Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

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Completely agree, the author is describing frugality, not the experience of being dirt poor.

> Each month the very generous Swedish government gives us no less than 600 dollars in child allowance. We also have some other incomes from book sales and irregular jobs. And we do have savings, larger than we like to admit, which in good years give capital income and in less good years give a cushion to take from. All in all our seven-person family has around 1400-1500 dollars in monthly expenditure

Author does not get it whatsoever. Being dirt poor means having no savings, or being in debt in which case you have negative savings. You have no or barely any money coming in from the government, not $600 a month just in child benefits. You don't have passive income in book sales or investments. If anything is broken, you cannot afford to fix it, including things like your utilities and appliances. You are one wrong decision from ending up homeless, which in turn is one wrong decision away from death. Subsequently, every decision you make is run through a lens of extreme anxiety. Your entire life is a fight for survival and you have no-one to turn to. That is dirt poor.

"Still you'll never get it right

Cause when you're laid in bed at night

Watching roaches climb the walls

You can call your Dad and he'll stop it all, yeah."

This author has multiple safety nets. Until they're stripped away, he has no idea what dirt poor looks like.

> All in all our seven-person family has around 1400-1500 dollars in monthly expenditure

Yeah, I doubt that takes into account external things like school lunches and neighbors giving things to the “poor” children. With “poor” meaning unfortunate and not poverty stricken.

Every time I hear of a school closing for whatever reason they always state that the food program will remain open because truly poor people rely on it out of absolute necessity. Nobody wants their kids to go hungry and that goes double for the collective “we”.

Now that I think about it my sister’s husband grew up dirt poor, and not because his grandparents(?) chose that lifestyle, and spent his entire youth working as hard as he could to not be poor. Like commuting 3 hours every day to attend a “good” university and never looking back. Dude absolutely hates poverty.

School lunches in Sweden are free.

That's great to hear, I think that's extremely important. Here in Belgium, a large percentage (20-ish if I'm not mistaken) of the children lunch very poorly at school because their parents can't afford it, don't care or for some other reason. Providing kids with at least 1 healthy, nutritious meal on a week day is at least a step in the right direction and I will be happy if my tax euros would be spent on that.

> Being dirt poor means having no savings, or being in debt in which case you have negative savings

Exactly.

I hate to say it, because I've often heard it coming from very financially privileged people as an accusation towards poor people, but in essence being poor is a state of mind, meaning it's not necessarily the lack of money and financial means that gets to you (even though that's not ideal, of course), it is the constant thought of not having money and financial means that eats at your soul.

I know because me and my parents stumbled upon a period of quite severe lack of financial resources about 20-25 years ago, in my adolescence years, and even though I've personally and thankfully managed to get out of it (thanks to free uni education) the feeling is still there, I suspect it will always be there till the day I'll be no more.

And, yes, whenever someone writes poverty tourism pieces like this one Common People is the first song I think about. Often times I come back listening to it on YT and watching the video just because.

> Your entire life is a fight for survival and you have no-one to turn to. That is dirt poor.

You are correct, and it's basically impossible for a Swedish citizen to be dirt poor - we have enough safety nets to prevent it.

Still, we have our share of people living in the streets; mostly due to poorly thought through mental illness reforms and drugs. And I bet at least some illegal immigrants have it pretty rough as well.

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