So I made it through the month with 3$ left. It has some interesting facts, but altogether it's a bit odd that everything breaks down in a single month.
There are three things I find annoying by this game.
I shouldn't be driving a car if I don't have money for it. I should sell the car and always take bus, since later in the game it says I have that option.
I had to choose if I should stay with an hourly paycheck or work by the piece. I choose piece because then I thought I could put in some more work, but then it just said I couldn't work that much. Well if I had known that I would have stuck with an hourly check, that's math you can actually work out in real life before making that decision.
It says I have a college degree but that wont help me, and then it says I'm probably too uneducated to help out my children with math homework.
All in all some interesting facts about the american low-income society, but the choices and different aspects of it are very strange. You could do a lot more to save money as well as make more money than is presented here. Well basically, kind of annoyingly simplified.
Yeah, if you choose hourly (I did) then your boss just cuts your hours in half. But then later I lost a whole day of pay when I called in sick, but I don't really see how I couldn't make up that time seeing as I was only working 20 hours a week.
And what state are we living in in this game? Is there a state where a single parent making $9/hour doesn't get subsidized health insurance? If so maybe this fictive character (in pretty poor health it seems) needs to move. Apparently, all of your friends and family (at least your dead grandpa and friend getting married) lived out of state, so what are doing staying put.
Fun game, great info, but I agree with the over simplification. IRL, I can't pick an apartment without building an elaborate cost-benefit spreadsheet, so the slider bar abstracted away too much for my enjoyment.
Why is it stupid? It happened to my aunt about ~3 years ago. She was making about $12.50/h doing phone ordering (very senior, trained everyone, etc.); the company was sold/acquired and she was offered her old job at $9.25/h during a fairly large layoff. Since she lives in Michigan where the unemployment rate is well over 15%, she decided not to roll her dice at job hunting. She took the 26% pay cut and went to work for the same supervisor the next day. At least her house is mostly paid off, although it's worth half what she bought it for ~15 years ago -- this was her retirement savings.
I think the point of the game is that many people just can't comprehend how easy it is to have bad things happen in a very substantial way... with very little notice and being mostly powerless to do anything about it.
It informs you of the choices. It doesn't inform you of the unforeseen consequences. For all the flaws in this propaganda game, that isn't one of them. Neither is the "screwed no matter what" part.
It didn't tell me how much I would be making with either choice. I would at least know how many parts per day I produced, and it would be easy to calculate the daily rate from that. Not to mention that, in real life, you would probably be able to switch after having had your rate cut in half, or the supervisor would tell you "do you want to keep half your hourly rate, or switch to a per-part rate?".
If she's getting paid by the hour, every time she takes time off for a job interview costs her over $30. In a state with 15% unemployment, she'd have to roll the dice multiple times, and the likelihood of finding a higher-paying job isn't great; the likelihood of finding a higher-paying job in only a few shots is very low.
I'm currently teaching a college algebra class in which students learn to solve the kind of problem presented. (It would be very interesting to know where "train problems" got their start, though...)
The vast majority of my students cannot solve that sort of problem by themselves after seeing several examples of similar problems worked out. Yes, this is the last math course some of these students will have to take. No, they are not all liberal arts students.
Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.
Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.
Well, that just sounds like an indication that we're handing out far too many Bachelor's degrees to people who don't deserve them.
Out of curiosity, are you allowed to fail these students, in this compulsory course?
Many of them do fail. But they don't go away. It's not uncommon for people to take it three or four times until by luck or sheer force of will they finally pass with barely satisfactory grade.
Of course, this might be confirmation bias on my part. I never again see the ones that drop out.
I don't think much encouragement is needed there. I hear the phrase "If / When I win the lottery..." cited too often as a cure-all. That weekly or daily lottery allotment would be better spent elsewhere but unfortunately isn't.
I didn't buy the lottery ticket in the game, but now I'm curious -- I wonder if they bothered to code up a one-in-a-million chance that if the player buys a lottery ticket they'll actually win. That would be pretty cool.
"You won the lottery! You gain forty million dollars! OK, you were lucky this time, but the point about poverty still stands, okay?"
It easily can be. Consider a twenty-four year old fresh out of college with an animal science degree, school loan debt, dependent parents, no car, no openings in her field, forced to take fast food job. The job usually gives her forty hours a week, but scheduled so she works 10-20 days before a single day off. Rent started lower, but has been slowly jacked up to $800+ before utilities. This describes my best friend for the past year. Paying bills is tremendously difficult, much less saving any money.
So get a roommate, look for a new place, move to a cheaper area, get a different job. I've done all of these things at one time or another.
I've paid as low as $125 per month in rent, but most typically in the neighborhood of $225-300 (this is in one of the 15 biggest cities in the US, a major college town, to boot).
Serving/bartending you can easily make $15-25 per hour and work 25-40 hours per week. I've also worked as a valet part-time for another $10-15 per hour. Package handlers can make $13 per hour (last I saw, several years ago) working the late shift. These are jobs that generally have no degree requirements whatsoever.
My roommate was once a couple grand short on tuition money. He stripped for a couple weeks and was able to pay it all off. My sister's husband brings in close to $40K in the Army, and they give money to pay off student loans, too. I've had several friends work in Teach for America or as an Americorps Vista, receiving relatively meager salaries but getting a living allowance, money toward student loans, and a resume-building experience for aspiring non-profit workers.
Meanwhile, remain tenacious in seeking out opportunities that make use of that degree, and make every use of student loan deferment and forbearance until all high-interest credit cards are paid off. Enter into debt management in order to get credit card interest rates down into the 5-8% range.
The only saving that should be happening is an emergency cash fund. It doesn't make sense to save until your debts are paid off, unless you can reliably invest at a higher return (e.g., your employer matches your contribution up to 3% of salary for an effective 100%+ ROI).
I know how easy it is to get dejected and want to give up, but you absolutely must soldier through it. Cut costs everywhere (don't eat out, sell that car, start biking, take up cheap hobbies instead of paying for entertainment, cancel cable, etc.) and pay down high-interest debts. Things get a whole lot easier once you start having some cash margin each month.
That was the main thing I hated about the quiz. Everything was so binary. Rarely in life are we constrained to a box other than the one we construct for ourselves.
Who's downvoting these posts advocating making smart decisions? Why? As noted, the game makes numerous foolish presumptions (premium health plan, expensive internet, overpriced food, etc.); there's nothing wrong with pointing out there are much better options available. To the contrary, you'd think YC types would be _upvoting_ suggestions to leverage every opportunity in ways the posters have in fact lived.
I've had to moonlight as a valet in between jobs and I could make anywhere from $10/hr to $35/hr with tips. They would have hired anyone to work that job.
Yep, valet parking was probably one of my favorite part-time jobs. They put me on a mailing list for valet events and sent out weekly emails; I picked the shifts I wanted to work. I got a good friend a job there, too, and we often worked together. It was a great way to get in shape making decent money to drive nice cars. And there was generally a 1-3 hour lull during the event to relax, shoot the shit, make plans for the night, and meet new friends.
In the game I took the option of being a waiter working for $2.15 an hour plus tips, thinking that based on all the waiters I know I could easily earn some pretty good money. It told me I wound up earning $8 an hour, and this was average. I remain skeptical.
For one thing, that's minimum wage, and as I understand it, the employer is obliged to subsidise your wages up to minimum wage if you don't make that in tips. Secondly, assuming a standard 15% tip that means I'm only serving about $40 worth of food and drink per hour, in which case I'm in a really bad restaurant. (OK, maybe we need to share some of the tip total with busboys et cetera, but that's still astoundingly low). Thirdly, there's no way that can be the average, because it's the minimum, and some waiters are earning a whole lot more.
For single/couple without kids you might get by. But when you are 45, still working the $9 job, with 2 kids, and a sick partner...
Luckily that doesn't describe me, but it's easy to miss what it can be like for those on the edge. I hate it when politicians (in the UK) make out that it's not a big deal that for someone to lose £50 in benefits (per month), and have no concept of what it's like to live a life where every penny does count, and where one big bill can set you back for years.
We all might be lucky with great support networks, skills and health, but not every one is.
So it is true that somebody can have a month in which his/her gradfather dies, pet dies, friend is terminally ill, they break plates at work, the get depression, their tooth hurts, rent is raised, they get a speeding ticket, neighbor's kid breaks their windows, they make only 150$ is a yard sale selling "a bunch of stuff", their bathroom leaks, they slip and hit someone else, have to pay for a worthless college degree (why would I get any, I don't know), they forget their lunch frequently and thus buy a 1$ burger (if you are working in a warehouse, that is not going to effect you that much), have chest pains, get their gas siponed off, mom gets sick, their children throws a tantrum because they are being taunted as "free lunch kid" (and why would they go hungry for that?) and still make it through with $398 with a paycheck tomorrow?
I mean come on! Utterly ridiculous. Some people have a bad luck but don't forget from next month I would be having food stamps and not any of those expenses so may be able to save much.
I like the concept a lot but the game is just too rigid to be realistic. It's essentially a propaganda piece and the choices it gives you are no-win by design (so that the game has opportunity to lecture you on the plight of low-wage workers). Real life is not so restrictive.
It seems a bit involved to get across what could have been an infographic.
I'd really like to see someone take a more serious and/or interesting approach to this concept. This game plays like an old "choose your own adventure"; you have "choices", but everything is pre-determined and there are only a handful of available story routes, which in this case are designed to make it difficult to complete the game while selecting any of the presented moral options and then to show that you'll only have a few dollars left in exchange for abandonment of all principles.
>>It's essentially a propaganda piece and the choices it gives you are no-win by design (so that the game has opportunity to lecture you on the plight of low-wage workers). Real life is not so restrictive.
Agreed. From a design standpoint, it's structured closer to an advergame that way - get your point across (scraping by on a low wage while dealing with what life throws at you) and quickly before the player loses interest. The events of the game over the course of a month are more indicative of what could happen spread across a wider span of time.
I think there is some value in presenting statistical data as a narrative. I love Choose Your Own Adventure!
I had no problem getting to the end of the month with cash left over. Of course, I also work for a factory so I know an awful lot of $9/hr workers and how they live, so it wasn't that hard. You have to make a lot of hard choices. No, it's not easy.
While this is a bit overdone, there's a lot of truth to this thing. I've seen the results of an unplanned child, days people come in sick because they really can't afford to miss work, and things like that first hand.
Some of the people really have dug themselves into holes all on their own, but there are other folks who are just trying to scrape by with the crappy hand they've been dealt. It depends on the person, really and I could give you examples of both.
This game seems loaded as in the message behind it. That's fine but I think its slightly misleading. I paid off registration but later I still got charged 1.5k for my car not being registered. Also is it me or for the maths question no matter what you choose does it say you got it wrong? Despite having a college degree.
I find that I live a much more active life in this game than I ever have in real life. Back when I was making $9/hr, I can't remember a single week where my dog died, I got injured at work, the neighbor kid broke my window, I decided to see a therapist and one of my co-workers came down with a terminal condition.
I only made it to day 13, but already I've spent more in that game than I did in real life over the last month. I realize it's trying to make a point, but all it's really doing is making me suspect that it's fibbing a bit. More realism might turn out to be more convincing.
I made it through the month with $150 to spare without sacrificing my child's education or my health. I just didn't turn down free stuff (hey, there's nothing wrong with being poor) and didn't make stupid decisions, even though the game tried to set me up (forcing me to choose between getting paid per hour or per piece without an estimate on how much per-piece would give me? I'd at least do a back-of-the-envelope calculation in real life).
EDIT: Just tried it again and went with the hourly wage. The game said my supervisor cut it in half. Nice going, game.
Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?
True, I have often eaten the cheapest food I could find and once or twice went without eating for a day.
But, I always had a safety net: while I may have been low on money and even without money on occasion, I could always have borrowed money from family knowing that they would give it to me if I asked. But, I was saving that for if I ever really really needed it.
And that is what really separates the poor from the impoverished most times. When you look at those who are in the worst of the worst situations you realize that these people have little to no support network. If their parents made the same choices they did, or they don't even have parents anymore, or reliable family and friends, what are they to do when it gets tough? I know that if things every got really crazy tough for my family I could go to either me or my wife's parents and we could stay there, we have a social safety net. Lots of people living in these scenarios don't.
Agreed. I was especially pissed off with this game when, after choosing to pay higher rent so I could live within walking distance of work, it still made me keep my car, which hit me with a resultant $500+ in monthly costs between insurance payments and a mechanical breakdown.
Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?
People who are depressed, whose friends mostly smoke, and who can't see how they'll ever get out of this financial hole that seems deeper every month. Assuming it costs $80 a month to start smoking, the difference between $0 and $80 at the end of the month looms larger than the difference between -$100 and -$180. In the former case, you're going broke smoking. In the latter case, well, you were already broke, so hey, no change: still broke.
[Edit: I didn't actually play the game. I'm just responding to your comment about it. :) ]
I started a while back because of work stress, depression and anxiety. It's a very short-term fix, but by the time it stops "helping", you're dependent on nicotine to the point of continuing just to avoid the extra pain of having to quit, on top of everything else.
The final impetus for me was realising that I was spending something close to £200 ($300) a month on cigarettes. Nearly 4 months now, and I reckon in a year or so I'll have enough to replace my macbook :)
I've been a smoker for 9 years now, and I still smoke at most 2 packs per month. I buy the most expensive cigarettes that are still mass-market, and still I only pay ~$20 per month for my habit.
If I were poor, I'd have to look more closely at that $20, but for anyone in the middle class $20 is the price of a good meal if that.
With the game, I found myself questioning a lot of the priors such as---why when I'm living <5 miles away from work, do I lose my job the moment I don't have a car? Can't I walk?
Why do I even have a car in the first place? Also, why do I have a mobile phone on monthly contract? Was pre-paid not available in my area?
It's just a game but it seems pretty unfair even for small choices.
So you ate up $850 in savings and have no way of paying rent the next day.
The game isn't realistic. It condenses in one month what could happen in the span of a year or more, but the result is the same though. you end up broke.
Right. And here's a different flash site, which shows that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide increased their real income over the last twenty years:
Somehow hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere went from far more deprived conditions to first world status over the span of a few decades. Nothing in that game compares to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. So clearly it is possible for an entire civilization to pull itself up by its bootstraps through capitalism. [0]
Finally, as noted the game stacks the deck against reality. It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are the major causes of poverty. [1], [2]
If the game started a few years earlier and asked "do you want to complete high school" and "do you wait till you're financially stable before marrying & having children", the overall message would be very different. Indeed, the authors would likely be accused of having unfashionable political sympathies for simply advising that people mimic the behaviors of middle class Asian immigrant families.
That statement may have a bit of racial stereotyping as we can be sure that not all (100%) Asian immigrants were so frugal but I don't see any malicious intent ... I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. I understand welfare for those who are truly needy, but there needs to be a way to lift them up so that it's not permanent (with perhaps the exception of those with disabilities that prevent it).
I guess I don't mind providing people the bare minimum to live without strings attached. I'd actually agree with Hayek and Friedman that we should attach fewer strings and just make them cash payments, because that's less distorting; all the book-keeping and social engineering to try to get people off welfare, and to not "waste" the welfare money when they're on it (Section 8 housing, food stamps, etc.) costs more and distorts the economy more than just paying them would.
I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).
Well said ... plus, it would only cost half as much because we could get rid of the highly-paid bureaucrats administering the system (assuming they were capable of keeping a job elsewhere versus going on welfare themselves).
Lets assume that ten percent of Americans choose to take the ten grand/year you suggest.
Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?
Well, in the first place, that's 8% of the federal budget, which seems like a pretty small price to pay for ensuring that everyone has a basic existence (minimal food/shelter). There are certainly stupider things we spend 8% of the federal budget on.
And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget.
If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)
I think you answered your own question. Spend the money on on people instead of the military.
I am a fan of TVA type government workfare. It is not close to perfect, but it is better than the MIC. I would rather have contracters skimming graft off of construction and litter cleaning and boarding schools (my pet solution to inner city collapse) and science labs and music and dance troupes,than off of bombs and desert deployments.
I know you're just using it as comparison, but didn't the Iraq War start in 2003? And if this[1] is to be believed, the total cost of the war is ranging around $3.2-4 trillion. That's thirteen and a third years of your $300 billion scenario.
And it's not like that $300 billion just disappears into a black hole. Because poor people need it to live they are spending it immediately, which multiplies out across the economy, certainly more so than a war does. And I'm not even counting the human life cost of war. So yes, just giving people $10K a year isn't that bad considering what we have done.
I just love the thinking though: "we've spent all this money to kill people for no reason and now you expect us to feed Americans?!?!"
we already provide the bare minimum...we have welfare, social security, unemployment benefits, hospitals that are required to treat your broken arm even if you can't pay for it...all sorts of help from churches and other charitable organizations. i don't think there is any threat of anyone in the united states starving to death unless they are anorexic, addicted to drugs, infested with tape worms and too stubborn to see a doctor, or lost in the woods for a long time. what you're thinking of is a star-trek sort of world. we're a long way off from that. we're still in the jungle baby. just be glad you're alive and breathing and stop trying to convince uncle sam to take even more of my money or i'll just stop working and play call of duty all day and let you program all these websites for me.
I'm not sure what kind of world you live in, but: 1) the U.S. is quite wealthy overall and can easily afford to maintain a basic minimum standard; and 2) does not currently do so in any sort of effective way.
You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point.
I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.
There's a happy medium achievable between the straightforward blunt instrument of cash payments and systems whose targeting is so complex nobody understands their costs or benefits.
I'm unconvinced by neoclassical arguments by Friedman et al. on "distorting" for two reasons.
Firstly there's nothing inherently wrong with introducing further "distortion" into the market unless you subscribe to the evidently false proposition that no person's ability to optimise their spending habits with respect to their budget constraint can be improved upon; that you're making individuals and society worse off for buying them healthcare when they expressed more interest in a hire-purchase agreement for a state-of-the-art pickup truck. I believe quite the opposite: people receiving government money aren't entitled to spend it on anything they want, and even with imperfect information a technocrat, will often be better at allocating some of that cash than the average welfare recipient.
