I love how when this comes up, it's people either saying "Here was my experience when I was poor in the past." or "Here is what I think about economics or the wording of this article."
Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on.
But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?
I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I got off the street last September. I am still quite poor. In fact, my bank account currently has zero in it and I don't get paid again until the 1st.
I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income.
I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand experience often turns into a pile on of people pretending to care and pretending to want to help while mostly virtue signaling, doing nothing for me and dragging my name through the mud by insinuating that I somehow must have made poor choices and it must be all my fault, never mind the larger societal forces under discussion.
I often worry that if I speak up too much, I will eventually be banned for disruptive behavior, never mind that I feel that a lot of the problem behaviors are due to how other people choose to react to me. When enough people pile on with problematic replies I can eventually get frustrated and lose my cool and then I feel like that will all be blamed on me and an excuse to say I am just badly behaved. I get a lot of downvotes and flags when I finally lose my cool. This tends to not happen to people talking at me like I am not really a victim of circumstances, I just am stupid, incompetent and not trying hard enough.
I try to then give it a rest for a while and avoid such topics because I would prefer to not wind up rate limited, banned or otherwise penalized for daring to be the token poor person giving my two cents. Privileged people tend to have no idea how to help me. They tend to say really shitty things to me. They often want me to shut up because I make them uncomfortable.
I am pretty thick skinned, well educated and come from a much more privileged background than I realized for most of my life. Most poor people are not going to stick their neck out like that. They are too vulnerable and can't afford more trouble and are very well aware that expecting rich people to be genuinely respectful and caring towards them is simply a bridge too far.
It generally works better overall for the formerly poor to try to cast a little light on such subjects. It is much less of a shitshow.
Thank you for sharing your views on poverty. While HN is primarily about programming / tech, there is room for talk about society, etc. I don't agree with your points about being rate limited / banned, all views are valued here if they're inherently non-inflamatory.
Edit: Your Karma given your account is only 3 days old is quite contradicting of your views of HN
I have been here 8.5 years. I just recently changed my name cuz reasons.
Overall, I get pretty well received. That doesn't mean I don't stress about it, etc. I am at times characterized by commenters as just having a chip on my shoulder about one thing or another and simply harping on it. So it isn't just me being paranoid. My concerns are based on observations of how others perceive me at times.
To be clear, it is not a criticism of the mods. They have been incredible. But I have been thrown off (or run off) of other sites. It would just be easier to remove me than to tell everyone else they need to figure out how to behave better towards me.
FWIW, I've been on the site a long time, and have seen parent commenter['s original account] get flamed (and presumably, nope out of those threads) for offering up her (inherently non-inflammatory) opinions / experiences.
Your posts always break my heart because, as you know, we share similar problems and needs and both cling to the same fraying thread. I am going to make my "hail mary" AskHN post today or tomorrow (keep editing and editing) and hope you might find something to cling to as well if people respond.
> I am still quite poor. In fact, my bank account currently has zero in it and I don't get paid again until the 1st.
Are you OK? Do you need some financial support? Can you afford to eat? I can offer to buy food and have it delivered to you, or a near by shop (or something) if need be.
This is the kind of comment I really hate seeing. It is almost always virtue signaling. People genuinely looking to help have zero problem finding my PayPal account or emailing me. The people who publicly offer assistance usually wind up really pissed off at me if I rudely try to take them up on it. It is gauche of me to take them seriously. They were just trying to look good in public for free. I am supposed to have too much shame or something to say "Yes, please." It also just puts me in an incredibly awkward position.
I find the entire thing annoying in the extreme because I have a Patreon account to help fund my blogging and I completely suck at promoting that. I also do freelance writing and resume editing and I can't get traction with that.
I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
> I find the entire thing annoying in the extreme because I have a Patreon account to help fund my blogging and I completely suck at promoting that.
> I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
I have no idea who you are. I've never heard of you. I've never seen your blog, YouTube channel, Twitch streaming account, or whatever else it is you have. I didn't read your profile or historical comments here in Hacker News to try and track you down or identify you because...
> People genuinely looking to help have zero problem finding my PayPal account or emailing me.
... I'm not going to run around the Internet looking for you.
I think I was well within my rights to offer you assistance using the most direct communication means that was available to me at the time of offering it: the comment box directly under your post. I made a safe assumption, in my opinion, that this would (and it did) reach you directly and now I'm being hosed down in public for trying to care about another human being.
I don't care about magical karma points. I'm 33 years old: I don't have the time, energy or the f--ks to give with regards to some magical Internet points that amount to sweet F/A.
I'm being sincere in my offer and it still stands. I'll email you to get further details from you about how you might want the money, if any, being sent.
Thank you for your sincerity and your email. I have already replied to your email. I apologize for you being the one who took it in the face here, but it is a kind of comment I absolutely do not want to see more of on the site for a long list of reasons.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." It isn't enough to mean well. Some ways of handling things simply do not work well.
The anger comes from, in personal experience, being taken out of society by things outside of your control, and whenever you ask for help being treated like a lazy beggar who has a lot of nerve even asking to survive. It comes from seeing the same "if I can help let me know" responses over and over that are really like "lets get lunch" statements and never result in actual help. Then when you get more depressed and upset that you can't get help people get defensive and dump their resentment or guilt on you more. It's a long spiral that is impossible to get out of often. Getting to the point you need help can happen to anyone...but most people need to pretend it can't and thus blame the victim and that victim's natural reactions to being crushed by life.
Man come on. I was explaining why those who suffer long term get bitter and depressed. I used to be healthy and happy and helped others for a living and personally. I was an empathetic person even then and thought I understood how people would respond, but until I lived the need I really didn't. It's not cynicism it's experience and it explains how people get grumpy and hopeless. Ask anyone who has suffered long term and they will tell you MOST people simply aren't willing to try to understand, and to truly help others. That's not a personal insult to you or those who would. When someone in pain lashes out because of their overwhelming experiences it's never about YOU but rather their fear and helplessness. The way you punched back saying "fine be a miserable person then" comes from you feeling slighted and wanting to lash out in that same way so it should be something you can empathize with.
I only want people to see the human in the suffering. The helpers are human too but are in a position of power and also have a more stable life and ability to cope. When I was working and being yelled at and unappreciated by people in severe distress I worked to never take it personally and did my very best for them. It was never about me..they had simply lost their ability to cope and needed help back to normality. It's terrifying to think about but can happen to anyone, any time.
I just wanted to answer the "why angry" question above. I have a LOT of relevant experience about this issue as both a provider and a victim. I just wanted to share that experience and explain the common behaviors. I don't want conflict and will back away and apologize if I offended you. I didn't downvote you above either in case that's added to it. I can't downvote at all anyway due to my low karma.
How about offering to help someone and then people acting like you are a bad person? How about that?
I've got nothing for or against either poster, but so many assumptions were made about someone who may have been just trying to help. Why is that fair? Why try to help anyone if you're gonna get treated like that?
I did not make assumptions about them. I talked about my experience with how this typically goes and the fact that I find this sort of comment very problematic.
It puts me in an incredibly awkward position because there is absolutely no good way for me to respond to it. If I publicly say yes and they actually help, there is a danger that this will become a running theme on the site. This would be a serious problem for me and for the moderators.
It's an inherently disrespectful way to handle the problem. The lack of real respect is one of the things that keeps certain classes of people trapped in poverty.
I have been commenting on my poverty on this site for years. I get lots of compliments on my writing here. I also get consistently told that trying to make a middle class income from my writing is a batshit insane deluded unrealistic desire.
If people genuinely respected me and genuinely cared, they could help me figure out how to turn my writing skill into a middle class income. I am not asking for charity here. I am asking to be taken seriously as someone who has a valuable skill that I would like to make a career out of. I can get no traction on finding a means to turn that into a middle class income. I have zero desire for my participation here to turn into some circus of me begging for money publicly. I see that as counter to my goal to get taken seriously and establish a career.
I also see that as a development that the mods would be fools to not ban me over. I have spent time as a moderator. That's a shitshow I would not tolerate in a community under my care.
> If people genuinely respected me and genuinely cared, they could help me figure out how to turn my writing skill into a middle class income.
Consider video. It's out pacing written material by a long shot and fast becoming how people consume knowledge. Not everyone is suited for it, but it's worth considering. The systems in place for publishing video content are also better and have a much bigger reach (without any work)
Thank you. And thank you for your Patreon pledge. The world would be a better place if there were more people like you genuinely trying to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.
You have to realize it's not about YOU and not make it an ego thing where you get offended at a suffering person's reactions. People in need are ignored, blamed and screwed with constantly and it's a normal reaction to be depressed, angry and defensive about it. But instead of having that empathy, most people react with a "Well who do you think you are? Screw you then I was trying to HELP!" and make it all about themselves. It's like people who get angry at someone in an emergency who is panicking or in pain. Yelling at them as if they are being a jerk to make the rescuer/provider's life difficult. I saw it a lot in my previous work. If you want to help others effectively you cannot make it about you and have to approach things outside your ego and gain the trust. Most people can' be bothered.
