
The Unexotic Underclass (2013) - kelukelugames
http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/
======
doktrin
Describing veterans as an _un_ exotic underclass feels incorrect to me. Maybe
it's just perception bias, but for instance my FB feed contains an order of
magnitude more appeals for veterans causes than literally any other endeavor.
GoFundMe's, petitions, charities, races, events - you name it. 4 out of 5 of
my last donations concerned veterans (as a group) or individual vets, as were
5 out of 5 of my last signed petitions (whose value, I will grant, is probably
a bit tenuous)

Maybe there is some other social circle out there that exclusively cares about
black and latino inner city youth, or Kenya, or Bangladesh - but if they
really are as over-represented and over-valued as the author seems to
derisively imply, then I'd like to see some data to support that.

edit : the instant downvotes interest me. Can you qualify your disagreement?

edit : to clear up some confusion, I mentioned anecdotal experience with
veteran charities and fundraising efforts in order to illustrate their
relative popularity - not their success. In my opinion, a popular cause is by
definition not un-exotic (i.e. marginalized), which is the notion that I am
responding to.

~~~
JabavuAdams
The veteran thing is strange. To a non-American the veneration of military
personnel and veterans seems over-the-top to the point of self-parody.
Watching the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, I wasn't sure whether I was
watching a sporting match, or Starship Troopers.

That said, for all the splashy thank-you-for-your-service it's a shame but no
real surprise that veterans are getting shafted, behind the scenes, by one of
the largest bureaucracies in the world.

~~~
doktrin
Absolutely. The VA is a disgrace, and it's a clear cut example of the
government not living up to its obligations vis a vis veterans.

However, my point concerns public perception, which is to a significant degree
the focus of the OP. Specifically, the author made the claim that veterans are
perceived as being an unexotic cause in public consciousness - whereas I think
the opposite is true. I think their cause is a popular one in America.

For comparison, this is how I personally perceive a few of the various
underclasses he mentioned :

The rural poor in Appalachia? Unequivocally unexotic : lower income whites
often appear to be more scorned than pitied. Inner city youth? Periodically
exotic. Veterans? Unequivocally exotic, in the sense that I perceive their
cause to be one of the most popular in contemporary American society.

~~~
afarrell
One problem is that it is difficult for the VA to fire people for performance
problems. There was a bill (HR 1944) that passed the House this summer, but
the corresponding Senate bill was only introduced in November.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-
bill/108...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-
bill/1082/related-bills)

------
hguant
She uses the VA as an example of an approachable "underclass" problem...but in
order to work with the government, you have to be on their procurement cycle,
which is (perhaps by design) anathema to all but the large contractors who
have equal budgets for their legal and software development teams.

Edit: he to she

~~~
cageface
She, not he.

~~~
hguant
Thanks for letting me know. I need to get in the habit of either using "they",
or being more strict about checking before I use pronouns.

------
clarkmoody
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261098)
[496 days ago]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5782704)
[958 days ago]

~~~
xiaoma
If you click on "past" under the article title at the top of the page, it will
show you several previous discussions.

~~~
kbenson
Oh, is that new? I don't recall seeing it before, but I like it.

~~~
armenarmen
first time I noticed it too

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andy_ppp
Unless we can find a way to give everyone a basic level of subsistence without
any bureaucracy (read a basic living income) then nothing startups can do will
help, apart from driving your business into the ground as there is no one to
pay for it! Charities will not even touch the scale of the problem going
forward.

~~~
hguant
I think the existence of the Gates Foudation and the success it has had is
sufficient rubutal of your argument.

~~~
MBlume
Ok, then the plan is start a world-beating company which monopolizes its
(rapidly growing) market, _then_ retire and start a non-profit.

~~~
jholman
It might not be the best plan, but it's not the worst plan.

Step one: Do something mildly skeevy that skims from the public weal, e.g. by
using monopoly power to suppress competition (hurting the ability of the
invisible hand to give hand-jobs to the rich) and thereby profiting more than
an "honest businessman" would. Step two: take actions that will actually
benefit the least fortunate on a massive scale.

More concisely, steal from the rich, give to the poor.

Bill Gates is Robin Hood. We who read HN are the rich from whom he stole. I
used to mildly resent it, but now I only resent that he couldn't figure out
how to do it without side effects like giving a cut to Steve Ballmer and
giving Paul Allen the capital he needed to start Intellectual Ventures. Until
those guys start Robin Hooding too, at which point I abandon all comprehension
of which white collar bastards are actually bastards.

~~~
marcosdumay
Sorry, but some of those "rich" is my country's government, that Microsoft was
caught bribing a couple of times and, like every other government, gets its
money basically from the poor.

------
CookieMon
I wonder about this with open-source as well, since it's often about
scratching the itches of the demographic that participates in it. But I don't
know the unexotic underclass well enough to know if there's anything helpful
software could do.

~~~
username223
> I wonder about this with open-source as well, since it's often about
> scratching the itches of the demographic that participates in it.

This is why I believe open source will always be much better at creating
compilers and programming editors than desktop environments and word
processors. There's nothing wrong with this, but it kind of explains why the
Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive. It's a lot harder to solve other
people's problems than your own.