Secondly, given differences between incomes, propensities to consume and the ease of introducing new supply into the market, a simple flat subsidy can distort markets more than targeted payments. Converting payments such as government funded health insurance to cash would have the effect of inflating the prices of ramen and particularly crappy apartments (since welfare recipients can live without the health insurance, albeit for less long, and there's not enough decent apartments in many areas). Given the relatively fixed supply of housing, people who already owned rental property would capture more benefit than any other industry, ironically because they chose to use their capital in a relatively unproductive manner. On the other hand, hospitals might be worse off, losing part of their customer base and seeing cost increases (notably unskilled labour). Since the government has the choice in how they distort the market, I'd rather they subsidise healthcare professionals than slum landlords.
I totally agree with your point about bare minimum safety nets encouraging innovation. Even those poor who are never going to launch world-changing startups might consider a stab at freelancing in an area they're more capable in than dishwashing once the risk of not having regular income is removed.
> I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks.
That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.
The U.S.'s immigration policies also take a highly biased sample of Asian immigrants, generally the highly educated, and those who already have enough money to do things like pay out of pocket for a U.S. masters degree (which gets you a student visa, which makes it easier, though still tricky, to end up with other kinds of visas). Geography alone gives us different socio-economic cross-sections of Asian versus Mexican immigrants, for example.
In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).
It's not racist at all. Quite the opposite. It's culture-ist.
It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.
I think the culture argument is bullshit. I assure you, there are a lot of dumb and lazy Asians out there. The US has been good at importing the grad students, the hardworking creme de la creme, that's all.
In a lot of ways the deck has been economically stacked against lower-middle class and working poor Americans, while at the same time macroeconomic trends benefited low-skilled workers in developing countries like China. Workers there were able to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" thanks in part to rapidly rising wages as production moved to lower-cost countries.
I have no doubts that the globalization of economic inputs produces higher global growth and a greater overall level of welfare, but I also have no doubt that this process produces winners and losers. One subset of the losers has been low/medium skilled Americans, who face stagnating wages and many of the challenges this game portrays (in an admittedly over-dramatic fashion). We can either accept this as the cost of doing business or work as a society to compensate the losers, but in either case we should acknowledge that there are some larger forces at play that make it harder for certain segments of the population to reach their own bootstraps.
Losers? I'll be the first to admit that I am ignorant about the situation in the USA, but do you really think that people such as these are losers considering the standard of living they can still afford? Mobile phones with $70 bills? Honestly? Hell, a mobile in itself? (My mobile cost £20, and I have yet to use up my initial top-up of £20 5 months after buying it).
I honestly feel disgusted by the fact that I am expected to feel sorry for people such as these. I managed to get to the end to the month all fine and dandy, and could see many things I could still do to improve my cash flow.
My kid may have not been given some meaningless luxuries that other kids got (I never went to school trips and the like myself), but my charisma and public services such as the library and the like would be more than enough to ensure he turns out a fine man.
Hell, if I wouldn't even have had a kid in the first place, until I could ensure that I could raise properly. Expecting me to feel sympathy for an individual who can't afford a kid, suffering from their own selfishness, is out of order. It's comparable to expecting me to pay for the treatment of some fool who didn't put on a condom when he knew he was have sexual intercourse with a - unique woman.
edit. Forgive me, due to my anger I lost focus on what I was initially trying to say. Basically, standard of living has improved dramatically. They may not be able to afford premium goods such as sparkly ipads and ps3's, but they can still afford a great deal of stuff.
Except adequate healthcare, housing, living in good school districts...
It's cheaper to have a mobile phone nowadays than it is to have a land line. That's why mobile has really taken off in places like, say, Africa. Just because someone has a cell phone doesn't mean they're not struggling.
Given a choice between living as a corporate CEO (or even upper middle class professional) in the 1950s versus part of the welfare underclass today, I would almost certainly choose the former. Even sans cell phones.
Would you really? If so, I think you're more interested in social status, and in relative wealth than in absolute wealth.
Let's just consider health care. One reason health care is so much more expensive now compared to the 1950's is the roughly 60 years of technical innovation that has happened since then. In 1950, there were still outbreaks of polio. Cancer was a far more certain death sentence. MRI's didn't exist. The birth control pill was not yet available. There was no dialysis. There was no laser surgery. Heart surgery was very primitive: there was no bypass surgery, no replacement of heart valves, and no pacemaker. By and large, people died of diseases that could be treated today, and many of those treatments are available today even to the poor and uninsured. (In a move unthinkable in 1950, my state even subsidizes access to birth control for low-income single women.)
In terms of ease of living and freedom from worry or want, relative social status trumps absolute wealth once you've passed a certain base level of well-being. Which I think the 1950's falls into.
I'm having trouble finding hard health data. The closest thing is that in 1972, life expectancy for the bottom half was 77.7 and for the upper half 78.9, while in 2001 79.6 years for the bottom half and 85.4(!) for the top half. Which amounts to about the same for the top half in 1972 and bottom half in 2001.
The top half life expectancy would be lower in the 1950s than the 1970s, but at the same time today's welfare underclass is probably significantly worse off than the average person in the lower half. I expect those would end up being a wash, and life expectancies would be comparable, though probably with a slight edge for the underclass of today.
That's a trade that I think would be worth it, given all the exceptional benefits of relative wealth and status. Yeah, no iPhones, but drivers, maids, home-visiting doctors, nice single family homes in fun areas, economic security, and ability to eat out or go to shows whenever you want makes up for it for most people.
The problem with metrics is they always measure less than you think. Polio, for instance, is more likely to cripple you for life than kill you.
You only have to go back to the year 2000 to give up iPhones. Going back to 1990 you give up the Internet. Going back to 1980 you give up Mac and Windows. Going back to 1970 you give up microwave ovens and personal computers at all along with cable television. Going back to 1950 you give up birth control, open-heart surgery, commercial air travel, and color television.
That's just technology. There's a huge cultural gap, too. In 1950 segregation was the law, there was little to no access to foreign culture, atheism was distrusted and associated with Communism, pre-marital sex was taboo, and women by and large did not work outside of the household, especially not when they had children. None of the music that I listen to even existed back then. None of it would even be possible.
I don't mean to valorize the 1950's generally, at all. Yeah, white privilege was encoded into law, but if you were a member of the ruling elite, that actually benefited you. The point about gender you make is well-taken.
There are two separate issues: consumer goods and actual well being. I think you overestimate the difference in consumer goods between the ruling elite in the Fifties and the contemporary welfare underclass: the latter rarely, if ever, can take advantage of commercial air travel and have severely limited access to open-heart surgery. And barrier birth control and abortion were readily available (albeit significantly more expensive) to the rich in the 1950s, while in the modern day they (especially abortion) are somewhat difficult, though far from impossible, for the underclass to access.
But quibbling over those details can make us ignore the more central point. Access to consumer goods is only part of the picture, because power is a very strong and often superior substitute good for most of them. Roombas are accessible to the middle class today, but they are inferior to an actual person cleaning the house for you, even with an antiquated vacuum cleaner from midcentury. The vast majority of the population can text each other now, but a well-off member of management could very easily have a secretary do the same through a messenger boy. The latter is slower, but in some ways easier: he (invariably a he) had at will access to an intelligence superior to the most advanced AI now, without the burden of having to hit tiny keys, save phone numbers, or remember to charge his phone. A member of the upper class in the 1950's did not have to worry about employment; about housing; about having interesting work; about getting fired for drinking on the job (hell, your company would pay for your booze and cigarettes); about worrying how to pay the bills the next month; about sending your kids to a school with regular shootings; about visiting the social worker to prove you had sent out pro-forma applications to jobs you're incapable of performing so you can get your welfare check.
Some tradeoffs are less clear. The middle manager in 1955 had to worry about global thermonuclear war, but not about catastrophic climate change or poisoned soy sauce from China. We have hormonal birth control, but also HIV.
All of us are members of the professional upper middle class, so we're certainly better off. But an unemployed single parent living on the bad side of Hunter's Point? If I were forced to choose, yeah, I'd definitely go with the rich straight white guy in the 1950s with massive social privileges. Even with fewer gadgets and less sophisticated technology.
I think the tipping point is honestly Internet access. A member of the welfare class today has free access to the sum of human knowledge. No one had that in the 1950's.
And frankly, the poor have much better access to health care thank you think. I know from personal experience that a poor, uninsured person can still get necessary or even largely elective surgeries that may not have even existed, and surely would not be performed with the same level of safety and quality, in 1950.
Oh yes--and abortion was actually illegal in the 1950's.
I'm no expert on dialysis, but ff we would be so much better off without dialysis even existing, then presumably no one, nowhere has legitimate reason to use it. Unfortunately, I think untreated kidney failure might be worse. Many medical treatments are not so much "good" as "better than death"--many cancer treatments, for instances, take the tactic of slowly killing the patient in such a way that the cancer dies faster than the healthy tissue.
Yeah, so you're right that electronics have gotten cheaper right along with Moore's law.
How about everything else? There's no such thing as a stable factory job anymore, if you can't code and don't have other white collar skills, you have a choice of Wal-mart and the gas station to work at. Neither gives you health insurance. You won't make enough to live in a nice school district.
Sympathy's the wrong way to look at it, although you could probably do with a little more empathy. The real point is that when enough people are struggling to get by, it hurts the economy at large and hurts you.
What's really odd is that the folks who talk the most about the problems for lower-class American workers will get most offended the moment you suggest that competition for cheap labour from millions of illegal immigrants might have something to do with it.
It's not the Lump of Labor fallacy to say that the economy has a limited appetite for low-skilled workers. In Australia, where illegal immigration is quite limited, it's not a choice of Wal-Mart and the gas station for folks without white-collar skills, there's also farming jobs, cleaning jobs, and best of all, tradesman jobs like builder, electrician or plumber. You'll need an apprenticeship for some of those, but can quickly work your way up from earning very little as an apprentice to earning six figures as a competent and fully-qualified tradesman. But in America, all the job categories which I mentioned are dominated by illegals, so it really is true that the uneducated have a really rough time.
Another thing to consider is the basic IQ requirements of modern high quality jobs. You don't need to be a genius to be a Doctor or Programmer but good luck finding them with subs 80 IQ's (~16% of the population). It may have been more dangerous and paid less to build the Model T but it was also reasonable to send just about anyone to that type of work. Now add to that Illegal immigration which results in fairly intelligent people doing manual labor for low pay it's even harder for people that are a little slow to compete.
I think the "dey took our jawbs" line is a little bit of a red herring here. Sure, there's an impact, but automation and outsourcing are both bigger impacts, and for all 3, they're here, we better deal with them.
I feel like a path to citizenship would bring the wages for these jobs back above-ground and create a fair marketplace for labor where people could compete.
What's the other option, "ship them all back to latin america"? If you think that's a good idea, I'd invite you to think about what that enforcement action would look like, and if it fits into your concept of "America".
EDIT: Watches blanket downvotes without counter-proposal or likely even reading my comments. Whoever that is should run for the House.
Frankly, it seemed like the next obvious step from his initial complaint. We're talking about underemployment and he brings up immigrants out of nowhere as a scapegoat? Was that a prelude to an argument for amnesty? It's not my fault if it sounds bad.
And accusing me of quote "douchebaggery" while being high and mighty about what belongs on hacker news is a little rich.
Hey, I'm just musing on the causes of unemployment. For the record, I do support deporting illegal immigrants back to wherever they're from, and I'm shocked that this is even controversial in this country.
I'm not actually even an American. I'm merely temporarily here on a visa. But once you've spent as much time and money on US visa renewals as I have, you don't have much sympathy for the line-jumpers who enter the country illegally.
If you look at states like Georgia (and i've seen similar articles about parts of the UK), there's a massive shortage of farm workers, and regardless of what the supply of illegal migrant workers is. Even after Georgia began holding farmers directly liable for employing illegal immigrants, local workers have not stepped up to fill the gap.
Besides, American immigration policy, rightly, allows white collar workers from other nations, especially Canada and Mexico into the country via NAFTA. That is, frankly, a good thing. All we're doing is keeping out a labor supply that is currently needed.
If you want to level the playing field for native low skill workers, require farmers and the like to pay all the taxes and health benefits for all their workers, illegal or not.
There was a documentary aired here in Australia which follows several out-of-work UK natives as they're given the jobs that (legal) immigrants do. These are jobs like picking asparagus, working at a packing plant, and carpentry. Out of the 8 or so natives only a handful actually show up for work, and of those only one or two actually do the work to a reasonable standard and would be considered employable.
I've also seen reports in the news where Australia needs more seasonal agricultural workers, as Australians don't necessarily want to do the work. Most recently there's been a trial program to get pacific islanders in on temporary visas to work these farms. And traditionally it's been backpackers that have worked these fruit-picking and misc jobs.
So it seems to me that a lot of the population of the "developed" world, especially the native people, don't want to be doing those menial, labour intensive, and repetative jobs themselves. Also I don't believe that the immigrants that do these jobs now want their kids to be doing them. Therefore I would say that we should work harder to try and automate these kinds of menial mind-numbing jobs as best as we can.
Given that the median farmworker (crops) made $8.98 in 2010, your experience would seem a little extraordinary. The better-paid median ranchworker made $10.56. $12 in 1999 had the same buying power as $15.71 in 2010.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in the 1980s the net advance of the undocumented population was at the 130,000 per year, increasing to 450,000 per year from 1990–1994, and further increasing to 750,000 per year from 1995–1999, and staying at 700,000–850,000+ per year since about 2000
Well i mean, sort of, but not really. The influx in immigration took place in the 90s and stabilized, and is now falling due to the economic collapse in the US.
Either way, i think we're well served by including some specific claims (and that's why i cited the wikipedia page)
NAFTA was the catalyst the created the waves of immigration from Mexico.
Why?
"Free trade" destroyed many US factory jobs, but it vaporized Mexican agriculture. Small proprietor farms were out of business overnight by the flood of cheap US corn.
The human element in illegal immigration is usually completely ignored. People don't pull up stakes and walk across a desert because they think that working in a poultry slaughterhouse is a great life. They do so because it is a better life than complete destitution that they face at home.
I started doing hay (which involves throwing and stacking 40-50 pound bales in a hot barn) at $6.00/hr. After a year or two I was doing a variety of jobs that were a higher value to my employer. Also worked for an awesome family who worked us very hard.
I went to a school that was big into the wine industry and they said many farms in New Zealand and Australia use machines to pick fruit. That doesn't leave as much room for low skilled workers on farms.
I would agree with you if three other things were comparably inexpensive:
1) quality education (including post-secondary, which would otherwise need to be saved-for)
2) portable, quality basic health care
3) inexpensive, safe, spartan-but-quality housing
No amount of TVs, computers, mobile phones, or iPods will make up for the fact that these three necessities are often pretty expensive in the U.S.
Hell, if I wouldn't even have had a kid in the first place, until I could ensure that I could raise properly.
Kids have a way of happening even when you don't expect or want them. Combine that with social pressures against abortion, and your stance becomes a luxury.
Also, I'm a bit disturbed that you see field trips at school as a luxury rather than part of a solid, well-rounded education.
Having unprotected sex is a choice.
Not taking birth control is a choice.
Not getting an abortion is a choice.
Making the decision to not have a kid until they are ready is one that anyone can make. Saying that it is a 'luxury' to decide to not have unprotected sex and take birth control is beyond ridiculous.
So, all those women who were brought up without strong parenting due to busy work, overcrowded schools due to underperforming kids and bored youth groups with no programs are going to avoid unprotected sex? That's not considering the amount of drugs, crime, etc to 'escape' life.
I'm not saying that those women (or men) are stupid, I'm saying that they are brought up badly due to the neglect. You're taking so much 'choices' for granted when they are actually educated choices. For example, finances (how much will a kid cost? Bigger car? Food? Rent?), job security (are the parent(s) comfortable?), time constraints (do they have time to spend with them?). Ironically, they may end up neglecting their own children despite best intentions (eg Working overtime on minimum wage so the kid can get into college for example but the kid ends up a drug addict).
The way USA's poverty is a form of a Spartan kid's bath. Many will suffer, a few will make it through and be strong. All the more while other countries provide social programs (Social governments) or strong families (Communal communities) to make it easier and more aware of the responsibilities of having a kid.
Yes, because teenagers are well-noted for their life experience, level of education, and decision-making abilities. And abortion is freely-available everywhere, with no social stigmas attached.
Throw into that mix 'abstinence-only' sex education, and your 'choices' disappear. If you don't know about protected sex, and it's clear that all this "choice" you mention is just illusion for a great many people.
You can't say "why didn't you use a condom?" if you block the information about condom use. Hell, in some parts of Africa, the Catholic Church is spreading information that condoms cause AIDS. Where's the choice there? Where is the 'luxury' there?
By the way, I didn't say the sex was the luxury, I said your stance was the luxury - this expectation that kids come along when you plan them. If you actually speak to parents, you'll find that kids frequently come along despite using high-reliability birth control, and sometimes never come along despite desperately trying for years.
What really is beyond ridiculous is your cold, calculating opinion of how humans operate, combined with this expectation that all humans have access to the information you have.
>Also, I'm a bit disturbed that you see field trips at school as a luxury rather than part of a solid, well-rounded education. //
It's a luxury because one can't afford it, not because one sees it as a frippery.
My lad wants to do an after school club that the school has been promoting, wants to go to a uniformed group with his friends, etc.. These things would be good experiences, provide useful educational opportunities and best of all be fun. We can't afford them. They are luxuries in the sense that he won't be unloved, malnourished, unfit or uneducated without them.
'Educated' is not a boolean true/false. Missing out on field trips would not make someone 'uneducated', but it would decrease the breadth of their education.
Example: I'm a city boy, born and bred, but I spent summers on my uncle's farm. Due to that experience, I understand much better how rural people think and why, and the kinds of things that are more important to them.
If I had never spent time on the farm, I would not be 'uneducated', but those experiences have significantly improved my understanding of the people around me - I am much better educated for having these [lengthy] 'field trips'.
Replay this experience in shorter amounts more frequently in the form of field trips and you'll get a variety of different things to help broaden your experience and who knows, you may see something you're passionate about that you might not otherwise see.
So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life.
