borderline able to pay bills and having to work long hours mean they have no capacity to think about how to improve things, or even basics like healthy eating; they can't afford to buy ingredients in bulk so they're forced to buy much less efficiently and so spend more; the health effects of poverty, both direct and indirect put additional time and cost pressure on them; etc etc.

Don't get me wrong, the fact that ghrelin may have an impact on intelligence is fascinating, I just don't think it has anything to say about poverty.

True there are a whole litany of reasons.

I dont think anyone works harder than the self employed.

I've done 80hrs straight, and I've not met anyone who has been at work for longer than that. Not parents, not nurses, coppers or soldiers, or cleaners.

I've gone with out food for 18days, just water. And I'd do it again if I needed to.

I've slept on the streets, had people want to beat me up but for their sake, I'm glad they didnt try!

Stupidity really annoys me, but as noone ever gets their exam paper back and checks their answers against the text books, how can anyone claim to be qualified? An exam result is little more than a medal or some other form of social division with an element of social conformity.

Huh, would this be noticeable from e.g. intermittent fasting?

So the problem with fasting is it depletes things like glutathione from the liver. Fast too much and the body will catabolise itself, ie loss of muscle mass and so on, plus things like ketosis acidosis can be a risk for some.

The hygienists (1950's US based org headed by a bloke called Shelton) were into fasting and it was what Christians Lent was originally about. Now water is also a factor with fasting so if you take Islam's no food or drink during daylight hours, that type of fasting caused an increase in blood sugar levels due to the lack of fluids. When you have no food or drink parts of the immune system increase rapidly and will attack the body so you get into autoimmune disease territory.

The world record is actually 382 days done in 1971 at the University of Dundee. Just water and electrolytes, but the bloke started from an obese state in the first place. He might still be alive today.

There are risks with many things, not only eating (diabetes/protein rich depression) but different types of fasting. Even the paleo diet which is like a ketogenic dieting has its risks. So thats protein rich, but some chemicals like tryptophan will not be absorbed in the presence of other proteins, they compete in the gut. Copper & Zinc iirc also compete. Then there is the form so we have a gut enzyme which limits our ability to absorb ferric iron ie fe3 or iron oxide (the brown rust you get when you cook meet), but its possible to absorb lots of ferrous iron (fe2), but then too much iron can cause its own problems like internal bleeding.

Ultimately it depends on what your goals are for intermittent fasting in the first place.

>supermarkets just withdraw their cheapest priced ranges

As an Australian, that's really interesting to hear.

In the past 5-10 years, we've seen an explosion in the availability of cheap, decent-ish quality "home brand" products in supermarkets and our media regularly runs stories arguing that certain foods (notably milk) have become too cheap for farmers to be able to reap a healthy profit.

UK supermarkets have some extremely cheap products - 13p (US$0.18) for a can of spaghetti in tomato sauce [1], 20p (US$0.27) for five meals worth of pasta [2].

They're so cheap I can't believe they make more than a penny or two of profit. And raising the price by even a few pennies is above the rate of inflation. And if they stop selling those super-cheap products? The next cheapest product is 3x the price.

[1] https://groceries.asda.com/product/tinned-pasta/asda-smart-p... [2] https://groceries.asda.com/product/spaghetti-tagliatelle/asd...

That's insane. The cheapest equivalent product over here would cost you 65c AUD (about US$0.50). I'm not even sure 13p would cover the cost of the empty can!

I was watching a video the other day of a Brit cooking for a quid a day. I was amazed by the price of bread in Tescos. I can't find a loaf near me for less than $3.

I rely mostly on the kindness of strangers to feed me. I eat whatever leftovers I find. I'd love to go to a food bank, but I'm on house arrest which only allows me to go to one specific grocery store and back. I would happily Dumpster dive if I could. There is so much food waste in the world.

If you need some help or just want to talk, feel free to hit me up. I'd take you to dinner if it weren't for physical proximity and the house arrest, but I'd be happy to help with some groceries and lending an ear if you want. My email is in my profile.

I think that argument may be right, but it isn’t that groundbreaking.

An important point here is that every cost is regressive for the poor. The poorer you are the worse any cost is. As a result, rising prices hurt the poor more, and low quality cheap items end up hurting the poor more. But; it is obvious to say this. There’s no will to fix these problems.

> every cost

A good salesman, contractor, etc., will size you up based on your clothes/car/house and will adjust their prices accordingly.

I've heard this said quite often but don't believe it to be effective from my personal experience. Granted, the majority of my adult life has been in Asia. But the millionaires I know dress like utter slobs and live in humble residences. (One drove an Aston Martin, but I didn't see his car until we became very close - maybe one or two years after becoming friends.)

