The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More | Hacker News Reader

The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More

washingtonpost.com

18 pointsgasull44 comments

Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycle for a reason.

It's simple things like vehicle emissions testing -- if you have money you don't think about it -- but if you drive an older car you fail emissions -- and it costs way too much to get it fixed -- so you drive without registration -- and end up in court. Worrying about things like the environment or organic food is a luxury only the gilded class an afford.

"Sophisticated" people love to shit on the big bad wal-mart empire as they happily truck into target to buy shit from the martha stewart collection-- as if there is any difference. The only difference is that poor people happen to really love wal-mart-- so you can take your sociology degree and shove it.

The poor do get exploited, but Michael Moore style class warfare isn't the answer either. The truth is that the poor exploit each other even more than the wealthy do. Poor people are poor because they don't have the social capital to get out of poverty. Most social programs do nothing to deal with social capital so they don't create long term solutions.

Those people throw indulgence money at poor people all day so they can absolve themselves of their materialism. Or they take vacations to Africa so they can post self-righteous photos on facebook that shows how socially chic they are. Is that a save darfur bumper sticker on your prius? But ask those people to spend their TIME actually building into people's lives and befriending people in a sacrificial way and you can forget it. When you're poor nobody wants to be your friend.

And by those people I mean me. I was poor, so I should know better, right? But MY time is too valuable. I would rather start a website to help the poor or raise a couple hundred bucks for some suburban 5k fun run to support some inner city whatever. This has to scale damnit! But be an actual friend? Take someone to a job interview? Have them over for dinner? Let them hang out with my cool friends? Don't bet on it, because I'm the problem.

I mostly agree, and especially with the point about the social capital. But it's more than that. In this country, education pays (which is not true in all countries) but is expensive, and the best kind of education, self-education, requires a personal discipline and a certain type of learning-loving culture with which one should really be imbued in childhood. Poor families often lack this.

This is only one point, and maybe not the most important one.

Yeah, that's spot on, it's a cultural issue. We've dumped increasing amounts of money to traditional education model to almost nil effect. But how do you change a culture that glorifies sports and celebrities and openly mocks anything related to learning?

So it's an "education" issue but not in the programmatic way that most people assume but in this broader systemic way can't be fixed with money alone.

'the devil shits on the larger pile'.

This article is nonsense.

You [a typical poor person] don't have a car to get to a supermarket...You don't have three hours to take the bus.

80% of the poor work less than half time (20 hours/week), and therefore do have 3 hours to take the bus. Also, 3/4 of the poor do have a car. The article even describes a poor person driving her car to a big box store, something it claims the poor can't do.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf

http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm

When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles.

Actually, 65% of the poor do have that luxury.

The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.

The poor pay more money to avoid hearing people informing them of their overdue bills?

...Harrison Blakeney, 67, ... uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney's money and send the payment to the phone company...Blakeney says: "I don't have time to mail it..."

What's his occupation? Blakeney [is a] a retired auto mechanic... You know those retirees, working their 80 hour weeks, don't have time to mail a letter.

"You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house...

Yet somehow, 45% of poor households do manage to own their own home.

I was once poor (grad school) and I can attest that the first point is valid. I didn't have a car, the grocery store was 3 miles away and the bus ran once a hour on weekdays and much less frequently on weekends - making it hard. 9 out of 10 times when I ran out of groceries, I ended up buying them at the gas station nearby.

I did work only 20 hours a week but gradschool easily consumed most of the remaining time (including weekends).

Graduate students are only superficially poor. They can be better called "temporarily out of money". They are not at the life's dead end, on the contrary, they invest heavily in their future lives. Very different from the poor people lacking education to get ahead as well as means to get the education. Different from those poor people who lack the capability (or habit?) of planning their life. In addition, grad students typically do not have families and kids to take care of.

I never argued any of the points you refute. I merely pointed out that when you are poor (temporarily or not) and lack a car, you do end up paying more for stuff that you have to buy nearby.

Use a bike!

I did. (I am neither a grad student nor poor any more). It wasn't very convenient carrying large milk and juice containers and large serial boxes back on the bike and Atlanta is not a very bike friendly city.

These kind of bags are very convenient:

http://www.gazelle.nl/assets/Producten/Accessoires/Fietstass...

Riding a bike instead of your car has advantages even if you're not poor: it's good for your health & good for the environment. But if it's dangerous because of the city I can see why you don't use a bike...

