Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know.
I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town.
Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade school, then got into college (full Pell Grant because I was so poor) and came out with a few degrees.
Everything I own is fully paid for. House, cars, etc. because I'm always afraid I'm going to be poor again. Of course, I only own modest things. Nothing fancy.
If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are.
My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.
Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.
I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.
> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.
I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy"
A few factors to consider:
- You had an aunt you could live with
- As a youth, you were wise enough to go to trade school and college
- As a youth, you were wise/careful enough to not have babies. Furthering your education would be far tougher when you have kids to take care of
- You had access to government programs such as Pell Grants, which many people would deride as being "government handouts"
- As a youth, you were wise enough to avoid crimes that would disqualify you from educational/employment opportunities in your adult life
Stories like yours are wonderful in inspiring people to make something of themselves. But it doesn't change the fact that we as a society should do more to help people who are caught in a poverty trap, especially because of poor decisions made when they were teenagers. Just because someone ran a 4-minute-mile doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so.
> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.
As always in such discussions, privilege is on a spectrum and has many dimensions. To give an obvious example, even as a youth, you were privileged to be an American citizen, with all the rights, assistance and opportunities it entails. If you were born in the same circumstances in Mexico or Congo, you would find yourself facing a far different outcome.
When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do (which is not always wise) rather than just what they should do.
But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.
You are obvioualy wearing your policymaking hat. Unfortunately, policymaking is and endless mess of arguing and distracts real people from doing the right thing. Calling things "unfair", even if true, is discouraging for struggling people and makes them less likely to succeed if they listen to you.
The fact is that there's a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of people in the world realize that and come here to realize the opportunity.
Any message of unfairness, in my opinion, should be coupled with the context that the best way forward is still by prudent choices and a multi-generational outlook. Like so many immigrants have.
You call poverty a "trap", but part of that is imposed by a given location. That coal mining town might never come back, and opportunities will be scarce. But growing cities will always offer opportunity to newcomers. It's much easier to "immigrate" from a declining city/town to a growing one than from another country.
This is not to say that we can't improve policy. We can. But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.
How about a reality hat: the world does not offer everyone equal chances. You live in a country surrounded by fences and border patrol exactly to keep those that were less lucky from trying to get some of that luck.
Even when born in the country, there are better and worse schools, better and worse social infrastructure, a billion different glass ceilings according to color, gender, age, accent or faith.
Your comment perpetuates the eternal lie that everyone can rise to the top, but we all know that some have a 50% chance and others a 0.0005% chance to 'make it'. It's absurd to blame the kid with a bad school and no breakfast for not living up to the highest moral standards and take all the right decisions when they have probably barely to no good advice, guidance or role models.
Its easy to judge, but try to empathise. That's not a policy hat, it's acknowledging reality.
What advice would you offer a young poor student looking to get out of poverty
A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard, get good grades, keep a clean criminal record, go to college, and get a good job.
B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed.
Both are true, but only one of these messages is actionable and relevant for the student.
Yes, the system us unfair, but people can and do rise out of poverty every day. In fact, most children born into poverty make it out of poverty (66% according to this PEW paper [1])
I don't understand why you can't tell the hypothetical young, poor student both 'A' and 'B.' In fact, not doing so seems a bit manipulative (regardless of your intentions).
A potential consequence of perpetually leaving 'B' out of the discussion is that, while some of these young, poor students will escape poverty and others will not, neither group may realize that the status quo reflects decisions made by human beings, not some invisible law of nature.
Telling poor and disenfranchised people that hard work is the solution to all of their problems sounds just like a recipe for inducing learned helplessness [1] to me. Sure, some hard-working poor people will escape poverty, but plenty won't. The difference between the two groups often lies in factors outside of their control.
I would assume the opposite; tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless? Opportunities and success are not and never will be evenly distributed, but effort still plays a part. Inculcating a victimhood complex in children seems extremely antithetical to the cause of bettering their prospects in life.
> tell someone that if they work hard, they have a chance is less likely to induce despair in my opinion and experience than telling them that their efforts are meaningless because every part of society is arrayed against them, the odds are laughable, and their failure is all but guaranteed. How could that not make someone feel hopeless?
I must not have done a very good job communicating my thoughts, because this is explicitly not what I was advocating for. The post I responded to claimed that both "A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard..." and "B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed", then suggested leaving B out of the discussion - even while acknowledging that both 'A' and 'B' were true.
My suggestion was simply to not leave out true, relevant information for the sake of provoking some desired behavioral response from the target audience. That just seems manipulative and paternalistic to me.
This isn't a revelation, however. It's certainly not uncommon for members of marginalized groups to tell their children that they'll have to work twice as hard as other children to end up in the same place.
First, is learned helpless. As the article you linked points out, learned helplessness is not the result of working hard and encountering challenges. It is the brain's default assumption in the absence of of encouragement. People's brains are already predisposed to inaction and helplessness by millions of years of evolutionary biology. Humans are already predisposed to fallacies and heuristics that overestimate the challenges and obstacles, and reinforcing them is actively damaging. Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.
Second, discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy. Is it 90% hard work and 10% luck, or the the inverse.
Last is relevance. A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points. They can't go back and be born to a richer household. Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today, and will continue to be more impactful in the future.
My point wasn't that we should gather all of the world's poor and disenfranchised together and hold a giant pity party, it was that being honest with people about the reality of the (unfair) status quo is better than trying to manipulate them with the sort of self-help mumbo-jumbo you might find at a multi-level marketing conference.
In both the contemporary understanding of learned helplessness and its predecessor, that is to say, whether helplessness is the default state of human existence or a conditioned response, what's being considered is a person's view towards their ability to reach a desired outcome through their actions.
Decontextualizing the actions of those who face increased environmental challenges is likely to provide discouragement, not encouragement, as the actions of those facing greater challenges will seem less impactful in comparison to the more fortunate. In more practical terms, this means that the relative under-performance of the disadvantaged may be interpreted as some form of personal inadequacy rather than an expected response to greater-than-average challenges. This relates to something you said, quoted below:
> Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.
This actually isn't true, at least in many important ways, and that's a major part of the problem. While poor Americans may realize that their house/neighborhood/car/etc. isn't as nice as those they see on TV, they can't understand what they haven't experienced - for example: the impact of stable finances, well-educated parents, or a high-performing school district on academic performance. This phenomenon also holds true for other segments of society - those more fortunate generally can't fully understand the disadvantages faced by those less fortunate than them.
This is why it's important to have honest discussions about the differing realities faced by those across society. If we don't understand the context of our actions, we can't understand the impacts of our policies, nor can individuals make realistic choices that optimize for their specific environment.
> discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy
I don't think this is at all feasible. The lived experience of every individual is too unique, with an almost infinite array of immeasurable factors contributing to visible outcomes.
>A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points...Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today
I don't want to sound overly blunt here, but the entire point of my previous comment was that we can encourage disadvantaged young people to take the actions most likely to lead to success while acknowledging that 'the system' is broken and trying to fix it. Where did you get the impression that we can't tell children to study and avoid crime while also telling them that they should be aware of unique challenges they could face?
And, again, I'm not trying to sound blunt, but what poor child doesn't want to be successful? What poor child wouldn't want "an education and a clean record?" I think it's important to consider why many of them won't achieve those goals. To me, ignoring the disadvantages some children face and simply telling them to work hard seems both naive and insensitive, but, most importantly, unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome.
I saw nothing of the sort in chmod600's comment. They even led with "When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do."
Policymakers in Washington and poor immigrants on the streets need different advice, because they control different things. If you are President or Congressperson in the U.S.A, then by all means: let's have a more humane immigration system, and universal health care, and a social safety net.
But if you're a poor immigrant in this country, none of that policy is up to you. Non-citizens don't get to vote; Congresspeople do not listen to them. They risk being deported for the slightest infraction. They often require their employer to sponsor their continued stay in the U.S. They lack financial resources, and oftentimes job skills. They lack cultural capital and a support network.
But they can control several things. They can control where they choose to settle, and move to areas with more opportunity. They can control what they choose to spend money on, and not let anything out the door that isn't absolutely essential for survival. They can control what they do with their time, and allocate that to building new skills and pursuing new opportunities. If they don't do all of those things, they will fall behind, through the cracks, because that's how life is for poor non-citizens in America. It's usually worse for poor non-citizens in the countries they came from, too.
Being able to think systemically, act collectively, and be free from any sort of reprisal or consequence is itself a form of privilege. I thought that chmod600's comment acknowledged reality more than yours did, because not everybody has that privilege. And if you're one of the many people who don't, your best option is to think about your own enlightened self-interest, act according to the options available to you, consider consequences carefully, and not feel too guilty about doing the best that you can.
Yes, thank you. An important element of my argument is to focus on what's in your control.
It's not exclusively about immigrants. In fact, immigrants are less likely to be caught up in notions of fairness because they probably thought to themselves before they came something like "this is going to suck and be unfair, but it will be worth it for my children and grandchildren". So they just make the best of it and compare with the country they came from, not some ideal utopia.
The ability to vote is some tiny amount of control, but democracy is a blunt instrument to actually affect your life in a positive way. Policies and their implementation rarely live up to expectations even when enacted, so people waiting for them just get more discouraged. And a lot of policies that might sound good have bad unintended consequences, which is why there are endless arguments.
I don't mean to give up on policy, just to recognize that it's not going to be the salvation you're waiting for. Sensibly spend some effort to understand issues and vote for good representatives, but don't hold your breath. Focus on ordinary good advice and encouragement that work regardless of the policies.
Most of the goodness in the world is not some well-crafted policy, but ordinary people doing ordinary good things. Be positive and encouraging and give credit when people do those good things, don't be dismissive because you think people will misinterpret the story and craft bad policy out of it.
The way we build on success as a society is when people share their success stories. If every time someone shares their success, the response is instantly about how privileged or lucky they are, then our culture is sick. We should listen to and support those stories.
> If every time someone shares their success, the response is instantly about how privileged or lucky they are, then our culture is sick. We should listen to and support those stories.
I would argue that a culture which attributes success in life to personal effort or choices is sick. This makes people blame themselves for not trying hard enough etc, when in reality there are more decisive factors such as who your parents are (or luck).
I think we already have a culture that exaggerates this aspect. Tried-but-failed stories do not sell very well. Not everyone can be successful and pretending this is case makes people that feeling left out blame them self (or maybe immigrants). I am not advocating a "entirely random" view, just a more nuanced and perhaps more realistic one. Also, I do not think humans will ever stop struggling to achieve things in life, even if we had a society where success where attributed to pure luck.
(Perhaps we should define "success" in this conversation)
I think our impressions are colored about by our different observations of those around us, and this conversation is probably colored by our definitions of success.
This thread kicked off with someone who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class. I am not talking about the fetishization of the hyper-rich.
I do think that with persistence, hard work, and an average allocation of luck most people are capable of achieving a comfortable job and a happy middle class life.
In my observations, a lack of personal responsibility for improving your situation is much more harmful than idealizing the successful. For every person I know held back by some sense of inferiority, blaming themselves, I know 10 stuck in a shitty situation by complacency. I see skilled people in miserable jobs who could be interviewing, people lonely or shitty marriages they should change. I see people who are unhappy with their heath but make no change. Many of these people think, "I am just unlucky" and resign themselves to their situation.
While you don't think people will ever stop struggling, I'm not convinced. People can become disillusion and hopeless if you tell them their effort has no correlation with their success in life.
Some say that the "American Dream" of getting ahead with hard work is a lie, but I think the idea that your efforts have no impact on outcomes is an even bigger lie, and a more dangerous one.
Sad to say, $200k is not middle class. $300k is the line, nowadays. Very few of us are middle class, in the sense that our grandparents could be even on a regular wage. That is, there is essentially no middle class in the US anymore. Income is distributed strictly bimodally.
None of this is accidental: it is the consequence of a specific program started about 1970, outlined in the Powell Memorandum, to grab control of the levers of power. Perhaps the most important factor was using military-grade propaganda methods to get the poorer half of voters voting against their own interests. It has been running for 50 years now, and has been a roaring success.
Kids come out of college now saddled with decades of crushing debt, facing homelessness after one medical or legal hiccup; scared voters are easily manipulated. Half the nation actually voted for an out-and-out con man--twice!--pretending to represent them while doing everything imaginable to grind them down further. Meanwhile the opposition has been forced to pray to the same gods, and depend on hedge funds to finance a half-hearted alternative that has to use a vocabulary created by the propaganda machine.
The amount of money generated by the US economy has gone up and up and up since 1945, but the amount collected by regular people--the less-than-99%-ers--leveled off in 1975. All the rest has gone straight to the pockets of those at the very top, even minting billionaires left and right. Make no mistake, we could all be fantastically better off given pretty small policy changes.
>Sad to say, $200k is not middle class. $300k is the line, nowadays. Very few of us are middle class, in the sense that our grandparents could be even on a regular wage. That is, there is essentially no middle class in the US anymore. Income is distributed strictly bimodally.
If you think <300k/yr is not middle class, I think we are coming from such different places that we cant have a meaningful discussion.
You have displayed just the left-hand lobe of the bimodal US income distribution. The other bump is way off to the right. Middle-class, if there were one anymore, would be at the dip in the middle, where I said, just off-screen. The goal has been to develop and maintain a permanent underclass who are just barely well enough off that any change seems to threaten to knock them into homelessness, yet imagine they are doing lots better than people with brown skin.
