Or not... actually I - AM - fortunate, and I've never been poor, but I can identify with many of the points in the article (many are too US-centric as someone pointed out), and U$ 8 an hour sounds like a good deal even today for me.
Of course, I live in Uruguay, South America, and mostly by choice (I was born here, but I've had my opportunities to emigrate).
It's funny, but many of the "being poor" points, would not be considered "being poor" here in Uruguay (I should write a similar article about "being poor" from the Uruguay point of view - let's say it would be much worse in several parts, a bit better on the healthcare bit.
Same thing here, Brazil ... $8 an hour is like R$16 here, most part of population here get around R$10 per hour ... i guess the truth about being poor is ...
"knowing the price of everything, but knowing the value of nothing"
Surprisingly, this is the first time this article was submitted to HN.
It's quite interesting. Some of these things happen in all developed nations, but quite a significant number of them only happen in the US. For example, it did not realize just how fucked up health care is in the US prior to reading this article.
The geographical disadvantage of the US is probably to blame for this. I don't think that there's a substantial number of rural poor in western Europe.
I don't think that there is any town in Germany that is not reachable by bus, and our inner cities have at least adequate public transit.
Apart from free health care, good public transit could turn some things in the US.
Agreed; I'm originally from the Netherlands myself, and the situation there is the same as in Germany. Over here in the US, it's a different story. If you live in a rural area (like I do) you really need a car, because there is no public transportation anywhere around.
Depends on the city and the job imo. Many cities have very bad late-night bus services (often non-existent), which is a problem if you're a janitor or fast-food worker who gets off at 2am. And many of the better-paying jobs available to the poor are in wealthy suburban areas with bad bus services as well, so with no car you're cutting out a bunch of employment options, like cleaning houses or waiting tables in upscale suburbs. Atlanta has interesting rush-hour traffic along those lines, with a large group of poor people from southern Atlanta driving to jobs in the suburban/exurban counties to the north.
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.
In the US, being poor is eating the meat, the potato chips, the bacon and the ice cream. But it might be a quart of Krasdale rather than a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
[Edit: I'm speculating that the poor get fat off a broad sampling of typical American fatty foods. I could be getting specific food items wrong. Thanks krschultz for pointing out that my comment was unclear.]
I recently found out how much money WIC pays out for "supplemental" nutrition.
$50 a MONTH. In vouchers. For only certain foods. Ice cream would definitely not be one of them. White bread is not one of them. Soda is not one of them.
Could you remind me where I claimed the poor were getting fat off WIC supplemental nutrition, rather than other sources of food?
I've edited my comment to reflect the fact that I'm only speculating about specific food items making the poor fat. But make no mistake, the poor are fat - their average BMI is 29, only one point short of obesity. If you ever live in a poor neighborhood, all you need to do is open your eyes to see that everyone has plenty to eat.
Ever seen footage from a famine in Africa? All the people appear to have huge bellies, but that is because they don't get a specific vitamin, not because they are fat.
I work in your neighborhood. Walk a few blocks off the NYU campus and you'll find plenty of people who are not exactly overeating due to their financial situation.
My state offers food stamps as well. Several of my friends have been on them, and they have more money to spend on food than they can eat. I want to say it's something like $50 per week, but I'm not positive. And I used to work at a grocery store, so I know for sure that you can buy any food (even soda) with it, as long as it's not pre-prepared (rotisserie chicken, salad bar, etc.).
Well I'm going on, my girlfriend is a consultant for the WIC program and she has both the numbers and the diet plan in front of her at this very moment, not speculation. And the requirements are federally mandated.
The only vouchers are for "Juice (without extra sugar), Milk, Cereal, Cheese, Eggs, Fruits and Vegetables, Whole Wheat Bread, Fish, Canned Vegetables, and Peanut Butter".
I wasn't disputing you... as I said, I worked in a grocery store; I know exactly what you're talking about. The poor in my state get WIC and the Ohio card. WIC is a federal supplement (for Women, Infants, and Children) to any state programs (income-based for all) that exist.
You've performed some artful misrepresentations there; the labor statistics you cite, for example, don't actually agree with your characterization, since the definition of "working" used by the BoL is at least 27 weeks in the labor force in a given year. So apparently, to you, someone who works 26 weeks (half the year) and gets laid off "doesn't work at all"...
The housing data is a similar problem. That "2 rooms per person" statistic is correct, but is the wrong statistic, since the Census Bureau defines the statistic by saying:
Rooms counted include whole rooms used for living purposes, such as bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, recreation rooms, permanently enclosed porches that are suitable for year-round use, lodger’s rooms, and other finished rooms. Also included are rooms used for offices by a person living in the unit.
Thus a four-person family in a one-bedroom house is "luxuriously" enjoying two rooms per person...
So how about you try again and get the numbers and methodology right this time?
27 weeks includes both time spent employed and time spent unemployed. If the person you describe looked for work even once, they are counted as "working poor" (having spent 1 week unemployed). Try reading the article.
A one bedroom house with 8 rooms? That works out to what, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, a home office, an enclosed porch, a recreation room, a dining room and one bedroom?
"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty."
- Mother Teresa
Specially given his propensity for excessive self-promotion. That piece might have been written to spread his name around. Just like that dipshit in Florida who gained international recognition by threatening to burn a book.
What can we do to help people who are this kind of poor? Having given a decent bit to charities in the past, I somtimes feel a bit odd not knowing where it really went, or even if it really helped anyone. Or is this just me?
give directly to local charities, like your food bank or library. you could ask around at your civic center or library for groups who don't have a lot of overhead - i personally try to only donate to groups who are very local and don't have high administration costs, e.g. run by volunteers. if you aren't bothered by church groups they also can do a lot of good. if you have children at school, as your local school if you can help out by donating books or music instruments for those who can't otherwise afford these things. you can make a difference in someone's life, believe me.
This. My better half is director at a small non-profit here that is part of an ecosystem focusing on helping people get out of this cycle.
Her non-profit is the last step in this local ecosystem, taking people who are at about 75% of the local median household income and helping them with more affordable housing while they get back on their feet (or find their feet for the first time). However, it's no free ride. They require that the participants go through financial education, require that they continue making forward progress in bettering themselves, and monitor/mentor them all along the way.
They've taken nearly destitute families and guided them to the point of sustainable, unsubsidized home ownership, requiring far less monetary assistance along the way than comparable (less effective) government programs. I'm generally jaded by the waste, fraud, and ineffectiveness that we so often hear about regarding charities, but the work that her charity has done is amazing.
It's depressing to watch her smaller, deserving organization have to fight a desperately uphill battle against huge, inefficient organizations when it comes to funding and donations. So, I strongly second the notion of finding good, local charities to donate to.
Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on. Most poor people work significantly harder than your typical white collar office worker. The only thing that separates most of the middle class from the poor is that the middle class had a solid foundation from their family on which to build their future.
I don't think minimum wage laws are a significant cause of unemployment, but there is plenty of dispute about that. Even if you're right, what good is having a job if it gives you nothing more than the ability to spin your wheels and never progress in life or provide your children with some good opportunity? It seems preferable to have a system where workers are paid well and there is higher unemployment, but also stronger safety nets as opposed to a system with lower unemployment, few safety nets, and swathes of working poor that will never make progress.
Also, there is reason to believe that higher minimum wages encourage your workforce to become better skilled in order to compete on the world market at their higher price, as is the case in Germany.
Being hired on the US minimum wage is hardly going to lift people out of poverty. One thing that really seems crazy to me is that the US minimum wage isn't even tied to inflation and went though a period of no increase from 1997 to 2006.
Almost need some kind of subsidy somewhere to give these people at least a decent standard of living.
"Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on. Most poor people work significantly harder than your typical white collar office worker. The only thing that separates most of the middle class from the poor is that the middle class had a solid foundation from their family on which to build their future."
What would stop companies from increasing the costs of their goods and services because they know minimum wage is higher (and people can now afford it)?
Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour (many states are higher). A person couldn't support a family on this, but they could find a place to live (either renting a room, cheap apartment, or sharing a bigger apartment with friends) and have enough left over for the bare-minimum.
That's not even close to the logical conclusion: the statement was "Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on", not "Higher minimum wage is always better."
Contrast that with many right wing arguments about taxation, which usually take the form "Lower/more regressive taxes are always better, and here's why" - disturbingly many of those arguments are "valid" (i.e. if you accept the arguer's claims, the conclusion follows) no matter what the starting point is, and the end result would either be zero taxes for everyone or (surprisingly common) almost 100% taxation of the lower classes and no tax on the upper; hell, if we allow for redistribution, many of the conservative arguments actually imply that the upper class should be given money by the lower class, for the good of the economy.
If your argument pushes some number in one direction but doesn't turn around for some value of that number, then there's typically a problem with the argument; here, that's not the case, the poster explicitly provided that stopping point.
That really depends on what you are willing to risk. You could volunteer\Donate directly to your local food kitchen. Then you know you have stopped someone from starving today. If you are willing and able to risk more for greater effect give a homeless person a job.
I just had a thought for a charity that could really help people who are stuck in a bad (physical) location: enough money to cover, specifically, the first and last month's rent deposit required by most apartments.
Living paycheck-to-paycheck (I've been there... although by my own fault and not for long enough to be desperate) means you can't make certain changes because they require some money up front, and those changes would help break the cycle of poverty (such as moving to take a better job).
I think this is a great idea. I know the microfinance people love to do photo ops in the third world, but there is a great need for microfinance to the poor in the first world too.
I grew up poor, not "oh, we're short on money" poor, but "people would randomly leave grocery bags with food in them during the holidays on our doorstep, of which some people stole food out of before we knew it was there" poor. It's hard to sum everything up properly in just a comment here on HN, it's not a lack of effort, or drive, or want to improve the situation. It's literally everything in the deck completely stacked against you. Get a $100 bonus? Well, that means we can pay the past due on the electric and water bill both this month instead of paying only the one that is about to get shut off. There's so much ground to make up that there is never any appearance of improvement, any and all progress results in "less behind" than you were before, but you're still behind and still have the same problems. I started my own lawn mowing business when I was fairly young (~11-12) by borrowing someone's lawn mower, dragging it from section 8 housing to middle class neighborhoods and charging $20 a lawn. I gave half of the money I made to my parents. One of the things I bought from my portion of it was an 18 speed bike. I eventually ended up getting hit by a car, and could afford to replace the rim of the wheel that got screwed up. Eventually, my parents replaced the rim and gave the bike to my brother for Christmas. Yes, they took my broken bike, spent less than $10 on a used, not-quite-right part and then gave it as a gift.