>Missing out on field trips would not make someone 'uneducated', but it would decrease the breadth of their education. //
Absolutely.
We do however always go out and about when we have family time. Thankfully the UK tax payer pays for the upkeep of key national museums - visiting them is one of the few things one can do for free. We do have a bent towards natural history, that's usually free too!
>So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life. //
Oh believe me I'm all for well-rounded. I'm not at all arguing against the enormous value of such things. You say they're necessary things. But my resources don't stretch to paying for them and the society around doesn't value them enough to make them available to all without direct charge.
I'm doing what I can to provide a well rounded education as I see the enormous value a broad education has brought me. For example I studied Art History for only a term before studies for my degree got in the way but I found it immensely valuable as a catalyst to my own enquiry and as a lever in to understanding societal development.
However, I don't think you can really argue that such things are "necessary" for "healthy adult life". Possibly "a doorway to a fulfilling adult life"?
Depends on the field trips. Most of the places that the field trips go probably have free days. The only difference is that you wouldn't be going with the class. For example, once per month the Portland Art Museum is free from 5pm-8pm and less frequently there are 'free for family' days on the weekends. Going on field trips doesn't mean that you aren't exposed to culture.
It's a whole different way of thinking though. I'm probably at the exterme end of it: my siblings and I have decided that we will form a trust in which we will all be equal owners and any company we start(or wealth we acquire individually) will be owned by the trust.
The upside? It distributes the risk and almost ensures that none of us will ever go broke.
The downside(for some people)? When one of us flips the company, the wealth will be equally distributed between my siblings, irrespective of whether they actually worked at the company or not.
Why 100% split? Why not a fractional share with a dollar cap, like social security? That could rednce the effect of freeloading, while still providing security in case the richest of you feels less generous in the future.
I suppose that could be done but financial security is only partial goal. The other goal of unity and equality is probably a little more important and that breaks pretty quickly if there is significant disparity between our standard of living.
This reduces the chance that any sibling will have a lifestyle that is relatively more affluent than the others. And when we get a freeloader, it encourages the other siblings to not give up on his life. It may be easier to give up if you can tell yourself "well he is getting what he deserves".
This assumes a great deal of good faith, obviously. It can easily go bad and turn into resentment if (a) we get a freeloader and (b) he remains a freeloader all his life. But even in that worst case scenario, the hope(from our cultural upbringing) is that there will be less resentment(for the financial unfairness) and more sadness/empathy for the sibling who went the wrong way all his life.
My father's brothers have been on this model for couple decades and it has mostly worked out. They've had multiple freeloaders at one point turn into super productive contributors a decade later(and after lots of hardwork by the non-freeloading siblings towards the freeloaders).
This model is most easy when you are still young and life is simple(as it is for us now). It becomes very challenging after we all have wives, children and grandchildren and different local interests and politics. It usually leads to (somewhat bitter) splitville where assets are divided. This is one area my siblings and me are most weary of and want to do a better job of than our prior generations.
This is super interesting. Did you know of anyone else that set up these types of family trusts, or was it just your dad and his brothers? Did you do anything to make it legally binding, and how long have you been doing it for?
Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks? Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?
Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?
It's really not about the companies nor is it even legally binding in most cases with these arrangements(there is a lot of argument for/against making it legally binding). This idea dates back generations when joint families were more common.
Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks?
This plays out every single day in one way or the other.
Example 1: One of the core points which I grew up hearing from my dad is that my money isn't really mine--it's the family's. Where as in American culture we largely teach kids independence from an early age, my dad never made me feel like I have to work as a teenager to have pocketmoney. His money was mine. What if he didn't have money to give me? I'd be expected to be sensitive enough to understand and work - so I can help the family(not so much myself).
Example 2: Last year I was in school and my (normally well to do dad) hit a rough patch. Our entire family finances were fucked. So I picked up a few coding gigs, worked my ass off and made the checks go straight to my dad.
Of course, my school friends thought I should be loaded at the end of the project. When I told them 100% of the money went to my dad, they were shocked. Some even tried to tell me "bro you're stupid!" :) May be. But that's my culture :) And so far I love it!
Example 3: Earlier this year, I just packed my bags one day and moved to NYC to live with my brother indefinitely. As I understand, this is not common in American culture. And even when a really close friend lets you do it, it is seen as "owing" a favor. But in our case, I did not owe my brother a favor or explanation on why I was going to live with him in his one bedroom apartment. In fact, I'd have to give an explanation to my family if I decided not to live with him. It's expected that if you live in the same city, you live together if you are family.
Oh btw, I have a full-time job now but my brother pays 100% of the rent. And I'm saving up cash from my job so one of us can potentially quit in a few months and take a shot at the start-up game again. None of this is planned or negotiated well in advance. My Dad could call me tomorrow and ask me for 100% of the money in my account and I'd send it without reservation. He'd do the same for me--though out of respect for being the father, he has more right to question me about why I need money than my right to question him. =)
Few months ago I had a major financial disaster when a client turned out to be fraudulent, putting me over $10,000 in the red. That's a lot of money for a freelancer. This is when I was able to call up my dad and pretty much the problem was immediately taken care of(he's doing a lot better now financially than last yr).
In a few years, my dad will be retired. He won't be getting a social security check from the gov and he barely has savings for retirement because he mostly invested them in his kids--knowing they'd take care of him after retirement. So he'll be getting money transfers from all of his kids every month after retirement.
That sounds great. Your family also has an advantage over those who go it alone because you can be more efficient with finances (we don't each need our own mortgage, interest payments, etc.) and you have more opportunity to take chances. While some subset of the family is trying a new startup, the rest can be earning money for the next round.
I find this really interesting as well. I'd really appreciate a longer account of your thinking and the details, if you wouldn't mind. I've mulled over a similar idea, but done nothing with it.
> "It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are the major causes of poverty."
Some people find it useful to walk a mile in the shoes of those affected by the policies they support. Whether you might ever choose or have to wear those shoes personally is rather beside the point.
A dialogue tree that allowed the player to navigate life choices at an intellectual remove from real human life would simply reinforce our societal tendency to dodge the question of "what do we do with the struggling" by asserting that "I know better than them."
I'd venture to guess that the choices you mention did not always carry the sort of consequences they do today.
You're right, policy decisions don't cause more people to have kids at a young age. They do however, have an effect on joblessness [1], just to name one facet of the economic environment that now exists in the US.
You're right, policy decisions don't cause more people to have kids at a young age.
'Abstinence only' sex education causes more people to have kids at a young age, because it prevents more people from learning what options there are available. Add into that the issue that young people have always been difficult to stop fucking each other throughout history, and combine with the highly sexualised modern society, and 'Abstinence only' sex education is, frankly, evil.
Yes, there absolutely are policies that encourage people to climb to a perch from which it is incredibly easy to fall: social pressure against out-of-wedlock births; ineffective sexual education; social stigma against and a lack of services providing female reproductive health in general, contraceptives, emergency contraceptives and abortion; the structure of our health system disincentivizing preventative medical care in general; bankruptcy 'reform'; predatory lending practices; social stigma against the trades; corporate abuse of the safety net to depress wages; college grants and their unregulated effect on tuition; the college loan system in general; regressive taxation; child tax credits; safety net rewards based on family size; the jarring transition between qualifying for social safety net programs and not qualifying; military rewards based on family size; subsidized sprawl and a lack of public transportation; zero-tolerance laws and policies; substandard school districts; etc.
"climb to a perch from which it is incredibly easy to fall"
This is a succinct way to put it, and a good list. Can you say more about "social pressure against out-of-wedlock births"? You see this as another thing that encourages unsustainable lifestyles?
It's great that you're providing a stable home, however that's the exception for unwed parents. Typically, the father wanders off and provides no support. None of the mother's options at that point are as good as a stable marriage/long-term relationship with the kid's father.
That's how the statistics work out. We can argue about why that happens, but it's absurd to suggest that it doesn't.
Parents' choices, and having kids is almost always a choice, have consequences.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've actually had significant interaction with young unwed mothers.
Almost every one of them got pregnant intentionally. Yes, many will tell you a story at first, and "I couldn't afford it" does let them save face, which is pretty much all they've got left. But, after a while, it comes out that they knew exactly what they were doing.
So, why did they want to get pregnant?
A minor reason is that being a parent gets you some immediate respect.
However, the big reason is one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
"A baby has to love me."
> regressive taxation
The US doesn't have a regressive tax system. In fact, much of the volatility in tax revenues, which is killing CA, comes from being too progressive. (FWIW, EU countries tend to have a much flatter tax system.)
"progressive" = fraction of income going to taxes increases with income. (Marginal rates are almost irrelevant, revenue is the only thing that matters.)
Yes, the US tax system is more progressive even including all of that. However, it is true that we spend less on social programs that benefit poor people.
In what way is it different from any other tax? A percentage of your earnings goes into it, you have no control over what happens after that point, sounds like any other tax.
That correlation is really weak, though, so I don't think it matters. In any case, why should it make a difference what happens to the money after you pay it? The nature of a tax is in how it gets collected, not what the government does with the money afterwards.
> That correlation is really weak, though, so I don't think it matters.
The payback is entirely a function of the contribution stream (amounts and time).
> In any case, why should it make a difference what happens to the money after you pay it?
Because money collected for specific services rendered isn't much like money collected for general public services.
For example, many cities do garbage collection. While that money is collected by govt, it isn't much like property or sales tax.
Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?
> The payback is entirely a function of the contribution stream (amounts and time).
SS isn't just the basic retirement stuff. Other payments are available which vary based on disability, personal resources, and location and status of residence.
Even the basic retirement stuff depends greatly on how long you live. If you die just as you retire, your inheritors don't get any of your SS benefits.
> Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?
Yes, as long as the $100/month is not optional. Gas taxes go to build highways that the driver uses, is that then not a tax? Tons of taxes are earmarked for specific purposes.
Problem is that not all those are "decisions" people make. Many of those are not decisions but arise out of life circumstances.
However many times people do chose to do the "fun" thing and instead of strive for a good job take the easy way out. That easy way is short-sighted.
Unfortunately we are seeing life from the walls of the castle, staring at the peasents saying "shame on you for not being royalty". However over the years I've grown to think that maybe 60%+ of the cause of people being poor is their fault. I see my friend partying every fucking night. She has no money. I have plenty of money yet cannot party because I have responsibilities. Yet when shit hits the fan, I have a buffer while she goes into a "shit my life is going nowhere" regression.
Sure her circumstances did not allow her to get the same living environment as I did, she is not a mathematically-inclined person, but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money. She barely works, when she does its not for long periods of time, and is older than I am.
So yea, my sympathy has been declining. Shoulda finished high school. Shoulda gone to a community college and studied your ass off. Shoulda worn a rubber till you were ready. Now it's too late, and you are standing there with your arms in the air begging for help.
> Problem is that not all those are "decisions" people make. Many of those are not decisions but arise out of life circumstances.
Almost all pregnancy is the result of a decision to have sex. Yes, contraceptives fail sometimes, but that doesn't explain teen pregnancy rates. And, in the US at least, contraceptives are free, and have been for decades. Yes, even in rural/backwoods US.
> but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money.
I think that schools should be on the hook for student loans. Yes, including non-profit and state schools.
And no, grants shouldn't be increased. 4 years of effort should have some lifetime economic benefit.
"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes." ~ Kurt Vonnegut
I think your mistake is to think everyone is capable of knowing the consequences of their actions. Letting all people suffer the full consequences of all their actions, when it would cost little to get them off the hook, seems wrong to me, and to many others.
Life isn't fair, and it never will be. But we, as intelligent human beings, can do a lot to make it more fair. I think that is an overall win for everyone.
That is a very odd interpretation of Harrison Bergeron. You believe that it's about taxes and the welfare state? I find that hard to believe considering Kurt was a self proclaimed socialist.
doki_pen, you make a great point. Lets also not forget that many people who end up in these situations actually grew up in them as well. Many of their parents didn't finish high school, don't have good jobs, and were born when their parents were only teenagers. A lot of people who live out these scenarios have never had anything better modeled to them. Preached to them, yes, but modeled? No.
So when a kid, at home, is always being told and modeled things that will skew them away from making good decisions what do you expect? What do you expect when their Mom, who they love and trust (for no other reason than its their Mom, how do they know any better?), tells them that their teachers are wrong because of x or y and that you need to look out for yourself and that no one will help and yadda yadda yadda... yeah, some people aren't making bad decisions with all the facts laid out in front of them.
Its easy to be an armchair quarter back, but instead of riding these people through their misery, why not show some love and compassion and try to help them out. This will go much further than beating them down and continuing not only the economic cycle, but the cultural one as well.
If the rest of society is ready to make sure nobody faces the consequences of their actions I see no incentive for anyone to care about the consequences of the choices they make. "Why should I care about whether I make the right decision or not when everyone is ready to bail me out?" Maybe people should stop making excuses for themselves and take responsibility for what they choose to do everyday.
China is far from first world. They have modern cities, but their GDP is less than $5000/year pp. They employ slave child labor to make your cheap plastic shit. They work 14 hour days. It sucks.
The coastal parts of China are first world economies, but parts of China are still effectively 3rd world. It's silly to claim that Chinese workers make "cheap plastic shit". They make high-end electronics, they make industrial equipment, they build ships, they make aerospace components, they even build orbital launch vehicles, communications satellites, and manned spacecraft. There are plenty of sound, factual criticisms of the Chinese government, economy, industry, culture, etc. without having to make things up.
I thought the point of stacking the deck was to show that broken homes and a failure to save are root causes of poverty, and not readily-reversible ones. That said, people generally don't choose to lose their adequately-paid job and spouse any more than they choose to be the target of a Cultural Revolution lynch mob; certain behaviours increase the chances of it happening but bad things happen to people who make good, or at least explicable, choices too.
Sure, China had terrible problems with revolutionaries, before reforms leading to a remarkable rate of economic growth that nevertheless still leaves the average person in living conditions that would appal the average debt-ridden member of the American underclass. Mostly they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" by being able to work for (or employ people on) the sort of wages that would leave Americans unable to eat, never mind have houses, cars and mobile phone contracts to owe repayments on. So they didn't do it in isolation[] and their model doesn't work for the US unemployed. Perspective is useful, but deeming freedom of choice and support for the poor in a rich democracy to be adequate by comparison with a poor country rapidly recovering from internal chaos is like judging the adequacy of a government by how many gulags they operate. By the standards of first world countries, the poor in the US get a relatively rough deal.
Singapore, since you cite it as an example, is a million miles away from a society where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from capitalism. For a start, the government cleared the slums by building 85% of the country's housing stock and fixed the rents and prices far below private-sector levels. They might be extremely business-friendly, but governments in democratic states don't get much more paternalistic than Singapore's.
[]Arguably the American poor have benefited far more from the resulting availability of cheap consumer goods than they lose from cheap Chinese labour pulling down on the bootstraps of the US manufacturing industry. But the availability of those jobs is still reduced.
"The poor are poor because all of their choices in life suck."
There are of course two completely different ways to read that. I find that the first interpretation that jumps out at people speaks volumes about their world-view.
Yep. The self-made man would say it a certain way, and the sad truth is that most people lack the mix of ambition and discipline to look for, find, and work on ways to change their situation. For every rags-to-riches story there are a million rags-to-rags stories to match.
Another person here mentioned people using check cashing services instead of service-charging banks. You know, as opposed to shopping around for a smaller bank or credit union that doesn't do that (another thing strangely lacking as an option in the game). What makes this even more pathetic is that the bank charge is usually LESS than the 3% they are paying from their paycheck to the check cashing service! Top it off with the tendency for poor people to withdraw small amounts of cash from ATMs and take the service charge hit (which, since it's a fixed price, increases the percentage loss the lower the amount you take out) and you can't but shake your head in disbelief.
And don't even get me started on the massive amounts of money stupid people spend on lottery tickets...
It's little things like this that make (and keep) people poor, and these things are so easy to avoid with a little planning and discipline. Wealth is a long term strategy that few consider seriously.
And once you have wealth, you need to protect it from your grandchildren, because it's a well known phenomena for the first generation to make the money, the second generation to keep the money, and the third generation to piss it away. Not to mention the incredibly stupid modern practice of splitting the inheritance between your children rather than passing it in its entirety to ONE child.
> Not to mention the incredibly stupid modern practice of splitting the inheritance between your children rather than passing it in its entirety to ONE child.
I'm not sure if this is a troll. What is incredibly stupid about the common practice of splitting inheritance equally between your children? What do you propose as a more optimal way to choose the single child who receives everything?
There is a word in Japanese "tawake", which means "stupid" or "foolish", but the literal translation is "splitting the rice field".
Every time you split your fortune, it becomes far less powerful. As generations pass, your "fortune" splits and splits until you've got a bunch of insignificant sums among your descendants.
This is why the powerful families choose ONE child who will receive the inheritance, while the rest must make their own way. The common practice is for the firstborn to take the inheritance, but the best practice is to wait and see how each of your children deal with money before deciding.
Like most truth, its not a binary choice, but a continuum along which individuals fall. (But that doesn't make for a very lively discussion, now does it?)
I quit when I got a collections call for an overdue car payment. I never had a choice to not miss a payment.
Being poor sucks, but this game is trying way to hard to make that point and actually backfires. The contrived situations make me less likely to emphasize with someone who is in that position.
The scary thing is that those situations feel contrived to you. But to someone who is actually in that situation this is much closer to reality than you want to believe. Sure, it's been crunched in in time a bit. But the end result is about the same. You can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps when all your time and energy is spent desperately treading water.
I played for an entire month. Not only did my dog die, but my grandfather did too (the funeral was a $350 airfare away). Then my best friend from school got married a few days later (another $350 airfare). I got sick twice, and my mother got sick once. Oh, and a neighbour's kid broke my window too. And I spilled bleach on my nice new shirt.
If this was billed not as a poverty simulator but as an "Unluckiest person in America" simulator, I might see the point. Perhaps the game should just start off "You go to look for a job, but you get hit by a bus and die".
Went to the therapist? wtf! All the poor people I know (grew up poor) wouldn't go to the doctor if a cancer tumor was growing out of the side of their head. Too expensive. This thing thinks we would be going to a therapist? Maybe if someone else pays for it, but even then: can I just get the cash instead if you're giving it away?
