On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
residentcontrarian.com
residentcontrarian.com
In retrospect the big dividing line is kids from cultures that value education and long term thinking and ones that don’t.
In the former category, the Asian and Eastern European Jewish parents took their little income and understanding of the system to make sure their kids studied their assess off, saved for emergency and eventual investment, etc. consequentially many of those kids are now in the 1% or close.
Kids from countries with less focus on education didn’t do this with regularity and their kids are by and large nowhere near the top today.
Despite in the early 1990s being on an identical starting line. I mention this because high empathy leads us to assume that poverty locks people into bad choices. The Asian parent example shows the opposite - the poorer you are the more your choices really matter - you only have a few dollars and a few hours and how you spend them really matters.
Obviously what I wrote also depends on the degree of opportunity that exists around you. The US is still a place where you can expect to alter your trajectory if you single-mindedly focus on it. The real challenge is how to give that focus to begin with. Eg immigrants from Asia etc came here with that value system and drive already and this achieved amazing outcomes. If you don’t have that culture and drive, how do you bootstrap it? I don’t have the answer.
It wasn’t uncommon in the 80s-90s to meet an Eastern European, Asian or Jewish immigrant who came from a STEM background but for a variety of reasons couldn’t work in their field once they moved to the US so they worked as store clerks or taxi drivers.
Perhaps the differences your talking about isn’t cultural but rather dependent on what economic and education class the immigrant parents came from.
To add to this; See this article & paper > https://news.ku.edu/2020/06/18/study-shows-african-immigrant...
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19376812.2020.17...
> The paper contrasts Nigerian newcomers with those from Somalia, whose work ethic is similarly strong, but whose lack of education hurts their employment prospects here.
> The authors wrote: “Overall, African-born immigrants aged 16 and over have a higher rate of employment (69.2%) relative to the foreign-born population (63.1%) and the general US population (59.9%).”
The study also notes significant differences between Nigerian immigrants, who mostly come from that country’s south, and Somalis. For one thing, with its history of British colonization, many more Nigerians speak English upon arrival in the U.S. than do Somalis. That makes the Nigerians’ transition easier in almost every respect.
“For the Nigerian-born immigrants, the proportion that possesses at least a bachelor's degree is 60.5%,” Chikanda said. “But when we look at the Somali-born population ... that's about 15%.”
It's sad to see people write off whole populations like this, "all the other immigrants that weren't european or asian", as if all africans and latinos are stupid and not that they didn't have any references of people that went to college or were educated and did well. Completely ignoring the environment these people came from.
I definitely recommend the work of professor Raj Chetty on the subject: https://rajchetty.com/
He talks a lot about how even growing up in a community with great role models (doesn't even have to be your own parents) affects the outcomes for kids because they get to KNOW there are other options.
When I got to college I had no idea I could move to another country by being a programmer, then a friend moved to Australia and I was like WAIT, I CAN DO THAT AS WELL? Most of my plans back then were to move to Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to find a well paying job but that single friend that moved to another country completely opened over the world to me.
If you compare two kids whose parents are at the 25th percentile economically, one whose parents are native born Americans and the other whose parents are Guatemalan, the Guatemalan kid is actually going do better as a grown up. And a Chinese kid will do better than both of them.
Speaking as someone who grew up in an area where Asian Americans were the majority, the average Chinese kid may ultimately fare better in terms of income, but may also have unresolved mental health issues steming from the crushing parental pressure in their childhood.
America is brutal competition. Asian parenting at least prepares you for that.
People who are from cultures that value education tend to be more educated.
Based on that you reject the parent’s point about education being a function of student motivation (derived via social norms acquired via their families)?
How can genetics not also play a large part in human variation?
I'm from Europe and my grandad, god rest his soul, a welder with his only 4 years of school which were the norm for peasant farmers that the state would provide back then, would get confused and frustrated seeing the youth of today mock and shit all over the free, state-provided education, saying he'd have given anything to be able to have the amounts of education and opportunities the youth of today have and doesn't understand how they don't value it and instead choose to disregard it and treat school with such disrespect.
Which is why he encouraged my mom and later myself to keep hitting those books so we don't "end up like him", though a skilled welder today can earn more than many professions with college degrees.
Certain groups, like Nigerians, outperform even conditional on educational attainment: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...
Regardless, as to OP’a anecdote, what difference does that make if everyone is living in the same neighborhood in similar economic circumstances? When my uncles and aunts migrated to the US Canada and Australia, their degrees from Bangladesh were worthless. They worked service jobs or were just unemployed. What benefit did their kids get over other kids who were living in the same rundown subsidized apartment housing?
> The Asian parent example shows the opposite - the poorer you are the more your choices really matter - you only have a few dollars and a few hours and how you spend them really matters.
It sounds like the most important "choice" a person can make is their choice of parents.
the biggest struggle i find is outside pressure by people telling you what you are doing wrong, but not showing you how to do it right. people that are judging but not helping.
these people also often do not understand what it means not to have family support. they can't even conceive the idea of a sibling who doesn't care about you or a parent who is absent.
and i feel that this is more often directed at poor people, as if they were responsible for being poor themselves.
Parents (or whoever raises us) sets the "default settings" for our life. It's what we think "normal" is. But we aren't robots rolling off an assembly line. We can change those settings away from the default. This is one of the most important choices for young adults - what are you going to keep from your parents, and what are you going to change?
But yes, given a culture with set of beliefs, the majority of the next generation is going to keep those default settings as their own.
> But yes, given a culture with set of beliefs, the majority of the next generation is going to keep those default settings as their own.
That seems quite important to me.
> But we aren't robots rolling off an assembly line.
Correct. Human genetics entails that children are not exact duplicates of their parents. Even "identical" twins are not 100% identical with their siblings. However...