Off-topic, but I am surprised how many regressive costs there are to having money: insurance, healthcare, legal costs, regressive government policies, advisors, retirement savings, hanging with peers of similar wealth means expensive habits...

The big difference with having wealth is how much agency I have over where I spend my time, compared with friends on minimum wage.

I have also lived with friends on the sickness benefit (somewhat by their choice), and they had relatively lots of time to spend as they wish compared with most employees (middle class or working class). In New Zealand you may have more disposable income on the benefit than you do working for minimum wages.

I heard them on an episode of 'More Or Less' making their case as well [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013r9w

I grew up fairly poor in a large family. One of the constants was that something important was always broken but we couldn’t afford to fix it just then - a car, the washing machine, the computer; a couple times, the electricity. We went on DIY camping vacations. There was always a vague notion that we were on the brink of insolvency. (But through some supreme act of will my parents always found money for music lessons.) As kids we learned that if we wanted something, we had to find the money. The clever siblings would win contests with cash prizes, $100, $250. The rest of us had various side hustles like neighborhood snow shoveling and leaf blowing…

This process was short-circuited immediately for those of us who went into tech. It’s the new gold rush; you really can go west and seek your fortune. Remarkable times.

Agree completely. It’s absolutely insane how much I earn today, and this is in Europe which falls behind US in a tremendous way.

My mum raised me on £50 a week at most, I spend more than that on food a week, let alone any of the other essentials.

Sometimes I get this kind of impotent rage, that I should boil in my gut and write out exactly how life was like and how it’s completely unfair to those still trapped in that life who weren’t lucky enough to adore computers.

In some ways it’s worse for them now than it was for my mum… that’s unimaginable honestly, there were times we chose between electricity and food…

But all my baying on a personal blog is going to do nothing. Another sob story in a sea of thousands, and deafening silence from the “haves” of our society- unwilling or unable to relate to another human being in torrid inescapable misery.

And they wonder why poverty and alcohol abuse are linked.

You need a sea to have a tsunami. Whatever it takes to make people realize there a issues that need to be fixed. Write down your experiences, even if it's only a record for yourself.

Alcohol abuse is rampant in the well to do classes as well, they just buy better stuff that won't kill you as quickly. See Boris Johnson.

You should consider writing. Some people only begin to care about something when they find out that someone they care about or respect has experienced it.

> This process was short-circuited immediately for those of us who went into tech. It’s the new gold rush; you really can go west and seek your fortune. Remarkable times.

> it’s completely unfair to those still trapped in that life who weren’t lucky enough to adore computers.

I must confess that after being picked on throughout middle school and high school for being a nerd, I totally reveled in this observation well into my young adulthood. Revenge of the nerds, baby... the gentle computer geeks are the ones getting rich and living well in fabulous places, while the mean, popular kids never left the hometown and are worse off than their parents' generation.

Eventually I realized that this was still thinking like a kid.

It’s funny how wildly off base my assessments of important life skills were as a kid (a fellow nerd, to be sure!) A world of ‘alphas’ where soccer skills and strategic bullying defined the social order. If you had told me that spending hundreds of hours dinking around on TI calculators was the real secret to future success, it would have just sounded so random. It’s like finding out that your collection of bottle caps you hoarded as a kid is now immensely valuable and assured you a life of wealth and access. So as much as I share the sense of catharsis, it does feel tremendously random and would have confused the heck out of teenaged me. :)

You can help. Donate to your local food bank, rescue shelter, night shelter and other immediate forms of aid. These places make an immense difference in the lives of those who live near you.

I used to be quite poor. It sucked, hard. I wrecked a car so I found a bike, I wrecked the bike so I walked. I spent my life looking for the next better paying job and tried to figure what skills I needed in order to get it. This led me from fast food, to warehouses, to assembly lines, to construction, to a computer repair shop, to tech support, to lab support, to IT helper, to IT admin, to Devops, to cloud support, to leadership. It was a series of tiny steps with a very focused goal. I'm sure that some would say it's because I'm a reasonably intelligent white male but I feel that my path could be taken by just about anyone. I worked with all types at all levels. Even if they stopped at construction they still wouldn't be poor.

I think that there are a lot of opportunities out there for people who want things badly enough. The question is, as a society what value do we place in the collective body of people who don't strive to better themselves? Is it something we want to prop up and freeze them in place or do we keep making the better future appealing like a carrot dangling for human growth?