Open discussion will not necessarily reinforce anything, people have the ability to draw their own conclusions. Personally I would rather that OP stated their opinion explicitly.
Also I actually don't know what the stereotype was that was being implied.
Thank you for asking more explanations so nicely, and sorry for being so cryptic.
I think that welfare in the US is about philanthropy, charity and "good will", and not about "social rights" as in Europe.
And that comment showed exactly that attitude: the guy is kinda confused on why that woman refuses his "good will". She is asking for rights, he is offering "good will".
In my opinion, her answer created a cognitive dissonance in his mind, and that's why he answers back so angrily. I find that attitude to social welfare super American.
I think that the American approach to welfare has ethical and practical limits. Welfare based on philanthropy and good will is not an efficient welfare: it won’t change much. It also adds a moral dimension that (imho) shouldn't be there…
I really try hard not to sound cynical or jaded as that puts people off even more, but it's so difficult as I have had similar experiences with "offers of help" of all sorts. Nobody ever actually follows through. Twice in the last 2 years people have dragged my hope for work out over many months or years with no intention of ever doing anything. It always follows the same script and has made me quite hopeless.
More importantly, people like us need sustainable situations, not a wad of cash that will be gone with next month's expenses and leave us right back where we were. We need to be helped get a base under our feet to grow from as the muddy pit we live in just keeps collapsing, we also need to "learn how to fish" as the saying goes and be reintegrated into the whole. Not have scraps of fish thrown at us, no matter how well meaning the thrower is.
Yes, the public offers to help me eat when I am flat broke drive me crazy because when I talk about being unable to make adequate income as a writer, that gets dismissed as "meh, sucks to be you." People use ad blocker, tell me Patreon is charity and expect good content to be free. Then I get pity money* once in a while when things are really bad.
And it's like, hello? 2+2=4. Can you not see how these issues are related? Geez.
* My apologies to the generous souls who have compassionately given me money at times so I could eat. But the reality is I would not need such gifts if I had enough regular income, but all efforts to establish an earned income fall on deaf ears.
Not saying you are or not but using the fact that one is poor cannot be used as a vehicle to receive more attention, that does not make you privileged or entitled to having a positive reception of your opinions.
Critical thinking is paramount to any argument to be made, if an argument is weak or else lacks fundamental building blocks required for reasoning through it to a conclusion, no amount of "I've been there take my word" should give it any weight.
If we're doing social experiments and not reason-based arguments then perhaps there is room for evidence-based arguments, but this forum not being such scientific lab I hesitate to accept such arguments.
using the fact that one is poor cannot be used as a vehicle to receive more attention, that does not make you privileged or entitled to having a positive reception of your opinions.
I often get insane amounts of attention. This has long been true and I have spent many years trying to figure out how to open my mouth in public without it being a train wreck waiting to happen.
Part of the problem is that when someone is a demographic outlier or otherwise special case, other people give it a great deal of attention. Then that gets interpreted as the person intentionally derailing the discussion, making it about them, etc.
It is really common for people to completely ignore whatever point I am trying to make so they can talk about me and for me to wind up trying hard to combat that and possibly just finally say "I'm done here" and stop replying. When I do that, the people focusing on me swear it is all my fault, I was going out of my way to make it about me, etc.
I post as openly female here. It is common for that fact to become the focus of discussion and I am often told that if I did not want people to talk about it, I should not have mentioned my gender at all. The burden winds up being hung on me to anticipate the reactions of everyone else and to go out of my way to avoid mentioning anything that might get weird reactions.
It is an excessive and unrealistic burden to hang on me and it is the essence of sexism, classism, etc.
I understand your view on critical thinking, and I am intentionally trying to foster that by encouraging other stakeholders to speak up. Namely, us Poors!
In this case, what speech is privileged over the rest? I read the article, her post, your post, and so on. I will continue to do so.
If your issue is with tone, great! Tone is an important discussion to have!
I usually just skim HN for links, but I this article and had to make an account. I've been making about 15k a year about the last five years. I live in a major metropolitan area. The section I live in is finally getting hit hard and fast with gentrification, and it's terrifying. Right now I can ride a bike to work, but if I'm forced to move somewhere that I have to pay to commute, my job won't even make financial sense anymore. I don't see anyway out.
I did a bachelors in a social science at a cheap non-elite state school, so most people will say I deserve a life of crushing poverty. I suppose that's possible. I did try to make myself relevant to the economy by doing a coding bootcamp, and an associates in design, and put apps into the iOS and Android appstores. Of course I would have rather done a masters, but that is about as realistic as buying a house at this point.
Everyone says they can't find programmers, but I have yet to see one job that I meet the on-paper requirements to even apply to, and I'm willing to relocate anywhere in the country (obviously I can't afford property or a family) Even if I did get an interview I'm sure I won't do well answering trick questions about data structures on a white board anyways.
Other than the constant stress, being impoverished for so long has definitely given me a negative attitude. I know, you guys went through the same thing that time you had to sleep on your buddies couch after you finished your MBA at Stanford and Goldman Sachs didn't have an opening, but for some reason I'm just not handling it as well.
Anyway, I'm just going to keep writing apps and pushing them out to the appstore, and maybe one day one of them will make enough money to poke my head out above the poverty level. See you then.
Finding a job as a junior iOS dev is so hard right now. I would look for an entry-level iOS QA Automation Engineer position, or SDET if they use that title instead, even though I think the positions are usually distinct. You will still be using Xcode and writing Objective C/Swift, even if you're not making contributions to the source itself.
It's extremely difficult to fill those positions because people looking for their first tech job don't want to start off in QA, and they'd rather just be unemployed for months or years instead. There's not enough experienced people to go around if you don't want to overpay significantly to poach them.
They pay very well, easily on par with developer positions in many cases. Average where I live for entry level seems to be over $70k, and I've seen postings for $200k+ for people with experience.
You could probably spend a week or two messing around with UI Automation and XCTest (if you don't already use them) and be more qualified than most of the people applying to those positions with prior QA experience but no prior iOS experience.
Thank you for sharing! I ABSOLUTELY know what it's like to have people believe that you deserve poverty. Sometimes when I get really depressed, I feel that way toward myself. The idea of reduced inherent personal value seeps into everything.
Your point about the difference between being on a couch after a high value MBA vs being on the couch --full stop, end of sentence-- being a total chasm is totally correct.
I think that it is interesting that another poster posited that poverty is truly informed by hopelessness, with the implication that HN readers can't be hopeless. The idea that the concept of poverty is definable only by those far enough away from it to say "That is another group of people than I am in." is problematic in my view.
One option is considering moving. Regardless of your eng. skills if you are able to discuss requirements and communicate well you would be an asset for any smaller consulting company in eastern europe.
And to do that, they would need immediate stable income, or enough capital to live on until they found it. Probably both.
That is the whole point: no one in this situation has either of these things. That is the group of people Sen. Hatch thinks does not deserve financial help.
After reading through (most of) the comments here, I am genuinely curious what we can do as individuals to help. It is pretty clear that the gov isn't too keen on helping (don't want to get into politics - just one look at the budget cuts is enough to prove this point).
So is there anything we can do? Protesting, running for public office etc makes the most sense but I am not built for it. What is the second best thing that an individual with a few dollars and few hours a week to spare do to help?
Honestly, I see the biggest problem is that there isn't a clear solution.
We have a culture that is trained against this group of people; trained against helping each other succeed, against promoting others' individual liberty. I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, and that seems to be the only kind this culture will accept.
I think an important first step is empathy: understand how people feel stuck and why. Understand that the bare necessities are not enough. Understand the heightened stress that comes with this situation: inability to take risks, inability to recover from failed ventures, etc.
The next step is sympathy. Sympathy is closely related to empathy, but there is an important distinction: the difference between comprehension and understanding.
After that, I really don't know. I haven't ever been in a situation where I have the capital to significantly change another person's situation. Because I have never had the perspective, I don't see a solution. That is probably the most frustrating part of the problem: not knowing how someone can help you.
Sure, I could beg for food and rent, but that wouldn't be enough to be independent. In our society, it's difficult to ask for even the bare necessities, let alone ask for things like a car, enough capital to move to the city, out of state, or even out of country.
Some see debt as a solution: Get a student loan and an education, and then get into a better situation. But that assumes that college education is well suited for everyone, which is simply untrue. Loans require judgment by lenders; and if the path that you are most passionate about does not explicitly follow the "normal" routine - school, internship, temp job, career, etc. - those who lend money are likely to deny you your dreams.