This would be a lot better if it were more realistic, it banks on you not being able to make smart decisions to ram the various factoids down your throat. It would be a much better experience if the basics were spread out over multiple months with the occasional clustering of events.
This 'perfect storm' of trouble is just setting you up for failure, the deck is stacked against you much further than it is in real life. You are also not given the full picture up front, nor are you given the option on which services you subscribe to.
Also, if you can't afford a mobile phone you probably shouldn't have one, and if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go f*ck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.
That said, it's probably a useful tool to get people to put themselves in the shoes of someone that has it worse than they themselves do.
- study loan: don't get one in a field where job prospects are bad, better to go do work instead
- cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)
- kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)
- in general: if you can't afford something, don't buy it.
Your prior decisions will determine to a large extent whether or not you can survive on a very basic salary when hard(er) times hit. Getting a room-mate and sharing the cost of things that you are unable to afford by yourself are good tricks to get around some of the more practical limitations that a low wage job gives you.
I used my low wage job (mailroom boy) to expand my knowledge about computers which eventually landed me a higher wage job. My typical meal back then consisted of plain macaroni with ketchup, because the rent took away 5/7ths of my income, and the electricity bill another 1/7th. That left me with a grand total of 100 'credits' to feed myself for a month. Not a whole lot. I made pretty sure that there were no kids, phone bills or debts to go with that, and I did whatever was within my means to cut short that phase of my life.
> - kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)
I totally agree. If you only make $9/hr, maybe you shouldn't have kids. If we ever get around to controlling reproduction in the US, income level seems like a great place to start to me. (The game also tried to make me feel like a bad parent because I 'let' my kid get teased for eating free lunch and 'risk my child going hungry'. Where's the "Eat your damn food and mock people who have to pay if they try to mock you" option? Also I didn't pay $15 for a field trip which forced them to stay at the school that day when I know kids at my elementary got their field trip fees waived.)
It is totally possible to predict when you'll become poor and therefore decide not to have kids. It beats me why do people ever get poor when life is just a sequence of such obvious decisions.
I personally know a number of people who are on social welfare and planning having a second or even third child. I find this is extremely irresponsible. They can barely afford the children they already have and want to get the state to pay for more? I'd much rather my taxes went to schools and hospitals and better public transport than for paying for these peoples stupid decisions. What kind of life will that child have?
If you cannot afford it, do not have children. I can totally understand if you had the children before you, eg, lost your job or whatever. Things happen, situations change. The problem is the people who don't already have children. Also, if you cannot afford it, you need to be extra careful not to have an "accidental" pregnancy.
If people on welfare stopped at 2 or 3 kids we and they wouldn't have any financial problems with it.
This generation's moonshot public works project should be a low cost reversible renewable year-long sterilization technology.
Also, harsh as seems, it would help if newborns on welfare were taken to orphanages and treated well there instead of generating funds for their genetic ancestors.
> This generation's moonshot public works project should be a low cost reversible renewable year-long sterilization technology.
At least for women, that already exists (IUD, implanon). The problem is, for any medical technology there's side effects, and people still need to consent to it.
Congratulations are in order anyway, so here are mine, and I really hope that you get that job. My children were all planned and even if I did fall on hard times (twice) in the intermediate the fact that we cut down to the bone as soon as trouble hit helped us survive. Things that don't kill you will make you stronger.
You can try that, but the market for that is probably very strange. For example, I can imagine that demand goes up with price, because no one wants a cheap child. And for some combinations of properties of the child you'll probably have to charge less than nothing (i.e. pay the adopters).
Of course, someone who really believes in the market would harvest the child for organs. (Sarcasm implied.)
Quite true. My daughter is the failure case for condoms combined with birth control and a wife who was told "you can't have babies." I'm just glad it happened two months after we got married instead of for the 3 years we shacked up previously.
Sage advice, and yes it IS possible to follow (and I know it is too late for you now but here it is anyway):
1. Do not have sex if you do not want a baby.
2. Do not get married unless you can support a baby.
Many ancient religious proscriptions have their basis in correlations to healthy living. There really are reasons to consider abstaining from pork and sex before marriage.
Anyway, everyone's life is half chance. Make the best of it and enjoy the ride.
Seems to counter itself with a statement like:
"Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who've never had kids."
Obviously if one equates happiness to lower amounts of worries and responsibilities than sure.. But that seems kind of.... superficial?
Note: I am not in anyway saying that those who choose to not have kids are superficial, it is their choice -- just as it was mine to have a kid.
So the game screws you over before you begin. It's like a car racing simulator where you start out three feet from a wall, travelling at 120mph. And every time you crash, the game tells you that this just goes to prove that driving is dangerous.
Or like playing QWOP and concluding that running is hard.
Based on the ignorance of your statements, I would have to guess that you're either of an upper middle class background with very little exposure to poverty or that you have an overt political agenda.
I'm really trying to see the intellectual validity of your statements. I'm really trying to understand if you truly believe what you're saying. Would you actually make those same decisions?
Sorry, this isn't against you. I just see these type of comments often, and they only seem to make sense to me, in some abstract 'know-it-all' 'hindsight 20-20' sort of way, as if all of these life decisions are black and white and obvious.
I would suggest that, perhaps, he has much more of a clue than you'd like to admit. Maybe not about you specifically, but I too have noticed that, in the general case, those who lecture the truly poor have never been truly poor, or in many cases even mostly poor, at all. Full disclosure: I was once one of those assholes.
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I, personally, have never been in a state of poverty. I've been very lucky. I was lucky to be born male and white in a country (and a state within it) where there were opportunities available to me. I was lucky to be born to parents who were reasonably educated but had enough discipline to take care of a kid (my father did, anyway). And I was lucky that a number of my own decisions, foolish in retrospect but in all seriousness a good idea at the time, did not come back to bite me in the ass.
I would suggest that, when talking about how people should not make those decisions, perhaps you could entertain the idea that they see no alternative. I've certainly been guilty of this before, both politically when in a certain libertarian phase (I got better) and in my professional life, when I drove myself to frustration wondering why person X did this thing that I instantly realized was stupid. Perhaps no alternative is within their view. (Even if you've been there, surely there's the possibility that you have certain advantages, in being able to see "the big picture", that others lack?)
Sure, there's no doubt some of the lazy "welfare queens" that the American right likes to demonize; I'm sure some exist. But I have come to something of an understanding in my own life that those in poverty are much more likely to encounter Morton's forks than others, and I find it more difficult than I did during that libertarian phase to self-righteously castigate such folks for making bad decisions when they have few, if any, good choices to make.
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From your other posts, it seems like you're not one of the people who's born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, but a lot of folks who write as you do are indeed those people--and the simple fact that you're able to do what you do, to have ended up in a position where you can perform the mental gymnastics necessary to be a (I assume, good) programmer, that maybe, despite whatever else, you weren't exactly birthed in the batter's box.
"cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)"
This is kind of a tricky thing, right? Phone access is still essential for job hunting, and payphones aren't terribly common anymore either. Borrowing a friend's phone is sometimes possible, but for getting a callback? Not so much.
Same thing goes for internet access (which, of the two, I think would probably be a better investment once a job is secured). Even so, low-wage jobs are often very dependent on scheduling and thus require a phone to get updated about shift changes.
(note also that yes, you can get net access from unsecured wireless networks [increasingly shunned due to piracy and access concerns] and public libraries [which may not be convenient to get to])
Simply not getting a phone (generalize to point of contact if desired) is not really a good option.
The per-minute rates are generally high (on the order of $0.30/min) and the prepaid time generally expires (in 10-30 days for low-dollar loadings). If you are actively searching for work, you need to have enough time loaded to handle a telephone interview and to be put on hold from time to time. Once that's covered, you need to top up the time at regular intervals in order to avoid losing what you've already paid for -- and that leads to a non-refundable "savings account" with your provider. Prepaid is not significantly cheaper than a low-end contract, and can be more expensive.
if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go fck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.*
I have never ever experienced a landlord trying to raise my rent mere days after I moved in, like they seem to do in this game.
It's not uncommon if it's cheap housing that's only semi-legit to begin with. When I lived in Santa Cruz, I heard all sorts of this kind of shady behavior going on with sublets, which due to housing shortage was the only thing you could really get for <$1000.
You might be able to prevail, yeah, but many people are a bit scared of finding themselves on the street, unable to find another apartment, so aren't willing to play hardball. With an unofficial sublet (no signed lease, etc.), landlords don't necessarily resort to proper court-supervised eviction proceedings; "eviction" can take the form of "change the locks and dump your stuff on the curb, and deny that you ever lived there", which probably rarely happens but seems to be a common worry of people renting irregularly with no paperwork.
Then you'd have to find somewhere to live, and undertake the time/expense of suing. The best protection is probably a bit of a mutually assured destruction angle if the landlord is breaking the law through the irregular rental in the first place (in Santa Cruz many of the rentals are off the books because they aren't even legal rental units--DIY converted garages and attics and such).
Not sure how big that "informal rental" section of the economy is, though, so maybe this isn't a common situation. I'd guess it's highest in NYC.
The usual money-grabbing scheme I've seen is to require some excessive security deposit, and then contrive ridiculous reasons for keeping large chunks of it.
One flat I shared the rental agency tried to withhold £150 for the changing of 1 (entirely ordinary) lightbulb, and cleaning a single drawer of a chest of drawers (a tiny amount of dirt under the drawer lining paper, and not apparent).
It's such a persistent theme that I tend to write off the deposit as part of the costs of moving, and consider it a good deal if I see 50% of it again.
This is true. Here, the deposit is usually a months rent. I lived in a house for a while and when we moved out the landlord didn't want to return the deposit (about €1200 I think it was) even though there was no real reason for it. There is some kind of government run agency here to deal with disputes with landlords and they got the deposit back for us, but it took a long time. In the end the landlord had a choice of going to court or paying up and he paid up.
Games are always rigged. Usually in favor of the player, this one is against. I think it supposed to illustrate this one month when problems cluster.
I know a poor person who has 3 kids and car that falls apart. Some of the decisions she makes are strange.
This game allowed me to take a peek at crazy world she's living.
If you had the education and forthought to read and comprehend a legal contract, you probably wouldn't be a low income worker. Don't look down on those who have difficulty in life, it's a roll of the dice with a little skill sprinkled on. I'd argue success is more due to your upbringing and factors outside your control than we give credit for.
I was one of those once, and I remember the time very well.
The bigger problem underlying all this is that people are lured in to making very bad choices the downsides of which only become apparent once they're hooked.
People that I employed were unable to do basic bookkeeping, balance their checkbooks, work out how much their various loans (for stuff they didn't strictly speaking need) were costing them etc.
This is first and foremost an education problem, low wage people are created, they are not born that way.
If you fail to educate a large portion of your populace to the point where they can do any of the above in their sleep then you will end up with people that are structurally in trouble in a country where wealth is potentially abundant.
If you outsource all your labor to even lower wage countries then you end up creating an even larger problem for those lower on the totem pole and you make the rich much richer still.
Problems like these don't just fall out of the sky, they systemic and single individuals have limited ability to influence the total picture, but they typically have a lot more control over their own life than they usually want to admit.
I know some people that are currently downright poor, they both smoke like chimneys, and have health issues to boot because of that, which further cuts in to their ability to spend their money where it should be going.
No. You were a clever guy who fell on hard times. That's quite different from someone who is destined to be a low income worker for life due to early events they can never recover from, whether their own fault or not. That foundational education you received stays, whether good or bad.
Having said that, yes it is an educational problem, but it's also the randomness of life events. Families breakdown without notice and without a childs control, lives end, jobs are lost, shit happens just like good things happen too. Some people get a string of bad events, others a string of good events.
Don't look down on their lack of skills, you had the ability to comprehend them, they didn't, maybe you had access to facilities and the time to learn, maybe they didn't.
In the end, who knows what the true reasons are, just do what you can to help a fellow out and enjoy your good fortune if that's how things turned out, but try not to judge and over simplify an exceedingly complex problem with one step solutions (although I agree, good education works).
You seem to be saying that people are simply a product of their (random) environment. I think that too is oversimplifying the problem. How can we tell the "clever guys on hard times" from those destined to wallow at the bottom? Just saying that the everyone that doesn't succeed in life was "destined to be a low income worker" reeks of confirmation bias.
Interesting. Some friends and I were talking about this the other night. I have a few friends who actually "made it" but still haven't learned those essential skills. I wonder what may happen if one day they happen to face tight budget. They probably wouldn't last long.
Some background: My mom made about $8000 a year, and my three siblings and I we were lucky to have temporarily free housing from a richer sibling. So, with food stamps, welfare, my absent dad's union health insurance we got by.
Eventually, I found my way into a gifted program at a small, urban city school. That, at least, put me on an academic track. My class size was about 400, and the gifted group was about 15. By the end of the 12th year, I would guess that, of my gifted class, probably 40% had dropped out. The class merged with the honors students in 11th grade because of attrition. However, I made friends with some honors students who were of working class and poor backgrounds.
Again, by sheer luck, I happened to get accepted at a state college. After meandering around for a couple of years, I happened to made the right decision by banking on computer science, even though I had never used a computer until I was 15 and didn't own one until my junior year of college. Those years of constantly fighting with the student aid program were some of the most stressful years of my life. Now, I make over 100K as a high-end developer. I have done well for myself.
However, most of the other gifted and honors students haven't fared so well. I do have a few friends that have also done well using Computer Science as a gateway out of poverty. However, those friends sadly still haven't figured out how to do basic bookkeeping or balance their checkbooks. But, in all honesty, I did not figure that out until I was 28 or so.
Anyway, without savings, with poor life skills, and a lot of debt, even those smart kids are probably likely at risk. If ever the software development market turns down, if they're out of a job for an extended period of time, I wonder what will happen to them, as well.
I never understood the American English term "balancing the checkbook." Is that simply keeping track of how much you're earning and spending and making sure the former is higher, or is there more to this skill?
It's that plus comparing what you wrote down to the bank statement at the end of the month to make sure that you didn't make any mistakes (and make sure the bank didn't either.)
The term comes from a paper process. Traditionally, balancing the checkbook was the act of reconciling your personal record of the checks you wrote (your "check register") against the statement the bank gave you at the end of the month, giving you a chance to correct errors on either side.
It is used in a more general context to mean keeping a budget, as someone who would check the bank's work and make sure their own accounting matched to the penny presumably is doing so to ensure he is living within his means.
There is/was a small ledger in the front of most American checkbooks where you (ideally) log the deposits into your checking account and the checks that you wrote and calculate the balance after each transaction. Some people integrated their budget explicitly, logging 'transactions' to represent future/monthly obligations, savings targets and the like, but that wasn't at all common IME.
Practically speaking, this was a more necessary skill back in the days before direct deposit and debit cards. When a check might 'float', having been written but not cashed, for days or weeks until the recipient cashed it and the bank that accepted the check worked out the transaction with your own bank.
Nowadays what people mean by the term is simply the discipline and wherewithal to understand how much money you have in your account, what your obligations are and what you can safely spend.
Certainly, I would love to take responsibility. But, generally, the data shows otherwise. Of my 10-20 closest friends, many of whom I consider smarter than myself, many are still in working class poverty, working as bartenders and laborers. In fact, only about 25% of adults in the US attain college degrees. Most of those degrees are attained by people already in the middle class. Furthermore, many are in uneconomical specialties like Literature.
At some level, I suppose I was a better decision maker, but overwhelmingly I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Some 'luck' factors:
- At 17, I became friends, by accident, with a boy in another area whose dad was the VP of an engineering company. His dad saw my interest in science and encouraged me to go to college.
- At 18, while working as a temp, I happened to make friends with a retired engineer who encouraged me to college.
- I went to college in the 90s, at a time when Computer Science was a much more achievable major. Now, it is much more competitive.
- In the 90s, Computer Science had much less inspiring occupational outlook. I believe chemical engineering was all the rage then.
- I stumbled into Computer Science by accident. I happened to be a Physics major who had a sad, late night addiction to MUDs. And, I decided to start my own MUD and code it myself.
Well these people encouraged you to go to college, but their encouragement didn't add to the likelihood you'd be accepted.
You worked hard and were in a good program--that was the decider.
May I ask.... did your 10-20 closests friends apply to a state school and get rejected despite having grades better than you (its not enough that they're smarter than you, their grades have to show it)?
I may be speaking out of turn though... I'm from Virginia, and here state schools are practically guaranteed acceptance. If you can't make it to the university level initially, you can always make it into a community college and after 2 years of passing grades the state university is required to accept your transfer.
That's actually what I find interesting about it. Propaganda film has been written about and practiced extensively, and we have a pretty good idea of various ways to make it, as well as analyses of how to use things like juxtaposition/framing/pacing/etc. for propagandistic effect. But propaganda games are a pretty weakly explored concept, and it's interesting to think of how to use game mechanics (rather than just in-game dialogue) for propagandistic purposes, especially since that overlaps pretty heavily with grayer-area things like "expression" and "persuasion" (propaganda is just sort of the limit case of persuasion with some poetic license).
I'm not sure this is the best game in the genre, but it's an interesting entry. Here's one satirizing airport security from a few years ago, which I think comes off as a bit more honest in that its clustering of events is also more frequent than would be the case IRL, but it clearly positions itself as satire that's exaggerating to make a point: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/airportsecurity.jsp
This is a pretty decent book on the subject, fwiw, but I think the area of game-rhetoric, of which propaganda games are a nice highlighting case, is still pretty open (and to me at least, more interesting than stuff like gamification): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Submitted separately, a 2009 blog post analyzing six ways to use game mechanics for rhetorical effect (which can of course mean propagandistic effect): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070404
In fairness, the vast majority of the comments are pointing out how rigged and unrealistic the game is. I think people are just upvoting it to criticise it. And fair enough too, there's some good quality discussion here.
I saw this on fark.com about a week ago, and decided not to cross post it here because it's far too biased. I understand what it's trying to do, but I don't think it's successful in doing so. My biggest complaint is that it attempts to show that it's not only about making poor choices - but the choices that the character has obviously taken prior to getting to the point where I control it were poor choices, and now I am trying to deal with it. My second complaint is that the simulation should have been one day longer - so you would have to pay rent again - that's when the real issues start happening.
