
California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living - mrb
http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/
======
patio11
A challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy
for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage
countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty
rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off.
California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently.

(I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US
gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true
for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer.

Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the
US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.

~~~
hkmurakami
It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make
the journey across the border in the first place.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't
need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in
the US.

~~~
adventured
That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises
because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US
saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as
wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from
Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The
desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world,
they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the
Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are
emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor
can't move from their spot.

One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care
professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher
incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost
always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in
action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and
Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor
Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.

There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the
Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.

~~~
polskibus
I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was
unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to
UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't
middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering
the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they
decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much
to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not
related to their education or previous aspiration.

The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms
their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social
perspective but still a minority.

~~~
frozenport
What you say is mostly true in the UK and what OP said is mostly true for the
USA. The USA gets better immigrants.

------
NumberSix
Urban areas in California, where most of the people live, such as the Silicon
Valley have extremely high home ownership and apartment rental costs. The
article notes this briefly and somewhat obliquely, but it is worth
emphasizing.

The median home price in San Jose, CA is about $850,000 at present (March 12,
2017) according to Zillow.

The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Jose is about $2473 per
month ([https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent-
tre...](https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent-trends/))

The US Census lists a median home price for the United States as a whole of
$221,800 in 2010
([https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf](https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf))

Median monthly gross residential rent in the United States was $934 in 2014
according to the Census ACS survey.
([http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/](http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/))

Other living expenses are often 10-25 percent higher in the major urban areas
in California where most people live than other parts of the United States.
(personal experience)

It is housing and rental costs that dominate the disparity with much of the
country however.

~~~
ricw
The direct negative effect on the quality of life of high housing costs is
astonishing. Yet there's no real public uproar. When the price of gas goes up,
seemingly everyone is up in arms. But housing?! People complain, but no where
near as much as they should. In areas with high housing costs, this should be
the primary political issue. I guess nepotism just wins the argument...

~~~
throwaway76543
It's a split issue. Renters want prices to go down. Owners want prices to go
up.

Who wins the political clash? Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?

Generally there are more owners, though California has one of the lowest home
ownership rates at around 53%. Cities draw this average down -- most suburbs
have higher ownership rates.

With this in mind it shouldn't be a surprise that owners outvote renters.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?

Doesn't matter. Owners win because we live in capitalist society, and
capitalism means you must be an owner to get full rights. Non-gentry are
second class citizens (no free movement, no access to clean water, no right to
work the land, no right to build shelter).

No free movement: I can't travel to many places without a car because property
owners decided only people who own cars should be legally allowed to access a
place.

No access to clean water: water is a resource owned by corporations, the
people drink at the corporation's pleasure.

No right to work/shelter ones self: all land has been sold off, new people
born into this world must first serve the gentry until the gentry decide to
pay them enough to buy some land of their own.

~~~
obstacle1
>Owners win because we live in capitalist society

NYC exists under the same capitalist system as SF or LA or wherever.

Nothing you have described (need to drive, no clean water, etc.) applies to
NYC.

Therefore, your gripes aren't caused by the capitalist system you are blaming.

~~~
throwaway743824
I guess one can say it's a similar system. But, while definitions might
differ, I'm not sure how capitalist I would call one of the largest government
run subway systems in the world [0], half century long water tunneling
projects [1] or the longest running rent control system in the US [2].

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/06/03/infrastru...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/06/03/infrastructure-
socialism-and-the-new-york-subway/) [1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10tunnel.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10tunnel.html)
[2]
[http://www.tenant.net/Oversight/50yrRentReg/history.html](http://www.tenant.net/Oversight/50yrRentReg/history.html)

------
rpmcmurphy
The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative
income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following.
You can be poor in the US, and have:

\- Clean running water \- Electricity \- Heat \- Phone, now plus internet
access \- Paved roads \- Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!)

Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how
much not having money sucks in this country, but I would take being broke in
the US over being broke almost anywhere else, with one important caveat, if
you have a long term physical or mental disability and do not have family to
support you, then you are truly fucked (but that would be true anywhere
outside of northern Europe or Canada as well).

~~~
dikdik
Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world
countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his
competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is.

In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the
least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the
healthiest populions.

We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowest denominator then
pat ourselves on the back because we are better than that.

~~~
adventured
Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that
have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture?
Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples
in the first place.

Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration,
and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military
shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military
spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you
want to compare their outcome, to the US?

Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or
Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the
world and Europe in particular.

Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New
Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median
incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for
the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and
are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US
collection of states.

Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the
relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about?
Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain,
Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc.

The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of
the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below
Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those
states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.

~~~
temp
>Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana

Can you provide sources for that? What are you comparing? Median disposable
income? Median household income?

~~~
xienze
Median household income. From a couple seconds worth of Googling:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gallup_gross_med...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gallup_gross_median_household_income)

> Japan: 34822

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi)

> MS: 40037

~~~
bonzini
Does that include health insurance?

------
HillaryBriss
When I look around at approaches for reducing poverty in CA, almost everything
I see is proposals for additional government subsidy programs. What I don't
see is proposals for increasing the supply of the things that make COL so high
in the first place.

How do you make things like housing, health care, and education more abundant,
cheaper, more competitive in CA?

No one seems to know.

~~~
YokoZar
Fixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize
construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle:
[http://missingmiddlehousing.com/](http://missingmiddlehousing.com/)

There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's
where houses can actually get built.

~~~
emojiofficer
They're called exurbs

------
bagacrap
Not a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the
country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute
rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a
very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively
affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial
burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather,
culture, community, etc).

~~~
dragonwriter
> If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose
> to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you
> think it has greater intrinsic value

Or because you were born here and can't afford to leave; the share of
California's population that is native born Californian has been growing for
the last decade or so.

~~~
massysett
For many people, having family nearby saves so much money that a much lower
cost of living elsewhere won't offset it. Having to pay for childcare (vs.
having Grandma do it) alone is enough to wipe out the savings of moving to
Dallas.

------
dmode
This headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's
huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly
different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living
measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for
coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert.
A better study will reflect supplemental poverty rate broken down by their
cohort regions.

~~~
username223
Absolutely. California is wildly divided into places you want to live but
can't afford (SF), and places you can afford but don't want to live (Barstow).
$100k in SF is $33k in Barstow ( [http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-
living/san-francisco-ca/ba...](http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san-
francisco-ca/barstow-ca/100000) )

~~~
laughfactory
Except they all face the same tax burden which, as a California resident until
recently, is quite high: sales tax, property tax, income tax...they tax
everything there, and there are few exemptions. Even at $60K the taxes in CA
will eat you alive. Great weather (in SoCal), but the sunshine tax, it seemed
to us, was perhaps as much as 50%!

~~~
pm90
To be fair though, its not like the tax money is going into the pockets of
corrupt politicians (well maybe not all of it). California is the most
progressive state and spends that money on its residents via education,
healthcare, scientific research etc. I would be willing to pay more taxes if
the State made good use of what I pay them.

~~~
jackcosgrove
California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used
to be before Prop 13.

California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public
employee pensions. Given how generous these pensions are and how they can be
manipulated for maximum payout I would consider it corruption.

~~~
gozur88
>California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used
to be before Prop 13.

That has nothing to do with Prop 13 or money, though. You pay more in taxes
today than you did pre-Prop 13, and in constant dollars we spend double what
we spent on k-12 education in the early '70s.

>California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public
employee pensions.

Yes. By and large this is where the money is going.

