
If You’ve Never Lived in Poverty, Don’t Tell Poor People What They Should Do - pm24601
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/if-youve-never-lived-in-poverty-don-poor-people-what-they-should-do.html
======
seabird
I get it; a lot of people are dealt a shit hand and it's a given that nobody
on this Earth has perfect foresight. The zinger here is that the writer is
throwing stones in a glass room, and does nothing but prove the (misguided)
point she's trying to refute.

In case you didn't read it, the article is written by somebody who payed her
own way through an appreciably expensive college for an English literature
degree and student debt, and seriously considered pouring coffee in Seattle
for a living a viable option. Unfortunately, the follow-your-dreams approach
generally doesn't pan out well when you took on debt for an education of
arguably limited use and end up living in a city with an exorbitant cost of
living. In many respects, the author had it made in a way that most
impoverished people never will; she had reliable access to higher education at
a college that feeds most of its graduates into Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon.
At that point, you just have to put two and two together, even if you don't
like that the result is four.

------
Noos
She's right, many people often prescribe things that are what middle and
upperclass people do to reduce debt in their lives rather than what poor
people can do to get out of poverty, and don't understand how life changes.

A big example is how much not having a stable, 40 hour a week job can work
over a person. A lot of lower paying jobs are part time, with variable
schedules and hours that often flux from 4-32 hours a week. This hurts things
like planning for the future or attending college, because there's no
stability to plan for; you may have to skip a semester because work suddenly
dropped you to 8 hours a week in one of your jobs, or they called you in and
the choice is either to skip class, or lose even more hours since they tend to
punish people in these jobs by reducing their schedule.

A big part of being poor is having large amounts of unchosen instability in
your life. Even a low wage of $10 an hour is survivable if you can count on 40
hours a week and long term employment, but if you can't rely on even working
the same hours or you constantly need to rely on contractor or temp services
that churn you out of a job every few months or weeks, that instability
prevents you from getting into a stable, affordable life.

------
joshuaheard
She claims her rent was half her income, but dismisses the suggestion she
should have gotten a roommate. When I was poor and in college, I shared a one-
bedroom apartment with 2 other students to cut expenses. We took turns
sleeping on the couch. I also worked in restaurants where your compensation
usually includes a free meal. But, I feel sympathy for the author. Those
years, and the years just after that were tough financially. I can say that
your later years will be much better financially.

[https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-
age](https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-age)

~~~
Noos
...this is a wonderful example of upperclass blindness.

Here's the thing..it worked for you because in your social class and specific
area in life, it is more likely than not any roommates you found would be
responsible students. But if you are poor, you are risking getting into a
legal contract with someone who could turn out to have an abusive boyfriend,
who managed to hide his drug use or alcholism from people, who is dealing with
serious mental depression, who can't stay in a job more than three weeks and
sponges off his roommates, etc.

The rather nasty side to Jesus's parable about the talents is that the rich
people got even richer, while the poor man who was frightened lost all that he
had. Many solutions people give rely on the person possessing wealth in that
sense; if just the social wealth of everyone coming from stable families, with
more or less no serious addictions or issues. but if not, many of those
solutions get even worse and lead to worse ruin.

~~~
synicalx
Ok I've been poor, so I guess that "qualifies" me to comment: the OP is right,
if you're struggling for cash in an expensive city then it's not wise to live
by yourself.

The argument of "oh but something bad might happen" doesn't hold water - if
you're struggling to feed yourself and have no money, then something very bad
is ALREADY happening.

------
masterponomo
The author has either not read "Nickeled and Dimed" or else has read it and
summarized it in this article. I truly hope she is not simply plagiarizing the
book. As for the title, it reminds me of the attitude displayed by callers to
the Dave Ramsey show. They would rather flood you with anecdotes justifying
their condition than listen to a word of advice. Having been poor myself, and
having emerged from it through my own learning and through following the
advice and example of people who were not poor, I would urge anyone who is
poor to know the things in this article but to also listen to any well-meaning
advice and see if any part of it, taken as is or modified to suit your
situation, can help at all. You are most likely to get out of poverty in
increments, so don't hermetically seal your mind inside a bubble of
justification and victimization.