The most frustrating thing to me is that because I don't have a perfect solution, the entire subject gets dropped. Solutions are found with effort and progress, not simply stumbled upon.
I get what you are saying and I feel the same way. But can't we at least toss some ideas around and see what comes of it? After all, for those in the US, all it takes from doing okay to bad situation is just one illness, hospital bills can screw someone's life faster than anything else. These things can happen to anyone.
Contribute or set up non profits to genuinely help people find self sustaining careers.
I’ve for long pondered how I could set up a 100 studio apartment complex with some counselors, training materials, and a supportive non profit. It seems doable.
One obviously wouldn't move before securing a position. For a consulting company like that having a native speaker interacting with clients can mean very tangible difference in hourly rate so should not be hard to find a place.
I feel like I always see this when it comes to breaking into mobile apps. Most mobile apps are stupid simple and they simply don't require large teams.
My advice is to pick a niche other than the one everyone and their mom is doing.
As a followup, I am a Real Poor! I am self taught, underemployed (I make less than $200 per month in the USA), and have pretty much been the poorest person in the room for my whole life.
I eat exclusively off of foodstamps. I am uninsured and partially disabled. I have been able to pay rent for the past few months by working off the books for a couple places, and cashing in on a very limited amount of goodwill that I accumulated in my youth. I have no reason to believe that this will last into the future, or even rent for March.
1. This is kind of open ended, so I'll give it a shot.
Both of my parents were janitors. I went to a private school in middle school on a work scholarship (we had to drive an hour each way, open and close the school every day). I dropped out of high school and have a few community college credits.
2. PTSD unrelated to anything I would care to discuss on HN.
3. ?
4. No. I have applied multiple times over the past six years, but long periods of being uninsured makes people wary of making any decision based off of medical data.
5. When I was 14, I founded and ran a hosting company, so I learned how to use PuTTY, maintain PHP installations, run cPanel, etc. I guess you can say I am "Okay with computers"
6. I have worked in construction, customer service, and sales across a few different industries, but all for very short periods of time. This relates to my disability.
7. I do have a small group of friends that I am very thankful for, but not to the extent that it doesn't scare me when it is snowing outside.
8. I would love to know how my answer to this matters to your estimation.
If anything, I find that successful people are culturally un-welcome in the conversation today. It's considered presumptive or 'privileged' to give advice on how to be self-reliant and grow wealth.
Culturally this is happening in a number of areas. Victimhood has become such a powerful status to claim that we increasingly refuse to listen to so-called 'privileged' voice, regardless of how solid their advice may be.
Not seeing the comment you're referring to. But my point is that a broader cultural phenomenon is occurring where successful folks are demonized and individual accomplishments are considered more a function of one's 'privilege' than hard work.
Hard work is one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient, so it all but begs for survivor bias. It may well have been the case in the past, when the economy was less abstract, that hard work could translate directly into material necessities (provided you were privileged to own land!) As far as I can tell, that's simply not the case in a society like this one.
I don't understand how that's not the case today. I grant you that there are a small percentage of folks who in such a disadvantaged position where this wouldn't be possible, but a lot more could follow this advice and get ahead: learn how to code. That could take a number of forms, whether it's online training, coding bootcamps (some of which are free until you land a job), or studying computer science in college / community college.
Yes, it's not just because people are at the moment going through a problem that they know how to solve it. It's one thing to be in a bad situation, how it is and so on, another is to know how to get out of it.
Wealthy people hold almost all of the power in America and the cultural reaction is to make sure other voices can be heard. I find that praiseworthy rather than something to disparage. I've known many wealthy people and many (not all) have been completely unable to comprehend the struggles poorer people deal with daily. Likewise, many of the poorer people I have known can't comprehend the lifestyle differences that come with being wealthy. My wife's mother, for instance, gives away all of her social security and alimony payments to struggling friends and family every month because her religion encourages it and she feels she is given too much in the first place. Her bank account is empty at the end of every month. My wife's nephew just graduated high school and also just had a baby with his girlfriend. He's working under the table and has no protections if his employer decides to stiff him, which has already happened multiple times on this job alone. He stays because he needs the money and is worried he wouldn't find another job soon enough if he left. He recently offered to get a payday loan to pay back her mother for some money she had loaned him for boots when she ended up being short on a utility bill. Fortunately he decided not to but no public high school in that area offers any kind of financial education course to tell him how bad of an idea those are.
My wife's brother drives all over the state looking for work, then once he finds a job he has to expect be laid off any day. On a recent job one of his team members stole something and didn't confess so the foreman fired the whole team. He pays child support for kids he doesn't see often and getting laid off can set him back months.
I have cousins who made dumb decisions when young and now have criminal records. A childhood friend reached out to me asking for money because his wife became addicted to heroin, ruined him financially and emotionally, and left him for another guy, taking his daughter with her. He had to spend a ton of money he didn't have on the court battle to get his daughter back from his heroin-addicted wife. Some of my best friends in high school were gifted but had great difficulty focusing on schoolwork and ended up coping with drug cocktails and are now working part time minimum wage jobs. I also know some dumb people who simply made bad choices and ended up putting themselves in holes they can't dig themselves out of. And they aren't even minorities, which are so statistically differentiated from white communities that when I build market models I have to remove ethnicity as an explanatory factor because it predicts nearly everything on its own and I don't want to reinforce stereotypes or abstracted discrimination among my customers.
On the other side, I know a wealthy international businessman who takes risks that would land anyone else in jail, like speeding around the city while driving drunk/high and crashing into a parked car. He broke his neck doing that but still drives drunk. For my wife's family that would have become a life crushing healthcare debt and at minimum a significant amount of time off work if not a life of disability, but for him it was a nuisance. He pays his workers under the table and his daughter just won a medal in the winter Olympics.
I work with several wealthy people who are working solely to make more money or have something to do. That's great but none of them have no understanding of the life of a poor person in this country, and they make assetions on how things should work based on how it impacts them and based on opinions they've heard from even wealthier people. I am related to people who have worked hard to become wealthy, and that is again great but now they claim anyone who is poor is lazy when that is not the case. They donate to causes that espouse the same.
I work in the real estate space so I also encounter a lot of lazy wealthy people who don't want to do any work but feel entitled to money because a piece of paper says they own a property. Legally and through market forces they usually are though they usually don't add any real value to society.
I've personally experienced both sides and my opinion is the poor need more help, whether that means education, healthcare, legal expenses, or just a voice in discussion. Successful people have their voice and are capable of amplifying it to the point where it reaches every voter in the US with little effort. The stories of millions of poor and working class are lost in the noise every day. It's not victimhood to describe your problems and explain why a certain ideology or policy will impact your life negatively. The wealthy in this country so often overlook real issues at lower levels that generally they will impact the lives of the poor whether they intend it or not. People are resilient, adaptable, and hard-working but sometimes they have a boot on their head keeping them dow and need help getting it off.
Also personally, I feel fortunate to have have lived and worked among many income classes in my life. I'm young, smart, hungry, skilled and effective so there is a high probability that I'll never have to worry about money again. I feel obliged to do what I can to change the balance of wealthy in this country to something that reduces suffering on a broad scale. I am working to get to the point where I can do that full time.
United States has become a government of corporations, by corporations and they have modeled the country after their image. I think we might have to turn to other organizations for solutions. I'm from Utah, the LDS Church (Mormons) for example have a whole welfare program (that works) for anyone who needs help (no need to be a member or religious). Just walk into any local church, ask to see the bishop and tell him you need help. The bishop can hand you money (no joke), provide housing options, food, jobs, medical care, etc. No strings attached.
In most societies being poor is shameful, asking for help is twice as shameful. Even if someone that is poor and read your comment will most likely post an answer.
When poor people get things for "free" (like charity, I hate charity) they actually pay with pride and dignity.
Depends on the form of charity (and that includes government assistance).
Give me basic income, and I will feel no loss of dignity.
Make me stand in a line for a few hours (what's the problem wasting my time, if I am unemployed anyway, right?), fill out a ton of paperwork, send me back to collect signatures from my former employers that I really did work for them three years ago (because everyone deserves to be told that I have a problem now, especially my former employers), and so on... then I will consider not eating for a few weeks a more dignified option.
Definitely, this said I won't call basic income charity. The difference is that charity is not a right but BI is. The same way when big corporations receive millions and millions of dollars in government subsidies they don't "feel" it as charity.
Without going into too much detail: I am exactly one semester away from a degree in the natural sciences but can no longer afford to attend classes - I am a single father with 3 children (two of which live with me) and I pay child support every month to my ex-wife who makes ~$80K per annum. I played her way through graduate school but she left and we divorced very soon after she finished school.