> with all types at all levels. Eve

Yes. I think there are but being an intelligent white male will get you farther than a minority assuming the same effort is applied.

Perhaps your parents were never really poor but just wanted you to be self reliant. Maybe they were gaslighting you with all the broken electronics.

Some Roman Catholic orders have drawn a useful distinction between poverty and misery.

Poverty is “what you eat.”

Misery is “whether you eat.”

Ordinary political discourse benefits from conflating both within poverty since this allows using misery counter-examples against poverty mitigation (these people have it worse) and poverty counter examples against misery mitigation (it’s not so bad they have color TV’s). And of course poverty is the better case scenario and misery sounds like what it is.

Related, Scalzi’s Being Poor:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/?amp

This is a very romantic account of poverty. Poverty, in general, in the abstract form, is not due the lack of philosophical questions on purpose, meaning or goals, or even bad spending. Poverty in the here and now is a part of our social system. It will not be eradicated while capital rules societies because it depends on it.

Loved ones killing themselves with crack cocaine can not be remembered fondly. Shitty emotional lives for children because of stressed out, alienated parents isn't either. Living in decay and not having basic necessities like a functioning sink met are not hot. The effects of poverty on self esteem are downright harrowing and saddening to even see.

Going along with this, I think there's a very big difference between being poor, and being educated and poor, or being in a supportive tribe and poor. My parents grew up poor, during the Depression, but were either educated, or had at their disposal the resources of Catholic education, which was affordable and of high quality.

My mom talks about how her family did OK, at least socially, and always had the nearby public library as a refuge. When the Depression and WWII ended, they were pretty much back on their feet. My mom's neighbors in the tenements couldn't even read, and had dramatically different prospects.

Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

Yes, objectively the managing of production for profit has benefited the world in some very real ways, but there are irremediable contradictions in this system that harm the world in other ways. Production should not be for profit anymore and for that to happen production must be in control of the producers not the profiteers. Its about going forward, not back.

Why should production not be for profit? Anybody who produces something useful should be rewarded for it.

Of course. Capitalism is a useful tool, because markets are the best known tool for facilitating economic growth.

However, capitalism is in itself an inherently broken system: because of the nature of capital, a perfectly capitalist society will approach a state where one actor owns everything, and everyone else owns nothing. As such, all countries practice a form of mediated capitalism: market functioning is limited by governmental action. Certain markets are not allowed to exist, while others are managed via regulation.

There is no inherent reason why capitalism cannot be adapted to preserve the utility of markets while simultaneously eliminating poverty.

Idk how you can derive that as the optimal state of capitalism

The optimal state of capitalism is where resources are being allocated so perfectly, any changes would be a net negative to society

Poverty on one’s own is difficult and disheartening but poverty with dependents is an order of magnitude harder.

>It will not be eradicated while capital rules societies because it depends on it.

Historically, the rule of capital has been the greatest reducer of poverty across centuries and countries. The rule of anything other than capital has been the most assured way to increase poverty.

One thing that gave me hope recently is seeing Jack Monroe campaigning for the Vimes index. I wont try and word it as well as the man himself[1]:

> “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money, Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

And to some extent, people focus on the economics, but I think it's just as important to point out - how good would your day be if you had wet feet.

[1]Monroe is a female poverty campaigner who does fantastic work, the Vimes index is based on Terry Pratchett's fiction, endorsed by his estate.

I believe Monroe has since come out as non-binary.

>Having found the work, most other things beside the work fall by the way side. And whatever your current financial situation I hope the same becomes true for you.

The economic reality that came to me in my mid 20's was that you have to work to stay alive, society has no room for pets. (not if your already rich of course.)

If someone emphasized this more strongly for me when growing up, it would have helped a lot.

If this is interesting to you, I would absolutely recommend you read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. It is a very engaging account of a period of destitution in his life.

“Hunger” by Knut Hamsun is another one.

Great book!

I remember reading that as a (not exactly wealthy) student just arrived in London. I felt lucky living on £5/day.

It also shows very convincingly how the presumably fair enforcement of unjust laws and norms can be a weapon in a context of class warfare. It was then that I realised that things I had internalised as normal (like rules to prevent rough sleeping) were in fact reactionary weapons to punish a group of people who were in that state mostly through tough luck of mental health issues. As Anatole France wrote, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

This was a well written article. Having gone through over a decade of hard times, I agree that a feeling of worthlessness and self loathing can easily set in.

I would also agree with the point that when someone who has not had money for a long time that finally has a stroke of luck and gets some will find it easy to devil it away and end up broke in a short time...A fool and his money? It is easy to get money but hard to keep?

