But there are vicious cycles involved where the mental effort of surviving day to day is too high to leave mental energy to think further ahead and make better decisions. There have been multiple studies about this - if I could remember where I'd read about them, I'd link to them.
Duke researcher Jane Costello tries to answer the question: do poor people make poor decisions, or is it that poor decisions lead to poor people. In order to answer this question, she looks at the extra money that a casino brought in to a poor native tribe.
She concludes that it was poverty that was leading to the "poor decisions":
"Ten years after the casino’s arrival, Costello’s findings showed that the younger the age at which children escaped poverty, the better their teenage mental health. Among her youngest age cohort, Costello observed a “dramatic decrease” in criminal conduct. In fact, the Cherokee children in her study were now better behaved than the control group."
Importantly, the parents didn't work less. They worked just as hard but the labor was redirected towards parenting.
"Granted, it would take a big program to eradicate poverty in the U.S. According to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations, it would cost $175 billion. But poverty is even more expensive. A 2013 study estimated the costs of child poverty at as much as $500 billion a year. Kids who grow up poor end up with two years’ less education, work 450 fewer hours per year, and run three times the risk of bad health than those raised in families that are well off."
I think the last figure I saw for military spending was 650bn a year.
Of course if you cut that by half you'd lose a lot of workers many of those with families (in one respect you could look at the military as a jobs program, what was the last time the US had more than 10% of it's total military personal actually fighting a war).
The left opposition in Germany has actually recently run a bill in Parliament to establish a "Willy Brandt peace corps" next to our army. The line of thinking is that the army is well-regarded because of their development aid during foreign missions, and especially because of their help during domestic natural desasters. If that reputation went towards a peace corps instead, we would have an easier time arguing for less military spending.
Being poor is hard. There is no flexibility to be nimble around hardships or mistakes.
Its easy to make money if you have money. But try to start a business with no backup funds.or credit line? The first time your vehicle breaks down can put your business in a death cycle.
Forget the breakdowns as an impediment to business. Most businesses have high startup costs just from taxes and fees alone. I'm trying to start a small hobby business and just getting the ball rolling I've forked over $500 in filing fees. I imagine it must be nigh on impossible if you are poor and want to start a small business. And I know people do it but they borrow heavily from friends and family.
The trick is, how do you get anyone who doesn't already think UBI is a good idea to read this line of thinking and agree with it? The 'bootstrapping' mentality is crazy-strong in the US. Too many people say "I did it, so you should be able to, also, and if not, that's your problem," without understanding the underlying reasons behind how they overcame poverty and how others get trapped in it.
"Poor Economics" is a good book about that topic, based on field studies of the authors. I found the investigation of economics at those margins very interesting. Most concepts of small business etc as people who have grown up in the West don't work anymore at those margins, because people have to pay enormous interest rates, shops can't really buy stock etc.
This article tries to shift perception from "poor people make bad decisions because they're intrinsically dumb" to "poor people make bad decisions because poverty makes them dumb." But this is also wrong; the decisions poor people make are, for the most part, sensible decisions given the circumstances they're in. Here's a list from the article:
> "The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthfully. Offer money management training and the poor are the last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire."
Borrow more: because you only need to borrow if you don't have money.
Save less: because you can only save if you have money.
Showing up at interviews in poor attire: because good attire costs money.
Eat less healthfully: because healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
Exercise less: because exercising requires the energy that poor diet and the other stresses of poverty sap away.
Writing poor job applications: because applications are judged based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.
The only genuinely questionable decisions in the list are smoking and drinking, but even these have sensible explanations that don't involve moralizing.
I think the real answer is that things have been labelled "poor decisions" not because they are strategically bad choices for the people who actually make them, but because seeing someone make them provides others with evidence that they're poor, which is stigmatized.
> Eat less healthfully: because healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
I hate this myth. It glosses over some of the most difficult choices that people in poverty have to make on a regular basis.
"Quantity has a quality all it's own." - various sources
This is anecdotal, and entirely based on my own experiences as I grew up in poverty (by Canadian standards, which is substantially better than most of the world). YMMV when evaluating this if you come from a part of the world that has more extreme cases of poverty.
Eating healthy foods is not inherently more expensive than eating unhealthy foods, but it is a risk management decision.
When you have a small budget and you have to make choices about where you will spend your money, you tend to make choices that insulate against risk. If you have a tight budget then you buy foods that provide the best economic value, not the best nutritional value. That means buying bulk, low cost food so that you can ensure that you have some food left at the end of the week, which might help reduce the amount you have to spend on food next week. This exacerbates the "healthy eating" myth because if you are buying foods that you hope last, you are disinclined to purchase foods that expire, so rather than buying fresh meat, produce, etc, you will instead purchase canned or frozen foods.
Everyone that I grew up with that has elevated themselves above their roots has a similar perspective - it's not that we could buy better food, it just didn't make sense to do so back then.
That sounds like a slightly more nuanced way of saying the same thing? I agree that a lot of the cost differential between healthy and unhealthy eating is caused by shelf-life issues rather than a difference in sticker price, but it works out the same. Eg if eating a diet with fresh foods requires making shopping trips twice as frequently as a diet with frozen foods, then that's the same as if the fuel/time/car-wear costs of the extra trips were added to the cost of the fresh stuff. And if fresh stuff will sometimes spoil, that's like if it sometimes unpredictably cost extra.
Yes, it's nuanced, because poverty and decision making is a complex issue :)
It's opportunity cost - you have the choice between eating fresh food, with the risk that it will spoil, or the choice of eating lower cost and frequently processed foods that have a longer shelf life.
There are also alot of factors to this - in a given week of budget the price difference between a processed product and fresh product might be radically different, but fresh food is almost always available throughout much of the developed world. There is another hidden cost here - when I see something I haven't tried before I will buy it and learn how to prepare it, but when I was poor, I didn't - it wasn't worth the risk that I would ruin the food, or that I wouldn't like it, and throwing away even a small amount of food was an intolerable waste. Less of a risk these days when even most people living at or below the poverty line have the ability to access the internet to learn, but in the late 90s, I was loathe to take those chances. There may be nutritionally rich, low cost options, but if people are too poor to have had regular exposure, or come from a culture unfamiliar with the foods available at reasonable prices locally, then poor eating choices will continue to be propagated.