I am almost 40 years old and I have been looking for a steady job for months...but imagine trying to convince someone to hire you for a job with the schedule restrictions that come with having multiple children in a lackluster economy.
I could go on but the message here is simply that poverty can easily be a self-perpetuating condition that becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract oneself from. It often seems like I am caught between multiple Catch-22 situations like some sort of 6-dimensional Chinese finger-trap.
I have also lost access to education because of resources multiple times. I cannot stress how much this has impacted me materially and in terms of morale, both in the short and long term.
The amount of inertia that the self-perpetuating condition, as you aptly put it, is staggering to many that aren't actively experiencing it.
It is difficult to know what aspects of being poor are seen as urgent --or even actionable at all-- by others. Communicating this is complicated, and I haven't been satisfied by the general discourse on the subject, personally.
I dropped out of college because I had to work 30 hours a week minimum to afford it. There just wasn't enough time. All I did was work, school, and homework. I was staying up until 4am doing homework, and then nodding off at the wheel all the way to school a few hours later. Something had to give. Giving up the job was a non-starter. There wasn't anything else to give up. So I gave up school. And that marked the beginning of my battle with depression. I'd grown up quite poor, but I'd never been depressed about it. Because the future I saw was me going to college and becoming successful. Once off that path, a real, deep existential horror that I'd never felt before set in.
That's exactly what I did, funny we posted at the same time. I worked 30 hours a week with fulltime school too. I was able to pull through it though and graduated. Took me 6 years instead of 4 total, but looking back, I would've purposefully taken even longer had I known it was actually one of the best times of my life. I had the benefit of starting at a community college though, which saved money, and those 2 years were easier. I also took other classes at other local community colleges to transfer the max into my university as well once I was there.
Yeah, you're right on the time management part for sure. I was the most efficient with my time during that period of my life than I've ever been. Basically work, class, study in library, repeat. It's not that bad, people are capable of more if they choose to. Best time of my life. It doesn't get better for sure. I've worked like a slave since then, with zero intellectual stimulation as I had at school other than what I seek out on sites like HN.
I've spent 20 years trying to decide what I could have done differently. Usually I conclude that I should have taken out loans. In my defense, I was 16, knew nothing about loans, thought they were scary, and had nobody to advise me otherwise. My single mother was working full-time to support two other kids, and didn't have the bandwidth to help me with school. Besides, that was back in the days before student loans became the foregone conclusion they are now. It only just now occurred to me that I could have blown off the homework, and graduated with lower grades, but there is no way 16-year-old me would ever have considered not doing homework.
Kids are the easiest, fastest (9 month) way to guarantee a life of poverty. Make them get jobs if they're 12 or older. I started working at 12 (paperboy) and never stopped 25+ years later!
My advice is to stop school, work a bit, save up, then finish off that last semester class by class while working.
I worked 30 hours a week while going to college, not because I had a wife or kids, but because no one was helping me and I had to pay rent/bills on top of the loans.
Sorry to hear that. If you are in the US, I am guessing that you can't take out any (more) student loans? They come with a 6 month grace period. Might get you through the semester to get your degree. Maybe you already know that and have done so. You might be able to talk to your school administrators and see if there is any chance of a tuition waiver as well. They should have resources to help. Good luck.
Poor people can’t comment because they’re poor. It’s the survivorship bias problem. People who are currently poor probably can’t comment on HN (or have no idea what it is), so what you see, overwhelmingly, is people who were able to escape poverty. This can lead some people to believe that it’s easier than it is to get out of poverty. And since this is an article about true, abject poverty, “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps with my tech skills” doesn’t really help anyone learn anything.
Sorry if I gave that impression. I have no problem with lots of perspectives. I specifically asked if anybody had made room for, uh, the poor people.
Considering my response has already gotten one "Well you're obviously not poor if you read this", and another asking for clarification of my opinions on non-poor people, I guess this wasn't the place to make that point. Sorry.
> I specifically asked if anybody had made room for, uh, the poor people.
But what does this mean? Unless someone is specifically arguing that poor people should not comment, how is anyone not "making room for" the perspectives of poor people?
I am poor and volunteered my voice on the subject of how poverty affects people. I specifically asked (as a question, not a substantive statement) whether or not my input was welcome. I have also made a point of saying that I have no issue with other perspectives. I can not speak to how you experience my intentions in my writing, but I will try to keep clarifying.
I'm sorry if you felt I was misreading your intentions. Your message did not mention that you were poor, or that you were asking if you specifically are welcome to comment. My answer to that would be: of course you are welcome to comment. Nobody needs to ask permission to comment here.
While there may be HN readers who have little income and possessions and are therefore living in "poverty", true poverty is a lack of those things and a lack of hope that your situation will improve.
If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
They're equally irrelevant, though. Poverty is when you don't have enough money. It's not a state of mind.
I thought some more about part of your earlier post:
> If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
This really doesn't make sense. I've known at least one desperately poor and depressed person who found escape and satisfaction in scavenging and programming discarded hardware. There's no reason people in poverty can't be hackers. Arguably they've got more motivation to hack than people who can just buy the latest widgets off-the-shelf.
I agree with the first part, but not the second. Even when I've been at my lowest, I doubt there's been a day that I didn't check HN. It's just an addiction.
> That’s the correct financial decision, according to traditional economics—to drive the extra distance no matter the original cost. Saving $50 is the same regardless of the amount of the item in question. But wealthier participants saw the savings in relative terms, noticing the percentage savings. By contrast, poorer participants thought in absolute terms. To them, $50 saved was $50 to spend on groceries or the electric bill.
Then traditional economics is a fool. Rich people value their time and their headspace. I’ve seen this again and again with someone close to me: they assign the same priority to tiny financial decisions as to big ones. They do make very optimized decisions but it is within a very small context. In the meantime they don’t realise the world of opportunity they are not seeing because of their obsessive focus on small items.
You're misunderstanding the question they've posed people.
In either situation, the question is "is half an hour of transit worth $50 to you." Whether it's $50 saved on a $300 item or a $1000 item has no impact on the $ saved per minute.
They don't realise it's not worth focusing on saving a dollar here and there, if they then move ahead and overpay for a house or a car (e.g. by not negotiating).
Half the battle is getting a good (or great) deal on expensive, one off purchases, if possible (say everything above $2k). Don't worry about the rest. As with everything: 20% of the "work" gets you 80% of the way there.
You can then not worry about the smaller expenses -- the ones that are generally time consuming and annoying to track -- that tend to make your life miserable.
Yes, Starbucks is expensive, but you're not going to go bankrupt drinking their coffee. You're also not going to get rich by not drinking it.
> "Yes, Starbucks is expensive, but you're not going to go bankrupt drinking their coffee."
I observed people spending 5$ both morning and lunch/day, but for arguments sake stick to 1/day. thats roughly 1300$/year. now imagine living paycheck to paycheck and spending that (very common). they end up taking on dept @20% interest.
in a 5 year window, just that spending on starbucks is effectively costing them nearly 10,000$.
edit: keep in mind, i heard the average 401k savings is ~5k
As someone said, you will not get rich by cutting pennies.
I spend about $50 on starbucks a month, mostly on weekends in the morning, $500/y would be not such a big gain. On the other hand the quality of life I'm getting without good morning coffee would be much, much worse.
If I would need extra $500 that bad, I would consider doing some side work or even changing the job.
It's very easy to go over the top of living frugal and forget what is the sole point of earning money and living your life in a first place.
It really depends. There was a time when what i could have spent on Starbucks was equivalent to at least one main meal, so splurging on a drink like that was a luxury of sorts for when i had extra funds-- this was at tertiary school and got by with a PT job.
They're correct. You should spend the same amount of time to save a dollar on A as you do to save a dollar on B. And you should spend 100x as much time to save $100.
If you're willing to spend 10 minutes to save $100, then you are only willing to spend 6 seconds to save $1. If you can't immediately identify a way to save $1 that would take less than 6 seconds, then don't try to save $1. Each person has a different time/dollar ratio. Some people might be willing to spend 2 minute to save $1, and thus willing to spend 1 hour to save $30.
A house has to appraise at the sales price or else you can't get a mortgage. You can, technically, "over pay" but that would be from savings which most people don't have. Also most first time buyers don't put 20% down so it's even harder to overpay. As for cars you should buy a new car at a low interest rate and hold it or buy a decent used car. You have to figure out the math here b/c after cash for clunkers used cars cost more... then again you can sell your new car for more later as well.
Things might be stricter now, but back when I dabbled in real estate, the appraisal was a farce. The appraiser, the real estate agents, and the loan appraiser could always magically make the numbers work.
Well it's based on comps which is the last 3 houses to sell within your neighborhood. After 2008 things also got stricter. You can also "check" the appraisal by asking your insurance company for the rebuild value of your house. That may have limited utility though but if you have new development of similar sized houses in your area then the rebuild should be close to that and that will set a max prices anyway. Since why buy the old house when you can buy new. Again it's a limited argument but it's another data point.
