Being poor vs. being broke
blog.ctms.me
blog.ctms.me
The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.
You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
Strangely, she did that only with comfort foods.
Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable.
But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).
(joking, but not nearly as much as I wish I was)
And for what it's worth, no one deserves blame for their cookie habits.
I do this for any or all of the following reasons:
* (culture) it is polite to leave something for the next person
* (I have roommates) I don't want to be the last person who finished something. I would be obliged to replace it.
For the typical girl thing, I haven't seen this behavior in real life with my family members or friends. I have heard of the concept on social media.
I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need, instead of hoarding five metric tonnes of crap that you'll never use.
If you haven't used something in the past 5 years, you can almost certainly toss it.
Ah but if only it were so simple. In my woodworking shop, in pretty much every project I end up using odd scraps for either temporary scaffolding or jigs or what have you that would be difficult to buy. You would have to go out of your way to buy a large board, and cut it up intentionally. Even then you would not have as rich a set of scraps. Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
What I need is time. Whereas buying things is stupidly time consuming, running completely counter to what is needed.
I don't have it all. Sometimes I have no choice but to go buy parts when a breakdown occurs, but that's never a welcome experience. You're looking at a good hour or more to source even if it is available locally, and often you have to travel far and wide to find someone who has it in stock. Worse, sometimes the only stock available is on the other side of the world in who knows where, leaving you down for days while you wait for it to show up...
Once someone invents a magical teleporter that can spit out what you need in a split second on demand, then money to spend when you need it becomes more powerful than already having what you need, but we're a long way from seeing that become reality.
I for one welcome out capitalist induced pack rat disorders for the elderly as it guarantees that vintage and retro survives.
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
You're born, you keep your head down, and you die - if you're lucky.
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
Homelife being bad = bad grades
bad grades = no support for further education
no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs
no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).
The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.
I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.
Or read a book like "Your money or your life"
You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?
He’s trying to help you empathise that in reality these kinds of holes are really difficult to escape from; moreso than you think on first glance. It’s also very easy to fall into them even if you think you’re immune. Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
In light of that, your response is just horrible.
1) The nature of interest in unsecured loans is high interest (almost by definition) and increasingly so if you are seen as a credit risk. Thus small debts compound over time making them unbearable for longer.
2) Our friend is merely Keeping up with the Jones’ despite never going above a zero balance.
One of these is uncharitable and ridiculous- the other is a known issue that keeps people in poverty.
I’ll let you figure out which.
You said:
> Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
My reaction was to this. I agreed with you, and added the cause: utter financial recklessness. People spending money on things they don't need instead of saving say a quarter of their salary.
For some time I was earning a couple times the average salary in my region of the world. Yet I found that spending about the average salary was more than enough to live a very comfortable life. I feel this is not the norm for whatever reason: most people inflate spending to match their income, and then they're 2 bad decisions (or even some bad luck) from poverty.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.
Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
That was all the "proof" he needed to be against helping the poor, because if he could do it, anyone could do it.
p.s. this person has also never paid taxes in his entire life because "government is a scam"
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.
Its interesting that the same mentalities that get us out of poverty are not the same ones that make people rich.
You could naively assume that competence around money would be universal.
Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income. It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.
Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.
All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.
My father manages employees that constantly have garnishment on their salaries because of some unpaid debt. Yet they make decent wage and could afford an OK life if they didn't blow most of it on stupid stuff.
So what I mean is that you cannot put all the blame on the "system" and the marketers selling appetising food or whatnot. Those people keep making those choices themselves and outside out of taking their liberty there is not much you can do about it. I actually think the current system affords them a better life than they could otherwise.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.
If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.
Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.
Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?
Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.
We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).
There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.
but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.
No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.
Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)
Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.
I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.
These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
Thanks for finding that.
But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-...
1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...
The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).
This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.
What should have happened in the original agreement is that the fed pays for the sewers at a very cheap rate and the municipality does the work and owns it for eg 10-20 years.
That's actually a really common agreement. I don't know why DOJ had such a derp moment here and instead demanded billboards about health risks for people who don't have the money for basic medical care much less exploratory lab testing.
Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.
The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).
If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."
Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".
20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.
*See what I did, there?
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
So far as I know, every single UBI trial has had consistently positive outcomes. People get jobs, get training, get a roof over their heads.
Giving people money does in fact give people more choices, and helps make the poor less poor.
But only six of the listed pilots mention the results.
1970s NIT pilots: no noticeable improvements.
Mincome: significant reduction in hospitalization. Slight decrease in work?
Tribal profit sharing: better homelife for children, parents on the booze less.
Madhya Pradesh: great success.
Netherlands: increased employment slightly, not health.
Finland: improved health slightly, not employment (employment was the goal).
So, I don't know. I suppose it helps, but mostly in Madhya Pradesh.
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
There is no proposal, and that's the point.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fox-news-brian-kilmeade-apologi...
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
You're right of course. The problem is that such institution no longer exist in North America.
We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.
I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.
I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.
or, are currently benefiting, but they're just getting what's owed to them, unlike all the other moochers taking handouts
Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.
I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
You are disconnected from reality.
I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.
Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".
I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.
Where are these people? Probably the largest concentration of such people are on the various Native American reservations (I believe ~15% of the Navajo Reservation lacks running water). The hinterlands of Alaska also likely has a high number of these houses.
Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at.
I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
These people are gross.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself
I’m not saying running a small business is easy. But they previously worked a corporate job and chose to start a landscaping business partly for lifestyle reasons.
Of course, they often have family they can fall back on, and education, but debt creates an entirely new class of 'less than dirt' poor.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
Which country, though?
Because that's like 90% of the solution.
The other 9% is good health.
The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.
that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.
xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution:
> Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled.
I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them."
Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/202505/wage-compression-drives-n...
The US does poorly on this metric too: https://i.imgur.com/eYHUysQ.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/vLz5iUz.png [2]
(Note that the x-axis is "birth year.")
[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/04282...
That lady has some serious chops, but she said she had to leave the UK, as she was denied opportunities, because of her "Distinctive Northern Accent" (In the UK, the "North" is considered kind of "Redneck," like our South).
Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads.
Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
...
> An eight-year-old child was sitting on the stoop of one of the trailers. Below him a white pipe ran from his house, across the yard just a few feet away from a basketball hoop, and into a copse of pine and sweet gum trees.
> The pipe was cracked in several places and stopped just inside the copse, barely 30ft from the house, dripping ooze into a viscous pool the color of oil. Directly above the sewage pool, a separate narrow-gauge pipe ran up to the house, which turned out to be the main channel carrying drinking water to the residents.
> The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house. At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight – a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.
That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.
Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.
Don't forget who was President during the time and sold us the idea it was fixed that year.
I had no idea it wasn't all fixed until someone there told sometime in the last two years.
The bank did not care that you would be a profitable customer, they still weren't going to lend to you.
The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).
Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.
Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
Yeah, and they probably had to spend money to make that happen. Night courses at a community college aren't free. A higher minimum wage makes it easier to get your foot in the door for something better.
Trying hard not to be and using some flimsy pretext to justify it probably accounts for 3/4 of state laws that don't pertain to a) a procedural matter b) a matter with an identifiable victim, or at least that's how it looks by my unscientific observation.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct.
People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
This is only a half-truth. Complaints are only worth respecting if people hold their governments accountable. There's a reason why single-payer healthcare polls higher than either party in the US. Inflation gets attention because it affects a minority of the population that matters more.
The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...