The propaganda message is that any improvement for the people at far left (with brown skin, in particular) would be at the expense of people immediately to their right. The other lobe, off-screen, that could afford everything, is invisible. The program has been a fantastic success. Champagne corks are popping every year, but most especially in 2020, when the right lobe shifted quite a ways further right.
I have some relatives in the other lobe. Their lives are very different from ours. Their kids' lives are very different from our kids'.
To track where the money is going, you have to multiply the count in each bucket by the value on the bucket.
And, get the income not reported as "household income". Income of most millionaires does not show up on there. Jeff Bezos's and Trump's incomes are not on there.
Meaning, why bother not just rotting in prison? Or, why stay in school when it will make no difference anyway? When you and I were kids, one hourly wage was enough raise a family on, and two (often enough the kid's) to send them to college. Now that is impossible. They graduate today with a lifetime of debt.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, both per capita and in absolute numbers (even counting, e.g., Chinese concentration camps). Cities have quotas now, where they are obliged to send a specific number to prison each year to maintain their contract. The prisons and police forces cost much more to operate than would be needed to lift every American out of poverty.
When you and I were young, no city police force had a billion dollar budget. Crime rates plummeted about 18 years after we stopped poisoning everyone with lead, so there is much less legitimate work for the police. They keep busy, though.
A culture that didn't do that at all would of course be doomed to failure. If people think it's all about luck, they won't make an effort. In reality it's of course not only about luck at all.
Yes you do need lucky genetics (and insane amounts of hard work) if you want to join the NBA, but if you're willing to work hard and make sacrifices it's more than enough to be born average (not too poor, not too sick), you'll be able to have a very decent life.
Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not realistic at a population level and you should not promote that as a solution there, but individuals can and do achieve despite adversity. Telling people that they are real humans that can make decisions and do things is healthy and you don't want to take that away. It's a line you need to walk but only going with the population level approach has a lot of downsides.
> When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do (which is not always wise) rather than just what they should do.
> But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.
This exact dichotomy comes up when I give advice. I have started calling it 'advice for persons' vs 'advice for peoples' (the grammatical peculiarity is on purpose). Both are often completely different.
OP's advice is great for persons. It doesn't work for policy making which is decidedly about peoples. But, I don't think that was its intention to begin with.
Seems high crime rate decreases the efficiency and well being of societies a lot.
The person can't live in a dense area and must have a car, to avoid other people since they are potentially dangerous. Also their workplace is in a dangerous area. So a large portion of their money goes to transportation and housing.
What if they were just as poor but the crime rate in general was just lower? They could live in dense housing and use public transport all day, as could the spouse and the kids.
To an outsider, this seems like a really big factor.
Thank you for this response.
As a first generation immigrant from a third world country, I don't understand this phenomenon of lightly chastising anyone who doesn't attribute their success to privilege, as if afraid someone might be inspired and succeed in something. I suppose its all a matter of perspective. If you haven't experienced poverty in the third world, its easy to whine about privilege and inequality in the USA. If you have experienced it, then you already know life is not fair and there is always someone better off than you.
I'm an immmigrant from a 3rd world country as well - I understand the phenomenon perfectly - it's not about "chastising anyone who doesn't attribute their success to privilege" - it's just pointing out the survivorship bias that's inherent in "If I made it through hard work, anyone can, if they just work hard". Implicit in that statement is that those who do not make it are lazy - this is just not true, but it also co-opts the "Just-world" fallacy.
I am doing better than the average American, in large part, because I'm not burdened by the things that hinder the average American (hyper-infation is one way of easily getting rid of your student loan, but the other aspects of your life will be terrible - I do not recommend it)
> If you haven't experienced poverty in the third world, its easy to whine about privilege and inequality in the USA. If you have experienced it, then you already know life is not fair and there is always someone better off than you.
Shouldn't it be a point of pride - that the USA has less inequality than third world countries. Americans should absolutely "whine" about it, and avoid moving closer to third-world standards. That should be taken as well as saying "If you haven't been detained for months without trial in the freezing gulags, it's easy to whine about mass surveillance and unlawful arrests in the USA".
> But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.
I don't get it, do you think the system is fair? Do you think it's fine to have so many homeless people in the US because they were given a fair chance? Do you think it's fair that you can go bankrupt due to a medical issue?
I disagree, because people often focus on success story to argue that we don’t need to improve the situation, the market will figure out itself, and that’s what we’re seeing at play.
The opposite problem can also happen, where people focus on unfairness instead of taking advantage of the opportunities that they have. That probably causes more actual harm.
It depends on the situation, of course. Slavery was so oppressive that it needed to be abolished before any other progress could happen. But that's just not the situation today -- lots of progress can happen without policy changes. I know that policy makers (or politically-obsessed people) like to believe that policy is everything, but it's really not. Policy is important but it's just one piece of a complex social system.
3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either.
I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I just mean to say that you can't discount the importance of hard work and good judgement. The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.
On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves".
It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick.
Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.
Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.
This is a good framing for thinking about policy, but if you were talking to an individual company that seemed not to be working hard or executing on their goals, then you would give them all the standard advice about correcting that behavior.
This difference between individual advice and group-level policymaking (mentioned elsewhere in this thread by chmod600) accounts for a lot of talking past one another in political debates. They are two totally separate levels of analysis.
I like your analogy but I’m not sure it’s perfect. In the finance world I don’t think anyone would presume to say more work === more success. There is a talent component that is not perfectly replicable across hedge funds. BUT in real life more work very often does equal more success because so many careers really do not require a high level of ‘talent’.
Your counter argument seems to imply that people who work in finance don't share the same reality as the rest of us. I think that plays into a fundamental human error; for some reason when looking at individual industries we can see that the people can put in more or less the same amount of effort and get different results, but on a national scale we attribute effort much more highly, to the point we call losers lazy.
To be clear I'm not saying there isn't a level of difference in talent or work ethic; what I'm arguing is that viewing the world that way makes for terrible government policy. When someone says something like "welfare makes people lazy", they are making the mistake you are. Somehow the imaginary "real life work" is directly correlated with effort, but actual finance jobs are not.
Certainly, ingredients such as hard work and talent help make success more likely.
There are successful companies and products that don't seem to have a lot of either behind them beyond the initial work to find a successful niche, that they've leveraged to great success. And companies and projects have failed despite having both of those because of circumstances outside of their control.
Just like people, companies are products of their environment. Why -doesn't- someone work hard? Or make the right choices? Because either of their environment, what they've learned, or because of who they were born as. Neither of those is under their control. And even if they do, and it doesn't pan out, why didn't it pan out? Again, factors outside of their control.
Judging from the folks I know in the finance industry, they would probably say 'those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard"'. Bloomberg built a massive business off the idea that finance professionals need to be constantly informed about everything that goes on in the markets or else they'll be one of the losers.
Perhaps there are some fund managers out there that are just like "Yep, it's a rigged system, I'm going to be the one getting rich off rigging it", but I haven't met one personally yet.
I think most people here are guily of double-think. Either you believe in capital punishment, or you believe in universal income, the third option is hypocracy.
If you don't believe in state sanctioned murder, then we have to clothe and feed and house people that commited horrible crimes.
Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? Being useless is not a crime.
Also i dispute this qualification as lazy - some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.
> Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job?
The State actively deprived the rapist of their ability to act autonomously to care for themselves, so they are obligated to do so on their behalf. The State (typically) does not actively deprive an innocent person who can't find a job of their autonomy. (There are some arguable scenarios in which they do, however, such as excessive fines, but obligation to pay those are dependent on ability, and feeding ones-self supercedes that in most jurisdictions.)
> some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.
It is ethical to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. It's not as clearly ethical to force someone else to care for those who are unable to care for themselves.
And my point is that you are making a false equivalence. The prisoner is not in the same position as a free person. If the government deprives a person of all of their freedom, and then tells them "work or die", that's slavery.
A free has has to eat, because of the nature of the universe, but he is free. He can choose his job, has recourses with his employers, etc.
Your statement implies that it's the government which gives everyone the deal "work or starve", but that's simply not the case. The free man is simply existing in the world, surviving as he sees fit. By taking away his capability to survive on his own, you have the ethical responsibility to feed him.
It sounds like you are not aware of all the 'innovation' UK has explored in 16-18th century, where people had to pay for being in jail, were charged for being judged, we had debt prisons and people ran their business from them! Also we gave cocaine to kids when their teeth hurt.
These ideas are preposterous by modern standards, but people can and have come up with arrangements where a person works from jail without becoming a slave.
Can a 'free man' survive 'however he sees fit'?
You can't even walk around 'freely', some guy in Uk was trying to cross the country naked and spent 2 years in prison.
Build a house in the woods, plow the land, hunt without a license, and someone will show up to deal with you. Sing a song in the street? You are breaking copyright and some public nuisance or antisocial behaviour laws. You built something with your own hands and sold it? Might have broken some patents.
About the only thing a free man may do is work for a man freer than him. I appreciate we have a civilised society, but compared to free day of olde, it's a total straigh jacket.
So no, these situations are not equivalent but they are comparable enough that I don't buy the categorical moral judgement you are casting.
Either the government allows the prisoner to go free 8 hours a day to make a living he sees fit, or the government dictates how the prisoner labors. In the first case, the prisoner is not a prisoner but becomes a free man. The second case is slavery.
I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.
When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable Steve to live his desired lifestyle of leisure, hookers and booze.
However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?
Because some of the money also goes to Sally who genuinely needs help. I don't understand how you can be okay with people starving or working themselves to death to survive and provide for their families, just because others do things you disapprove of.
You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.
This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.
“ The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways”
I think the idea is that if the government took less money, there would be more money in the hands of people to help take care of local misery.
The government doesn't generally tax poor people much, so most tax savings benefit those that can better afford life already. The whole purpose of taxes is to take enough from the ones that are still doing okay and redistribute it to stuff that more wealthy people wouldn't necessarily choose to spend it on, but that are still a net benefit to society over other causes.
So, say government increases the income limit for one of the lower tax brackets by $5,000. That's great for people who make more than that, which btw isn't all poor people, but at the same time it also gives more money to everyone who was already doing okay. Meaning inflation will soon eat up the extra money and we're right back where we started.
In order to help the poor with upgrading to non-poor, the government has to explicitly avoid extending that benefit to the rest of society, has to continue taking from middle and upper income people. It needs to be targeted, and tax cuts are a great way to target middle/upper classes while helping poor people less.
It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)
If my alcoholic friend from college came to me because he was short on rent or needed to buy them groceries, I wouldn't give them $100. I'd offer to buy them groceries or write a check to the landlord directly.
The government can do the same thing. If someone needs healthcare or education and can't afford it, pay for the healthcare or education. A social net doesn't mean a blank check.
What if he blew his budget buying cable TV and soda? I lived in poverty, and had many aquaintances who were also in poverty. Everyone had children, and so many of them had $30-40k a year in benefits (welfare). Everyone had gaming consoles and very large modern TVs and computers, endless soda on tap (that is all they would drink), and everyone had cable TV and bought drugs (cocaine, weed)...and cigarettes. Everyone I knew. This was just their life with no serious ambitions. I forgot to mention that most households pulling in government benefits were engaged in fraud. Often the fraud was a live-boyfriend who contributed money but who's income was not counted on the mothers' benefit calculation because she claimed to live alone with her children.
Before you make soap box comments you should be aware of reality. You might think I'm arguing against welfare benefits but I am not. The whole time I watched this state of affairs I seethed because it was middle class tax payers making up the difference in pay for walmart and other corporations who pay poverty wages.
The $100 Steve asked me to borrow will also turn directly into housing. He said that he needs it to meet his rent, and he's not lying: he will use it to pay his rent. Nevertheless, that just enables him to continue his hookers and booze habit.
If he can continue to both pay his rent and continue [his habits that you disagree with], is there a problem? Is the problem that Steve won't pay you back, or that he won't pay you back because he spent money on [habits that you disagree with]?
No, but the point is that when my friends ask me for help, I can use the circumstances under which they got themselves into needing help in my decision of whether I help them, and whether there is any moral obligation on me to help them. With government, there is no such option: they will take my money by force, use it for anything at all that they might possibly want, and all I can say is something on the order of one or two bits of feedback every 4-5 years.
Not enough to make it a serious problem. But then I'm neither a Puritanical moralist nor a "better 10 (or 100) good people starve than one bad person gets benefits", either.
If society agrees to give $100 to the military you have no say in how they spend it.
If society agrees to give $100 to Steve then you have no say in how that move is spent.
If you think it's better not to give to Steve anything and you lobby to change the law and are successful. When Andre is affected by this change he decides to make up the difference by breaking into your place and killing you. At least Steve doesn't have his hookers right?
Interesting to hear this, when I modeled “Steve” after two people I personally know. One is my family member, and the other is my middle school acquaintance. Their lifestyle is exactly enabled by the money they get from government. Should I believe you, or my own lying eyes?
Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.
What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.
Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.
That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.
I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support.
Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.
Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.
Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?
I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.
Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).
In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.
Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".
Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people.
Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.
So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).
The empty houses in UK and especially London is a well-known and researched problem, they are prime real estate where the owner decided that renting them out is not worth the trouble, they are just land-banking and waiting for their 'investment' to grow. Many (of those) owners don't even live in UK.
We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.
The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.
Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.
Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?
Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?
That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.
The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years
> By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty
I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.
Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.
All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.
Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?
In the US, even before the 2008 the percentage poverty rate was higher than the 1970's. It was about to come down lower than the 1970's just before the pandemic hit. After the pandemic I presume we will be back to worse than the 1970's rate. But the poverty rate measure has been flat or worse for 50 years.