The decision is not always a choice to eat the less healthy food over the more healthy food, it is a choice to marginally increase the level of food security you have by choosing less "healthy" options that have a longer shelf-life and offer a discount in bulk.
They smoke/drink more because they're stressed more since they have menial jobs coupled with poor financials. It's not crazy for the 47y/o waitress to feel like he's "stuck", and as a result, indulge in smaller forms of pleasure for temporary escape from the bleak reality of his life. It's for this reason that I believe unfair taxation upon cigarettes is morally corrupt. It's literally pushing them into a deeper hole.
You pull the child-card to justify discriminated taxation against the poor, but I pull the 47y/o free-willed bummed out waiter card. Shall we start unfairly taxing sugar as well, which is probably a bigger epidemic than tobacco amongst children[1]?
It reduces use, but the people stubbornly still using tobacco are likelier to be poorer. No peer-reviewed studies are required to demonstrate that it's a regressive tax, any amount of "Think of the children!" posturing notwithstanding.
I'm fine with that. Cost was a factor in helping me quit. Considering the lifetime cost of being a smoker (both in past expenditure and probable future medical expenses) I wish cigarettes had been much less affordable when my parents were puffing away during my childhood. I loathed cigarettes and yet I was in a hurry to try them and sure enough became seriously addicted to tobacco.
I don't think that's the real answer. Each of your bullet points has some truth to it, but is far from the whole story:
> you only need to borrow if you don't have money.
> you can only save if you have money.
Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment:
Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.
> healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
While an optimal diet does certainly cost more than a calorically-equivalent amount of cheetos, you can shop at walmart - buying only eggs, oatmeal, and bananas - with the probable result that your diet will be both healthier and cheaper than those of most low-income families.
> good attire costs money.
Maybe so, but anyone can get a dress shirt/jacket/slacks at a thrift store for probably less than $30 all told. It won't be high-end clothing, but will at least look professional.
> based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.
Idk about this one. What would a poor person write? Is this just a matter of whether they have good grammar? Nobody (almost nobody?) is conspiring to keep the poor stuck where they are. I don't think anyone would reject a qualified applicant just because they have no money.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that most of the chronically poor's lack of success, and their poor decision making has much more to do with the fact that their upbringing has not instilled into them (at least not deeply enough) the idea that their current behavior can affect their future wellbeing.
I hate to be "that guy" who takes exception to a tiny part of an admittedly arbitrary thought experiment, but...
If I were a financially responsible professional earning 6 figures and I'm told one day that I'll be forced to stock shelves for measly wages for the rest of my life, you bet your ass I'll hit the bottle.
Maybe poverty is somewhat like a biological niche -- guaranteed to be occupied as long as human life remains a struggle for resources with other people who may be much smarter than you. In that sense, you can hardly blame the poor for occupying that niche. It's just human beings having their best shot at life under rather difficult circumstances.
I may be wrong, but aren't you replying his quotes using a logic of a non poor human being? That's what I understood when reading your replies. The parent comment is meant to share the 'biases' that poor people have, their mindset, such as "Save less: because you can only save if you have money.".
I am. But I interpreted his comment differently from the way you did.
The article's thesis, with which I partially I agree, is that poverty is persisted, at least in part, by a poverty-induced inability to consider one's long-term welfare.
jimrandomh's comment seems (to me) to be saying that the poor are not making bad decisions, but instead behaving in an objectively logical/near-optimal way given how little money they have. See the beginning of his comment:
> This article tries to shift perception from "poor people make bad decisions because they're intrinsically dumb" to "poor people make bad decisions because poverty makes them dumb." But this is also wrong; the decisions poor people make are, for the most part, sensible decisions given the circumstances they're in.
Long-term anything is not something you think about when you are poor. Ask any poor person.
What is a "bad decision" ? It's a decision that ends poorly. But poor people are not intentionally deciding to make bad decisions. No poor person goes "Oh boy, I hope I fuck up today!" They are making risky or ill-advised decisions, which then don't pan out. They may have been aware of the consequences, or even willfully ignorant of them. But there was still a cause and effect which started with a basic need. For most of those decisions, they are acted upon by considering the most immediate solution to the need.
Long-term goals are inherently prioritized lower than short-term goals. People with less money have less resources to achieve long-term goals. General welfare is often a secondary priority to the most basic needs of paying bills and feeding and sheltering oneself or one's family. But having a drink, doing drugs, the high of gambling, getting laid, and more are all much higher in priority than even those other basic needs, because they can be achieved the quickest and easiest and provide an immediate positive emotional gain, something sorely lacking for most poor people.
So in terms of decision making, first you'll buy booze, then you'll debate between buying food for your family or paying the electric bill, then you'll think about finding a job. But to get the booze or pay the bill you might have to steal a radio. If there are no other apparent options, these are simply the only choices.
Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial habits in the first place?
Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery store?
Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.
I'm not expressing any animosity toward, or disdain for, people in poverty. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances.
I disagree with the parent comment's thesis that the poor don't make bad decisions in their lives. That doesn't mean I blame them for their poor circumstances or think that they deserve what they get.
> Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial habits in the first place?
I agree. Your rhetorical question is correct.
> Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery store?
They probably don't know how to eat healthy - just like with the financial habits. I think it must be a pretty small fraction, though, that doesn't have access to a better diet than what they eat now. Cooking need not take more than a single-digit-number of minutes.
> Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.
It's true that some people's circumstances are so poor that they cannot survive an additional one-time $30 purchase and can't even set aside $1 per day for a month despite their best efforts. If such a person interviewed for a job that needed professional garb, I would hope that they would explain their situation to the interviewer and that the interviewer would give them special consideration. Maybe they wouldn't, but this scenario seems pretty rare to me and not especially relevant to the discussion at hand.
Yea, I didn't think you were being harsh or anything. I meant ignorant literally. Certainly people in poverty make bad decisions, everyone makes bad decisions, but alot of those bad decisions are based on a lack of education that is largely out of their control.
I don't have hard numbers, but I think you are overestimating people in poverty's disposable income and access to fresh groceries.
So my intuition about your thought experiment is that said high performing individual would probably waste away quite quickly by the onset of severe depression leading to high incidence of drink, drug abuse, and possibly suicide. I don't think their savings account would be very high priority.
