
Why it's expensive to be poor - tialys
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html?referrer=emailarticle
======
projectileboy
Data point: I once worked on software for very large retail chains which
allows those retailers to group stores by "zones" for pricing purposes. One of
the commonly defined pricing zones is "inner-city", which consistently get
their prices bumped by, say, 5 or 10% for many items. The reasoning behind
this was exactly as laid out in the article: inner-city residents lack
transportation options, and so retailers can command higher prices.

~~~
mattmaroon
Right, the article should have been about it being expensive to be the urban
poor. Suburban poor have it much better. They largely have cars, because
people in a city pay more to park a car for three months than people in the
suburbs pay to buy a car. They shop at and work Wal-Mart rather than 7-11, and
Wal-Mart costs less and pays more. Etc.

The moral is, if you're poor, get the hell out of the city.

~~~
bokonist
The urban poor usually have much better bus access and walking access to jobs.
That saves a lot of money. The cost of housing is also super cheap. And many
inner cities do have inexpensive super markets, cheap ethnic grocers, and
dollar discount stores for household goods. I'd need to see some actual stats
on the price of milk or eggs by neighborhood. I'm not sure inner cities are
really that much more expensive.

~~~
joetrumpet
The poor city I'm adjacent to, Trenton, has no supermarket. People simply have
to shop at the convenience stores, which are more expensive anywhere. I'm not
aware of anything you mentioned inside the city--just in the suburbs
surrounding it. Housing is not super cheap: 800-1200 a month rent is typical
for a far-from-glamorous home, maybe 700 if you're willing to live in the
high-crime areas. Most people with kids would do anything to stay out of those
parts. That doesn't leave a lot for food, utilities, child care,
transportation, and misc. costs.

I'm not really sure what city you're considering. It's far from the reality
I've seen.

~~~
bokonist
What do you mean Trenton has no super markets? A quick google maps search
shows over a dozen super markets and grocery stores. The rent you cite is less
expensive than the suburbs. The cities I know best are Philly, DC, and New
Haven. In each of these cities, the poor, inner city areas have lower housing
prices than the surrounding suburbs, and they have available super markets.

~~~
joetrumpet
Those small grocery stores aren't the same as a supermarket, and the
supermarkets listed aren't really in Trenton. For some reason some of them are
listed as such, but if you look at the map they're a bit off elsewhere. We
don't consider that part of Trenton--one of those is in Hamilton, for example.
Trenton's last supermarket closed back awhile ago and it's an obstruction to
food access often-mentioned by non-profits in the area.

I'm not sure about rent. In states south from NJ those rents are high for
suburban areas, for housing in much worse shape (chipping lead paint, etc).
You're right in terms of staying within New Jersey--those are low in a state
with very expensive housing (and everything else), but considering both health
and the pay people get in the poor areas receive I'm not sure if it's a fair
comparison. In my own experience, the suburban poor do seem to be better off
than the urban poor (and I think it all trumps rural poverty)--and I love
cities, so I really wish that weren't the case.

------
yummyfajitas
I call BS on some of the "facts" in this story.

 _...an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston
[says]. "You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of
money...."_

Just not true. The typical poor family works less than half as much as the
typical non-poor family (1000 hours/year vs 2100 hours/year).

<http://www3.brookings.edu/es/wrb/publications/pb/pb28.pdf>

 _You ask him why he didn't just go to a bank...He says he lost his driver's
license and now his regular bank "won't recognize me as a human._

A check cashing place requires the same, usually more stringent ID than a
bank.

 _...Jacob Carter finds himself standing in a checkout line at the Giant on
Alabama Avenue SE...The clerk suggests that he use his "bonus card" for
savings...Carter tells the clerk he has no such card._

Bonus cards are so hard to get. You need to walk over to the courtesy counter,
ask for one, then fill out phony information on the card to get it.