However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.
If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).
"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).
Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.
Homelessness is obviously increasing though it’s difficult to measure with precision. Homelessness is worse than poverty and homeless aren’t even counted in official poverty calculations. The census can’t sample them.
It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.
As someone who doesn't live on the west coast and rarely interacts with homeless people, could you explain how this is "obvious" if there's no measure of it?
The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.
I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.
As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).
Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?
You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.
Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.
You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.
Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.
And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.
Ah yes, the good old: 'this guy dares criticise the status quo, must be a socialist"!
You post is narrow minded and presumptious - I am not socialist, we don't have rent controls in London, and there are economic terms other than 'socialist' and 'capitalist'. Try 'Shumpeterian'
But if you want to go on believing that the only choices are socialism or economic collapse every 8 years, go on.
About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year.
An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.
About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.
So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)
Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.
It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend.
We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow.
Most of the people I know who don't work who are sometimes dismissed as lazy have mental issues. In the family of ADHD, or anxiety. Unable to focus on pursuing a particular path long enough for it to pay off. Easily frustrated and prone to giving up when frustrated. And often a crippling doubt that they're capable of doing anything worth being paid for in the first place.
I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.
> Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.
Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.
The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all.
You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.
"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."
Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?
Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
I disagree, and I think most people disagree. This is the ant and the grasshopper, man. Most people are not inclined to enslave the ant for the benefit of the grasshopper.
For some definition of "deserving", I would agree. Certainly, everyone should have the tools and opportunities they need to build the life they want.
Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.
> The world has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone.
this is kind of reductive claim. in one sense, it's trivially true that the earth has more raw resources than humans can consume even over the course of centuries. AFAIK it's also true that, under the current system of organization, the global economy produces enough finished goods to feed, clothe, and house everyone (though people often bring up logistical caveats here, eg, distributing stuff in places where there are no paved roads or airfields).
the real question here is whether we would still have that quantity of finished goods under a different system of organization with different incentives. to be clear, I don't discount the possibility that we might have even more! but it seems more likely to me that people would simply produce less stuff if they didn't get to keep the surplus by default.
Just like how that increase in marginal tax rate prevents anyone from climbing into the upper tax brackets (and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%), eh?
Of course people can keep the surplus. Some of it. But we're a far, far cry from the point where people will stop working when only getting a percentage of their labor's worth (or their parent's labor's worth, as is often the case).
> and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%
some caveats apply to this offhand quip (very different tax laws and perhaps even widespread evasion meant almost no one was paying an effective tax of 90%, regardless of actual income). I suspect you know this.
I'm sure there's a lot of slack in the tax brackets. I doubt we are close to a laffer curve inflection point. all I'm saying is I'm not convinced by the style of argument that goes "we already have enough food for everyone; we just need to radically reorganize the economy and then no one will go hungry!". more analysis is needed.
> and why we never had millionaires back when the top bracket was > 90%
Over 20% of the money in circulation in the US was printed last year. i.e. the pot is much bigger now. Also, while tax rates were high back then, loopholes were proportionately larger!
The kind of poverty where you starve and have to wear rags is becoming rare even in Africa. From this point of view, the system has clearly worked and the pendulum even went too far, with obesity becoming a serious problem in places that aren't typically considered rich (Mexico, Brazil).
Housing is a different problem. We have a housing crisis because many people want to live in a few select urban hotspots of the world.
This statement reads to me the same as something like "Computers have the resources to find the cure for cancer, but we've chosen not to find that cure." You're using the word "chosen" as if we know how to build the system you're describing. Our understanding of technology is sufficiently advanced to build a system that feeds, clothes and houses everyone, but our understanding of social sciences is not there yet.
We only have that much because of the incentive to produce. Redistribute, by compulsion, the fruits of one’s labors and most will soon stop laboring. I may be able to support >10, but compel me to and my productivity will plummet.
Sustainable resources? Food production relies heavily on fossil fuels, for example. But I suspect the same people who make that claim you make also make the claim that it would be easy to solve the climate crisis, we'd just have to act more sensibly.
If one were to redistribute all of the top 5%'s wealth at once:
- it wouldn't be liquid, so you'd be giving part ownership in assets
- the value would be slightly less than median yearly income per recipient. At a pretty sizeable 5% average return, the individuals would net about $2,000 a year.
- if they chose to sell the assets, they would end up with about one year's median income and then it's gone
I'm not sure how much money you think lives up at the top, but redistributing it is not sustainable, and it's certainly not enough to magically pull everyone out of poverty indefinitely. (Or even for very long, at that.)
There are a ton of reasonable discussions to be had about imbalanced power structures between socioeconomic groups, but this whole redistribution thing is just a fantasy.
One can look at a million/billionaire and say, "oh, this person has 50 cars. That's way too many cars for one person to have! Let's give them away to people who actually need cars!" So you seize them and give them away—along with the other 12,000 super wealthy people that own 50 or more cars—and then you have... 200,000 people who still don't have cars.
For groups that preach so frequently about global and ecological sustainability, there's a disturbing blind spot for economic sustainability. I think that's more a feature of envy than responsibility, unfortunately.
> For groups that preach so frequently about global and ecological sustainability, there's a disturbing blind spot for economic sustainability
What you've done is described a position ("redistributing all of the top 5%'s wealth at once"), described the problems with it, and then criticized my obvious blind spots due to this oversight. Forgotten in this tale is that I never held that position in the first place! You are criticizing your own invented argument.
Also, even if I did favor redistributing all wealth in the top 5% of families, a simple back-of-napkin calculation shows that your argument is wrong.
107 * 10^12 (total networth of US households [0]) * 0.619 (share owned by top 5% [0]) * 0.05 (rate of return) / (315*10^6 (population of US)) = $10k/yr for every person in the US just off of the returns from that wealth, which is 5x your estimate. The US Census poverty threshold is making below $13k/yr. If that wealth was held for you until you were 18, that would be every young person starting their life with $180k in savings, which is another $9k/yr with 0.05 rate of return.
Obviously, there's a whole host of issues with this, including some of the ones you mentioned, and (of course) price inflation, but I am not sure how you calculated your numbers.
> I'm not sure how much money you think lives up at the top, but redistributing it is not sustainable, and it's certainly not enough to magically pull everyone out of poverty indefinitely.
People just do not understand this. You could take away every penny from every billionaire in this country. If you sold everything they had, you would not have enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. And now the money is gone; you can no longer collect tax from the ex-wealthy.
Nevertheless, "just tax the rich" is treated as the solution to all problems. I guess people hear all the talk about the "top one tenth of one percent" and they imagine literally bottomless bank accounts.
The notion that children don't deserve the spoils of their parents is really crazy to me. Parents work so that they can give their children a better life. Heck, they even choose their partners to maximize odds for a better life for their offspring (wealth, good genes, and so on - it does not even depend on capitalism).
To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).
1 rich person saving his money so his 3 children never have to work is bad for the economy.
It's better the 1 rich person is forced to consume that in his lifetime. By doing so that money is redistributed back to the economy, and his 3 kids are also productive.
In scenario 1 only 1 out 4 people work. In scenario 2, 4 out of 4 people work.
Also - it's hypocritical for 'pull yourself by your bootstraps' for children born poor, and 'guaranteed basic income' for children born rich. That is more dehumanizing than not being allowed to pass off inheritance.
Its hard for me to imagine being so full of envy that you would like to see the children of rich people stripped of everything they have. Equality means nothing if you achieve it by pulling everyone down to the lowest level.
> 1 rich person saving his money so his 3 children never have to work is bad for the economy.
"Your rights are bad for the economy, we are taking everything from you. Back to work, pleb".
> Its hard for me to imagine being so full of envy that you would like to see the children of rich people stripped of everything they have.
I think you misread the sentiment. What a lot of us would like to see is a more meritocratic system, where children start off on more equal footing and either earn their wealth or not. But inherited works against that. It is difficult to listen to arguments against taxing the wealthy heavily "because they earned it" while at the same time hearing support for what amounts to aristocracy.
Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up. This isn't a footrace, and it's not a zero sum game. When you say something like "we need to take money away from rich kids so they have to work like everyone else", you're doing nothing but harm. You may feel the people you're harming have it coming, but that's still what you're doing.
The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.
This is all beside the pont anyway. Increasing tax revenue will not solve any of the problems you are trying to solve. As I said elsewhere, you could tax 100% of every billionaire in this country, leaving them homeless, and you would not have collected enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. You could sell off your entire "aristocracy" and it wouldn't make a dent. The strategy of "just spend more money" does not work.
> Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up.
And how are we to do that without taking money from somewhere and using it to help people up?
> The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.
Case in point. You can't take money away from rich kids via inheritance tax (nevermind that they'd still have innumerable advantages from growing up in a wealthy household), you can't tax the wealthy, but you're somehow supposed to help poor children up anyway. Who's paying for that?
Furthermore, I disagree with the statement on the grounds that national infrastructure and protections are doubtless large contributors to anyone being able to amass that kind of wealth in the first place, therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that a portion of that wealth be contributed back.
Children already start of pretty well in most parts of the world. Every child gets an education, for example.
I think you would find that to make everything equal, you would have to take children away from their parents at an early age. Because having caring, loving parents is also an advantage. At least so far not all kids in a school turn out the same, even thought they all have the same teachers and lessons. Must be the parents that make the difference.
I don't think that would be desirable. I don't want my children to be raised in a government institution to make them exactly the same as everybody else, just for the sake of an arbitrary metric ("equality" measured in some arbitrarily chosen terms).
In fact why not get rid of parents altogether, and create children in labs? I bet that is the socialist dream fulfilled.
You misunderstand the nature of money. Money means society owns something to the holder of the money. By not spending money, society is temporarily richer.
Also, sorry, but I don't care how productive other people's kids are, or "the economy". I care about the well-being of my kids. yes, I want everybody to be happy if possible, but my kids have priority to me.
And what exactly is "hypocritical"? What are you referring to? You assume everybody should have the same starting position in life, and I reject that notion.
Children of course are not at fault for the actions of their parents (like if they are drug addicts and have an unwanted child they can't afford, the child is not to blame - but neither are other people's children or parents). But that doesn't mean every child should automatically get the same "starting money". This is not a game of monopoly.
As I said - people compete to give their children the best odds. That is not even unique to humans, it is true for all of nature.
If you take that away, why bother with anything? Why should you bother to get a good job to be able to support your family? Just fuck and live the good life, and dump your children on society to be taken care of.
Already in the west everybody gets a pretty good deal in the form of an education.
When rich person pays others to, let's say, build a luxurious castle, the money is both redistributed back to the economy AND the castle is there to use, for a few centuries at least.
That's how investing* makes the society wealthier over time, and promoting consumption instead is nuts.
* There is a caveat that it should be a new investment rather than a purchase of the existing one, the latter is zero-sum.
You're right. We should kick that kid out on the street, sell all his belongings, and write a check to ever american for a fat 10 cents. Problem solved.
> So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich?
This is such a twisting of my words I am not even sure how to respond. Are you saying the only way out of poverty is to steal everything you want from the rich?
Why don't parents who work hard to give their children a good live deserve to do so? It is not their fault if other people have children while they are poor.
Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?
There's an extra layer of nuance missing in your reply. 3 of the 5 factors boil down to "op made good decisions and worked hard" AS A TEENAGER. OP's formula won't work for a 30-year old who is trying to work equally hard and making equally good decisions... if they are saddled with poor educational qualifications, kids to take care of, and/or a criminal history. At which point, we as a society are faced with 2 options:
1. We can tell them it's their own fault for not making great decisions when they were teenagers, and therefore, they deserve to remain stuck in a poverty trap for the rest of their lives
2. Or, we can acknowledge that they are now in a situation where hard work alone is unlikely to solve their problems. And we can provide them with the tools they need to help themselves, and also become more valuable assets to society. For example, subsidized/free college or job training. Free/subsidized childcare. Safe living environments. Better access to healthcare. Better public transit so they can actually get to work. Etc
The way I see it is that we should optimize less for the theory of pure agency. It's like the Polgar sisters - bootstrapping with structure yields benefits.
So it's less about "refuse to work to better themselves" and more about correctly placing incentives on the growth path for individuals so that they become the kind of people who want to "better themselves".
Of course there are those who, provided any amount of support, will not become productive individuals and it makes sense to continuously evaluate for growth.
But it is beneficial to society and to each participant to offer a minimum childhood to adulthood transition experience that optimizes for productive adults.
Of course, this is usually only important for the poor because most wealthier people are better at bringing up children.
3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to being able to make the right decision because of outside factors. In this case, the aunt. Without that single person, I imagine things might have been different.
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.
3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..."
The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."
I think the ones you are thinking of are those that specifically called out as being made as a child or only just out of childhood. Yes people who work hard in school or university should be rewarded (both in principle and because, as a practical matter, they make a financially greater contribution to society). But the converse to that doesn't fully hold: people that make bad decisions as a child should still be given a chance to redeem themselves, somehow, later in life.
The common mistake here, which I think you mostly avoided but didn't make explicit, is to believe that if someone didn't make it they didn't work hard or have good judgment.
It's also problematic how little good judgment we require of young people coming from most backgrounds, compared to underprivileged ones. There is also a common and mostly false trope that many/most poor people are lazy and that is why they are poor. The truth is at minimum more nuanced than that.
I agree with you, and I appreciate that you have extended a bit of generosity.