I believe there are some new regulations that have taken the appraiser out of the back pocket of the bank. I'm not sure if it has made any difference though.
I completely understand the parent comment and I don't think it's a misunderstanding. The idea is that a rich person doesn't care to think through that situation using all their reasoning capabilities, as they're more focused on the long-term; they spend their time thinking about how to get that promotion to prepare for their children's college funds, or something of that sort.
An example: I was raised by a single mother in poverty, where she would try to scrape by and live on welfare without working, year after year after year. She would only think about tomorrow's expenses, and she'd do a great job budgeting to make sure we had enough food to eat and so forth. As a child, I would show her job listings, explain the value of utilizing her assets as well as she could (she had her inheritance invested terribly), and all that. She would never be able to understand it, as she couldn't think that far ahead with all her mental capacity being devoted to making the best decision to save $50, as mentioned in the other comment.
In conclusion, optimizing those tiny financial decisions often leads you to neglect the ones further out. That's the issue the parent comment was highlighting.
Also, traditional economics isn't a fool if you account for the limited economic reasoning capability, and consider that reasoning capability as a scarce resource to be allocated.
Right, but there's a subtlety: The dollars saved in those minutes are worth a different amount to a rich person depending on their relative impact on the sale. $50 off of $300 is a 1/6 discount, so a "good deal" that they will (somewhat recreationally) decide to go and get. But they still don't inherently care that much about $50. You could say if they make lets say ten times what I do, they probably care 1/10th as much as I do, about $50.
Anyway and meanwhile, $50 off of $1000 is a 1/20 or 5% discount. Now it's still the same $50 they don't give a shit about, but it's also now an insignificant discount. Would they spend extra time on what to them is a rounding error on a $1000 purchase? They're not really getting a "deal" anymore, it's a bore, and they decide to spend the extra $50 just to buy back their half-hour. So long as the price is still "about $1000" they're OK with it.
The rational answer is that if you would drive 30 minutes to save $50 off a $300 tablet, then you should also drive 30 minutes to save $50 off a $1000 tablet. You've described the psychology of why a wealthy person might not drive the 30 minutes for the $1000 tablet well (but still will spend the time to save money on the $300 tablet), but that choice is still irrational.
Well yes, it's completely arbitrary! Those with the luxury to act irrationally will sometimes do so, I guess. And economics doesn't do a good job of explaining it, so the root of this branch of the comment tree was kinda right when they said traditional economic theory is a ass.[0]
Adversity and scarcity breeds a precision and a ruthless attention to detail that prevents that $50 from escaping. Meanwhile abundance leads to a relaxing of all such, and maybe even a dulling of that skill. Being born into wealth I imagine would put you at an even bigger disadvantage in that regard... though I might be okay with having such problems...
The reason why people act irrationally has more to do with psychology than economics. Vsauce has a good segment talking about human tendency to think in terms of proportion instead of absolute scale: https://youtu.be/Pxb5lSPLy9c?t=1m53s
That is too simple of an answer, as it ignores the added utility from getting a "good deal" on the tablet. People feel good/smart for finding good discounts and they can even brag about the great price to their friends.
Without that added utility, saving $50 alone might not be worth 30 minutes to them.
It can still be rational, but you need to look at shopping as an aggregate of probabilities.
Let's make it more extreme. A $50 item for free or $50 off a $5000 purchase. Discounts as big as 100% off don't come every day. Maybe you'll never see that deal again in your life. You should jump on it. Where as a 1% discount is something you see every day at dozens of stores. There will probably be a bigger discount next week, so don't bother going out of your way.
If you have to make a choice between the two, you choose the item with the less-common discount.
You're thinking that the question is "should I this item or not", or "should I buy this item now or wait a while". Then it could be logical to prefer the higher percent discount.
But that's not what the study asked. The study said "you need to buy this item now, where will you buy it?" In this case it is illogical to prefer the higher percent discount, dollar value is the only thing that matters.
When behavioral economists do these studies and brag about counterintuitive results, they usually ignore that more expensive items usually have a longer lifespan, so the cost per unit time isn't as different as the sticker price suggests.
I think you're misunderstanding. The question had nothing to do with whether the more expensive tablet is better or not, or which one someone would rather buy.
The parent's comment point was that it may logically be assumed that you'd be doing such an action once every 1 year vs once every 3 years, for example.
Edit: Upon realizing that you'd save the $50 every time you go / every 30 minutes spent regardless of how often, me (and presumably the parent) are wrong, and I'm going to bed. :)
Whether the device will last 1 year, or last 3 years, doesn't change whether you should spend 30 minutes to save $50. The rich people who changed their answers were still illogical.
I freelance, so I consider 30 min travel vs $50 saving differently, depending on how much work I have, when it ought to be done by, and what I'm billing at. If I were billing at less than $100/hr, and had enough slack, I'd of course make the trip. But if I were behind schedule on a $75/hr job, I'd probably pay the extra $50.
But damn, people working 15 hours per day at minimum wage might also pay the $50, if they can't readily get time off work.
It's not just about the $50 vs. time spent. If after the calculation you decided it was worth $50 to spend that extra 30 minute drive, it shouldn't matter if you're saving $50 on a $100 item or you are saving $50 on a $1000 item.
Agreed. Except to the extent that people who buy $1000 tablets care less about saving $50 than people who buy $100 tablets. And their time is more valuable as well. Unless they don't need to work, and enjoy driving.
I'd be interested to know if there was some sort of priming effect going on. With the wealthier people thinking more in percentage terms rather than absolute price, they might expect that the $1000 tablet would be discounted more in the future (if the $300 tablet can be 17% off, why not the $1000 tablet?) and decide to wait it out.
Not really. There is the notion of opportunity cost. 30' might be worth your time, unless investing that time, either working, or even resting, paid you back e.g. > $50. If you expect yourself to make less than $50 an hour (assuming you have to drive back (?), otherwise $100) then that would be a good deal. It depends on your model of course. After some point spending 30' to get $50 off is crazy, if you are struggling to make time for your family.
Either the article does a poor job describing the research, or I find it somewhat incomplete. I mean there is an inherent misconception that $1000 item/asset is much much better than a $300 equivalent. I am curious how that affects the valuation between different groups of individuals.
The study asked some rich people "would you spend 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 item". Some rich people said yes. Then they asked "would you spend 30 minutes to save $50 on a $1000 item". Some of the previous "yes" answers changed to "no". That is illogical, logically no one should have changed their answer.
Poor people didn't make this illogical answer change.
> I mean there is an inherent misconception that $1000 item/asset is much much better than a $300 equivalent.
That's not how I read it -- the authors were not assigning a qualitative value to the items, only a quantitative one. They did not need to be the same 'type' of asset. It was just that when comparing the savings - 50/300 vs 50/1000 - some people considered the ratio more important than the numerator.
It’s a lot harder to quantify and value headspace. Is there a way? I was expecting the article to quantify it in reduced IQ, but it went the other way.
Quantifying IQ is hard enough - quantifying deltas based on subjective rates of poverty? That'd be a courageous goal.
Authors set out to demonstrate qualitative cognitive differences between people suffering with scarcity (primarily cash) and those not.
People suffering with scarcity have a cognitive load that the 'not' category does not -- I don't think that translates to reduced IQ, but was demonstrated to translate to 'more bad decisions' via heightened and persistent cognitive load.
ADDENDA: From the outside looking in, that phenomenon may be misunderstood by an observer to indicate a causal relationship between bad decision making and poverty. TFA makes the case that causality is inverse to common (by governments, elites, etc) interpretation.
not only do the poor make affected decisions we also know that the poor (1) have a restricted set of feasible solutions (2) face higher uncertainty in outcomes due to the impaired ability to execute solutions (3) have limited ability to mitigate the consequences of a failed solution.
in addition, public policy tends to strip the poor of their agency, not to mention dignity: (1) their choices are dictated without the context of their situation (2) the actual risks they face are ignored or treated as if a wealthier person were to face these risks (3) their actual utility curve is discarded in place of the utility curve of the policymaker or the general public... and then should the poor continue to fail to make full use of these programs that are not only difficult for the target group to take up, but also humiliating and undermining confidence in helping themselves, they are chided for continuing to make poor decisions.
the article offers a few examples that overcame some problems affecting these people. but the story is very different between communities in which members are equally affected by limited resources and unequal communities. the separation of classes of people within a community with elevated inequality blinds the group to the myriad problems the poor face and leads to a caricature of the poor as incompetent - and it is this warped public perception and conversation that is holding back effective poverty programs.