(This reply may come across as harsh. I don't think you're bad or dumb for your views. I think you haven't a chance to experience some of this stuff from the inside so you're making reasonable guesses about what's going on, and some of those guesses are understandably limited because you don't have direct experience with the issue.)
---
This is a pretty patronizing view. You led with an intention to get "the whole story," but you only went one step further. I'd like to take it another step or two further than that:
> you only need to borrow if you don't have money. > you can only save if you have money.
>> Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment: Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.
I very much doubt they would--that group is used to saving more, yes, but they are also used to spending more, in absolute terms, than the poor who are not saving. Old habits die hard?
But actually since it's not possible to know what the results would be, I'd like to assume you're correct about the hypothetical results, and further point out that the proclivity to borrow and not to save may be adaptive. Middle class+ people obviously do better when they save, but I'd be surprised if that were true for most of the poor.
The marginal value of each dollar is still quite high when a person makes minimum wage, so it's a big stretch to save, say, $100 per month. After a year of saving at that rate you'll have approximately $1,200.
First of all, it's worth noting that saving $100 month consistently is super unlikely just on the basis of stability of employment. At this level, jobs and hours are unpredictable. But let's say that somehow you have a unicorn job that pays you a consistently $1100 a month (don't short your hours, or fire you without notice, isn't seasonal, whatever).
Next, consider that in this unlikely scenario where you have consistent income and can live off only $1,000/mo, then at the end of the year you've saved $1,200. My daughter recently went to the dentist, her bill was around $2,000. I've gotten bills higher than $1,200 for car repair. Heaven forbid an ER visit that year--$1,200 would be a tiny fraction of that bill.
So now we're in a world where not only do we posit super unusual job stability, but also no emergencies happening or major expenses coming up (eg. never having to move). Back of the napkin, assuming the market doesn't tank at some point, someone doing this impossible thing would save about $38,000 in 30 years. That's enough for about 3 years of living expenses at their poverty level, $1,000 per month.
The reality is that they would never be able to save such an exorbitant amount.
The reality is that bills and emergencies do come up, and that's what puts poor people in the hole. And when you receive that $9,000 ER bill it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether you had that $1,200 saved or whether you bought a flat screen with it, you're still deep in debt probably forever (or whatever, the 7.5 years it takes for the debt to fall off). Except it's obviously better to be fucked while you have a flat screen, instead of identically fucked without a flat screen.
The calculus here is that you are going to end up in an unrecoverable financial hole on a regular basis no matter what you do, so when you have some cash you spend it before the system takes it from you. I'm not so sure that way of thinking is wrong for those people.
On top of all that, many assistance programs aimed at the poor penalize ...
(1) I think you have at least partially misconstrued my comment. It is not my intention even a little to dismiss the plight of the poor. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances. I certainly do not think asking them to dig themselves out on their own is the last word in a conversation about how to solve poverty.
(2) My bullet points about diet/clothing/saving/debt/etc were not intended to mean the poor have a way out and need no help. I was simply pointing out that there are ways that a more educated/energetic/encultured person can behave that will yield better outcomes. The parent comment's thesis seemed to be that nobody with those financial means could do any better, and that seems wrong to me.
(2.1) I have been convinced by some other comments plus some googling that I have overestimated the means of many of the poor. A one-child household that can only scrape together $5k per year in the USA is in dire circumstances indeed. Google suggests such households are rather more common than I thought.
(2.2) I included that thrift store bit in an attempt to cover all the parent comment's points. In actuality, I think that the fraction of jobs where the candidate's wardrobe budget is a serious factor in determining eligibility is so small that this is not worthy of in-depth discussion.
(2.3) While I can imagine situations in which your spend-all-the-money-because-ill-end-up-in-a-hole-anyway logic seems genuinely valid, I'm not sure how common they are, and I'm skeptical that anyone actually performs that particular calculus in their brains. It seems like regular thoughtless spending is probably more the norm, even when that calculus is offered as a rationalization after the fact.
(3) Who really takes signals about socioeconomic class into account when making hiring decisions? Is this different from rejecting less-educated candidates due to their inferior communication skills? Does anyone mind a secretary/cashier/barista/construction-worker/floor-manager who seems like they are poor (or even from some alien subculture with wildly different social sensibilities) as long as they are efficient and productive and communicate effectively? If so, that sounds like a pretty small-minded hiring manager to me.
(4) Thanks for your comment. I still think I mostly agree with the article's thesis, but I'm coming around to the idea that I'm not fully appreciating number of people who find themselves in economic situations where savings of any kind are nearly impossible.
(5) I realize that my point of contention with the parent post is somewhat irrelevant because, regardless of which of us is correct, the proper way to combat poverty probably does not change. We both believe (I think) that a large fraction of the population is not going to be stuck in poverty unless/until the rest of us provide them with an unconditional income substantial enough to let them turn their lives around.
I'm glad to hear we're basically in agreement. For whatever reason I still want you to understand how fucked some people are, through no fault of their own.
re: 2.2. I can trivially counterpoint. Hopefully this analogy works--maybe you've seen the show The Wire. Imagine basically any one of the kids from the ghetto, or how about Bubbles. [For reference, these characters are all poor and black.]
Let's say he got clean and didn't look literally like a crack head, but he was the same guy with the same means, now looking for a job. Recall that Bubbles is particularly charaismatic and likable [for a homeless drug addict]. Imagine what he sounds like when he talks. Imagine how he might feel and act around a "professional" white guy (think about things like body language and cultural signaling). Imagine the clothes he owns and wears daily.
As a hiring manager for a professional position, you wouldn't take his appearance into account? Even if he got himself a thrift store suit you could still "smell the poor on him." Think about how he talks--imagine considering him for a retail position at a suburban mall. Are you going to let him sell ice cream to white suburban moms? What about letting him do your taxes? Represent you in court? Maybe he somehow went to a dev bootcamp, are you going to take a chance on Bubbles, or will you give it to the bright young [white middle class] kid? (Bonus: how about hiring him to plumb your new home? Note how that one feels distinctly different from above.)
