Why getting a job isn't a ticket out of poverty | Hacker News Reader

Why getting a job isn't a ticket out of poverty

stearsng.com

45 pointsaabdulrahim33 comments

I don't want to give out my email just for the privilege of reading the page's contents, and I don't think I'm being unreasonable.

Harvesting emails is a ticket out of poverty.

Same, they lost me when I see the register section.

Same here

This article focuses on Nigeria, but this happens in the US [0] as well. This is especially cruel when you consider how many benefits are tied to work requirements. This leads to a power imbalance for employers know people will take terrible jobs, which leave them in poverty, because if they take time to get job training or even time to just find a better job, they might lose the SNAP benefits they need for their own and their children's survival, just as one example.

0 - https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/work-alone-often-not-enough...

SNAP is certainly an example, although it's pretty minimal (generally ~$1-$2 / hr increase is enough to jump out of the cliff). The child care subsidies cliff is the biggest one by far -- not even close.

One interesting question though is since the framing here is net benefit of society, is whether it's actually a benefit to society to fix the child care cliff. It could be that stacking <5 y/o in a pile with an overworked stranger leads to worse outcomes for children. It may be this cliff is actually a net benefit by allocating labor of a low earning parent into a high-payoff 1:1 attention long-term benefit to a small child. I think we may find that society is worse off if child-care subsidies are "fixed."

Financial hardship & stress causes an awful lot of problems, including being a major factor in divorce, which is definitely, statically speaking, really bad for kids. Housing insecurity and things like frequent moves between apartments and/or spending stretches with various relatives are common among the very-low-income—those things keep kids from developing friendships with peers (in school or otherwise), and badly disrupts their school experience, once that starts (because they switch schools a lot, have tons of absences for various reasons, et c.)

I'd be very surprised if the benefit you mention even comes close to making up for those things.

> divorce, which is definitely, statically speaking, really bad for kids.

The alternative, seeing parents who clearly don't like each other, is worse.

I often think that studies on the effect of divorce on kids are missing the forest for the trees: They're studying divorce, not broken parental relationships that lead to divorce.

Anecdata here, but I dated a girl who had parents that had certainly fallen out of love ages ago, and it was clear that she had a sad idea of what a relationship was supposed to look like. She didn't have a language of love [0] that she would ever express, and was unresponsive to my attempts at using any of the languages. She claimed to love me and cried when we broke up, but I couldn't be in a relationship that felt loveless.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Love_Languages

The trouble is that divorce, and even relationships turning bad, isn't something that necessarily happens in a vacuum. Very few marriages would really survive all changing circumstances, no matter what the vows say. A relationship that might have worked out OK can turn bad and end in divorce in part because money gets very tight, for too long a time.

I do agree that a more nuanced analysis would need to find some way of determining whether, or at what rate, the particular cases that are pushed over the edge by financial hardship were already in some way toxic or creating a poor environment for the kids, and were likely to stay that way even if circumstance improved somewhat.

Poverty rate has remained fairly flate since ~1970 while divorce rates have come up. If poverty were the dominating reason for divorce, then divorce should have been much more common in pre-1980s and particularly pre-1960s America when poverty was significantly more common.

It's entirely possible the new era of welfare benefits and no-fault divorce open up the door of divorce for many people. If fewer divorces is your goal then recreating social policy and values of conservative earlier America is a pursuit you may be looking into.

I'm not sure that kind of multi-decade analysis gets at what you're trying to. Too many confounding factors. Meanwhile, money trouble is often reported as a major factor in marital/relationship struggles. Better might be to find a cohorts of broadly similar SES, then look at them over just a few years, and divide them into "household earnings went up" and "household earnings went down", then compare divorce rates. Still not perfect, but much closer to being useful.

> It's entirely possible the new era of welfare benefits and no-fault divorce open up the door of divorce for many people.

Yes, it probably did! Especially the latter.

> If fewer divorces is your goal then recreating social policy and values of conservative earlier America is a pursuit you may be looking into.

I'd prefer to try to fight it by improving benefits so being poor doesn't cause as much stress. Ideally, also by lowering the poverty rate.

I'm confused, America had a system where divorce rates where much lower (even in the face of poverty!) , which is ostensibly your goal. You've simply brushed aside a tested system. Of course you could test your novel experiments in parallel, assuming you can find willing parties to fund this experiment.