Even with the odds against me, I was able to finish the simulation a few times with over $1200 available (thus being able to pay the rent on the following day).
This was a very interesting exercise, but some of the numbers don't seem very realistic. For example, is $600 really the cheapest rent a poor person has to pay? Even in a city like London, I've lived on $300 per month, including food, when times were tough for me.
$300 including rent? I thought I was doing well (in far east London) renting a room in a student share house for £257 a month, 9 years ago. Plus bills.
I concur. In metro Atlanta (USA), my mortgage+taxes+fees is rather less than in this game (and what I assume would be a smaller place in-game.)
Having a dog and a high-end cell plan, among other expenses seemed incongruous. Visiting schools, given the evening job (and only one job!) should have been trivial, as school are open in the a.m. The food shopping choices were awful too.
For a more realistic look (if several years old), a former colleague of mine took the "Food Stamp Challenge", and ate on a budget that could be purchased with food stamps, in response to claims the rate was too low.
My hunch is that they had to cartoon up the expenses a bit because a more realisitic version would have had cheaper prices but probably x10 the number of economic transactions, which would have bogged the game down. Same with the amount of bad luck situations. As an example, the player did have really bad luck - but no starting credit card debt, or rolling payday loan debt, or student loan debt from incomplete schooling...
Someone needs to check their numbers. A little research suggests that 275$/month health insurance premium is really high. A good emergency coverage should be closer to 50$. 60$ for internet? I get mine, high-speed, for half that. 75$ phone bill? That's the average for -smart phones-, basic services should only cost 10$.
And I managed to finish with 1157$ anyways. Clearly low-income people need to learn to be frugal. :)
I live in Texas and currently pay $780/month for health insurance through my employer. Over 1/4 of the people in the state have no health insurance at all. So no, that number isn't very high.
Not at all, though I did leave out that I am insuring myself, my wife our child. This doesn't include the deductible of $10,000 out of pocket per year.
I just bought my own health insurance because I'm self-employed and I'm only paying $80/month. I can pay $150 and have doctor visits/prescriptions mostly covered.
You must have had lots of health problems in the past or your are lying about that number.
Heh. You can loose your car if it isn't "road legal". But this caused me to loose a job (probably because I was living far away). This didn't stop them from firing me second time in the same game when I tried to join union.
Made it through the month with $411 left, a root canal to pay for and apparently I owe a collection agency money for a car.
Wasn't terribly impressed with the choices I was given though, because I've been in similar situations in the past and, while it may be very different in the US, I have never had any significant problems. Also, why do bills like car registration cost more if I choose to pay them later? In real life I once had to pay my electricity bill a month late because I didn't have the money - I called them up and they deferred the payment by a month. They didn't suddenly charge me extra.
EDIT: Just played it again and made it through the month with $274, with no outstanding bills.
"Nickel and Dimed" was mentioned in one of the fact-bubbles. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn more about the decisions people face when in situations like this. I was spent for a time (about 10 months) being unemployed and lived on about $40 per week, skirting my rent, not having phone/internet, and getting my power cut (twice). Even though I ended up taking a job I didn't like, it payed well and I pulled myself out of that situation. Never Again.
I had the same problem with "Nickel and Dimed" that I had with this game. She made a series of completely irrational decisions which resulted in expenses larger than they needed to be.
Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed—a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory—the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom—by making something out of nothing to achieve the American Dream.
Shepard's plan was simple. With a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using his contacts or college education, he headed out for Charleston, South Carolina, a randomly selected city with one objective: to work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.
Thanks for the recommendation - looks like a good read.
Its been a while since I've read Ehrenreich's book but am curious - which decisions of hers did you find irrational?
I will say that a fundamental flaw in Nickel and Dimed, (and most likely in Shepard's book as well) - is that she ultimately had a choice. Many people in these situations have no choice. Many of them have children. Many of them have no college education to fall back on. I count myself among the lucky.
I recall her writing about a job requiring a belt, and spending $40 to buy one new. Without a mention of a thrift store.
As someone who lives on about $750/month [1], both the game and the book seemed not to notice major ways to save money like having a lot of housemates, commuting by bus, combining proteins, and thrift stores.
Being poor definitely sucks, but the book and game imply it is impossible, which it clearly is not.
[1] this doesn't include taxes and health insurance, which are deducted from my paycheque, but if I were making only $750/month I would have free health care from MA and negative taxes (EITC)
I've read both books. Ehrenreich clearly had an agenda. I think Shepard gave an honest effort.
He makes the point that knowing he could quit at any time (and carrying an emergency credit card, never used) would be a disincentive to working hard. If he did not have a safety net, he would probably work harder. Instead, he takes many hard day-labor jobs.
In less than 10 months, he moves from a homeless shelter in a town where he knows no one to an apartment with one roommate. He goes from $25 to owning his own truck and savings of almost $5000.
I am curious to know how he avoided using his college education and the attendant cultural support. Did he take on an affected "low" accent, alter his skin color, give himself a few scars indicative of an unhealthy upbringing or a tour of duty in Iraq, deprive himself of sleep to simulate average intelligence, and invite some folks to play hanger-on friends and family?
Obviously, there's a limit to the extent that he could make himself lose the benefits of race, intelligence, and education. But I think he did a pretty reasonable job. He moved to a city semi-at-random, where he had no friends or family. He never claimed to have any more than a high school diploma. He lived in a homeless shelter and worked day-labor jobs until he could save enough to move out (with a roommate he met in the homeless shelter).
>Shepard's plan [in "Scratch Beginnings"] was simple. //
If he did the same but tutoring a small group of randomly chosen people from the jobless line who were nonetheless motivated to achieve then I think he'd be on to something.
It's an option. The local library will order books for a charge. The charge is about what we spend on entertainment for a week. Probably ebay would be as cost effective once you factor in travel cost. I can walk the couple of miles but not really with the kid(s).
When the book first came out, he made an offer to give a free eBook copy to anyone who asked for it because they couldn't afford it. Send him an email.
Great. Playful (asking you to solve a "train a travels at 70mph..." question when you say you can help your kids with their homework) and creatively designed (cute distance-from-work slider for picking where to live). Of course it's propaganda, but regardless of the realism it does do a good job of simulating the low-income mindset, where every decision ("The ice-cream truck rolls round. Can your kid have an ice-cream?") ends up about money.
Quite a silly game, but it does a decent job of showing how all the options are not always considered by the people who most need to consider them. It's easy to say "I would make a fun homemade gift, take advantage of charitable dental programs, get a roommate," etc., but the people in hard situations often don't have the mindset to do this.
This describes the life of around 50% (may be more) of Tunisians. The probability of bad things occurring to you is increased by the bad infrastructure, evil government, the general hardness of life and the chaos the country is living on.
So for me, this is completely realistic. Just drop the costs (and also the earnings) around 10 times (for poor people) to adjust for the living expenses.
Time for an anti-American rant.
You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor ?
You don't have unemployment aids ?
You can get fired for talking to a union guy ? (if that happens to you in France, that is your way to wealth through court action)
C'est la vie ... curiously, I have no desire to move from the U.S. to France but I'm glad you're happy where you're living. We all should be or we should move!
You should probably do some research before ranting.
You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor?
That obviously depends on the provisions of the healthcare contract. It's common to pay a deductible and/or token co-pay. But these plans can always be tailored to address the needs of the buyer, and of the provider. (I might rant about the problems with enforcing a one-size-fits-all plan.)
You don't have unemployment aids?
Yes, we do. There is unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, disability insurance, and so on, to provide a safety net.
You can get fired for talking to a union guy?
No, you cannot (labor regulation in America is absurdly skewed in favor of the workers). The employer is forbidden from interfering with any labor attempt to organize. However, our Democrats have been attempting to pass a regulations called "card check" [1] which would take away the workers' right to secret ballots when voting for unionization. (And the Democrats are supposed to be the ones standing up for the little guy?!?)
>> You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor?
Yes. That's the short answer.
The longer answer is that there are plans without co-pays, etc., but that they are to the best of my knowledge not available to purchase by individuals or far too expensive for our hypothetical $9/hr worker (think more like $1000/mo).
>> token co-pay
In the context of a $9/hr job, "token" co-pays probably shouldn't be called "token," when they can easily run over $40 for a single visit. I certainly don't consider 4+ hours of my compensation to be a token amount.
>> You can get fired for talking to a union guy?
The short answer is yes, you can be fired for talking to a union guy. As in your employer will not be stopped from firing you on the spot, and it's then your turn to try to get reinstated/compensated through legal channels. You're right that legally you can't be fired for organizing. But in the calculus of business and the working poor, it's actually fairly common for low-wage employees to be fired for attempts at organizing. The employer wagers (usually correctly) that the person who just lost his $9/hr job today will have more immediate priorities than finding an attorney he can't pay to take a case he'll probably lose due to being able to only secure the services of one lawyer and not a team of the best money can buy.
As in your employer will not be stopped from firing you on the spot
Are you suggesting that the French have found some way of physically preventing this improper action from ever occurring? I'd have to guess that the French are just as vulnerable to such misbehavior.
I'm not knowledgeable about the French labor system, so I won't rebut your guess with speculation of my own. I was simply pointing out that labor law isn't always as useful for day-to-day offenses as the well-off often assume.
Ask people who are involved in this issue, one way or another. Employer, worker, or organizer in France versus the USA. No matter their ideology, they will agree that management has far more freedom of action and employees have far less protections in the USA.
I am not sure what you are implying and feel I am missing something but no, in France you cannot fire an employee without a professional fault from the employee's part. And "professional faults" are fairly well defined, and being part of a union is explicitly not one of them.
> But these plans can always be tailored to address the needs of the buyer, and of the provider.
Unfortunately, as any startup who's tried to buy health insurance can attest, this isn't really true if "the buyer" isn't a giant corporation. If you're an individual or 5-person business, the market is completely broken. The main problem is that insurance only really works if you can effectively pool risks, and health insurance is difficult to pool risks in unless it's mandatory in some manner. A large employer agreeing to sign up every employee with no opt-out is the only real way to create a mandatory-coverage pool that seems to consistently work in the U.S.
You are deeply misinformed about labor legislation.
The employer can and does interfere regularly with labor attempts to organize.
Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by businesses hiring labor consultants known affectionately as "union busters" who spend their time and efforts intimidating employees.
Talking to a union organizer can and does get you fired. Particularly workers who are passionate supporters of unionization.
Even the laws that do exist are rarely enforced, and even when they are the penalties are minimal. Employers figure it's cheaper to pay a couple thousand dollars in fines after they've won an election than it is to not break the law and lose it.
Labor regulation is massively skewed toward the employer compared to any other developed country. Unless you think that any labor regulation at all is an encroachment on the employers' rights.
Full disclosure: I've spent some time labor organizing and have been physically assaulted by management for talking to employees in the parking lot, so I'm a bit biased.
scarmig, not that I disbelieve you, but can you provide citations to help me understand when and how often this occurs?
Labor regulation is massively skewed toward the employer compared to any other developed country.
I'm not interested in comparisons to other countries. My interest is in both sides playing on a level field. When, for example, the government is trying to prosecute Boeing for simply deciding to open a new plant in a non-union state so that it won't have to deal with the union [1], it's clear that the playing field is slanted. I'm not asking for businesses to have an upper hand, just that the situation be handled with as much fairness as possible.
labor consultants known affectionately as "union busters" who spend their time and efforts intimidating employees.
I've never encountered such a thing. My understanding is that this kind of thing disappeared decades ago (although these days I don't tend to work near unionized people, so may have missed something). But: how can you explain the insistence on the particulars of "card check", other than that the unions want to be able to intimidate workers into signing up (which they'd be able to do, since their votes wouldn't be secret)?
Disclosure(s): I've had my parents tell me that we won't have very much to eat for a while, because my step-father is being forced to go out on a strike that he voted against. I've been forced to pay union dues myself, even though (as a temporary employee) I wasn't entitled to union benefits or representation. I've been forbidden from helping customers by a simple 1-minute effort, because only union workers are allowed to do that task (although the union workers were not doing their duty by performing that task). My employer had union protesters [2] fake a picketer being hit by a bus, those picketers claiming that justified their attacking the bus with bats and pipes.
[2] The protest was simply that one of the building contractors my employer was using for a renovation was not a union shop; there was no concrete grievance. And the bus that was attacked was carrying the non-union workers to keep them safe from the union animals.
It's interesting that almost all comments thus far uniformly criticize the game for propaganda bias and that real-life is not this hard.
A special-ed teacher I work with has a dimmer view than most of the US education system - because she sees so many of its failures and that for a living.
I can easily see how the propaganda perception by an outsider is just the everyday reality in the eyes of http://www.umdurham.org/, one of the two game sponsers.
IMHO the game does a good job of creating a forcing function
to make decisions that atleast I haven't had to make in a long while, if ever.
Imagining myself as the game designer, suspect I too would favour inciting empathy to accurate "real-life"-ism.
I sit at a keyboard all day typing and earn 100% of my living via the computer. Funny that I couldn't pass the typing test. I'm pretty sure the problem is that I don't have practice copying the text ... my time is spent typing words (and code) that's flowing from my brain.
Does anyone still take dictation? Are there really jobs like this? I had an AA at my last job and in the nine years I was there I don't remember ever having her type up notes, etc.
I think this part is actually quite realistic. Temp jobs have typing speed requirements and when you go in to sign up as a temp they find out how fast you are. They also measure how fast you can use word, excel, etc.
They also measure how fast you can use word, excel, etc.
Like the parent, I also spend my days in front of the computer developing software and doing general business-running activities. But I'm almost certain I would fail this test. I think I used Word once in high school and that is about where my experience ends.
I have never found a use-case for an Office suite. There are always better tools for any job that it might be able to tackle. For it to be a prerequisite for finding a job outside of the software industry is kind of frightening and sad.
Someone looking to hire a secretary to temp for a week to cover a vacation cares that the temp will be productive. This means that that secretary can teach the temp what they need to do for the week, and the temp will be able to do it quickly and efficiently using the templates and tools that the office uses. If they keep track of accounts in excel, you need to be able to quickly enter data into excel to use their system. They're not going to switch to something better just so they can employ you for a week.
This doesn't mean you're unemployable outside of software, just that this heuristic suggets you are a poor candidate for a temporary secretarial position.
Some folks do still take dictation. Medical and legal secretaries in particular -- secretaries for classes of professional who are very busy, make a lot of money, send quite a lot of letters, and don't tend to spend a lot of their time sitting in front of a computer.
Secretaries to doctors and lawyers make a lot more than minimum wage, though.
386 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThe trick is to not live paycheck to paycheck in good months, and it seems like $9/hr should be enough for a bit of savings.
It would take several consecutive good months to offset a single bad month.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070904
I shouldn't be driving a car if I don't have money for it. I should sell the car and always take bus, since later in the game it says I have that option.
I had to choose if I should stay with an hourly paycheck or work by the piece. I choose piece because then I thought I could put in some more work, but then it just said I couldn't work that much. Well if I had known that I would have stuck with an hourly check, that's math you can actually work out in real life before making that decision.
It says I have a college degree but that wont help me, and then it says I'm probably too uneducated to help out my children with math homework.
All in all some interesting facts about the american low-income society, but the choices and different aspects of it are very strange. You could do a lot more to save money as well as make more money than is presented here. Well basically, kind of annoyingly simplified.
And what state are we living in in this game? Is there a state where a single parent making $9/hour doesn't get subsidized health insurance? If so maybe this fictive character (in pretty poor health it seems) needs to move. Apparently, all of your friends and family (at least your dead grandpa and friend getting married) lived out of state, so what are doing staying put.
Fun game, great info, but I agree with the over simplification. IRL, I can't pick an apartment without building an elaborate cost-benefit spreadsheet, so the slider bar abstracted away too much for my enjoyment.
I think the point of the game is that many people just can't comprehend how easy it is to have bad things happen in a very substantial way... with very little notice and being mostly powerless to do anything about it.
There's nothing unforeseen about that.
The vast majority of my students cannot solve that sort of problem by themselves after seeing several examples of similar problems worked out. Yes, this is the last math course some of these students will have to take. No, they are not all liberal arts students.
Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.
Well, that just sounds like an indication that we're handing out far too many Bachelor's degrees to people who don't deserve them.
Out of curiosity, are you allowed to fail these students, in this compulsory course?
Of course, this might be confirmation bias on my part. I never again see the ones that drop out.
I looked at it and 'reasoned' they will meet when the combined distance of both trains is 300 miles. No math required for that step.
I believe most adults and kids could then figure out 50 MPH + 70 MPH = 120 MPH and 300 Miles/120 MPH = 2.5 Hours or am I giving people to much credit?
That's not even the right message to send out.
"You won the lottery! You gain forty million dollars! OK, you were lucky this time, but the point about poverty still stands, okay?"
I've paid as low as $125 per month in rent, but most typically in the neighborhood of $225-300 (this is in one of the 15 biggest cities in the US, a major college town, to boot).
Serving/bartending you can easily make $15-25 per hour and work 25-40 hours per week. I've also worked as a valet part-time for another $10-15 per hour. Package handlers can make $13 per hour (last I saw, several years ago) working the late shift. These are jobs that generally have no degree requirements whatsoever.
My roommate was once a couple grand short on tuition money. He stripped for a couple weeks and was able to pay it all off. My sister's husband brings in close to $40K in the Army, and they give money to pay off student loans, too. I've had several friends work in Teach for America or as an Americorps Vista, receiving relatively meager salaries but getting a living allowance, money toward student loans, and a resume-building experience for aspiring non-profit workers.
Meanwhile, remain tenacious in seeking out opportunities that make use of that degree, and make every use of student loan deferment and forbearance until all high-interest credit cards are paid off. Enter into debt management in order to get credit card interest rates down into the 5-8% range.
The only saving that should be happening is an emergency cash fund. It doesn't make sense to save until your debts are paid off, unless you can reliably invest at a higher return (e.g., your employer matches your contribution up to 3% of salary for an effective 100%+ ROI).
