What can I afford to eat today? How am I gonna pay the electricity bill? How am I gonna fix my broken 20yo car? Which grocery has the cheapest diapers? Should I switch on the heating today or are there colder days coming this month?
If you are well off none of the above is even a thing.
Those things didn't cost more money (nobody had any) but they reflected the focus on getting their kids out of that situation. The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. The kids whose parents didn't think this way have a by-and-large the same life their parents did.
The stats are really not that relevant IMHO because you don't know which way the people are thinking, that make up those stats. I bet stats show a vast difference in upward mobility between Asian immigrants and others, for example, because Asians think about how to get unstuck...
Sometimes someone really didn't have a point, or stated it badly enough that it's not very clear. But more often, "What's your point?" is being used as a cheap rhetorical trick, to try to make everyone else not see the point that is being made, because the one who says "What's your point?" very much doesn't want anyone to see the point, or to acknowledge it as an actual point with any validity.
Take comfort when you get asked that. You've made a point that they have no real response to, so all they can do is ineffectively try to get everyone else to ignore it.
Now in this case, they did go one step further. They said that statistics disprove your anecdata. That's at least a bit of a rebuttal. But they didn't actually cite any statistics, so it's just this unsupported claim.
For some reason, for some people, it's very important to insist that "no, you can't change your own stickiness" - if you are poor, you are poor. If you are fat, you are fat. If women hate you, they will hate you. This reveals something about their own approach in life but worse, I worry that it can influence someone who's on the fence ("should I try to lose weight, should I try to better my economics, etc?") and being barraged with messages of impossibility is poisonous to them.
It is not your successful friends staying online all day posting negative messages.
That’s the line I tell anyone who needs some unstuckitude and feels it’s impossible. Has worked well for me personally. The people bitching and moaning on Reddit are not the people busting their butts getting unstuck.
Commies want everybody to think that class warfare is the only solution to their problems. They lose their composure whenever somebody points out that individual determination and responsibility have proven effectiveness. I almost fell for their ruse and but pulled myself out of it and have turned my life around. Screw their crab bucket hell.
The truth is that it is both true that there is a 'system' - in the sense that large groupings of independent organisms self organize into an emergent property that behaves with 'rules' that appear like a systemic thing - and also that individuals are not equal in capacity. From will, to intelligence, to resourcefulness, to bravery, to then the more nefarious luck, and many other factors, some people succeed and some fail.
The 'systemic' emphasis, at the exclusion of any and all other factors, is the problem, here, as it's a reductionism.
There is no objective scientific measure to disprove political ideals - you can't prove or disprove that capitalism, or socialism are good or bad. And you can certainly not falsify any claims of "systemic." These are claims of values masquerading as science and objective facts.
I think there's a bit of individual / group culture that plays a role in relative success (such as immigrants often doing better than richer but still poor Americans) and also there is some systemic factors, residually.
But here the systemic folks are going to lash out, because it is considered that not prioritizing the systemic factors is a lack of education, at best, and perhaps racism, at worst.
It's a very complex problem.
My point is that the same mindset is available to others if they chose to seek it out. Telling yourself how poor and stuck you are precludes that.
Remember that the immigrants who come to america already have enough resources at minimum to immigrate!
... and are usually unable to do anything with that education because most American employers (outside the very unusual field of software engineering) discount or ignore non-American degrees. An immigrant with an engineering or medical degree making a living by driving an Uber in America is a stereotype very much based in reality. I personally know people who fit that stereotype.
Some people's circumstances are a result of systemic racism that has kept them from succeeding. Some people have been deliberately kept from better jobs, better schools, and better neighborhoods. Some people have consistently bad experiences from the power structure.
Possibly it could be argued that many of these barriers can be overcome in the modern age but that is a questionable assertion and the experiences of one's parents and grandparents is not easily overlooked.
Which is frankly something as a child of an asian immigrant im tired of hearing. Its such a self-congratulatory nonsense.
Personally, I think the explanation is structural, or if you prefer, just math. Just statistical distribution will assure that if you're poor, 99 percent of you won't get into the 1%. You'll never amass the required 5.8 million dollar net worth.
In fact, I almost hate to say this, but it should be implied, whether you are poor or middle class, 90% of you will never even get into the 10%.
I'm not sure that it's a psychological state of mind, or even a statement on the innate abilities of poor or middle class people? I'm more confident that it's a simple structural barrier. There is not room in the 10% for every law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individual. Which means many law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individuals who are poor or middle class, will need to aim lower to increase their chances of success. It sucks, but just in my opinion, that's how things are, I'm not sure there's a way around it?
So I think what's happening is more along the lines of people, perhaps even unconsciously, realizing the structural reality, and adjusting their strategies accordingly. That poor or middle class kid says:
"You know it's a lot safer if I just become a nurse, teacher, or regular software engineer instead of trying to swing for the fences on a startup since I have no safety net to work with."