> We can change those settings away from the default. This is one of the most important choices for young adults - what are you going to keep from your parents, and what are you going to change?
I'd say there are two general competing theories of human behavior:
1) It's a combination of "nature" and "nurture".
2) It's a combination of "nature", "nurture", and "free will".
I don't believe in the philosophical/religious notion of free will. Thus, I don't put much ethical significance on the concept of "choice". As a practical matter, yes, some kids choose to go against the teachings of their family, friends, and community. Some people are naturally iconoclasts; you might say they're born into that role. But I don't think that makes them "better" people, just different. You can't choose your genes or environment any more than you can choose your parents. You don't choose to be born with a disability, right? Likewise, you don't choose to be born with a special ability either.
So it goes through the American ages: an ancestor was forced to abandon a successful contracting business in South Carolina under threat from white supremacists. Family farms that couldn't receive Farm Bureau financing languished. Developers with visions of gentrification bought family brownstones for pennies on the dollar as Silent elders faced end-of-life costs and Boomers reeled from the Dotcom Bust. Both of my parents struggle under student debt loads from the 80s. It is likely that my grandfather was only able to access GI Bill benefits because he was nominally able to pass as white.
One starts to wonder if systems and institutions are designed to exploit users who aren't made aware of particular loopholes; and yet, to not avail oneself of those "resources" is to be kneecapped by lack of access to advantages other Americans take for granted.
It was once said that the purpose of racism is to distract. We agree that focus is necessary, but to say that "culture" and "drive" are the sole inputs in regards to the maintenance of that focus is to be incredibly naive. An immigrant family is partially forgiven for not having the requisite cultural memory of US history needed to understand this, at least.
The NY Times published data that showed that black boys whose parents are in the top income quintile have an equal chance of ending up in each income quintile, while white boys in similar situations overwhelmingly stay in the top two quintiles. Black women remain among the lowest earning demographics despite having one of the highest rates of degree attainment. Twice the work for half the recognition, and I will say explicitly this time that the GP is wrong.
Let them buy their own gadgets from their own paychecks. Let them work, or show them, some really tough physical labor jobs and the lifestyle those jobs enable.
The kids who didn't... aren't. I want to give my kids a better shot at a better outcome in life. There's no guarantees but I want to maximize their chances and knowing how to learn and work is a key input to that.
You mentioned in another post some pointless teacher-pleasing that you engaged in, I am not sure why you think that's the only or even a common path. Most of these kids I am talking about adopted their parents' "invest in yourself" mentality, and also by-and-large found their studies challenging and interesting. You seem to be taking your own worst-case and projecting it onto the world.
There was actually a recent article on this subject in The Cut
https://www.thecut.com/2023/09/do-kids-need-ambition.html
The author's son seems to already be experiencing the existential dread of this system in kindergarten. Meanwhile rates of teenage depression and suicide increase while life expectancy in the US decreases. I'll never understand this place.
Then we tell them, see? You don't have to study at all! There is plenty of work for you!
Ideally they should not be paid. It should be a service provided for free to the [ideally] already wealthy owner of the factory. Yes, you just spend 4 months making money for someone who already has a lot of money.
It sounds lame but it is a nice thing to do compared to confronting kids with their new factory life sentence after they failed school.
So it is mostly an American problem, you can fix all of those via laws, many other countries has. In Europe housing scales down well, you can always pay less by living smaller or a bit further out from the city, you don't need a car and you don't need to pay that much for healthcare. Poor people still has it worse, but at least they have plenty of options.
If by "you", you mean a poor individual living in the United States, then I guess your reasoning is absurd, because one individual cannot change the laws. If by "you", you mean all individuals lumped together as the people making up the United States, then the argument makes slightly more sense, but then still, they can't, because they can't seem to agree on how to divide all wealth properly.
So, no, "you" cannot fix this via laws. You can hope for it to be fixed, you can lobby for it to be fixed, you can pray for it, even go to war for it, but I don't think it's as easy as you make it seem.
Moving to Europe might be an option, but even that is not an option for most people outside of Europe, mostly thanks to the laws that "we" put in place to stay rich.
That is a very uncharitable interpretation, not sure why you would read it like that. "You" can refer to governments or countries in general and not just individuals.
And that was the entire argument of your post, please don't make strawmans like that.
I am often a bit disappointed that in common language, it is very easy to suggest that one can change the world for the better, but in reality it is not an option for nearly everyone.
I think that the problem leading to this is that most people believe that a group of people has similar traits as a single individual. A lot of reasoning goes awry by mixing the two. In my personal opinion, the way an individual makes up their mind is completely different from how a group of people makes up their collective minds. The first can be attributed to freedom of choice, agency, gut feeling, rational thought, etc. The latter lives in the realm of sociology, group think, religion, politics, marketing and communication.
Another example of where I think this goes wrong is in the idea that we can rescue the climate by starting with ourselves. This is simply not true, unless nearly all people do this. Another one is the idea of contemporary voting in democracies. It simply does not help at all to put out just one vote.
Change requires the opinions of many people to align. Sometimes, only sometimes, does a change by one person incur change in others. Most often, if you are not a leading figure, your change does not do anything at all. Ignoring this results in falsehoods and make-belief. I find this counterproductive in discussions.
It may well be that I made up the strawmans, but I tend to believe that they're already there.
But perhaps, and given your response, this is probably not at all the direction you'd want the discussion to go.
USA is a special case since the poorer 50% somehow failed to organize politically and form a party to represent them like they did in basically every other democracy. I think they still can organize, but there has to be massive barriers that are hard to overcome or they would already have done so.
It seems to be fixable with changes to the electoral law.
for real progress a complete overhaul of the electoral process is needed. i'd abolish the concept of parties wholesale. instead each representative is elected individually, and there is no party association that limits any of them on which issues to support. think of it as each representative being their own individual party.