Currently, hard work is a prequisite. In order to achieve equility of opportunity, which would allow anyone to succeed, we need to provide for the "unlucky" scenarios people fall into. Access to childcare and education are two big things in particular that should be improved.
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.
At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?
Lots of people wake up and never evaluate their life at all. People win the lottery and end up homeless with a drug addiction. If millions of dollars can't help them, do you think the government should keep writing those people checks?
This is a strawman argument, because this is in no way representative of the many people who live in poverty, but I’ll address it because it doesn’t change my final opinion:
Yes, because obviously what someone who won (and lost) millions of dollars needs is not money, but help and support.
Not to mention, by the construction of your own strawman, if they’ve won such a jackpot they’ve probably also then paid millions in taxes.
I don't see how this is a strawman. My argument is an existence proof. There exists people who cannot be lifted out of poverty by giving them money. I can trivially prove my claim by giving examples of such people[1]. I never claimed that all or most people are like this. But its undeniable that some people are simply irresponsible / lazy.
"Some people" is not "all people" and certainly not "almost all" people or even "most people".
I'm curious to know your position on those who are homeless -- as if mental illness, systemic neglect, and abuse combined with skyrocketing housing costs such that even otherwise-able people are just a few missed paychecks away from foreclosure) are incidental, and it's really a result of being "lazy".
I don't have any personal experiences with homeless people, but my understanding is that the vast majority of the homeless suffer from serious mental illness / addiction. I think that's a categorically different thing than those unwilling to improve themselves (which I do have personal experience with).
Being homeless would rob nearly every opportunity from you. I don't think it would be fair to dismiss those people as lazy, if all the hard work in the world wouldn't do them any good.
> 3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard"
One of those "decisions" was avoiding prison. OP says people call him privileged, so he probably didn't belong to a race that is jailed disproportionately for crimes that white people are let off for.
> There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy"
> we as a society should do more to help people who are caught in a poverty trap, especially because of poor decisions made when they were teenagers. Just because someone ran a 4-minute-mile doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so.
Yes. Thank you. Lots of people start out poor and make it out. I did. Many friends did. But just as many did not. And it had _zero_ to do with "hard work". Almost all of it had to with the lack of a robust safety need and the need to (endlessly) prioritize survival.
In my experience, an individual who believes that success is the result of hard work will end up being more successful than a similar individual who believes that success is primarily due to starting conditions or luck.
At the same time, government policies that acknowledge that success is hugely dependent on starting conditions and luck seem to result in more equitable societies. (i.e. higher Gini coefficient or Shorrocks index)
I don’t think there's an inherent conflict between those perspectives -- it's boiling them down to two-dimensional strawman arguments that makes them look that way.
Fully agreed. At an individual level, there are often decisions you can make regarding career choices, saving, when to have children, etc. that can greatly impact your financial situation down the line.
At a societal level, not every single person can be a software engineer, UI designer, realtor, etc. And additionally some fraction of people simply will make mistakes or not-strictly-optimal decisions. It’s a balancing act recognizing that individual decisions can have an impact on outcomes, that some portion of people will still suffer anyway, and alleviating that suffering as much as possible without creating a cycle of dependence/socializing the costs of easily fixed issues.
If you're talking to the people in the professional class already, your points are valid. If you're talking to someone in OP's situation back then, your points are dispiriting. I know you didn't mean it that way, but it is important to a person who is in a disadvantaged situation to not hear well-meaning members of the professional class saying what sounds like, "you can't make your situation better until the whole system is changed". I think OP's statement of "I made it and you can too" was clearly aimed, not at you or me probably, but a person in the same situation that OP was in years ago.
The trick is separating "Don't give up" from "it's your fault if you haven't escpaed poverty."
Cause it's also dispiriting to have worked your ass off for 10+ years and still be poor and have someone telling you if you were trying hard enough you would be in a different position.
As I come back to this again I guess here's what I think it's really about:
The implication that there's some correlation between how hard you work and poverty. But most poor people I know work way harder than most "professional" people I know. If there's a correlation, it seems to me to be the reverse, poor people are, by neccessity to survive, as a general rule hustling a lot harder than wealthier people.
Does it really help to inform someone sharing a story of their privation that they could have had it worse? I mean I am on board with the notion that there are various aspects of privilege, and that someone who had it hard in some dimension might have some privilege in others. But it doesn't seem like an appropriate response in this context.
Reeling in out of control price increases on the most important expenses like health care, education and housing would do more to improve the lot of the poor than any redistribution scheme.
Now, redistribution may be a necessary part of lowering costs. Like establishing government run health care to control cost increases and investing in public universities to radically reduce or eliminate tuition.
This approach helps everyone, but disproportionately helps the poor. And controlling costs will help the poor more in the long run, I believe, than any redistribution scheme that doesn't address skyrocketing costs.
“Wise enough” is not quite the word for some of these points, “self-controlled enough” is. And giving bail-outs, either to individuals or big corporations, will always distort their incentives to take more risks, save less, spend more, and generally act more selfishly. If you’re going to give bail-outs, at least make sure you give more to responsible, “wise enough” people, or your recipients will experience a shrewd lapse of judgement.
Similar story I'm now late 30s; father left when i was 2 died of aids when I was 6
Mother washed dishes then was unemployed from age 12-now and we bounced around her boyfriends houses
My metric (edit: for myself) "have you been poor" is gathering extra condiments from a gas station and having mustard on bread for a meal. We had food stamps, and a small social security check. I always had a bed, and food, but barely and i was aware how close we were as we midnight moved at least once.
I got my college degrees through federal grants and employer sponsorship; now making north of 200k I reflect on how privileged I am to get here. My mother kept me in an upper middle class public school system using a po box, I'm a white man who loved computers in the 90s. I ended up with a social network and a background that looks upper middle class.
I don't subscribe to that "I made it and so can you" I see my story as a I had privilege, how can we make privilege into equity.
Equity should operate just as much, if not more so, by boosting people up than by cutting people down. It should also favor the individual and small business over large megacorporations.
I fear that the concept of equity presents a real possibility of a race to the bottom if we're not careful to prevent a Harrison Bergeron situation. That doesn't mean I think we should avoid equity, just that we should be cognizant of the potential pitfalls along the way to determining the exact implementation.
Your fear is well-founded, that's already what is happening. Boston Public Schools, for example, just suspended placements in AP courses for all students out of equity concerns.
It turns out it's much easier to achieve equity by pushing people down (no more AP courses for anyone) than by lifting people up (getting more black and latino students into AP courses).
>just suspended placements in AP courses for all students out of equity concerns.
The "ruling" class were angry that the plumbers' kids weren't paying a full 4yr of dues to the state colleges so now they're making it so you need to go to private school if you want to get a head start at college gen-eds. And they sold the idea to the masses in the name of making all the animals equal.
I'm being cynical. More likely the people responsible just don't know or care and pushing everybody down is just the easiest way to appease the pro-equity crowd.
"Equity should operate just as much, if not more so, by boosting people up than by cutting people down."
This is central to the whole problem with this concept of "equity". If the implementation, as you say, _at all_ involves cutting someone down, then it's morally bankrupt. Who decides who gets cut down? Does the person being cut down have a voice? Are they told how they're supposed to feel about it? Is that not creating a newly marginalized group? This will lead to lots of division, and understandably so.
There's a lot of truth to the adage "two wrongs don't make a right". Equity seems to be about saying that everyone should have the same outcome, by force if necessary.
This is a very reasonable thing to fear. The concept of "уравниловка" in Russian exists precisely because the government tried to do just that in many cases. Making everyone the same (in terms of equality of outcomes) is a lot easier to do by making all the outcomes bad.
I should note that "equity" need not mean "equality of outcomes", but when pressed for how one evaluates "equity" far too many proponents fall back to "equality (and proportionality) of outcomes" in practice....
> My metric for "have you been poor" is gathering extra condiments from a gas station and having mustard on bread for a meal.
Do you really mean that or is that hyperbole? Because if you really mean that, thats a bit gate keeperish, isn't it? What if someone had their own mustard but dinner was still bread mustard? Its a ridiculous example, I know, but so is this yardstick.
Metric for myself; not others. I can't pretend to know what "line" people have in their mind that gives them anxiety around money. (I'll edit for clarity)
It ends up being a discussion point with my wife for lots of topics where I'm not picky about the quality of food because it's not mustard on bread.
Oh in that case I understand your trauma. But you need to understand that it is trauma and not facts of life. I am, for the past few years, learning how to be happy. I realized that most of my life training has been around learning how to survive because that's how it is where I was born. And because that's all I knew, I thought that was somehow superior. Our media also tries very hard to glamorize "struggling", there are no stories about how to be happy because it will be laughed out of room. It will be counted as either "privileged people being privileged" or they will tie it to family/love as the only posed answer.
Seriously man, I want to be happy and nobody out there wants to tell me how. I am slowly discovering it for myself, but I feel like this is a deficiency in our media.
I did not comment upon their trauma at all. Just that I think it is trauma. I have gone through my share of poverty without the first world safety nets. That is what I was talking about.
I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it.
I made it and you can too.
It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's smart and ambitious and quite lucky.
As someone who came from a fairly poor background (not half as as bad as the OP to be fair) and who has managed to "break out" I can say for sure that looking back I had a ton of lucky breaks - but, and this to me is crucial, only after I stopped worrying about what might go wrong and focus on what I could do right. If I had predicated my success on somehow getting lucky I don't think I would have made it.
So to me - and not wanting to speak for the OP of course - but the way I look at this is that the simple encouragement of "I made it and you can too" is more motivating than "I made it but then again looking back I had a ton of lucky coincidences that you probably won't have so, sure, try it, but don't expect success" :)
I only think of it as “failure is understandable and doesn’t reflect on you as a person” - but you bring up a good point. I have no patience for people who say “because I made it everyone else can too” which is a really common attitude. People play up their adversity (understandable; it’s the adversity one has had) and downplay their advantages. Lack of empathy and help for those struggling is unacceptable to me. As people succeed they tend to stop congregating around those that don’t, and I think that’s fine but to sit around those successful and vote against policies to help those not succeeding is to me a moral failing.
For those struggling through poverty - one must know that one CAN succeed, or else you end up in a psychological hole waiting for the next nibble of luck. A tempered balance of both optimism and also a real social safety net seems like the best of both worlds to me.
As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same?
I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people even if it’s a long shot.
For all those reading this who are in a bad place financially or otherwise - YOU CAN DO IT! Do not listen to nay sayers and just do your best (or better yet, do even better - you can never really know your own limits/potential unless you try). It’s not a done deal, but is better than the alternative.
If you read "you can do it" as encouragement to others in the same situation, it's a good thing. When you read it as a justification for why we shouldn't expand the social net, it's pretty terrible. No one is trying to belittle OP's accomplishments, but "I did it and you can too" sounds like a line from an anti-welfare politician so it shouldn't be surprising that many people take issue with it.
Agreed. "It can be done" would be a more appropriate phrasing, IMO. I dug myself out of worse circumstances than OP described, but it took a lot of luck, persistence, and a good amount of risk taking to get there. I guess it helped that I was at a point where I didn't have much to lose, so, risk taking seemed less risky than staying where I was.
OPs context does not touch on safety nets at all, so where are you getting this from?
Seems like such thinking is a symptom of our current political BS. Having experienced some pretty crappy times, would you honestly think I’d oppose NOT subjecting others to the same misery?! Of course not, no one should experience these and everyone deserves basic dignity.
It’s just the social context in the US right now and for better or worse, this is often a very US-centric forum. “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and you can too” is very strongly associated with the political view that people should receive minimal/no help from the government. It’s a talking point by that side and one that is heavily parodied/mocked by the other side. You can’t use a phrase like that without many people seeing a connection - as seen in this comment section.
For what it’s worth, I don’t actually know of an implemented system that is sufficient in preventing/mitigating enough of the poverty. (EDIT: if we had basic income, that would probably do it, without means testing/etc) US situation is unbelievable in that regard - not only do we not have a safety net to speak of, our medical care system is a fast track to poverty and bankruptcy.
I don't think the point is to belittle their accomplishments, but rather a realistic take on poverty. A lot of people try really hard, and still cannot get out of poverty.
This is something we as a society need to deal with, and not disregard a systematic problem with anecdotal success stories and saying "You can too!"
> why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same?
It is very sad if you ask me. Some people hold the worldview that becoming poor and staying poor are things entirely outside of one's own control. Success stories threaten that worldview, so people admonish those who "made it" and remind them that they are nothing but lucky.
How do you keep believing "YOU CAN DO IT"? I have been looking for stable employment for three years, only finding temporary gigs or underemployment. The past year, I've pretty much given up. I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what.
Today I am forcing myself to go through the motions of an application - and I am constantly asking myself why am I doing this, because they will just find fault with me and not respond.
He said poverty doesn’t have a color implying that black people aren’t impoverished because of systemic racism, but because they don’t work hard enough. It’s racist drivel.
An interesting social science result is that one (in my mind, the primary) result of wokeness is deminished empathy for impoverished whites. I took ops comment to mean "hey, don't disregard my struggle because i happen not to be black", rather than seeing, as you apparently have, "racist drivel". A point I'm sure has been made a million times, and which you are no doubt impervious to, but one that remains valid nonetheless.
Keep in mind, you're referring to a comment on a message board that took maybe 30 minutes to write, and likely less, not an op-ed in the NYT. Read more charitably, and in context, "poverty doesn't have a color" sounds more like "people of any race can end up poor."