It's not poverty. It's stress. Poverty is very stressful. Any kind of stress stops people from acting the way they normally would be inclined to act. It takes a lot of conditioning and practice to deal with stress without having it impact you and your performance.
Take a little stress off your staff, and instantly everyone starts making better decisions, their work seems more focused. As a manager, the best thing I can do for my team is try and shield them from scope creep, angry clients, and unreasonable deadlines. And make sure everyone has time off when they need it.
Take care of your team, team will take care of the work.
It's also mental. When I was poor and finally got a "student" class credit card, i knew paying off the month's bill was the best option economically, i still could not get around the idea of giving up all my "cash" (money in the bank) to pay off the debt. Even though i could have simply paid off and then should something come up, use the zero balance credit card. No, i still wanted cash available. Knowing this was not the logical option.
The value of cash liquidity seems deep within much economic activity.
It's what, essentially, Adam Smith railed against in Wealth of Nations, arguing that wealth was not gold and silver (liquidity) but real produce and labour capacity. And yet much present economic theory and practice is only so much neomerchantilism.
This makes me suspect a real foundation, at least psychologically, to the behaviour.
Trade is not a zero-sum game, in sum we gain. Cooperation leads to synergy. The sick and poor cost money. Having that in mind, I cannot understand why a country wouldn't give food and money and shelter to the poor. Without shelter, you get sick and can barely work. Without money, you are stressed and get sick. Without food, you get sick and can't work. It's obvious that even the hard working people have a better life when society helps the less fortunates ones. So, why on earth wouldn't a country do it? That would be unethical, irrational and economical madness.
Homeless for nine months and about to be officially destitute tomorrow. At least I’ve had a vehicle to have shelter and live in a warm area.
Combo of Homelessness and poverty is a cycle that is quite difficult to get out of. I took on programming work from nice folks while still homeless, which absolutely backfired. Lack of a normal safe routine and attempting to work from public when under such stress can be an effort in futility. Thus couldn’t work and couldn’t get back on my feet. It’s a vicious cycle
The other consequences are deteriorated mental state from isolation, paranoia, and depressive symptoms all of which serve to make digging out of any hole seemingly impossible.
Constant never ending stress, concerns about basic survival, concerns about physical safety change your mentality. Idgaf attitude prevails, to the point where crime including violence seem less unjustified.
I could go on, and obviously this is just an anectode
The first time I saw abject poverty was in high school on a family trip to Hong Kong. I saw an skinny old lady, wearing literally rags, washing herself from a puddle. I had never seen that in the other countries that we went on family trips to. The image is burned into my brain.
I am lucky having grown up in a middle class family. My father also grew up in poverty and it affected me as well. He was able to provide for us bery well but the specter of being poor was burned into my psyche to an extremely unhealthy level. It lead to a decade of fear and broken relationships because I was so paranoid about losing my money and my livelihood.
Now the combined income of my wife and I make us easy 1%ers and my perceptions of money have changed again. Instead of saving every penny we made smart financial decisions, like buying a house that was very affordable instead of getting as big a house as we could pay for. I’m reasonably comfortable that I will have a job until I retire and I’m very sure my wife will. This allows us the luxury of spending money on things that we never would have, like nannies and cleaners, and traveling business class instead of economy.
It’s something I never, ever, would have considered 20 years ago. When I was scared about money in my 20s and early 30s (never living in poverty,though) I felt vulnerable and that I could “fail”. Going through the dotcom bust reinforced these feelings to the point where I went to the hospital several times due to anxiety attacks. I felt like this wouldn’t last and “winter was coming” so I saved every penny and even ended relationships over money.
After a particularly bad breakup I realized I had a problem. My mindset now is I can always make more money if I lose my job. It might have to be something unpleasant but it can happen. I’m not wasteful with money but I don’t obsess over it anymore. I’m grateful for being in this position obviously, because all it takes is a really bad recession for things to get really bad. Aside from a couple of perks, like the cleaners and nannies, I generally save most of my money for “winter”. It’s a position that, as I said, I’m grateful having. I have friends who aren’t in the same position, and our mindsets in life are completely different.
I think you mean buying in bulk. Buying in bulk is great but often not because if it is food it might go bad before you eat it and if you are poor your limited on space... so huge packs of items don't fit well in your tiny space. Plus the up front cost is a real killer since the money is saved over time. And if you have more of something you might end up using more because it's convenient. And finally if you are splitting rent with many people they will help themselves to the bulk items.
There's a subtle difference between "buying in bulk" and "keeping a reasonable stock".
I grew up in a quite poor family and my parents are terrible with money. One thing that frustrated me to no end is that they would almost never buy something ahead of time. An item would literally have to run out before they'd consider buying its replacement, which meant I'd regularly get in the shower in the morning to find there is no soap, no toothpaste, no toilet paper.
You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities. Also when you work on a system of buying one item only to replace the previous, you really miss out on bargains because you have to pay the full price it is at the time you need it, instead of a week or two earlier when the same product was BOGOF.
At the same time, they throw away tonnes of food which has gone off because they can't plan meals and shopping consists of "we might eat that." Food which has a long expiry date (canned foods, etc) always runs out.
> You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities.
I see this at a lot at my local 7-11, many poorer people do a lot of their grocery shopping there even though an aldi is 5 minutes walk away (so it's actually closer for some of them, literally across the road) and three other supermarkets are under 15 minutes walk. I suspect there is some sort of psychological effect (possibly from advertising) that is compelling them to go to 7-11 instead of somewhere cheaper and that they aren't making a conscious financial decision.
No, I meant stocking up. If there is a sale on toilet paper, poor folks can save some money this week but cannot buy a couple of extra packages because they don’t have those discretionary funds available. It’s not space, it’s budget.
This is kind of the opposite of what I've seen? The discount grocers often have people buying huge quantities of stuff. Some of which is probably attributable to having a single car for the household.
There is a rather large difference between the monthly EBT run and buying quantity when something is on sale. Having one vehicle, often in poor condition, tends to make people do a once a month large grocery purchase. It is so common that some unscrupulous police officers will have a checkpoint on a known route to write some easy tickets.
It doesn’t matter what’s on sale, the big purchase happens anyway. They aren’t shopping the sales.
I grew up in poverty. My dad is fortunately able to get tuition assistance through the Native American tribe he is a member of. With that assistance, he was able to graduate law school and become a lawyer. As soon as he did that and got his first job as an attorney, our lives changed dramatically. My fondest memory of that time was buying brand new clothes. That never happened before, at least not that I can remember. I was so amazing to wear clothes that weren't hand me downs that were initially purchased used from a thrift store.
The thing is, even with the tuition assistance, both of my parents had to work double shifts almost constantly to keep food on the table. I have many memories of my siblings and I coming home to an empty house in elementary school because my parents would be out working their ass off for us. Most weeks I wouldn't see them until the weekend. Now, as adults, my siblings and I are now living well enough in middle class.
Government programs and assistance for the poor can fail and can be taken advantage of by people who would rather squander that assistance, no doubt, but that doesn't mean all people are like that. It can and does work, but even with assistance, it is not enough. My dad was very fortunate to have a tuition free ride through law school, and we as a family were fortunate enough not to run into anything that derailed his desire or ability to finish law school. Without that tuition assistance, I doubt he could have secured the loans that were needed. Simply cutting assistance programs will not make poor people to 'get back to work' and dig themselves out of poverty. It was next to impossible to do so when I was growing up and it is even worse now.
Can those programs be better? Yes. Should we cut them because they aren't the best? Absolutely not. Please.
This is not the first time this article has come up, and as usual I'll give my 2c.
What qualifies me to talk about this issue? I was raised in the UK on income support, single mother, social housing, low income city etc;
Now the situation has changed somewhat in the UK; back then in the UK it was possible to get by without going into debt if you were smart about things and I believe this no longer to be the case, but I am no longer in this system and; to qualify my statement further: it was not possible to be poorer than my mother was. No family and no registered father on record. (He would have had to pay child maintenance if he was on record, the state does not supply this if there is an absence)
What I found to be true is that my mother will buy the cheapest thing that will do the job, she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money. She still trawls second-hand stores and will not buy anything that needs maintenance.
Her cars tend to be 1-step from the junk-yard (even though she has a steady well paying job now).
For myself, I select heavily for things that require less maintenance too. I buy extremely high quality things because I assume that my job is temporary and that I will once-again be plunged into poverty, and if anything needs to be replaced in that time I may not have the financial freedom to do so. I do not have anything that requires recurring costs (no netflix, no apple music.. I will not subscribe to anything that is not a utility), I do not take long-term contracts (if there is a choice between 12months at a cheaper rate or month-to-month for 10% more I will pay the 10% more not to be tied).
This is my anecdatum, of my mother who grew up working class and became poor through choice, and for me, who grew up poor and became middle-class.