Does not look like an achievable first step.
There are a hundred absurdly impractical comments for every half-practical when it comes to US politics (or global politics which US could/should lead). I habitually scroll over ideas so brilliantly revolutionary that they wouldn't even qualify for bad sci-fi literature.
change is possible, but it takes time and effort. which means patience. and it requires picking your battles. you can't fight all the problems at once by yourself. you have to pick a few issues that matter to you the most, and focus on those. and then instead of trying to make a visible change focus on a few people and try to win them over.
Meritocracy requires a hierarchy; it requires winners and losers. Meritocracy wouldn't make sense if everyone had the same merit, if everyone was equally worthy.
Meritocracy allows people in the middle, people who are average by definition, ordinary, not special, to feel better about themselves by looking down at the poor. "They made poor choices, that's why they're poor. I made better choices." The point of meritocracy is to undermine sympathy and solidarity, to turn everything individualistic. Divide and conquer.
The economics of competition, supply, and demand is amoral: it's just a method for determining the prices of products and transactions, without any judgment about whether the outcome is morally good. What we've done is turn our economic system into an ethical system: you are judged worthy, meritorious, based on your economic value. It's almost as if the so-called Invisible Hand of the market is God distributing punishment and reward.
Amusingly, Capitalism as a concept fits the definition of an "Eldritch Abomination."
Growing up in Eastern Europe, you could be extremely hard working and honest and the second you reach even minor success there would be a strong man (mafia muscle or political/government corruption) knocking on your door to trim you down a bit and take your everything if you fight back. If you were born in a village, you were not allowed to move to the city and had your destiny sealed as the farmer to feed the privileged citizens.
There is a Bulgarian Book called “To Chicago and Back” where the author travels to America for the world fair. One of the highlights mentions that in the bus or train in America, even low level workers can wear a suit. Unlike the rest of the world, in capitalistic countries your money and effort is just as green, regardless of your parentage, color, proclivities, etc. You can make what you are willing to work for and the rest is a matter of choice. At least you have a choice. The rest of the non-capitalistic world mostly doesn’t.
1. US Capitalism uses money as priority for getting whatever you want. Those willing to spend more get first dibs at most legal things and the more money something costs, the faster you’ll see resourceful people find a way to make more of it - so if something is in shortage, that doesn’t last long and eventually everyone who wants it can afford it (assuming the scarcity is not deliberate like a rare location) . You have many legal and some illegal ways to make money and once you make a surplus of that, you can have the stock market grow your nest egg for you, so the older you get the more likely you are to have money. In countries without a stock market, seniors can live in misery and barely afford food on government rationed pensions.
2. Communism/socialism - point system is political connections. If you have them you get nice things, if you don’t you are assigned to where you can live and where your kids can study and punished if you complain. Government rations to you whatever it hasn’t spent on frivolous stuff, while its officials can be partying every weekend with shared resources. You can get whatever is available, whenever it is available - cars in 20 years, for example, because everyone works as much as they want and is equally poor. Rich or educated/higher class people get fleeced or imprisoned. You can prioritize what you want with connections or money (corruption thrives after all).
3. The stuff in between gravitates to one or the other because your system either prioritizes getting more stuff supplied to its people or more people restricted to meet the available eternally lesser supply. If your birth rate goes up or you get immigration gets higher, the process accelerates.
Take your pick, or offer more currently available societies with different point systems.
Which all did you have in mind here? All the top 10% of HN contributors? Or all the people in whichever country you are in? if it is the latter I can assure that it is most certainly not the case that "We are all .. able to move to countries .." unless they are EU citizens proposing to move to another EU country.
A substantial fraction of all people wouldn't be able raise the money for the flight, let alone have the necessary qualifications to satisfy the visa and residence permit issuing authority of most western countries.
I think you missed my point. I didn't say that our social values come from capitalism. Quite the opposite. I said that capitalism is nothing more than an amoral economic system. The problem is that we've imposed a bizarre ethical system on top of capitalism.
I suspect that this unholy alliance is a result of trying to reconcile capitalism with the dominant American religion, Christianity, which originally was vehemently anti-materialistic: Jesus himself was exceedingly clear about this. But eventually the self-sacrificial ethos of Christianity morphed into the Protestant work ethic, and wealth became God's earthly reward for "hard work".
> in America, even low level workers can wear a suit
Can, or must?
I personally don't want to wear a suit.
I'm sure the opportunities for poor people in the US are much greater than they were for a poor person growing up in late 20th century Eastern Europe. But I think it is wishful thinking to say that any poor person in the US can become rich if they work hard enough. Of course, it suits the rich people to have everyone believe that.
That argument looks like it is based on equivocation between different meanings of 'merit'.
On the contrary, for meritocracy proponents, 'merit' is explicitly amoral quality as it is clear that it has significant pure luck factor. Fundamentally it says that economic outcomes (both positions in economic structures and personal incomes) should depend just on ability to create economic value (which is in this context called 'merit'), not on other factors like moral worth.
This is a strange argument. Luck is the opposite of merit, and meritocracy proponents are at pains to deemphasize the luck factor, to the extent of claiming, "you make your own luck". Persistence, making the most of your opportunities, hard work, yadda yadda.
I think it is pretty clear. Merit is just ability to create economic value, regardless of where this ability come from (which is clearly based on many factors, some a luck, some are your good decisions, some are good decisions of other people). There are obvious examples of luck factors, like genetics and accidents. If your merit is based on ability to think deeply, and after a hit to a head by a robber you end with concentration problems, then your merit is lowered, by bad luck.
> to the extent of claiming, "you make your own luck". Persistence, making the most of your opportunities, hard work, yadda yadda.
These are not really descriptive statements about merit, these are advice how to behave to maximize your merit. If you want to maximize your merit, then it make sense to focus on aspects you can change and not on that you cannot.
