It's depressing when I create something I'm proud of and when I show it to others it in their perception it is part of an economy. That is in my opinion the true poverty trap.
I know you're being poetic, but poverty is a very real thing.
There comes a point where you need to worry about food on the table before worrying about self-actualization and "value-of-itself" for what creative thing you've done.
You just described the difference between lower-middle and middle class.
Poverty is when you have to quit your job yet again because your CCMS paperwork got screwed up and the daycare won't take your kid after school.
Poverty is when you have to make visits to the food bank on a regular basis for commodities because the price of food is outstripping what EBT is offering.
Poverty is when you don't have a strong attachment to any of your physical possessions even if you've worked long and hard for them because one medical problem could make it impossible for you to afford your rent, so you might as well not become too attached to anything that you'll eventually lose.
Poverty is when you either keep your cash on you at all times or you pay a 3% fee to a debit card company to keep preloading a prepaid card because the banks don't think you're creditworthy enough to open an account.
Poverty is when you make stupid decisions with money when you have it because there are just so many occasions when you don't.
Poverty is getting CPS visits because even though you put your kid in the best clothes that you could afford, some teacher decided that today was the day she was going to white knight your child away from you.
Poverty is being ashamed to be dragged through a book fair only to be the only child to not purchase anything because you don't dare ask your momma for money given how much she struggles.
Poverty is when you gut through toothaches and abscesses because you don't have dental insurance and nobody does that work for free.
That's poverty.
What you described is an inconvenienced life.
One could just as easily compare your poverty with that of people in the poorest places in the world.
Oh, your kids get to go to school? Our kids spend their days digging through rubbish heaps. Oh your kid was taken away by CPS? Our kid died from inhaling toxic fumes from melting down the old computer parts they found digging through the rubbish heaps. Oh, you have a debit card fee? We're don't even have ATMs, or banks.
Poverty is a spectrum. Just because X is poorer than Y doesn't mean Y isn't also poor.
Food scarcity, shelter scarcity, basic health need scarcity, location impermanence, government impunity on your freedom. Poverty.
I kind of think these are just middle class issues rather than poverty; but you're right that this means different things to different people.
> Decisions small and large, accumulate and create a much bigger impact than most people imagine. Now imagine having to make these decisions consistently for two decades until you can see the return on it - like say your kids actually getting a better job or you becoming an entrepreneur or finding a career ...etc.
I think there's an element of "little bit at first, then all at once" -- i don't think it's that these individual items that "make wealth" but rather, they would be symptoms of different states of mind regarding stress, risk, etc.
I climbed out of poverty and met my wife who's "comfortably middle-class" -- she has no appetite for risk (see dr straight away, get name-brand products, college first) and i have a much larger appetite for risk (wait and see, bulk-buy products, work first).
Interesting to think about, thanks for the comment; i wonder if there is/should be a study / analysis on those questions.
I don't think so. I grew up squarely middle class (and the question was never "can we afford health care or collage", but a weeklong trip to Disney world set our vacation budget back several years (to the point we could not take vacations, or only took small road trips).
The idea of not being able to afford basic health care or a university education should be utterly alien to the middle class.
Poverty is never "do I buy a washing machine or buy something else" it's "can I afford to go to the laundromat this month".
Now, if you are able to see the value in something despite not having a firm monetization strategy, that just puts you in the same mental frame as the greatest entrepreneurs in the world. Jeff Bezos said something about how you should do what matters and find the profit later, it was written on the wall somewhere. SpaceX still might not be profitable (not sure), but the promise of 100kt of payload to LOE with recoverable lower and upper stages? Its worth the weight!
That is however still a system of debt and scarcity. A system of abundance would account for how many of the gifts you have given have been retained. Then add orthogonality to your retainment. That system of value does not destroy information that makes us happy. It assigns resources to where they can be refined to additional value.
What of other types of pollution? Why wouldnt we be taxing the environmental damage of mercury or lead? These items are in fact heavily regulated today, and yet it was with the help of the local government and their power over utilities that flint michigan was poisoned with lead; this is something a private company could be more easily sued for, as opposed to the government with sovereign immunity. Why would we expect this system of weights and measures to not be captured like other systems of political power? Try to imagine the negative consequences of the corporate capture of power over the prices of all goods in the market, what effect that could have over relatively powerless people just trying to eat.
To the second part, scarcity is not something that can be changed; no matter how much you produce of something it is still ultimately limited in its supply.
This is a debt based system though, and it doesn't have to be; all dollars are created when a debt is issued, like a home loan or government debt, and these debts are issued at an interest rate, it is systemically guarenteed that there will always be more debt than dollars to pay it off. Taken this to its logical conclusion, you get the repo-men/corpus style society of everyone being a slave to bankers, its not markets that do this, its exogenous debt that can never be repaid without entering more debt. With a commodity money or a money with commodity backing, this is not possible; the banks cannot issue debt for a bar of gold they never had, and when their debts turn out to be malinvestments they cant be bailed out by a central authority, meaning they will only issue debts that they can reasonably expect to be paid off, rather than the predatory practices of today.
I think you meant to say revenue?
> Now, if you are able to see the value in something despite not having a firm monetization strategy, that just puts you in the same mental frame as the greatest entrepreneurs in the world.
It is also the same mental frame every starving artist shares too. They are able to see the value in what they do despite not having a firm monetization strategy.
Yes, thanks.
>It is also the same mental frame every starving artist shares too. They are able to see the value in what they do despite not having a firm monetization strategy.
If you read the next sentence you can see I was gently incepting that along with the idea that successful people see value before they see the price they can attach to it. To even waste your time performing the economic calculation to determine the numbers you must first be motivated by something, there is a period of time however short between the idea and its technical analysis, the value you see and its monetization. Hey, that doesnt mean monetization isnt important, but it can be forestalled for important reasons like exploring the field or gaining experience, just as much as unimportant reasons, those, being subjective to the one paying the bills.