But on another point, I recall that the entry of women into the workforce was almost complete by the 70’s so moving from one to two earner household isn’t likely the main driver.
People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.
Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:
>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)
That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.
This rate should be <1%.
I'm not saying that they're living comfy lives, but when you throw around terms like "abject povery" you're really discrediting people who are actually living in abject poverty.
What are your plans to get the rate below 1%? What would you have done differently that wouldn't have wrecked the economy?
The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.
And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.
I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.
Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.
You’d be wrong then. Countries with universal healthcare and other social programs still have the very poor.
~10% of households experience food insecurity in the US. So assume that's a direct overlap, that would be most of the 18%
The U.S. was by far the leading global agricultural exporter in 2020 with exports valued at $147.9 billion. [0]
And it's not like it's hard to get the food from where it's grown to where it's needed. The US has a navigable waterway system that is smack dab in the middle of both where the food is grown and where it is eaten by the most people. That's not a coincidence.[1]
I'm not playing semantic games about whether the households experiencing food insecurity are 'working poor' 'abject poor' or 'totally fucked poor'. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a problem that we can solve in this country.
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/100615/4-cou...
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Inland_w...
https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2021/08/05/food-availability-...
Your second point is way off. Food moves crazy distances. The last mile is critically important. The direct path from farm to table is pretty much irrelevant and you couldn't possibly use the waterways to solve this problem effectively in its entirety. People don't want to eat a ton of raw corn and soy.
Hunger is a problem, but it's a hard problem. Cost and nutrition and logistics do a weird dance. Many (most?) people suffering from food insecurity are also obese.
While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.
Hmmm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584410/
> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.
Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”
By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.
I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.
Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.
How does that work?
Food insecurity doesn't mean you're constantly underfed. It just means you can't generally know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger sucks. It's not tough to see how that could cause you to eat more.
They aren't buying TV dinners at $5 per pop.
What do you mean they are forced to eat crappy food? It's usually more expensive than the healthier options.
Veggies are dirt cheap. Sure, pre-sliced baby carrots in star shapes aren't cheap, but the poor shouldn't buy those.
You should tell the 80% of the world population that lives off beans and rice as staple foods. They tend to have a lot less obesity and live longer than Americans. And we're comparing it to unhealthy food - how on earth is rice and beans "not particularly healthy" compared to potato chips and fast food?
Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
Sounds more like a lack of life skills and poor choices more than anything.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708033/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-...
The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25292135/
> Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
It is rent, wealth inequality, spread out urban planning leading to single dollar trees being the only available grocer, commute times, social support structures, corn subsidies, and a myriad of other factors that make this a very complicated issue.
But sure, let's just blame the poor for being stupid. I'm sure you'd be just fine making $7.25 an hour.
Is it possible the kind of self-discipline needed to prevent yourself from over-eating is more heartily rewarded economically in the US than in some of the particularly impoverished nations where only a tiny fraction escape poverty? I don't know, but it's worth noting the causative direction could influence going from obesity to poverty, poverty to obesity, neither, or even merely correlative dependent variables caused by some other 3rd stimulus.
That’s fantastic news.
As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.
Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.