I didn't have it as hard as the parent, but I remember choosing between bus fare and meals quite a few times. My first paycheck was spent on white bread and a tube of sausage, and now I live a pretty comfortable life.
Most everyone in my orbit has improved their situation too. Sometimes that was with help from a family member, but generally things have gotten better for friends who were in the same circumstances I was.
The two exceptions are those who got into drugs and never got out (a few folks I know seemed to never have issues, but they're the exception and not the rule) and a single friend who has some non-drug problems that probably need counseling work.
This is my experience too - almost everyone who hung out with me in the library, computer lab or metal shop seemed to do fairly well for themselves - not like 200k tech job well but like 80k blue collar or white collar when most of us grew up with less than 40k combined household income. Half of us first or second generation immigrants and refugees, lots of broken families, lots of substance abuse, lots from Romania, Serbia, Irab, Iraq, China.
IMO it was passion for reading and building things with our hands that that seperated our cohort from the rest - that and the bond between those of us who knew we hadn't much of a safety net to rely on.
I’m not sure of your age, but for instance, my dad, the sole breadwinner at the time, made $40k/year in 1989 when I was born, which is equivalent to $84k today. So, making $80k now and being raised on $40k/year then are the same thing if you adjust for inflation. (Furthermore, I’d argue healthcare, college, and housing are much more expensive now than they were then.)
I'm 28 now so this was about a decae ago. I personally never expected to make much more than 50k out of college, 100k by 35 career wise until my first internship. I think I can still live quite happily with ~60k by myself or ~90k with a loving family.
Good books and good company were all I had and all I think I'll ever need - that and the satisfaction of a job well done be it a piece of code well written, a field well groomed and raked or a McDonalds well wiped and scrubbed.
The important part is to focus on the things you can control. Luck always plays a role, but your own actions decide how prepared you are to capitalize on lucky breaks when they arrive.
Luck is important, but it’s a mistake to try to attribute the success of others purely to luck. Someone winning the lottery is lucky. Someone who gets hired because a company noticed their quality GitHub commits to a project relevant to their needs is also lucky, but their success isn’t the result of luck alone.
Yeah there's also thousands of potential opportunities like that over course of years, each with the potential to open new doors. One lucky break does not success make and a lucky break without the talent or drive to back it quickly collapses.
I think it’s not so much luck, but perseverance. I have a similar poor upbringing and I have built a pretty comfortable life by never letting myself get too down and always keep working towards a better life. Being smart helps, but really the best thing that works for me is being okay with failure. When you’re poor you fail a lot, being able to take that failure and learn from it separates the successful and the unsuccessful. If you’re rich none of this matters because life isn’t fair.
See you are disregarding all the luck a person had while being born in the right side of the world. I would say being born in the first world, even if poor, is a huge privilege which large parts of the world can't get. You win that lottery, and you already have a huge leg up. Now I don't want to convert this thread into misery olympics, all sadness is valid if felt genuinely and just because you are privilege in one sense doesn't mean your life is not incredibly hard. But if you think the large amounts of generationally poor, even in the first world, lack perseverance then you don't understand the game.
I can only pull from my experiences, but I have witnessed many in my family and other poor families that only work hard enough to get what they need. And very few go beyond that and work for what they want. It’s hard, exhausting work. I regularly slept less than 4 hours because I’d be up all night working jobs, projects, anything to get a better life. My mom is mixed and my dad is white, I look like my mom but with really light skin. Being mostly white and not having my moms Arabic name helped get interviews and my foot in the door. What some see as luck is others using absolutely every advantage they can muster to go further than they would be able to otherwise.
I think this issue is very important and when I think about it I cannot help but think the answer lies all the way down in the question whether we have free will. Some people say "you have to be perseverant like me and you will make it and often time we think about people who have simply cannot be perseverant enough but they are good people. Can they be better "if they wanted it more" or "if someone helped them" and who would that person be? People especially here have stories with "I was in a bad situation but I worked hard learning coding" while many people were in a similar situation but didn't pick up coding as these people did. Are they to blame and did the other people pick coding because they knew it would launch them to great heights?
I think we’ve become so afraid of giving the impression of victim-blaming people who are down on their luck that we’re afraid to acknowledge that people can and do work their way into better life circumstances.
Even if we think of luck as the central determinant of a person’s success in life, then we still have to acknowledge that the person’s own choices and actions will pivot their destiny around that luck. Licking in to a dream job through connections and serendipity doesn’t go very far if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job, for example.
Maybe where you are from but here in eastern Europe you can get a cushy job and work at 20% of effort and live an upper middle class life just from 1 good connection. Then you can work you ass off in college but in the wrong industry where there are no "well paid jobs for hard working people" around where you are and live a barely middle class life. The sad part is people do succeed from here by working hard but byoving away to where the job is, often half a world away, leaving behind everything, friends, family. Did they work hard and "succeed"? Yes, but at what cost. Meanwhile lucky people were born at the right time in the right family. We should both equalize the starting positions and especially make sure your lowest low still gives you medical insourance, a place to stay and food to eat. At least it's laughable how many people in USA don't have proper health care
> if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job
I read this rhetoric constantly, then I look at a bunch of hard working people that I know, who are poor.
Luck is the opportunity to succeed, hard work is the way to capitalize on that opportunity. One without the other means no success. And on that same note, you can make "good decision" that cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities, and "bad decisions" that end you up in with great opportunities.
I've made plenty of decisions that I thought at the time were kinda dumb, but put me in serendipitous situations which ended up landing me great jobs. So really, the luckier you are, the more chances you'll have to escape poverty; if you're willing to work hard at those critical times, you'll actually succeed.
> along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way.
And probably and equal amount of decisions that could have turned out better.
So rather than being the result of one or two lucky or unlucky events, the final outcome is more likely to be the average of the quality of all the decisions over time.
no, it depends on the shape of the modeling function, and sociobiological functions are highly complex, possibly unknowable, but certainly not a simple linear function around which decisions revert to the same mean.
for instance, consider success to be a knowable function (like y = ax^2 + bx + c ). luck would be like having high (initial) coefficients and constants through no effort of your own (e.g., being born into a wealthy, connected family). hard work and good decisions might allow you to increase (or decrease through neglect/bad decisions) these coefficients at the margin, but the relative advantage often remains many multiples of the disadvantaged.
Aside from the socioeconomic circumstances of one's birth, luck favors the prepared. I also come from a poor background and got "lucky" a few times in my life (in particular the sequence of events leading to me joining a US tech company while making web apps in Russia was rather tenuous), but the cause for the luck each time was prep.
E.g. I aced an interview question on GC design because, after doing some GC tuning for a web app at work I read GC docs and then a couple research papers at home to understand it better. After the (group) interview loop, someone told me they were asked a hypothetical SQL backend design question they had trouble with, and I realized I knew then how SQL Server solved that, for similar reasons, so I could have aced that question too.
Sure, I could have gotten yet another design question that I knew nothing about ("unlucky"), but to even have a chance to get "lucky" you need to prepare... to win the lottery you at a minimum need to buy a ticket ;)
As for the luck of the birth, almost by definition, when you are poor you grow up surrounded by people in similar circumstances; if you "make it", it is very easy to judge those who didn't, because well, they were in similar circumstances to you and you saw what they did differently, often in detail.
Of course luck plays a factor in everything everybody does. The question isn't whether luck plays a role; it's how much salience it deserves. This person made hundreds of good choices across decades to achieve the success they have, so it seems a bit perverse to focus instead on the hundreds of things outside their control.
Personally, I doubt that luck plays a major role. The bothersome part is that some people seem to assume that success is replicable if you follow some sort of recipe.
The thing is, socioeconomic status affects our outlook. It doesn't matter if you're poor, rich, or somewhere inbetween. A simple example is taking advantage of opportunities. You may be unaware that they exist, view them as being out of reach, or simply see the risk as being too high. Only one of those even imply that chance plays a role. It is also worth noting that values may play a role. Some people like to blame being poor on bad decisions. While it may be true that some decisions are bad in the sense of generating wealth, they may be good decisions in other respects. Many jobs serve have social value or serve the public good, yet are woefully under compensated. Some people will choose that path simply because they are more intersted in serving others and simply don't have the will to be selfseving.
I genuinely don't know if even "can" is applicable to allpoor people in this context. A person who has a similar background but ended up with a chronic illness preventing them from working... that dream of working for 200k/yr is impossible.
Do you watch Tasty videos on Facebook with their two hands and three ingredients and four steps and think "What useless advice - what about people with no hands! How dare suggest they can make bakeless chocolate brownies!"
I think the "can" is applicable here and can think that even while acknowledging there are people who can't physically work. I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll ask: is this the only reason you object to using the word "can"? What would be more accurate in your view?
I think this is backwards and the opening lines of Anna Karenina get it right. It's "bad luck" that you should look out for, but every (moderate [0]) success story sounds more or less the same. (Said yet another way, success isn't the result of good luck, but it does require the avoidance of bad luck.)
[0] We're talking about routine success here, not Elon Musk. We're talking about avoiding poverty, not going to Mars.
Bad decisions can have good outcomes. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, so really it depends on how often you get lucky. I think charisma has the greatest effect on this.
Probably nearly everyone can make it. Even the Pakistani kid born into intergenerational debt slavery that means he is making bricks from when he's 5 years old and has no access to school, healthcare or balanced nutrition. It's a difference of a 50% chance for the luckiest to 0.00005% chance for the least lucky.
But to see the world through the lens 'everyone van make it, just put effort and stop worrying' is simply absurd.
Those who accrue and leverage a variety of skills tend to get 'lucky'. This is why you could strip most entrepreneurs of all their money and assets, and not be surprised to see them enjoying success in 5 years. You put into place a system that makes making the right decisions inevitable, and learning from the wrong decisions.
To believe that your success is out of your hands is incredibly disempowering. I understand it's primary function is to help you empathize with others, but it subconsciously has a hold on you. A very limiting belief, I'd 'yeet' it immediately.
Your idea isn’t backed up by statistics. The vast majority of successful entrepreneurs come from upper-middle class or richer families. If it was just about “building a talent stack”, then the distribution would be relatively flat across all family income distributions. You also missed the part in the article that described how hard it is as a poor person to just find the time and resources necessary to learn those skills.
Of course you need to put the work in, but the deck is stacked in your favor if your family is very well off (and frankly you need to do far less work, due to nepotism and everything else), and massively stacked against you if you come from a poor family.
do you have data on this? Are you talking about tech entrepreneurs? My understanding is many self made millionaires come from the trades (plumbing, electricians) starting their own company. I can't find my source, thats why I'm interested in your source.
there is the similar distribution of self starters in all areas of society, there is a survivorship bias towards upper middle class and upper class people because they get to try again over and over and over again. whereas someone that "makes it out" has pretty much one chance or else they have to pay off all the debt they accrued financially or to society for the next 10 years (or more). let alone if they get a little lonely and create obligations.
Sure, but social capital is an asset you build like anything else. Remove a big chunk of anyone’s wealth - liquid, paper, social, health - and it’s gonna be painful and disruptive.
The point isn’t that they’d be poor if you took away what they built... it’s that they succeed in building it in the first place! That process of building wealth in all its forms is the key.
It’s not easy. It’s definitely not fair. Some people start out way ahead. Some people start out way behind and don’t even have role models to show how it’s done. It always takes time. My view is that you just have to accept people where they are, respect their efforts, politely look past their structural (dis)advantages, and deal with them as human beings who deserve love and support for their own sake.
What I find sad is that there is a bunch of low hanging investments that improve the "luck" probabilities for all people. Well designed built environments, access to power/refridgeration/medicine, access to information. Obviously there are political barriers to achieving these small investments, but the most successful societies will these basics into existence, and the groups overall quality of life is higher.
I find the developments of cheap solar power + low latency satlite internet + digital banking(access to stable currencies + inflation hedges + global transactions) as essential to deliver the services that the most successful and privileged have used, to the poverty stricken around the world.
As these people join the fold, do we prepare them documentation, do nothing, or set up roadblocks?
I think a big part of it is also the moral choices people are willing to make. Most people climb to success because they are incredibly talented (rare), incredibly lucky (nobody likes to admit it), or because it's always bowb your buddy week to them.
Sometimes they are able to do a minor hurt to a vast number of people (marketing, some sales, etc...) and they don't feel like they are doing anything wrong. Sometimes they are just conforming to the standards our society has set, (everybody is doing it).
I myself try to do the best, but I've discovered the only way to advance is to job hop my way to a decent salary. I'm sure this has caused problems for others, but it's accepted in this industry. I've seen others who won't job hop languish with much lower salaries.
I think its about seizing the opportunity once luck strikes. According to sociology its very rare to switch class. If you start out upper class and make some bad decisions you will still likely be upper class. Same with poor, you can make the right choice every time and still end up poor.
I have a similar story and luck played no part of it. I spent lots of time in public libraries and on public computers as a kid. As a result, I got an academic scholarship. A few years after graduating amidst the 2008 economic crisis, I heard about a company that used a particular programming language. I learned that language and convinced someone I knew at the company to get me an interview. I aced the interview and got the job. A lot of studying and a couple of job interviews later and I'm making good money at another company.
If you study the right things, you'll get "lucky" in interviews because the more problems you've seen in the domain, the more likely you are to be tested against the knowledge you've already acquired. But that's clearly not luck - it's preparation. You won't ace every interview, but you'll do well in enough.
I made the wrong decisions several times. I lacked focus in and after university that cost me several years in my twenties. As soon as I made a plan to change things, the plan worked. When a plan goes wrong, you evaluate and make a new plan. Every idea doesn't always work - you just need one that does.