Thank you for that link. I have been living life with a rather short sighted perspective of late due to dayjob+startup leaving me no time to breathe. I plan to change that in the near future and a bike is part of that plan :) These bags should be helpful!

But that was a while ago, right? Don't most supermarkets deliver these days? Seems like that one, at least, should be a solved problem.

The biggest thing with groceries IMO is having the spare money to "stock up" when the prices are low (eg on sale, large sizes, etc) and then getting into the cycle of just replenishing that opportunistically, instead of constantly running out of things and buying replacements on demand.

For example, if you notice your favourite brand of washing powder is half price, don't buy one, buy ten. And then a few months later when you notice it's getting low, keep your eyes open the next few times you go to the supermarket, then buy up big again when you see a good deal. This is far better than repeatedly buying small quantities at high prices because you don't have any choice and need it that day, but it does require some spare money to start.

Riiight, I mean can't everyone just FreshDirect to their UES studio?!

Well, can't they?

For $5 I can get a load of groceries delivered to any suburb in Sydney, you don't even need a credit card. I had assumed there was something similar there. No need for the sarcasm.

Available in some places.

I've never seen a supermarket that delivered. To a degree I could order some groceries from amazon but thats it.

Really? In the UK almost every supermarket does, from Iceland at the low end of the market to Waitrose at the high end, with Sainsbury's and Tesco in the middle. Getting a big shop delivered every couple of weeks and picking up small items yourself on the way home from work is normal now.

Same in Australia, I was pretty surprised at apparently causing offence. Even my unemployed bum friends get their groceries delivered, it is the cheapest way to shop.

Yeah, Iceland for example targets the sector of the market that wants highly processed food in large quantities for a low price. The idea that home delivery is just for the so-called rich is ridiculous.

Even Waitrose, the most expensive grocery store in the UK apart from maybe Whole Foods Market, charges GBP 99/year up-front for as many deliveries of over GBP 40 as you want. If you are doing the majority of your shopping this way (incl. household supplies, alcohol etc) esp. for a family, it's pretty economical. Probably less than driving to the supermarket once a week would cost.

Yeah, and certainly much cheaper than owning a car in the first place. Being able to carry things is half the reason for having a car, and groceries would be the #1 thing most people carry, I would think. For example, I have a friend who rides a motorcycle, and that's fine for him since he gets anything big delivered.

You have more supermarket chains in the UK I think - here there's only two really big ones, but their coverage is pretty much universal. Delivery costs start at $5 and get more expensive as the time window narrows - eg, delivery sometime between 3pm-9pm is $5, between 5pm-9pm is $9, or between 7pm and 9pm is $13. We're not advanced enough to have annual "plans" yet though : D

Maybe that is a UK thing - Amazon.co.uk also does a scheme where you pay GBP 50 up-front and get a year's unlimited first-class post.

Tho' I guess that's kinda the point of the original article - if you can afford to buy into the plan in the first place, you save money.

Ha, Australia's too small to even have an Amazon! I have to order from the US and get it shipped.

Which is why it boggles the mind that we can have a comprehensive supermarket delivery service and they don't. Wonder what the reason is. I know both the UK and AU have pretty consolidated groceries markets, a limited number of big players with nationwide presence - maybe US supermarkets are just too fragmented?

I dunno, Americans are always complaining that Wal-mart is too big, they even have a presence in the UK (here they are called Asda, and they do do deliveries).

Wasn't this already discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. . . . Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. -Sam Seaborn, West Wing

Unfortunately Seaborn only got half of the picture right. The relationship between per pupil spending and SAT scores or other metrics of quality is weak to non-existent. Those like Seaborn, not unlike those currently holding office, talk a great game of increasing funding to education 'in order to compete' and fall short when it comes to accountability and then being too afraid to stand up to teachers unions (unions who absolutely abhor the idea of merit pay) when they actually get into office.

Education _is_ everything, but the way the system is currently run, the poor are often hurt the most, ironically, by their most vociferous and supposed advocates.

I agree that the quote is only half the picture. But what I remember is, "Education is the silver bullet." Not more money for education will cure all. The level of conversation on education is not nearly enough just like the amount of money. It shows a lack of care.

I don't know what the fix for education is; all I know is that education is the fix for most of the world's problems.

I think that is a step in the right direction that plenty of people have not taken.

I should have also qualified my response and thinking in saying that I think that in the US and much of the west this holds true. In developing countries, often the key barrier for the poor to becoming rich is the lack of strong property rights systems. There are numerous studies that show the education spending is largely useless or rather suboptimal relative to other interventions in developing countries (see William Easterly's books - he was an economist with the World Bank).