~~~
jrockway
I agree with you here. Some of the things that the article dismisses as
impossible are quite possible, like getting a bank account. You have to waste
an hour waiting in line to get an ID, and then you can save $15 every time you
get paid. That sounds like a good deal to me. These people should do that, and
stop letting the check cashing places take advantage of them. They can also go
to the public library and pay their bills online, saving the the cost of
either postage or the fee on the money order. None of this costs money or much
time, but it will _save_ money.

Also, why are people with a 10 minute drive not riding a bicycle? If you can't
afford a car, and the bus route isn't convenient enough, it's time to get a
bicycle.

I also don't buy the article's premise that having a car is mandatory. I live
in a big city (Chicago), and I have never owned a car. I ride my bike to the
grocery store (even in the winter), take the CTA to other stores I need to
visit, or just order what I need online. All of these things save me money,
and don't cost me much time. (It would take as long to drive to the grocery
store ad it takes to ride my bike.)

Don't get me wrong, I know the poor have a hard life. But some of their
problems are easily fixed, if they are willing to invest time now to save time
later.

~~~
huherto
That is kind of the point of the article. Part of being poor is not knowing
ways of saving money. That is why they are stuck in this vicious circle.

~~~
profgubler
Not taking this out on you. But, start a business then that teaches them this
and find a way to make money doing, or get donors and do it as a none profit.
I am not saying that you are saying have the government do it for them, but
that is the vibe, I get with the vast majority of people in this thread.

The government is not the only people that can help the poor, and likely not
the best to help the poor. Why is this? Because the government does things on
tax payers dime, they don't have a 100% control of the money.

I am sorry, but even if this is the case in real life that the poor have it
harder, which I do not doubt, it does not make the solution government
intervention.

~~~
lutorm
"I am sorry, but even if this is the case in real life that the poor have it
harder, which I do not doubt, it does not make the solution government
intervention."

Why is that any less a solution than starting a business?

I realize this place is full of people who want to start businesses, but at
least attempt to make an argument why that is the case instead of just stating
it as if you're saying "the Sun rises in the East"...

In the case of poverty it's _in the taxpayers interest_ to get rid of poverty,
because society is footing a lot of the bill. The interests seem much better
aligned than those of someone running a business trying to extract money from
the people who have none.

------
tomsaffell
I had high hopes for this article (based on the title), but was utterly
disappointed by it. It seems to serve no purpose other than to provide dinner-
party fodder for the middle classes hoping to project a sense of _I'm in touch
with the poor_ empathy.

It deals with a generality that is stunningly obvious: it's expensive to be
poor. In the space of five pages, it struggles to get beyond that generality.
There are a handful of anecdotes and equal number of catch-phrase expert
opinions that barely scratch the surface.

Where is the data: how many people are _actually affected_ by these factors
(not merely 'poor'), to what extent, and at what ultimate cost (in dollars).

Where is the root-cause analysis: is being poor linked to class / expectations
of life / upbringing?

Where is the counter story: examples of people who got them selves our of the
trap - how did they do that? What made them different.

Where is call to action: if this is truly an _oh-so-terrible-problem_ then
where is the call to action? What are readers to do?

I apologize now if this comes across as a rant. In my opinion this is a _real
and growing problem_ for the developed world, and as such a article that
merely skims the surface like this one comes across as disingenuous, so I
suspect the motives.

I'm reminded of the 1984 hit "Feed the world". The final lines of the verse
(sung by Bono) always sends a chill through me:

    
    
      There's a world outside your window,
      and it's a world of dread and fear
      Where the only water flowing
      is the bitter sting of tears
      And the Christmas bells that ring there
      are the clanging chimes of doom
      Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you  (Bono)
    

This feels like classic _'tonight thank God it's them instead of you'_
journalism.

</rant>

~~~
davidmathers
_I apologize now if this comes across as a rant._

Actually, I think yours is the best comment of the entire page.

------
lutorm
What is it they say, "money rolls uphill"?

It's very true that when you don't have funds to make financial investments
that pay off over time you end up even deeper.