Starting from nothing, it's easy to gain income and then double it, but most people eventually hit a wall and find that they can't improve their circumstances no matter what they do. Our society will conspire against them to keep them in their place. It will lay out traps for them to hold them back. Some of those traps, like payday loans, you might be able to avoid. For other traps, like our healthcare system, you will have to depend on luck to limit the number of times you are caught. Medical expenses are the reason most people in the US fall into bankruptcy.
Wealth inequality, and a lack of social mobility are huge problems in the US. In the "wealthiest nation on Earth" 1 out of every 8 Americans can't make enough money to feed themselves without government assistance, but even for the others it's easy to gain a false sense of comfort where you are well feed and entertained, but still live paycheck to paycheck and don't have savings to protect yourself from sudden unavoidable expenses. 'Today you are fine, but always one bad day from ruin' is not a comfortable way to live.
Americans complain because even though things can always be worse, they should also be better than they are. I hope Americans never stop trying to improve their situation and the situation of those around them.
Yes, I know what 3rd-world poverty looks like, but, in a sense health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US). Also, the morale-destroying aspect of poverty hits harder in advanced countries, because people assume you're poor because of what TFA talks about: being lazy, dumb, etc.
Poverty exists people think it ought to, that's the simple reason it exists. People think a world where some deemed unworthy have to experience crushing poverty is a more meaningful world, that's it. Certainly there is absolutely no reason that any person has to go to bed hungry, as a lot more food is produced in the world than is needed.
Do you seriously believe it's even remotely comparable? In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
I know for sure this is totally wrong, because I have lived in 3rd world countries, and I was born in one. You're just imagining stuff.
But many (most?) 3rd world countries, like Ghana where I was born, are nowhere near this level of misery.
Plenty of former 3rd world countries are middle-income now. There is just no comparison between living in Thailand vs. South Sudan, even though there might be in the 1950s.
Time to toss the expression entirely, it doesn't really describe anything concrete anymore. The world has changed.
Money and those other things may be correlated, but focusing on those things emphasizes how much money is a proxy for them.
So for example, even if you earn 100k, but many/most people are earning 500k, it cause a huge power imbalance that enables them to easily make your life miserable on a whim. It also causes society to see you as a failure, causing mental/emotional distress that further pull you into a spiral of despair.
Using this as an example to illustrate a broader point: Most Americans can't afford not to have a car. Public transit in the US is next to non-existent in many places. If you want a job, you probably need a car to drive to work every day. So you take out huge loans to pay for the cheapest car you can find: now your financial situation is precarious because you're in debt. Because you bought a bad car, you're constantly at risk of having it break down and having to pay to repair it, which is another layer of precarity.
Similarly, poor Americans do not have the latest iPhone—they have a cheap, used iPhone which could break any day, and they're extremely dependant on it. I can't speak to what life is like in the developing world, but living in poverty in the US is extremely stressful.
I live within a bike ride of a lot of places, but it would still add up to hours more a week. And for 3 months of the year there's ice and snow that are rough on the equipment.
iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
Copium for poors.
I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.
We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.
But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.
update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
Consumption tax is said to be regressive since it doesn't work on rich people since they invest, that should tell you that consumption is much more evenly distributed than wealth is.
How. How on earth is it evil if you or I have a bit more wealth than the other? Who gives a flying fuck, except... except those who seek power. Total power. You can't have peace as long as you or your preferred leaders are not in total power, and you won't let the rest of us have peace either.
What do you care about wealth distribution? Why should anyone? As long as we each can a) not be poor, b) prosper, c) live our lives in peace, none of us should care that someone else is wealthier (or less so) than us.
"But wealth inequality!!" is just moving the goal posts: so poverty has gone down and has been going down, but you can't be satisfied with that, not even if it goes to zero. No, you want something else: power -- total power.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
Saying "let's not even think about B until we've 100% sorted A" is just a way to ensure B never gets done.
I apologize. That was not what I meant.
I simply stated they should be decoupled, and approached concurrently.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?
I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
> I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
Go ahead and just talk about it, I want to hear it. This isn't so easy a problem, even on an individual level as you put it.
Yes, it's not a fun solution. It won't make you rich. But it will take you out of being dirt poor, which the article is about. One example of those kind of places is the merchant navy. You're on a ship, so you don't have to spend any money and you can't even spend it. Instead of going on shore leave like the other people, just get extra days, or work on another ship on your leave days. I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
While you're at it, you have the opportunity for a career or education. And entry level jobs are available for those who have the work ethic.
Monastic life is another such example, where you are at least provided for. And traditionally the monasteries have swallowed up millions of people who would have been dirt poor, and given them an alternative. Just like the merchant navy and the military has done the same for millions. You can arrive to these places with nothing but the clothes on your back, and start putting together your life again.
Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
So? Is the third world not included in the original article? And also, that's like saying that you can't become a farmer or a teacher, because the vast majority of farmers or teachers in the world are third world nationals getting third world wages. The merchant navy also has many ships which only hire nationally.
As per the article, we are talking about being dirt poor. In that case, in the merchant navy you get food, board, medical attention and on top of that a salary. Which may be good or very small. If you have better options, please feel free to ignore my advice. It is for those who don't have any better option, but it is always impossible among hackers to get this through. Maybe we should discuss a few hundred miles of text more about how to change the system, rather than talk about real and actionable advice?
> Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
Have you tried?
Not everyone is physically cut out for the merchant marines. This is also inconveniently ignores OP’s family.
Not everyone wants to join the military, but that feels like it’s getting somewhere… What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
They do, various and sundry, e.g. making license plates.
I'm being glib, which is probably unforgivable under the circumstances, but people do this. Sometimes intentionally -- and, granted, there are often other issues in play -- but it's heartbreaking.
But they're all ripe for abuse, and that makes them politically untenable.
As a layperson in such social matters, I'd guess the real-world abuse rate would be something like 10%. This is mathematically tolerable, and socially beneficial.
But even at 0% real-world abuse, there would be righteous opposition. And at 0% + 1 predictable example, it'd be politically toxic in most of the country.
But I've worked in places like this with people who were deaf and people who had limps, and people with a ton of other problems. And hundreds of thousands of people who have families work in the merchant navy to support them, or in other similar work places.
Sometimes (almost all the time) trying to talk about things on HN feels like having to argue that it is indeed possible to fry an egg or boil a cup of coffee...
So we’re talking about general solutions for the country at large, and solution that only works for a few means there’s still the problem of the rest of the poor to solve.
But that was why I didn't want to write about it in the first place. People here don't take kindly to solutions, when it feels so good complaining about problems.
I have to ask what you mean by incredibly difficult? These are just normal jobs, with no skill required to start.
I don't know about the US services, but some militaries have non-combat roles which have no deployment and never see combat, but offer food and board.
Where can I easily sign up for such a situation? And mind you I mean the average person signing up, not that `anyone` could sign up.
I've looked at downgrading myself in the economy and the standard reaction is that the employers at that level dont like the idea that I know whats going on or have skills and dont want to take me on as "overqualified"
You might as well say, "let them eat cake" when your argument is just to find a job. Employers arent hiring.
And there's countless more similar vacancies.
Food, board and $1500 per month. That's a life line out of absolute poverty for any person who is willing to take it.
I know that hackers hate it, because the truth is that deep down most of you have a caste mentality and think that people who are born poor should stay poor, and dependent on government handouts. All discussion about "changing the system" is just for show so you can feel good about yourself and pat each other on the back, while things remain the same.
So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour. How dare they leave the ghetto behind, when they belong there?