From all that I saw during this, I never once knew of a charity that provided any actual help. Around the holidays, several different charities, churches and caring folks would drop off food. But the food all had a shelf-life of less than a month, so we would eat really good for November/December and then immediately go back to how it was before. I've worked for a few charities/non-profits since dragging myself out of that. I wouldn't ever contribute a single dollar to a charity. However, my time is worth far more value (to me and to those receiving it) than a dollar could be. Volunteer regularly somewhere, like one Saturday a month. The day given up is less cost than a corresponding day's worth of salary and the benefit you can provide is larger than the dollar amount. In the past, I've provided efforts such as: plumbing/electrical/construction/maintenance at zero cost to the person receiving it (including replacement parts), child herding (three of us would take and pay for a trip to a local amusement park for the day, along the lines of a carnival in terms of rides), free tutoring (this one went a long ways, 2 kids and free "babysitting" all day, as well as providing a lot of benefit for the kids). It is much easier to find people who are in need via religious organizations or shelters.
The key takeaway is that if you give dollars, it will be spent on what they absolutely need to survive. There are no more decisions about sacrificing a little bit somewhere in order to do something "nice" such as fixing the leaking faucet because they just can't be made. By providing the things that are sacrificed, you give a glimpse that things can be better while providing for what they cannot manage to. I'm also of the opinion that it doesn't introduce a dependency on charity, which means that it would be better for them in the long term.
Somehow I managed to miss when that article came across HN, and they auto-detect mobile devices so I couldn't read it till I got home, but it is a much better fit that the typical ones people assign. It's a somewhat flawed analogy though, if you have 6 bee stings and can relieve one, there's noticeable improvement. A better description would be "Imagine you get stung 6 times per day and you have the option to treat one sting a week". The entire problem is that they're losing ground every day and any progress they make is to lose less ground per day, not actually making forward progress.
There's a program in Germany which has well-educated non-teachers teaching and tutoring pupils in low-income areas. It's quite new, but from what I've heard (from a teacher), it's going to help, mostly by showing pupils possibilities.
If you can, try engaging or tutoring pupils in low-income areas.
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.
Plus knowing that your kids are likely to ignore your guidance and follow your example, making the same mistakes you did, no matter how much they know it's a bad idea, and that it will be your influence at fault when they do. I mean, everybody deals with this, but I imagine the worse off your situation, the worse the fear is.
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
I still have this now!
Of course I was never poor for any real hardcore definition of the word, Third World-style, but I spent a good few years totally flat broke. Money coming in only occasionally covering the rent, utility payments never paid as I couldn't justify spending that much money when I couldn't afford to eat, living off dry bread and instant mash etc etc. It was an experience for sure, and one I never, ever want to repeat! It's only relatively recently that I've stopped dreading the arriving of mail or jumping when there's a knock at the door, or even keeping the curtains closed so no one can see I'm in.
But yeah, I still buy the cheap brands if they are there out of habit. I'll walk down the road to save 10p on a bottle of milk and so on.
You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I have been very, very poor. And I've made a million bucks in a short amount of time. In fact, I've flopped back and forth about as many times as anybody I know, so I know both sides of this.
I would not idolize poverty as some kind of state of nobility, and I would't spend a lot of time agonizing over it either. It is a thing that happens to you, like cancer. You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation. The last day of your life, if you were lying in a ditch somewhere, you can still choose how to confront the end of your existence. These choices are all we own. The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself. It is extremely possible to dwell on all the bad things in life and despair.
If you are poor and reading this, whatever you do, please don't despair. Make some different choices. The only way you're not making a difference in the world is if you've decided that you're not. Don't let others -- no matter how well meaning -- give that to you.
Me too, man. That's a very compassionate and honest comment you just wrote. I tend to be shorter and less patient with people who self-pity, and especially people who come from more who treat poor people like helpless children. But I should be friendlier, more compassionate, less short tempered, more steadfastly guiding. Very nice comment by you - you managed to be patient and kind while still being strong and emphasizing responsibility and choice. I should emulate this, this was a great comment.
How have you made a million bucks in a short amount of time?
I agree there are always options, the problem is knowing them. For example, I suppose at any time there is a stock I could buy for little money that would make me a millionaire over night. The problem is I don't know which one.
Of course other options are maybe simpler to judge than stock prospects, but the general problem still holds. In fact, if markets are efficient, wouldn't it imply that choosing anything in life is as difficult as picking the right stocks? Because making a choice (on actions) is an economical decision, hence it is subject to the efficient markets theorem.
If you have contact information I'll email you and we'll talk. I don't think it's relevant to this conversation and I'm not comfortable talking personal finances on a public board.
> You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I'm not sure. I've never been poor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but being poor is not necessarily about choice. Certainly I can start off rich, and make bad decisions. Perhaps that's my fault, perhaps I got unlucky. But if you start off in poverty, it's not easy, as I understand, to get yourself out of poverty. If you had a crap education, and a rough home life, you probably didn't leave school with good grades, so you can't get a decent job etc etc. There's a whole life-defining set of knock-on effects. And if you're trapped in debt, struggling to pay the rent and keep yourself warm, how easy is it to get out of that? If an opportunity does come along, will you have the cash to leverage it (think train ride to job interview).
I don't know how you got out of your fix, I'd be really interested to know.
Let's be real though -- sometimes "shit happens." I'm not saying the majority of poor people are pure victims of circumstance, but there is also significant evidence that being poor and dealing with those struggles is permanently damaging to the human psyche. One has to look no further than an abused animal to see that this emotional baggage is a very deep part of the mind. It takes much longer to undo the damage than it does to inflict it.
You make a good point that poverty isn't something we should obsess over or try to make ourselves feel guilty about. If we are successful, we should feel good about that and have a healthy sense of empathy towards those that are less fortunate.
The key question, then, is whether you were _born and raised_ poor, or did you become poor in your later life. There is a ingrained mental barrier of hopelessness being born into poverty, especially in America where the cycle of poverty consumes communities and perpetuates all manner of things that are easily contested by people on the outside looking in, but is palpable to those trapped within it.
The difference, interestingly enough, can be found in a line in the song "Common People" by the English band Pulp, which follows the story of a rich girl who "slums it" with the poor narrator:
"But still you'll never get it right
cos when you're laid in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall
if you just called your Dad, he could stop it all
You'll never live like common people"
I was born and raised poor. Like, picking cockroaches out of my cereal box poor. Like, magic block of cheese appearing on the doorstep poor. Like qualifying for free lunch at school poor. Like pink bicycle with sissy bar bought from the thrift shop and handed down from eldest daughter to two youngest sons poor (I broke the cycle of shame with black electrical and silver duct tape).
I never blamed my parents; they were immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime with nothing but a suitcase of hastily gathered clothes, papers, and photos. But, to say it's "just a thing that happens to you, like cancer" doesn't really speak to how stifling poverty can truly be.
My family pulled themselves out of the cycle, but millions don't. MOST don't. Getting out has less to do with "using your feet" and more like pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset that they can't succeed even if they tried their damndest. It's not only cultural, it's systemic.
"The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself.
Not always the case. My wife's family came to this country in 1978. Her father's job for the first five years was to mop the floors and clean toilets at schools, for which he was (legally) paid less than minimum wage because of his immigrant status. Then, the church that promised the family free admittance to their school in exchange for Dad's reduced salary rescinded it upon his offer to take ESL classes by day and cleaning the schools by night. So, he pulled them from that school and into public school, which, because of redistricting and rezoning, was among the poorest and most dangerous in their state. I guess it is about choices, but don't think there aren't people out there who disincentivize you from making them.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that some people couldn't eat at the same counter equally as others. I mean, could you even make a clear-headed choice in that scenario?
Choices to pull oneself up from a cycle of poverty is as risky as entrepreneurship, perhaps even more so. If you fail at business, you have your firm footing of educational background and network of employees, peers, investors, and family to watch over you and give support. If you fail at pulling yourself from the ghetto, the next stop could be homelessness and the soup kitchen. And, if you have a family, they'll suffer doubly so.
Very well put. I lived a similar childhood, as did my 4 siblings, and its shocking that I am one of 2 to see my way out of the cloud of hopelessness. I would say its because of a connection to the hope in art and literature, in my case, that allowed me to see through the cloud, while sadly most of my siblings are still in the cycle.
Its sad that I am seen as almost a hero in my own neighborhood for owning my own business. I have tried to help everyone I know out of this thinking, but its truly difficult when you tell a person who has had nothing all of their life how easily it is to change that situation, and they see it as a wild fantasy.
I think you misunderstood, however. Nothing is cut and dry. Did I say it was? When I say that you own your choices, I am not promising some kind of magic future if you just get Positive Mental Attitude. This is not a Tony Robbins seminar, and I am not trying to just throw out slogans. I believe most of your reply was based on this premise, and that was not the intent of my comment at all. I am also not trying to get into a "who's the poorest" contest. There are lots of ways these conversations can go off the rails.
As an example, and to specifically counter this idea of quick-fixes, I used the scenario of the person dying from cancer in the ditch. Will proper choices make them any less dead in a day's time? I seriously doubt it, and that's completely not the point.
Any life in any situation can be celebrated and you can use your mind to make choices about your attitudes. People in concentration camps awaiting death can be cheerful. Perhaps you would stop by the ditch an lecture the dying person on the futility of it all, how you knew many people who also died this way, and how painful it was. Perhaps you would go on about the pointlessness of action, and how tens of millions are in the same place and we must do something to begin " pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset" About how few ever make it out.
I would not do this. In fact, I would go so far as to say that those who do this to someone are not their friend.
"Perhaps you would stop by the ditch an lecture the dying person on the futility of it all, how you knew many people who also died this way, and how painful it was"
I happily pay my taxes, try to vote with my conscience for those engaged in healthcare reform, and contribute freely to causes to help prevent people dying of cancer in a ditch. It's not self-righteousness or soliciting thanks from poor, sick people or anything else that drives me to do that; it's my belief that we're more than just the successes we've made in this life -- the actions we've managed to perform to get a positive result. There is community outside of the self.
Sometimes people are frozen into a rut because they've never seen what it's like at the top (except for watching those that succeed in nearly impossible scenarios, like sports athletes or heiresses-turned-celebrities), and they likely never will. So, platitudes that "there is a there there" is cold comfort for them. Working hard and still not being able to pass the "first-month rent + last-month rent + security deposit + credit/background check" gauntlet put forth for anyone wanting to break that cycle is oppressive to the psyche.
And, before anyone in this thread ever decides to veer off into blaming "degenerate cultures", I'll cut it off at the pass and say there is about a nickel's worth of difference between being poor in W. Virginia and being poor in Harlem, NYC. It's the same down, with very little upside (aside from working for the mines or for the state, respectively). Makes the sentiment "been down so long, it looks like up to me" even more resonant.
I'm not trying to argue, but I believe you don't understand.
