
No Money, No Time - aturek
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/no-clocking-out/
======
beat
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of
human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that
society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals
- the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game
for everyone else.

Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty?
What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into
trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other
short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their
talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role
models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.

Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their
birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what
southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and
charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas,
and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for
generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day,
when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have
done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember
visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice
the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My
father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.

I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living
in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful
habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any
brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the
spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living
around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in
poverty and hopelessness.

Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe
neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field,
raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine
going back to that life.

But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the
grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.

~~~
Meekro
The fact that people like you _can_ escape is very encouraging: it means we
still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can
be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.

~~~
alexqgb
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few
anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of
statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's
declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom.

Yes, people _can_ win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet),
but very few will and those who do will have to make extraordinary sacrifices.
So yes, give them credit. But don't - whatever you do - look at people who
haven't managed to keep their heads about water, and think "well, this one guy
made it against all odds and you didn't, so you must be a lazy, stupid human."

That may be fair (if harsh) in a supportive world where it takes rare talent
to fail. But it's a monstrous attitude in a world where the opposite is so
clearly the case.

~~~
jonny_eh
The number of people that can win an Olympic Gold is arbitrarily fixed. The
number of people that can become financially successful isn't.

~~~
alexqgb
And yet, for the last 30 years, the number of those who are successful
relative to the rest of the population has suffered sharp decline.

Do you honestly not know this? Or are you simply the sort of person who just
doesn't mind?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Relative mobility has remained flat and absolute mobility has increased.

[http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf](http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf)

~~~
alexqgb
Not actually the point I was making but an interesting paper nonetheless.

When I said "relative" I meant "relative to the population as a whole", not
"relative to the members of one's class from prior generations."

------
alexqgb
Outside of the SV bubble, it's extraordinarily difficult to fail without
seeing your credit take a serious hit. And boy howdy is getting back on your
feet hard when you (a) can't get an apartment, and (b) find yourself getting
screened out of otherwise available jobs. Forget getting money on loan, this
is just getting access to the basics of economical survival - work to do and a
place to sleep.

The fact that we punish economic failure by making economic success even
harder to achieve is evidence of the deep insanity within American culture.
Sink or swim is a misnomer. Swim or be drowned is closer to the mark.

So it's great that we're making technical progress on every front imaginable.
But how many of these advances see their promise still born in a culture that
pays more attention to recycling its trash than the people it discards on its
streets?

This winner-take-all/losers-get-ruin problem goes way beyond the business
cycle. As Reuters noted a couple of years ago, entrepreneurship has been
suffering a decades-long retreat. Having peaked in 1987, it's declined
precipitously ever since.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-
bus...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-businesses-
idUSBRE84113G20120502)

In just about every way imaginable, SV is the exception not the rule. For
those who are young enough, smart enough, skilled enough, male enough,
credentialed enough, connected enough, unencumbered enough, and possibly
delusional enough it's great. But strike any one of those factors from the
list, and watch the curve get steep. Start crossing off two or more and the
odds on the lottery start looking good.

Those are the odds that the rest of America sees. So it's no wonder they're
backing further and further away from risk, regardless of the long-terms costs
the country. Until this country has a social contract that's worth a damn,
people are going to be very adverse to even the slightest setback. And for
good reason.

After all, there's a big difference between the kind of failure that can be
chalked up "a valuable learning experience" and failure so catastrophically
crushingly severe you never, ever, get back on your feet. There's a lot of
that in America. It's where the Fear comes from. That's what drives most
people. Not dreams of being one of the great or the good. Those are luxuries
for the fortunate few. Most people just live in constant dread of being thrown
in the street.

------
fit2rule
There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its
really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up
paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to
spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before
you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories,
then you're stuck in a feedback loop of no progress. And so it goes.

This is why the truly rich (not necessarily wealthy) find pleasure in lifes'
simple, cheap, offerings. It's almost impossible to find vegetables as good as
the ones we grow in our home garden, but yet it takes on average 30 minutes of
work every day to keep things in order .. finding that balance is what is key
to moving from being poor to rich, in my opinion. The time not spent getting
in the car to go grocery shopping is instead spent maintaining a well-ordered
garden plot ..

~~~
aturek
There's a great quote from a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they
managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an
affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then
leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those
were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so
thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the
feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could
afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry
in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would
have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have
wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

~~~
SilasX
That quote always bothers me, because most long-term savings like that aren't
nearly so clear in numerical terms.

~~~
sliverstorm
You agree with the conclusion but are upset that an example which has been
simplified to make a point isn't as nebulous as real life?

~~~
SilasX
You're right -- if that were the issue, it would be a bad objection; let me
try again.

The problem is that in real life, most such cases (of buying the more
expensive item) don't result in a pure savings, but rather, leave you better
off in some ways and worse off in others. The cheaper shoes, IOW, will not
_actually_ be so bad that you have to replace them entirely, and you will in
fact end up with with more liquid savings. The temporary discomfort and
greater savings are much harder to compare to the alternative than the example
suggests, so wealthier people do not always have some obvious choice that
leaves them better off in every way.

So, on top of that, it's not an issue that is fixable simply by pointing this
out to the poorer person and loaning them the money.