It is ridiculous of you think this sort of job is the solution to poverty at any amount of scale.
> So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour.
Hackers on this board are provoked when people suggest ways of taking destiny into their own hands that removes power from the tech billionaires, they are not provoked when someone finds a job
* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor
* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.
Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.
If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
1. There are solutions to organization and staying on task, that person can use, to successfully manage their lives, or
2. Those solutions actually aren't. They only work for people who would have been organized anyway.
Casting this dichotomy into a different area that I understand better helps me to see what you are saying. I think that it also gives me an idea that this is not a dichotomy. There are solutions to poverty for the individual. The individual must be aware of them, use them, and keep using them, until they are no longer poor. Then, they have to have a system to avoid returning to poverty. The sum total of this is much harder than it seems, so to many people it seems like those solutions cannot work. Sure, to a person for whom these approaches work, who has become broke and homeless, they can do it, but that is cold comfort for those who cannot escape poverty.
Thanks for the insight.
* People who have successfully clawed and scratched themselves out of poverty are almost never taken into consideration in discussions about poverty.
At most modern culture appreciates a rags-to-riches story. But rags-to-normal stories are unheard of. When was the last time you heard about people going from poverty to having just decent lives? Doesn't really pique the interest of people, perhaps.
But that's what countless people have done, they're just not considered in the perspective of poverty. At most you just see them as some everyday guy in the supermarket or on the bus.
Getting out of poverty and back on your feet again is very close to a miracle. That's how it feels for those who experience it. But hackers spit on it with contempt, because that was not the solution they would have preferred. Or that was not a solution which was applicable to every single person on earth. And in that case, I guess we should file a formal complaint also against all the saints who cured the blind but didn't cure the deaf.
There are also a tiny number (less than 1 in 1000) who have a lot of wealth but choose to live in poverty because that is freedom. If you look close you see they are the ones who have a warm coat and working heat in their tent. This is not poverty, but they try to be counted in your poverty numbers because it helps them. When you have wealth living in poverty is not that bad. (the above is a story a homeless man told me this week while I was helping out at our local food shelf. The homeless man is in poverty and I get the impression his divorce settlement is the problem and as soon as his kids are out of school he plans on getting a real job)
IMHO this is one of those areas where lots of things can be true. If you're sick or catch bad breaks then yep poverty is a grinding cycle. If you're not then the American Dream is still alive. But the "American Dream" always kinda sucked. In that you never got a ton of luxuries and it was all somewhat precarious.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
I am lucky to get out of the cycle.
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
If you have been there, you feel that one.
There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money.
I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night.
He said no. Just give me what you owe me.
He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him. Poverty is not a single static state. It’s a negative feedback loop that requires systemic change to get out of.
Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.
I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
Everything else was self-taught/learned.
There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).
And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.
I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.
Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.
What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.
I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.
Prior to this fb story, the girl’s mother sold her older 16yo sister to Chinese guy for marriage. And frequently leaves her daughter to sleep on the street, because the girl isn’t able to get home by herself.
Despite all of that, she still felt her mother loved her and just then was when she realized it? I don’t know.
Unfortunately Youre correct, but also it takes years for these kids to process these realities. They’re just isn’t one moment where it’s like “maybe my parents don’t love me” time to change my behavior.
You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.
Suburbia has little to no community these days.
It’s not a 100% thing, but I’ve noticed a strong correlation having lived in a number of suburbs and in city cores. I’ve also spent a decent amount of time in rural parts of America and I totally get what you’re saying. The average rural person likely has a much larger local support network (aka community) than the average suburbanite.
I'm not poor, but I had more of this sort of network in the city than I do now in the burbs.
They’re selling the stolen merchandise to a fence who then resells it to stores with looser procurement requirements at a discount or they box it and ship it to an Amazon fulfillment center and flip the stolen merch on Amazon.
Poor people don’t have enough cash liquidity to make stealing and selling toiletries worth it, it’s loosely organized crime.
The same sort of marker exists for diabetic test strips, people on Medicare get them for free, sell them for a discount for cash to someone who resells them for a profit.
And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".
Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
This 2+ hour documentary partly talks about it, in particular from ~28m: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1584
Calvinism. Your poor because you're bad. Interestingly enough Calvinism serves as a lot of the basis for what became Capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
It's one of the classic subjects in sociology,
I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:
> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.
> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.
> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.
> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."
Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-real-protestant-eth...
If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.
I grew up in a take of two households, with parents divorced at a young age. Father grows up in a picture perfect well-to-do family and ends up a classic party-hard drug addled dirt bag. He died last year living alone, homeless in a tent off an interstate motel town. Mother grows up in a stereotypical “dad went out for milk” family that descended into (and rose above) poverty.
While my father just kind of floated around and lived life, my mother remembered the poverty she experienced growing up, worked her ass off in university, and worked two jobs (one professional, one as a weekend cahsier) until she retired.
Nothing any of us can write here on a forum from on high will counter lived reality.
All this is to say, I agree about empathy being needed on society, poverty can still be moral failure. Pretending it can’t is just as in constructive as any other moral argument in this topic.
In divorce courts will often emotionally and monetarily abuse men. (divorce itself if you love the other party is emotional abuse, though I don't know what to do about this. Abusive men do love their wives despite the abuse). As such die of a drug overdose while living in a homeless tent is probably the only option seen left.
I'm not saying there are not lazy losers in the real world. However the picture is often more complex and few people will admit that.
I always think I'm lucky I was born with a pretty good brain.
I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.
Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."
I imagine there's an even "earlier" starting point most people don't have to begin at, which goes:
"My own circumstances are too different to truly empathize and understand, and I'm not too proud/delusional to admit it. The presence of that gap in comprehension is itself a reason for action."
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.
His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."
I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.
Right now I’m still recovering. It’s my fifth year making over 150K and I have zero to show for it because I did a poor job managing my finances. To help me (in general, but also productivity wise) I have a coach and coincidentally today exerpeinced a breakthrough. I am still afraid of being poor. Of being made fun of. And not being enough.
I’m operating out of a ‘it’s not enough’ mentality, because I don’t feel enough. It feels like a life sentence, but some hope shimmers at the end of the tunnel.
What it’s like being poor: even buying a simple football in a supermarket felt leagues out of reach. Being sent back home because a teacher told me my clothes did not cut it. And my parents just sent me back. I never thought there was a path for me to become a doctor. Or any other noble job. Growing up or being poor is not being able to see a way out. Recognising opportunity.
Forgive me my language. Super tired and on my phone.
It kind of feels it’s never enough. So it does not feel I am helped in the sense that I left my problems behind me. Just traded some problems for better (but also bigger) ones.
I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
Many people don't and never will.
There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, some of us will be short, have bad looks, be unappealing to women, etc. And some of us will not have the cognitive capacity to have a job that keeps you above water, forever.
The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out. Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability.
There's a lot of dumb rich people, too. Sometimes the wield a lot of power and are indeed bad people.
The percentage of people so dumb that they can't hold a useful job is staggeringly low.
Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society" in which case I suggest you step off your tech pedestal and look around you.
Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.
OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".
Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?
[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.
It's in the single digits of %. Multiplied by the number of people in a country, it's millions.
It's definitely not "staggeringly low".
> Unless in your mind anybody of average or below average intelligence "can't contribute to society"
Classic fallacy of "it's either 0 or 50%".
I do believe in the idea of meritocracy and competition in general to motivate people. We are far from a meritocratic society unfortunately.