By analogy, getting hit by a car has significant luck component, but if you want to give someone advice how to avoid getting hit by a car, you would focus on things like 'look around before crossing' and not 'have good luck'.
This is in danger of being a tautology. How do you distinguish one's actual economic value created from one's "ability" to create economic value?
> These are not really descriptive statements about merit, these are advice how to behave to maximize your merit.
How can you tell whether someone has "maximized" their merit? Especially if "merit", according to you, includes luck? You could always have more luck.
From a previous comment:
> economic outcomes (both positions in economic structures and personal incomes) should depend just on ability to create economic value (which is in this context called 'merit'), not on other factors like moral worth.
I think you're misunderstanding. According to meritocracy, the ability to create economic value is moral worth. Meritocracy is a moral (or immoral) system. That's my point. Economic value itself has no inherent moral/judgmental component.
> This is in danger of being a tautology.
Well, that is an definition of a term, so it is tautology.
> How do you distinguish one's actual economic value created from one's "ability" to create economic value?
That is a hard question for real societal structures, but not relevant for the idea of meritocracy itself, which is just a societal aspiration, not some explicit criteria.
So yes, in some sense idea of 'meritocracy' is a value system, but a value system about societies (saying that society should aspire to be more meritocratic), not about individuals.
The concept of 'meritocracy' is pretty clear on specific examples. I guess that few people would disagree with idea that e.g. surgeon positions should be occupied by people with better outcomes when doing surgery (even if we do not know how effectively evaluate that) than some other criteria like class origin, loyalty to the regime, or based on whether their parents were surgeons. But also i guess few people would consider 'have better outcomes when doing surgery' as factor of moral worth.
Using terms like 'creating economic value' is just universal term (and kind of simplification) for merits in specific positions.
It's not just an aspiration. We wouldn't be talking about meritocracy so much if were some pie-in-the-sky utopian ideal. What makes the idea of meritocracy so pernicious is that many people believe that our society is in fact more or less a meritocracy, albeit imperfect. We do judge people in our current society based on their so-called merit in the capitalist economy. That's the whole point of this discussion, going back to how we view poor people, as having "made bad decisions" and thus "deserving" their predicament.
> few people would disagree with idea that e.g. surgeon positions should be occupied by people with better outcomes when doing surgery
You've chosen the least controversial question to answer. But this says nothing about, for example, how much money surgeons should get paid, or who gets admitted to medical school, when surgical outcomes are definitely unknown at that point. And it says nothing about what social services we should or shouldn't provide to the poor, again going back to the original issue.
Meritocracy views poverty as a personal moral failing, deserving blame rather than sympathy. It doesn't view poverty as a natural, predictable side effect of the economic system that needs mitigation.
This sounds like an oxymoron, but nonetheless you are right that it's a distinctively American credo.
The middle class is sold on the dream that two cars, a house, and kids make you rich. And any day now you'll get bigger/more of all of that -- if you just work harder and more. Just don't look behind the curtain, that's above your station.
This is why they vote against their own interests and support less taxes for the rich. They'll join the rich as soon as their hustle and long hours of work pay off
$6,200 is not going to be a comfortable experience - but there is no fundamental reason it should be impossible, crushing or stressful. And the non-linear effect of dropping price that the article mentions is probably going to be caused by regulatory factors demanding minimum standards.
If people directed the effort they put into minimum wages into driving down costs, they'd have a much more meaningful impact on the experience of impoverished people. Increasing incomes is good, but controlling costs is better.
[0] https://www.move.org/the-average-cost-of-food-in-the-us/
That being said, if I had to choose, I think I would prefer to increase my income instead of decreasing the cost of items I had to purchase. (Of course, both would be best!) Lower cost items only benefit me, if I need to purchase them. With an increased income comes an increased set of options for how to deploy that income.
That'd hold small picture too. Observe that income is a flow while costs are a static measure. In theory, if my costs halve then we wouldn't expect wages to halve. They'd halve per-widget and there would be more demand for widgets, leading to a slight quality of life increase.
I know what you mean, I have two adult children and they did eat a lot in their teenage years but not enough to cover the disparity I questioned.
> feeding a family of 4 should cost around $20k
This sounded absolutely crazy to me, so I did a little bit of digging. $20k is $416 per person, per month. For reference, we (a family of two adults) spend less than that total per month on groceries - not including eating out, which we do a couple times a month. That's been relatively constant, it was ~20% more or so when we lived in a much more expensive city (typical rent more than double our current).
I would be really interested in hearing concrete stories from other middle class or poor people (or seeing links), but the relevant points of difference seem to be these:
* The cost estimates are based on a 2400 calorie diet per person. Both of us eat less than that as adults, and 2 children can certainly be expected to do so.
* The food estimates they're using [1] seem outlandish. It includes no processed foods, has you eating apples, bananas, oranges, and tomatoes every day, and the weights given are strange as well - 300 g of apples is probably two apples, so we're talking a lot of fruit in this meal plan. It also estimates eating 2.4 eggs per day??!
* It's not clear how the average values for the whole U.S. are derived. If only large cities are considered, the cost will probably be artificially inflated relative to the true average.
* We're both vegetarian, and a considerable fraction of our food is made fresh. Even with the US government heavily subsidizing meat purchases, it's probably significant cost savings for us to live like this.
* In the other direction, I don't think grocery cost is likely to account for anything close to 100% of the true cost of "feeding a family of four", because it doesn't account for eating out, drive-through coffee purchases, etc. Americans spend more on food away from home than they do food at home. [2]
In terms of food cost estimates that are not based on the grocery cost of an arbitrary (and odd) subset of the food that people eat, I found the following estimates:
* USDA: the middle quintile household spends $9k a year on food (with the lowest quintile around $5k). [3] $20k a year would be more than spent by the average household in the highest quintile. (Note: this is for a typical household, not a family of four. On the other hand, this includes realistic not-at-home food expenses.)