There is a book called "The Richest Man in Babylon" written by George S. Clason that touches on this matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_(bo...

Not to be too critical about the article because as I said it was well written, but I felt as though it might be a little too intellectual for the common reader such as myself.

Sometimes elegant words make an author look smart but can create a barrier to getting the intended message out. I may be way off saying this but personally felt the vocabulary was challenging at some times.

>I would also agree with the point that when someone who has not had money for a long time that finally has a stroke of luck and gets some will find it easy to devil it away and end up broke in a short time...A fool and his money?

From my experience and what I saw when I was poor - when you're poor you never have money, and you *can't* save money - there's always something. A broken down car, an unexpected medical bill, floor collapses and you need stuff to fix it, electric bill comes due before your paycheck because this month has a different number of weeks. Always something that drains your savings right back down to zero. Poor is never being able to get ahead of that.

So that one time you get some money - like tax refund time - you spend it. Use it or lose it. You spend it on something that will at least hopefully bring you some happiness until next year. Because that's the only chance you'll have. And if you don't use it, if you diligently save it, it will be gone by next month anyway and you'll have nothing to show for the last year.

That's not foolish. That's not "deviling it away". That's just taking the rare opportunity while you have it for something, anything.

I can't argue to your situation and didn't mean to offend you. Hopefully you are out of that trap now and are not living hand to mouth anymore. Everyone's circumstances are different and I was making a comment in regards to myself not you.

For me at my lowest there was no tax return as you don't get that if you don't have a job and any government rebate was seized before I saw it. I didn't have an electricity bill or car either. I will agree that when I was broke it didn't seem to matter that much if I was minus 30K or 35K and the collection agents eventually gave up on me. The few times I managed to pick up an odd job for cash, or through some other fortunate circumstances I happened upon some money, the last thing I thought of doing was getting in touch with a credit councilor and handing that cash to them...until I did.

Silly question, but what typically causes prolonged poverty?

Apart from illnesses (including mental illnesses and addiction), isn't it mostly a matter of finding a reasonably paid job eventually?

I have known times when I had little money, but it was in part also because I did not want a job and tried other things. But at least when I was younger, I think falling back onto a job would have been an option. Wouldn't it for most people? I mean even if you have to look for two years, wouldn't most "normal" people be able to get a job eventually?

Where does one live in those two years while they are looking for this job? With no income they may end up in a shelter or their car, sleeping half on and off, mentally and physically exhausted. They then have a host of problems that come with being homeless. How many jobs hire homeless people?

Some job types just die out and the workers can‘t catch on because they did very specific work that isn‘t required anymore and they don‘t have much experience in other tasks. Yes, there are ways to relearn another trade or a similar one but it gets harder the older you get. Often the case with parents who have taken a longer break from working because they‘re taking care of their children or even people taking care of an ill family member.

OK, but in the timeframe of two years for finding another job?

Make a list of the jobs that aren't "reasonably paid" then note that our society runs on a certain percentage of people being in those jobs at all times. US govt has a detailed breakdown if you're interested.

I would say falling out with your parents is a common cause of poverty. Which can be due to homophobia, alcohol abuse, abuse, any number of things. But the parent's issues have a knock on effect on the child.

Once you're in poverty it's difficult to get out. You lack a car (which makes everything more expensive and time consuming), lose confidence, get hungry and can no longer think straight... instead of up skilling it is difficult enough just to balance food and the bills.

You can work 2 jobs 60+ hours a week and still be poor because wages have not kept up with cost of living increases, especially when it comes to housing and healthcare.

Everything is more expensive when you are poor. For example, having to buy a car and putting a disproportionate amount of your income into petrol makes it very difficult to find jobs outside your neighbourhood. And moving costs money. So when you get stuck in an unattractive area, it’s difficult to get out.

Another example is education. It’s difficult to educate yourself when you need to work 2 jobs just to eat and pay your rent and bills. There are stories of people managing it, but that is an unattainable utopia for a large number of people.

Sure, but the internet is almost free, and these days you would look for jobs on the internet?

I don't say it is easy, just wondering what is wrong if you never manage to find a job?

Sure, but you still need to go there to work. You need money to buy a car, and you need the car to get paid. Of course, some vultures will lend you a couple of quid to buy something, but then the astronomical interest rates just add up to your problems. And pray that nothing unexpected happens, like the unreliable car you just bought for £500 breaking down before you finished paying for it, because then you don’t have a job anymore and it takes weeks to get support from the government. And good luck you if you have children.