------
restingrobot
There are many assumptions made by this article in an attempt to build a straw
man.

First, there are many places where the author references children. Yes people
in poverty have children, but the points she makes, also assume that the
individual is a single parent.

>Cost of an extra hour of childcare to account for the commute time (at
$13/hour, as well): $260 per month

>Which equals $800 – and doesn’t take into account the fact that grocery
shopping by bus is not ideal for someone with kids in tow.

If you have a partner, both of these scenarios are likely a complete non-
issue.

Second, the author uses incredibly avoidable financial _decisions_ as
justification as to why poverty is expensive.

>Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees,
and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses.
The average payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred
dollars between paychecks – ends up paying more than 300% interest on their
initial amount.

Why are these necessary components of poverty? This is making wild assumptions
that a payday loan is the only option when short.

>Banks also find ways to capitalize on people without money. Many checking
accounts require that a person carry a minimum balance – and fine customers
for every month that they don’t meet the requirement.

Checking accounts are free for anyone that can provide a consistent direct
deposit, regardless of balance. If the job does not offer a direct deposit,
its worth noting that many Credit Unions also offer free checking just for
having an account.

>Each year, immigrants pay billions into our tax coffers, only to get the
short end of the economic stick.

I would pay to see factual evidence backing this statement up.

I could go on, but this is only halfway through the article...

~~~
sidlls
> Why are these necessary components of poverty?

Try getting a checking account or a share account in a credit union when you
have a checkered history of overdrafts or bounced checks.

Frankly your comment reads like a person who's never been poor lecturing poor
folks.

Frequently what we'd describe as a "financial decision" isn't a decision for
poor people so much as a desperate attempt at keeping one's head above water.
It's hard to do what you might call "the rational thing" when one is starving,
has hungry kids, or has to choose between food, utilities, or medicine.

~~~
restingrobot
You have moved to an ad hominem approach regarding my past, normally I
wouldn't even respond to this, but in this instance you are completely wrong.

I actually grew up very poor. As in my next meal was a privilege and not a
guaranteed thing. I think its easy to dismiss my points by assuming that I
have no experience with poverty, (or the pain of not having eaten a
substantive meal for several days).

Again you reference

>checkered history of overdrafts or bounced checks.

Believe it our not, these are choices. You have a choice whether or not to
write a check for more than you have in your bank account. You have a choice
whether to with draw more than your current balance.

Furthermore, your point is moot as there are many options for those with
spotty histories. A quick google search turned up this:
[https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-can-i-open-a-bank-
accoun...](https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-can-i-open-a-bank-account-when-
my-credit-sucks-1585417920)

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
>> You have a choice whether or not to write a check for more than you have in
your bank account.

It's a 'choice' if you are choosing to buy a shiny thing you didn't really
need. It's hardly a choice if you have to write that check to buy medicines
for your sick kid.

~~~
loco5niner
>> It's hardly a choice if you have to write that check to buy medicines for
your sick kid.

This is certainly a tough scenario to argue against (way to choose a truly
heart-wrenching emotional situation ;-), but the fact is, if you are writing a
check (even for a good cause), knowing that you don't have money in the
account, that also is a choice. Certainly there must be another way... use a
credit card, get in a time machine and convince last_year_you that you need to
create a small (or large) emergency fund for these sorts of things... etc.

~~~
Powerofmene
Surely you jest ...."use a credit card"???? Most people who are poor don't
even have bank accounts because they cannot manage them or they cannot afford
the monthly fee. And no, bank accounts are not universally free if you have a
direct deposit. My parents receive social security via direct deposit and they
have never ever had an insufficient check in more than 50 years of maintaining
a bank account. They still have a monthly fee.

In the words of Maya Angelou, "when you know better you do better." Maybe we
should not only look into solutions to help people pull themselves out of
poverty but maybe we should help with education to make the interim just a
little bit easier.

~~~
loco5niner
Sure, "use a credit card". I'm listing options here. < that's what the "etc"
was for> Some will work for some people, some will work for others. I a little
surprised you chose to argue against credit card rather than time machine
though...

What I was really trying to get at though is this: if you write a check with
insufficient funds, you are just making the situation worse for yourself.

I agree that we should help with education but we should start with something
simple like "don't write checks that are going to bounce". Second would be
"don't spend money you don't have", so obviously the credit card scenario
itself is not ideal, but better than a bounced check.