* The USDA offers food plans that are intended to be healthy (so likely more expensive than typical American food choices). On a "thrifty" budget (the lowest level), their costs for a reference family of four are $975 a month, or $11.7k a year. [4] Even on the most liberal plan provided [5], the cost for the reference family of four is $19k.
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/food-prices/country_result.jsp?countr...
[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
[4] https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-f...
[5] https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-f...
What I get for that money is luxurious; I only use maple syrup for sweetener, fancy grains and lentils, halawi dates as my main winter fruit, and fairly expensive nuts. For veggies I mostly eat cabbage, beets, sweet potatos, and squash which are low cost but delicious (lettuce is such a rip off, particularly considering it lacks any nutritional value). I don't eat as much fruit as I should but I think the model diet in your [1] link has it about right in terms of healthy fruit consumption (that is about 4-5 pieces of fruit per day; 300g of apples is more like 1.5 apples). I think you are right that it is common to not eat particularly healthy, although I think a fair number of people do eat that much fruit (fresh orange juice with breakfast for example). I think I grew up eating about that diet (but a wider range of veggies) before I became vegetarian then vegan and I think it is fairly common. 2.4 eggs a day sounds about right for many people too as I don't think it is uncommon to have an egg or two for breakfast and all sorts of stuff is commonly made with eggs.
I think you are right that for many people these days the cost of eating out is a major part of food costs. I'm surprised that people are spending as much on food away from home as food at home these days (your [2]), although considering food away from home is often quite a bit more expensive it is still going to be less than half of all food and I'd guess a large part of that will be meals during working hours.
In my experience, the number of calories does not as directly relate to the cost as you might think since high calorie grains are usually inexpensive (particularly wheat). Even for non-vegans a lot of the higher calorie diet will be wheat or other grains (or oil or sugar, which are also inexpensive). Although too much maple syrup or expensive nuts can certainly add to the cost :/.
Given than the average monthly rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is ~$1300, how does this make any sense? Even if it was only $500 a month, this theoretical family of four would be spending their entire $6000 on rent. I realize that talking about driving down costs probably includes rent, but getting the typical cost of a two bedroom apartment well below $500 is almost certainly not possible.
But the issue I'm seeing here is, right now, people are staving themselves and having their water cut off because they can't afford to pay for it. If anyone was going to help them, it'd have happened by now - so it is a safe guess that they're on their own. Living in a tent is brutal, but humans have millions of years experience doing that and they'll probably be ok. Dehydrated starving is worse.
The path to wealth is to get costs down below income. Then they save a little bit of money each month and can start investing in long term improvements. That isn't possible if society makes it impossible to survive at low incomes.
I can't get them myself due to my immigration status, but I spend perhaps $3/wk on food since there are food pantries which give you all sorts of random stuff that is expiring.
I found going to Hiroshima a fascinating example of this. Tokyo and Kyoto are all very walkable and contain few cars. Since Hiroshima was re-built after cars were already a thing (and when Japan was under US occupation), it feels very un-Japanese and more like a big US city.
In a sense, such family is better off than a middle income family. I have a lot of such poor relatives, they don't complain.
This is the worst part. Being financially poor automatically lumps you in with the “morally poor”, which is devastating to empathy levels.
As the article points out, there is a huge and literal gap in the market for low-cost housing that adequately protects low-income households from drugs and crime, and from the association with drugs and crime. Those things aren’t a necessary consequence of poverty, and yet if your income is low, you have no choice but to live amongst them. The article uses the phrase “the murder-iest part of town”. Why do there have to be such places? Low income becomes associated with low morals, and the hearts of the rich harden: “I don’t want to give money to people in the murder-iest part of town”.
The #1 thing we could do to address the hardship of poverty is to break the forced association between low income and low morals.
And yes of course low morals exist in all strata of society, but their effect is particularly pernicious amongst the poor because the poor can’t afford to disassociate themselves from them.
The things they do get covered up, or are behind closed doors because they can afford to close those doors.
Wealth does not buy you impulse control, at all. The exact opposite, actually, as every whim can be met.
Citation needed?
Only when I got older I found out that often times they didn't have enough money to buy food. Explains the constant soup from potatoes :-)
Good education can do wonders for you though, in my personal experience.
Both me and many of my friends went to one of the best schools in the city by the virtue of living next to it. We started learning programming at 12 yo.
Now most of my peers who studied there, both from poor and rich families, live abroad having managed to get jobs at good companies.
At one part of my life I could only afford the cheapest pair of shoes for 10€, and since it was the only pair I owned I needed to buy a new pair every few months. Of course, I quickly paid more on shoes than I would have if I’d been able to afford one good pair of shoes.
In places like NYC anyone can get free clothes if they want them. There are hundreds of charities and gov orgs (eg [1]) for precisely this reason. Shoes are free if you are not picky. Zero dollars. That's way cheaper than "shoes that last" regardless of price.
[1] this is aimed at people on probation but is open to the public, no questions asked https://www.nyc.gov/site/neon/programs/clothing-closet.page
The one thing I appreciate RESIDENT CONTRARIAN explaining is about the housing situation. People would always point to rentals that cost $800 a month and say "Why don't you live there?" Then I take them on a tour and they see why I choose not to move in.
I am sorry for the suffering that many will go through if this happens, but the only thing I have to look forward to is an economic recession in the hope that it will lower the barrier to entry for housing.