My point was that you seem very happy with explaining the systemic reasons for problems, even being very proud of your progressive social attitudes and willingness to pay taxes, but none of that money, explanation, or enlightenment does the actual poor one bit of lasting good. They deal with despair as a primary obstacle. Explaining sociology to them and the systemic nature of poverty does not help them despair less. In fact, and this is critical, for many it may have the effect of making their lives substantially worse. There's a very fine line between explaining a complex problem that you don't currently have the solution to and telling people their life is pointless. In fact they can look and sound like the same thing to an outside observer.
I have no qualm with you -- the things you have said are most likely true -- but there is a difference in talking about a thing from an external clinical standpoint and living the thing, as you know so well.
As a sidebar, why would you even mention that you weren't angry with your parents? It seemed such an odd thing to say. Why would anyone think of being angry with their parents for something like wealth?
I'm done here. Sorry to take the thread so far down. Just sounded like we were talking past each other. Thanks again for the conversation.
"none of that money, explanation, or enlightenment does the actual poor one bit of lasting good."
Tell that to Joe the Plumber, who went from growing up on welfare to being the everyman who just wants to run his own plumbing business if it weren't for a then-Presidential candidate taking his money. Ditto Sarah Palin and Craig T. Nelson (who once famously said on the Glenn Beck show, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone help me out? No!")
I figured you were a "supply-side" kinda guy, so we'll truly never see things eye-to-eye. Fair enough.
Just know that poor people actually _do_ want to know why they're poor, as that kind of sets expectations, pacing, and gives them some wiggle room to strategize solutions to their problem. State support helps them with essentials, education helps ameliorate their thinking, and charitable causes and people give them the helping hand to see through the hardship.
"There's a very fine line between explaining a complex problem that you don't currently have the solution to and telling people their life is pointless."
That's why you give them cold facts and then real solutions based on what you and others have experienced. If you don't want to talk publicly about success, you're essentially telling them, "I'm a millionaire and so can you!" and then leaving. In other words, show don't tell.
"Why would anyone think of being angry with their parents for something like wealth?"
I would be positively _ecstatic_ if I were born into a wealthy family. It would bring no end of awesome, warm feelings. I will never know what that feeling is like, unfortunately, as they were the poorest of immigrants. I was just implying that I didn't begrudge them being poor, as I still had a decent childhood, even in the ghetto.
Yeah I think there is a deep infection here, but it has nothing to do with poverty. It begins with the idea that if you take social assistance then social assistance must be a good thing. Or that somehow you must support it. As you are demonstrating by your words, this isn't any good at all. For Joe, Sarah, you, or anybody else. This same logic holds that if you don't send your kids into the military, you can't support a war. One supposes that everybody must volunteer at the local fire station or go without emergency support, or that those who took a pencil in second grade must somehow support armed robbery as a way of life. Give a man a fish, and he must support government sanctioned fish distribution for his entire life. It's the one-size-fits-all, if-you-were-touched-by-it-you-must-endorse-it thinking. Not good. Not good for anybody. Let's move past such rhetorical nonsense.
Here's the thing: it's one thing to explain something that you understand and know how to fix. It's quite another to simply cite statistics and general correlations. There are a lot of folks who think that positive mental attitude can lift you out of poverty -- I am one of them. And there are folks that think it is mostly luck. (I also think luck has quite a bit to do with it as well) But I can guarantee you that anybody who thinks that life is pointless will never make it. I also observe that after trillions spent on LBJ's War on Poverty (one hopes it did not involve shooting poor people) we are no further along than when we started. So for all the bluster, we do not have the answer. We have a lot of complex ideas and theories, but we have no answer.
We do not know how to lift people out of poverty. We DO know that hopelessness and despair will prevent folks from succeeding. You can either sit around and dress up correlation as "giving them cold facts" or you can help with attitudes. That's just what every poor person with a poor education needs -- some rich college guy with a $50 vocabulary going on and on about how the system is against them and how they'll never make it.
When I was poor, I knew people like this. Oddly enough, many of them were college educated. It was always pointless, the system was always corrupt, the rich guys always got richer and the poor guys always got the shaft. It's mental disease masquerading as wisdom. Guys who felt that way are either still there, dead, or in prison. You can be in a hopeless situation and still have joy and hope. Unless you listen to some people.
Like I said, you sound more part of the problem than the solution.
You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation.
Let's say there's been a rash of home invasions in a town, a criminal gang ripping people off, holding them at gun point, that sort of thing. Would you say that society shouldn't increase police protection because this is ultimately about the victims making good choices? What if the victims complain that the criminals need to brought to justice? Maybe the victims should be dusting for fingerprints, collecting evidence and investigating leads themselves, trying to recover their property themselves. If they can't, this just shows that they lack good morals and strong character traits like hard work and determination.
This is wrong because it doesn't matter whether you're a hard worker, you have the unconditional right to police protection and justice. We don't say that some groups of people are excluded from those rights because they haven't earned them - those are part of human dignity and you get them for free.
The argument that society ought to address poverty is argument about justice, that the suffering endured by the poor is a violation of their basic human dignity. When one of us is deprived of justice, all of us are deprived of justice, and the question of whether they can make choices to change their situation or whether they are morally worthy is irrelevant to this argument. The counter-argument is either that human dignity doesn't exist, or that the horrors and suffering endured by the majority of humanity so that a few can enjoy luxury doesn't constitute a deprivation of human dignity and justice.
Being poor is wanting as much stuff as the people around you.
The article came across to me as a whiny. Being poor is having a car (but not a nice one), having toys (but not nice ones), having shoes, shelter, food (but...).
If I have one complaint about the article, it's that his idea of poor, and my idea of poor seem very far apart. My idea of poor makes his idea of poor look like a lavish paradise.
This guy's suffering was real -- it's just that, contrary to what the article implies, it was not caused by the lack of material comforts, but by the low social position relative to others he compared himself against. If he time-traveled to Eastern Europe thirty years ago he would be the coolest kid on the block owning a car, American clothes and high quality toys and he wouldn't consider himself poor or deprived.
On the other hand, in the future, when everyone has their own planet, some people will still have planets with designer ice caps and others will have to contend themselves with off brand ice caps and the latter will feel underprivileged and unhappy.
>Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
No... this is being "poor", i.e. still in the top third or more of humanity as far as living standards.
Being poor is what the people I visited in barrios in Ecuador do - living in huts made of corrugated aluminum and scraps of wood, with a dirt floor, no plumbing or electricity, access to education, healthcare or clean water. Oh, and also having almost no way of changing your situation, no matter how hard you try. Surprisingly, these people were in general happier than well-off people in America, because they had a strong faith, strong families, strong relationships with others in their community, and were just plain tough.
I guess after visiting a third world country and seeing how hard the truly poor work every day, how much they care for what little they have, and how thankful they are for everything, I feel a little less sympathy for the "poor" in America. I wish they could spend a few weeks in a truly poor country, and then realize what an amazing land of opportunity they live in.
There's always someone worse off than you. There are people living in sub-saharan africa that would probably trade places with anyone in Ecuador given half a chance.
Being poor is miserable because you look around you, and see how other people have it better. Poor people in America don't see Ecuadorians living in shacks, they see people driving to their big house in a Lexus, and relaxing by taking a dip in the pool.
There is a huge difference. Poor people in America have a much greater ability to change their circumstances - public education, needs based financial aid for education, job placement programs, military service, etc. Poor people in third world countries generally have almost no way of doing so.
It's an easy argument to make but it isn't quite that simple. I'm sure the poor of the US would love to take a trip abroad, then come back and realise things aren't so bad & make a start on getting themselves out of their situation.
Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating. Yes, it could be worse, but it could also be a lot effing better, From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue (£5 for a domain name that may not pay off, or £5 to eat for a week and I'm bloody hungry).
True, absolute poverty is horrific and all efforts should be made to ensure that no one has to endure this through no fault of their own, but that doesn't make relative poverty a non-issue where people need to man-up. Of course, you weren't so extreme as to say that, but it gets side quite a lot and I don't really think it helps much tbh.
I'm sorry but I can't help but think that my ancestors (5 brothers that came over from Italy with almost nothing) who were poor from the start, had few if any social programs (other than help from other poor people in the community) to rely on, and were openly discriminated against as "Dirty WOPs" in the late 1800's / early 1900's, made it out of poverty and in the process helped make this country great. Generation 1 - low wage factory worker, Generation 2 - post man then small grocery owner, Generation 3 - first college educated one who started a body shop and then a neon sign business, Generation 4 - my dad, partner at a top CPA firm, Generation 5 - successful tech entrepreneur.
It just feels to me that the poor in first world countries have a victim mentality that keeps them from working with the kind of hard determination that not only gets people out of poverty, but builds up the nation in the process.
Do they need more help to develop that work ethic? Probably. Do they need more handouts? I think that is what's keeping them where they are.
Oh I'm certainly not arguing for more handouts. As an other commenter pointed out, these tend to mainly go on keeping your head above water anyway. For true betterment I agree totally that it's up to that person to make it happen. They just maybe need a bit of help to get started.
I think there's something to not giving handouts. I'd prefer a hand. The strange thing is that we look at the poor as if we are a meritocracy. the general distribution of talent, intelligence and ability is likely to be statistically the same for all classes. And since there are more poor people there should be more success stories. Under a meritocracy there would me more processes in place that reached out to the "underprivileged." But what we see is a war on drugs...
There are lots of anecdotes like these, but one factor often overlooked is social capital. That's difficult to measure, but consider the difference between a fairly cohesive and inter-reliant sub-community on the one hand (Italian) vs. one riven by gang warefare and in which high grades may get you branded as "too white," on the other.
Not that that proves anything. Discussions like these are 90% a game of "re-enforce my confirmation bias," imho. Believe people are poor because they make bad moral choices? I'm sure you can find lots of great examples of that. Believe people are poor due to external societal forces? Ditto. A question I'd like to see more of in these types of discussions is "what would falsify my theory of poverty?"
One more thing I want to comment on that you wrote:
> From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue
The way that is written shows a huge problem in peoples' perception - why do we assume the poor can only get by if opportunities are "obvious" or "easy to pursue"? Working your way up society's ladder is HARD, but people are capable of amazing things when it's their only way out. Throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom of the ladder will only take away motivation to make the long and difficult climb. Don't we want people to look back on their lives with pride on what they accomplished, in the face of difficult odds, rather than disappointment that their lives were spent living off of others' charity?
Throwing scraps down to the guys at the bottom of the ladder is to keep them from setting the house on fire. Ethically, stealing is considered a right if your situation is so bad that starving is the alternative. Don't agree with me? Consider that practically every religion on this planet reaches the same conclusion.
So while I don't think that throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom is going to be effective it still better than all the alternatives that have come before. Those tend to end up as revolutions, civil wars, or worse.
> Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating.