~~~
Powerofmene
I don't argue against things that don't exist (time machine). And you are
missing my point, most people who are poor do not have a credit card. There
options are few and far between.

What I am suggesting by education is financial education such as don't spend
what you don't have (if you have an account, don't write bad checks). Don't
borrow money from payday lenders, etc. How to reduce expenses by having a
roommate, utilizing public transportation, starting a community garden, etc.
Then adding things such as you can go for dental care that is income based?
Where you can go for annual flu shots etc?

I am not trying to make excuses for the decisions people make. What I am
saying is to give alternatives (credit cards) that are not likely available to
the majority of people who are poor does little to advance efforts to help
find solutions that should be aimed at education and the development of safety
nets for those all too common but expenses expenses (dental care).

When people know better, they do better. It has been repeated time and time
again in these comments. People learned a better way and with that knowledge
they were able to make much better choices and change their lives.

~~~
loco5niner
> And you are missing my point, most people who are poor do not have a credit
> card.

I repeat... < that's what the "etc" was for>. I don't think you read my entire
comment...

I didn't miss your point. I think we actually agree for the most part. My bit
about the time machine was basically saying, if you could go back in time and
tell yourself, "hey, buying shiny things is less important than establishing
an emergency fund" and similar other wisdom, that would be ideal. Obviously,
we don't have a time machine so we can only tell people these things going
forward. Sounds a lot like the "financial education" you refer to.

~~~
Powerofmene
It does but that is not necessarily a lesson that needs to be learned by those
who are poor. If you read the thread here about those of us who have had to
clean out our aging parents home it is amazing how much stuff they have that
they hold on to forever and really did not serve a purpose other than to have
it.

We all make financial mistakes. It is just that the mistakes of the poor have
much more profound consequences.

~~~
loco5niner
When you are saying "that is not necessarily a lesson that needs to be learned
by those who are poor".... are you referring to my statement that "buying
shiny things is less important than establishing an emergency fund"?

If so, we definitely disagree. Those are the people in most need of an
emergency fund.

You mentioned safety nets earlier > the development of safety nets for those
all too common but expenses expenses

I would argue that a personal emergency fund is the first form of safety net
that everyone should have.

------
geebee
A good summary of the article's thesis comes at the end: "instead of telling
poor people what they should do to work around a system that’s leaving more
and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend
and change to better fit the needs of all people."

I think this thesis is well supported by the rest of the article, which is
much more measured than the somewhat click-baity title suggests. I also think
that it's generally a bad idea to tell people what they should do without
understanding their circumstances in general, and even worse when you don't
experience their circumstances. This article doesn't claim that people who
haven't lived in poverty can't study it or have an opinion.

I would be interested in the writer's opinion of JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy"
and similar work.

------
StavrosK
This has to be some sort of fallacy. After all, I don't expect my cardiologist
to have a heart attack before he can tell me how to recover.

~~~
JamesBarney
The title is mis-leading and click-baity, but the article argues a more
reasonable position. A more appropriately named title would be "Before giving
advice on how to climb out of poverty, think a little harder about all of the
consequences of a given decision before recommending it to the poor,
especially if you haven't had experience living in poverty."

She uses the example of "getting rid of your car", which sounds great until
you tally up the costs of increased child care, reduced hours, and limited
comparison shopping.

------
lucozade
I have to say that I'm a little confused about the point of this article.

In my experience, the people who make the type of argument she describes tend
to advocate hard work, education and financial prudence. In fact the sort of
attributes that the author exhibited to remove herself from poverty. If
anything she's a good advert for the kind of advice that tends to be foisted
on people in poverty.

My pet theory is that the key issue is really about time horizon. If you live
your life day to day then you're much more likely to be poor in the long term
than if you have a time horizon of years or decades. This time horizon is
largely culturally determined i.e. if your parents/peer group didn't think
about the future then you are less likely to. But it can be substantially
affected by personal characteristics e.g. the dissolute rich kid as well as
illness e.g. depression.

