My family came to the US in the early 90's with zero dollars, but now we're doing well. The difference between us and those who didn't make it out of the neighborhood was what we did with the little money and time we had.
Basic things like figuring out how to get a bank account open vs paying a check cashing fee, things add up quickly. If you don't figure that stuff out, you're screwed. I find it off for poverty-advocates to get indignant when poverty education comes up, because they don't understand how much ignorance/lack of interest/lack of skill exists in those communities, and how much of a headwind that is.
Forget things like encouraging your kids to study in school, apply for competitive courses - etc. Even if your kids are capable of that, if you don't know to push them, you perpetuate your poverty. In contrast to say Asian immigrants who drive their kids to excel and go from poverty to 1% in one generation. Any coaching that helps people recognize and take advantage of the resources and opportunities in front of them - if it actually sticks - is super valuable.
I was pretty shocked to discover that one of my friends (2nd gen asian immigrant in amsterdam) had parents who even tapped large interest free loans, and that the community largely expected this kind of help to be given freely.
>I find it off for poverty-advocates to get indignant when poverty education comes up
Yeah, coz it's well known to be ineffective (by design, pretty much), and is almost universally used by banks and politicians fronting for banks to try and get the heat off their backs and let them keep raking in profits unimpeded.
Stuff like interest rate caps and banning payday lending, on the other hand, is very effective but impedes profits. The goal of corporate lobbyists is to present solutions (usually faux) that appear genuine but don't impede profits.
Hmm, the argument I always hear is "the poor don't need to be taught, they need (some short term thing that won't scale)"
If you want to argue the effectiveness of various education methods, I am not down to that level of nuance. Obviously if the education is ineffective, that's a problem, it's still necessary.
And if the benefits of networks based on country of origin were so powerful you'd expect places with a large percent of South American or Caribbean countries to be wealthy. But if you look at small Haitian or Dominican you don't see the same kind of upward mobility compared to asian neighborhoods.
Are you equating the economic potential of being able to tap a large interest free loan from your community and having an equally poor sibling?
Btw i wouldn't discount free childcare and is honestly worth more than an interest free loan. If you can help share childcare you can work many more hours
Needless to say, frequently is a scam.
EDIT: Here are examples:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikipedia.org+informal+...
Means for the slightly-better-off middle class to exploit the lower class through rent are being thwarted, thankfully. They just allow one half of the population to exploit the other half without providing any tangible benefit in return.
Source: I'm born in, and living in, the Netherlands.
How does merely visiting Netherlands tell a person that inequality stats are misleading ?
I actually lived there for a period, not that it's relevant.
Also, not sure but this comment may be a reference to:
How The Dutch Economy Shows We Can't Reduce Wealth Inequality With Taxes | Economics Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE
and if you watch that it's well worth watching this Dutch economist's rebuttal
The Dutch Economy is NOT the Most Unequal
May I ask what was the path to financial well being ?
Coming to US with zero dollars is pretty common and doesn't really tell the whole picture. You might come with things that can be converted to money later like an education, family connections ect.
I came to us with no money but I had education for in demand jobs. Lots of patels from india come to usa with zero dollars but they have family connections that get them started on a path to setting up a business. We are close to a patel family that came to usa with zero dollars but grinded for years to finally become business owners. They are insane hardworkers but having that family connection that set them up on the path was critical imo.
That's the point - it's things that can be taught and learned. The person I am responding to is acting like an attempt to teach poor people anything is evil.
There’s also a selection bias amongst immigrants like yourself: immigrant families have already made the biggest leap, they’ve uprooted their family and gone to a new country, and so they’re already on the path towards all of the behaviours you describe — they didn’t arrive in America and then decide that education was the path forwards, they arrived in America with optimism and gusto and were ready to do whatever it takes to realise their dreams.
Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs. Many of those people are in poverty, many of those people are rich. Many people are not suited to a life of intense pressure to succeed.
The problem of poverty education as the solution to poverty is that it is built on the idea that education is why people are in poverty, and that if they just knew a bit more than they’d be doing great… but that’s not really true, poverty is a trap, education cannot save you from the poverty trap.
The value of support for people in poverty is that it gives them a better chance to escape poverty and for many people, education is a part of that support, but it’s important to understand that the solution to poverty is not education about how to open a checking account, it’s the whole spectrum of support from financial to education.
Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed.
You sound like you have never been around a poor person. Most people if they get a raise, their spending magically goes up by the same amount.
And people don't understand how money works.
My in-laws provide healthcare and profit sharing for everyone who works in their business. And guess what, a big percentage of their turnover is someone gets a 50 cent an hour raise somewhere else but doesn't understand that they are missing out on much more in profit sharing and healthcare. When they leave and get paid out their profit sharing, they are like "what's this??" even though it's been explained to them a thousand times.
A million dollars is nothing. You can blow it on a few ill advised purchases and be back where you started. It takes brains to make it last, not to mention make it grow.
There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot.
Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income.
There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.
If this were true many lottery winners would have their lives and their children's lives changed forever after winning. As it stands almost every person who wins the lottery ends up in the same place they were before within 10 years.
The skills required to get out of poverty are often the skills required to stay out of poverty.
You: Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs.
These things are incongruous.
Separately, in the US you only need two factors to predict poverty: did you graduate high school and did you wait for marriage to have children. For the vast majority of people, it's their culture that determines if those are valued. You need to change culture to change those, and people are suspect of having the government do that because of past and ongoing mistakes.