But, the thing is, every US state that gets cold enough in the winter has heating assistance aid available from the utility companies. If you can't afford to pay your gas bill in the winter, it gets paid for you. This seems to be mandated by the public utility commissions.
So, if you're shivering under a blanket because you didn't pay your gas bill, it's probably your own damn fault that you didn't apply for home heating assistance. I've even had the gas company mail me a big letter in multiple languages when I was a few days late paying my bill saying "do you need help paying your bill? Please call us." And in a lot of northern states, it is illegal for the gas or electric company to shut off your utilities in the winter months, as long as you can prove financial hardship.
Edit: re-reading the nlavezzo's comment, it really isn't as dismissive as I had initially read it, and the reply below is more because this topic really touches a nerve for me. I'm leaving it here because I don't want it un-said, but I don't want to target someone who doesn't deserve it. Sorry.
This encompasses a lot of my reaction when I first read this article a few years back, and before I spent some time volunteering with charities in the US. I was, frankly, angry. Most of the time, being poor in the US is not a matter of sheer survival (except for health care), but simply a very deep hole which is hard to climb out of. But possible, right? So why not just do it?
But these days, this reaction is what really angers me. It's still a fucking deep hole. And the psychological effect of being raised in these circumstances is what doesn't get acknowledged a lot. A lot of the time you have to be taught that it's even possible to dig out of it, let alone how. This is especially true if you were raised in poverty, by parents who were also raised in poverty, in a place where the schools are a joke and you don't know anyone who has been successful. It's very easy to simply despair in these conditions, and not even realize it might be possible for things to change, because as far as you know it's not. And while the rare person might be able to summon the willpower to escape this, I'd like to know how many people truly think they could if they had never even seen what success looked like, except on TV.
Hell, I was raised in an area which was simply rural middle class, not poor by any definition; and almost no one there could imagine that good schools, good health care, or a substantially better life were in reach. The idea of attending any private university, let alone an Ivy, was a joke. And we were luckier than 99% of the world, and knew it! For some... I simply can't imagine.
The dismissive attitude exhibited in so many tech forums towards the poor is just infuriating, both in the "lazy poor" category and the "it's not as bad as elsewhere!" type. If you're in that situation, it doesn't matter that there's someone out there worse-off. What does matter is if you were brought up to think success isn't possible, you despair of making anything better, and you've lost hope. I won't argue back and forth about "handouts" because a lot of the time that's used to be dismissive too. But making it known that it's actually possible to have a better life--that is what needs to be done.
(Tangentially, it's worth pointing out that Scalzi acknowledges the difference between being poor in the US and in the Third World, as in his followup post here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/04/quick-followups/ .)
Leaving five dollars laying around with friends over strikes at a crucial difference in that being poor means living outside of the generally accepted rule of law that most take for granted. The difference between a housing project or rural tract in the US and other nations is largely one of degree and similar in character to living in a war zone.
So the folks in the barrios live in makeshift shelters, assembled from whatever materials they have available; they have to worry about where they're going to get clean water and food from one day to the next, etc.
How is this any different from how all of humanity lived for millennia, up until about ten thousand years ago?
I don't mean to sound condescending or dismissive, I'm just wondering why more people don't see these circumstances as an opportunity to develop mature, self-reliant communities, and instead presume that some external catalyst is necessary to improve the situation.
You're missing a big piece of the puzzle here, though.
In third world countries, there is an infrastructure to support expectations. You aren't the only poor person, there is direct feedback that "we're all in this together".
However, in the first world, there is a great amount of isolation that can be crippling. We have very fragmented communities, especially in the suburbs.
Poverty is real, and dismissing it because it doesn't seem as "legitimate" as some other place and different social context doesn't help anything. It's very naive to assume that because we've got access to "better tools" we should be grateful.
Read the Bell Curve. See how IQ is affecting the utility of the workforce in the United States. Imagine being born below the magical IQ to be effective in modern American society.
Imagine being useless to the world around you. Imagine waking up every day feeling hopeless.
Poverty has nothing to do with dirt huts. It has everything to do with feeling as though you can control the situation of your life. It has everything to do with not feeling like a net drain on the world.
All of those are valid points, but honestly unless someone is truly mentally handicapped, there are simple things they can do to improve their situation, and the situation of their dependents.
I look at the "illegal immigrants" to this country who stand out front of Home Depot every day by my house, looking for someone to pick them up for work, and see hope. I imagine this was similar to my great great grandfather standing in a mob outside a factory hoping for a day's work. These new Americans will give rise to a generation following them that saw their parents work hard to provide them with opportunity even though they were faced with incredible hurdles. Hopefully that generation continues the hard work, and keeps this country vital.
The fact that I only see new immigrants doing this though, is what is disturbing. If the rest of the poor were so eager to get ahead, they'd be doing the same - and eventually, succeeding.
Mostly agreed, but I'd suggest that, instead of The Bell Curve- which is full of highly questionable and mostly-discredited pseudoscience- you instead read Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man". The most recent edition, I believe, has an entire chapter devoted to dissecting exactly what's wrong with the arguments presented in "The Bell Curve".
This is why I don't like the article. Being poor in America means you might have to take a $8 an hour job working in a fast food restaurant flipping burgers. At least you get enough money to live off of (granted, living at a low standard), and all the junk food you can eat at work for half price. If you work there long enough you'll probably even get health care benefits. Being poor in another country means not even having the ability to find a job.
He is complaining about having heat in only one room of the house, when people in other countries don't even have 4 walls and a roof. In the US we have heating assistance that will pay your gas bill if you can't afford it. You just have to have 2 brain cells to rub together and enough literary skills to fill out a piece of paper and apply for it.
(a) Sex is cheap, good entertainment. (b) If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse. (c) For some reason, most people really want to have children. (d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.
Free birth control, as well as better sex education (which is, from what I've read, hilariously bad in the US) would probably help quite a bit.
People don't plan to remain poor forever. Some of them become poor after they have kids, while others hope things might improve in the future, since the life of the poor always fluctuates from bad to relatively better off.
Besides, who are you to tell someone they couldn't have children of their own just because they're poor? It's their right to conceive and adopt children, just as it's yours.
In fact, they could easily afford to feed their children and lead a happy life, wasn't it for the rest of the well off society that's making their lot worse than it is, by comparison. Being poor in a rich town is worse, both materially and psychologically, than being one of a larger poor community.
Well, if a person complains about being poor and still have kids, I find the right to point out to that person the obvious planning mistakes in his life, It's not like I am shouting at random poor people now, is it?
Yes but many of the complaints centered around not being able to provide for said children. Is the purpose behind having children just to hold them up for pity?
It is their right to have children, and it's my right not to pay for their children. How is it that the rest of society makes it harder for them to feed their kids?
(c) For some reason, most people really want to have children.
"For some reason"? Is natural selection not a good enough reason that people have this desire?
(d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.
True, but not relevant when talking about goals. Reason cannot tell you that your highest goals are right or wrong, only that some action or lesser goal is right or wrong with respect to a higher goal. I think the drive to reproduce is probably a pretty high-level goal, and while wealth has temporarily short-circuited it somehow in many developing countries, that situation doesn't seem stable.
> Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.
Despair is finally realizing, at nearly 36 and with a barely-afforded AA in English from a community college, just where you could have been by now had you had $300, and what that missed opportunity has truly cost you.
"or probably one post on your facebook page asking for donations"
I seriously doubt facebook was around back when this person was in school.
And, how do you mow 15 lawns with no transport, and the people around you are too poor to even have a lawn, let alone have people mow their lawns for them? Hell, where could he even get the lawnmower in the first place?
And, 2000 cans collected is a noble (and green!) act, but there are states where they'll give a big fat nothing for recycling; in fact, the home state of Duke University (NC, USA) doesn't offer money for aluminum like up North, unless you're willing to collect a pound of it and sell it for 20 cents. I guess he could move to another state to get better recycling prices, but then there's moving costs.
Sometimes being poor sucks, and there's NOTHING you can do. Not saying his case was completely hopeless, but it's easy to find solutions when there are zero consequences.
When you work 80-100 hours a week just to keep a roof over your head, and eat at least 2 square meals a day, when exactly should this poor person mow 15 lawns (provided they had a mower and transport to get around) or collect 2000 cans (and again haul all that around)?
Don't you think Duke University has financial aid programs in place exactly for this scenario? I realize the poster might not have known this at the time, but I would be willing to bet that if they called the admissions office and explained their financial situation they would be able to waive the test fee.
Usually they don't and/or if they do you have no guarantee of qualifying for it. At one point in my life I made about $12k a year working two full-time jobs, believe it or not, even though a meal at a "sit-down restaurant" was a once a year extravagance, I didn't qualify for many financial aid programs when I went to school. And student loan programs said I didn't have the guaranteed financial means to pay the loans back.
I've personally been on the begging end of paying for tests and the calculus is this, "how many meals do I have to skip to pay for this?"
Every item on the list applied to my upbringing I had to stop half way through to avoid depressing myself too much this morning.
There's two reactions to this. One will be people saying these problems aren't like what's compared to "real" poverty in third world countries. Well, perspective doesn't feed you, pay bills, or support a roof over your head. Because there are people living in situations that is really fucked up doesn't invalidate you. Suffering is not a zero-sum game.
Second, the common thread of being poor is the inherent limitations. You do and behave certain ways because you have no other choice, stuck on a treadmill. Some will never get an opportunity to learn the skills to make better choices. It will take an overwhelming amount of energy and effort to change the momentum of where a life goes. Being full on dollar meals and drunk on two dollar wines doesn't help with that situation.
In all these years I have not been a god-believing man but I have become a faithful man. I have kept hope that things will always be better down the road. That it's up to me given the hand I've been dealt to play it as best as I could. And at the end to let go the bitterness or the awkwardness. There's no choice to be made when you're blinded by your own madness of being hopeless.
Daniel Markham here said you're never ready to have kids ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474454 ), but I strongly agree with the statement that you should be able to afford kids before having them.
In the sense that yeah, just like there's no good time to get married, there's no good time to have kids, since life just gets in the way.
That said, I think at a young age, like in your teens (and nowadays in your early 20's), there's still a lot of things that you need to do in order to make your childrearing easier.
If you don't get to that point, you're always trying to do short-term gains to raise your kid, while not being able to invest (either financially, educationally, or situationally) in long-term gains.
Getting pregnant is natural and easy. As die_sekte points out elsewhere on the page:
(a) Sex is cheap, good entertainment. (b) If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse. (c) For some reason, most people really want to have children. (d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.
And I'll add to that: when you're poor and poorly educated, you neither know much about contraceptives nor can you afford them. Hell, in the US we have a lot of kids who are perfectly well off and don't know how condoms work, because of various kinds of screwed-up politics. If you're poor? You might not even know you have a choice in the matter. And "abstinence only" doesn't work.