I guess this is why I think progressive taxation is "fair", people with higher
incomes can leverage it so it makes more difference than the apparent income
difference would indicate.

~~~
noonespecial
This is exactly the arguement I make when people tell me that progressive
taxation is some sort of evil and "fair" is when everyone just pays a fixed
percent. I usually say "money has its own economies of scale" and a
progressive tax is just a way to address these. "Money rolls uphill" is a nice
way of saying that. I hadn't heard that before. I think maybe I'll borrow
that. Thanks.

~~~
pg
Rich people pay more taxes if you have a flat tax rate too.

How do you know how much progressiveness you need to counteract the vague
phenomenon you describe? How can you be sure a mere proportionate increase
wouldn't be enough to do it? Or even less?

~~~
lutorm
Look at the wealth accumulation with time of people with different incomes. I
bet you that someone who makes $80k/yr will accumulate a whole lot more wealth
with time than someone who makes $40k/yr (~ median income in US), and compare
to those that make $14k/yr (what you make in a year of full-time work at
minimum wage). That should tell you what the ROI of money made at various
income levels is.

~~~
byrneseyeview
It tells you that if that's your hypothesis. If you think rich people are
smarter, it tells you that not only do they make more money, but they're more
responsible about saving it, too. So even though Mr. $80K has to buy a nice
car and a couple suits, and Mr. $40K doesn't, Mr. $80K still spends less on
liquor and lotto tickets.

~~~
lutorm
It tells me what if what's my hypothesis?

I really dislike when people use the word "smart" or "intelligent" in these
situations, because it makes it sound like "intelligence" is innate, like a
genetic trait. Even people's IQ scores are not genetically determined, and an
even more amorphous trait like "ability to amass monetary wealth" probably has
a lot more to do with skills you acquire during your upbringing than with
genetics.

So if you want to say that rich people are better at gathering wealth, sure.
That does not imply that the poor people, if they had been swapped at birth,
could have acquired the same skills from the same situation.

~~~
pg
Don't get distracted with the intelligence thing. His point is simply that you
can't tell how much of the growth in people's fortunes is due to money rolling
uphill, because it's probably not the only factor.

------
oldgregg
I've always really hated vehicle emissions testing. It's evil. The government
colludes with the auto industry to force perfectly fine but slightly older
vehicles off the road. And 90% of the time it's not even related to
emissions--- some damn sensor is just faulty. For the middle class it's a
costly expense. But if you own a car that costs $1500 but to pass emissions
you have to spend $1000 to get it fixed, you're hosed. So you don't have any
option but to drive an unregistered vehicle, and so the cycle continues...

~~~
onedognight
Putting $1000 into a $1500 car still makes it much cheaper than any new car
you can buy in the US.

As air pollution expert Glen Class used to say (while acknowledging its
disproportionate effect one the poor), the most effective thing you can do
improve auto emissions is to remove the oldest 10% of cars from the road as
they contribute emissions equal to the newer 90%.

While I don't know who colludes with whom, new cars really are that much
better emissions wise than older ones.

------
patrickg-zill
I feel bad for the people mentioned ... however, just by virtue of being in
the US/Canada/Western Europe etc. you have already "won life's lottery".

Is it also expensive to be a flea-bitten, hungry, malnourished baby in Africa
and with only a 50% chance (or whatever the number is) of making it to 25
years old?

No matter which country has higher mobility, the reality is, you can in fact
improve your lot in life if you are poor and in the USA.

~~~
huherto
".. however, just by virtue of being in the US/Canada/Western Europe etc. you
have already "won life's lottery"."

That is true. But you can also "win life's lottery" if you are born in a
middle/upper class in a developing country.