Unfortunately I think you're right in that most people don't think hard enough about the issue - but the problem is that most people equate caring with blindly spending money instead of delving into some of the more nuanced issues. That they do so is often because this blind spending also happens to cater to special interests like teachers unions. The research on charter and voucher schools for instance is quite promising but just look at the spending that teachers unions have done in those districts that have even considered the ideas. Again, it's the poor who are the worst off given that the wealth(ier) just send their kids to private schools.

Education means students learning, not teachers teaching. The product of the process of educating is what is inside the students' heads, not what has been said by the teachers. So this is more a question of cultural preferences than that of the money thrown this way or that way.

If you want to have a well educated population, get the parents love the process of learning and help them pass this love to their children.

No, education is most certainly NOT the silver bullet for this (at least not our current system).

There are too many kids in school, racking up absurd amounts of debt for worthless degrees right now. A backelor's degree is more-or-less worthless right now because it is so common. Currently, you'll need at least a masters degree if you want to get noticed, possibly even a PhD.

The idea of "lets churn more people through this ridiculous system! That will fix the problem! The numbers won't lie! 4 years chained to a desk will fix the problem!"

No. Please not more educations.

I'd say that bachelors degrees in traditional subjects from traditional universities retain most of their value.

In most cases, a degree from a second-tier university is unlikely to be a good investment, but that's not the only reason that people do degrees - if a grown-up (18) wants to do it anyway tho' that's got to be their choice (and their responsibility to pay for it).

Teachers themselves - specifically, teaching unions - are the biggest barrier to that happening.

Incidentally, in the UK we spend GBP 30Bn/year on defence and GBP 70Bn/year on education. It is already incredibly expensive. Literacy and numeracy rates have been falling for over a decade. More money isn't the problem. In fact, the graphs show that more money is making education worse.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things. -Stuff White People Like

I do not understand why the above quote is marked down (-2 points when I was looking at it). We may agree or disagree with certain arguments, but if an argument is well presented, or a quote from a mainstream publication, I do not see any reason to shout it down.

Now, I abhor this distinction between the white and black population, but this may be because I grew up in a European country with essentially no blacks, and have not internalized the American history of the racial relations. However, if we remove the "white" label from the above quote, the argument sounds mainstream. I do not agree with it, however, and besides, see it as illogical: the second sentence neither follows from the first sentence nor contradicts it, and how it is a "fact" is unclear to me. No studies have been mentioned, so this must be pure speculation.

While I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, the line "When you're poor you wait" (the very last line of the article) is bogus. Sorry, but lineups are a part of just about every class's life.

That's so wrong it is not even funny. People with some money can easily afford to have others take care of the drudgery of life for them, which means they have more time.

You don't have to line up because you send someone else to do it for you. It is only in very rare cases that you can't 'jump the line' if you have cash. (airports ? business class. shopping ? have the maid do it etc.).

It's true but most middle class can't afford to jump those lines (not many people I know can afford a maid..) ... so, as least, I guess only a few percentage of the richest can afford to skip the lanes...

I was really offended when I found out about things like flash passes or fast passes (http://www.sixflags.com/greatAmerica/tickets/flashpass.aspx) that let you either queue up for an additional price or just cut to the front of the line while poorer people have to wait.

There was just something about having such a class segmentation at a public, kid-oriented park that got to me.

Ermm, no, class segmentation is when you show up and say "My father is Lord so-and-so and I went to Eton" and they let you skip the queue. Or alternatively, being a member of the Party, Comrade.

Paying cash and getting what you want in a straight-up transaction is completely classless and 100% American.

There is a reason the American project is an ongoing experiment. There must be something in the human nature (hierarchical societal structure?) which leads some (many?) people to behaving like hogs. Egalitarianism requires constant work. If you stop, the experiment is over.

(Just one point where the American experiment may break.)

This whole thread is a side note, but I think it is relevant.

America wasn't founded on the concept of egalitarianism, that was an idea of the French revolution. America was founded on the idea of equality before the law (something that we are still working on).

Equal rights were (and are) a fundamental idea for the US, egalitarianism less so. However, the anti-aristocratic feelings were strong. Recall, for example, that the titles were easily abolished.

Certainly monarchist ideas were easily eliminated and equal rights were a fundamental idea, but aristocratic thought was not uncommon among the Founding Fathers. The split between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists was often worded in aristocratic language. The people were split pretty evenly between pro, anti, and indifferent to the Revolution.

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