I grew up relatively poor in the U.S. under wildly different family circumstances, but I felt myself nodding to the solutions and approaches of both your mother and yourself -- some out of recognition, some out of familiarity.
I've found it almost impossible to enumerate the ways in which growing up poor wildly alters your mindset about money. It's literally mind altering and often nonsensical or hard to explain to people who haven't been through it.
My wife, who grew up in a fairly wealthy household (to parents who themselves escaped crushing poverty), has tried to train me to avoid many of those instincts now that I myself am in good financial status. But I still take a weird kind of comfort at least browsing local thrift stores, figuring out what we'd absolutely need in case of a major bankruptcy or working over scenarios on how to survive and get housing if we lost everything.
The industries that prey on the poor basically exist because they've managed to use these instincts against the poor rather than trying to get people out of poverty. They've always been there, but I'm afraid that they've become much more sophisticated at extracting pennies from people with mere dollars.
Similar situation. Lived with my mother, constantly stressed about survival until she kicked me out at 14. Moved in with my upper middle class father (who should have had full custody from the beginning, courts don't always do it right eh?)
For a while (my mind says 'for now'), I'm able to make about 100k in 6 months in the midwest. My formative memory combined with the local prices make this a nearly unimaginable sum. My "resting expenses" coalesce to no more than 90$ a day at the extreme. At 90$ a day I feel like i'm spending my face off. Any more and it'd feel like I was buying a jetski while unemployed with loan shark money.
58$ a month is $7,000 over a decade. Most things aren't worth that when I think of it in those terms.
To expand my consulting services I bought a unity3d license for $1500 a few years ago. As soon as they decided MRR was the way I pivoted hard towards selling webgl to interested customers instead. Recommended the last company I worked for stay away from AWS Lambda for similar rent averse lock-in reasons. Locking yourself in to something like that reduces your degrees of freedom.
In some ways I'm definitely hamstrung by this attitude. I will never own a home unless I save up enough to buy one in cash (I'm trying!). I rolled my truck a few months after graduating and had to get an auto loan then. I paid it and my student loans off like I was on fire and had to spit myself out. Last time I checked my credit, the "not enough lines of credit" penalties had me in the basement, which is hilarious.
The "not enough lines of credit" thing bit me too, if you don't take debt you can't have debt, it's so bizarre.
Regarding your AWS lambda aversion, I am also guilty of aggressively avoiding lock-in with cloud vendors... Now I wonder if that is related to my upbringing.
I don’t get the aversion to lambda. A lambda function is just a regular function that takes in a few parameters and outputs something. I always separate out the lambda interface from the main logic. Lambda is just another interface for business logic. Correctly structured, it is pretty easy to convert the core of your code to use any interface - a command line, pub sub, rest APIs etc.
Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance.
What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers.
lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that takes more discipline than I can ascribe to your average team that's willing to use AWS Lambda.
If AWS tripled its prices tomorrow, how long would it take you to migrate? Is it instantaneous? Does lambda linearly correlate with increased migration times? What if aws-sdk dropped support for all non lambda applications. Are you screwed?
Even if you don't subscribe to it, the aversion should be obvious.
You just said it- the advantage is the discount. I don't have to pay for EC2 instances to sit idle and lambda is more finely grained than EC2 based auto scaling.
It really doesn't take any more discipline to separate out your Lambda interface from your code logic than it dors not to have business logic in your controller. I treat the lambda interface method like I would treat a controller. My business modules don't know anything about lambda - just like they don't know anything about http for REST services.
For us, to move from lambda, it would be a matter of putting all of our lambda functions in one big solution and creating the appropriate REST endpoints.
Our consuming code wouldn't change at all for lambdas triggered by http. We use Consul + Fabio for service discovery and URL lookups. We would just change the service registrations.
We have a few message based triggers, but all of our messaging is abstracted into a library. We have a hybrid lambda, raw executable system. When an "event" is triggered it either triggers a real SQS message or the method submits a job to run on one of our app servers using Hashicorp's Nomad (what to do for an event is configured in Consul). I chose Nomad because it gave us the flexibility of not having to use Docker containers but we can when we need to.
I would love to move to AWS Fargate so we could have serverless longer running processes with Docker containers.
I'm the dev lead so I see most code that gets put into production. I try to both tie us to AWS services as tightly as possible and put facades over the services to allow portability.
she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money
It is interesting you say this. I have a friend who struggles to get by. Single mom, two kids, a father who does the absolute bare minimum to provide support to his kids, and she is unemployed.
She does get support from the state (rent assistance, energy assistance, SNAP), but it is barely enough to squeak by and what little money is left over is quickly consumed with unexpected expenses.
With that said, I find she spends an exorbitant amount of time searching for "deals". It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something. While apps like ebates, ibotta, etc.. have made these quick deals better, they still don't cut down on the time she spends. With the apps she spends just as much time searching through the deals or trying to find the best store to get something.
While it can be frustrating at times as a third-party sitting back watching her do this, I can somewhat sympathize. The most frustrating part to me is that she will sometimes say that there is not enough time in the day to get things done. I try to convey to her that at some point time is money. Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.
>I try to convey to her that at some point time is money. Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.
If you don't have realistic prospects of finding a good full-time job and taking on part-time or casual work would result in a loss of welfare benefits, the value of your time is essentially nil. "Working" for 33 cents an hour to find good deals may be the best option available.
Your friend isn't necessarily acting rationally, but she isn't necessarily acting irrationally either. If you've never been poor, it's difficult to understand just how many practical obstacles poor people face on a daily basis.
Think of money as a form of control and you will understand you friend. When you are accustomed to being knocked down every time you get a little ahead, deal searching is something of a coping mechanism, a way to take back control from the system.
> It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something.
That's not a far-fetched thing for a poor person to do. $1 can buy a can of beans and add nutrition to an otherwise hungry day.
> Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.
Opportunities aren't unlimited, and the closer to poverty one is the shorter their term.
So she needs short term opportunities that beat $1 savings for the 2-3 hour period. Short term here means the amount of time it would take her to spend the saved $1-- let's be optimistic and say two days.
What do you have for her that beats the $1 savings and beats it with the same (or better)predictability of success as searching for deals?
Your comment is good. The relevant question is what can I do right now to make money? Maybe Mechanical Turk? (can you make $1 in 2 hours?). The abundance of human potential sitting idle agonizes me.
Yes, I think you're right-- MT might be a better use of that time. But then, how many other opportunities look very similar to MT but turn out to be scams? What damage can be done by taking out a payday loan?
I think another way to put what I wrote is that opportunity costs are a luxury one can afford once one has saved enough to move on from focusing solely on catastrophic costs like losing food, shelter, electricity, etc.
OP's friend probably started searching for deals because it returned predictable savings and-- most importantly-- carried very little risk. The fact that she's filling lots of idle time with the same behavior is evidence of her poverty as she is probably not able to take on any greater risk for fear of catastrophic failure.
Thus it is suspicious when the OP analyzes only in terms of opportunity costs. It would be more persuasive to convey ideas in terms of catastrophic risk. But that's a more difficult problem to address and an area where the OP-- like most people-- has little expertise.
I think cash cliff effects are harder on the poor.
If your friend comes up a dollar short, she'll miss paying for something. She'll have to choose among food, gas, electricity, rent, meds - all the things & basic services with nonnegotiable prices.
The stress of missing a payment for something critical is enormous. Your friend may be spending 2-3 hours saving a dollar in part to avoid that hard cash cliff and its stress.
Years of that sort of stress will likely degrade one's cognition in ways described in the posted article.
It's tricky though, if you work, marginal benefit from an extra unit of work is quite high.
If you're unemployed and on benefits, it tends to be zero and could even be negative, until you reach a full workweek and/or something above minimum wage.
For example, I know people who receive about $1k a month and don't work. If they worked 20 hours, they'd lose their entire $1k assistance and earn about $650 (at $7.5 minimum wage). If they work 40 hours, they earn about $1300, which ends up slightly above $1k after-tax. They effectively earn the same but now have full-time employment and need to pay someone to take care of the kids. Financially, she's better off saving $100 a month with a 15 hour discount-seeking occupation and taking care of her kids.
It really depends on the welfare system how all of this works, but there's this idea of the benefits/welfare cliff:
They are looking into several forms of scarcity (e.g. time scarcity of busy academics) and how this similarly affects the behaviour, creating a "focus" on the immediate scarcity that distracts from everything else, and prevents seeing the "big picture".
One interesting conclusion being that poverty is a "root" scarcity that begets other forms of scarcity.
Interesting was also the observation that scarcity-behaviour can have desirable outcomes and can be put to use (e.g. using budgeting as a form of artificial scarcity in personal finance).