In fact, in a societal moral hazard kind of way, the more intelligent and rational that poor or middle class kid is, the more likely s/he is to say that. (Or maybe it isn't a societal moral hazard? Since we do need nurses, teachers, fire fighters, and so on. I don't know?)
[1] Net Worth of 1%-er: https://money.com/richest-1-percent-america-other-countries/
While this is true as a simple matter of distribution, it conflates two very different things.
In terms of relative wealth, yes, there's no way everybody can be in the top 10%.
But in terms of absolute wealth, there is lots of room to make even the bottom 10% wealthier than they are today. Indeed, the bottom 10% in the US are already wealthier than most humans who ever lived. But they could be much wealthier still, even if their relative wealth stays the same.
Focusing kids on "getting out of the bad situation" doesn't have to mean "shoot for being in the top 10%" (and if the GP was implying that it does, I think the GP is wrong on that point). It just has to mean "go out and create wealth instead of staying stuck in this place". And doing that will make those kids better off--not to mention society as a whole--even if their relative wealth never makes it anywhere near the top 10%.
To the extent that our society has "structural problems", I think they are about preventing people from creating wealth, by imposing all manner of nanny state micromanagement and by allowing people in power to bully others.
I am the GP. I agree with everything you wrote here. My reference to the "1%" was specifically applicable to the kids growing up in my neighborhood in the 90s - the public school and other education OPPORTUNITIES were good enough to launch many of us into this stratosphere.
Meanwhile, a ton of our neighbors didn't even try to avail their kids of these opportunities (namely, to work hard and optimize for education) and their kids got stuck too.
I totally agree with you that 1% or 10% is not the goal. We both agree that if people try to look for ways to grow vs accept stickiness and limitation, they are likely to move up SOMEWHAT and that's really important.
I know your type, I came from your world. You are not being truthful.
And even if you are the extreme statistical abnormality of that is nothing you should based a white ranging judgment on.
Even if it were true, I'd bet dollars to donuts that there was something different about the public school to which those kids were assigned. That's just way too high of a statistical variance to be, "Oh they just thought positively."
I'll make this point again. If in the 90s your parents made you take the hard math classes, try for the AP courses, try for the magnet school, try for a good college/major/scholarship, you're on track to earn 350K at baseline.
If this really bothers you, fine - let's talk top 10%. Going from broke-ass to top 10% is an impressive feat. top-10% is under 170K.
> Every one of your friends has a net worth of 6 million or more.
You are intentionally strawmanning. When people say 1% they usually mean income (in my experience) and sometimes are using it as a figure of speech. Your usage of wealth really stuck out to me badly in your original comment - I actually thought you were trolling by choosing an obviously silly figure.
HN rule: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> I know your type, I came from your world. You are not being truthful.
HN rule: "In Comments: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
And your strong stereotyping is likely not helpful to you. Perhaps be a little less discriminiating and a bit less judgemental. No one likes to be bucketed. You know nothing about the OP.
Wait, by definition, 99% of anybody - poor or not - won't get into the 1%.
To tell people it's their "state of mind" is nonsense. It doesn't matter what everyone's state of mind is, only 1% ever get into the 1%. So arguing about "state of mind" or "accelerated classes" is meaningless to that structural reality. If you need 5.8 million dollars to get into the one percent, there is a 99% chance you won't get there.
I'm also skeptical of these people who say they grew up in the ghetto surrounded by poverty, but several of their friends who were also in the same ghetto and suffered the same childhood poverty, have 5.8 million in assets. The statistical likelihood of multiple children from the exact same impoverished neighborhood, of similar age cohort, all going on to amass 5.8 million in assets is,
well,
remote in the extreme.
Not saying you can't have a neighborhood like that where everyone goes on to become millionaires. I'm saying it's statistically unlikely.
The research on this suggests that you've got it the other way around actually on who ends up with lower levels of emotional well being.
> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.
But please don't get an animal, treat it like it is a kid and not properly train it.
Evidence, please?
Choosing both, either, or neither of the two options are all valid. And I think that's nice.
Memetics are also a consideration.
Even if one's genetics aren't passed on, their memetics do which nullifies the proposition of competition to begin with. You play, you don't play, you win!
shitposting on reddit is not a net contribution to society.
most people work bullshit jobs where the ownership class skims value off the top.
tell me, what memes did a peasant in 600AD Hispania, or 1100 Samerkand, leave for us?
Value propositions on memetics is a different discussion anyways so I don't understand how it fits here.
As far as extrapolating my current choices effect on my descendants, nothing could be simpler; I have none and so there will be no effect on them. This is something that brings me much peace. I do wish that people with or without children would take better care of this planet, since I find the continued degradation of it to be the most depressing aspect of modern life, but I would think that parents in particular would be more future oriented.