The only reason people like you or me can sit on their lazy arses typing for a living is because there's a small army of people that take care of things like food and other boring tasks. The people keeping the Tesco running. The drivers delivering stuff there. The distribution centre. The farmers. The people building roads. The people maintaining roads. People maintaining water. People maintaining electricity. People maintaining gas.
All of that is just to keep the local supermarket running. I probably forgot some. It expands even more if you include other things.
A lot of this is what is generally known as "low skilled labour". But it's all needed. It's all contributing. I did this kind of work until my 20s and I definitely had a share of coworkers who were dumb, for lack of a better term. Most were not, but some were, a few to the point of being clinically handicapped. But they were all contributing.
Without them one couldn't make privileged elitist statements on internet forums being derisive of an entire class of people. Snobby comments like this is why people hate "the elite".
People don't need your compassion or help. They need a roughly fair system where working a full-time job gives you a decent standard of living. Lets start with that. And I'm not even going to start how the entire post stinks of eugenics. The only way to eliminate poverty is to genetically engineer out the people you been too dumb to exist? Really?
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
I see this said over and over without actual unbiased stats. As quick google search tells me it's not.
I don't blame you for saying it, it's just said so casually and it seems true but isn't.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
I’d like to see what information you have that’s different though.
https://www.debt.org/bankruptcy/statistics/
78% cited loss of income.
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.
If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.
Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.
Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.
One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.
Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.
But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.
That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.
Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.
Anyway, I see what you're driving at.
Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.
Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?
It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
kek-a-roonie.
What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.
Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
What isn't urban but also not rural?
I've seen disagreement over exactly where urban begins. A density of ~400 people per km², with a minimum of 1-2,000 people is a common definition, although the OECD targets a density of 1,500 people per km², with a minimum of 7,000 people, to capture all the variation throughout the nations it tracks. Regardless, in all those cases "rural" always encompasses that which falls short of what constitutes urban.
I've never heard of this alternate state you speak of.
The sub-urban regions. All the suburbs I've been in (and I'd wager nearly all of the US suburbs in existence) require you to have a vehicle to go about your day... unless you work from home and have everything delivered to you, I guess.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
Like you said, this is irrelevant. Cities aren't planned or built like that, and really haven't been... since the founding of the USA, at the very latest. (If they were, the Brits would have had a much more difficult time capturing D.C. than they did.)
This you?
> …originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall. The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
> suburb (noun):
> a: an outlying part of a city or town
> b: a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city
> c: suburbs plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town
I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
> a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and that often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families
Yes they would. Absolutely. Which means that they clearly see it as being outskirts of a city or town, not the outskirts of an urban area. You even say so yourself. It is literally written as such.
> There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
You did the same thing again: Outside a city, not outside of an urban area. Of course there are different community types within urban areas, just as there different community types within rural areas: e.g. hamlets, villages, small towns, it is even technically possible, albeit unusual, for a city to be rural! For example, Greenwood, British Columbia is both a city and rural.
Have a nice day.
But, regardless, it is quite delusional to think that I would write for anyone but myself. Nobody is paying me to be here. It can only ever be for myself. As I care, that is more than satisfactory. It makes absolutely no difference what other people have to say about it. It was never for them.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
It was always a reverse slide down.
First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.
If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.
But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.
The answer is just ... luck.
When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.
No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
What's the point of society if everyone needs to bust their ass 70+ hours a week to get by? Might as well go homestead in the woods and be a subsistence farmer and do it on your own at that point.
Just fuck having time for creative pursuits and hobbies outside of working and making someone else rich?
Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this so everyone else should too."
I think we should help poor people, but I also think that its not hard for poor people to work hard and stop being poor today. If you want my support just say you wanna help poor people, don't try to tell me that its impossible for poor people to help themselves because then I will argue against you.
Like, why equate the two opinions "you can work yourself out of poverty" and "we shouldn't help poor people", those are two entirely different kinds of opinions.
The "prosperity bible" turn that America has taken is truly saddening.
Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
I do! So does everyone I like.
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.
It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
In that case, was he really poor? His whole argument is that being poor is a permanent state. If he's not poor now, was he ever?
Bruce Wayne (Batman's public-facing identity) was imprisoned in a pit where he was the second person to ever escape.
What I find a bit ironic, is this allegory can be used to reach the opposite perspective OP is trying to dispel. The bit about the "hopefulness" doesn't only refer to the light at the opening of the pit, but also in that the "escape" mechanism was actually being facilitated by the prison. This "escape" was supposedly designed to enact the "true despair" the OP was highlighting. The element they left out, was the fact this was done by extending a "support" rope from the opening which was deliberately too short to be useful. This causes Bruce to muster his own raw physical and mental strength to make the climb without the rope and ultimately prevail through personal will-power.
I guess OP would say Bruce is actually only "broke" here and not "poor".
If there are jobs are legitimately not worth doing or paying someone to thrive while doing, why do those jobs exist? If these people aren't capable (or even willing) to do these jobs (or better jobs), why? How can we motivate or train people. (Lots of education, healthcare and especially psychotherapy are missing, I can tell you that.)
We can't solve poverty by thinking "well, some individuals might be able to solve theirs". It's a whole population, we have to solve for the whole population.
"Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?"
The rest of the article is about how you can't just choose to stop being poor. And in the middle of all this is something that boils down to, "I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff." Which is certainly his right, but it makes this whole thing feel like poverty cosplay.
I feel like this is an ugly truth, but still a truth. It's also very ugly.
For some people there's no tradeoff on how much they have to suffer to get some financial security because they already have it. Some people have to suffer a bit but quickly hit escape velocity. Some people never stop suffering. It's terrible.
I think Dave Ramsey has many annoying qualities but his "sometimes you have to act crazy to get out of it" is basically correct even if it's very, very uncomfortable IMO.
Many poor people are in difficult situations with no clear way out. They're already working the best paying job they can find, as much as they can, and doing as much as they can to advance. Learning new skills requires time and energy they don't have.
Some are poor by choice. They could put in more hours, get a second job, or learn new skills, and escape the trap. But they don't want to. This might be "lazy," or it might be "prioritizes family time," or whatever.
But as soon as you say that some people are really stuck no matter how hard they try to get out, it's taken as saying nobody can ever get out of it. And if you say that some people can get out of it and don't, it's taken as saying every poor person is just lazy.
What's curious about this post is that it seems like a pretty good insider description of being completely stuck, except the author isn't.
I have a lot of empathy for people that are struggling financially, especially with how hard things are now. I grew up in a way that most would consider to be "poor", though I mostly never felt that way.
I do well for myself now, better than I ever thought I could, and yet still I had to think very hard about the financial implications and compromises that come with choosing to have kids. Making 6 babies then complaining that you're poor, come on man, wtf? If you're going to do that, you have to do absolutely whatever you can to bring resources in for your family. That means working the "boring desk job" if it pays more, even if you prefer to be outside wiring up sprinklers.
Where is the accountability, the locus of self control? Sorry, but I don't buy any of this.
However, I do judge adults who aren't in good circumstances who also decide to bring children into their hardship. I have two kids, which is the most I felt I could provide for (time, money, attention, energy, etc).
Even the "worst" state in the USA will give tons of assistance quite high with 6 kids.
- Cancel Netflix
- Make food at home
- Stop going to Starbucks
- Fix it yourself
- Don’t upgrade your phone
They'd be better off with DVDs from the library.
The problem is the same as with dieting; we do know what we need to do but the willpower required is quite high.