I know how easy it is to get dejected and want to give up, but you absolutely must soldier through it. Cut costs everywhere (don't eat out, sell that car, start biking, take up cheap hobbies instead of paying for entertainment, cancel cable, etc.) and pay down high-interest debts. Things get a whole lot easier once you start having some cash margin each month.
That was the main thing I hated about the quiz. Everything was so binary. Rarely in life are we constrained to a box other than the one we construct for ourselves.
I've had to moonlight as a valet in between jobs and I could make anywhere from $10/hr to $35/hr with tips. They would have hired anyone to work that job.
In the game I took the option of being a waiter working for $2.15 an hour plus tips, thinking that based on all the waiters I know I could easily earn some pretty good money. It told me I wound up earning $8 an hour, and this was average. I remain skeptical.
For one thing, that's minimum wage, and as I understand it, the employer is obliged to subsidise your wages up to minimum wage if you don't make that in tips. Secondly, assuming a standard 15% tip that means I'm only serving about $40 worth of food and drink per hour, in which case I'm in a really bad restaurant. (OK, maybe we need to share some of the tip total with busboys et cetera, but that's still astoundingly low). Thirdly, there's no way that can be the average, because it's the minimum, and some waiters are earning a whole lot more.
Luckily that doesn't describe me, but it's easy to miss what it can be like for those on the edge. I hate it when politicians (in the UK) make out that it's not a big deal that for someone to lose £50 in benefits (per month), and have no concept of what it's like to live a life where every penny does count, and where one big bill can set you back for years.
We all might be lucky with great support networks, skills and health, but not every one is.
I mean come on! Utterly ridiculous. Some people have a bad luck but don't forget from next month I would be having food stamps and not any of those expenses so may be able to save much.
It seems a bit involved to get across what could have been an infographic.
I'd really like to see someone take a more serious and/or interesting approach to this concept. This game plays like an old "choose your own adventure"; you have "choices", but everything is pre-determined and there are only a handful of available story routes, which in this case are designed to make it difficult to complete the game while selecting any of the presented moral options and then to show that you'll only have a few dollars left in exchange for abandonment of all principles.
Agreed. From a design standpoint, it's structured closer to an advergame that way - get your point across (scraping by on a low wage while dealing with what life throws at you) and quickly before the player loses interest. The events of the game over the course of a month are more indicative of what could happen spread across a wider span of time.
I think there is some value in presenting statistical data as a narrative. I love Choose Your Own Adventure!
While this is a bit overdone, there's a lot of truth to this thing. I've seen the results of an unplanned child, days people come in sick because they really can't afford to miss work, and things like that first hand.
Some of the people really have dug themselves into holes all on their own, but there are other folks who are just trying to scrape by with the crappy hand they've been dealt. It depends on the person, really and I could give you examples of both.
I only made it to day 13, but already I've spent more in that game than I did in real life over the last month. I realize it's trying to make a point, but all it's really doing is making me suspect that it's fibbing a bit. More realism might turn out to be more convincing.
EDIT: Just tried it again and went with the hourly wage. The game said my supervisor cut it in half. Nice going, game.
Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?
[1] ok ok, I know that sometimes this is unplanned or you already have children before you have no money
[2] often had to turn down things I wanted to do because I couldn't afford them
Although, I must add, I was soft-poor.
But, I always had a safety net: while I may have been low on money and even without money on occasion, I could always have borrowed money from family knowing that they would give it to me if I asked. But, I was saving that for if I ever really really needed it.
People who are depressed, whose friends mostly smoke, and who can't see how they'll ever get out of this financial hole that seems deeper every month. Assuming it costs $80 a month to start smoking, the difference between $0 and $80 at the end of the month looms larger than the difference between -$100 and -$180. In the former case, you're going broke smoking. In the latter case, well, you were already broke, so hey, no change: still broke.
[Edit: I didn't actually play the game. I'm just responding to your comment about it. :) ]
The final impetus for me was realising that I was spending something close to £200 ($300) a month on cigarettes. Nearly 4 months now, and I reckon in a year or so I'll have enough to replace my macbook :)
I've been a smoker for 9 years now, and I still smoke at most 2 packs per month. I buy the most expensive cigarettes that are still mass-market, and still I only pay ~$20 per month for my habit.
If I were poor, I'd have to look more closely at that $20, but for anyone in the middle class $20 is the price of a good meal if that.
With the game, I found myself questioning a lot of the priors such as---why when I'm living <5 miles away from work, do I lose my job the moment I don't have a car? Can't I walk?
Why do I even have a car in the first place? Also, why do I have a mobile phone on monthly contract? Was pre-paid not available in my area?
It's just a game but it seems pretty unfair even for small choices.
A pack of 20 in the UK costs about £6, which is about $9.
It's going up in the next budget.
That's atypical, the typical smoker smokes between a half pack and a pack a day. I'd even say you're not really a smoker, you just dabble in smoking.
So you ate up $850 in savings and have no way of paying rent the next day.
The game isn't realistic. It condenses in one month what could happen in the span of a year or more, but the result is the same though. you end up broke.
I guess you've never, um, opened your eyes and looked around.
Maybe the game needs some other measures to track or force you to react to, like morale, or depression level, or boredom, or popularity, or addiction?
http://www.gapminder.org/labs/gapminder-china/#$majorMode=ch...
Somehow hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere went from far more deprived conditions to first world status over the span of a few decades. Nothing in that game compares to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. So clearly it is possible for an entire civilization to pull itself up by its bootstraps through capitalism. [0]
Finally, as noted the game stacks the deck against reality. It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are the major causes of poverty. [1], [2]
If the game started a few years earlier and asked "do you want to complete high school" and "do you wait till you're financially stable before marrying & having children", the overall message would be very different. Indeed, the authors would likely be accused of having unfashionable political sympathies for simply advising that people mimic the behaviors of middle class Asian immigrant families.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First-Singapore-1965-2000/...
[1] http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba428
[2] http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/pdf/bg2465.pdf
I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).
Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?
And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget.
If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)
And it's not like that $300 billion just disappears into a black hole. Because poor people need it to live they are spending it immediately, which multiplies out across the economy, certainly more so than a war does. And I'm not even counting the human life cost of war. So yes, just giving people $10K a year isn't that bad considering what we have done.
I just love the thinking though: "we've spent all this money to kill people for no reason and now you expect us to feed Americans?!?!"
[1] http://costsofwar.org/
You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point.
I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.
I'm unconvinced by neoclassical arguments by Friedman et al. on "distorting" for two reasons. Firstly there's nothing inherently wrong with introducing further "distortion" into the market unless you subscribe to the evidently false proposition that no person's ability to optimise their spending habits with respect to their budget constraint can be improved upon; that you're making individuals and society worse off for buying them healthcare when they expressed more interest in a hire-purchase agreement for a state-of-the-art pickup truck. I believe quite the opposite: people receiving government money aren't entitled to spend it on anything they want, and even with imperfect information a technocrat, will often be better at allocating some of that cash than the average welfare recipient.
Secondly, given differences between incomes, propensities to consume and the ease of introducing new supply into the market, a simple flat subsidy can distort markets more than targeted payments. Converting payments such as government funded health insurance to cash would have the effect of inflating the prices of ramen and particularly crappy apartments (since welfare recipients can live without the health insurance, albeit for less long, and there's not enough decent apartments in many areas). Given the relatively fixed supply of housing, people who already owned rental property would capture more benefit than any other industry, ironically because they chose to use their capital in a relatively unproductive manner. On the other hand, hospitals might be worse off, losing part of their customer base and seeing cost increases (notably unskilled labour). Since the government has the choice in how they distort the market, I'd rather they subsidise healthcare professionals than slum landlords.
I totally agree with your point about bare minimum safety nets encouraging innovation. Even those poor who are never going to launch world-changing startups might consider a stab at freelancing in an area they're more capable in than dishwashing once the risk of not having regular income is removed.
That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.
In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).
Edit: never mind - I read the wrong post.
It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.
I have no doubts that the globalization of economic inputs produces higher global growth and a greater overall level of welfare, but I also have no doubt that this process produces winners and losers. One subset of the losers has been low/medium skilled Americans, who face stagnating wages and many of the challenges this game portrays (in an admittedly over-dramatic fashion). We can either accept this as the cost of doing business or work as a society to compensate the losers, but in either case we should acknowledge that there are some larger forces at play that make it harder for certain segments of the population to reach their own bootstraps.
I honestly feel disgusted by the fact that I am expected to feel sorry for people such as these. I managed to get to the end to the month all fine and dandy, and could see many things I could still do to improve my cash flow.
My kid may have not been given some meaningless luxuries that other kids got (I never went to school trips and the like myself), but my charisma and public services such as the library and the like would be more than enough to ensure he turns out a fine man.
Hell, if I wouldn't even have had a kid in the first place, until I could ensure that I could raise properly. Expecting me to feel sympathy for an individual who can't afford a kid, suffering from their own selfishness, is out of order. It's comparable to expecting me to pay for the treatment of some fool who didn't put on a condom when he knew he was have sexual intercourse with a - unique woman.
edit. Forgive me, due to my anger I lost focus on what I was initially trying to say. Basically, standard of living has improved dramatically. They may not be able to afford premium goods such as sparkly ipads and ps3's, but they can still afford a great deal of stuff.
It's cheaper to have a mobile phone nowadays than it is to have a land line. That's why mobile has really taken off in places like, say, Africa. Just because someone has a cell phone doesn't mean they're not struggling.
Given a choice between living as a corporate CEO (or even upper middle class professional) in the 1950s versus part of the welfare underclass today, I would almost certainly choose the former. Even sans cell phones.
Let's just consider health care. One reason health care is so much more expensive now compared to the 1950's is the roughly 60 years of technical innovation that has happened since then. In 1950, there were still outbreaks of polio. Cancer was a far more certain death sentence. MRI's didn't exist. The birth control pill was not yet available. There was no dialysis. There was no laser surgery. Heart surgery was very primitive: there was no bypass surgery, no replacement of heart valves, and no pacemaker. By and large, people died of diseases that could be treated today, and many of those treatments are available today even to the poor and uninsured. (In a move unthinkable in 1950, my state even subsidizes access to birth control for low-income single women.)
I'm having trouble finding hard health data. The closest thing is that in 1972, life expectancy for the bottom half was 77.7 and for the upper half 78.9, while in 2001 79.6 years for the bottom half and 85.4(!) for the top half. Which amounts to about the same for the top half in 1972 and bottom half in 2001.
The top half life expectancy would be lower in the 1950s than the 1970s, but at the same time today's welfare underclass is probably significantly worse off than the average person in the lower half. I expect those would end up being a wash, and life expectancies would be comparable, though probably with a slight edge for the underclass of today.
That's a trade that I think would be worth it, given all the exceptional benefits of relative wealth and status. Yeah, no iPhones, but drivers, maids, home-visiting doctors, nice single family homes in fun areas, economic security, and ability to eat out or go to shows whenever you want makes up for it for most people.
You only have to go back to the year 2000 to give up iPhones. Going back to 1990 you give up the Internet. Going back to 1980 you give up Mac and Windows. Going back to 1970 you give up microwave ovens and personal computers at all along with cable television. Going back to 1950 you give up birth control, open-heart surgery, commercial air travel, and color television.
That's just technology. There's a huge cultural gap, too. In 1950 segregation was the law, there was little to no access to foreign culture, atheism was distrusted and associated with Communism, pre-marital sex was taboo, and women by and large did not work outside of the household, especially not when they had children. None of the music that I listen to even existed back then. None of it would even be possible.
There are two separate issues: consumer goods and actual well being. I think you overestimate the difference in consumer goods between the ruling elite in the Fifties and the contemporary welfare underclass: the latter rarely, if ever, can take advantage of commercial air travel and have severely limited access to open-heart surgery. And barrier birth control and abortion were readily available (albeit significantly more expensive) to the rich in the 1950s, while in the modern day they (especially abortion) are somewhat difficult, though far from impossible, for the underclass to access.
But quibbling over those details can make us ignore the more central point. Access to consumer goods is only part of the picture, because power is a very strong and often superior substitute good for most of them. Roombas are accessible to the middle class today, but they are inferior to an actual person cleaning the house for you, even with an antiquated vacuum cleaner from midcentury. The vast majority of the population can text each other now, but a well-off member of management could very easily have a secretary do the same through a messenger boy. The latter is slower, but in some ways easier: he (invariably a he) had at will access to an intelligence superior to the most advanced AI now, without the burden of having to hit tiny keys, save phone numbers, or remember to charge his phone. A member of the upper class in the 1950's did not have to worry about employment; about housing; about having interesting work; about getting fired for drinking on the job (hell, your company would pay for your booze and cigarettes); about worrying how to pay the bills the next month; about sending your kids to a school with regular shootings; about visiting the social worker to prove you had sent out pro-forma applications to jobs you're incapable of performing so you can get your welfare check.
Some tradeoffs are less clear. The middle manager in 1955 had to worry about global thermonuclear war, but not about catastrophic climate change or poisoned soy sauce from China. We have hormonal birth control, but also HIV.
All of us are members of the professional upper middle class, so we're certainly better off. But an unemployed single parent living on the bad side of Hunter's Point? If I were forced to choose, yeah, I'd definitely go with the rich straight white guy in the 1950s with massive social privileges. Even with fewer gadgets and less sophisticated technology.
And frankly, the poor have much better access to health care thank you think. I know from personal experience that a poor, uninsured person can still get necessary or even largely elective surgeries that may not have even existed, and surely would not be performed with the same level of safety and quality, in 1950.
Oh yes--and abortion was actually illegal in the 1950's.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/-8220-god-...
Just saying that it's not all peaches and cream.
How about everything else? There's no such thing as a stable factory job anymore, if you can't code and don't have other white collar skills, you have a choice of Wal-mart and the gas station to work at. Neither gives you health insurance. You won't make enough to live in a nice school district.
Sympathy's the wrong way to look at it, although you could probably do with a little more empathy. The real point is that when enough people are struggling to get by, it hurts the economy at large and hurts you.
It's not the Lump of Labor fallacy to say that the economy has a limited appetite for low-skilled workers. In Australia, where illegal immigration is quite limited, it's not a choice of Wal-Mart and the gas station for folks without white-collar skills, there's also farming jobs, cleaning jobs, and best of all, tradesman jobs like builder, electrician or plumber. You'll need an apprenticeship for some of those, but can quickly work your way up from earning very little as an apprentice to earning six figures as a competent and fully-qualified tradesman. But in America, all the job categories which I mentioned are dominated by illegals, so it really is true that the uneducated have a really rough time.
I feel like a path to citizenship would bring the wages for these jobs back above-ground and create a fair marketplace for labor where people could compete.
What's the other option, "ship them all back to latin america"? If you think that's a good idea, I'd invite you to think about what that enforcement action would look like, and if it fits into your concept of "America".
EDIT: Watches blanket downvotes without counter-proposal or likely even reading my comments. Whoever that is should run for the House.
(I agree with most of the rest of what you say in this post.)
Frankly, it seemed like the next obvious step from his initial complaint. We're talking about underemployment and he brings up immigrants out of nowhere as a scapegoat? Was that a prelude to an argument for amnesty? It's not my fault if it sounds bad.
And accusing me of quote "douchebaggery" while being high and mighty about what belongs on hacker news is a little rich.
I'm not actually even an American. I'm merely temporarily here on a visa. But once you've spent as much time and money on US visa renewals as I have, you don't have much sympathy for the line-jumpers who enter the country illegally.
If you look at states like Georgia (and i've seen similar articles about parts of the UK), there's a massive shortage of farm workers, and regardless of what the supply of illegal migrant workers is. Even after Georgia began holding farmers directly liable for employing illegal immigrants, local workers have not stepped up to fill the gap.
Besides, American immigration policy, rightly, allows white collar workers from other nations, especially Canada and Mexico into the country via NAFTA. That is, frankly, a good thing. All we're doing is keeping out a labor supply that is currently needed.
If you want to level the playing field for native low skill workers, require farmers and the like to pay all the taxes and health benefits for all their workers, illegal or not.
I've also seen reports in the news where Australia needs more seasonal agricultural workers, as Australians don't necessarily want to do the work. Most recently there's been a trial program to get pacific islanders in on temporary visas to work these farms. And traditionally it's been backpackers that have worked these fruit-picking and misc jobs.
So it seems to me that a lot of the population of the "developed" world, especially the native people, don't want to be doing those menial, labour intensive, and repetative jobs themselves. Also I don't believe that the immigrants that do these jobs now want their kids to be doing them. Therefore I would say that we should work harder to try and automate these kinds of menial mind-numbing jobs as best as we can.
Sitting on your behind is easier, regardless of pay.
Sources: BLS http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#45-0000 http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=12.00&year1...
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in the 1980s the net advance of the undocumented population was at the 130,000 per year, increasing to 450,000 per year from 1990–1994, and further increasing to 750,000 per year from 1995–1999, and staying at 700,000–850,000+ per year since about 2000
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of... )
Either way, i think we're well served by including some specific claims (and that's why i cited the wikipedia page)
Why?
"Free trade" destroyed many US factory jobs, but it vaporized Mexican agriculture. Small proprietor farms were out of business overnight by the flood of cheap US corn.
The human element in illegal immigration is usually completely ignored. People don't pull up stakes and walk across a desert because they think that working in a poultry slaughterhouse is a great life. They do so because it is a better life than complete destitution that they face at home.
1) quality education (including post-secondary, which would otherwise need to be saved-for) 2) portable, quality basic health care 3) inexpensive, safe, spartan-but-quality housing
No amount of TVs, computers, mobile phones, or iPods will make up for the fact that these three necessities are often pretty expensive in the U.S.
Kids have a way of happening even when you don't expect or want them. Combine that with social pressures against abortion, and your stance becomes a luxury.
Also, I'm a bit disturbed that you see field trips at school as a luxury rather than part of a solid, well-rounded education.
I'm not saying that those women (or men) are stupid, I'm saying that they are brought up badly due to the neglect. You're taking so much 'choices' for granted when they are actually educated choices. For example, finances (how much will a kid cost? Bigger car? Food? Rent?), job security (are the parent(s) comfortable?), time constraints (do they have time to spend with them?). Ironically, they may end up neglecting their own children despite best intentions (eg Working overtime on minimum wage so the kid can get into college for example but the kid ends up a drug addict).