It doesn't even have to be racial. Imagine a lily white girl born and raised in a trailer park Appalachia. At 25 she decides she's tired of her generational poverty, and somehow overcomes the basically impossible barrier of moving from the boonies to a place with job prospects. No one she ever knew ever worked any jobs except menial labor, and one uncle who is a trucker, so she doesn't really know how to do it or what a resume should look like, but she does her best using google to help her. She has a kid, the dad's long gone. She can cover up all her tattoos except the one on her neck. She looks and sounds distinctly "white trash."
Are you going to hire her as your receptionist? Are you going to add her as the 3rd dental hygienist at your dental practice? What will your professional customers think of her tattoo?
re: 2.3. I think you'd be surprised how many people would explicitly use this line of reasoning, but that doesn't matter. I said it was adaptive, by which I meant there was an emergent sort of wisdom in doing what would irresponsible for a middle class person to do.
re 3, see 2.2 above. Also, I imagine that when you're thinking poor, you're thinking of someone who is like you, except delta. Poverty marks people deeply, in ways that are hard to escape. If you don't think you take this into account during hiring, then that is the water you're swimming in--it's not a fact about your virtue, but a fact about how filtering happens before you ever get to see the candidates who were privileged enough to have practical access to the system by which you hire.
I'll have to put "The Wire" on my ever-growing list of things I don't have time to watch :)
I suppose you're pretty much right about everything here. But with my eastern-connecticut goggles stuck irremovably over my eyes I still have trouble accepting that it can be so hard to get someone to hire you.
I don't think I know anyone under 60 who would object to a girl based on her having a tattoo on her neck.
While in college, working various jobs to pay my tuition, I worked alongside a variety of poor individuals, both rural "white-trashy" types and urban people of various races (It's a pretty rural area, but a bunch of people would take a 1-hour shuttle ride from Hartford to throw boxes around
at the Fed-Ex distribution hub). These people varied widely in intelligence, charisma, criminality, and work ethic. I got to know many of them and had a fairly good sense of what each was capable of. If I am ever in a position where I'm hiring a receptionist or a construction crew or a store clerk or a plumber for my own house, and I get an applicant that looks like one of those guys I used to work with, I will certainly give them a serious interview and determine as best I can whether they are both reliable and capable of doing the job.
Of course, the job will go to the most promising applicant and it doesn't seem unlikely that another candidate with a middle class upbringing would demonstrate better literacy or communication skills or critical thinking abilities (or maybe even work ethic?) and I don't deny that this places the poor at a disadvantage in a competitive job market. But it's not clear to me that this is the same thing as a systematic bias against those who "smell poor".
If you're digging ditches in the sun all day, you have zero energy to shop for hierloom tomatoes, pick some basil from your herb garden, and whip up a nice little caprese.
You're in "screw it, but I have to eat something now" mode. Your win for the evening was not telling your boss to stuff it as you were leaving the job site. KFC isn't that big of a deal by comparison.
> you have zero energy to shop for hierloom tomatoes, pick some basil from your herb garden, and whip up a nice little caprese
What are you even talking about? There are many foods that are inexpensive and healthy, the kind of foods that people have been eating for thousands of years. Rice and beans, for instance.
Honestly I don't know why I'm even replying to you; making childish straw men arguments means you have no interest in an actual discussion.
I was trying to explain that many people in poverty are short on things other than money. Like time, flexibility, creativity, and willpower.
Telling them "to cook more because rice and beans are cheap!" is missing the realities on the ground for many. Besides, you can get fat on rice an beans really easily. Again, willpower can be in short supply.
Anyway, these aren't straw-man arguments. I've been there. My family is there. But I guess it's your right to think that people haven't thought about rice and beans before.
rco8786 says that it's possible to eat cheaply and healthily, and you respond like he's talking about heirloom tomatoes and caprese salad. That is absolutely a straw man.
The whole point of me listing Rice and Beans was that it was a cheap and healthy food that poor people have heard of, and have eaten for thousands of years. So no, that's not a straw man, unlike what you said.
I grew up with the kind of income that would qualify me as poor. However, my parents' financial discipline were off the charts for someone in their position. Both of them had a decent education for their time and knew what matters vs what doesn't. We never got anything fancy - two pairs of uniforms, one nice set of clothes, one pair of shoes and pretty ugly looking backpack for the whole school year - nothing more. Absolutely no pocket money. No movies, not even extra-curricular activities - basically anything that costed money.
What we got was good healthy food, a great education - things that ended up making a difference in the long term. There were people like us all around us who we could clearly see not appreciating the value of some of the things we valued.
I would go so far to say, it's not the money. People need education. People need discipline and self-control if they are really going to pull their weight. They need help along the way but it's not always money they need.
There are levels of poverty. Once you are low enough, you are pretty much unable to afford extra time for either education or probably even proper food. Or time to cook. I personally know a few people pulling 16h of work daily to make ends meet.
What you describe as poverty would be called middle class in quite a few countries. No frills but not really poor.
Especially if you managed to always pay all bills on time.
"Granted, it would take a big program to eradicate poverty in the U.S. According to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations, it would cost $175 billion."
Is that a correct figure? It's hardly that large and there's no excuse for us not spending it to end poverty if it is.
Agreed, except that it would have to be spent by Congress. That makes me... let's say somewhat less optimistic about it being doable.
Could Congress allocate $175 billion? Sure. Could they sell it to the public that it was worth it? Maybe. Could they do it in a way that actually eradicated poverty, rather than throwing big chunks of it down the sewer? I'm not optimistic.
If they could actually do it instead of larding it down with pork, though, I'm all for it.
I know more than a few poor people, and the one thing they all have in common, is that they either consciously or by virtue of their personalities or aptitude, do not treat maximizing financial impact as the primary criterion in their decision making.
And I would venture that in general, this group of people thinks running around, chasing money 'cause the man says it's important, is a sad way to live your life.
The stress-caused-by-poverty narrative feels plausible to me but I'd like to see more evidence.
Scott Alexander recently posted this study [0] that seems to show that stress is not linked to poverty:
> socioeconomic status has no relationship to hair cortisol level
> which complicates theories about how many body systems are
> affected by “the stress of poverty” since we might expect hair cortisol
> level to be an indicator of biological stress levels.
On the other hand, a couple of years ago I lost access to my bank accounts for 2 months, and I will say it was a fairly stressful experience, and did force me into situations where I made what I would generally consider bad economic choices.