And the world is engineered to make it hard, because they want to separate us from what money we do have.
You're not going to make any money in this unless you have a ton of tools. Working for someone else with the tools generally doesn't pay crap. Also in the US it is/was common to use undeclared immigrant labor for these kinds of jobs.
With that said, I have a perpetual point of confusion here, likely due to my own blindspots and something I don't want to ask in person because it's not nice: is it an issue of budgeting?
Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, etc. But theoretically, couldn't the latter person live exactly like the first one, and save $2000/yr?
Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
Where am I going wrong in my thinking here?
What does this mean, exactly? I think that's the core of my question, and something I don't understand since I lack the experience. If someone can live like this for, say, 10 years then in some sense it is meeting their expenses exactly.
I understand a situation of accumulating debt - that's a state that's not in equilibrium. But a lot of poor people can't really obtain credit, I believe.
Or they're dead.
If you save an extra $2000/year, what are you supposed to do with the money if you're always hungry, if you're always cold? I'm guessing you could buy food and clothes; you'd end up at $0, just slightly better off. If there's no safety net to rely on, you'd save to be able to face the next problem, and maybe pay it less with your health (which is a kind of invisible debt).
And that's even assuming there's some certain income you can rely on. In my case, I know that for the next few months, I'd at least get unemployment benefits if I lost my job. Not everyone get that, and if you don't, the income floor is $0 and it's way harder to budget.
Another aspect to consider is that maybe the case of a single person who would be in poverty throughout a long life is not representative of poverty. Some people get out of poverty, some fall into it, some die early from it. If we're considering a single person always starting at $0 and always ending up at $0, several years in a row, we already dismiss these nuances. I'm sure you can find such examples, someone who lived to be 80 with a constant wealth of $0, but how common are they really?
Emergency expenses are generally not the same for different people
> Or, consider the same person from one year to the next. Expenses are lumpy. They begin the year at $0 and they end the next year at $0. It seems... unbelievably coincidental, I guess?... that they happened to earn the exact amount of money they needed.
If you need $x per year and only earn $x-y per year... you're going to end up with $0 at the end of the year and not have your needs met.
> The second part is that I've heard it's expensive to be poor. You get crappy stuff that breaks and needs replacement more often. You can't afford the larger, cheaper-per-ounce item at the grocery store, so you're paying more for the smaller things. The flip side is that if that's true, it provides kind of a ramp out, since as you're able to save, you can use your money more efficiently and save more.
Saving is difficult - as mentioned before, emergency expenses come up. And it's very hard to break that mindset ("I could buy this more expensive version but I need this money for other things too")
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
This is an element of the argument for dismantling the nanny bureaucracy and instead going to UBI / cash payments.
1. It doesn't waste time, both of the gov't employee, but also of the recipient.
2. The author could buy better food, or car parts, or a bus pass, or ... with what otherwise might have been a more or less forced purchase in a single category. The flexibility returns agency and self-help behavior into the hands of the recipient.
All this needs to be tempered against the progress[1] we are making against poverty. I know it's a lot to ask the poor to be patient, but I do think there's an element of knowing that a lot of good people are trying really hard to alleviate the situation can help with the mostly mental elements of the article
> No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving.
eg: this statement is not actually a fact, it's a mindset
Overall, this is a big big testament to the overall worldview that I think is missing, just how impactful choices actually are. Some of these kinds of stories start generations ago, some of them start with the individual themselves having spent excess in the past that could have taken them through the low times (kind of "a waste not, want not" scenario). Some folks had opportunity and squandered it. Some flipped tails (failing scenario) 20 times in a row... People don't really want to help the former, but definitely the latter.
[1] - https://x.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072/photo/1
Now do chances a child makes it to their 20s over the past 20 years.
Now do suicides.
No, we are not making progress on poverty, at least not in the United States. We are simply trading one problem for another. Progress has entirely stopped since essentially the 1990s, and things have gotten much much worse in the past 5 years.
Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like
The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all
If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.
But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.
I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.
Because it was an immigration policy that selected for that Pakistani gentleman to be in your general vicinity at that moment. But it was something more akin to Math.rand() that chose the American.
If your purpose were to post the same complaint about someone drawn at random from Pakistan, you could try using Math.rand() to pick (on) one of them, too.
As others have said “Happiness = Reality - Expectations.”
For the Pakistani or Mexican man coming from poverty stricken, crime riddled, violent places in the world to America that’s a major step up in quality of life. Whereas I, an American, making $150k per year as a software engineer literally cannot afford a house within two counties of my mother because the costs of housing in those areas are so sky high that I would have to squeeze my wife and three children into a small 2/2 condo in a rough part of town. This would effectively revert me back to the standard of living my poor immigrant grandparents had when they came to America.
In any case I work remote and instead live in a reasonable home in a moderate income area instead so I’m just fine. But that right there is a large part of modern generational bitterness among the youth. Even those that on paper have made it often haven’t.
You make enough money to afford rent on a small villa in very livable parts of the United States - the richest nation on earth - as far as I an tell. How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?
They're not bitter about the situation.
They're bitter about the degradation of their situation relative to their parents' or grandparents' situations.
I have seen abject poverty growing up in India.. It is right in your face most of the times. I have friends from the other side of the street and pretty much, you live in very different realities.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.
The underlying problem not talked about in all this is how our entire financial system is built around charging you a bit more than you can bear, but not actually driving you into bankruptcy.
Then a huge percentage of your income goes to interest payments.
1) John Scalzi's "Being Poor"
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712493
2) Meg Elison's "Poor in Tech"
Ever since I was a child, that idea has been shoved down my throat. "The American Dream", "they're lazy", "they should work harder".
Spending some serious time in developing countries fixed that mentality up real quick. Being able to escape the circumstances you're born into is a rare privilege in any culture. And that aspect of life in USA seemed to end in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Imagine if they tried to do without coffee until they saved a few dollars for a can. It could take years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-575-0550...
You don't happen to have link do you? I couldn't find any obvious hits on a search engine.
It’s totally doable. Growing your own fruits and veggies is out of the question. It’s stupid -the only ones that make sense are herbs and only because when fresh they are better.
The difference is that you need $x00 to invest into the washing machine to then benefit fromt over the next decade+
It is both back-breaking and time-intensive especially if you are trying to get clean laundry not just "smells of detergent" laundry. And especially if there's someone who does manual labour in the household - getting heavy stains out effectively doubles your workload. There are many people who cannot just "try not to dirty" their clothes.
I am not trying to downplay your experience. But student poverty and poverty in the adult world without all the cushioning of a campus are very different kettles of fish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
There is a reason
See also Ted talk about best invention ever by factfulness guy
A few accumulated years of those savings would let you buy a better-quality drier or washing machine - saving you from replacing them regularly, or replacing your damaged clothes.
Pets are a choice that's fairly high up the Maslow hierarchy. Get rid of them, get into a better position, build up some reserves, and leave your family in a better place than you started.
Also raise your family so they have the same mindset - they need to leave their children in a better place than they started.
A lot of the discourse about poverty reminds me of this:
> I do occasional work for my hospital’s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way.
> My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.
> The patient freaks out. “A hundred dollars a week? There’s no way I can get that much money!”
> My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.
> The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.
> My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a “profit” of $110.
> At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he’s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn’t mean that after getting rid of that she’d have $210 to spend on medication. Sure, these fancy doctors think they’re so smart, what with their “mathematics” and their “subtracting numbers from other numbers”, but they’re not going to fool her.
> At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs – and I don’t want to know – it’s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don’t even think it’s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.