Frankly, a couple of rounds of Angry Birds doesn't seem like a great way to decide important policy. How many of the studies cited in the article were at least replicated a few times?
One thing that looks paradoxical to me: In the first half it says people going through financially stressful situations suffers from deficit in IQ level and drop in cognitive performance. But at the same time, they can take smart and wise decisions as the experiments suggested.
I wonder how relevant is the question asked in the original article, or - maybe better said - to whom the question has been asked.
>The researchers asked real people of various socioeconomic strata if they were willing to travel an extra 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 tablet. Some said they were. But when asked if they’d drive that far to save the same amount on a $1,000 tablet, some of the respondents changed their minds. Their answer depended on their income.
I wouldn't even think to ask such a question about buying a $300 (let alone $ 1,000) tablet to someone who clearly cannot afford it (the actual poor people).
I mean, when you are dealing with someone who is homeless or that is on foodstamps (or similar assistance for the very basic needs) are you really going to ask them about the $50 savings on a completely voluptuary item such as a tablet, particularly a $ 1,000 one?
And the question is about "driving" (implying that the "poor" has a car).
I.could tell you a story about how my broken family made it all happen, how a family of 6 boys never made it better, a city or circumstance made the option to be wealthy almost impossible or how generations of economic destruction made me this way. But this all matters not, for what I think , I become.
The only 3 books you will ever need to break out of the cycle are these.
·THINK AND GROW RICH
·GRIT
·A PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE
They are all fundamentally written for you to find the answer on the first page, on the front cover, in every chapter, and of course within YOURSELF. Go now, Be rich.
"Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you." - Jim Rohn, http://www.bquot.es/s/1023
The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank. In the United States, however, the poverty rate has been more stubborn—41 million people lived below the country’s poverty line in 2016, about 13 percent of the population, nearly the same rate as in 2007.
Is this a fair comparison? I thought that the poverty line in the US was defined relative to median income. If the definition is changed to $X per day after inflation then maybe the US doesn't look so bad?
Also I would like to see some kind of adjustment for immigration. Imagine that the US lifts 10 million citizens out of poverty and at the same time accepts 10 million poor immigrants. Is it fair to say the US has made no progress on poverty?
> US lawmakers have expressed frustration when investments such as welfare programs don’t pull people out of poverty.
Most US welfare spending is explicitly excluded from measures of poverty; if you're measuring "the values of X excluding Y", increasing Y isn't going to move the needle.
"The U.S. Census Bureau determines poverty status by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold..."
American anti-poverty measures overwhelmingly take the form of tax credits (eg, the EITC program), food stamps (SNAP), housing vouchers (section 8 vouchers), and health care (eg, Medicaid). All four are excluded when looking at pre-tax cash incomes. For good or ill, we don't give the poor cash.
I know that's not really the point of the article, but it was a bit jarring.
We already have an issue with business consolidation in the US and the decline of small businesses, I would be wary about anything that might contribute to it, as an inheritance tax might.
I grew up "spoiled" but my grand-parents lived the WWII in France, they weren't poor but they still live in frugality even if they are comfortable since many decades - ex: they do not eat lots of meat. I inherited this frugality and do not like to buy useless stuff.
My girlfriend, a russian who lived in USSR, is the complete opposite. She rely heavily on consumption to be "happy" and to fill an insecurity. It might be genetically cultural, but the communism sadness/deprivation has created generations of Russians who love consumption and luxury lifestyle.
Very interesting findings. The study seems to indicate that poverty is correlated with better economic decisions, unless the option to borrow is present, in which case, poverty correlates with poorer decisions.
Poverty is caused by low or no wages. Not a mindset or lack of education or any other BS. I am technically below the poverty line working as a software engineer on a startup and I work hard. If we made some money or got funded then I would be less poor.
The structural issue is unequal distribution of resources. It's not a personal mental health problem or weakness or other BS used to cover for racism.
Also since I have had less money I have made better decisions not worse. Because I have to.
I might not belong to "poor" because my parents had money, but the thing was that they were extra ordinarily stingy when it came to spending it on me. This resulted in me going to school in torn pants etc
So now that I have money, I don't spend a dime of it. I use the same clothes, same cycle, the only thing I spend money on is books: I buy lots of it.
I had a time in my life where I constantly used the calculator app on my phone.
salary - rent - transport - food * 30 < 0 is stressful.
And this doesn't account for any incidental expenses.
I was blessed enough to have education, a social support circle, a safety net from parents, and some growth to look forward to. Despite that, the stress caused almost daily headaches.
I grew up on welfare well into elementary school and my mom married my stepdad who was delivering oil to gas stations up driving all night on trucks.
Before that I spent my first years in a trailer park where my mom had my older brother and I in her teens, living in a single wide with my biological father and his mother. My dad's mother and both of my parents were addicts and alcoholics. I was taken out of custody and lived with family members until I was about 5 before I could live with my mom again on food stamps when she was single. She found a job as a medical transcriptionist and living in a two bedroom sharing a bunk bed with my brother. She met my stepfather at a church when he was a trucker.
Noone in my family including my older brother graduated high school.
I made straight A's was bored as public schools in the south are notorously bad mine was no different with the exception of overcrowding, riots etc, and after my parents foreclosed on their house we moved into yet another tiny apartment but this one was closed to a bookstore. I walked to Barnes and nobles everyday after school and one day after reading the alchemist in one sitting I picked up a teen vogue (I'm a girl) in the 9th grade in highschool, and read a fashion edition on boarding school fashion ($350 Tori Birch flats) and I thought hmm boarding school sounds like it might be challenging....
I went home and applied to every boarding school in the northeast, got accepted into three and a scholarship to 2. I went to one and cried for three weeks when I made an unweighted 3.96gpa because I wanted a 4.0 and needed to get a good scholarship to afford college.
I went to an engineering school and got a degree in Electrical Engineering, I have worked my ass off and dealt with all of the nonsense of going to school with spoiled rich white boys who did engineering because their dad did engineering and spent their weekends on expensive getaway trips, binge drinking at frat houses with jobs waiting for them at their dads big engineering firm.
Luckily for me I met alot of great kids in college as well who were genuinely geeky and there for the experience, but it has not been fun being a girl in engineering and dealing with the nonsense with that plus all of the ignirnace associated with how easy some people have it relative to me and many people who have it way worse than me. I consider myself lucky to be curious and enjoy hard work, and grateful for all the rich people in my life who have donated literally hundreds of thousands of dollars so people like me could afford to have a good education. I am not slighted or bitter in any regard when it comes to understanding how lucky I am (I could have been a girl trying to go to school in a third world country with no rights money etc) in the grand scheme of things and I truly believe gratitude is a healthy attitude to have in life.
That being said, I genuinely think so many people, particularly young white males whose mother's baby them to not end through their 20s have never struggled a day in their life and cannot understand what it's like to have to budget for a vacation, or food for that matter, buy their own first car and not be able to afford.to fly home on the holidays in college.
When I interned in Manhattan in college I actually met guys who tried to impress me by saying they came from nothing because their dad "only gave me $10,000 to invest when they were 18 and wouldn't give me anything else after that" (accept.of course all the luxuries in their life up to that point, including a good education, summer camps at ivy leagues, a brand new car and a fully paid for $200k tuition with no loans, but I digress...). I sat next to a kid at orientation at the company I was working for complaining about his stock options being limited for 10 weeks due to conflict of interest for the company we were working for. Stock? Wow, I was excited to get my first paycheck so I could pay rent. But these kids swear they "came from nothing".
And many girls I went out with I ended up not being able to hang out with because they would go shopping for Jimmy choose ($600 heels) and to clubs where shots are $50 a pop. I couldn't afford to socialize with them and it never occurred to any of them an $80 sushimi dinner with cocktails could be an affordability issue. They were living in Soho, I was in the Bronx living paycheck to paycheck. It was the first income I had ever had.
I genuinely think there is a level of non intentional ignorance about what it really means to come from nothing and it's a big deal considering politics plays into inner city education, taxes etc.
I'd honestly love to see some of these guys I worked with walk a day in my shoes and try to show up in Manhattan at the age of 21 with $300k to liquidate, no debt and a sports car with my background, and try to lecture me about how I'm not "confident" enough and that's my issue when it comes to advocating for myself in the business world.....
"The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank."
Is this because $1.90 is 2008 money is equivalent to $2.50 now?
Interesting, took me a while to discern your meaning here[1]. I had never heard of John Bradford, but basically, it's in the spirit of "There but for the grace of God, goe I".
The question I have is: in the ideal society, should anyone have to live with the consequences of their actions without a government safety net to save them? It seems that the liberal answer is "no" and that "nobody is ever at fault for a bad circumstance, and the government should always provide a free solution to get people out of any trouble they are in"
- Examples: health, abortion, addiction, debt, bad money management, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on.
But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?