Interestingly, I came to this conclusion because of a conversation with
someone at the other end of the time horizon spectrum. I was chatting to a
member of an English aristocratic family about farm husbandry (a subject about
which I know absolutely nothing). It occurred to me that he made decisions
that had a time horizon of a century or more. Something completely alien to my
way of thinking but entirely natural to him.

I realised that my time horizon, which has always been oto 20-30 years, was
just a point on a spectrum. Probably typical of a child of professional
parents but not special in any way. And if you have a substantially different
horizon than me then you're very likely to make substantially different life
decisions than me.

------
err4nt
Whenever I open up about some of the hard times I've been through (usually
trying to motivate or encourage a freelancer who is experiencing a rough
patch) somebody inevitably pipes up claiming I don't _really_ know what it's
like to be poor, one time somebody told me "You don't know anything, you only
have the backs of your eyelids to go off of". I'm not even sure what that
means, but it can be frustrating for those of us who HAVE been to rock bottom
and found a way up again to try to show the ropes to others if every time you
get questioned, disbelieved, and even shouted down because somewhere at this
moment there's somebody poorer than you, or a spectator doesn't truly think
you've experienced hardship.

When somebody says they've been through hard times and is trying to help
another person out - that's NOT the time to interrogate them and try to
disprove them, it's the time to focus on the person presently in need, and to
find ways to help them get back on their feet or at least get their wits back.

Please don't be a 'poverty skeptic', it's a little hurtful and a lot
unhelpful.

------
notyourday
The author was poor because the author _chose_ to get a degree in English lit
and rather than getting a full time job in Starbucks she _chose_ to get an
internship. Her experience demonstrates that it is largely a _choice_.

Experience of truly poor people is also largely a choice. I used to be very
poor. It is called "crap happens". And it was a choice during those years to
put one's head down and do it over again and again and again and again
regardless of how helpless it felt.

The biggest issue that poor people have is misallocation of time. They have a
crapload of time and very little money. Unfortunately, instead of leveraging
their time, they try to leverage the money the way those who are not poor do.
That's a mistake.

~~~
AstralStorm
How do you leverage time when already working multiple jobs to make ends meet?

Sounds like you've never even met actually poor people. Most of them actually
do work back-breaking hours or are completely incapable of most work for
health or age reasons.

~~~
notyourday
The reason why they are working those back to back jobs is _because they do
not leverage their time_ and instead trade it for money at a _terrible rate_.

For someone who is poor figuring out where it is possible to buy groceries for
pennies on a dollar using coupons is _more important_ than making extra twenty
dollars a day. By spending 10 hours a month finding the right coupons and
advertisements to save $300/mo on products he or she buys a poor person
achieves a rate of $30/dollars an hour _after_ taxes.

That's how one gets out of poverty, not by taking another back breaking job to
get effective rate of $4/hour.