From https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/25/apologia-pro-vita-sua/
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Paragraph level upvoting needs to be a thing.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.
And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.
Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
Free objects are an easy to understand example. If you're in an expensive neighborhood you can walk down the street and really good get free stuff because people are throwing it out - like the nice 42" Samsung screen I'm using right now. In a poorer neighborhood that just doesn't happen.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
If you completely ignore cost of living and public services, then maaaybe, but still quite a stretch ;)
And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.
One thing that's missing that I have seen a fair bit is crime and scams. People who are victims of crime can get dumped into the poverty trap through no fault of their own. For a while I was living in my car because my signature was forged by and an employer decided to simply opt out of payment. I took the employer to arbitration and won but that took 2.5 years - that's obviously a structural problem when eviction happens in 30 days.
Descriptively, the author is (worthily!) conveying the real, lived experience of resource scarcity so complete that standard budgeting advice is useless, tone-deaf, etc.
But prescriptively, he goes much further than "useless": advice "doesn't work". The endless runner, The Pit, eternal poverty with "no relief in sight."
This language of inescapability creates a framework where "poor" is effectively defined as "people for whom interventions don't work." This is unfalsifiable! If someone escapes, they were never really "poor".
And if that's true, then what? We can't identify what interventions help, we can't learn from success stories, we can't reason about different causes needing different solutions. The framework meant to defend the poor actually makes it impossible to help them effectively.
The author almost certainly wants to avoid victim-blaming, which is respectable. But defining poverty as this inescapable, almost metaphysical state removes all agency from both people in poverty and those who'd want to help them.
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
If repairing auto at shop costs $1000 one should op out to spend $300 in parts and own labor.....
Paying for the wrong utility makes you remain poor as the down car repair has a very low utility to you earning that higher wage while the shop repairs your car.
It would only make high value utility sense if you did that several times and then open your own car repair shop as business owner.
Warren Buffet implies this obliquely in his writing about the choices he has made.
I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.
If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.
Sounds for me like "I could do it on my own, so nobody should have to help you".
I really hate this mentality of not helping others. Everybody gets better when everybody gets help.
I grew up lower middle class because for most of my life my parents both had full-time jobs. (By the definition, you are not "poor" in the US if you have a full-time job) However, we grew up what I would call educationally poor. My parents struggled with financial woes constantly. In my mind, we were broke due to their ineptness but they were poor as far as this writer is concerned. That said, I grew up around much more poverty than most in the US can imagine. I went to (public) school four days a week because the local district couldn't afford the fifth day. My parents had no thoughts about college or me getting ahead. There was no planning for my future. I had to entirely self-drive everything. There's obviously a lot more dark parts of this that come with being educationally poor as well but no need to elaborate.
Anyway, my point about all that is that I think it's really a mindset more than anything else. I don't think everyone can do what I did but I came from such a bad background with no hope at all and I still managed to be early eng for an IPO, FAANG, competitive university, etc.
You, presumably, worked extremely hard at things you thought would help you long term. You also, presumably, got lucky at some points. One does not diminish the other.
And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
Yes. I'm very far left. Landlords going under the guillotine wouldn't be a bad thing in my book.
> I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.
In some woke circles, a lot will say it's impossible. Also, I don't know anyone who has managed something similar as to what I've done, especially from where I grew up or similar. I hear of random stories online but random stories online come with a lot of missing details.
No, they haven't.
I grew up in circumstances that were very much "broke"/"feeling poor" and it took a long time to learn that we really weren't poor. Some of the simple actions that are mis-directed towards the truly poor (second job, DIY car/home maintenance, better financial planning) would have elevated our circumstances quite a bit. Not to the point of being rich, but definitely to less precarious circumstances. And, selfishly, I would likely not have spent my childhood feeling like an impoverished outcast from my peers.
Found the post to be Shockingly true.
"You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever. "
In India there is a concept of "Langar" at Sikh temples where you get free hygienic vegeterian food.
The weather is also a lot forgiving ( as of this year you will not die of cold or a heatstroke in summers - but this situation is changing with extremes weathers due to climate change)
I do not have a solution .. but am looking on this problem of poverty due to job losses since a long time.
If you know of some good pointers to look at pls share.
I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough.
If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary.
This is possible because we live in an era of abundance. This wasn't possible for most of history.
So to me, being poor, for those without major health issues and with the ability to work full time, is either a skills issue, or a mindset issue.
This guy has a car. I don't think we need to look further than that.
Your math might be wrong here.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, so if you have a FT job, that's $14.5K/yr, or $1200/mo.
10% of that is $1450/yr, or $120/mo.
For example working in a place where I can get some free food, 500$ for food is manageable. 2400$ rent/services (e.g. rural areas with roommates) and 300$ misc. Always walk for transportation. Yes, it's a stretch.
I wonder how much society would change if that system of student loans was reformed to offload the burden from young people, how much more growth there could be if these people weren't stuck in debt.
But mostly I'm dumb, buying things I can't afford. The six-fig jobs come and go also but in general I've had at least $75-$83K jobs aside from the couple six-fig jobs I've had. I only started to have that kind of money in 2019 to now. I spent 2023 working in a warehouse/my own fault that time I went down to the $50K range or so with side gig work added in to warehouse work.
I did pay $3K for an MRI one time, well not yet it's on a defaulted card.
Oh and loneliness eg. I spent $1.2K at a strip club one time.
It's crazy how you go up in levels though like in 2016 I was living on $20K+ a year, now it's $100K+ a year
You should save for retirement and a "rainy day". However remember you can't take it with you. If you have the above savings, an extra penny, and something to spend a penny on spend it. You can't take it with you, so you should be at 0 at the end of every month (again ignoring retirement and rainy day savings)
yeah once I get to $0 net worth I'll start saving/investing
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
it’s even been written about: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/economy/retail-fast-food-work...
Yes and the world you experienced decades ago doesn't exist anymore.
>a clerical temp worker (I could type fast) for data entry/processing
Rarely available as a job anymore in the US. People in other countries can do it for cheaper, or local people who are so thoroughly disabled that it's legal to pay them almost nothing just to give them something to do as the government pays them to survive.
"Just walk in with a firm handshake" hasn't been a thing in forever.
>A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
No they wont, because they can just tell you to deal with it or find someone else.
If you aren't willing to take exactly the hours they give you, exactly the shifts they give you, or figure out how to cover those shifts yourself, they'll just stop giving you hours and pay someone else.
Even if you have a friendly manager, corporate will fire him if he isn't pushing you hard enough. First level "managers" don't even get to manage anymore, they just follow whatever policy or some algorithms tell them they have to do.
I guess most folks are too young to have had direct contact with people who lived through it.
It caused decades of collective trauma. Almost the entire nation became devastatingly poor, overnight. Many folks that lived through it became compulsive hoarders.
And, most significantly, eats away at time which could be allocated for retraining/career-advancement.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
Start again please from the state of being homeless but assume this person has no family members, or has relatives, but they do not give a damn.
It crumbles, IMO.
What about low paying jobs? I’m sure some people on minimum wage have netflix - which automatically makes them non-poor according to TFA.
The distance Americans drive is very high. Driving 30 minutes to work might mean traveling ~45km because the infrastructure is heavily reliant on highways. The average daily travel is about 65km.
Many motorbikes aren’t legal or fast enough for the interstate.
America is just built in a way intended car infrastructure. The poorest in America have above average access to cars compared to the rest of the world as a whole, but that doesn’t make them wealthy.