"I'm just so confused that you don't want to go back to 1950s mores around marriage and divorce, it's tested and it works"

Are you really confused, though?

[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not uncertain about that, and know you aren't. That was rhetorical.

I'm genuinely confused at your complete dismissal, no it wasn't rhetorical or sarcasm. Your goal was to reduce divorce; completely ignoring and brushing aside historical precedent in favor of your pet theories (which may work and may not) calls into question your actual goals. Earlier your thesis was regarding concern for the children and the impact of divorce, but when confronted with an actual historical precedent where fewer children grew up in divorced households you simply ignored the precedent entirely in favor of marching on towards your other social goals.

I'm not the one saying 1950's 'works' -- I never advocated against divorce or that the family needs to be married. Personally I'd rather see a society where lifelong monogamy or marriage is optional and our society, including children, aren't made to feel out of place because they don't fit into the (largely religious) institution of marriage. I think if you dig deep you may find marriage actually has a long history, one that can't be ignored if we are to understand how it fits into modern society.

>"I'm just so confused that you don't want to go back to 1950s mores around marriage and divorce, it's tested and it works"

If you're going to fabricate quotes this conversation is over, good day.

Could be worse, could not. Maintaining two households is costly and could lead to imprisonment of one parent if they can't keep up with paying child support an imputed income a judge assigns to them. Were I to fall out of love with my wife I would be very much tempted not to divorce and instead maintain an amiable platonic relationship until my child is gone.

I'm not sure which is worse, two parents who don't love each other, or two parent who don't love each other and are in separate households with one under constant stress of possible imprisonment if they lose their job.

Do you have any evidence that kids in daycare do worse off than kids raised by a stay at home parent?

“ We find that the negative effects on noncognitive outcomes persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20170603

I would prefer the burden of proof lie on those who seek to use systemic violence to extract money (taxes) from others to fund these programs. Violence should always be justified, so I'd like to see the evidence that providing benefits that allow being shoved in a room with 6+ kids per overworked stranger is better off than more individualized care by a parent.

If it's your own kid and you're paying with your own earnings then have at it.

Getting a job at helpdesk for an ISP was definitely my ticket out of poverty, but I'm in Spain though.

Im not wealthy, but I almost ended homeless, with no education. I was probably on track to jail. Quite different situation.

I've seen many people I knew fail though.

The most difficult thing when you have no money and nobody cares at you is making the right decisions and having the right information.

Ive used all sorts of state aid and counseling, and it was terrible beyond belief. Not only the absurd hoops you have to make for basically anything, with processes more costly than the handed ait itself, but the terrible advice they give, maybe because many of this people gives zero fucks.

It didn't help to have a penis and be straight.

So in the end, after all the safety net stuff it was this ISP who saved my life. I got stable income, and an understanding of how a semi competetent big org works, and how the lives of normal people look like.

> state aid and counseling, and it was terrible beyond belief

And disturbingly, the most common answer to poverty is - more state aid and counseling.

Harder state aid and counseling*

The issue is that if it takes you ten to twenty hours a week to get your state aid, you cannot put those hour towards a "productive" behavior (looking for a job/for a formation). And worse, sometime state aid is linked to formation. Its usually quite okay, almost good, for ten years, and then the regulatory capture and the market consolidation make the formation business both profitable for the owners AND worthless for the attendants. Until the state break the oligopolies (or tries too) and then it reverts to okay for five to ten years. If you get lucky, you fall into the few years where the formation is good, if not, you can only pray you have familly support, or off yourself/drink yourself to death.

My mother if forming caretaker/home helpers/nurse assistants (don't really know the real translation) since 2007 in France, and saw the degradation of the formation level, then the quick shake up in 2015 when our president re-liberalized this market, then the fast drop off with the market consolidation (Covid only made the consolidation quicker and definitely did not help).

If you were formed in 2007-2010 or between 2016-2018, you probably had an okay-ish formation (although the formation was way more complete and included way more advanced knowledge in 2007, especially in nutrition, technical gestures and hygiene than it did in 2016.)

Half of my mother students in 2007 and 2008 became nurses by the way. It did diminish to one third in 2009 and 2010, and since then i think she had two girls becoming nurses. I know it is a conspiracy theory, but it really feel for her that this is a wish of our governments to have less capable caretakers and keep the ration caretaker/nurse as high as possible, since nurses expect to be paid at least three time as much.