------
hirundo
By this logic Elizabeth Taylor would have been a great marriage councilor and
anyone with a great marriage should STFU about it.

~~~
bnjms
Had Taylor found herself in a good stable marriage after her poor one your
comparison would match the authors. But I guess it doesnt and you're being
flippant.

------
k__
Often I have the feeling some people are just magnets for bad luck.

My ex girlfriend for example. Failed two degrees, started a badly paid
apprenticeship, lived in a few flats with bad roommates and bad land-lords and
had always bad bosses at work. She came from a upper-middle-class family, but
somehow everything she touched went bad.

I met a bunch of such people, they fail the moment they start something and I
just don't know how or why.

------
RickJWag
I know many people who started out with little money, then saved a percentage
of not much for decades to build wealth.

There's power in time. Warren Buffet knows this and other things. It's why he
makes 'Secret Millionaire Club' for kids.

Poverty can be overcome. Definitely.

------
elipsey
Some of the issues discussed in this thread evolve quickly, or may be highly
situational. As a consequence, problems that appear to result from negligence
may be difficult even for reasonably conscientious people to avoid.

For example, overdraft of a bank account may have been more difficult to
predict in some periods than others. When I was younger, I was payed by check
(direct deposit was not available from some of my employers), I payed my rent
with a check, had automatic bill pay for a small utility bill, and used a
debit/check-card to buy food and sundry necessities. The timing to post these
transactions was inconsistent; the time to clear the checks varied, and the
auto bill pay occasionally failed. One month my rent check cleared quickly,
but my paycheck took a few days. I bought a small amount of groceries with my
checkcard, which authorized, but overdrew my account by a few dollars. It was
not my intent to overdraw my account, and I thought that “authorized” meant
that sufficient funds were available. Even one or two NSF or overdraft fees
would not have been a huge problem, but because the bank reordered
transactions from largest to smallest, I had several hundred dollars in bank
fees which consumed my income for the rest of the month.

The account was free, and as far as I can understand and recall, the
transaction reordering was mandatory, and “Overdraft Protection” was offered
as a value added opt-in service for higher cost account types. I made at least
some effort to understand the account documentation I was given when I signed
the contract, but I failed to understand that transactions were reordered, let
alone recognize the risk implications of that policy. When I told my dad about
this story, he thought it was just a mistake, and that the bank might fix it
if I called them. He hadn’t found out about transaction reordering because he
had ample savings since before it was invented.

Another example: prepaid cellphones were extremely expensive at that time and
place, pay phones were disappearing, and I was not able to have a home phone
for practical reasons (moved too much, installation delays, not on the lease,
etc). I needed a contact phone number for employment reasons, and I accepted a
contract cell phone plan because it was so much less expensive then prepaid.

The contract plans available changed occasionally, and to save money I changed
my plan a couple of times; eventually, I was erroneously told by an agent of
the provider that unlimited “off peak” hours of my plan began at 7pm, but in
fact they started at 8pm. My efforts to cut my expenses resulted in a surprise
bill for several hundred dollars. I couldn’t even take my business elsewhere
because the contract had a deposit and a $500 cancellation fee. (In general, I
have learned to suspect that when services are predicated on a mandatory line
of credit, it is in order to drive up consumption using price obfuscation.)

I’m offering these as examples of cases where consumers must make a poorly
understood cost/risk trade off in order to access basic financial or utility
services. It seems to me that this disproportionately affects people with less
money because they are more price sensitive and less resilient to unexpected
costs.

The rules and conventions tend to change overtime, so depending on our
circumstances we might have no idea of the details of these kinds of problems
as they exist now if we aren’t having them. Since I can now easily keep
several thousand dollars cash in a back account, I wouldn’t know first hand
about transaction reordering if it had been introduced more recently.
Similarly, the pricing structure for phones has changed completely since I had
“bill shock”, and I can now easily afford more service then I ever use in any
case.

A few members of my extended family grew up poor enough to have serious
problems securing food and housing; sometimes they lived in a barn and
survived on wild game. These options were totally unavailable to me when I
needed them. They are now middle class retirees, and they have no more current
experience then I do with the kinds of financial issues discussed here.

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine who lost his job was advised by
his grandmother to try selling oranges by the freeway. He was an adult man
with bills to pay and an estranged family – his grandma offered a simple, well
meaning suggestion that demonstrated her total misapprehension of the nature
of the problem. If my experiences with financial distress are not in the same
place and time as another person, I assume that I am probably somewhere on the
knowledge spectrum between that person, and my friend’s grandma.

The point I mean to make is that if people seem to have problems that could be
trivially avoided, it could be due to negligence, or it could be that we don’t
fully understand the problems.

------
rhapsodic
Poor people, how does this proposal sound: I won't tell you what you should
do, and you don't demand any unearned transfer payments that are subsidized by
the taxes I pay. Fair enough?

~~~
mempko
At the local level you are paying taxes for education. At the federal level
you are paying taxes to keep dollar afloat. Guess what's cool? We can have the
federal government spend more without raising your taxes at all!

~~~
rhapsodic
_> Guess what's cool? We can have the federal government spend more without
raising your taxes at all!_

Of course, just borrow the money to spend, and let future generations of
Americans suffer the consequences.

~~~
mempko
Let's say you had a credit card and a magic job where you get to decide your
paycheck. Would you be worried about paying that credit card?