In my city, the poor school children in 8th grade are at a 3rd grade reading level. They also frequently go without food, have parents addicted to drugs, and are in or have friends who are in gangs. There are also no jobs in their neighborhoods and no transportation to areas that have jobs, that they can't get anyway, because they're in 8th grade at a 3rd grade reading level. And miraculously passing their exams every year.
Poor people do dumb things because they live in shitty situations and are trying to survive, not thrive.
You don't mainline heroin because it's a great idea. You do it because your drug addiction has progressed to the point where this is the only thing you can do. You are addicted to drugs because it's the only thing you can do to escape endless depression from how shitty your life is. And you were born into this life, so "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" seems less likely than winning the lottery (hence why poor people play the lottery).
A better question might be, why do poor US born Americans make poor decisions while poor legal immigrants (regardless of race or color) arrive with nothing and make wiser decisions. These first generation immigrant often escapes poverty within 15-20 years (albeit with very hard work). Their children are more successful then they were and far more successful financially than the US born American's children.
Knowing some of these people immigrant and US born poor the answer is quite obvious to me. No study needs to be conducted, only casual observation. Here are the key differences.
The influence of the US culture is obvious in the US born American. He expects more for less effort (entitlement), he is more easily discouraged when facing adversity, he expects someone to care for him and hand him all the tools and opportunity, his expectations are polar opposite of the immigrant (who expects nothing but what he has earned with his bare hands). He is disillusioned easily and when discouraged, drinks or abuses drugs to forget his problems. He supports liberal or socialist ideals because he feels that they will put cash into his pocket and bring down the wealthy people who "oppress" him. The US born minority (non white) thinks the cards are stacked against him, the minority immigrant sees other minority immigrants who have created wealth and aspires to replicate their success despite it's challenges.
The culture of the US born poor person comes from the media (not just news - all media) they consume and the media saturated people surrounding them. Plain and simple that is the most corrosive thing. Secondarily, the idea that these people must be helped out, they don't have to fight through adversity to succeed. This is the worst thing you can do to a man. A man must be a man and have a fighting will to survive and flourish. If you make him a dependent, you are extinguishing this flame... perhaps forever.
Some of the immigrants I know come from socialist countries and they are coming partly to escape from them. They respect the opportunity to work hard and succeed whereas the US born man does not. Americans have been given too much, they watch too many TV shows and other media which slants their view of reality and what life really is like. They have been over medicated and indoctrinated with views that are unproven and those which claim they are proven "cannot be replicated" (psychological studies).
America needs to look back to see what has worked for us when we were great, take some good things we have now that have worked and put some other things back to the way they once were.
The most revealing thing when looking at immigrants is how by the third generation, they hardly stick out from the lazy culture that their grandparents were so different from.
TLDR: America is too liberal, has too much cheap crap from China (materialism) and watches too much Garbage TV and other media and is too medicated. We are lazy. An immigrant of any color comes over here and works his ass off, escaping poverty.
Cannot find a more bigoted version of it elsewhere of the Internet.
You do know said immigrants tend to work illegally or for subhuman wages, pooling their wealth and network in local societies? They also tend to immigrate not to rural our crime-laden parts of the US.
On the other hand, US poor are nuclear and in places with few perspectives. They might be saddled with debt, a problem which the immigrants do not have. (Medical, educational or housing.)
Therefore helping them establish local communities might be the first step, but it is not enough most of the time. There have to be actual opportunities to be had.
It is easier to start with nothing in a good place, than with less than nothing in squalor.
The people you describe are not the people I am describing. What debt do poor Americans have? they can't even get credit. These immigrants I describe live in ghettos along with the US born poor but guess which ones move out and into a nicer neighborhood in ten years? Trust me, debt means nothing. We have this thing called bankruptcy. I know plenty of people who were in debt, declared bankruptcy and started over with a clean slate, they built themselves back up. You have no idea what you are talking about.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadIn other words, the article is about debunking exactly this restatement.
Duke researcher Jane Costello tries to answer the question: do poor people make poor decisions, or is it that poor decisions lead to poor people. In order to answer this question, she looks at the extra money that a casino brought in to a poor native tribe.
She concludes that it was poverty that was leading to the "poor decisions":
"Ten years after the casino’s arrival, Costello’s findings showed that the younger the age at which children escaped poverty, the better their teenage mental health. Among her youngest age cohort, Costello observed a “dramatic decrease” in criminal conduct. In fact, the Cherokee children in her study were now better behaved than the control group."
Importantly, the parents didn't work less. They worked just as hard but the labor was redirected towards parenting.
Can't really compare them more than that though.. I'm not trying to start something. Just a thought.
Of course if you cut that by half you'd lose a lot of workers many of those with families (in one respect you could look at the military as a jobs program, what was the last time the US had more than 10% of it's total military personal actually fighting a war).
Because they are poor.
Its easy to make money if you have money. But try to start a business with no backup funds.or credit line? The first time your vehicle breaks down can put your business in a death cycle.
http://www.pooreconomics.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Pove...
> "The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthfully. Offer money management training and the poor are the last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire."
Borrow more: because you only need to borrow if you don't have money.
Save less: because you can only save if you have money.
Showing up at interviews in poor attire: because good attire costs money.
Eat less healthfully: because healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
Exercise less: because exercising requires the energy that poor diet and the other stresses of poverty sap away.
Writing poor job applications: because applications are judged based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.
The only genuinely questionable decisions in the list are smoking and drinking, but even these have sensible explanations that don't involve moralizing.
I think the real answer is that things have been labelled "poor decisions" not because they are strategically bad choices for the people who actually make them, but because seeing someone make them provides others with evidence that they're poor, which is stigmatized.
I hate this myth. It glosses over some of the most difficult choices that people in poverty have to make on a regular basis.
"Quantity has a quality all it's own." - various sources
This is anecdotal, and entirely based on my own experiences as I grew up in poverty (by Canadian standards, which is substantially better than most of the world). YMMV when evaluating this if you come from a part of the world that has more extreme cases of poverty.
Eating healthy foods is not inherently more expensive than eating unhealthy foods, but it is a risk management decision.