What predicts high school graduation? The framing of your comment ("did you graduate..." "did you wait for marriage...") suggests that these are choices made by people which determine whether they'll go on to live in poverty and if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great. The problem is, poverty does not start with the individual, in fact, it can be traced to before the person was born. High school graduation rates can be predicted based on the circumstance the child was born into.
Yes, that's literally what they need to do. If we want to change that, then changing their culture to value education is the only way to do it. No culture which denigrates education is going to equip the majority of its adherents for the modern world.
Edit: I feel you're saying the same thing. Said poor immigrants succeed because they value succeeding. That's culture.
I can't vouch for this specific organization, but i'm very familiar with similar organizations. This kind of organization runs on volunteers, many of whom have experienced poverty firsthand, and virtually all have experienced poverty secondhand. This kind of volunteer work is typically people actually caring, not people 'virtue-signaling'. This kind of work is done in intimate collaboration with municipal social services, which are typically well-respected in the Netherlands.
There is no doubt in my mind that everyone involved is intending and capable of affecting a change for good.
> I wonder how effective life coaching is to people in poverty.
I've personally volunteered as a coach in poverty situations. It works. The coach doesn't need to do much, just listen to the problems people cope with, and occasionally point them towards a resource that'll help them is enough. Just being able to vent to someone who knows how it feels to deal with poverty might be enough. If it's not, helping people navigate social services and programmes typically ends up lifting them from poverty.
It helps that in the Netherlands, poverty is typically unnecessary. There is (almost) guaranteed livable income for everyone independent of employment, due to our strong social security system.
I lived in multiple countries, including the Netherlands.
Living there substantially changed how I view subjects such as taxation and social security. Taxes were high, but the benefits a strong social security brings to the place are great.
Not saying that there's no waste, things that could be improved, etc. But in comparison to the other places I lived, the Dutch were way ahead of the curve.
The problem with a lot of poverty focused charity is that it is, essentially, a payment to a vulnerable person to be dehumanised. Fortunately, that means we can assess a poverty charity easily: do they humanise the people receiving help? Allowing people to come into a store and shop and engage with bespoke support is very humanising, because it’s just removing money from the equation, it does not take away agency or trust. The support they’re offering is not one size fits all, or a jobs-pipeline, rather, it’s whatever the customers need help with — essentially, what someone with money pays for!
There’s certainly the possibility that even a well designed service can become a karma-mill for the middle-class, but in this case, I think we can be quite optimistic.
That said, “life coach” has terrible connotations in the US but I think that’s just something lost in translation.
I know people in poverty where the root cause is downs syndrome: they mentally don't have the ability to be any more than assistant usher at the movie theater. They can handle most usher tasks, but when there is someone difficult they need the head usher: some 16 year old kid who has been on the job for at least 2 weeks.
I know people in poverty because they despite getting straight A's in school they dropped out at 16 and started having kids (I'm not sure if they dropped out before are after the kids started coming, it doesn't matter: both dropping out and having kids were intentional decisions). 10 years latter it finally occurred to them how much their bad life choices has hurt them.
There is nothing a coach can do to help the first person, no matter what they will still be in poverty as they are not capable of doing better. The second just needs a bit of help to turn life around - this help will work now, but at 21 this person would have refused all help as they didn't see that they were doing anything wrong in the first place. Most people in poverty are somewhere in the middle of these two.
The above is based on real people (though I'm hiding a lot of details for privacy reasons). These are not strawman examples, but they should feel like it. I intentionally picked people who are on the two far ends of the extremes.
Here in Canada, a single disabled person that is expected to live independently receives about 800 USD per month from the government. Out of that, they're expected to pay all their expenses. Canada is relatively typical as such things go. In France or Germany it's about 1000 USD a month. It's about 900 USD in the United States. It's only some 300 - 500 USD in the UK.
Depending on jurisdiction, there may or may not be subsidized housing which can make a big difference; but either way, many are paying market rate for housing. There are also other benefits, etc., that may alter the picture. But the overall picture is very very poor. The Scandinavian countries are the only major exception I can think of, where the disabled living only on a government pension might not actually be in poverty.
I personally have no problem other than the casual nuisance and I have positive experience overall during my stay over there for a couple of years.
The founder of the supermarket/umbrella foundation seems to have the similar background as the people live in the area. Thus, I think he has insight on what the community needs and how to help them.
The two things required for this program to work are useful information & willing learners.
By making it free, the organisers are incentivised to provide the first, and by requiring participation with a coach they're asking for the second. Could your question be more accurately stated as "is the information good?".
People stay in bad situations when they don't know how to change and/or they don't want to change. The former is kind of up to those with knowledge, however ultimately nobody can do anything about the latter but those affected themselves.
Social workers and life coaches are really great when they are able to fill in the gaps. Help people acquire the resources they need and take advantage of the services offered to them that they may not already know about. Even something as simple as filling in a form properly can be life-changing. Not to mention connecting them to resources like housing assistance and debt forgiveness.
Life coach is dependent on the opportunities available to that family, otherwise the life coach might just be left with cutting the only entertainment or treat food the people buy to alleviate some of their daily stress.
I really wish we could take the good parts of organized religion and turn them into regular institutions. In our town the local library has taken on a strong community center role but that's just because the staff there happens to be excellent.