I think the key is looking at the opportunities that you have, whatever they may be, and putting in the work to take advantage of them. I have hundreds of friends who are relatively poor and who have many opportunities they don’t take. For example, I’ve offered to give free guidance or instruction to many, but it turns out most people don’t want to take advantage of that. I told people I could hire them (into the very same role I first had), but they didn’t recognize the opportunity. People want easy, so they ignore opportunities like this in their lives.
Definitely agree that it's frustrating to offer to teach someone to code or something, and they act like "Who the F are you to think you can teach me?" or "Nah, seems boring" but then they turn around and resent you for your success.
Some of the advice I wish friends would take is this: accept help wherever you can get it, as long as it won't distort your relationship or create an untenable dependency.
Fellow former-poor here. It's the kind of thing that casts a shadow over your whole life.
And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires. I hear things get said by people that are so far from the orbit of my reality and I cringe.
Reading the article was really eye opening for me because I hadn't thought of all of the life skills that I've picked up simply as a result of being poor. It even affects how I think about my new-found wealth. I spend an enormous amount of money on tools and equipment. I'm the one helping all of my friends build, move or fix things.
> I spend an enormous amount of money on tools and equipment. I'm the one helping all of my friends build, move or fix things.
I grew up lower middle class but my dad grew up poor. I think a lot of his practices still rubbed off onto me, sounds a lot like what you describe.
We have a friend who grew up comfortably and have noticed how that influenced their more laissez-faire approach to life. E.g. when we help them move, we do most of the work. There’s a sort of “everything will work out” mentality on their part, whereas I’m constantly worrying about how it’s all going to fall apart.
It’s not really good or bad, though. I almost envy the carefree attitude. Childhood trauma tends to make people try to control things more as adults, and I wish I didn’t stress things so much. My wife also grew up more “securely” and we talk a lot about how it informs our worldview differently. Thankfully it doesn’t cause problems though, it’s just interesting. I think we’re just different enough to make a great team.
And as others mentioned, I value the life skills I gained by my upbringing and early start on working for myself. I can build and fix things, and cook really well. Gonna be just fine, I think.
> And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires.
This is surprising to me. I’m also a former poor. A lot of people I work with in tech come from generally “normal” backgrounds. Middle to lower class (in excluding h1b and green card holders). It just turned out for them that their passion and hobby (computers) ended up being a great career.
Now things are probably different for younger generations now that the secret is out about P90 software salaries.
Good thing I got in while they were still taking nobodies.
> Good thing I got in while they were still taking nobodies.
I feel the same way! I look around at my younger peers with such impressive pedigrees: Stanford, Ivy League, PhD’s, former founders, etc. and I think “wow, I’d never even get my foot in the door if I were entering today!
Maybe its just the FAANG companies that are hiring only those from prestigious universities?
I still hope I can land a decent software engineering position someday without such a degree, even if its not at a FAANG company and doesnt pay as well
> And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it.
Man, I remember some of the business courses I took, as well as the reports and presentations we did after our internships. So many people's thoughts and conclusions read basically as "I learned that the poor are people too". This was at one of the top universities in my home country. It's reasonable to expect these people would be industry leaders eventually. The lack of empathy they showed was appalling.
All that being said, I'm glad you got through the challenges in your early life. I wish we were more tolerant about poorness, because sharing experiences like yours could definitely teach and encourage other kids to fight for a better quality of life. Having more people with your experience in places of power could also help bring a little more empathy to society. We need it badly.
As someone who also grew up in a poorer family I can relate as well, both the disconnect from people in the industry I've talked to and the skills I picked up growing up.
My dad had a bunch of tools growing up which he used to do household repairs and repairs on the cars, I remember for the longest time my parents driving an old station wagon with a lot of duct tape holding things together or covering leaks and the air conditioning not working.
I still try to repair things on my own if I can, while some people I know just go hire someone on Handy or something to fix things for them.
I grew up upper middle class, our car had no air conditioning, my father was doing car repairs himself. I'm from Eastern Europe, a relatively wealthy country compared to much of the rest of the world.
>And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it.
If you make the assumption that HN is vaguely representative of the software industry and then looking at the reception that all the comments that stop short of saying "luck is the primary factor of success" are getting it seems pretty obvious why nobody talks about it.
> It's the kind of thing that casts a shadow over your whole life.
Shadow really though? I'm super glad everything came through my own work, I'd hate if my parents gave me anything. I hate spending any money, to me that is just sensible though not a problem.
I’m also very pleased with the results I seem to have wrought myself (with help of course), but I always notice that I’m a bit behind the curve compared to people getting ahead in the workforce, adulting with home refinancing or retirement, entering Ivy league direct from high school, or in high school, the students that seemed to know which classes to take, or what AP was (I took 3 while my peers averaged 6-7 AP courses). Same for sports. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s noticeable when you have parents that can’t help you and while I’m very capable of learning all of these things on my own, and I have, I’m no match for folks basically speed-leveling early in life.
Also wrt money, I always hated spending it, and really hated debt/interest. Now I find myself very willing to spend money on actually useful things like gear and tools, lest the power of money, or my ability to earn it, diminishes in the future.
>but it’s noticeable when you have parents that can’t help you and while I’m very capable of learning all of these things on my own, and I have, I’m no match for folks basically speed-leveling early in life
I definitely feel on this one. I had to learn a lot of those things on my own as well
I can't edit the original post, but I wanted to clarify that the last paragraph was intended to give other poor people hope, not to make them feel inadequate. Sort of a cheer leader type thing. I probably should have left it out.
You are all right. I was lucky. We all are to some extent. I consider my aunt my only real family. I still drive to visit her grave each year.
I wouldn't have gotten where I have without someone telling me to take my shot and apply to a good college I dreamed about applying to when I was much younger. My parents encouraged me to with their blessing. There were plenty of neighbors and friend who told me it was a moonshot to get in, that I should go to state school, that I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't fit in, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I got in, went, graduated, and I've done well.
I'm sure if my parents told me it was a long shot, I wouldn't have applied. And, I can imagine internalizing this idea that I never had a chance because of who I was and where I was from.
So don't apologize. You don't need to feed the self-righteousness of others.
Very similar situation. I had a single mother and spent time with family and non-family members most of my life. I never had much and essentially grew up in a trailer park throughout my teenage years with an elderly couple that I called my grandparents but weren’t even related. They were kind enough to take me in.
Fast forward to my 40s and I make a quarter million a year. Have a net worth of over a million, a quarter of which is liquid sitting in several bank accounts making zero interest.. but I NEED it there. Own a house outright that is far too small for the family I raised in it (the kids have begun to move away so it’s getting ‘bigger’). Max my retirement plans. Go long on safe market bets. My car is 12 years old and burns oil (it’s a Prius so.. it evens out?). I pay my kids college tuition and squirrel away all my money.
My wife says most people like to collect things and I collect money.
I probably need help but between growing up poor, not figuring out a career path until 30, and the Great Recession... everything is a bubble and unsafe.
Just want to say I hate the "yeah but luck"/"yeah but you're still privileged because x" going on in the comments and I found your comment inspiring, in case you ever doubt it.
I'm poor, but not extreme poverty poor only because I'm "lucky" that I've had my parents be able to support me. I have several health problems which border on being disabilities (for which actually getting support would be very hard). Without my parents I'd probably be dead. My goal isn't even not being poor just self-sufficient. Of course I'm grateful for having them and how hard they've worked to get where they are now, but anyone pointing out this "luck" anytime I try to comment about my experiences pisses me off to no end. Do you think I don't ponder how much worse off I could be? Will dwelling on that even more than usual help me or anyone like me? No. It already depresses me enough as it is. What helps is hearing that other people have managed to improve their lives too (I also look at ways I could apply what they did). The worse part is when people say it in a way that dismisses all effort on my part (which is how it's usually put even if the people writing it don't realize it). As if, because statistically there are people at my level with worse/better luck that somehow should mean anything to me. I'd rather some ignorant rich person complain about being "poor" than that sort of thinking. If I had put in no effort I would probably still be stuck at home, in pain, probably suicidal.
I can't speak for people in extreme poverty, but I can't imagine "well, you got the short end of the stick" helps them in any way. I would say, yeah, you got the short end of the stick, but even more because of that, if you don't try to dig yourself out, no one is going to come do it for you. You'll fail, again and again and again probably. It's not your fault, and yeah, it's not fair. But if you give up there is not even the chance of getting out.
It requires both hard work and luck, and neither will really come without the other. To discredit either one playing part in success seems to be looking at only half of the picture
It's frustrating talking with my friend who needs a new car but has no money and bad credit. They have a small windfall to afford a $3000 or so car with but they think you can't get anything worth driving for less than $15000 and with 100k miles or less. Meanwhile I've been driving my $800 Jeep for years and it's still running strong nearing 200k miles. They also balk at used appliances, furniture etc. Some people get stuck in debt forever because of these bad mindsets.
I think similarly. Add in a pinch of imposter syndrome and the anxiety hiding under my privileged life is.. interesting. Eg i am super, super fortunate. I definitely don't make 200k, but i had no experience, managed to work my way into some experience and now make a comfortable living.
My wife and I are DINKs, so while neither of us make amazing money in combination we make a solid wage. No retirement (yet), but a house, and an income that is starting to pay off life (house/retirement/etc) with lots of safety buffer.
With all that said, i'm still terrified of losing everything. I'm sure i've acquired some skills, but passing interviews is difficult so i always think losing it all is one job loss away.
I just have to focus on improving myself, to mitigate my fear of losing it all. I'd like to build software to help people. I'd like to make enough money to eventually help some individuals, too.
Maybe being poor gives you perspective, but i loathe the "bootstraps" mantra. The overwhelming hopelessness you can feel when you're poor and see no path upwards. Yea, you can get a job, but minimum wage barely pays for itself. You want some modest things in life like a house, a car.. but saving for those at $200/m takes a long, long time.
I got out. I hope to stay out. But i consider myself lucky.
Depending on where you live, you're right to live in fear. In the USA, you're probably one medical emergency (cancer?) away from bankruptcy.
I'm glad you got out, but hard work is no guarantee. A lot in this world is luck and connections.
"I made it and you can too" should be "I made it, but lots of others don't. If you work hard, you might, but don't be discouraged if you don't. It's possible to do all the right things and not make it out. If you make it out, give back to those who are in similar situations, and try to improve the pathway out of the darkness."
> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.
You lost me at this conclusion. This is wrong in every sense of the word and perfect case of Survivorship Bias[0]
The point of having societies is so we should not fend for ourselves, especially rich societies. In rich countries there should be no poor people and charity should not exist because it is not needed.
Go read The Millionaire Next Door. You'll see that there are plenty of people like yourself who remain frugal after managing to pull themselves out of poverty. I'm suggesting the book to both validate your behavior but also give you some examples so you can perhaps moderate it if you still feel that's needed. I can give a single example from my life: my uncle managed to snag a liquor distributorship after WW II. It was a license to print money. He never moved out of the first postwar house he purchased when he started his business because he just didn't see the need and he felt showing off his newfound wealth in poor taste.
In short, you're not alone and as long as you're not making yourself or people in your life miserable well maybe you're not too far off from where you need to be.
I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.
It’s a good book, but the core point is more about how our perception of rich versus poor is detached from the reality of one’s actual wealth. It’s not uncommon for families with multi-generational wealth to also live frugal lifestyles. It’s also not unheard of for those who grew up poor to overspend their wealth at the first signs of success, because they’ve never known how to manage money at that scale.
It’s important to not turn this into a rich versus poor debate, because it can give people on either side of that divide the false impression that they’re naturally better at managing money due to their background. The truth is that wealth management is a learned skill that often comes separately from one’s career or upbringing. And the point of the book is that looking wealthy and being wealthy aren’t as tightly coupled as we believe.
>It’s also not unheard of for those who grew up poor to overspend their wealth at the first signs of success, because they’ve never known how to manage money at that scale.
That was really my point: it's ok to not go buy a condo in Aspen the second you can afford it. The original poster was saying he knows he's being overly frugal. OK, fine. My counter-example of TMND was don't feel you need to move to a flashy conspicuous consumption lifestyle either.
I really didn't like that book, for me it missed the point entirely. For the entire length it discusses how you accumulate more wealth by not spending it, but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth.
People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords. This book just assumes the end goal is the number on a bank account.
>For the entire length it discusses how you accumulate more wealth by not spending it, but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth.
To be fair, I believe that motivation comes from the reader, not the author.
>People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords.
Again to be fair I believe you're projecting: you may want to be a millionaire for the lifestyle it affords, whatever that means to you. The book is a recipe on ways to retain wealth and anecdotes on how people accumulated their own. It's not a self-help guide to motivate people to become millionaires. I think it's assumed if they're reading they book they're already motivated and need to know how, not why.
> People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords
Some do. Others do not.
My boss makes ~300k a year base. He drives a ten year old Golf, carries zero debt, and plans his (very infrequent) meals out around "which restaurant is running a 'kids eat free' special today?"
His goal is to build up a sizeable savings, retire and live off interest, and provide generational wealth for each of his children.
One of his peers makes ~300k a year base and enjoys driving a Ferrari that costs more than my house. Different strokes for different folks :)
Fine, but in my opinion this is what the book should discuss, at least in part. If it advocates for not spending your millions and dying with them in the bank, it should discuss that.