When you have a small budget and you have to make choices about where you will spend your money, you tend to make choices that insulate against risk. If you have a tight budget then you buy foods that provide the best economic value, not the best nutritional value. That means buying bulk, low cost food so that you can ensure that you have some food left at the end of the week, which might help reduce the amount you have to spend on food next week. This exacerbates the "healthy eating" myth because if you are buying foods that you hope last, you are disinclined to purchase foods that expire, so rather than buying fresh meat, produce, etc, you will instead purchase canned or frozen foods.
Everyone that I grew up with that has elevated themselves above their roots has a similar perspective - it's not that we could buy better food, it just didn't make sense to do so back then.
Yes, it's nuanced, because poverty and decision making is a complex issue :)
It's opportunity cost - you have the choice between eating fresh food, with the risk that it will spoil, or the choice of eating lower cost and frequently processed foods that have a longer shelf life.
There are also alot of factors to this - in a given week of budget the price difference between a processed product and fresh product might be radically different, but fresh food is almost always available throughout much of the developed world. There is another hidden cost here - when I see something I haven't tried before I will buy it and learn how to prepare it, but when I was poor, I didn't - it wasn't worth the risk that I would ruin the food, or that I wouldn't like it, and throwing away even a small amount of food was an intolerable waste. Less of a risk these days when even most people living at or below the poverty line have the ability to access the internet to learn, but in the late 90s, I was loathe to take those chances. There may be nutritionally rich, low cost options, but if people are too poor to have had regular exposure, or come from a culture unfamiliar with the foods available at reasonable prices locally, then poor eating choices will continue to be propagated.
The decision is not always a choice to eat the less healthy food over the more healthy food, it is a choice to marginally increase the level of food security you have by choosing less "healthy" options that have a longer shelf-life and offer a discount in bulk.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
> you only need to borrow if you don't have money. > you can only save if you have money.
Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment: Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.
> healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
While an optimal diet does certainly cost more than a calorically-equivalent amount of cheetos, you can shop at walmart - buying only eggs, oatmeal, and bananas - with the probable result that your diet will be both healthier and cheaper than those of most low-income families.
> good attire costs money.
Maybe so, but anyone can get a dress shirt/jacket/slacks at a thrift store for probably less than $30 all told. It won't be high-end clothing, but will at least look professional.
> based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.
Idk about this one. What would a poor person write? Is this just a matter of whether they have good grammar? Nobody (almost nobody?) is conspiring to keep the poor stuck where they are. I don't think anyone would reject a qualified applicant just because they have no money.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that most of the chronically poor's lack of success, and their poor decision making has much more to do with the fact that their upbringing has not instilled into them (at least not deeply enough) the idea that their current behavior can affect their future wellbeing.
If I were a financially responsible professional earning 6 figures and I'm told one day that I'll be forced to stock shelves for measly wages for the rest of my life, you bet your ass I'll hit the bottle.
The article's thesis, with which I partially I agree, is that poverty is persisted, at least in part, by a poverty-induced inability to consider one's long-term welfare.
jimrandomh's comment seems (to me) to be saying that the poor are not making bad decisions, but instead behaving in an objectively logical/near-optimal way given how little money they have. See the beginning of his comment:
> This article tries to shift perception from "poor people make bad decisions because they're intrinsically dumb" to "poor people make bad decisions because poverty makes them dumb." But this is also wrong; the decisions poor people make are, for the most part, sensible decisions given the circumstances they're in.
What is a "bad decision" ? It's a decision that ends poorly. But poor people are not intentionally deciding to make bad decisions. No poor person goes "Oh boy, I hope I fuck up today!" They are making risky or ill-advised decisions, which then don't pan out. They may have been aware of the consequences, or even willfully ignorant of them. But there was still a cause and effect which started with a basic need. For most of those decisions, they are acted upon by considering the most immediate solution to the need.
Long-term goals are inherently prioritized lower than short-term goals. People with less money have less resources to achieve long-term goals. General welfare is often a secondary priority to the most basic needs of paying bills and feeding and sheltering oneself or one's family. But having a drink, doing drugs, the high of gambling, getting laid, and more are all much higher in priority than even those other basic needs, because they can be achieved the quickest and easiest and provide an immediate positive emotional gain, something sorely lacking for most poor people.
So in terms of decision making, first you'll buy booze, then you'll debate between buying food for your family or paying the electric bill, then you'll think about finding a job. But to get the booze or pay the bill you might have to steal a radio. If there are no other apparent options, these are simply the only choices.
Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial habits in the first place?
Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery store?
Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.
I'm not expressing any animosity toward, or disdain for, people in poverty. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances.
I disagree with the parent comment's thesis that the poor don't make bad decisions in their lives. That doesn't mean I blame them for their poor circumstances or think that they deserve what they get.
> Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial habits in the first place?
I agree. Your rhetorical question is correct.
> Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery store?
They probably don't know how to eat healthy - just like with the financial habits. I think it must be a pretty small fraction, though, that doesn't have access to a better diet than what they eat now. Cooking need not take more than a single-digit-number of minutes.
> Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.
It's true that some people's circumstances are so poor that they cannot survive an additional one-time $30 purchase and can't even set aside $1 per day for a month despite their best efforts. If such a person interviewed for a job that needed professional garb, I would hope that they would explain their situation to the interviewer and that the interviewer would give them special consideration. Maybe they wouldn't, but this scenario seems pretty rare to me and not especially relevant to the discussion at hand.
I don't have hard numbers, but I think you are overestimating people in poverty's disposable income and access to fresh groceries.
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This is a pretty patronizing view. You led with an intention to get "the whole story," but you only went one step further. I'd like to take it another step or two further than that:
> you only need to borrow if you don't have money. > you can only save if you have money.
>> Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment: Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.
I very much doubt they would--that group is used to saving more, yes, but they are also used to spending more, in absolute terms, than the poor who are not saving. Old habits die hard?
But actually since it's not possible to know what the results would be, I'd like to assume you're correct about the hypothetical results, and further point out that the proclivity to borrow and not to save may be adaptive. Middle class+ people obviously do better when they save, but I'd be surprised if that were true for most of the poor.
The marginal value of each dollar is still quite high when a person makes minimum wage, so it's a big stretch to save, say, $100 per month. After a year of saving at that rate you'll have approximately $1,200.
First of all, it's worth noting that saving $100 month consistently is super unlikely just on the basis of stability of employment. At this level, jobs and hours are unpredictable. But let's say that somehow you have a unicorn job that pays you a consistently $1100 a month (don't short your hours, or fire you without notice, isn't seasonal, whatever).