So for now I just pretend I am renting my van for $600 a month and I throw that money into it for upkeep. I am just grateful I have no drug issues or family to worry about.
i am fully with you, but not being familiar with your specific circumstances i am still curious what you tell people. would you mind sharing some examples?
while i have lived in the US i have never been to areas that one is being told to avoid (the most dangerous area i have lived in for a short time was somewhere near downtown DC), and in most other countries that i have been to such neighborhoods are inconceivable. heck even slums in africa appear safer compared to some gunshot prone areas in the US
Deeply intimate with this one. I live in an area completely dependent on defense contracting. I dropped out of my degree program years ago, but have an aerospace engineer friend who I handle software for if a project requires it.
Had the experience of running some flight tests this summer; the dinner conversation with the outside client, other consultants about who I am and what I do is soul crushing. Yeah, I took a week off my landscaping job to do this, will go right back to working it when your project is done.
The American excess of space has some negatives, too, like endless sprawl and long commutes.
Someone in this thread proposed changing the law, which seems to be a bit hard. The 80,000 hours crew suggests that a privileged individual must change society by their own ideas, which seems a bit risky (and using big money to do so seems debatable at best). Some Christians try to help a few poor people in their vicinity, often without regard for the bigger picture, which might be valid, but that possibly requires some deity to believe in.
What do you people typically do to help?
There isn't much else you can do though.
More fundamentally, the reason the laws doesn't adapt to the poor here is the implementation of democracy, if politicians has to cater to poor people or get voted out then you start to see more laws and regulations to support this group.
I may be speaking out of turn as I am not "rich", but I have known a few people who would be considered the "part of the 1%".
Let them develop communication skills with people that are their intellectual, but not necessarily social, peers. Broad social appeal is where the opportunities are. Take poor people out of their element and be accepting of their awkwardness. Question their assumptions in a non-threatening environment and let them grow. Let them mix with people who are not so easily offended, nor unhappy.
Many of the rich aren't so different and think about the same topics all the time, yet often just have a different and more constructive perspective.
On the other hand, even within that framework, I think that the American mindset could be better, ask more "whom did you trick to get that success", ask a little more how a fortune was made instead of blindly celebrating each and every success until proven guilty of breaking the law. But this has very little to do with what the article is about, perhaps a tiny connection could be constructed with the housing chapter but even that would be a rather weak link.
No it is not, and I say that as somebody who lived below the poverty line for several years. Yes, it is devastating, but unless you live in some shithole country without any government help, it can be overcome. Disability and sickness (assuming chronic) can't.
Did I have to recover from and undo a lot of bullshit? Of course!
The unfortunate part is how many people have the attitude of leaning on an external source of inspiration and always making excuses. I'm not saying it's easy, but there are too many for whom it never clicks that whatever circumstances they were born, this is their only shot at life, fair or not.
Personal responsibility and constitution is far more powerful than the supposed forces at work making "free will an illusion". Give me a fucking break. Goddamn so many people on here need to grow the fuck up! How much worse it must have been for so many not so long ago.
I think for all of these things to be congruent you need to be implying some kind of moral or personal weakness which doesn't come from the environment which occurs more frequently in poorer circumstances, which doesn't seem as likely as the causality being the other way around.
Feel like I also need to qualify this with the obligatory I grew up poor and am not anymore and I think...
Probably some version of the typical-mind fallacy.
Edit: removing a further unnecessary elaboration here because it feels like I'm just piling on. Initially the reception to my earlier comment skewed quite negative but it seems to have leveled out.
You can make all the observations you want but correlation is still not causation.
Your original comment before your edit made claims of someone in a given environment having certain behaviors while someone in a different environment not having those behaviors. I'm saying those behaviors are not caused by a mere "environment", but systemic and wholly caused by the broader culture we all live in and the opinions espoused by those who control it. Poor people are definitely attuned to that and mostly because they're vulnerable and living in a social desert. They don't know better beyond what's fed to them by the media and bad interpretations of "science" on social media and anywhere there are comments such as these. They spend so much of their time searching for and grasping at whatever seems relevant to their situation and overthink what they believe is beyond their horizons.
The poor are still often ignored and excluded especially by those who think they're being inclusive.
"How can I feel good about helping poor people if the answer is in themselves, and there's no more poor people? It's best if they are oppressed by some system, in which I can counterbalance by the few dollars I give them on my way home from work"
Poor people really don't consume that much.
Political power is another matter.
I can agree with a lot of that, and sorry about cutting out the comment from underneath you - didn't realise.
I think you're right that claims and sentiments like, for example, the poor stay poor but it's not their fault don't exist in a vacuum and will have some negative effects.
The question is whether they're more helpful on balance, or less damaging than an alternative tough love just pull yourself up already, everyone else did attitude.
I think speaking about the current reality as we understand it is probably the best option.
I don't personally agree with the correlation/causation comment in this context. Putting the research (eg. the heredity of university admission) aside, not-born-poor folk can be just as shitty and lazy and morally bankrupt as anyone else but hope, greed, health, education and opportunity are good counterweights to that.
There is a LOT of "poverty programming" - people get a moral kick out of having poor people around, poor people buy consumerist things, etc. Society needs poor people to remain poor, more than anyone is comfortable with.
It's like the age ol' "why don't they teach you how to do taxes in school?" - not just taxes, but things like budgeting, meal planning, mending clothes, (home economics I think it was called?)
All of my friends said the same thing "why bother budgeting, voting X will be better, the system is against us, there's no point, didn't you watch Y, burn down the place!" - and they are still grovelling in poverty.
I'm not, I'm out, I'm with OP and I know where they're coming from.
"Typical mind fallacy" my ass. If you contribute to poverty programming, you're profiteering off poor people, even just to feel morally righteous.
(Not attacking you, just trying to point out what almost everyone does, this isn't aimed to you)
Even for this example, it's not "OP was poor and got out, good on him, he has some experience to share" - but instead, the response is - "OP got out, but he's the lucky one, and now he's grandstanding" - ie: pulling someone down.