------
forinti
Ok, you save a dollar on a gallon of milk, but how much does it cost to own a
car?

~~~
akeefer
The point is that the poor pay more for exactly the same (or even inferior)
things as people who are better off, not that they somehow spend more in the
aggregate. People who already are going to have less than others because of
their lower income actually have that small amount of money go less far than
exactly that same amount of money would go for someone who was better off.

You can view that as just the reality of how the economics work out, or you
can view that as fundamentally unfair that people essentially get kicked while
they're already down.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_You can view that as just the reality of how the economics work out, or you
can view that as fundamentally unfair that people essentially get kicked while
they're already down._

The two are not mutually exclusive positions.

------
adatta02
It seems like this should be a huge opportunity for someone to come in and
optimize things.

The "pay day advance" stuff seems particularly wasteful and generally awful.
Even my credit card company won't charge me $50 to front me $300 in cash. Hell
on a clean card with one of those "0% APR for 6 months" I could probably cut
myself a 3k bridge loan and pay almost nothing. (assuming I just pay minimums
and then if the 0% APR expires I clear the balance).

~~~
JimmyL
If you're the kind of person that needs to go to a payday loan place, you're
not going to be eligible for a 0% APR card - if you're lucky, you'd be offered
a fully-secured credit card (meaning you have to give them money first before
you can use it, and you can only use up to the amount you've given them) with
a maximum balance of five hundred bucks, which you wouldn't have lying around
anyways.

You get those card offers now because you're (presumably) employed to some
degree and have a decent credit rating, so the card company thinks you're a
pretty good bet to not default. If you need a payday loan, it's unlikely you
have anything near a good credit rating, if you have one at all.

As for optimizing things, it depends on who you want to optimize for. If you
want to optimize it for the credit card and payday loan companies, that's
pretty much been done already - they have a very permissive set of regulations
they operate under, and aren't short on profit margin. If you want to do it
for the customers, that means you need to set up a financing service aimed at
high-risk individuals, but you're going to have to mark-up some to make up for
the default rate.

A good deal of people who frequent payday loan companies can't even get it
together (for whatever reasons, both in and out of their immediate control) to
get a normal checking account - you think that they'll be offered no-interest
unsecured credit cards?

~~~
adatta02
@optimizing why not do something like a fresh fruit/vegetable cart that rolls
through every morning at say 8am. The cart is actually
backed/financed/supported by some bigger "rich folk" store
(Shaws/Krugers/whatever) and is only available from 8am to 10am.

This, theoretically reduces the "cost of doing business" since the likely hood
that you get mugged for vegetables and fruit in broad daylight is probably
pretty low.

Following from the article, low cost of doing business should mean lower costs
- even if you factor in gas and such you should still be able to beat the
corner market and cut a profit since you are selling "big box" product at a
markup...

------
timmaah
>>But, Blakeney says: "I don't have time to mail it. You come here and get it
done. Then you don't get charged with the late fee." <<

Huh? So you pay 10% for someone to do it for you..

~~~
JimmyL
To mail it himself would take some long-term planning. He'd have to book off a
time when he knows he'll have the bill and the address with him, not put this
off until tomorrow, locate and go to a post office/convenience store to buy
stamps and an envelope, get the money in his account, and then keep it there
for five or six business days until he's sure that it's been cashed.

If you're living paycheque-to-paycheque, this is more difficult than you would
think - especially the part about having the fifty bucks sitting in his
account for five days without touching it.

------
hpvic03
Print Version:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053_pf.html)

------
Dilpil
"The effective annual percentage rate is 806 percent"

A ridiculous metric for a week long loan.

~~~
gojomo
Unless you take one out (almost) every week.

~~~
ambition
No, because the 806 number includes compounding.

~~~
gojomo
It certainly does not include compounding; the 806 figure is derived from the
stated weekly cost of $100 -- $15.5 -- times 52 weeks, a simple sum.

A calculation of the annual rate based on 15.5% compounded weekly would be
much, much worse.

The effective annual rate is _somewhat_ worse than 806%, because if you rolled
over your $100 principal loan each week, paying just the $15.5 fees, then paid
back the principal at the end of the year, you've paid $806 in interest, yes.
And if that full interest payment had been made only at the end of the year,
your annual rate would have been 806%. But you paid a lot of that early, so
your effective rate was higher.

~~~
ambition
Yikes, you're right. That's obscene.

I hope non-profits like Kiva are able to help in this area.