I have never heard anyone say "I really want kids but I can't afford them" - I hear people say generically "oh kids are expensive" but I've never heard of anyone use that for their own decision.
60% of women aged 35 or younger have kids. That doesn't sound like a "luxury". And I doubt that these are the strictly richest 60% of women...
I am not an expert but I do expect the epigenetics field of study to help us build a better understanding of the things touched on in this paper.
P.S. you do have a "point". Someone saying that you don't is a cop-out so they don't have to think about how to engage in a conversation, debate, or discourse.
Also, "poor" as you're using it here might be too broad a term. The amount of brain cycles that parents can spare for their kid's academic performance is inversely related to how much time they're worrying about food, whether or not the utilities will be shut off, how to work overtime and keep the kid safe, etc.
Interesting. But it’s worth noting that many different causal mechanisms can explain that data. For example it could be that parents that think that way are pretty smart and good at long-term planning / delayed gratification, and such traits are highly heritable. So kids inherit those traits and do well.
This is why our current solutions are failing so badly, but telling people they are responsible for their children's outcomes does not get as many votes as telling them that the government is responsible. Just make sure to vote for us and we will fix all your problems!
This is comforting fantasy. One of the most dire statistics in the US is that black people consistently place more value on education and getting certifications than white people do, and that it doesn't help them (as a group) in the market at all. A black person with a college degree has about the same likelihood of being hired as a white high school graduate who has spent time in prison.
It's also a slander on the poor. You either think that fewer than one percent of the poor place value on education, or you think that class is so hypermobile that far more than one percent of the poor are ending up in the 1%. The idea that all the worthy poor automatically go to heaven is, with the slightest inspection, a statistical impossibility, unless you believe that the poor are almost never worthy.
edit: also, where the hell are these worthy poor parents coming from, and how did they manage to stay poor with so much virtue?
Source? This is hard to believe.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/b38Bg/9/#embed
Another - black people get 50% fewer callbacks in general:
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
Here's a random Ipsos poll that finds US attitudes on higher education virtually indistinguishable by race (which understates black educational values based on other studies I recall, but to say that the value put on education was indistinguishable is enough, considering the outcome.)
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/all-americans-see-val...
An interesting quote from a guy who ran a study reported on in Fortune: "White participants who opposed affirmative action were more than twice as likely to select an applicant with a white-sounding name compared with applicants perceived as Black – whether or not they had to make the simulated hiring decision in a hurry.
"By contrast, giving white participants who favor affirmative action unlimited time to choose a name from the hiring list reduced discrimination against the job candidates with names they perceived as Black-sounding by almost half."
What this means is that the 50% fewer callbacks (mentioned above) for black-sounding names became only 25% fewer if you believed in AA, but if you didn't like AA, you would call random white-sounding names twice as often as random black-sounding names.
https://fortune.com/2023/09/24/affirmative-action-race-discr...
So, I wouldn't say this random selection of links proves what I said true, but I'd say that it points pretty heavily in a direction.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
It's worth a read. And a re-read, come to think of it - I'll go do that now.
Many well-off people care about these things. They cook for themselves to save money, they monitor their electricity usage, buy reliable second hand cars, look at the diaper prices and wear warm clothes instead of overheating the space. Some of them do it even if they don't have to, making it a waste of their valuable time, but for those with low middle-class income, it is the difference between a rather good standard of living and poverty.
In fact, if you are really good at "dealing with your situation", chances are that you won't stay poor for long. Not only you will make the best of whatever income you have, but it is also a highly sought after skill, and you may up with a well paying job or a profitable business.
But it is usually a learned skill, and other poor people are unlikely to teach you, because they failed at it themselves, it is a vicious circle.
I call it "Poor Brain/Rich Brain", and neither requires you to be rich or poor, although they are heavily correlated. A Poor Brain person will always take the immediate reward, even if it's not crucial to their survival. They fail the marshmallow test [0]. Rich Brain people will weigh the immediate reward against future opportunities, even if the immediate reward would significantly enhance their life, and the future opportunity is vague and undefined. It's about understanding that how you are perceived in certain situations can far outweigh your own ability to change your circumstances.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
"Free Advice is seldom cheap"
This does not pass the sniff test. Lets see your statistics?
Then you misunderstand the metric by poor people.
If you eat the marshmallow now, you get a marshmallow.
If you wait, it WILL disappear. You don't get a marshmallow.
Basically, for poor people, the "future" is just future suffering, judgemental assholes in government cutting more funds cause you made $10 more this month (welfare cliff), and your sad equipment breaking down at the worst case causing whatever meager savings to evaporate like smoke.