Owning an operating a car in the US is more affordable than many other countries, and things like gas prices, the car industry itself, and road maintenance are heavily subsidized/supported by the government.
The US basically chose personal vehicles as the primary way to get around and structured society around it, with only a small amount of exceptions.
A functioning car in the US is not really much more money than a motorbike, especially because it’s far more common and popular. Motorbikes are more like a niche product.
If you don’t have the $300 for the own part repair on your truck, there’s no point in worrying about it. If you truck breaks it breaks, it’s never going to recover unless you think of something else. Complaining that you don’t have $300 for even the home repair doesn’t do anything to improve the situation. Better figure out a way to live if the truck breaks.
Easier said to tell people to get on with their lives.
I just feel people always say ‘I have no options’, when they eminently have tons of them. They’re just all bad ones.
“Just don’t worry”
“Just pull yourself by your bootstraps”
“Just stop being poor”
“Fixing your car” is just one example and not anywhere close to the worst imaginable one.
“Just don’t worry about skipping meals”
“Just don’t worry about that abscess”
“Just don’t worry about getting evicted”
You can spend time finding solutions, or spend time worrying, or writing blog posts saying that people don’t know what it’s like to be poor. I do plenty of spiraling myself, but I try to recognize that it’s not very productive.
Worrying or complaining about the fact that you won’t have any food tomorrow is not going to fill your belly.
I think the point it’s trying to convey is that people too often blame the poor without stepping in their shoes.
If you think that conversation isn’t “very productive” I’m not sure what planet you’re living on. Certainly not the same planet where the world’s richest country is trying to cut food assistance, add work requirements to social safety net programs, refuse to make even the most basic healthcare services universal, cut the basic healthcare services that it does provide the poorest, and generally has a cultural zeitgeist actively hostile to people in poverty.
You say that the poor person whose car broke down should just magically stop worrying and do something productive like find a solution, but don’t you think that having to do that constantly sounds a bit exhausting?
As someone who is not poor you have no need to train your brain to ignore survival alarms like that. If your car breaks down you have ample options, just throw your uber ride on a credit card, take your car to the fancy dealership that will give you a courtesy car, own a second or third car, or own a nice new car that will never strand you in the first place.
Your belly never feels hunger for too long, your body never feels excessive cold or heat, you don’t feel the pain of untreated preventable health conditions, you don’t feel your body aching from working multiple physical jobs, you don’t feel the adrenaline rush of being mugged or hearing bullets fly in your neighborhood, the police don’t work with a heavy hand because of where you live and they don’t harass you for how you look, you don’t breathe the pollution and don’t hear the noise that disproportionately impacts lower income neighborhoods, [1] you don’t have the government coming to move you and take your house because it’s cheap and convenient to do so. [2]
Those are actual physical survival feelings that you’re just telling the poor to stop worrying about.
[1] Interstate highways don’t tend to cut through/demolish established wealthy neighborhoods.
[2] Here’s a random example: the LA Dodgers stadium was built on the site of a working class neighborhood where the residents were kicked out in a fiasco that can only be described as an abuse of eminent domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chavez_Ravine
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
You might think, hooray, I fixed the engine leak! And then suddenly your wife is leaving you and taking the kids. So you rush to court to deal with that, and park in the wrong place, and your car gets impounded; getting it out costs money you don't have. In trying to deal with all that, your mental health suffers, so you're rude at work, and now your job is at risk. So then you work on being more positive at work, you finally get dual custody of the kids, and pay for the car to be returned... and then the transmission dies.
It's that, but your entire life.
(For the record I give no money to charity because I'm completely selfish; I make no assumptions about the people I don't help)
I always seemed to find the money for beer and smokes somehow though.
Now that I know what it means to be poor what should I do?
However, you need a car to get to Costco, which you don't have, so now you're looking at riding the bus there. But you just worked two back-to-back 8 hour shits, and you're a zombie so that's not happening. Besides, $20 is a stretch, you really might need that $15 to cover a few meals until your next paycheck if you can't get enough hours this month.
So, you have to pay $5 for what should be a $1 roll of TP.
Now imagine that for everything - food, rent, everything.
To quote a song, "having money is not everything, not having it is"
This part gets me. I once saw someone on Twitter who was like "I was poor, I worked a bazillion hours a week and never saw my wife and kids, just so I could put food on the table! If I could do it, anyone can!"
And one response was just like, "if you need to do that just to make ends meet, the system is obviously broken. If I'm gonna work that hard, there better be a private jet at the end of that road"
Yeah, just because one CAN kill themselves for capitalism, doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to.
The way they measured that was by having devices installed on peoples homes, that tracked TV usage, and all of it was planned around demographics as well. People would get a few bucks for having the device installed. But hey, if you wanted to measure the top 1% of income, what would you do? A few bucks meanth nothing, so it was always in terms of 'favors' and 'gifts'. A nice champagne here and there.
What about the bottom 5, 10%? Well, you can't give them any money, because that could effectively move them from one social class to another (not the US, but locally this would be moving them from Class E to Class D). So you took them to lunch.
I thought it was wild once I learned that.
It seems you have what matters man.
This author lays out the experience of being “poor” perfectly. It’s a case of doing all the right things, and still failing. It’s being constantly stuck in survival mode no matter how hard you work, because there’s always a new expense, a new hurdle, a new obstacle to reset your progress - because being poor means you can’t even afford the “save point” of insurance or redundancies or savings to fall back on.
It’s why even when I was scraping above the $200k mark at PriorCo in TC, I was championing more social services. More healthcare support, more housing assistance, more compensation. We could afford it, but shareholder returns came first. It was sickening knowing colleagues who lived in vans because despite pulling down six figure salaries, it simply wasn’t enough for rent when expenses continued to pile up for injuries or illnesses.
Those of means and privilege simply do not grasp how hard it is to exist in America without large sums of cash behind you. I was struggling on less when rent was still considered reasonable, in one of the cheapest states to live in. In the fifteen-odd years since, it’s just gotten exponentially worse, even as the stock market has exploded in value.
It’s why I never stop arguing for better, because I know how bad it can get.
I was just lucky enough to escape.
1) they are all stupid and lazy because they have absorbed liberal values
2) they are smart enough to get ahead but can't because liberal governmental policies have ruined the economy.
3) they are mentally inferior due to belonging to the wrong race.2.a) the foreigners / jews / muslims invading and pillaging our glorious, Christian home country are stealing their jobs
2.b) the socialists / communists / antifa bureaucrats are stealing their wages
This can be tailored and highly specific towards the target audience (e.g., Facebook Ads, Twitter Bots, in a small town with abandoned industry), alternatively keeping it broad and widely accessible (for Podcasts, banners, or national TV). What really matters for explaining this with impact though is the tone. It is imperative to be loud and angry, ideally you are yelling at your audience. Repeat yourself often and use the most limited vocabulary possible. You need to empathize with the anger of the poor for the clear and obvious injustice that has happened to them. Leaning into that emotion will make anyone happily abandon any remains of rationality and critical thinking, which they have experienced as being completely futile in advancing their own quality of life, or improving their family's living situation. Which is of course the reason why Conservatives would like to have as many poor people as possible amongst their constituencies, and are fighting hard to actively push more people into poverty. They know those people will be their most faithful voters.
I really cant think of why you could not get out of beeing poor, IF you have the wits and willpower. If you grind some shithole job for 6 bucks/hour you should think really hard on your choices. Where did you spend your check? Do you live in a too expensive appartment? Did you have kids without being absolutely fucking sure you can support them? Did you fuck up something like foolish debts? Do you drive a car when you can take the bus?