Currently it basically tells you that if you spend the least possible, you accumulate wealth faster. Well, wasn't that obvious.
> but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth.
One reason is that if one accumulates that wealth, and puts that wealth to work itself making money (i.e., investing it) then one obtains an income stream that is separate and apart from the number of hours per day one can spend "working".
Accumulate enough money that is itself making money, and one can live comfortably without having to spend 40+hrs/week "working" for one's income.
Right, except that book also tells you not to spend/use any of that interest, and continue working as much as possible, so that it accumulates exponentially.
The number is a goal, for me. Since the moment the goal is hit, is the moment i can live safely. If you save $X, you can retire. You have the rest of your life planned for, and that feeling is worth a lot.
I don't plan on retiring, but i'd feel so, so good if i hit $X tomorrow.
The economy could still go down, but as long as society doesn't collapse retirement-amounts can bring massive QOL, even if you don't live like you're rich.
And if you're already clear that reaching a given number is your priority above your current lifestyle, do you really need a book to tell you that spending the least possible will make you reach that goal faster?
> I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.
This a million times. I ended up in a small private university (which was awesome and I still love it) that initially gave me a lot of scholarship money, but didn’t even try to get into top tier. While good at educating, the network and the name recognition were not there at all. Can’t remember how this came up, but at one point I compared notes with someone who attended top 10 university and their grades/scores were slightly worse than mine - live and learn :)
I can appreciate the sentiment of books like that, however reality isn't that ...fair.
For any one "millionaire next door" who made it by being frugal, many more starve no matter how frugally they live. Many will rise and fall, many more will never even rise above poverty.
I'd like to see the statistics on lifetime well-being between frugality and financial risk-taking†. I'll bet the disparity is shallower than we'd like to believe.
These discussions always interest me, but I'm disappointed by the amount of puritan dogma that usually gets treated as some kind of natural truth. If being poor taught me anything, it's that there is no dogma you can lean on.
† Caveat: the risks being made with a goal to "level-up" (read: escape poverty), rather than blind self-indulgence. Ex—do you max out your credit card (/whatever available leverage) to acquire the tool you need to perform a job in the manner of quality you know can be accomplished with said tool, or do you buy the tool you can "afford" and gradually, over time, work your way up to the "right tool" in this case. In the past, more of the latter may have been possible. These days, I think you're at an even more immense disadvantage by taking that path. Admittedly, my outlook might be too coloured by my own experience. Had I not taken the chances (sometimes enormously painful), I would probably still be trying to squirrel-away $5 bills at a time while working 11 hour warehouse shifts.
> My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.
Same with mine. I never travelled outside of Canada until my mid thirties because the notion of spending that kind of money (despite having it) seemed absurd. My kids lost opportunities because in the back of my mind, we’re constantly on the brink of homelessness. I have a seriously difficult time shaking this state of mind.
Something I’ve found useful is reminding myself that 1) I managed to survive and stay healthy despite how poor I was, and when things go wrong, there is typically a way forward. If something were to go wrong, it would likely be outside of my control. 2) my energy is better spent being moderate about money, otherwise relaxing about it, but then focusing my energy on immediate things which matter and are within my control. 3) most people I know carry and manage more debt that I’ve had in my entire lifetime. If I were to lose everything tomorrow, I’d still be ahead of them. I always exaggerate my risks.
One of the things I know poverty did was make me hesitate to take on a mortgage. It was such a burden to think at any moment I might not have a job and then lose everything.
I also remember being the kid who didn’t buy Nikes or the natural rubber soles to play sports on parquet, so had to do with other sports that didn’t have that requirement.
I also remember the PE teacher telling me I could not just wear short pants, I needed to get sports shorts...
Yes, I was afraid of a mortgage as well. But seeing the cost of homes rise to outpace my ability to save was what opened my eyes.
After buying (mortgaging) a home though, I was surprised that it was not the liability I expected it to be — even with the interest on the mortgage, it was my biggest asset and always has been.
Yea, that's why i ended up with a house, too. Rent was so variable. It went up and up and up, and while i didn't have to deal with repair/etc, it felt like i had no control.
At least with a house i can budget to pay it off and budget to repair it. Both seem reasonably stable to plan for, assuming you make enough money.
> My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.
Do it. This is on the PTSD spectrum and in my own case the habits of poverty have substantially impacted how I've experienced my own life.
10 years of working 2-3 jobs was enough to crawl out of deferred expenses land and pay for a few community college classes. I lucked my way into an unexpected pile of cash and a decent paying job. I bought a house and a car, and savings started piling up. I continued to be hounded by anxiety that I didn't notice, because it was the same pot of anxiety I'd been boiled in to that point.
Everything was fine and rosy for a while. Eventually the anxiety burned out enough fuses to start directing choices. What seemed like interests became obsessions. Unpowered hand tools can't run out of gas, work when the electricity's off, and are easy to fix if they break. Gardening replaced more of the shopping list. Wild edibles supplemented gardening. Bicycle commuting saves money and makes scavenging more accessible. Years of anxiety slowly bloomed into delusions, one thing led to another, and quite suddenly I was living out of a bicycle and two panniers. The persisting anxiety of poverty pulled the plug on my success.
Homelessness, poverty, and mental illness are all outcomes of one another. Removing someone from the circumstances of poverty or homelessness is only the first step.
I got lucky again, managing to stumble over housing and a surfeit of income before homelessness made its recognizable mark. Profoundly lucky that by chance I came to know folks who've done social work with others recovering from homelessness, who told me to get some counseling so I could learn to experience the life I had, feel like I own the things I own, and stop alternating between resentfulness and fear of my own success.
Anyway, I'm gonna be that person now and offer the perspective that poverty in the USA is only transactionally similar across lines of discrimination. People of color (and other marginalized persons) do experience a source of trauma and hardship that doesn't go away like poverty does, but does additionally compound the frequency and quality of poverty they experience.
Interesting, I have two conflicting feelings about this. On one hand I agree with you and I am super paranoid about being poor. On the other hand, one thing that I definitely learned from growing up poor (I like the original article say "it’s very small (think ~900 sqft)", cause I had stable housing when I was growing up and it was 600sqft for 3-4 people ;)) is how little you need to be happy.
In college, when we were somewhat better off but before I could work a real job, I often had a choice of either paying my internet bill, buying (cheap) cafeteria lunches, or buying beer. So, unless I wanted to and could find a part-time job, I liked to joke that my choices were - hungry, sober, and online; sated, sober and offline; and hungry, drunk and offline. I was still happy. After I got my first job, sometimes I would get impostor syndrome and become afraid of losing it; then I'd be like, well I used to be happy when I was choosing between the three options, so anything on top of that is just a nice bonus. As long as I have 150sqft of housing, some food and an internet connection I will be fine. I like to think about that every time I'm afraid of losing my current level of privilege.
> As long as I have 150sqft of housing, some food and an internet connection I will be fine. I like to think about that every time I'm afraid of losing my current level of privilege.
I tend to agree, but I also need a couple of things on top of that:
- the place needs to be relatively quiet (no asshole neighbors on the other side of the wall, or a busy street)
- I need to have an access to relatively peaceful area for walks, preferably green
- I need to live in an area that's not depressing because it's decrepit or filled with aggressive idiots
- I need friends in a distance that makes seeing them often not a nuisance
Take away any of the above and I'm not doing too well long-term. Also, I suspect most people in the world are missing at least one thing from my list.
Some of these things are (more or less) free, some are just a matter of perspective. E.g. a place being decrepit is fine, or becomes fine over time, it just blends into the background. The noise is spot on, I guess I meant 150sqft of ok-quality housing :)
I got to experience wealth and poverty growing up, unfortunately in that order. Parents were pretty wealthy and then we moved to the US at 13 and had to leave everything behind. Going from a house with pool, BMW's etc to food stamps, constant threat of foreclosure and no health insurance is pretty jarring. I was way better off than many others though. Far better off than OP's start. Worst part of being poor or being raised by those that are poor due to both circumstances and bad choices is that you dont learn to make sane financial decisions. I was never taught how to balance a check book or to live within my means and that lack of both education and discipline has haunted me my whole life. Reached a point where I make over 200k now and finally the surplus of funds have been a wakeup call that 'Hey, you can save and you can eventually retire if you just wake up and stop spending like you're going to die tomorrow'. Another vital lesson is to focus on the long run instead of trying to hit a home run with every investment.
Financial literacy should be the a 4 year highschool class. Not being fluent is a detriment to millions.
I'm curious what about your fears are driving your family crazy. Is it living well below your means, forgoing luxuries they'd like (and you can afford), or agonizing over every spending decision, or what?
I've lived on <$20k (as an individual), and lived very frugally as a result, but I've never been in a position where I was struggling financially, so I lack any trauma around that. I do still have some lingering "Is this $5 item worth it?" tendencies, though. Automating bills away can help, but what I really like is having a spreadsheet of "if I had to cut back, I could easily live on $X month" + "I have $Y saved up" and focusing on that ratio. Gives me the appropriate background sense of "I'm doing fine", and allows me to say "fuck it" and spend money more readily.
At any rate, if you're driving your family crazy, and you think counseling might help, try it. That's one life-improvement investment that doesn't saddle you any long-term financial obligations. Your "If I had to cut back" number stays low.
As someone who grew up poor, one of the best things I've ever done to get past that real hesitancy around spending money is to use envelope budgeting (I use YNAB but the tool isn't important).
My old habits had me tracking after the fact and I found that I either obsessed over minutiae, failed to plan for the future, or worried too little about bigger purchases.
But now, I put my money in a virtual envelope the moment it comes in, and I have to start thinking about how I'm using it: if I empty out the "restaurant" fund, I have the freedom to reallocate, but I'm forced to decide to reallocate – I don't just swipe a card and figure it out later.
This also shows me without any question what my current baseline is: I can look month over month and know how much of my spending is discretionary, how much is saving, and what the bare minimum is that I need to survive.
If it were as easy now as getting paid to go to college and get a decent job it wouldn't be so bad - but prices have increased exponentially due to that federal aid. Instructor quality has significantly decreased, and administrative bloat has skyrocketed (these people can't get Jobs in the private sector either and government money is free). Jobs in technical fields are not in demand in the manner higher education advertises. As I've said before here I still have friends with bachelor CS degrees turned down from entry positions because the majority of companies are experience siphoners. There's entire youtube channels exampling the level of exploit companies can do because CS grads don't have the choice.
Sure, overcoming poverty is possible, but it's a shifting scale over time thats heading in much worse directions due to inflation in basic living costs and companies and individuals breaking the ladder that got them on the surface.
>> My father left home ... My mom ... left us when she found a new husband.
The horrible thing is that much worse situations are common today. The most common one I've witnessed into is "Dad left, mom is sick". The children become primary care givers to the remaining disabled parent. That basically axes higher education options. Such kids often cannot work outside the home and if they do it will be at most part time and very local. One can choose not to have children. One can decide not to commit crimes. But one cannot choose whether or not to have disabled parents/siblings that need 24/7 care. The really dark aspect is that children grow up. An unplanned child will grow and eventually not need 24/7 care. An aging disabled parent can remain at the same level need for many decades, normally progressing to greater need with time.
Have you considered trauma release (there are many different ways you can do this) in order to get over your fear of being poor?
From the way you're speaking (for want of a better phrase), it sounds like the poverty experience traumatised you, and you're re-living your trauma each day.
I can relate very closely with grandparent. For me, I don't consider it "traumatizing" as much as "moderating" from a very clear perspective of how well I have it now, how rare that actually is, and how much ridiculous excess most people are comfortable with.
My story is somewhat similar to yours, grew up poor AF and in a toxic environment. I escaped in my late 20's, moved cross country and put myself through college and then MBA part time while working full time.
Fast forward to today I am doing well, like you I have no debt whatsoever, decent cash flow, and decent net work.
A couple of interesting things:
1. 1/3 of homeowners in the US are mortgage free
2. Read the book "The Millionaire Next door"
Third anecdotal note: I have recently switched job, and I work in a company where there are about 25 people. Well I have noticed that the amount of $ spend on lunch is inversely proportional to the pay: the highest paid employees pack their lunch from home; the lowest paid go out and buy lunch most days, and more expensive lunches.
Thank you for sharing your experience and the optimism.
That fear feels similar to PTSD - we experienced something we never want us or anyone else to experience.
A lot of people don’t really understand how much space and luxuries we actually have around us. The trick is that in that modest house everything works, nothing leaks. The car starts and is safe and comfortable enough. If you take these for granted, it’s no big deal. But if you understand that this is in and of itself better than many places, boy is it satisfying when you have it. It is also terrifying that you may lose it again.
The knowledge I feel makes for the better life. The fear unfortunately poisoned it for me for a long time, but I think I’m almost past it. Hope you are as well!
I was poor, received food stamps, stole to eat, and was unemployed selling drugs on the side to make scratch. Now I make half a million a year and I still recognize my privilege, I was a huge outlier. No matter how bad it got, I was still a fairly attractive white male who had been introduced to computing by his single mother as a very small boy and spent my latch key kid time on donated computers. Had I gotten caught up in the criminal justice system as a black man, or interviewed as a black man, or any of that and my success could not have been achieved.
House cost 200% yearly pay... drive 2005 Toyota Corolla.
I'm the poorest dressed millionare you will know.
I buy two shirts a year and wear conference shirts.
$200k per year is in the top 10% of salary, I think it's actually around top 8%. So, obviously not everyone is going to be able to do that. Errors can cause big problems that compound, so early in your career it's much easier to be derailed.