------
xg15
After reading many mental gymnastics excercises of varying creativity in this
thread that try to explain why the supplemental poverty measure is irrelevant
and/or misleading, I'd like to know, how would _you_ define a measure for
poverty that's both objective and gives a realistic account of the quality of
life in the measured area?

~~~
mdpopescu
Following Julian Simon, I'd use "how much X can you buy with an hour's worth
of work", where X can be food, a basket of goods [1], precious metals or
whatever seems more appropriate. I think the official basket of goods can be
taken as a good first approximation.

[1]
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp)

------
yummyfajitas
There is something very important missing - the SPM poverty measure is
_relative_ poverty, not absolute. All this means is that CA has many rich
people.

~~~
HarryHirsch
And all the the pretty money you earn as a software engineer in SF is
sufficient only for a _kommunalka_ : [http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-
workers-live-40-to-a-...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-workers-
live-40-to-a-house-in-high-rent-san-francisco/)

We had one in town when I was a student. The thing had a name. It was called
_Schweinebunker_.

~~~
Epenthesis
So, living in places like that and paying that much is _definitely_ not
normal.

For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the
desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods
(sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are
living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of
the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being
representative of SF real estate.

~~~
jon-wood
I think you making that an example of a great deal just shows how skewed the
SF housing market is. I'm in the south of the UK, just within commuting
distance of London, and for $800/mth less than that rent a 3 bedroom house
with a garden in a well connected area, and that's a bit expensive for the
area because its well located. The housing market in London is just as
ridiculous at the moment and I'm so glad to have got out.

------
rayiner
Is California a good place to live for your typical person? It has an enviable
economy with Silicon Valley and whatnot. Places all over the country are
trying to recreate that. But it doesn't appear to have particularly good
schools, infrastructure, or public services to show for it. Does the vaunted
economic engine really translate into prosperity for the middle 50% of
Californians?

------
tathougies
Not surprising as california also has one of the lowest minimum wages in real
terms. For all this talk about progressive politics and a 15/hr minimum wage,
'backwards' states in the south have real minimum wages well above 15 CA
USD/hr. Some even surpass 20/hr. Mean while California wages would be the
equivalent of around $3.50/he in their terms.

So much for progressive politics

------
nameisu
karma automotive told me only 10% cost of living increase from michigan. i
told them to fuck off

------
gojiberry
Oh my my. Makes me want to leave everything and move to Alabama. Does it?

~~~
Apocryphon
Huntsville has a strong tech presence due to aerospace and defense, or so I've
heard.

------
danjoc
$30,000 a year

"poverty"

[https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-
global-p...](https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-
poverty)

"more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day."

~~~
psyc
Maybe try restating your point in units of food and shelter. Dollars have no
intrinsic value.

~~~
megous
So perhaps move those poor americans to the third world. They'll feel like top
1% with those dollars.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Please don't - here in India we don't need a bunch of people too lazy to make
their way in America.

~~~
TheGirondin
Says the person who wants them to all come to the US.

"I agree with that [immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone] and
support more or less open borders" \- yummyfajitas

~~~
yummyfajitas
I should have caveated that statement with the fact that immigrants must be
good people who sell labor to willing buyers and don't victimize innocents. I
thought I made that clear by mentioning comparative advantage.

Unfortunately most poor Americans refuse to work, commit disability fraud and
otherwise exploit the taxpayer, and commit disproportionate amounts of crime.
(Far more than Indians - I've never felt unsafe in any slum here, unlike in
the US). You don't get any comparative advantage from people who refuse to
trade and merely take things from you.

------
danjoc
Americans waste enough food to end world hunger

[http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with-
th...](http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with-thom-
hartmann-americans-waste-enough-food-to-end-world-hunger-and-more)

~~~
deelowe
This is a meaningless metric. Food can't be magically shipped to the regions
that need it. A better measurement would be waste per capita or farm land
utilization.

~~~
estsauver
The other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and
into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants
to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief
programs.

Development is hard.

~~~
danjoc
Most of the food wasted is "ugly" food. It's not putting farmers out of
business. It could keep starving people alive though.

~~~
deelowe
Which completely misses the point. To summarize what the parent is suggesting:

"Teach a man to fish..."