I find it very hard to believe that a significant part of the US population doesn't know enough about condoms or pills. The problem is that a large percentage of people don't use contraceptive methods and have kids out of wedlock.
I don't know for sure but it sounds like kids happened when there were two people, and then a partner took off. If all you can act on is that this person promises to be around to help you pay for and look after your (theirs too!) kids, and they break that promise.. what can you do? never trust anyone? It's just not quite that simple, though I absolutely agree with the sentiment.
I've never been anything near poor.
I was wondering how really hard it is to get out of poverty in today's society, and if people really wants it (i'm NOT implying that they don't want, i'm really just asking myself).
This is more for homeless-poor than just poor:
I would really like to try taking someone homeless, let him shave and dress him nicely, get him to an interview even for a shitty manual job, that'd make me feel really useful in this society, I could probably host him in small building we own in the city (no heating but still it's a shelter and it's not that cold here) UNTIL he finds something else.
"Unfortunately" I can't find any homeless guy in my city (smallish northern italy town), let alone the ones that truly wants to change their situation which i suppose are a % of the homeless people
Being truly poor is not being able to imagine anything else.
Both of my parents grew up with absolutely nothing.
My mother shared a bed with her sisters and wore nothing but hand-me-downs until she got married.
My father never had 3 meals in the same day until he joined the army.
They both tried to explain what life was like to us many times, but every story ended with, "Never mind. You just wouldn't understand."
They were so determined to escape their situations, almost every decision they made as adults was shaped by growing up with nothing. They worked hard almost every day of their lives so that none of us would ever have to experience what they went through. There was never any discussion or debate about what life would be like in our house: we were all going to finish high school, go to college, and build lives of our own. None of us has ever missed a meal or gone without anything essential.
I realize many people are just as determined as my parents were, but still don't escape poverty. There are no guarantees.
I just don't know how anyone can reverse the cycle without imagining that they can. Having no money is bad. Having no hope is worse.
This is so very true. I grew up sleeping 3 to a bed, no food, no clothing, and no utilities more often than not. I'd never wish it on my worst enemy's kids. But I would not trade my upbringing at all.
Thankfully that was long ago, but those memories give me the determination, and humility,that i need to advance myself each day.
This is similar to how my parents grew up. My mother shared a bed with all her sisters at one point, but as they got older I think they were forced to be 2 to one bed and 3 to another until the eldest married.
My dad didn't graduate highschool, he dropped out at 15 to start work and move out of his home (because they had more problems than a lack of money), literally at the first chance he got. He worked around to become a mechanic and eventually opened his own shop. He got into fuel injector programming, which got him a job at Ford, which when me and my brother were little meant we had 3 meals a day (literally sometimes 4), got almost everything we wanted but already had everything we needed. We had family vacations to places even my friends didn't get to go to.
I think what he taught me most was to not give up and just keep trying. He said he had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen years while paying his way to get qualified as a mechanic. He's had 3 companies, all successful in their time before he moved on to bigger and better to get solidly middle-class from not even a working class upbringing.
My family migrated to Canada when I was 3 years old, my mom came with 60 cents in her pocket, my dad just a little more than that. One thing my Mom has that my Dad could not find was faith, and a hell of a lot. She always had faith that she could escape poverty, fast forward to the present, she now has a wonderful government job and she is well on her way to starting her own business. I can't say the same about my dad, he is still buying those $800 cars, living in shitty apartments and has been working at the same barber shop since we first came here. My parents split up about 7 - 8 years ago and to be honest, I was happy. My dad was bringing us down with his mentality, my mom has always sheltered me from it, so even though I was growing up in poverty, I never felt poor.
I do understand this article; however I would point out that among the "poor" (in America hardly anyone is poor like in the 3rd world) I have met, TV is present and books are not.
TVs are much cheaper per hour, so what's the surprise?
I mean, yes, I know what you're getting at, but a $50 used 25-inch CRT that you use for several thousand hours is going to beat out a book on the price front any day. Even just the effort of going to the library and back adds up to more human capital per book/hour than watching TV. I'm not endorsing it, just observing it.
Just a quick comment; most books one cannot even give away. A lot of used books are sold on Amazon for $.01. The local used bookstore won't even take boxes of nearly mint books for free, because they can't give them away either.
I read thousands of books as a kid and paid for nearly none of them.
It is not about cost per hour, but about improving yourself vs. entertainment.
TV's information density, even for good shows (however defined), is very low; you can learn far more in 1 hour of reading than in 1 hour of TV watching. And TV is a passive activity while reading a book requires mental involvement.
What people, even poor people, choose to spend their time on has an effect on what they are able to do later.
I don't know when this was written, but some of the "facts" listed are simply not true.
"Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime."
The minimum wage in California is $8/hr, so $0.1 is equal to only 0.75 minutes of labor.
"Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor."
A burger at McDonalds costs around $1, or only 7.5 minutes of labor.
There's only so many hours in a week one can work to earn this money. Once it's spent, it's gone. You can't just add a few more hours onto the day to make up the difference.
Interesting looking at the Australian minimum wage of $15/hr ($14.21 USD atm). Whereas from what I have seen of the US one it seems really hard to get by at all with the Australian one you could rent out a nice 2 or 3 bedroom house in an outer suburb but nice area which would only take up about half your weekly wage.
I believe the U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr before taxes are taken out (and it can be less than that if you work in a job that expects to collect tips, like waiting tables), or about $15k/yr for a full-timer. In my area, which is a suburban area, 600 sq ft. single bedroom apartments go for around $900-$1200/mo. Significantly more if you live closer into the city. For reasons of transportation, many poor people live in the city.
Keep in mind most apartment complexes won't let you have the apartment if your credit is bad, or the rent is more than 1/3 monthly income.
You can rent bedrooms or basements though for $500-700/mo.
Supposing you got the $900/mo apartment. That leaves you with around $100/wk to feed yourself and cover all other expenses. Once taxes are taken out, that can leave you with significantly less. No amount of budgeting can turn that into night school + transport + clothes + utilities + anything else you need like furniture or medical insurance or dental care.
Most people trying to get a leg up work two full-time jobs which, while getting you more money (and enough money to qualify for the cheapest apartment possible), it doesn't leave any time for life advancement plans like night school. So it's a vicious cycle and you can only break out of it by being lucky in many areas simultaneously. You have to find the job that pays more than minimum wage, and compete with all the other poor people trying to get that same slot...so you can work only one job...so you can have time to take one class a semester at community college (so long as they happen to offer the classes you need at time that don't interfere with your work schedule and your work schedule doesn't change during the semester to interfere with your classes)...so in 5 or 6 years you can get an Associates degree, which isn't really worth much, but can be transfered to many state schools in lieu of the first two years of a 4-year degree (at much less cost).
Of course many people stop at this point because they can't afford the last two years of school, and the A.A. or A.S. didn't really help them get a better job. So they feel like they've just wasted 5 or 6 years of their life scraping for every penny they had to put themselves through school.
Escaping this kind of life requires so much luck and so many people in so many places to turn a blind eye, or offer a meaningful helping hand, that a person simply can't do it on their own. It's numerically impossible in the U.S. Most immigrants who come here with nothing never escape it themselves, but end up in a better life through their children.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadOf course, I live in Uruguay, South America, and mostly by choice (I was born here, but I've had my opportunities to emigrate).
It's funny, but many of the "being poor" points, would not be considered "being poor" here in Uruguay (I should write a similar article about "being poor" from the Uruguay point of view - let's say it would be much worse in several parts, a bit better on the healthcare bit.
"knowing the price of everything, but knowing the value of nothing"
It's quite interesting. Some of these things happen in all developed nations, but quite a significant number of them only happen in the US. For example, it did not realize just how fucked up health care is in the US prior to reading this article.
Where I'm from poor people take the bus, as they could afford neither a car nor the gas.
I don't think that there is any town in Germany that is not reachable by bus, and our inner cities have at least adequate public transit.
Apart from free health care, good public transit could turn some things in the US.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
This is definitely not the US. Most of our poor don't work at all (and are not trying to work), and about 90% don't work full time.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf
Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.
In the US, 67% of poor households have 2 rooms per person (compared to 70.2% of non-poor households).
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.
In the US, being poor is eating the meat, the potato chips, the bacon and the ice cream. But it might be a quart of Krasdale rather than a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
[Edit: I'm speculating that the poor get fat off a broad sampling of typical American fatty foods. I could be getting specific food items wrong. Thanks krschultz for pointing out that my comment was unclear.]
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February06/Features/featu...
I really don't know what part of the world he is talking about.
[edit: changed secondary source to original source on obesity. ]
$50 a MONTH. In vouchers. For only certain foods. Ice cream would definitely not be one of them. White bread is not one of them. Soda is not one of them.
Get your facts straight.
I've edited my comment to reflect the fact that I'm only speculating about specific food items making the poor fat. But make no mistake, the poor are fat - their average BMI is 29, only one point short of obesity. If you ever live in a poor neighborhood, all you need to do is open your eyes to see that everyone has plenty to eat.
Maybe something like that is the case here?
Early on during the recession, NPR, an American radio station did a report on people going hungry as a result of the recesssion. Go look at the picture. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9259254...
No starving person in Africa or anywhere else had a BMI of 29.
http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/benefitsandservices/foodpkgallow...
The only vouchers are for "Juice (without extra sugar), Milk, Cereal, Cheese, Eggs, Fruits and Vegetables, Whole Wheat Bread, Fish, Canned Vegetables, and Peanut Butter".
The housing data is a similar problem. That "2 rooms per person" statistic is correct, but is the wrong statistic, since the Census Bureau defines the statistic by saying:
Rooms counted include whole rooms used for living purposes, such as bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, recreation rooms, permanently enclosed porches that are suitable for year-round use, lodger’s rooms, and other finished rooms. Also included are rooms used for offices by a person living in the unit.
Thus a four-person family in a one-bedroom house is "luxuriously" enjoying two rooms per person...
So how about you try again and get the numbers and methodology right this time?
A one bedroom house with 8 rooms? That works out to what, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, a home office, an enclosed porch, a recreation room, a dining room and one bedroom?
It was already discussed here before (with many comments), but it was submitted as a comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619197
Most of them are about being financially poor, but this one is about emotional poverty and can happen to the richest of us.
Her non-profit is the last step in this local ecosystem, taking people who are at about 75% of the local median household income and helping them with more affordable housing while they get back on their feet (or find their feet for the first time). However, it's no free ride. They require that the participants go through financial education, require that they continue making forward progress in bettering themselves, and monitor/mentor them all along the way.
They've taken nearly destitute families and guided them to the point of sustainable, unsubsidized home ownership, requiring far less monetary assistance along the way than comparable (less effective) government programs. I'm generally jaded by the waste, fraud, and ineffectiveness that we so often hear about regarding charities, but the work that her charity has done is amazing.