You're talking about time preference. What you've decided to call "poor brain" is simply high time preference, and "rich brain" is low time preference.
There. Now you don't need to defend the implicit statistical correlation, or deal with those who are justly annoyed because it's unsupported and classist.
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" accurately describes the experience of many people who grew up in poverty. It's a proverb for a reason.
Precisely. And the problem is that experience does not map to reality in all situations. Thus Poor Brain. It leaves you physically unable to see the long term risk/benefit. Loan a friend $20, and Poor Brain will demand it be paid back over and over again, even if it's not crucial to their survival, even ruining the friendship over it. Rich brain never mentions it, and uses it indirectly as leverage in every possible situation, far outweighing the original value of the $20. Call it $10 or $1 or whatever is a trivial amount of money to even a poor person in your society. Having Rich Brain does not require you to not need the money, only that you understand how much more valuable not getting the money is. It's about understanding the value in your relationships with people and how that vastly outweighs your own skills/talents/ambition/resources.
Fair, in that the experience I'm describing is among the poor whites of the US; a notoriously atomic and individualistic group. This probably does not map to other cultures as neatly.
There is no way to know the reality until after the decision to take the marshmallow, one always has to make the decision and the decision is going to be based on prior experience. That is how all our minds work. "Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes" and that sort of thing.
I think being raised poor imbues you with the opposite mentality, that you will inevitably end up being broke. This has played out a few times in front of my eyes when friends from poor families come into a windfall and burn through it within a few months. It was like they subconsciously knew they would wind up broke again so why not?
To me an extra $100 is that much closer to a safe retirement. For them it’s 4 candles. Compromising on 2 candles has worked well for us.
“Poor people” cannot be lumped into a single group.
Some respond to their problems like you mention: they dwell on the scarcity and try to problem solve. I’m not convinced that group is the majority of poor (at least in developed countries).
There are many low income people who do not really worry or think about those things at all. They are incredibly reactive vs proactive and do not plan well. They don’t really worry about whether or not they can pay the electric bill—either they will pay it or they won’t.
A big one, I generally have disdain for status goods, probably because I couldn't have them as a kid so I convinced myself they don't matter. This one I'm not planning to fix :)
Or, I mechanically buy things I need on discount and optimize minor things like that without much mental effort. I have to train myself now to notice when I do make effort, so I don't waste time saving 5 bucks anymore.
Or a weird one, I am averse to buying anything that I cannot afford /very/ easily, I remember the first time I saved enough money from odd jobs and gifts to upgrade my computer (early aughts), I was deathly afraid to do it - cause if something happened to my years-old shitty computer I could use the money to buy a new one 3 times over, but if I spent the money now on the new one and something happened to it I'd be SOL, better stick with the old shitty computer. When having money, it translated into e.g. buying a house I could afford very easily ("the cheapest house on the best street", sorta) instead of maxing out like most people I know and buying as much house as practical... However in smaller things, I have to really force myself to spend money, e.g. to not buy crappy air tickets just cause they are a bit cheaper, and such.
Why cannot everyone get the good hangups from poverty? :)
Source: grew up in that situation.
Living in a large German city, I also never owned a car and didn't feel poor for the fact.
In no other circumstances would it be referred to in this way.
e.g. it’s like saying someone with above average work ethic is ‘lazy’, someone with above average intelligence is ‘stupid’, etc…
i.e. at a conference of neurosurgeons perhaps the vast majority of the HN userbase, including perhaps everyone commenting here, would be considered ‘lazy’ and ‘stupid’.
If it’s fine to refer to people in this manner, depending on their physical location, then I think it would have some pretty big implications.
Lacking a car doesn't make one poor, and if you're growing up in one of Germany's largest cities (where one does not need a car to survive), you're already in an incredibly fortunate position in terms of lottery of birth compared to the rest of the people on the planet.
It's not "someone". It's the majority of the world's population. 150 years ago, it was all of the world's population, including the rich people.
Was everyone severely traumatized back then?
The concept of the poverty line is somewhat artificial but it avoids this sort of pointless digression.
If being "poor" in the United States (meaning, say, having to buy Walmart clothes instead of designer stuff) leads to "lifelong trauma", imagine how traumatic it must be to live in one of those countries where the income is less than a dollar a day.
It's easy to work 80 hours a week when you have people taking care of all of your other needs.
Somebody with a fairly normal job could, in principle (assuming employer allows it, opportunities exist, etc.), work 80 hours a week and spend their entire extra income on a full-time assistant for their daily chores. The more your hourly income is higher than the assistant's, the more economical that becomes. A FAANG level programmer could absolutely do that, but they typically don't, probably because it's not easy!
You don't even need an assistant if you have no kids, live walking distance from work, and get all your meals by eating out/delivery. You won't have much housework because you won't spend much time there.