The way USA's poverty is a form of a Spartan kid's bath. Many will suffer, a few will make it through and be strong. All the more while other countries provide social programs (Social governments) or strong families (Communal communities) to make it easier and more aware of the responsibilities of having a kid.
Throw into that mix 'abstinence-only' sex education, and your 'choices' disappear. If you don't know about protected sex, and it's clear that all this "choice" you mention is just illusion for a great many people.
You can't say "why didn't you use a condom?" if you block the information about condom use. Hell, in some parts of Africa, the Catholic Church is spreading information that condoms cause AIDS. Where's the choice there? Where is the 'luxury' there?
By the way, I didn't say the sex was the luxury, I said your stance was the luxury - this expectation that kids come along when you plan them. If you actually speak to parents, you'll find that kids frequently come along despite using high-reliability birth control, and sometimes never come along despite desperately trying for years.
What really is beyond ridiculous is your cold, calculating opinion of how humans operate, combined with this expectation that all humans have access to the information you have.
It's a luxury because one can't afford it, not because one sees it as a frippery.
My lad wants to do an after school club that the school has been promoting, wants to go to a uniformed group with his friends, etc.. These things would be good experiences, provide useful educational opportunities and best of all be fun. We can't afford them. They are luxuries in the sense that he won't be unloved, malnourished, unfit or uneducated without them.
Example: I'm a city boy, born and bred, but I spent summers on my uncle's farm. Due to that experience, I understand much better how rural people think and why, and the kinds of things that are more important to them.
If I had never spent time on the farm, I would not be 'uneducated', but those experiences have significantly improved my understanding of the people around me - I am much better educated for having these [lengthy] 'field trips'.
Replay this experience in shorter amounts more frequently in the form of field trips and you'll get a variety of different things to help broaden your experience and who knows, you may see something you're passionate about that you might not otherwise see.
So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life.
Absolutely.
We do however always go out and about when we have family time. Thankfully the UK tax payer pays for the upkeep of key national museums - visiting them is one of the few things one can do for free. We do have a bent towards natural history, that's usually free too!
>So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life. //
Oh believe me I'm all for well-rounded. I'm not at all arguing against the enormous value of such things. You say they're necessary things. But my resources don't stretch to paying for them and the society around doesn't value them enough to make them available to all without direct charge.
I'm doing what I can to provide a well rounded education as I see the enormous value a broad education has brought me. For example I studied Art History for only a term before studies for my degree got in the way but I found it immensely valuable as a catalyst to my own enquiry and as a lever in to understanding societal development.
However, I don't think you can really argue that such things are "necessary" for "healthy adult life". Possibly "a doorway to a fulfilling adult life"?
The upside? It distributes the risk and almost ensures that none of us will ever go broke.
The downside(for some people)? When one of us flips the company, the wealth will be equally distributed between my siblings, irrespective of whether they actually worked at the company or not.
This reduces the chance that any sibling will have a lifestyle that is relatively more affluent than the others. And when we get a freeloader, it encourages the other siblings to not give up on his life. It may be easier to give up if you can tell yourself "well he is getting what he deserves".
This assumes a great deal of good faith, obviously. It can easily go bad and turn into resentment if (a) we get a freeloader and (b) he remains a freeloader all his life. But even in that worst case scenario, the hope(from our cultural upbringing) is that there will be less resentment(for the financial unfairness) and more sadness/empathy for the sibling who went the wrong way all his life.
My father's brothers have been on this model for couple decades and it has mostly worked out. They've had multiple freeloaders at one point turn into super productive contributors a decade later(and after lots of hardwork by the non-freeloading siblings towards the freeloaders).
This model is most easy when you are still young and life is simple(as it is for us now). It becomes very challenging after we all have wives, children and grandchildren and different local interests and politics. It usually leads to (somewhat bitter) splitville where assets are divided. This is one area my siblings and me are most weary of and want to do a better job of than our prior generations.
Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks? Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?
So many questions.
It's really not about the companies nor is it even legally binding in most cases with these arrangements(there is a lot of argument for/against making it legally binding). This idea dates back generations when joint families were more common.
Also see this if you haven't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071593
Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks?
This plays out every single day in one way or the other.
Example 1: One of the core points which I grew up hearing from my dad is that my money isn't really mine--it's the family's. Where as in American culture we largely teach kids independence from an early age, my dad never made me feel like I have to work as a teenager to have pocketmoney. His money was mine. What if he didn't have money to give me? I'd be expected to be sensitive enough to understand and work - so I can help the family(not so much myself).
Example 2: Last year I was in school and my (normally well to do dad) hit a rough patch. Our entire family finances were fucked. So I picked up a few coding gigs, worked my ass off and made the checks go straight to my dad.
Of course, my school friends thought I should be loaded at the end of the project. When I told them 100% of the money went to my dad, they were shocked. Some even tried to tell me "bro you're stupid!" :) May be. But that's my culture :) And so far I love it!
Example 3: Earlier this year, I just packed my bags one day and moved to NYC to live with my brother indefinitely. As I understand, this is not common in American culture. And even when a really close friend lets you do it, it is seen as "owing" a favor. But in our case, I did not owe my brother a favor or explanation on why I was going to live with him in his one bedroom apartment. In fact, I'd have to give an explanation to my family if I decided not to live with him. It's expected that if you live in the same city, you live together if you are family.
Oh btw, I have a full-time job now but my brother pays 100% of the rent. And I'm saving up cash from my job so one of us can potentially quit in a few months and take a shot at the start-up game again. None of this is planned or negotiated well in advance. My Dad could call me tomorrow and ask me for 100% of the money in my account and I'd send it without reservation. He'd do the same for me--though out of respect for being the father, he has more right to question me about why I need money than my right to question him. =)
Few months ago I had a major financial disaster when a client turned out to be fraudulent, putting me over $10,000 in the red. That's a lot of money for a freelancer. This is when I was able to call up my dad and pretty much the problem was immediately taken care of(he's doing a lot better now financially than last yr).
In a few years, my dad will be retired. He won't be getting a social security check from the gov and he barely has savings for retirement because he mostly invested them in his kids--knowing they'd take care of him after retirement. So he'll be getting money transfers from all of his kids every month after retirement.
That's our social security =)
Would you mind disclosing your nationality?
Some people find it useful to walk a mile in the shoes of those affected by the policies they support. Whether you might ever choose or have to wear those shoes personally is rather beside the point.
A dialogue tree that allowed the player to navigate life choices at an intellectual remove from real human life would simply reinforce our societal tendency to dodge the question of "what do we do with the struggling" by asserting that "I know better than them."
edit: effect/affect
Exactly which policies cause folks to get divorced (ie, get married young), have kids at a young age, and quit high school?
Apart, of course, from the policies intended to reduce the effects of those decisions....
You're right, policy decisions don't cause more people to have kids at a young age. They do however, have an effect on joblessness [1], just to name one facet of the economic environment that now exists in the US.
[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&...
'Abstinence only' sex education causes more people to have kids at a young age, because it prevents more people from learning what options there are available. Add into that the issue that young people have always been difficult to stop fucking each other throughout history, and combine with the highly sexualised modern society, and 'Abstinence only' sex education is, frankly, evil.
This is a succinct way to put it, and a good list. Can you say more about "social pressure against out-of-wedlock births"? You see this as another thing that encourages unsustainable lifestyles?
There's divorce, and then there's divorce.
No kids, not much of a problem. Economically, they're better off together, but ....
Unwed parents are a disaster for both society and the kid(s). It's pretty much a guarantee of long-term poverty.
Having kids is almost always a choice, a choice that has huge consequences.
on what basis?
My partner and I had our 3 children out of wedlock. Who are you to say that unwed parents is a lock-in to food stamps and crime?
Next you'll be blaming unwed parents for the break down of the fabric of society.
You are way out of line.
Some states call it common law marriage, but even if they don't you are still effectively married.
Marriage is not a piece of paper, marriage is a family structure.
That's how the statistics work out. We can argue about why that happens, but it's absurd to suggest that it doesn't.
Parents' choices, and having kids is almost always a choice, have consequences.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've actually had significant interaction with young unwed mothers.
Almost every one of them got pregnant intentionally. Yes, many will tell you a story at first, and "I couldn't afford it" does let them save face, which is pretty much all they've got left. But, after a while, it comes out that they knew exactly what they were doing.
So, why did they want to get pregnant?
A minor reason is that being a parent gets you some immediate respect.
However, the big reason is one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
"A baby has to love me."
> regressive taxation
The US doesn't have a regressive tax system. In fact, much of the volatility in tax revenues, which is killing CA, comes from being too progressive. (FWIW, EU countries tend to have a much flatter tax system.)
"progressive" = fraction of income going to taxes increases with income. (Marginal rates are almost irrelevant, revenue is the only thing that matters.)
The twist is that the less you contribute, the higher your return.
What other taxes are paid back to you later, in rough approximation to the amount that you paid?
The payback is entirely a function of the contribution stream (amounts and time).
> In any case, why should it make a difference what happens to the money after you pay it?
Because money collected for specific services rendered isn't much like money collected for general public services.
For example, many cities do garbage collection. While that money is collected by govt, it isn't much like property or sales tax.
Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?
SS isn't just the basic retirement stuff. Other payments are available which vary based on disability, personal resources, and location and status of residence.
Even the basic retirement stuff depends greatly on how long you live. If you die just as you retire, your inheritors don't get any of your SS benefits.
> Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?
Yes, as long as the $100/month is not optional. Gas taxes go to build highways that the driver uses, is that then not a tax? Tons of taxes are earmarked for specific purposes.
However many times people do chose to do the "fun" thing and instead of strive for a good job take the easy way out. That easy way is short-sighted.
Unfortunately we are seeing life from the walls of the castle, staring at the peasents saying "shame on you for not being royalty". However over the years I've grown to think that maybe 60%+ of the cause of people being poor is their fault. I see my friend partying every fucking night. She has no money. I have plenty of money yet cannot party because I have responsibilities. Yet when shit hits the fan, I have a buffer while she goes into a "shit my life is going nowhere" regression.
Sure her circumstances did not allow her to get the same living environment as I did, she is not a mathematically-inclined person, but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money. She barely works, when she does its not for long periods of time, and is older than I am.
So yea, my sympathy has been declining. Shoulda finished high school. Shoulda gone to a community college and studied your ass off. Shoulda worn a rubber till you were ready. Now it's too late, and you are standing there with your arms in the air begging for help.
Almost all pregnancy is the result of a decision to have sex. Yes, contraceptives fail sometimes, but that doesn't explain teen pregnancy rates. And, in the US at least, contraceptives are free, and have been for decades. Yes, even in rural/backwoods US.
> but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money.
I think that schools should be on the hook for student loans. Yes, including non-profit and state schools.
And no, grants shouldn't be increased. 4 years of effort should have some lifetime economic benefit.
I think your mistake is to think everyone is capable of knowing the consequences of their actions. Letting all people suffer the full consequences of all their actions, when it would cost little to get them off the hook, seems wrong to me, and to many others.
Life isn't fair, and it never will be. But we, as intelligent human beings, can do a lot to make it more fair. I think that is an overall win for everyone.
Except for when you make life more fair by handicapping the high performers. See Kurt's Harrison Bergeron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
So when a kid, at home, is always being told and modeled things that will skew them away from making good decisions what do you expect? What do you expect when their Mom, who they love and trust (for no other reason than its their Mom, how do they know any better?), tells them that their teachers are wrong because of x or y and that you need to look out for yourself and that no one will help and yadda yadda yadda... yeah, some people aren't making bad decisions with all the facts laid out in front of them.
Its easy to be an armchair quarter back, but instead of riding these people through their misery, why not show some love and compassion and try to help them out. This will go much further than beating them down and continuing not only the economic cycle, but the cultural one as well.
>They make high-end electronics, they make industrial equipment, [...] and manned spacecraft. //
Are you saying they don't employ minors in China at poverty wages in the manufacture of "cheap plastic shit"?
That would be news to me.
Sure, China had terrible problems with revolutionaries, before reforms leading to a remarkable rate of economic growth that nevertheless still leaves the average person in living conditions that would appal the average debt-ridden member of the American underclass. Mostly they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" by being able to work for (or employ people on) the sort of wages that would leave Americans unable to eat, never mind have houses, cars and mobile phone contracts to owe repayments on. So they didn't do it in isolation[] and their model doesn't work for the US unemployed. Perspective is useful, but deeming freedom of choice and support for the poor in a rich democracy to be adequate by comparison with a poor country rapidly recovering from internal chaos is like judging the adequacy of a government by how many gulags they operate. By the standards of first world countries, the poor in the US get a relatively rough deal.
Singapore, since you cite it as an example, is a million miles away from a society where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from capitalism. For a start, the government cleared the slums by building 85% of the country's housing stock and fixed the rents and prices far below private-sector levels. They might be extremely business-friendly, but governments in democratic states don't get much more paternalistic than Singapore's.
[]Arguably the American poor have benefited far more from the resulting availability of cheap consumer goods than they lose from cheap Chinese labour pulling down on the bootstraps of the US manufacturing industry. But the availability of those jobs is still reduced.
"The poor are poor because all of their choices in life suck."
There are of course two completely different ways to read that. I find that the first interpretation that jumps out at people speaks volumes about their world-view.
Another person here mentioned people using check cashing services instead of service-charging banks. You know, as opposed to shopping around for a smaller bank or credit union that doesn't do that (another thing strangely lacking as an option in the game). What makes this even more pathetic is that the bank charge is usually LESS than the 3% they are paying from their paycheck to the check cashing service! Top it off with the tendency for poor people to withdraw small amounts of cash from ATMs and take the service charge hit (which, since it's a fixed price, increases the percentage loss the lower the amount you take out) and you can't but shake your head in disbelief.
And don't even get me started on the massive amounts of money stupid people spend on lottery tickets...
It's little things like this that make (and keep) people poor, and these things are so easy to avoid with a little planning and discipline. Wealth is a long term strategy that few consider seriously.
And once you have wealth, you need to protect it from your grandchildren, because it's a well known phenomena for the first generation to make the money, the second generation to keep the money, and the third generation to piss it away. Not to mention the incredibly stupid modern practice of splitting the inheritance between your children rather than passing it in its entirety to ONE child.
I'm not sure if this is a troll. What is incredibly stupid about the common practice of splitting inheritance equally between your children? What do you propose as a more optimal way to choose the single child who receives everything?
Every time you split your fortune, it becomes far less powerful. As generations pass, your "fortune" splits and splits until you've got a bunch of insignificant sums among your descendants.
This is why the powerful families choose ONE child who will receive the inheritance, while the rest must make their own way. The common practice is for the firstborn to take the inheritance, but the best practice is to wait and see how each of your children deal with money before deciding.
Being poor sucks, but this game is trying way to hard to make that point and actually backfires. The contrived situations make me less likely to emphasize with someone who is in that position.
If this was billed not as a poverty simulator but as an "Unluckiest person in America" simulator, I might see the point. Perhaps the game should just start off "You go to look for a job, but you get hit by a bus and die".
This 'perfect storm' of trouble is just setting you up for failure, the deck is stacked against you much further than it is in real life. You are also not given the full picture up front, nor are you given the option on which services you subscribe to.
Also, if you can't afford a mobile phone you probably shouldn't have one, and if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go f*ck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.
That said, it's probably a useful tool to get people to put themselves in the shoes of someone that has it worse than they themselves do.
- cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)
- kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)
- in general: if you can't afford something, don't buy it.
Your prior decisions will determine to a large extent whether or not you can survive on a very basic salary when hard(er) times hit. Getting a room-mate and sharing the cost of things that you are unable to afford by yourself are good tricks to get around some of the more practical limitations that a low wage job gives you.
I used my low wage job (mailroom boy) to expand my knowledge about computers which eventually landed me a higher wage job. My typical meal back then consisted of plain macaroni with ketchup, because the rent took away 5/7ths of my income, and the electricity bill another 1/7th. That left me with a grand total of 100 'credits' to feed myself for a month. Not a whole lot. I made pretty sure that there were no kids, phone bills or debts to go with that, and I did whatever was within my means to cut short that phase of my life.
I totally agree. If you only make $9/hr, maybe you shouldn't have kids. If we ever get around to controlling reproduction in the US, income level seems like a great place to start to me. (The game also tried to make me feel like a bad parent because I 'let' my kid get teased for eating free lunch and 'risk my child going hungry'. Where's the "Eat your damn food and mock people who have to pay if they try to mock you" option? Also I didn't pay $15 for a field trip which forced them to stay at the school that day when I know kids at my elementary got their field trip fees waived.)
It is totally possible to predict when you'll become poor and therefore decide not to have kids. It beats me why do people ever get poor when life is just a sequence of such obvious decisions.
If you cannot afford it, do not have children. I can totally understand if you had the children before you, eg, lost your job or whatever. Things happen, situations change. The problem is the people who don't already have children. Also, if you cannot afford it, you need to be extra careful not to have an "accidental" pregnancy.
This generation's moonshot public works project should be a low cost reversible renewable year-long sterilization technology.
Also, harsh as seems, it would help if newborns on welfare were taken to orphanages and treated well there instead of generating funds for their genetic ancestors.
At least for women, that already exists (IUD, implanon). The problem is, for any medical technology there's side effects, and people still need to consent to it.
Congratulations are in order anyway, so here are mine, and I really hope that you get that job. My children were all planned and even if I did fall on hard times (twice) in the intermediate the fact that we cut down to the bone as soon as trouble hit helped us survive. Things that don't kill you will make you stronger.
Of course, someone who really believes in the market would harvest the child for organs. (Sarcasm implied.)
Good luck, boss!
Make a solid investment in her, and she'll pay you back with interest.
Anyway, everyone's life is half chance. Make the best of it and enjoy the ride.
Obviously if one equates happiness to lower amounts of worries and responsibilities than sure.. But that seems kind of.... superficial?
Note: I am not in anyway saying that those who choose to not have kids are superficial, it is their choice -- just as it was mine to have a kid.
Agreed.
The game background implies the player had a good job, could afford kids, but fell on hard times after cranking out some pups.