------
larrykubin
Related video: Comedian Louis CK on the cost of being broke:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q0dIktwJmw>

------
jodrellblank
Read the article, didn't like it.

How can I comment that it's stupid to _lease a sofa_ when you have to scrounge
food for your family, without getting lynched by the "you don't know what it's
like you evil smug lucky middle class brat" crowd?

It's a suboptimal choice. Maybe a stupid choice (BUT POOR PEOPLE AREN'T
STUPID).

You could go on the bus to the cheaper shop and buy two lots of food while
your friend does two lots of washing at the laundromat (BUT IT'S EASY FOR YOU
TO SAY YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE)

You could pool your money and get a washing machine between several people and
free up a lot of time (BUT THAT'S NOT AN OPTION, DON'T YOU _SEE_?)

You could not spend 25% of your available money on fried chicken instead of
food that lasts longer (and is healthier). (What the hell? Fried chicken? Is
that paragraph solely there as bait to trap commenters like me?)

Isn't it silly for several people to have $800 cars they can't afford to
repair, when together they could have a $2000 car and some spare cash? Well
isn't it?

OK, OK, you can't do any of that. You can't do anything. You're not stupid or
lazy you just didn't get a break. Yes I am lucky, yes I don't know what it's
like. Yes I see it's probably extremely unpleasant. OK then, there's no way
out. At all. So does it help that I now feel guilty about it? Not really.

Do you really believe it's possible to have a society almost like ours, but
with no poor people? I don't. Not really. No good reasons why not, but it
feels impossible. I mean, we can't all be millionaires, can we? Is that
different?

So there's Bob. Bob is poor. It can't be OK. because that's something "you
can't say" (see PG essay). So it's not OK. But it's not Bob's _fault_. If
there's anything that can happen short of a lottery win that would help Bob,
then that would be good. But that must include being able to publicly
acknowledge bad choices without condemning them or the reasons for making
them.

So is information the answer? You can't see what available options you have.
Well hello the internet - information delivery a specialty. Hello HN -
information crunching a specialty.

Whoever brought up AKay's quote that "perspective is worth 80 IQ points" in
these comments, that rings true.

But I also want it to be true that anybody has the chance of happiness. This
includes billions of people born in poor countries. It includes the billions
and billions of people who were born and lived more than 50 years ago. In
order for this to be the case, then the answer has to be in perspective, not
money or sofas or cheap rent or abundant food or "lack of opression by the
system" or handouts or community centres or lucky breaks.

Would it be as bad to be poor if I didn't know anything of any alternatives?
There is so much poverty and so little luxury when you consider global
population. Global population over all history - is wealth and comfortable
living really a possible way forward, or just an aberration? A temporary break
from a nasty, brutish and short life, for the lucky few?

:(

------
christofd
This aligns well with the concept of economic mobility: Team of Brookings
Institution researchers publish study -
[http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_American_Dre...](http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_American_Dream.pdf)

From the PDF: the U.S.A. has fallen behind other western nations, such as
Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden in maintaining the concept of economic or
upward mobility...

And this is the main reason, as I recall, why the U.S. was always portrayed as
more desirable than European nations (and it was true in the 50s; part of my
German family immigrated to the U.S. in the 50s). If you take that concept
away - why would you want to live in the U.S. anymore:

\- none of U.S. cities rank in the top 100 most livable places (Mercer Cities
Ranking)

\- high schools and many public schools rank low in comparison to other
western nations

\- education is much more expensive

\- there is no organized trade school education, like in Germany, Britain etc.

\- salaries for the lower third are less

\- health care (don't get me started)

\- hardly any social safety net

\- crime, largest per capita prison population in the world

\- infrastructure - roads, bridges, buildings etc. (don't get me started; it's
almost third world country level)

\- average lasting quality of housing (drywall, cheap wood framing, bad
carpentry on windows and doors etc.)

\- manufacturing quality and capability: look at American made cars or power
tools (I always prefer foreign made)

\- half of the government budget goes towards the military

\- lack of public transportation (Standard Oil bought up the urban train
networks in the 1940's and had them decommissioned: street cars, urban transit
etc.)

