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Comment by thedevil | Hacker News Reader

This article seems naive, at best.

Time after time, when I've helped family members with cash, it winds up getting wasted horribly and helping them less than it hurt me to give it to them. When I help them with what they need, their situation improves.

And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Yet the article asks me to abandon reason and experience because there's some "a growing body of evidence" somewhere out there which are not provided by the article.

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Just as logical as saying that if the wheelchair-bound were better at walking, they wouldn't be in wheelchairs. Poor people are often living anxiously one emergency from total bankruptcy, eating cheap, non-nutritious foods, living in uncomfortable or dangerous housing, etc. They'd need to be more than just good with money, they'd need to be brilliant.

"Just as logical as saying that if the wheelchair-bound were better at walking, they wouldn't be in wheelchairs."

Yeah, that's a good analogy to show my point. You don't throw someone on a wheelchair on their feet and hope it goes well. Just like you don't give a poor person a wad of money and hope it goes well.

No, the analogy was intended to compare a condition (poverty) with another (paralysis), not a tool (money) with another (wheelchair).

Actually, lack of money seemed to play the same role as presence of wheelchair in the above...

Somebody should construct a theorem that states that any metaphor can be used to support any given argument.

This doesn't make sense. I pay a quarter (or more) of my total income so that government can take care of these individuals. Food, basic nutrition, basic safety, etc.

This should be a solved problem.

Most government spending benefits the middle class, not the poor. Roads for your car, schools for your kids, basic research for your devices, police to keep poor people from stealing your stuff, subsidies to keep your company profitable: the typical taxpayer gets a lot of benefit from taxes.

I get what you are saying. But really, not all of your income tax goes to take care of the poor. Sure the government wastes a lot of it on bullshit but there is no reasonable scenario where 100% of your income tax could go to help the poor.

> And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Sorry, but that is not really logical. Many people are poor simply because they don't earn enough money. There is a difference.

By "as a group" I meant most. Most poor people I know are poor because of their choices or because of the place they live. Neither of which are fixed with cash.

I would assume, then that you don't know many poor people.

Based on the relationship between poverty and ethnicity, I'd say it's related to much more than their choices.

> Most poor people I know

Which, clearly, are a representative sample of the poor people in the society at large.

> are poor because of their choices or because of the place they live. Neither of which are fixed with cash.

Since changing the place you live often is generally not free of cost, I don't see how that follows for the "place they live" group.

To the extent that the "choices" group is past rather than current choices, I don't see how that works for that group, either. (Heck, even with current choices, choices are constrained by the available options, which cash does change.)

Some poor people are just born into bad situations and stay that way. You can't extrapolate your limited experience onto all of them.

My experiences are limited but consistent. If you can provide even more evidence pointing consistently the opposite direction, I'd not only be convinced, but I'd be thankful. However, I don't think that's easy to do.

Sampling bias tends to be consistent. It is likely to be the case that, given a similar starting point, those who tend to make better decisions will tend to do better. Given that it is also likely the case that your friends and family started in a somewhat similar place, this can seem to be the effect that dominates. That is not incompatible with the notion that the bulk of poor people are not there because of a persistent habit of making bad decisions.

All the evidence points the opposite direction... in the United States, you are unlikely to escape the economic circumstances that you are born into, especially if you are born into the top or bottom quintile: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/04/us/comparing-e...

The difference is in the culture you learn. So of course if you grow up poor, you're more likely to be poor. For example, you would think payday loans are normal if that's how you grew up.

The problem with the "evidence" you're using is that it can be interpreted many ways. It's merely a correlation.

In circumstances closer to controlled experiments where I actually gave someone money, they usually wound up worse off in a couple months, not better, unless I made sure the money went towards fixing a real problem.

Of course culture plays a role, as does education level of one's parents, access to opportunity such as good health care and higher education, the role of the criminal justice system in your community, the stress of dealing with basic material needs, etc, etc. Point being the cards are stacked against you if you are born into poverty, and those who escape it are basically the exceptions that prove the rule. So if we were sane, we'd focus our attention on leveling the playing field so as to lower the barrier to entry into the middle class, and not focus attention on blaming poor people for having poor values.

I'm with you on trying to improve the odds for poor people. My argument is merely that throwing money at them won't fix their situation. I'm not just trying to blame the poor but to explain why throwing money at them won't work.

> And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

I am sorry, just this statement alone, disqualifies your whole argumentation. It is just a barroom cliche of the rich.

Sometimes cliches are cliches because they're accurate.

And who cares if you think my argument should automatically be "disqualified" because it doesn't match your politics.

> Sometimes cliches are cliches because they're accurate.

And sometimes they are cliches, because they match into politics of some people. It is always much better to have an argument, why you do better than others, than to admit, that you are lucky.

But I guess, you are the one, who knows which ones are "accurate", because you know best.

> And who cares if you think my argument should automatically be "disqualified" because it doesn't match your politics.

Right. It is better, that your politics matches the politics of the rich and mighty.

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I do help others financially, quite a bit. And actually giving someone money in a way that helps them is a lot different than talking about someone else helping out people.

And what's with the childish ad hominem? Do you think you're still in high school?

(responding to undo an accidental downvote...)

The point of basic income is to provide a baseline level of stability. There are many things that lead to poverty, but it is the inherent instability that traps people there.

When there is a monthly stipend that someone knows they can rely on no matter what happens (getting sick, losing their job, family emergency), they are suddenly capable of thinking beyond immediate needs.

Many people caught in the poverty trap know full well that they're making short term decisions that will do more harm than good in the long run, but often the better decision is beyond your means, either financially, or time-wise (because you're working 3 jobs and still falling behind on your bills and coming home completely drained and exhausted).

I wonder, do you know about countries that have done serious experiments with basic income? It seems interesting although risky.

There have been a number of experiments with basic income and similar things (I am typing this from a phone, or I would dig up links), but nothing at a national scale anywhere. I would guess the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend among the closest things currently running, though of course it's not nearly as high as BI proponents would want.

>>>And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Give poor people a reward/goal within reach and then see how they do.

I know working on long projects can be very draining because weeks can pass by and I'm still very far away from the goal of project completion.

Poor people's lives are like that. They have to jump through more hoops and exert much more discipline for their life to get better.

To a certain extent you have to give it to them to know they'd waste it horribly.

One of the things I love about basic income is that if it's set high enough it really removes moral culpability from the rest of society.

So even if your relatives can't make good decisions, you've established a moral high ground and can safely refuse and blame them going forward, whereas if you'd never given them money, it'd all be your fault still.

The real problem with it is that's it's likely a massive labor subsidy, since basic income likely kills the minimum wage.

Without counter measures, wealth tends to pool into smaller groups of ownership. If this is a reasonable observation, start reasoning from there. Your family is not representative of macroeconomics.

I don't know about the macroeconomics part. My family is pretty big.

Joking aside, the concentration of wealth is a different issue than poverty. They're only distantly related.

Also, I'm for progressive taxation schemes.

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