~~~
thedudemabry
I would posit as a counterpoint that improving compilers, programming
languages, and programming editors feeds back into improving the open-source
tools available to tackle the problems of others. Hopefully, we eventually
arrive at a series of summits where creating a useful solution for a non-
technical problem using an open-source tools requires less and less obtuse,
finicky, technical knowledge gained through trial-and-error.

That being said, I agree with you. Anecdotally, I haven't contributed anything
to non-technical open-source projects outside of the odd bug report. That may
be a good belated New Year's resolution.

I'm also hoping that interesting experiments in lowering the unnecessary
barriers to doing powerful things in programming will inspire folks like me to
find a useful way to contribute to one of those summits. We need infinite Alan
Kays and Bret Victors.

------
kazagistar
Entrepreneurship is a capitalist phenomena, and as such serves capital. People
trying to solve real problems are going to fail more often, because there is
just a lot less money in it. Helping rich people find a place to get their
toenails done is a way safer idea then trying to help the homeless find a
place to stay or whatever.

------
FussyZeus
This speaks to me on such an impressive level. Being one who lives in the
midwest and not in a city, all the startups out there pouring just asinine
amounts of money into solving complete non problems is just an endless source
of amusement. Like that article I found way back here on HN about how you
shouldn't send some rep from some shop-for-you company to CostCo, and I was
literally laughing out loud saying "No shit, did this question really need an
answer!?"

So much of Silicon Valley now is peppered with insipid firms run by well
educated and street dumb people spending atrocious amounts of money solving
problems that exist to no one outside of an urban center.

At the risk of sounding too rural: Ya'll look so silly.

------
amelius
This just shows how much capitalism is broken.

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tempodox
Wow, I can't upvote this enough.

> _The dysfunction in D.C. is a big problem._

Indeed, it's high time for a disruptive change.

------
hardwaresofton
Lost me early on at the assumption that entrepreneurs have always faced Big
Problems... When was that assumed/implied? Entrepreneurs are just small
business owners... literally

------
hackaflocka
This video is a counter-argument to the idea that single moms are suffering
and looking for flexible jobs, etc.:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhU85b7cidA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhU85b7cidA)

------
johnrob
It's happening! Those companies that serve the cushy urbanites (Uber et al)
are also providing above-minimum-wage jobs to the unexotic underclass.

~~~
pmorici
In general I wouldn't characterize the money Uber pays it's drivers as "above
minimum wage".

------
facepalm
I can't even think of so many frivolous examples, off the top of my head. Most
technology would also benefit the "underclass"? Maybe Tinder helps veterans
and single moms to get together and have sex. Uber facilitates the date, and
AirBnB organizes their honeymoon should they hit it off? Amazon saves time for
everybody.

What are the horrible startups - are they really dominating?

What would be an idea that would benefit exclusively the underclass?
(Political issues aside - or how could you launch a startup to fix the
paperwork veterans have to do, wouldn't that have to come from politics?)

~~~
VLM
The frivolous examples all have something in common, spending money.

One thing all underclasses have in common, is not having much money.

As income and wealth concentrate into ever smaller groups of people,
technologies that extract money are naturally going to focus on ever smaller
demographics.

The point of the article is possibly there is some social good in doing
something other than finding new ways to extract money by entertaining the
ever shrinking pool of ever richer people, and by doing that, possibly, we can
avoid joining the underclass. Ironically that joining is inevitable, much as
people can try to avoid death but can't really, "we" can't avoid demographic
pressures and we will all be poor sooner or later.

One aspect carefully tiptoed around in the article is if the number of rich
people only decreases and the number of poor people only increases, there is
some enlightened self interest involved. All of us are far more likely to
become poor than to become rich. And that makes us and everyone around us
extremely uncomfortable for obvious reasons, so its really cool to help exotic
people on the other side of the planet, and really uncool to help our own
people locally, beyond the minimal symbolic stuff like saying we support the
troops and putting a ribbon on the car, for example. If you help a poor white
male, that's going to make people extremely uncomfortable because its socially
unacceptable to discuss that as our inevitable future, even if we all know it
is our future and even worse we can't talk about it.

~~~
facepalm
A couple of years ago I visited a castle in Slovakia. The boss of the castle
had all sorts of amenities (the museum told), such as people who washed their
clothes, food that would appear magically, heated rooms. That required a whole
castle with lots of employees (slaves?) to sustain. These days "normal" people
live better than the kings in former times, with zero employees, thanks to
technology. So poor is not always the same as poor.

Also, please provide an example of startups catering to rich people? Tesla
comes to mind, but other than that? Netflix is pretty cheap, I think -
certainly cheaper than the cable subscriptions of old times?

~~~
thebaer
The article isn't talking about the relative wealth of modern,
industrialized/technologized society to medieval times.

The point is that a single mom (with an 80% chance of being "poor or hovering
on the nasty edges of working poverty") probably isn't worried about how much
Netflix, or rather cable TV, costs when she can't afford someone to watch her
child so she can go to work and make money to pay for food and a roof over her
head. She isn't going to pull out her iPhone and call an Uber to drive her to
work from this place she AirBnB'd last night -- adding it to her Snapchat
story, of course, before she heads out the door.

~~~
facepalm
Is that really the case? I think some citation would be nice. For example the
refugees in Europe often have a smartphone among the very few things they take
along on their journey, simply because is is essential to their survival. I
mean they have nothing, but they have a smartphone. And some smartphones have
become really cheap, too - (there is Android, you don't have to buy an
iPhone).