Where the player went wrong was letting things get so desperate that choices were limited.
Or like playing QWOP and concluding that running is hard.
I'm really trying to see the intellectual validity of your statements. I'm really trying to understand if you truly believe what you're saying. Would you actually make those same decisions?
Sorry, this isn't against you. I just see these type of comments often, and they only seem to make sense to me, in some abstract 'know-it-all' 'hindsight 20-20' sort of way, as if all of these life decisions are black and white and obvious.
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I, personally, have never been in a state of poverty. I've been very lucky. I was lucky to be born male and white in a country (and a state within it) where there were opportunities available to me. I was lucky to be born to parents who were reasonably educated but had enough discipline to take care of a kid (my father did, anyway). And I was lucky that a number of my own decisions, foolish in retrospect but in all seriousness a good idea at the time, did not come back to bite me in the ass.
I would suggest that, when talking about how people should not make those decisions, perhaps you could entertain the idea that they see no alternative. I've certainly been guilty of this before, both politically when in a certain libertarian phase (I got better) and in my professional life, when I drove myself to frustration wondering why person X did this thing that I instantly realized was stupid. Perhaps no alternative is within their view. (Even if you've been there, surely there's the possibility that you have certain advantages, in being able to see "the big picture", that others lack?)
Sure, there's no doubt some of the lazy "welfare queens" that the American right likes to demonize; I'm sure some exist. But I have come to something of an understanding in my own life that those in poverty are much more likely to encounter Morton's forks than others, and I find it more difficult than I did during that libertarian phase to self-righteously castigate such folks for making bad decisions when they have few, if any, good choices to make.
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From your other posts, it seems like you're not one of the people who's born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, but a lot of folks who write as you do are indeed those people--and the simple fact that you're able to do what you do, to have ended up in a position where you can perform the mental gymnastics necessary to be a (I assume, good) programmer, that maybe, despite whatever else, you weren't exactly birthed in the batter's box.
Just something to think about.
This is kind of a tricky thing, right? Phone access is still essential for job hunting, and payphones aren't terribly common anymore either. Borrowing a friend's phone is sometimes possible, but for getting a callback? Not so much.
Same thing goes for internet access (which, of the two, I think would probably be a better investment once a job is secured). Even so, low-wage jobs are often very dependent on scheduling and thus require a phone to get updated about shift changes.
(note also that yes, you can get net access from unsecured wireless networks [increasingly shunned due to piracy and access concerns] and public libraries [which may not be convenient to get to])
Simply not getting a phone (generalize to point of contact if desired) is not really a good option.
If you're only using your phone for job calls, this should be fairly cheap.
Who gets a telephone interview for any of those things?
At least I know that no warehouse job I ever worked required a telephone interview.
I have never ever experienced a landlord trying to raise my rent mere days after I moved in, like they seem to do in this game.
Then you'd have to find somewhere to live, and undertake the time/expense of suing. The best protection is probably a bit of a mutually assured destruction angle if the landlord is breaking the law through the irregular rental in the first place (in Santa Cruz many of the rentals are off the books because they aren't even legal rental units--DIY converted garages and attics and such).
Not sure how big that "informal rental" section of the economy is, though, so maybe this isn't a common situation. I'd guess it's highest in NYC.
One flat I shared the rental agency tried to withhold £150 for the changing of 1 (entirely ordinary) lightbulb, and cleaning a single drawer of a chest of drawers (a tiny amount of dirt under the drawer lining paper, and not apparent).
It's such a persistent theme that I tend to write off the deposit as part of the costs of moving, and consider it a good deal if I see 50% of it again.
I know a poor person who has 3 kids and car that falls apart. Some of the decisions she makes are strange. This game allowed me to take a peek at crazy world she's living.
I was one of those once, and I remember the time very well.
The bigger problem underlying all this is that people are lured in to making very bad choices the downsides of which only become apparent once they're hooked.
People that I employed were unable to do basic bookkeeping, balance their checkbooks, work out how much their various loans (for stuff they didn't strictly speaking need) were costing them etc.
This is first and foremost an education problem, low wage people are created, they are not born that way.
If you fail to educate a large portion of your populace to the point where they can do any of the above in their sleep then you will end up with people that are structurally in trouble in a country where wealth is potentially abundant.
If you outsource all your labor to even lower wage countries then you end up creating an even larger problem for those lower on the totem pole and you make the rich much richer still.
Problems like these don't just fall out of the sky, they systemic and single individuals have limited ability to influence the total picture, but they typically have a lot more control over their own life than they usually want to admit.
I know some people that are currently downright poor, they both smoke like chimneys, and have health issues to boot because of that, which further cuts in to their ability to spend their money where it should be going.
Beats me.
Having said that, yes it is an educational problem, but it's also the randomness of life events. Families breakdown without notice and without a childs control, lives end, jobs are lost, shit happens just like good things happen too. Some people get a string of bad events, others a string of good events.
Don't look down on their lack of skills, you had the ability to comprehend them, they didn't, maybe you had access to facilities and the time to learn, maybe they didn't.
In the end, who knows what the true reasons are, just do what you can to help a fellow out and enjoy your good fortune if that's how things turned out, but try not to judge and over simplify an exceedingly complex problem with one step solutions (although I agree, good education works).
Don't worry, I do my bit.
Some background: My mom made about $8000 a year, and my three siblings and I we were lucky to have temporarily free housing from a richer sibling. So, with food stamps, welfare, my absent dad's union health insurance we got by.
Eventually, I found my way into a gifted program at a small, urban city school. That, at least, put me on an academic track. My class size was about 400, and the gifted group was about 15. By the end of the 12th year, I would guess that, of my gifted class, probably 40% had dropped out. The class merged with the honors students in 11th grade because of attrition. However, I made friends with some honors students who were of working class and poor backgrounds.
Again, by sheer luck, I happened to get accepted at a state college. After meandering around for a couple of years, I happened to made the right decision by banking on computer science, even though I had never used a computer until I was 15 and didn't own one until my junior year of college. Those years of constantly fighting with the student aid program were some of the most stressful years of my life. Now, I make over 100K as a high-end developer. I have done well for myself.
However, most of the other gifted and honors students haven't fared so well. I do have a few friends that have also done well using Computer Science as a gateway out of poverty. However, those friends sadly still haven't figured out how to do basic bookkeeping or balance their checkbooks. But, in all honesty, I did not figure that out until I was 28 or so.
Anyway, without savings, with poor life skills, and a lot of debt, even those smart kids are probably likely at risk. If ever the software development market turns down, if they're out of a job for an extended period of time, I wonder what will happen to them, as well.
edit: thanks all!
It is used in a more general context to mean keeping a budget, as someone who would check the bank's work and make sure their own accounting matched to the penny presumably is doing so to ensure he is living within his means.
There is/was a small ledger in the front of most American checkbooks where you (ideally) log the deposits into your checking account and the checks that you wrote and calculate the balance after each transaction. Some people integrated their budget explicitly, logging 'transactions' to represent future/monthly obligations, savings targets and the like, but that wasn't at all common IME.
Practically speaking, this was a more necessary skill back in the days before direct deposit and debit cards. When a check might 'float', having been written but not cashed, for days or weeks until the recipient cashed it and the bank that accepted the check worked out the transaction with your own bank.
Nowadays what people mean by the term is simply the discipline and wherewithal to understand how much money you have in your account, what your obligations are and what you can safely spend.
Sheer luck? You were a hardworking person in a gifted and talented program in high-school. Luck had nothing to do with your college acceptance.
At some level, I suppose I was a better decision maker, but overwhelmingly I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Some 'luck' factors:
- At 17, I became friends, by accident, with a boy in another area whose dad was the VP of an engineering company. His dad saw my interest in science and encouraged me to go to college.
- At 18, while working as a temp, I happened to make friends with a retired engineer who encouraged me to college.
- I went to college in the 90s, at a time when Computer Science was a much more achievable major. Now, it is much more competitive.
- In the 90s, Computer Science had much less inspiring occupational outlook. I believe chemical engineering was all the rage then.
- I stumbled into Computer Science by accident. I happened to be a Physics major who had a sad, late night addiction to MUDs. And, I decided to start my own MUD and code it myself.
You worked hard and were in a good program--that was the decider.
May I ask.... did your 10-20 closests friends apply to a state school and get rejected despite having grades better than you (its not enough that they're smarter than you, their grades have to show it)?
I may be speaking out of turn though... I'm from Virginia, and here state schools are practically guaranteed acceptance. If you can't make it to the university level initially, you can always make it into a community college and after 2 years of passing grades the state university is required to accept your transfer.
I'll bet the people behind it are laughing at their clever social engineering.
I'm not sure this is the best game in the genre, but it's an interesting entry. Here's one satirizing airport security from a few years ago, which I think comes off as a bit more honest in that its clustering of events is also more frequent than would be the case IRL, but it clearly positions itself as satire that's exaggerating to make a point: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/airportsecurity.jsp
This is a pretty decent book on the subject, fwiw, but I think the area of game-rhetoric, of which propaganda games are a nice highlighting case, is still pretty open (and to me at least, more interesting than stuff like gamification): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Submitted separately, a 2009 blog post analyzing six ways to use game mechanics for rhetorical effect (which can of course mean propagandistic effect): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070404
Even with the odds against me, I was able to finish the simulation a few times with over $1200 available (thus being able to pay the rent on the following day).
Having a dog and a high-end cell plan, among other expenses seemed incongruous. Visiting schools, given the evening job (and only one job!) should have been trivial, as school are open in the a.m. The food shopping choices were awful too.
For a more realistic look (if several years old), a former colleague of mine took the "Food Stamp Challenge", and ate on a budget that could be purchased with food stamps, in response to claims the rate was too low.
http://www.dynamicrange.org/2007/05/food_stamp_chal.html
And I managed to finish with 1157$ anyways. Clearly low-income people need to learn to be frugal. :)
You must have had lots of health problems in the past or your are lying about that number.
I'm insuring a family (wife & child) as well as myself which drives up the cost. If I were to leave them uninsured then I would pay $0 out of pocket.
http://www.popmodal.com/video/1251/BILL-COSBY--Economics-Les...
Wasn't terribly impressed with the choices I was given though, because I've been in similar situations in the past and, while it may be very different in the US, I have never had any significant problems. Also, why do bills like car registration cost more if I choose to pay them later? In real life I once had to pay my electricity bill a month late because I didn't have the money - I called them up and they deferred the payment by a month. They didn't suddenly charge me extra.
EDIT: Just played it again and made it through the month with $274, with no outstanding bills.
As a counter to this, I highly recommend Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061714275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
The summary, from Amazon:
Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed—a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory—the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom—by making something out of nothing to achieve the American Dream.
Shepard's plan was simple. With a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using his contacts or college education, he headed out for Charleston, South Carolina, a randomly selected city with one objective: to work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.
Its been a while since I've read Ehrenreich's book but am curious - which decisions of hers did you find irrational?
I will say that a fundamental flaw in Nickel and Dimed, (and most likely in Shepard's book as well) - is that she ultimately had a choice. Many people in these situations have no choice. Many of them have children. Many of them have no college education to fall back on. I count myself among the lucky.
As someone who lives on about $750/month [1], both the game and the book seemed not to notice major ways to save money like having a lot of housemates, commuting by bus, combining proteins, and thrift stores.
Being poor definitely sucks, but the book and game imply it is impossible, which it clearly is not.
[1] this doesn't include taxes and health insurance, which are deducted from my paycheque, but if I were making only $750/month I would have free health care from MA and negative taxes (EITC)
This saves money, but it's actually pretty small compared to other ways to be more frugal. So I probably shouldn't have brought it up.
He makes the point that knowing he could quit at any time (and carrying an emergency credit card, never used) would be a disincentive to working hard. If he did not have a safety net, he would probably work harder. Instead, he takes many hard day-labor jobs.
In less than 10 months, he moves from a homeless shelter in a town where he knows no one to an apartment with one roommate. He goes from $25 to owning his own truck and savings of almost $5000.
If he did the same but tutoring a small group of randomly chosen people from the jobless line who were nonetheless motivated to achieve then I think he'd be on to something.
Now just to find some way to buy the book ...
Library.
So for me, this is completely realistic. Just drop the costs (and also the earnings) around 10 times (for poor people) to adjust for the living expenses.
As soon as you get out of the wealthy countries your odds diminish rapidly.
You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor?
That obviously depends on the provisions of the healthcare contract. It's common to pay a deductible and/or token co-pay. But these plans can always be tailored to address the needs of the buyer, and of the provider. (I might rant about the problems with enforcing a one-size-fits-all plan.)
You don't have unemployment aids?
Yes, we do. There is unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, disability insurance, and so on, to provide a safety net.
You can get fired for talking to a union guy?
No, you cannot (labor regulation in America is absurdly skewed in favor of the workers). The employer is forbidden from interfering with any labor attempt to organize. However, our Democrats have been attempting to pass a regulations called "card check" [1] which would take away the workers' right to secret ballots when voting for unionization. (And the Democrats are supposed to be the ones standing up for the little guy?!?)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check
Yes. That's the short answer.
The longer answer is that there are plans without co-pays, etc., but that they are to the best of my knowledge not available to purchase by individuals or far too expensive for our hypothetical $9/hr worker (think more like $1000/mo).
>> token co-pay
In the context of a $9/hr job, "token" co-pays probably shouldn't be called "token," when they can easily run over $40 for a single visit. I certainly don't consider 4+ hours of my compensation to be a token amount.
>> You can get fired for talking to a union guy?
The short answer is yes, you can be fired for talking to a union guy. As in your employer will not be stopped from firing you on the spot, and it's then your turn to try to get reinstated/compensated through legal channels. You're right that legally you can't be fired for organizing. But in the calculus of business and the working poor, it's actually fairly common for low-wage employees to be fired for attempts at organizing. The employer wagers (usually correctly) that the person who just lost his $9/hr job today will have more immediate priorities than finding an attorney he can't pay to take a case he'll probably lose due to being able to only secure the services of one lawyer and not a team of the best money can buy.
Are you suggesting that the French have found some way of physically preventing this improper action from ever occurring? I'd have to guess that the French are just as vulnerable to such misbehavior.
I'm not knowledgeable about the French labor system, so I won't rebut your guess with speculation of my own. I was simply pointing out that labor law isn't always as useful for day-to-day offenses as the well-off often assume.
Ask people who are involved in this issue, one way or another. Employer, worker, or organizer in France versus the USA. No matter their ideology, they will agree that management has far more freedom of action and employees have far less protections in the USA.
Unfortunately, as any startup who's tried to buy health insurance can attest, this isn't really true if "the buyer" isn't a giant corporation. If you're an individual or 5-person business, the market is completely broken. The main problem is that insurance only really works if you can effectively pool risks, and health insurance is difficult to pool risks in unless it's mandatory in some manner. A large employer agreeing to sign up every employee with no opt-out is the only real way to create a mandatory-coverage pool that seems to consistently work in the U.S.
The employer can and does interfere regularly with labor attempts to organize.
Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by businesses hiring labor consultants known affectionately as "union busters" who spend their time and efforts intimidating employees.
Talking to a union organizer can and does get you fired. Particularly workers who are passionate supporters of unionization.
Even the laws that do exist are rarely enforced, and even when they are the penalties are minimal. Employers figure it's cheaper to pay a couple thousand dollars in fines after they've won an election than it is to not break the law and lose it.
Labor regulation is massively skewed toward the employer compared to any other developed country. Unless you think that any labor regulation at all is an encroachment on the employers' rights.
Full disclosure: I've spent some time labor organizing and have been physically assaulted by management for talking to employees in the parking lot, so I'm a bit biased.
Labor regulation is massively skewed toward the employer compared to any other developed country.
I'm not interested in comparisons to other countries. My interest is in both sides playing on a level field. When, for example, the government is trying to prosecute Boeing for simply deciding to open a new plant in a non-union state so that it won't have to deal with the union [1], it's clear that the playing field is slanted. I'm not asking for businesses to have an upper hand, just that the situation be handled with as much fairness as possible.
labor consultants known affectionately as "union busters" who spend their time and efforts intimidating employees.
I've never encountered such a thing. My understanding is that this kind of thing disappeared decades ago (although these days I don't tend to work near unionized people, so may have missed something). But: how can you explain the insistence on the particulars of "card check", other than that the unions want to be able to intimidate workers into signing up (which they'd be able to do, since their votes wouldn't be secret)?
Disclosure(s): I've had my parents tell me that we won't have very much to eat for a while, because my step-father is being forced to go out on a strike that he voted against. I've been forced to pay union dues myself, even though (as a temporary employee) I wasn't entitled to union benefits or representation. I've been forbidden from helping customers by a simple 1-minute effort, because only union workers are allowed to do that task (although the union workers were not doing their duty by performing that task). My employer had union protesters [2] fake a picketer being hit by a bus, those picketers claiming that justified their attacking the bus with bats and pipes.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-20/boeing-should-move-...
[2] The protest was simply that one of the building contractors my employer was using for a renovation was not a union shop; there was no concrete grievance. And the bus that was attacked was carrying the non-union workers to keep them safe from the union animals.
A special-ed teacher I work with has a dimmer view than most of the US education system - because she sees so many of its failures and that for a living. I can easily see how the propaganda perception by an outsider is just the everyday reality in the eyes of http://www.umdurham.org/, one of the two game sponsers.
IMHO the game does a good job of creating a forcing function to make decisions that atleast I haven't had to make in a long while, if ever.
Imagining myself as the game designer, suspect I too would favour inciting empathy to accurate "real-life"-ism.
Does anyone still take dictation? Are there really jobs like this? I had an AA at my last job and in the nine years I was there I don't remember ever having her type up notes, etc.
Like the parent, I also spend my days in front of the computer developing software and doing general business-running activities. But I'm almost certain I would fail this test. I think I used Word once in high school and that is about where my experience ends.
I have never found a use-case for an Office suite. There are always better tools for any job that it might be able to tackle. For it to be a prerequisite for finding a job outside of the software industry is kind of frightening and sad.
This doesn't mean you're unemployable outside of software, just that this heuristic suggets you are a poor candidate for a temporary secretarial position.
Secretaries to doctors and lawyers make a lot more than minimum wage, though.