It's depressing to watch her smaller, deserving organization have to fight a desperately uphill battle against huge, inefficient organizations when it comes to funding and donations. So, I strongly second the notion of finding good, local charities to donate to.
</grammar nazi>
Also, there is reason to believe that higher minimum wages encourage your workforce to become better skilled in order to compete on the world market at their higher price, as is the case in Germany.
Almost need some kind of subsidy somewhere to give these people at least a decent standard of living.
What would stop companies from increasing the costs of their goods and services because they know minimum wage is higher (and people can now afford it)?
Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour (many states are higher). A person couldn't support a family on this, but they could find a place to live (either renting a room, cheap apartment, or sharing a bigger apartment with friends) and have enough left over for the bare-minimum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._minimum_wages
Contrast that with many right wing arguments about taxation, which usually take the form "Lower/more regressive taxes are always better, and here's why" - disturbingly many of those arguments are "valid" (i.e. if you accept the arguer's claims, the conclusion follows) no matter what the starting point is, and the end result would either be zero taxes for everyone or (surprisingly common) almost 100% taxation of the lower classes and no tax on the upper; hell, if we allow for redistribution, many of the conservative arguments actually imply that the upper class should be given money by the lower class, for the good of the economy.
If your argument pushes some number in one direction but doesn't turn around for some value of that number, then there's typically a problem with the argument; here, that's not the case, the poster explicitly provided that stopping point.
Living paycheck-to-paycheck (I've been there... although by my own fault and not for long enough to be desperate) means you can't make certain changes because they require some money up front, and those changes would help break the cycle of poverty (such as moving to take a better job).
From all that I saw during this, I never once knew of a charity that provided any actual help. Around the holidays, several different charities, churches and caring folks would drop off food. But the food all had a shelf-life of less than a month, so we would eat really good for November/December and then immediately go back to how it was before. I've worked for a few charities/non-profits since dragging myself out of that. I wouldn't ever contribute a single dollar to a charity. However, my time is worth far more value (to me and to those receiving it) than a dollar could be. Volunteer regularly somewhere, like one Saturday a month. The day given up is less cost than a corresponding day's worth of salary and the benefit you can provide is larger than the dollar amount. In the past, I've provided efforts such as: plumbing/electrical/construction/maintenance at zero cost to the person receiving it (including replacement parts), child herding (three of us would take and pay for a trip to a local amusement park for the day, along the lines of a carnival in terms of rides), free tutoring (this one went a long ways, 2 kids and free "babysitting" all day, as well as providing a lot of benefit for the kids). It is much easier to find people who are in need via religious organizations or shelters.
The key takeaway is that if you give dollars, it will be spent on what they absolutely need to survive. There are no more decisions about sacrificing a little bit somewhere in order to do something "nice" such as fixing the leaking faucet because they just can't be made. By providing the things that are sacrificed, you give a glimpse that things can be better while providing for what they cannot manage to. I'm also of the opinion that it doesn't introduce a dependency on charity, which means that it would be better for them in the long term.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1467832
(article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/... )
If you can, try engaging or tutoring pupils in low-income areas.
Plus knowing that your kids are likely to ignore your guidance and follow your example, making the same mistakes you did, no matter how much they know it's a bad idea, and that it will be your influence at fault when they do. I mean, everybody deals with this, but I imagine the worse off your situation, the worse the fear is.
I still have this now!
Of course I was never poor for any real hardcore definition of the word, Third World-style, but I spent a good few years totally flat broke. Money coming in only occasionally covering the rent, utility payments never paid as I couldn't justify spending that much money when I couldn't afford to eat, living off dry bread and instant mash etc etc. It was an experience for sure, and one I never, ever want to repeat! It's only relatively recently that I've stopped dreading the arriving of mail or jumping when there's a knock at the door, or even keeping the curtains closed so no one can see I'm in.
But yeah, I still buy the cheap brands if they are there out of habit. I'll walk down the road to save 10p on a bottle of milk and so on.
You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I have been very, very poor. And I've made a million bucks in a short amount of time. In fact, I've flopped back and forth about as many times as anybody I know, so I know both sides of this.
I would not idolize poverty as some kind of state of nobility, and I would't spend a lot of time agonizing over it either. It is a thing that happens to you, like cancer. You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation. The last day of your life, if you were lying in a ditch somewhere, you can still choose how to confront the end of your existence. These choices are all we own. The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself. It is extremely possible to dwell on all the bad things in life and despair.
If you are poor and reading this, whatever you do, please don't despair. Make some different choices. The only way you're not making a difference in the world is if you've decided that you're not. Don't let others -- no matter how well meaning -- give that to you.
Me too, man. That's a very compassionate and honest comment you just wrote. I tend to be shorter and less patient with people who self-pity, and especially people who come from more who treat poor people like helpless children. But I should be friendlier, more compassionate, less short tempered, more steadfastly guiding. Very nice comment by you - you managed to be patient and kind while still being strong and emphasizing responsibility and choice. I should emulate this, this was a great comment.
I agree there are always options, the problem is knowing them. For example, I suppose at any time there is a stock I could buy for little money that would make me a millionaire over night. The problem is I don't know which one.
Of course other options are maybe simpler to judge than stock prospects, but the general problem still holds. In fact, if markets are efficient, wouldn't it imply that choosing anything in life is as difficult as picking the right stocks? Because making a choice (on actions) is an economical decision, hence it is subject to the efficient markets theorem.
I'm not sure. I've never been poor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but being poor is not necessarily about choice. Certainly I can start off rich, and make bad decisions. Perhaps that's my fault, perhaps I got unlucky. But if you start off in poverty, it's not easy, as I understand, to get yourself out of poverty. If you had a crap education, and a rough home life, you probably didn't leave school with good grades, so you can't get a decent job etc etc. There's a whole life-defining set of knock-on effects. And if you're trapped in debt, struggling to pay the rent and keep yourself warm, how easy is it to get out of that? If an opportunity does come along, will you have the cash to leverage it (think train ride to job interview).
I don't know how you got out of your fix, I'd be really interested to know.
You make a good point that poverty isn't something we should obsess over or try to make ourselves feel guilty about. If we are successful, we should feel good about that and have a healthy sense of empathy towards those that are less fortunate.
The key question, then, is whether you were _born and raised_ poor, or did you become poor in your later life. There is a ingrained mental barrier of hopelessness being born into poverty, especially in America where the cycle of poverty consumes communities and perpetuates all manner of things that are easily contested by people on the outside looking in, but is palpable to those trapped within it.
The difference, interestingly enough, can be found in a line in the song "Common People" by the English band Pulp, which follows the story of a rich girl who "slums it" with the poor narrator:
"But still you'll never get it right
cos when you're laid in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall
if you just called your Dad, he could stop it all
You'll never live like common people"
I was born and raised poor. Like, picking cockroaches out of my cereal box poor. Like, magic block of cheese appearing on the doorstep poor. Like qualifying for free lunch at school poor. Like pink bicycle with sissy bar bought from the thrift shop and handed down from eldest daughter to two youngest sons poor (I broke the cycle of shame with black electrical and silver duct tape).
I never blamed my parents; they were immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime with nothing but a suitcase of hastily gathered clothes, papers, and photos. But, to say it's "just a thing that happens to you, like cancer" doesn't really speak to how stifling poverty can truly be.
My family pulled themselves out of the cycle, but millions don't. MOST don't. Getting out has less to do with "using your feet" and more like pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset that they can't succeed even if they tried their damndest. It's not only cultural, it's systemic.
"The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself.
Not always the case. My wife's family came to this country in 1978. Her father's job for the first five years was to mop the floors and clean toilets at schools, for which he was (legally) paid less than minimum wage because of his immigrant status. Then, the church that promised the family free admittance to their school in exchange for Dad's reduced salary rescinded it upon his offer to take ESL classes by day and cleaning the schools by night. So, he pulled them from that school and into public school, which, because of redistricting and rezoning, was among the poorest and most dangerous in their state. I guess it is about choices, but don't think there aren't people out there who disincentivize you from making them.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that some people couldn't eat at the same counter equally as others. I mean, could you even make a clear-headed choice in that scenario?
Choices to pull oneself up from a cycle of poverty is as risky as entrepreneurship, perhaps even more so. If you fail at business, you have your firm footing of educational background and network of employees, peers, investors, and family to watch over you and give support. If you fail at pulling yourself from the ghetto, the next stop could be homelessness and the soup kitchen. And, if you have a family, they'll suffer doubly so.
It's almost never cut and dry.
Its sad that I am seen as almost a hero in my own neighborhood for owning my own business. I have tried to help everyone I know out of this thinking, but its truly difficult when you tell a person who has had nothing all of their life how easily it is to change that situation, and they see it as a wild fantasy.
I think you misunderstood, however. Nothing is cut and dry. Did I say it was? When I say that you own your choices, I am not promising some kind of magic future if you just get Positive Mental Attitude. This is not a Tony Robbins seminar, and I am not trying to just throw out slogans. I believe most of your reply was based on this premise, and that was not the intent of my comment at all. I am also not trying to get into a "who's the poorest" contest. There are lots of ways these conversations can go off the rails.
As an example, and to specifically counter this idea of quick-fixes, I used the scenario of the person dying from cancer in the ditch. Will proper choices make them any less dead in a day's time? I seriously doubt it, and that's completely not the point.
Any life in any situation can be celebrated and you can use your mind to make choices about your attitudes. People in concentration camps awaiting death can be cheerful. Perhaps you would stop by the ditch an lecture the dying person on the futility of it all, how you knew many people who also died this way, and how painful it was. Perhaps you would go on about the pointlessness of action, and how tens of millions are in the same place and we must do something to begin " pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset" About how few ever make it out.
I would not do this. In fact, I would go so far as to say that those who do this to someone are not their friend.
I happily pay my taxes, try to vote with my conscience for those engaged in healthcare reform, and contribute freely to causes to help prevent people dying of cancer in a ditch. It's not self-righteousness or soliciting thanks from poor, sick people or anything else that drives me to do that; it's my belief that we're more than just the successes we've made in this life -- the actions we've managed to perform to get a positive result. There is community outside of the self.
Sometimes people are frozen into a rut because they've never seen what it's like at the top (except for watching those that succeed in nearly impossible scenarios, like sports athletes or heiresses-turned-celebrities), and they likely never will. So, platitudes that "there is a there there" is cold comfort for them. Working hard and still not being able to pass the "first-month rent + last-month rent + security deposit + credit/background check" gauntlet put forth for anyone wanting to break that cycle is oppressive to the psyche.
And, before anyone in this thread ever decides to veer off into blaming "degenerate cultures", I'll cut it off at the pass and say there is about a nickel's worth of difference between being poor in W. Virginia and being poor in Harlem, NYC. It's the same down, with very little upside (aside from working for the mines or for the state, respectively). Makes the sentiment "been down so long, it looks like up to me" even more resonant.