\- no functioning Euro-style city cores, urban sprawl, stuffed highways with
commuters

\- and the most important fact of all: the byzantine law system of the U.S.
and the huge costs of lawyers and law suits (this affects many areas); lawyers
can cost over $ 500/ hour and if you can't afford one you are out of luck;
further, judges are not high-end lawyers trained as judges (like in Germany
etc.) but can be any random divorce lawyer that got appointed regionally, as I
understand

Final verdict: the U.S. has been badly managed in the last 30 years, and the
poor carry the burden.

The final evidence is given in the study of Cliometrics and measuring average
body height of nations (an indicator for health/ prosperity): it used to be
(up until the 1950s) that U.S. Citizens were taller than Europeans; this trend
has been reversed in the last 30 years - now the Euros are taller (especially
the Dutch)

~~~
joecode
"- none of U.S. cities rank in the top 100 most livable places (Mercer Cities
Ranking)"

This is rather false: <http://www.citymayors.com/features/quality_survey.html>

This calls into question the other assertions. What is your source?

I actually agree that the U.S. has been pretty badly mismanaged lately, but
despite this I've encountered many hardworking immigrants who manage to do
well for themselves. I believe the main reason the poor continue to be poor is
lack of drive and lower intelligence/education. Both of these derive mostly
from environmental factors, especially family life, poor values, poor
education and generally inhospitable surroundings.

You would need to make some pretty radical changes to turn it around.

~~~
christofd
My mistake - quoted from memory (comment system on HN locks edits after 1
hour), tried to edit later.

------
earl
Everyone should read this link by John Scalzi, as well, as a companion to this
article. Being Poor:

<http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/>

~~~
noonespecial
That's fantastic. They're all brilliant but, _"Being poor is having to live
with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old."_ , just
gives me chills.

~~~
patio11
_Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you
were 14 years old._

Let's not mumble-mumble "choices" -- that makes it sound like you could be
doomed forever if, in a fit of adolescent stupidity, you went out with friends
instead of studying for a geometry test.

Here are the durable wreck-your-life decisions you can make at age 14:

1) Dropping out of high school, at age 14.

2) Getting thrown in jail for crimes you committed, at age 14.

3) Getting pregnant, at age 14.

They don't seem all that hard to avoid now, do they? And they don't look all
that hidden now, do they? Its not like rich people get together and say
"Psssst, pssst: having a baby at age 14 will wreck your life. Pass it on but
_don't tell the poor people_!"

~~~
noonespecial
When I was 14, I thought that sex in a pool was a contraceptive method because
_"the chlorine would kill the sperm"_.

14 year olds can be _monumentally_ ignorant about very important things. How
many geometry tests do you have to skip before its one too many?

------
thras
The poor tend to be the stupid (plenty of studies to back this up), and hence
the poverty. Since they are more stupid, they fall for stupid payday loan
schemes, credit card idiocy, etc., at rates greater than the rich do.

Please do not reply if you read "tend to" as "always." I'm not going to bother
responding.

~~~
njharman
yep, so?

Your implying stupid people aren't equal, they deserve to be poor? That smart
people are superior? Perhaps stupid people should have to stay in special
stupid areas, go to separate schools, drink at special stupid people only
water fountains.

I believe stupid people need more not less of a break, more not less
assistance, more not less of everything from society and government precisely
cause they are stupid.

~~~
thras
I implied nothing. I said what I said.

Your solution, however, leaves much to be desired. Affirmative action for the
unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale.

~~~
socjus
If your original comment really does imply nothing beyond what it literally
said, it is superfluous. All it offers is a correlation - which is
insufficient to show whether poverty causes stupidity or the opposite - and a
qualitative, unsubstantiated 'explanation' for why stupidity causes poverty
and not the other way around.

~~~
thras
You're right. I didn't say which caused what. I can if you'd like though:
Sibling and SES-normed adoption studies tend to show that intelligence is the
cause and not the result.