Also, people who can’t keep up with bills are not going to have easy access to the Internet either. There are libraries and such, but it adds yet more friction and stress. There are loads of things you don’t necessarily realise if you haven’t been in such a situation or really thought about it. Every one of them is not a huge problem in itself, but it all adds up.

Mental aspects are also important. People familiar with symptoms of depression and chronic anxiety know how debilitating they can be.

It definitely is not impossible to get out of poverty, just very hard.

But if you are poor, you either don't have a computer, or you bought a $150 new laptop at Staples which you thought was a great deal, but is ridiculously slow, has a 5 minute battery, and gets destroyed by a 10 year old Thinkpad X230. Being poor requires you to buy lots of reasonably priced junk just to get by. Your daily life is just full of substandard things that wastes time and money, and increases stress.

And internet isn't free if you have outstanding payments with the sole internet provider in your area. (This is not hypothetical, by the way.)

Basically what I got from the article is that nobody notices that they are poor until they see someone richer than them.

I don’t know if this kind of ‘poverty’ can ever be solved.

Poor people have more 45% more leisure time than wealthy.

Society as a whole has more leisure time than any time of history before. We still bitch day after day, minute after minute.

source... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JLaF_4Tz8

More unqualified leisure time isn't what most people want. Most people want meaningful connections to others. Watching T.V. for eight hours isn't going to make people feel good. Feeling connected and maintaining a sense of belonging is what is lacking in the modern world.

Damn, I guess I should become poor

Karl Marx said there was no such thing as poverty, and of course he was right. People do not have a relationship with things, other than perhaps possessions (not property) like the shirt on your back. There are no signs pointing down from the heavens that someone owns this office building or factory or mine or IP rights to a 1927 film or book. People have relationships with one another. There is an idle class of heirs and there is a working class. Being broke is in the context of these social relations. Pointing to material items like federal reserve notes in a bank under some account number is a fetishism ignoring what is obvious, these basic relations between classes - heirs and workers.

Do you have a relationship with your teeth, gut or brain? Because poverty tend to be bad for your physical and mental health.

There is a large gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest, not to mention the quality of that life. Poverty is not just a deprivation of possessions, it is a deprivation of housing, education, employment and health care. Increasingly it is a deprivation of clean air, water, healthy food and physical safety.

Poverty is a ruinous gravity well that chews you up and spits you out as a twisted shadow. It traps people in vicious cycles that can last for generations. You can escape it alive, but you can't escape it unscathed.

Are there seriously people who believe this bullshit? You think everybody who works only works for "heirs", and if there were no heirs, nobody would have to work?

If nobody would work, billions of people would starve within weeks. The only relationship to other people that would prolong ones life would perhaps the ability to eat some of your peers.

> Are there seriously people who believe this bullshit? You think everybody who works only works for "heirs", and if there were no heirs, nobody would have to work?

Well that does sound like "bullshit" as you put it, but it bears no relation to what I said.

"There is an idle class of heirs and there is a working class. Being broke is in the context of these social relations." - that sounds as if you believe people who are "heirs" exploit the people who are not.

Toilets are not mystical mechanisms; the flush is simply pouring water into the bowl. When the tank's empty, or (as is common now with "low flow" toilets) insufficient to the job, pouring more water into the bowl from a bucket or jug will work.

I submit that that aint "broke". You're "broke" when you have to decide whether to repair the car so you can get to work, or repair the heater so you can sleep and shower and stuff, or buy food. "Broke" is when you know all the places you can hit for free crackers on your way to somewhere else.

Agreed about the toilet, but don't be a gatekeeper.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Like everything else there's a spectrum. And there are plenty of problems that start well before worrying about your next meal.

> pouring more water into the bowl from a bucket or jug will work.

Which is what they did, so I fail to see the point of your comment.

Ah, but that is not what he wrote. He never claimed the toilet was broken because he was broke, but due to bad organisational skills.

He then used the story to illustrate the fact that such things can become fond memories, and related _that_ fact to poverty.

At least, that is how I understand the text.

I was also struck by this behavior. Toilets are pretty simple mechanisms. You can just directly look at how all the parts work (as long as the toilet isn't built into the wall; normal residential toilets in North America are not built into the wall).

I know the author reflects on this aspect, but it still struck me. What kind of person doesn't fix this situation, and then proceeds to do this laughable hack every time they want to use the bathroom. A hack that might "flood" the place?

>pouring more water into the bowl from a bucket or jug will work.

Isn't that exactly what the article describes?

>after each us did our business we filled a mop-bucket with bathwater and flung it down the toilet pan.

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