Next, consider that in this unlikely scenario where you have consistent income and can live off only $1,000/mo, then at the end of the year you've saved $1,200. My daughter recently went to the dentist, her bill was around $2,000. I've gotten bills higher than $1,200 for car repair. Heaven forbid an ER visit that year--$1,200 would be a tiny fraction of that bill.
So now we're in a world where not only do we posit super unusual job stability, but also no emergencies happening or major expenses coming up (eg. never having to move). Back of the napkin, assuming the market doesn't tank at some point, someone doing this impossible thing would save about $38,000 in 30 years. That's enough for about 3 years of living expenses at their poverty level, $1,000 per month.
The reality is that they would never be able to save such an exorbitant amount.
The reality is that bills and emergencies do come up, and that's what puts poor people in the hole. And when you receive that $9,000 ER bill it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether you had that $1,200 saved or whether you bought a flat screen with it, you're still deep in debt probably forever (or whatever, the 7.5 years it takes for the debt to fall off). Except it's obviously better to be fucked while you have a flat screen, instead of identically fucked without a flat screen.
The calculus here is that you are going to end up in an unrecoverable financial hole on a regular basis no matter what you do, so when you have some cash you spend it before the system takes it from you. I'm not so sure that way of thinking is wrong for those people.
On top of all that, many assistance programs aimed at the poor penalize ...
(1) I think you have at least partially misconstrued my comment. It is not my intention even a little to dismiss the plight of the poor. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances. I certainly do not think asking them to dig themselves out on their own is the last word in a conversation about how to solve poverty.
(2) My bullet points about diet/clothing/saving/debt/etc were not intended to mean the poor have a way out and need no help. I was simply pointing out that there are ways that a more educated/energetic/encultured person can behave that will yield better outcomes. The parent comment's thesis seemed to be that nobody with those financial means could do any better, and that seems wrong to me.
(2.1) I have been convinced by some other comments plus some googling that I have overestimated the means of many of the poor. A one-child household that can only scrape together $5k per year in the USA is in dire circumstances indeed. Google suggests such households are rather more common than I thought.
(2.2) I included that thrift store bit in an attempt to cover all the parent comment's points. In actuality, I think that the fraction of jobs where the candidate's wardrobe budget is a serious factor in determining eligibility is so small that this is not worthy of in-depth discussion.
(2.3) While I can imagine situations in which your spend-all-the-money-because-ill-end-up-in-a-hole-anyway logic seems genuinely valid, I'm not sure how common they are, and I'm skeptical that anyone actually performs that particular calculus in their brains. It seems like regular thoughtless spending is probably more the norm, even when that calculus is offered as a rationalization after the fact.
(3) Who really takes signals about socioeconomic class into account when making hiring decisions? Is this different from rejecting less-educated candidates due to their inferior communication skills? Does anyone mind a secretary/cashier/barista/construction-worker/floor-manager who seems like they are poor (or even from some alien subculture with wildly different social sensibilities) as long as they are efficient and productive and communicate effectively? If so, that sounds like a pretty small-minded hiring manager to me.
(4) Thanks for your comment. I still think I mostly agree with the article's thesis, but I'm coming around to the idea that I'm not fully appreciating number of people who find themselves in economic situations where savings of any kind are nearly impossible.
(5) I realize that my point of contention with the parent post is somewhat irrelevant because, regardless of which of us is correct, the proper way to combat poverty probably does not change. We both believe (I think) that a large fraction of the population is not going to be stuck in poverty unless/until the rest of us provide them with an unconditional income substantial enough to let them turn their lives around.
I'm glad to hear we're basically in agreement. For whatever reason I still want you to understand how fucked some people are, through no fault of their own.
re: 2.2. I can trivially counterpoint. Hopefully this analogy works--maybe you've seen the show The Wire. Imagine basically any one of the kids from the ghetto, or how about Bubbles. [For reference, these characters are all poor and black.]
Let's say he got clean and didn't look literally like a crack head, but he was the same guy with the same means, now looking for a job. Recall that Bubbles is particularly charaismatic and likable [for a homeless drug addict]. Imagine what he sounds like when he talks. Imagine how he might feel and act around a "professional" white guy (think about things like body language and cultural signaling). Imagine the clothes he owns and wears daily.
As a hiring manager for a professional position, you wouldn't take his appearance into account? Even if he got himself a thrift store suit you could still "smell the poor on him." Think about how he talks--imagine considering him for a retail position at a suburban mall. Are you going to let him sell ice cream to white suburban moms? What about letting him do your taxes? Represent you in court? Maybe he somehow went to a dev bootcamp, are you going to take a chance on Bubbles, or will you give it to the bright young [white middle class] kid? (Bonus: how about hiring him to plumb your new home? Note how that one feels distinctly different from above.)
It doesn't even have to be racial. Imagine a lily white girl born and raised in a trailer park Appalachia. At 25 she decides she's tired of her generational poverty, and somehow overcomes the basically impossible barrier of moving from the boonies to a place with job prospects. No one she ever knew ever worked any jobs except menial labor, and one uncle who is a trucker, so she doesn't really know how to do it or what a resume should look like, but she does her best using google to help her. She has a kid, the dad's long gone. She can cover up all her tattoos except the one on her neck. She looks and sounds distinctly "white trash."
Are you going to hire her as your receptionist? Are you going to add her as the 3rd dental hygienist at your dental practice? What will your professional customers think of her tattoo?
re: 2.3. I think you'd be surprised how many people would explicitly use this line of reasoning, but that doesn't matter. I said it was adaptive, by which I meant there was an emergent sort of wisdom in doing what would irresponsible for a middle class person to do.
re 3, see 2.2 above. Also, I imagine that when you're thinking poor, you're thinking of someone who is like you, except delta. Poverty marks people deeply, in ways that are hard to escape. If you don't think you take this into account during hiring, then that is the water you're swimming in--it's not a fact about your virtue, but a fact about how filtering happens before you ever get to see the candidates who were privileged enough to have practical access to the system by which you hire.
re 4: (thumbsup)
I suppose you're pretty much right about everything here. But with my eastern-connecticut goggles stuck irremovably over my eyes I still have trouble accepting that it can be so hard to get someone to hire you.