~~~
davidmathers
I wasn't going to waste my time responding to this, but wikipedia made it
easy:

 _The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and
Unknowns[8] states that IQ scores account for about one-fourth of the social
status variance and one-sixth of the income variance. Statistical controls for
parental SES eliminate about a quarter of this predictive power. Psychometric
intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social
outcomes.[8]_

 _One reason why some studies claim that IQ only accounts for a sixth of the
variation in income is because many studies are based on young adults (many of
whom have not yet completed their education). On pg 568 of The g Factor,
Arthur Jensen claims that although the correlation between IQ and income
averages a moderate 0.4 (one sixth or 16% of the variance), the relationship
increases with age, and peaks at middle age when people have reached their
maximum career potential. In the book, A Question of Intelligence, Daniel
Seligman cites an IQ income correlation of 0.5 (25% of the variance)._

 _A 2002 study[75] further examined the impact of non-IQ factors on income and
concluded that an offspring's inherited wealth, race, and schooling are more
important as factors in determining income than IQ._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient>

~~~
thras
I hadn't come across the APA link you provided before, but I had read the
Bowles study. He's absolutely right if you assume that inherited wealth, race,
and schooling are all independent of IQ. But there's plenty of evidence to
show they aren't. So he's not right. In fact, his analysis is quite
representative of a certain kind of study you see every so often: you can
always make the IQ effect disappear by relying on IQ-correlates instead. I can
give you a half-dozen papers that use the same trick. Nobody is impressed by
them.

Now, instead of copying and pasting from Wikipedia, maybe you should actually
look into the literature in the future. You'll come up with a much fairer
sampling of what's out there.

~~~
davidmathers
Cosma Shalizi will handle this one for me:
<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html>

_Let me sum up._

 _4\. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment
interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that
Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with
socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to
around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it
neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment,
correlations between variance components, etc._

 _7\. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all
show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed,
responsive to purely environmental interventions._

...

 _I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to
know about differences between people who do not have significant
developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have
no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to
guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my
suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas
of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you
have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the
distinction between "human equality" and "genetic identity", and ask why it is
so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable._

~~~
thras
Oh, god, not Shalizi. Back when I was a younger fellow, still willing to
devote long chunks of my time in pointless internet debates, I thought of
writing up a long critique of Shalizi. He's wrong, and purposefully so. He
invokes straw man arguments. He cherry picks whatever evidence he needs to in
order to make his points. The fact that he believes something is wonderful
evidence that it's probably not true.

A friend of mine once told me that Shalizi's world view was explained by a
certain instructor he had as a graduate student, and most of his argument is
derived from there, but the name escapes me right now.

Regardless. I happen to believe in evolution. Shalizi believes in a magical
equality fairy. One look at an SNP map proves him wrong.

Edit: I just realized that you were trying to follow my suggestion to look
into "the literature" and mistook Shalizi's blog entries for actual journal
articles. He never published them anywhere as far as I know. Nor could he.

------
c00p3r
Yeah, it is expensive for a poor to try to live as middle-class. And it is
stupid. Stupidity is always more expensive.

The advantage of being poor is that you're detached from all that useless
goods, property, stuff and even people. Then you can move. You can live where
life is better - some warmer and cheaper place - maybe some buddhist
countries, but not California, of course.

Take a look at the Indian brahmins, Tibetan or buddhist monks - they are very
poor, as poor as possible, but they are happy and healthy because they does
not trying to catch some advertised illusion or broadcasted style of life.

The rule is very simple - spend less than you got. It means to avoid what you
can't afford. If you have only one bag with some absolutely necessary things
you can live in almost every place with warm climate and peaceful people.

------
swolchok
read it, enjoyed it, but had to flag because it's OT. Sorry.

~~~
mattyb
And what exactly is the topic?

~~~
gamache
Hacker News. I flagged it as well, incidentally.

------
gtt

        For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
        —Matthew 25:29, King James Version.