Im not really sure what to say, but i know what I would do if things webt south.
Maybe that's why you can't comprehend the idea of being poor in a fashion that doesn't let you escape, even working as hard as you possibly can and making all the right choices.
It usually boils down to alcohol/drugs, idiotic credit card debts and/or living way beyond your actual capability to sustain that lifestyle, and having zero savings, and possibly having children way too young.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
IMO good government (i.e. the government that I would want to live under) treats all citizens equally under the law, not because everyone is equally lucky or everyone who is poor is a terrible person or something but because it's not the government's business to do anything but enforce the law. Good government is not a caretaker and is not a bank. Communities should look after their needy members and give them a lift up, not the government. If our communities aren't tightly knit enough for that, then that's a different and IMO deeper problem.
The problem isn't that there is equality in the eyes of the law. The problem is what that means in practice.
A poor citizen has the right to use their money as they see fit. <spoiler>A poor citizen has the right to: lobby, to fund think tanks, to advertise their interests, to sway research through funding, to fund the careers of politicians, to gift resources to local police departments, to fund ballot initiatives and referendums, to acquire media outlets, to fund documentary films, to buy bots online, to fund lawsuits against the corporations, to host fundraisers with high net-worth individuals.</spoiler>
How many poor people are able to do this? Very very very tiny amounts. These rights are nearly exclusively actionable by a certain class of people.
And you may argue about the philosophical implications of 'equality of opportunity' vs 'equality of outcome'. But the thing is this so called "neutral legal framework" leads to a monopoly of power by the rich, because the law pretends both of these kinds of people are the same.
The very framework is in negation of itself because it leads power in the hands of a few.
That is the true problem of this framework. And to suggest that the alternative must be "equality of outcome" is a false dichotomy. The "neutrality of the government" is more like "a broken clock is right twice a day" kind of thing.
The founding fathers were already aware of this, in fact I think they made the state in their own interests seeing as during the founding of the US the vast majority of Americans at the time were illiterate farmers/workers and/or slaves. In a very real sense the state was made for the rich by the rich, but with lingo that pretended it was for everyone.
This is why class politics is the most important aspect of politics in our lives. We live in class society where there are fundamental differences between classes of people. This difference is not strictly and categorically based on the amount of money they have, but on HOW they fund their lives which allows them to have extra rights. Effectively we can't afford all the rights. This is the classic "All animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others".
This is a goal, not a claim.
> and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
Whose goal? Seriously. My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
>This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
Did you read the article? The vein here is that liberalism, the official ideology of capital, is what is used to engage with analyzing other peoples lives. They use the tennets of liberalism to judge what others make of themselves. They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all. People who thrive or support the status quo idealize the material conditions in the world. That reasoning gets passed onto the poor. It is essentially an ideology of the rich.
The goal of classical liberalism, obviously.
> My claim is that liberalism is contradictory because it does not contain a class analysis. It uses the language of true equality but it cannot guarantee it.
Classical liberalism understands the word "equality" to mean something different from what you think it means.
> Did you read the article?
I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant. You're saying that classical liberalism says things that it does not say. The article is also not about classical liberalism.
> They use the myth of free markets, they use the myth of equality under law, they use the myth of economic freedom, they use the myth of liberty and justice for all.
None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
>I'm referring to your analysis, so the article is irrelevant.
You didnt read it. I said that the group of ideas that are talked about in the article belong to liberalism, the philosophy. That they are derived from philosophical liberalism, the overarching philosophy of capitalist countries.
> None of these things are myths. They are, again, ideals. You commit the is-ought fallacy, blatantly and repeatedly.
I am specifically saying that these ideals cannot be attained. The philosophy is in negation of itself. That they are unworkable and cannot be practiced while there are classes within society. Moreso that they are how the rich defend their own rule, knowing that they are unworkable ideals. Its a philosophy analogous to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
I did, and it's against guidelines to make such a charge anyway.
The article is irrelevant to the point your making. There is nothing it could say, in principle, that would rescue your argument.
Because your argument is of the form "liberalism says X", but liberalism does not, in fact, say X.
Therefore, whether
> the group of ideas that are talked about in the article belong to liberalism, the philosophy.
is completely irrelevant.
> I am specifically saying
And you are incorrect in this.
Alright lets do an exercise...
Please look at any of the widely accepted tenets of liberalism. Okay? Got em? Keep them in mind for this next part...
Now I will distill my argument into one sentence for you:
I claim this article is a critique of the widespread notion that it is possible to figuratively "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", I claim that this notion is founded on the assumption that liberalism has attained its goals or that it is in progress of that.
And I promise you that if you put an ounce of effort you can see what I'm saying. In fact I'll help you more.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstrap" people are either in a financially stable position or support the status quo. They use this phrase to signify that, through a liberal lens of liberty, you are wholly responsible for your condition, and not only that, but that you should be capable of such feat BY VIRTUE OF the benefits bestowed upon you by a liberal economy/country. These benefits that they claim ARE the tenets of liberalism, such as: the right to private property, political equality, rule of law, freedom of assembly, economic freedom, etc.
Do you see? This is, fundamentally, a critique of liberalism.
Please don't reply if you don't have anything to contribute.
The truth is that humanity’s default state is one of “poverty”. It should evoke no surprise or confusion whatsoever, and yet it does.
Poverty is an entirely valid and normal state for a person to be in. There isn’t a vast shadowy conspiracy trying to keep you down; you’re just at the default state of humanity.
Humans improving their situation, now THAT is surprising and interesting, and it’s the thing we should be focusing our curiosity on. If you’re poor, emulate those who aren’t. Maybe they’re onto something.
The alternative is to blame the vast shadowy conspiracy, “capitalism”, etc, and remain poor. That’s an entirely valid mode of being. Nobody owes you anything.
I insist that the distinguishment proposed in the article is BS.
There is a small subset of clients with disabilities AND absense of insurance/government pensions, whose situation is permanent for all intents and purposes. But everyone else, one-off clients as well as regulars have ups and downs, and get through defaults or manage to repay their debt at times. Gambling and alcohol are a clear factor (drug abuse is harder to identify on someone's bank statement), but cases such as divorce from a partner with abuse problems bring relief most of the time. Children grow up or grow older and require less work or even generate income of their own.
I know it's different, when you live in a low income country and everyone around is poor and scamming people on the internet or marine piracy are the only possible access options to wealth, but that's a different topic.
All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).
"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.
Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.
You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.
On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.
Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.
I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.
TFA said something cancel Netflix as "advice for getting through being broke". This is not in the "original" article you linked.
Could be AI (I honestly don't know), but it is not a "summary".
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
They had a bigger TV than my middle class family, a premium channel package, and ordered pizza not infrequently. I get all the arguments, but when you're working 20 hours a week and living off food stamps and subsidized housing you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor. The person described in TFA as being poor is rare at best.
Some people might be inclined to try to drag you for the first half of that statement, and honestly I'm inclined to try to not judge poor people for what I usually assume is one or two small splurges that raise their moods just high enough to not slit their wrists, you know?
But I think the second half of the sentence is kinda fair. IF they are self-aware that they are choosing to divert money from more important things, it's their life and I don't really want to pass judgment. If they whine constantly that "the system" is keeping them down while continuously making "unforced" errors with their money, that's when it makes me start to roll my eyes.
I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.
For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".