~~~
arg01
A classic one in the US would be the choice of visiting the doctors. The rich
can afford to have regular checkups(or insurance) and get a sniffle checked
out early. The poor can not afford to visit the doctor over minor ailments and
because of this end up spending big in lost time at work and more expensive
one off treatments for a serious illness they didn't nip in the bud.

But I'd have to concede that you'd be right to say it still doesn't fit the
boots analogy with out some rather lax semantics around up front vs long term
cost. You could also argue that any individual might get lucky/unlucky and so
it's not clear cut there, but I think it would be fair to argue that in
aggregate the outcome on cost is a reasonable example.

------
incision
I'm glad to see a few studies bearing out the sort of things I perceived
growing up.

 _' To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just
like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge
them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you
offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.'_

I believe this is exactly the right sort of thinking. Finding ways to
encourage and enable people to start moving gradually in order to build
positive momentum.

The "front loading" of forms, waiting lists and probationary periods are like
mountains. Some people break themselves on the ascent, others spend themselves
reaching the summit and have no energy to continue safely down the far side.
These man made mountains need not remain arbitrarily steep.

~~~
_delirium
As mostly an outside observer in both countries (fortunately), this is one of
the big differences I see between the American and Danish welfare systems. The
Danish one has a reputation for being much more generous, which is true to
some extent, but is not _as_ true in terms of throughput as it is in terms of
latency. The Danish system does a lot of short-term "business": people get
onto the system in a matter of days, use it for 6-12 months, then get off
again. (By "the system" I mean a range of things: housing subsidy, retraining,
cash welfare, mental-health treatment, etc.) Whereas the American one seems
incapable of delivering _anything_ with less than a 6-month waiting list, with
an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the
gatekeeper.

~~~
incision
_> 'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less
than a 6-month waiting list..'_

My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a
child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible.
The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for
less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel.

 _>...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always
serving as the gatekeeper.'_

Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as
difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance
are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the
system 40 years later.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen)

~~~
msandford
The problem is that while there are a great many deserving people who wouldn't
abuse the system, there are also plenty who would.

Worse is that if you overhear one person on the bus (like I did when I was in
college) talking about having another child so she could get a larger welfare
check, it has a way of getting to you. It's an anecdote so it doesn't really
count from a scientific perspective. But emotionally, that's HUGE.

When I use my brain I realize that it would be far more effective to cut the
military budget by 10% than the welfare budget by 10% in terms of reducing
taxes. But somehow I still feel some kind of moral outrage about the person
who considered a welfare payment her divine right for existing rather than a
temporary thing that well-intentioned people created for the sake of trying to
help lift less fortunate folks out of poverty.

Emotionally I feel less bad about the military because at least something's
getting done as a result. People have jobs (even if they're not the most
efficient) and technology is advanced (even at a cost greater than a private
company might capable of) and actual tangible things happen. In some ways
that's easier to justify, even if that justification is completely wrong given
the graft and corruption that's rampant in the military-industrial complex.

It also is very upsetting from a felt-justice perspective. Here I am working
hard end paying my taxes so that (in a very, very small way $ or % wise) I'm
empowering someone else to just sit around and get paid to do nothing but pop
out babies and raise them poorly.

Thinking critically I realize that I have no actual idea what my opinion of
acceptable false positives and false negatives is, or how the system actually
performs irrespective of my judgement. But as human beings we're wired to
reject "unjust" gains for others even at our own expense.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game)

"Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as
difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance
are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the
system 40 years later."

It's hard to not feel as though it might still be happening in a measurable
way when you can read articles like this:
[http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched...](http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/)

Again, I realize that it's ENTIRELY possible that the subjects of this article
are the exception rather than the rule. But it's hard to use your brain rather
than react to your emotions when this kind of thing gets written up.

Ultimately the problem is that not everyone can think critically all the time
about everything and then react appropriately.

~~~
yardie
I used to think similar to this, even though I was and grew up poor. But after
working with a few NGOs I've found the system is designed to screen out the
people that need the help. At the same time the people that know how to work
the system get the most aid.

Most welfare requires that you report 0 income, so instead of searching for
work working welfare becomes the job. Showing up every day to the local
office, wait in line, fill in papers, come back tomorrow, and repeat.

A few years ago I had a friend quit her job as a social worker because she was
expecting a baby and her company didn't provide health insurance. She was able
to get Medicaid by going on unemployment as a single mother with child. Then
she had to stay unemployed because the cost of daycare was more than her
income. Social welfare in the US is so screwed up because you have to be
backed into a corner to get it and then have to stay there because your time
becomes devoted to keeping track of all the paperwork.

~~~
incision
_> '...the cost of daycare was more than her income.'_

Covering the gap when coming off of assistance is a major problem.

The sharp cutoffs and various criteria for violations turn leaving assistance
into a leap of faith.

A small raise becomes a big problem when the increase adds up to far less than
the food benefit you'll lose all at once for exceeding the income limit.
Likewise, you can't build a basic emergency fund when two thousand dollars in
the bank will kill your SSI.