Not all state aid and counseling is the same

We could make it not suck, but that would take effort

They're not getting my email, so I guess I'll comment on the premise.

A job absolutely can get you out of poverty, assuming you're in a good environment. When I was 19 years old , you could get an apartment for $600. It wasn't too hard to find a job paying $10 an hour

So I had more than enough money to have my own place, hang out with my friends, go out with girls from countries I can't find on maps etc.

Unfortunately, LA has turned into an unaffordable hell hole in the last decade or so. Any successful society should make it so you can, turn 18, get a job and move out.

It's still definitely doable in other cities, in Chicago. You can get a two bedroom for around $1,300 or less of you're lucky, split that with one other person and you can definitely get a place making $10 an hour. It also helps you don't need a car in Chicago.

Some people are incapable of acknowledging they are struggling and making adjustments. A common antipattern among people I've met over the years is moving to <some city where rent is expensive and salaries are high> for a while and literally saving no money. Some of them even end up being poorer than before.

That's me. I find it hard to internalize the reality that I need to live like a poor college student just to make ends meet in silicon valley, as a software engineer.

> need to live like a poor college student just to make ends meet in silicon valley

How common is this? I'm not american and I'm having trouble visualizing how a job that pays $100k+/year on average can lead to a poor college student quality of life.

It’s exaggerated, but I did live with housemates in Palo Alto for my entire twenties because of housing costs.

You’re hardly a poor college student, but you don’t have the same standard of living as friends in the Midwest that have their own house.

You can live alone on the salary, but most of your money then gets eaten up by living in a worse apartment than if you lived with housemates. You’re better off living with housemates and saving - either for a downpayment on a shitty Bay Area house or to move back somewhere cheaper.

LA/SV are just insanely expensive. Living costs alone eat up a lot of pay so even with high wage you end up living a more average life than if you were somewhere else with the same wage

Too good to rent in East Palo Alto?

Poverty is multidimensional; but to put it simply, it is one's inability to meet their basic needs and wants. So, food, shelter, clothing, primary education and sanitation—are collectively referred to as welfare. When an individual cannot afford these needs, the person is considered poor. The lack of access to these needs and wants can be monetary or non-monetary. It's monetary when the person does not have the money to afford these things and non-monetary when non-financial barriers prevent you from accessing these needs, like geographical limitations, culture and more.

This account has submitted 3 articles from this same paywalled site within the last 24hrs. Two of which have climbed up HN recently based on the headline alone. Maybe not spam, but at least suspicious?

Poverty is a lot of things, but one interesting thing I'd read is about how it can create a gift culture. There's a local max where in order to survive people in poverty rely on each other. This creates weird incentives where when someone comes into money they're expected to spend it to help the group (and if they save it they're shamed as greedy). Getting seen as not helping is high risk because relying on the help is often a matter of survival. This can make it culturally hard to get out.

For those in need of triage => https://www.ramseysolutions.com/ramseyplus/financial-peace

For those in a less dire context => https://www.youneedabudget.com/

If you FaceBook => https://www.facebook.com/groups/ChooseFI

However you're arranged domestically, be harmonized and be on a budget.

Things I have heard now for a generation:

- Real wage growth is stagnant (and this is through the great productivity boom starting in the 1990s

- the Middle Class is disappearing / War on the middle class

- Education, housing, and medical care costs rising faster than inflation

- Globalization destroying manufacturing jobs

- the gap between rich and poor growing

- rise in service jobs / reclassification of service jobs as manufacturing to hide numbers politically (burger flippers becoming manufacturing jobs was one example)

- those memes about what 22 year old boomers had to do to get a job, house, college education, and the benefits they typically had, compared to what the current generation has had to deal with.

- Boomers aren't retiring, aren't interested in true mentorship and providing jobs to the next generation

I am a Gen-Xer for reference. I generally perceive these popularly reported trends as mostly truthful, trying to correct for the inevitable "world is going to hell" bias that you get as you get older.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-val...

That's the minimum wage, notice the drop/flat nature of inflation adjusted minimum wage. That would tell you everything. With the rise of boomers, the war on the minimum wage began. Or it was the collective identity from WW2 waning. Or whatever.

Combine "job doesn't really pay well" with "costs going up" and well, yeah.

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