I don't think I know anyone under 60 who would object to a girl based on her having a tattoo on her neck.
While in college, working various jobs to pay my tuition, I worked alongside a variety of poor individuals, both rural "white-trashy" types and urban people of various races (It's a pretty rural area, but a bunch of people would take a 1-hour shuttle ride from Hartford to throw boxes around at the Fed-Ex distribution hub). These people varied widely in intelligence, charisma, criminality, and work ethic. I got to know many of them and had a fairly good sense of what each was capable of. If I am ever in a position where I'm hiring a receptionist or a construction crew or a store clerk or a plumber for my own house, and I get an applicant that looks like one of those guys I used to work with, I will certainly give them a serious interview and determine as best I can whether they are both reliable and capable of doing the job.
Of course, the job will go to the most promising applicant and it doesn't seem unlikely that another candidate with a middle class upbringing would demonstrate better literacy or communication skills or critical thinking abilities (or maybe even work ethic?) and I don't deny that this places the poor at a disadvantage in a competitive job market. But it's not clear to me that this is the same thing as a systematic bias against those who "smell poor".
Gah, I hate this line of thinking. Buying healthy food and preparing it at your home is enormously cheaper than eating KFC 3 meals a day.
You're in "screw it, but I have to eat something now" mode. Your win for the evening was not telling your boss to stuff it as you were leaving the job site. KFC isn't that big of a deal by comparison.
What are you even talking about? There are many foods that are inexpensive and healthy, the kind of foods that people have been eating for thousands of years. Rice and beans, for instance.
Honestly I don't know why I'm even replying to you; making childish straw men arguments means you have no interest in an actual discussion.
Telling them "to cook more because rice and beans are cheap!" is missing the realities on the ground for many. Besides, you can get fat on rice an beans really easily. Again, willpower can be in short supply.
Anyway, these aren't straw-man arguments. I've been there. My family is there. But I guess it's your right to think that people haven't thought about rice and beans before.
rco8786 says that it's possible to eat cheaply and healthily, and you respond like he's talking about heirloom tomatoes and caprese salad. That is absolutely a straw man.
What we got was good healthy food, a great education - things that ended up making a difference in the long term. There were people like us all around us who we could clearly see not appreciating the value of some of the things we valued.
I would go so far to say, it's not the money. People need education. People need discipline and self-control if they are really going to pull their weight. They need help along the way but it's not always money they need.
What you describe as poverty would be called middle class in quite a few countries. No frills but not really poor. Especially if you managed to always pay all bills on time.
Is that a correct figure? It's hardly that large and there's no excuse for us not spending it to end poverty if it is.
Could Congress allocate $175 billion? Sure. Could they sell it to the public that it was worth it? Maybe. Could they do it in a way that actually eradicated poverty, rather than throwing big chunks of it down the sewer? I'm not optimistic.
If they could actually do it instead of larding it down with pork, though, I'm all for it.
And I would venture that in general, this group of people thinks running around, chasing money 'cause the man says it's important, is a sad way to live your life.
Scott Alexander recently posted this study [0] that seems to show that stress is not linked to poverty:
On the other hand, a couple of years ago I lost access to my bank accounts for 2 months, and I will say it was a fairly stressful experience, and did force me into situations where I made what I would generally consider bad economic choices.[0] http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/24/055244
Poor people do dumb things because they live in shitty situations and are trying to survive, not thrive.
You don't mainline heroin because it's a great idea. You do it because your drug addiction has progressed to the point where this is the only thing you can do. You are addicted to drugs because it's the only thing you can do to escape endless depression from how shitty your life is. And you were born into this life, so "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" seems less likely than winning the lottery (hence why poor people play the lottery).
There are 2 ways to interpret that. Which one you choose has radical implications for the methods you might use to remedy poverty.
Knowing some of these people immigrant and US born poor the answer is quite obvious to me. No study needs to be conducted, only casual observation. Here are the key differences.
The influence of the US culture is obvious in the US born American. He expects more for less effort (entitlement), he is more easily discouraged when facing adversity, he expects someone to care for him and hand him all the tools and opportunity, his expectations are polar opposite of the immigrant (who expects nothing but what he has earned with his bare hands). He is disillusioned easily and when discouraged, drinks or abuses drugs to forget his problems. He supports liberal or socialist ideals because he feels that they will put cash into his pocket and bring down the wealthy people who "oppress" him. The US born minority (non white) thinks the cards are stacked against him, the minority immigrant sees other minority immigrants who have created wealth and aspires to replicate their success despite it's challenges.
The culture of the US born poor person comes from the media (not just news - all media) they consume and the media saturated people surrounding them. Plain and simple that is the most corrosive thing. Secondarily, the idea that these people must be helped out, they don't have to fight through adversity to succeed. This is the worst thing you can do to a man. A man must be a man and have a fighting will to survive and flourish. If you make him a dependent, you are extinguishing this flame... perhaps forever.
Some of the immigrants I know come from socialist countries and they are coming partly to escape from them. They respect the opportunity to work hard and succeed whereas the US born man does not. Americans have been given too much, they watch too many TV shows and other media which slants their view of reality and what life really is like. They have been over medicated and indoctrinated with views that are unproven and those which claim they are proven "cannot be replicated" (psychological studies).
America needs to look back to see what has worked for us when we were great, take some good things we have now that have worked and put some other things back to the way they once were.
The most revealing thing when looking at immigrants is how by the third generation, they hardly stick out from the lazy culture that their grandparents were so different from.
TLDR: America is too liberal, has too much cheap crap from China (materialism) and watches too much Garbage TV and other media and is too medicated. We are lazy. An immigrant of any color comes over here and works his ass off, escaping poverty.
You do know said immigrants tend to work illegally or for subhuman wages, pooling their wealth and network in local societies? They also tend to immigrate not to rural our crime-laden parts of the US.
On the other hand, US poor are nuclear and in places with few perspectives. They might be saddled with debt, a problem which the immigrants do not have. (Medical, educational or housing.) Therefore helping them establish local communities might be the first step, but it is not enough most of the time. There have to be actual opportunities to be had.
It is easier to start with nothing in a good place, than with less than nothing in squalor.
When was America great? When did it stop being great? How are you measuring greatness?