If he had a drinking problem, then these sort of attacks could've spiralled them back down into the pit. No one wants that (On the surface at least)
My sister still is in the poverty cycle. Got pregnant at 16 and have been having to deal with child rearing (along with a partner, and later, 2 more kids) which I'm starting to appreciate the difficulty in her getting out of the mess
(I have a my own kid now, no time for life improvement! I've got to work and then clean and make dinner!)
Not only that, but her partner is abusive, they have smoking and alcohol habits, and the only refuge they have is spending some paycheck on getting a new Xbox for the kids, seeming they broke the last one.
Not only that, but their real estate agent is literally saying "send us a extra $1000 for water bill this month or we'll kick you out" - so they just pay, even when I tell them not to because there's no legal requirement if there's no invoice to say what you're paying, and it's not on the lease agreement.. they don't have the time to understand the law and get help..
This is all to say, it can be tough for people. Yes some/most of it might be their own doing, but they have more to undo, because they made silly mistakes earlier, and it's very difficult for people to think of anything past second-order effects, let alone first-order..
That being said we're on an upward trend for her :), I'm helping her out even if she gets annoyed at my lecturing (some of it is sticking, and the kids are definitely staying in school at all costs! :)
If they ask 100 folks, they'll get something like 101 responses of "HELL YEAH!" but then when they pop people in a simulator to try it, no-one makes it out alive.
I've often wondered if i could make it out alive if i had to start over from scratch. Keeping the life skills and knowledge i have today, but with one exception - NOT being allowed to rely solely on my programming or sysadmin skills because that feels like cheating by making it too easy to succeed.
So a job or entrepreneurial venture, in a different field, starting from nothing and build up. Could i make it out alive?
My answer is always yes. Like i have zero doubt. The only ways i can doubt myself in this thought experiment are if i do something really extreme like start off in a remote African village or imagine starting with a disability of some sort. In those cases, i can see a possibility of failure but in just about any other starting scenario, i jump straight to seeing how i would deal with the obvious problems that would happen along the way like having my stuff repeatedly stolen / trashed, being dragged into fights etc. etc.
Can't shake this niggling feeling that it's hubris. Am i Mr 102 full of smiles who high 5's everyone as he triumphantly strides out of that simulator? Or am i just on the wrong side of Dunning Kruger?
If you mean literally, absolutely yes. Even Palestine has a life expectancy of 73 years, unless you start doing heavy crime or are very unlucky you will survive until you get old.
If you're starting today surrounded by a loving family, in good health, enjoying relative comfort but you end the thought experiment as a comfortably solvent 80 year old in an apartment but with no friends or family, does that count as making it out alive?
That has to be for you to decide.
That specific scenario most probably isn’t one, for most people, but are there fates worse than death?
Yes, obviously.
>but are there fates worse than death?
If you're not sure about that, you can at least be sure that "not getting out alive" isn't one of them. Because that means death.
I know you’ve specified an exception for computer skills, but you have so much more in-built human capital, much of it the result of your education and upbringing. You likely have extensive subconscious training in the mannerisms and norms of upper-middle-class culture. You probably know exactly what behaviors constitute fitting in well and being a valued employee. You know where to go for help, and how to get good credit. The fact you can speak English is, on its own, the foundation of a good career in many parts of the world. If you start to strip out all of that built-in experience and upbringing in order to level the playing field, is it really still you?
On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-being-rich-ish-lesso...
Wow, in that particular respect he lives in relative paradise. On the San Francisco peninsula, this service does not exist, and as far as I’m aware no level of wealth short of hiring a private doctor will make it appear. There are emergency rooms (some of which are fairly nice as such things go), and San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland appear to have a small number of genuine urgent care clinics. Otherwise… nothing.
Going to the ER for an ear infection is not usually a go-in-and-quickly-handle-it experience.
(Also, wow, the housing in the OP looks awesome at the price point.)
> it’s hard to wake up the next day and go “well, I’m sure that’s all in the past - let’s learn Java!”.
Had I written something like this (it wouldn't be addressed at "rich" people) it would be entirely about this part of the game mechanic. (The author has kids, it makes the challenge even harder but is a fine excuse to proudly work yourself to death.)
There are many gradients between throwing in the towel and uhh.. attacking the lion with your bare hands. When you've given up nothing is possible anymore. It's a horrific thing to see from up close. You don't even have to be actually poor for it.
The opposite is also true, if you have the will, energy and motivation all you really need is a pair of pants. I've seen and done things that might blow your mind. Each hack gives a new surge of motivation.
No, the point of taxes is taking some minimum amount of money from others by force, so that the government can spend it how they choose.
> So you're fine with taking others' money by force, and spending some of it on the arts, but you think it's overall not going where you want it to, so you'll minimize your personal contribution?
I don't see this as a consistent view.
Feel free to enlighten me, and please tell me in what way they speak to you, and what you believe they say to you.
I'm not terribly libertarian, but they're not wrong about taxes being collected at gunpoint.
There are lots of things (basically any governmental action) that we should remember end up being done by a police officer physically arresting someone, and if they resist, they will be violently subdued. What's more, there can be serious, often violent side effects. Cigarette taxes come to mind[1][2]. Prohibition in the US. Even property taxes results in folks getting removed from their house (sorry, their government's house) by a sheriff. And don't get me started on eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture.
I'm not saying that taxes are immoral. I am saying that we should be very careful how we wield this lever of government. And implicitly (now explicitly) that you're being rather blasé about it.
[1] Taxes Have Made New York Into an Empire of Cigarette Smuggling https://www.wsj.com/articles/taxes-have-made-new-york-into-a...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/brooklyn-da-23-arrested...
A wildly generous estimate for federal and state spending that ends up going toward poetry is 10 million a year.
Our middle east wars have cost 8 trillion over 22 years, or 360 billion a year.