My point was that you seem very happy with explaining the systemic reasons for problems, even being very proud of your progressive social attitudes and willingness to pay taxes, but none of that money, explanation, or enlightenment does the actual poor one bit of lasting good. They deal with despair as a primary obstacle. Explaining sociology to them and the systemic nature of poverty does not help them despair less. In fact, and this is critical, for many it may have the effect of making their lives substantially worse. There's a very fine line between explaining a complex problem that you don't currently have the solution to and telling people their life is pointless. In fact they can look and sound like the same thing to an outside observer.
I have no qualm with you -- the things you have said are most likely true -- but there is a difference in talking about a thing from an external clinical standpoint and living the thing, as you know so well.
As a sidebar, why would you even mention that you weren't angry with your parents? It seemed such an odd thing to say. Why would anyone think of being angry with their parents for something like wealth?
I'm done here. Sorry to take the thread so far down. Just sounded like we were talking past each other. Thanks again for the conversation.
Tell that to Joe the Plumber, who went from growing up on welfare to being the everyman who just wants to run his own plumbing business if it weren't for a then-Presidential candidate taking his money. Ditto Sarah Palin and Craig T. Nelson (who once famously said on the Glenn Beck show, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone help me out? No!")
I figured you were a "supply-side" kinda guy, so we'll truly never see things eye-to-eye. Fair enough.
Just know that poor people actually _do_ want to know why they're poor, as that kind of sets expectations, pacing, and gives them some wiggle room to strategize solutions to their problem. State support helps them with essentials, education helps ameliorate their thinking, and charitable causes and people give them the helping hand to see through the hardship.
"There's a very fine line between explaining a complex problem that you don't currently have the solution to and telling people their life is pointless."
That's why you give them cold facts and then real solutions based on what you and others have experienced. If you don't want to talk publicly about success, you're essentially telling them, "I'm a millionaire and so can you!" and then leaving. In other words, show don't tell.
"Why would anyone think of being angry with their parents for something like wealth?"
I would be positively _ecstatic_ if I were born into a wealthy family. It would bring no end of awesome, warm feelings. I will never know what that feeling is like, unfortunately, as they were the poorest of immigrants. I was just implying that I didn't begrudge them being poor, as I still had a decent childhood, even in the ghetto.
Yeah I think there is a deep infection here, but it has nothing to do with poverty. It begins with the idea that if you take social assistance then social assistance must be a good thing. Or that somehow you must support it. As you are demonstrating by your words, this isn't any good at all. For Joe, Sarah, you, or anybody else. This same logic holds that if you don't send your kids into the military, you can't support a war. One supposes that everybody must volunteer at the local fire station or go without emergency support, or that those who took a pencil in second grade must somehow support armed robbery as a way of life. Give a man a fish, and he must support government sanctioned fish distribution for his entire life. It's the one-size-fits-all, if-you-were-touched-by-it-you-must-endorse-it thinking. Not good. Not good for anybody. Let's move past such rhetorical nonsense.
Here's the thing: it's one thing to explain something that you understand and know how to fix. It's quite another to simply cite statistics and general correlations. There are a lot of folks who think that positive mental attitude can lift you out of poverty -- I am one of them. And there are folks that think it is mostly luck. (I also think luck has quite a bit to do with it as well) But I can guarantee you that anybody who thinks that life is pointless will never make it. I also observe that after trillions spent on LBJ's War on Poverty (one hopes it did not involve shooting poor people) we are no further along than when we started. So for all the bluster, we do not have the answer. We have a lot of complex ideas and theories, but we have no answer.
We do not know how to lift people out of poverty. We DO know that hopelessness and despair will prevent folks from succeeding. You can either sit around and dress up correlation as "giving them cold facts" or you can help with attitudes. That's just what every poor person with a poor education needs -- some rich college guy with a $50 vocabulary going on and on about how the system is against them and how they'll never make it.
When I was poor, I knew people like this. Oddly enough, many of them were college educated. It was always pointless, the system was always corrupt, the rich guys always got richer and the poor guys always got the shaft. It's mental disease masquerading as wisdom. Guys who felt that way are either still there, dead, or in prison. You can be in a hopeless situation and still have joy and hope. Unless you listen to some people.
Like I said, you sound more part of the problem than the solution.
Don't tell me he actually said that. That's just so deliberately idiotic.
Let's say there's been a rash of home invasions in a town, a criminal gang ripping people off, holding them at gun point, that sort of thing. Would you say that society shouldn't increase police protection because this is ultimately about the victims making good choices? What if the victims complain that the criminals need to brought to justice? Maybe the victims should be dusting for fingerprints, collecting evidence and investigating leads themselves, trying to recover their property themselves. If they can't, this just shows that they lack good morals and strong character traits like hard work and determination.
This is wrong because it doesn't matter whether you're a hard worker, you have the unconditional right to police protection and justice. We don't say that some groups of people are excluded from those rights because they haven't earned them - those are part of human dignity and you get them for free.
The argument that society ought to address poverty is argument about justice, that the suffering endured by the poor is a violation of their basic human dignity. When one of us is deprived of justice, all of us are deprived of justice, and the question of whether they can make choices to change their situation or whether they are morally worthy is irrelevant to this argument. The counter-argument is either that human dignity doesn't exist, or that the horrors and suffering endured by the majority of humanity so that a few can enjoy luxury doesn't constitute a deprivation of human dignity and justice.
Context is important. This was posted about a week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
The article came across to me as a whiny. Being poor is having a car (but not a nice one), having toys (but not nice ones), having shoes, shelter, food (but...).
On the other hand, in the future, when everyone has their own planet, some people will still have planets with designer ice caps and others will have to contend themselves with off brand ice caps and the latter will feel underprivileged and unhappy.
>Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
No... this is being "poor", i.e. still in the top third or more of humanity as far as living standards.
Being poor is what the people I visited in barrios in Ecuador do - living in huts made of corrugated aluminum and scraps of wood, with a dirt floor, no plumbing or electricity, access to education, healthcare or clean water. Oh, and also having almost no way of changing your situation, no matter how hard you try. Surprisingly, these people were in general happier than well-off people in America, because they had a strong faith, strong families, strong relationships with others in their community, and were just plain tough.
I guess after visiting a third world country and seeing how hard the truly poor work every day, how much they care for what little they have, and how thankful they are for everything, I feel a little less sympathy for the "poor" in America. I wish they could spend a few weeks in a truly poor country, and then realize what an amazing land of opportunity they live in.
Being poor is miserable because you look around you, and see how other people have it better. Poor people in America don't see Ecuadorians living in shacks, they see people driving to their big house in a Lexus, and relaxing by taking a dip in the pool.
Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating. Yes, it could be worse, but it could also be a lot effing better, From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue (£5 for a domain name that may not pay off, or £5 to eat for a week and I'm bloody hungry).
True, absolute poverty is horrific and all efforts should be made to ensure that no one has to endure this through no fault of their own, but that doesn't make relative poverty a non-issue where people need to man-up. Of course, you weren't so extreme as to say that, but it gets side quite a lot and I don't really think it helps much tbh.
It just feels to me that the poor in first world countries have a victim mentality that keeps them from working with the kind of hard determination that not only gets people out of poverty, but builds up the nation in the process.
Do they need more help to develop that work ethic? Probably. Do they need more handouts? I think that is what's keeping them where they are.
Right. And staying where you are is exactly what you want to do when you're almost drowning.
Not that that proves anything. Discussions like these are 90% a game of "re-enforce my confirmation bias," imho. Believe people are poor because they make bad moral choices? I'm sure you can find lots of great examples of that. Believe people are poor due to external societal forces? Ditto. A question I'd like to see more of in these types of discussions is "what would falsify my theory of poverty?"
> From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue
The way that is written shows a huge problem in peoples' perception - why do we assume the poor can only get by if opportunities are "obvious" or "easy to pursue"? Working your way up society's ladder is HARD, but people are capable of amazing things when it's their only way out. Throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom of the ladder will only take away motivation to make the long and difficult climb. Don't we want people to look back on their lives with pride on what they accomplished, in the face of difficult odds, rather than disappointment that their lives were spent living off of others' charity?
So while I don't think that throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom is going to be effective it still better than all the alternatives that have come before. Those tend to end up as revolutions, civil wars, or worse.
I consider practically every religion on the face of the planet as unethical, and I doubt I am the only one on this board who do so.
So if you forgive me, that argument has negative weight too.
And if the only thing that you don't like about my post is religion than you can piss off too. Because you've completely missed the point.
But, the thing is, every US state that gets cold enough in the winter has heating assistance aid available from the utility companies. If you can't afford to pay your gas bill in the winter, it gets paid for you. This seems to be mandated by the public utility commissions.
So, if you're shivering under a blanket because you didn't pay your gas bill, it's probably your own damn fault that you didn't apply for home heating assistance. I've even had the gas company mail me a big letter in multiple languages when I was a few days late paying my bill saying "do you need help paying your bill? Please call us." And in a lot of northern states, it is illegal for the gas or electric company to shut off your utilities in the winter months, as long as you can prove financial hardship.
This encompasses a lot of my reaction when I first read this article a few years back, and before I spent some time volunteering with charities in the US. I was, frankly, angry. Most of the time, being poor in the US is not a matter of sheer survival (except for health care), but simply a very deep hole which is hard to climb out of. But possible, right? So why not just do it?
But these days, this reaction is what really angers me. It's still a fucking deep hole. And the psychological effect of being raised in these circumstances is what doesn't get acknowledged a lot. A lot of the time you have to be taught that it's even possible to dig out of it, let alone how. This is especially true if you were raised in poverty, by parents who were also raised in poverty, in a place where the schools are a joke and you don't know anyone who has been successful. It's very easy to simply despair in these conditions, and not even realize it might be possible for things to change, because as far as you know it's not. And while the rare person might be able to summon the willpower to escape this, I'd like to know how many people truly think they could if they had never even seen what success looked like, except on TV.
Hell, I was raised in an area which was simply rural middle class, not poor by any definition; and almost no one there could imagine that good schools, good health care, or a substantially better life were in reach. The idea of attending any private university, let alone an Ivy, was a joke. And we were luckier than 99% of the world, and knew it! For some... I simply can't imagine.
The dismissive attitude exhibited in so many tech forums towards the poor is just infuriating, both in the "lazy poor" category and the "it's not as bad as elsewhere!" type. If you're in that situation, it doesn't matter that there's someone out there worse-off. What does matter is if you were brought up to think success isn't possible, you despair of making anything better, and you've lost hope. I won't argue back and forth about "handouts" because a lot of the time that's used to be dismissive too. But making it known that it's actually possible to have a better life--that is what needs to be done.