~~~
_delirium
The SSI one also tends to discourage disabled people from doing any work,
because _any_ ability to earn income, even a small amount intermittently, is
taken as evidence that you aren't really permanently disabled. I have an
American uncle with MS, who can't work at all now, but in earlier stages of
the disease he probably could have worked _some_ of the time (not a steady
job, because he'd be relatively better for a few months then relatively worse
again, but a part-time job for part of the year would probably have been ok).
But he was advised that SSI disability just isn't set up for that: you can't
be completely disabled some months a year and work part-time other months. You
are either permanently disabled and get a monthly benefit, or you aren't
disabled and get nothing. Since he wouldn't be able to work regularly enough
to support himself through work, he went on SSI disability and didn't work at
all, which was probably not ideal for either the economy or him.

------
sogen
Another article in the increasing line of studies of the poor getting poorer.

tl;dr: The poor are worse at managing time and money because they are
exhausted all the time and have fewer/no options (i.e. costlier credits than
the wealthy)

------
Mz
I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice
that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece
gives a small snippet of examples of what works.

How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that
does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to
solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a
hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of
good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer.

But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who
falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get
back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.

~~~
xnerak
I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book,
they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living
in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to
be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size
fits all solution.

One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered
by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long
and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling
financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one
class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your
time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more
modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.

I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their
problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel
that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get,
so why should we make it easier for them?

~~~
Mz
Thanks for the feedback on the book.

As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs
to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss
away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to
accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of
the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first
be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.

I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those
attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some
programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to
the point of being actively hostile.)

------
jseliger
I wrote about this in more detail here:
[http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-
progressive...](http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive-
ideals-in-proposals-money-time-and-poverty-in-grant-writing/) , but one
underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the
infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and
otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own.

I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal,
state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be
hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their
interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still
analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule":
[http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)
.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct
cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The
bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is
more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.

------
gambiting
>>It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich
ones were doing worse.

I reminds me of a sentence from a recent study of breastfeeding vs. formula
milk - "It's not that natural milk is better for babies - it's that baby
formula is worse for the babies".

------
harmonicon
In a capitalist society, the key to "a good life" is passing a certain
threshold of capital accumulation. The poor, not having much to begin with,
has to constantly fight this uphill battle of trying to save more money, of
finding more resources constantly, adding to their net worth, etc. This
article shows that there is even an adverse psychological effect that makes
reaching the goal still harder. All this seems to require big intervention of
the governments part to level the playing field and make capital accumulation
possible.

Unfortunately in the US, one bad financial decision, one loss of job, one bad
case of illness or one trouble at home can reset the pool to 0 and often
negative due the extensive background and credit history checking. It is the
US government's responsibility to fix this because we submit to its authority,
fund its existence and elect its officials for the purpose of trusting it to
steward our nation and its people. Sadly when I tune into the political
discourse it's all about gun/abortion/tax/federal debt and whatever other
kinds of "freedom". Why is helping people never and enhancing social mobility
on the table. And I am so so tired of politicians parading education as the
silver bullet.

------
javajosh
We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can
connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities
to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with
chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-
pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle.

I'm willing to build it if you are. Contact me.

~~~
droopyEyelids
In my experience, in everything from going out to lunch to planning a camping
trip to having a party to asking someone out to doing any work-- you have to
do it, and yes let other people know you're doing it, but you have to be doing
it regardless.

Things generally don't work if you say "I'll do it if you agree to do it too."

~~~
javajosh
Nonsense. If I can't find someone to go to the movies with me, I probably
won't go. I care about this issue, and am willing to work toward it - and it
might even be fundable through grants, and other philanthropy. So I'd
recommend contacting me if it interests you.

------
jqm
This was a good article.

The comments seem to focus mostly on the financial aspects but I found the
portion regarding how time is spent interesting. (True, the article does tie
them together to an extent).

As far as financial poverty... my personal opinion is that "finance" is too
widely regarded as an unalterable given that is intrinsic to the human
condition. Certainly the concept of money has produced a system that has
advanced human control over our environment, but a bit of perspective suggests
it is a concept that we did without for tens of thousands of years. And, I
suspect sometime in the future we will do without it again.

Maybe not "poor people need money" but rather "hungry people need food" might
be the type of larger and more directly useful framework to address some of
these problems within. Certainly we are at the level we should be able to
provide basic food, clothing and shelter to all members of our species and no
one should suffer and die from want. If we aren't doing this, given what we
have and what we can do, then there is something wrong with the system and
this needs correcting before we will be able to move much further. IMHOP.
Maybe the thing that got us here (the concept of money) is becoming a
conceptual problem that is now keeping us from advancing further. I don't have
a fix. I just see what I think is part of the problem.

------
yummyfajitas
Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from
the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty.

Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time
should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that
the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty
is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case.

[http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data](http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data)

If I have time tomorrow I may do it myself.

~~~
nilkn
> given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working

Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly
poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line
cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have
to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on
taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires
walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in
their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a
relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for
example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent
neighborhood at 10PM.

~~~
nilkn
I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post
is locked into stone for now.

I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like
that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.

The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have
(and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.

They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly
beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an
ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages
and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.

Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A
random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's
on a payment plan paying off that debt.

This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his
phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.