For every lone tax dollar spent on poetry, $36,000 is spent on destruction.
To match the proportional effort that went into your comment above, you'd have to write 360,000 words - about 4 novels - against war.
And a 1:1 ratio wouldn't be necessary - as generously estimated above, the ratio is more like 1:36,000.
Not convinced about that. Athens and Renaissance Italy were both hugely centres for the arts, but also fought plenty of wars.
The arts in Renaissance Italy were funded by patronage, not taxes.
... Not that I ever claimed spending money on arts removes all possibility of war, mind you.
Poetry, art, music, drama, etc, improve critical thinking, empathy, self-determination, awareness of history, political engagement, etc; all of which are reasons that one of the first things fascists will do is suppress any arts not related to propaganda.
It's really weird to see someone try and argue that funding the arts has no effect on a populations mindless bloodthirst, in order to defend not paying a microsopic fraction of their income toward poetry.
As I said, the most generous amount the US could be considered to spend on poetry via fed and state taxes is about ten mil. That's 10 cents per person, per year. That's what you're arguing over here. It's profoundly odd.
So you are arguing that the general population are bloodthirsty beasts without exposure to the arts? If so, I find that quite odd.
Wow. I'm out. Bad faith conversations are strongly discouraged here, btw.
Ok.
I’m sure there’s a market for this but there are much better alternatives that have lower or equivalent cost.
But how odd. I’m not at all sure how that happened. :(
But it is such social commentary.
25k tents being deployed around national parks targeting wealthy travelers so people can get rich is such a social commentary when we have (officially) 582,000 Americans homeless and nobody seems to be “able to find a solution” — it seems oddly prescient.
Some things were exactly as described: Cars and constant worry about repairs, but my dad was pretty good at repairs so despite all our cars being 20+ years old (and not Mercedes, but more like a Fiat 125p) we were OK with transport. Also living in a medium sized city public transport was always good.
Food - The author mentioned eating lots of rice, for us it was potatoes. I had a family member in Germany, so I still remember the first orange I ever are (from a Christmas gift pack from that aunt in Germany). Sweets like chocolate-from that same pack) were were usually divided into single squares and I would get one a day until it lasted.
Then there were things that differed a lot:
Travel&Holidays: When I was 10 we went for "holidays" in Germany in the summer (holidays in quotes, because I had holidays while my parents worked on some farm). At the time I never had allowance etc, but I'd get money from extended family members for various holidays, birthdays in years prior. I saved most of it for years. When we went to Germany I felt pretty rich as after exchange it amounted to 20 marks (about 40 EUR today I guess) so I could buy myself a really nice toy. Yes we drove our 20 year old fiat 125p for 18h all the way and yes it did break down once mid way... Otherwise travel&holidays meant living with my grandma in the countryside during the summer when the school was off.
Accommodation : My parents did get a flat back in the communist system after waiting 8 years for it living in shared accommodation (with 2 kids). So we had it pretty good. Also I was pretty shocked when I read this: >How many times have they turned off your water?”. Back then (and now I think) it was illegal to disconnect essential services like water without an eviction order. There were times when we didn't pay for amenities for 10 months and we ate mostly potatoes(I still consider a full plate of fries by themselves a proper dinner - you needed oil too and lots of it so it was quite a luxury) and we were never disconnected from water/heat, but that might have been a local thing to my housing association.
Safety: There was never a risk of getting shot, the closest was getting blown up by some explosives left in the ground (as there was this abandoned military base nearby). Crime was getting your fruit stolen on a tiny plot of land in the "community gardens" or getting punched in the face by some drunk. Thieves would never steal potatoes from the ground, but everyone kept their preserves and potatoes in cellars (under an apartment building, every flat would have it's own cellar) and these were frequently stolen.
Heathcare: we had access to national healthcare for most of the time(when my dad was unemployed he was registered as "looking for work" so the state paid for it), but the quality of it really varies (to say the least). For example dental work - if you want your teeth pulled out in emergency, yes national heath care in 90s Poland is great for that. If you want cosmetic work done? Maybe you will wait 12 months, and then after it's done it will fall apart after a week... Typically you didn't do cosmetic work if you couldn't afford to go private. Really life threatening stuff was handled fairly well (although 2 of my grandparents died as a result of medical mistakes - specifically one getting normal hospital food after waking up from a gastric surgery, the other going in for gall stone removal and getting pneumonia there as they'd just leave the windows open for hours on end forgetting to close them in winter).
So here we go, this is how being mid-level-poor looked like in Poland in the 90s. Why mid-level? Well, because we always had cars, we never went hungry, and after an entire extended family chipped in I did manage to get a computer I wanted (a commodore 64) when I was 12 so I'm not even sure it really classes as being that poor. At the time unemployment was 40% at the worst of it many people had it much worse, but I guess my parents always had higher aspirations so they felt pretty bad not being able to afferd better food, or not paying amenities for months and months wondering if their electricity will get turned off today (electric is not considered essentially).
Children need childcare. This has a major impact on your finances if you are poor. You might need to have a reduced availability and might not find full time - or any - work because of it. If your child is prone to being sick and you make less money, it becomes easier to lose your job when you have to stay home with them. And childcare is expensive: I've known plenty of folks that stayed home or have worked little simply because they didn't actually make money by working, once they factored in child care and transportation costs.
And that's not even getting into something mentioned in the article: Sometimes, when you make more, you are actually worse off. People refuse full time hours, raises, and promotions because the increased pay won't cover the government help they'll lose, let alone make them better off.
Being articulate and well spoken doesn't really grant you anything when you are working bad jobs (and many 'decent), depending on the job. I worked a couple of days in a food factory back in the late 90's. It was barely over minimum wage. Being articulate didn't matter: You just needed to do the work fast enough and follow the health guidelines fast enough. Oh, and work mandatory OT on short notice.