My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
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.
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.
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.
Copium for poors.
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...