(Tangentially, it's worth pointing out that Scalzi acknowledges the difference between being poor in the US and in the Third World, as in his followup post here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/04/quick-followups/ .)
How is this any different from how all of humanity lived for millennia, up until about ten thousand years ago?
I don't mean to sound condescending or dismissive, I'm just wondering why more people don't see these circumstances as an opportunity to develop mature, self-reliant communities, and instead presume that some external catalyst is necessary to improve the situation.
In third world countries, there is an infrastructure to support expectations. You aren't the only poor person, there is direct feedback that "we're all in this together".
However, in the first world, there is a great amount of isolation that can be crippling. We have very fragmented communities, especially in the suburbs.
Poverty is real, and dismissing it because it doesn't seem as "legitimate" as some other place and different social context doesn't help anything. It's very naive to assume that because we've got access to "better tools" we should be grateful.
Read the Bell Curve. See how IQ is affecting the utility of the workforce in the United States. Imagine being born below the magical IQ to be effective in modern American society.
Imagine being useless to the world around you. Imagine waking up every day feeling hopeless.
Poverty has nothing to do with dirt huts. It has everything to do with feeling as though you can control the situation of your life. It has everything to do with not feeling like a net drain on the world.
I look at the "illegal immigrants" to this country who stand out front of Home Depot every day by my house, looking for someone to pick them up for work, and see hope. I imagine this was similar to my great great grandfather standing in a mob outside a factory hoping for a day's work. These new Americans will give rise to a generation following them that saw their parents work hard to provide them with opportunity even though they were faced with incredible hurdles. Hopefully that generation continues the hard work, and keeps this country vital.
The fact that I only see new immigrants doing this though, is what is disturbing. If the rest of the poor were so eager to get ahead, they'd be doing the same - and eventually, succeeding.
He is complaining about having heat in only one room of the house, when people in other countries don't even have 4 walls and a roof. In the US we have heating assistance that will pay your gas bill if you can't afford it. You just have to have 2 brain cells to rub together and enough literary skills to fill out a piece of paper and apply for it.
Free birth control, as well as better sex education (which is, from what I've read, hilariously bad in the US) would probably help quite a bit.
And yet considerable of his pain points are about not being able to cater for his child(ren)
Besides, who are you to tell someone they couldn't have children of their own just because they're poor? It's their right to conceive and adopt children, just as it's yours.
In fact, they could easily afford to feed their children and lead a happy life, wasn't it for the rest of the well off society that's making their lot worse than it is, by comparison. Being poor in a rich town is worse, both materially and psychologically, than being one of a larger poor community.
It is their right to have children, and it's my right not to pay for their children. How is it that the rest of society makes it harder for them to feed their kids?
while this is not the motivation for most people, some people are shortsighted enough to think another kid will actually help the situation.
"For some reason"? Is natural selection not a good enough reason that people have this desire?
(d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.
True, but not relevant when talking about goals. Reason cannot tell you that your highest goals are right or wrong, only that some action or lesser goal is right or wrong with respect to a higher goal. I think the drive to reproduce is probably a pretty high-level goal, and while wealth has temporarily short-circuited it somehow in many developing countries, that situation doesn't seem stable.
> Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.
Despair is finally realizing, at nearly 36 and with a barely-afforded AA in English from a community college, just where you could have been by now had you had $300, and what that missed opportunity has truly cost you.
I seriously doubt facebook was around back when this person was in school.
And, how do you mow 15 lawns with no transport, and the people around you are too poor to even have a lawn, let alone have people mow their lawns for them? Hell, where could he even get the lawnmower in the first place?
And, 2000 cans collected is a noble (and green!) act, but there are states where they'll give a big fat nothing for recycling; in fact, the home state of Duke University (NC, USA) doesn't offer money for aluminum like up North, unless you're willing to collect a pound of it and sell it for 20 cents. I guess he could move to another state to get better recycling prices, but then there's moving costs.
Sometimes being poor sucks, and there's NOTHING you can do. Not saying his case was completely hopeless, but it's easy to find solutions when there are zero consequences.
It is the belief that she can't.
Being poor is living where everyone collects aluminum cans for money.
I've personally been on the begging end of paying for tests and the calculus is this, "how many meals do I have to skip to pay for this?"
There's two reactions to this. One will be people saying these problems aren't like what's compared to "real" poverty in third world countries. Well, perspective doesn't feed you, pay bills, or support a roof over your head. Because there are people living in situations that is really fucked up doesn't invalidate you. Suffering is not a zero-sum game.
Second, the common thread of being poor is the inherent limitations. You do and behave certain ways because you have no other choice, stuck on a treadmill. Some will never get an opportunity to learn the skills to make better choices. It will take an overwhelming amount of energy and effort to change the momentum of where a life goes. Being full on dollar meals and drunk on two dollar wines doesn't help with that situation.
In all these years I have not been a god-believing man but I have become a faithful man. I have kept hope that things will always be better down the road. That it's up to me given the hand I've been dealt to play it as best as I could. And at the end to let go the bitterness or the awkwardness. There's no choice to be made when you're blinded by your own madness of being hopeless.
I hope there's something that can be done, knowing (or believing) this to be the case.
That said, I think at a young age, like in your teens (and nowadays in your early 20's), there's still a lot of things that you need to do in order to make your childrearing easier.
If you don't get to that point, you're always trying to do short-term gains to raise your kid, while not being able to invest (either financially, educationally, or situationally) in long-term gains.
(a) Sex is cheap, good entertainment. (b) If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse. (c) For some reason, most people really want to have children. (d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.
And I'll add to that: when you're poor and poorly educated, you neither know much about contraceptives nor can you afford them. Hell, in the US we have a lot of kids who are perfectly well off and don't know how condoms work, because of various kinds of screwed-up politics. If you're poor? You might not even know you have a choice in the matter. And "abstinence only" doesn't work.
This is more for homeless-poor than just poor: I would really like to try taking someone homeless, let him shave and dress him nicely, get him to an interview even for a shitty manual job, that'd make me feel really useful in this society, I could probably host him in small building we own in the city (no heating but still it's a shelter and it's not that cold here) UNTIL he finds something else.
"Unfortunately" I can't find any homeless guy in my city (smallish northern italy town), let alone the ones that truly wants to change their situation which i suppose are a % of the homeless people
Both of my parents grew up with absolutely nothing.
My mother shared a bed with her sisters and wore nothing but hand-me-downs until she got married.
My father never had 3 meals in the same day until he joined the army.
They both tried to explain what life was like to us many times, but every story ended with, "Never mind. You just wouldn't understand."
They were so determined to escape their situations, almost every decision they made as adults was shaped by growing up with nothing. They worked hard almost every day of their lives so that none of us would ever have to experience what they went through. There was never any discussion or debate about what life would be like in our house: we were all going to finish high school, go to college, and build lives of our own. None of us has ever missed a meal or gone without anything essential.
I realize many people are just as determined as my parents were, but still don't escape poverty. There are no guarantees.
I just don't know how anyone can reverse the cycle without imagining that they can. Having no money is bad. Having no hope is worse.
Thankfully that was long ago, but those memories give me the determination, and humility,that i need to advance myself each day.
My dad didn't graduate highschool, he dropped out at 15 to start work and move out of his home (because they had more problems than a lack of money), literally at the first chance he got. He worked around to become a mechanic and eventually opened his own shop. He got into fuel injector programming, which got him a job at Ford, which when me and my brother were little meant we had 3 meals a day (literally sometimes 4), got almost everything we wanted but already had everything we needed. We had family vacations to places even my friends didn't get to go to.
I think what he taught me most was to not give up and just keep trying. He said he had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen years while paying his way to get qualified as a mechanic. He's had 3 companies, all successful in their time before he moved on to bigger and better to get solidly middle-class from not even a working class upbringing.
My family migrated to Canada when I was 3 years old, my mom came with 60 cents in her pocket, my dad just a little more than that. One thing my Mom has that my Dad could not find was faith, and a hell of a lot. She always had faith that she could escape poverty, fast forward to the present, she now has a wonderful government job and she is well on her way to starting her own business. I can't say the same about my dad, he is still buying those $800 cars, living in shitty apartments and has been working at the same barber shop since we first came here. My parents split up about 7 - 8 years ago and to be honest, I was happy. My dad was bringing us down with his mentality, my mom has always sheltered me from it, so even though I was growing up in poverty, I never felt poor.
I mean, yes, I know what you're getting at, but a $50 used 25-inch CRT that you use for several thousand hours is going to beat out a book on the price front any day. Even just the effort of going to the library and back adds up to more human capital per book/hour than watching TV. I'm not endorsing it, just observing it.
I read thousands of books as a kid and paid for nearly none of them.
TV's information density, even for good shows (however defined), is very low; you can learn far more in 1 hour of reading than in 1 hour of TV watching. And TV is a passive activity while reading a book requires mental involvement.
What people, even poor people, choose to spend their time on has an effect on what they are able to do later.
"Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime." The minimum wage in California is $8/hr, so $0.1 is equal to only 0.75 minutes of labor.
"Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor." A burger at McDonalds costs around $1, or only 7.5 minutes of labor.
The business owners in America have no respect for the poor of America. It's 'not their problem', since 'everyone does it'.
Keep in mind most apartment complexes won't let you have the apartment if your credit is bad, or the rent is more than 1/3 monthly income.
You can rent bedrooms or basements though for $500-700/mo.
Supposing you got the $900/mo apartment. That leaves you with around $100/wk to feed yourself and cover all other expenses. Once taxes are taken out, that can leave you with significantly less. No amount of budgeting can turn that into night school + transport + clothes + utilities + anything else you need like furniture or medical insurance or dental care.
Most people trying to get a leg up work two full-time jobs which, while getting you more money (and enough money to qualify for the cheapest apartment possible), it doesn't leave any time for life advancement plans like night school. So it's a vicious cycle and you can only break out of it by being lucky in many areas simultaneously. You have to find the job that pays more than minimum wage, and compete with all the other poor people trying to get that same slot...so you can work only one job...so you can have time to take one class a semester at community college (so long as they happen to offer the classes you need at time that don't interfere with your work schedule and your work schedule doesn't change during the semester to interfere with your classes)...so in 5 or 6 years you can get an Associates degree, which isn't really worth much, but can be transfered to many state schools in lieu of the first two years of a 4-year degree (at much less cost).
Of course many people stop at this point because they can't afford the last two years of school, and the A.A. or A.S. didn't really help them get a better job. So they feel like they've just wasted 5 or 6 years of their life scraping for every penny they had to put themselves through school.
Escaping this kind of life requires so much luck and so many people in so many places to turn a blind eye, or offer a meaningful helping hand, that a person simply can't do it on their own. It's numerically impossible in the U.S. Most immigrants who come here with nothing never escape it themselves, but end up in a better life through their children.