We all like to say, "you could do this too", but it's more accurate to say, "I could have ended up like you too, but I got lucky".
Speaking as a very lucky person who makes less then you.
Ive never been truly impoverished. The nearest I ever got was living off the minimum student allowance back in the 80s.
On the edge of solvency it takes so little for things to go badly wrong, even if your scrupulously careful. On the other hand, it's the ability to make effective use of financing options and to leverage even modest wealth or income through mortgages and such that enables a lot of middle class families to prosper as much as they do.
I came from a family that was lower middle class when I was young, then upper middle class, then back to lower class before I graduated college. And I graduated into the 2008 recession.
When I got my current job back in 2017, I finally felt what I though was economic optimism - a sense that the future would be better than the past. What a feeling. This phrase is over-used, but it did feel like a weight off my shoulders.
> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money
Any they are right thinking that,aren't they? That kind of money and wealth gives you a huge safety blanket and insulates you from most of the stresses described in the article. That's the whole point of the article, that this is a huge privilege that's overlooked by the well off.
I really enjoy your story, but to say "I made it and you can too" presumes there is an endless supply of $200k jobs in this country. There obviously is not, and we can't conceive of an economy wherein there would be, so the "you" who can make it "too" is always going to be an exclusive and finite group.
I have never been Poor, but the kinds of reactions you describe can take root with even pretty transient financial stress.
I had a couple very thin years -- savings dwindling, and then gone; work was scarce. Collectors were calling. I was afraid I was going to lose my house. My power got cut off.
I scraped by, and got out of it, and find myself now in a very fortunate position -- better off than I was before, excellent income, minimal debt (and zero consumer debt), etc. -- but even a couple years of that kind of instability leaves a mark. It's not as much as throwaway's, but I'm very debt-averse. I'm very risk-averse. We save a LOT. I'll never be in that position again.
I find that most people never consider how precarious their position really is until an object lesson comes along.
> I won the lottery and you can too. Luck has no color.
Maybe the Wish will help, or Intentionality. Prayer also popular.
Against this never lose sight of the fact that since 1971 economic mobility in this country has eroded as comprehensively as has the social safety net as has access to high quality public education not to mention health care.
Since 1971 wealth inequality has increased and we are now over the event horizon. So much wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the ultrarich that they have successfully captured both discourse and polity. The possibility space is defined by those who own the means of not just literal communication but the fabrication of consensus opinion and the boundaries of the political spectrum.
What was possible, like this, a generation ago, is literally orders of magnitude more unlikely today.
The status quo cannot hold, and it isn't holding. We remain on the brink of literal violent fascist coup and permanent kleptocracy. Take a look at the headlines from CPAC...
These are dark days.
Most readers here are part of the precariate 10% or aspire to be, the buffer zone of the rich-enough who zealously angrily defend the prerogatives of the very wealthy with whom they identify though they are no more of that class than the utterly disenfranchised permanent Lower Class who have roil and rage in Nomadland, controlled by the surveillance capitalism systems so many of us are building...
You would be surprised how long this sort of thing can hold. To paraphrase a bit, societies can remain irrational longer than citizens can remain sane...
My father left when I was 6. My mother went cleaning to make some money. Later, she remarried and my step dad was well off, but he also had kids of his own, so it wasn't that much of an improvement.
We didn't have much and all of my childhood I played video games I borrowed from friends on PCs I built of old parts I got from friends or in the trash.
When I went to university, I suddendly met many people who had rich parents and I felt like the dumbest person around. I guess, I probably was, haha.
Since coding paid well, I could clear all my dept realatively early after my degree and now I have saved some money.
But I still have the feeling tomorrow all my clients will desert me.
> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.
Don't worry too much about that, I've seen people here seriously claim that you're privileged unless you are destitute and homeless. The word has lost all meaning.
I'm glad to hear you made it. I have a similar story, except mine involves health problems and homelessness in adulthood. I "made it" from living on the streets in Austin TX to being a senior manager at a big company. It's SO HARD to dig yourself out of that, and I just wanted to say GOOD JOB!
My story is not as extreme, but similar. There past that made me comment is the wife and kids comment. I feel that too.
Knowing just how bad things can get, especially when you have kids, motivates you to maintain a large cushion in a way for people who haven’t seen things fall apart have a difficult time relating to
> If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are.
Love this. These are luxury products for upper middle class folks in a lot of developing countries. I don't think people really grasp this until they experience it themselves.
I think if we just replace “privileged” with “lucky” it would greatly improve the overall tone of the message for many, myself included. I.e. “I was lucky enough to be born in a family of engineers” sounds much better than “privileged” in this context.
> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.
> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.
These two statements are so irritatingly bland and dismissive.
> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now
Yeah, so if people look at you and say "that person probably grew up in a nice home with good parents", that is a privilege. Boo-hoo, middle-class people accept you and think you belong within their social tier. The fact that you're afraid your co-workers will know that you grew up poor is proof of how much of a privilege it is.
By that, I mean that a non-trivial percentage of the people in your circumstances at every step of the way (soup kitchen, GED attainment, degree attainment, buying your Corolla, buying your house, applying for your $200k/yr job) didn't make it.
I admire your accomplishments. I loathe and rebuke your, "And you can too!". The entire point of the essay you're replying to is to encourage sympathy and empathy for the people who cannot and will not, who will continue to exist in large numbers as long as our society remains as it is. You missed the point.
This is being downvoted, but I think there's some truth here.
I had a stroke that resulted in some permanent loss of intelligence. Like most here, I started out a bit higher than average, but experienced what it was like to be below average (right after) and ramp up to a bit below where I was before (after 2 years).
My intelligence, and it's ability to show me the answers to difficult problems, the thing that gave me all of my success, is only very slightly tied to my efforts/education. I was lucky to have been born smart, and it's the only reason I "made it". Maybe I could have "made it" some other way, but it made my climb out of poverty so much easier. Not everyone will be able to climb as well.
Your general story of poor-to-doing-well is the majority story in the US (not sure of other countries). Income mobility is a huge thing in the US, a great feature that I see mentioned very little outside of academics. Something like 80% of people will be in the top 10% of earners at some point in their lifetime, and 98% of people will be in the top 50%. "poor" and "rich" are not static labels, and they vary greatly even year to year (Thomas Sowell has excellent data and analysis on this).
FWIW I grew up poor and I do the same as you - no debt, pay cash for cars (even expensive ones) and despite millions in the bank, I fear not being able to provide for the family. At my age, I've learned that this is a good thing, as opposed to people my age that have spent lavishly and are now wondering how to start saving for their retirement in 10 years.
That claim doesn’t even pass the sniff test. The idea that 80% of people - which must include those born into multi generational deprived families just by numbers alone - suddenly find themselves for a period of time on the other side of the glass ceiling of poverty, it’s outrageous.
This is how they counter all the talk about the 1%. They suggest that 56% of people will be in the top 10% for one year or more. In their entire working lives.
Distortions include:
-income is not wealth
-some kinds of income are very uneven year-over-year
-jumping into the top bracket for only one year doesn't indicate income or class mobility
-most of the top 1% of income do in fact stay in the top 1% of income
People who earn a lot in one year but don't become wealthy may include:
-actors who get one TV commercial
-waiters at high-end restaurants who burn out
-realtors who get a few good sales in a row
-victims of disabling accidents receiving large insurance payouts
-oil and other trade workers in Alaska
-minor lottery winners
-people cashing in a retirement fund to deal with emergency spending
The fact that America is a land of random windfalls doesn't help with social mobility. A family with multi-generational poverty gets a windfall and immediately has to spend it just trying to catch up a bit.
You left out one of the biggest causes of this. For many people in that 56%, the year they end up in the top 10% is the year their last surviving parent passes away. Inheritance is a big one-time windfall for many people.
The other misleading thing is it looks at 44 years of longitudinal data, and doesn't make corrections for differences between the early years and later years. Income has become more polar in the last 40 years, so the current numbers are a fair bit worse than the average numbers of the last 4.4 decades.
Inheritances are not taxable (for the recipient), but IRS data shows similar patterns.
What it really comes down to is that the upper tail of the "reliable income" distributions is thin enough that a large fraction of the people who end up in various "top N%" buckets are there due to various windfalls, lumpiness of income (e.g. a writer getting an advance that they live on for a few years while writing the book), etc, etc.
Which is, by the way, why the way we do progressive taxation is a bit weird. Progressive taxation with tax brackets based on lifetime earnings, as opposed to current-year income, would make a lot more sense in some ways...
As much as at first blush progressive taxation based on lifetime earnings might seem fairer, it has extremely dangerous consequences. Having your tax bracket go up throughout your life creates major complications in saving for retirement (and extracting deferred income from retirement savings) which is enough to make the idea wildly impractical in my view.
Dynamics, like income mobility dynamics are a complicated thing. We tend to think in stories, and that is useful, but it makes it easy to reach overly general conclusions.
The old republics (US & France, mostly) tend to overlook class... to some extent intentionally. My country (ireland) has the opposite problem: too much class consciousness. To much telling of class-sentric stories.
But, class dynamics do exist in the US & France too.
Class mobility exists too, but it's nowhere near as mobile as income mobility. Class is stickier by definition. You can just as easily colour in a class stickiness story with statistics. The likelihood at birth of someone graduating high school, going to prison, being poor, rich etc. It is true that where you start is a pretty good predictor, statistically, of where you will end up.
It's important to keep both perspectives in mind, simultaneously. There are real opportunities to escape poverty. The ovarian lottery is also very important, so are other "lotteries." It's also a mistake to see yourself as a statistic.
This is a great write-up, and as someone who spent time being poor-ish, it really resonated.
What I realized from my own life experience: the US sawed the bottom rungs off the ladder in the 1950s when it suburbanized. There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area, and virtually every societal problem we deal with either stems from this or is made worse by it. Then the healthcare disaster is the cherry on top.
The US is a great place to live and work with tremendous upward mobility —— but only if you can stay above the event horizon which is reliable car ownership and insurance coverage (health, home/renters, auto). If you fall under that, you will need help or a lot of good luck to get back out.
I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway.
Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US is a lot nicer, but also much more expensive.
Buses have no route maps, no shelters and no doors. They might not come to a complete stop when they pick you up. But you can ride for 25¢.
The US has a kind of minimum standard of living, but it comes with a minimum cost of living. If you can't afford that, you end up with nothing.
This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.
The older I get the more I realize that you can't regulate the things wealthy societies do into existence. If everyone can't afford building code things collapse when you mandate that. If the economy is underpinned by bad working conditions or child labor things collapse when you regulate them. If people can't afford to eat at restaurants that follow some new code then they simply won't and those restaurants will fold. If you restrict the supply of some trade through licensing in the name of quality then you just get amateurs doing the lower dollar work for cash. A society has to be able to afford to do the things it mandates. People have to get wealthy enough to reliably afford "right" before you can legislate away "wrong".
> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.
People don't want poor people to live near them. That is the root of most of the zoning issues, it's not because they are actually worried about the quality of the housing stock that the people would live in.
I've seen some research on "relative income happiness" that suggest having poor(er) people nearby should increase happiness. Perhaps it doesn't apply if the income cap is to large...
Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. So no psych/social science research would ever claim that people are rational utility maximizing machines since they're descriptive by their very nature. And if people were rational utility maximizing machines such an effect would not be observed since happiness affected by social comparison is irrational. I don't understand how you came up with such a straw man.
I'm guessing sorisos is spot on with their last sentence. There's a big difference between being a millionaire surrounded by middle classers and being a lower classer surrounded by extreme poverty. Often times with happiness research there are caveats and ranges to keep in mind but the nuances tend to get lost in the headlines.
> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.
No, mostly people don't want poor people or sub-optimal housing in their neighborhoods, for a variety of financial, perceived safety, and emotional comfort related reasons.
If it was just not wanting poor people to live in suboptimal housing, there'd be a lot greater effort to provide non-sub-optimal housing to poor people. There are definitely people with this concern, but it's not the driver of housing and zoning policy.
Beautiful, cheap, easy, fast, durable (fire- and earthquake-proof, "It will not rot, rust or decompose in water.", etc.) and regular folk can make them with "backyard-scale" foamers and construction technique.
Yeah they said concrete would end homelessness. It's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. Places that allow and encourage lots of dense, walk-able construction (like where I live) have low rent, places that don't do this have high rent no matter how cheap construction materials are.
The liberal approach is to subsidize to maintain that base level, because of an awareness that the social outcomes tend to pay dividends in higher social unity, better health, etc.
Some people would rather pay for private security than for policy that makes muggings less likely, I suppose.
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A lot of cities in developing countries are built around cities/villages of the past. Today, they are redeveloping those, so they have infrastructural problems of the kind where they struggle to rip something out and redesign (unless you are China).
America got a clean slate in 1700s. And completely fucked it up over the years with massive suburbanization. America could have been Europe++ or Japan++ but instead we are a economic meat grinder with soulless suburbia being the pinnacle of a dream life.
I am originally from “3rd world country”, now my country is doing better, or worse. Depending on whom your ask. One thing I find very inefficient in comparing costs of living by converting everything to USD. In your example, $60 for our family used to be a lot. For example, it’s an amount of monthly pension of my grandparents, after having worked decent jobs their entire life.
Regarding aspirin, it interesting example. And I would argue, that it’s used to be the opposite: shortages were common, so everyone would try to buy provision, such as food and medicine, in advance. I recently witnesses a conversation, when a woman in her 30s complained that she could not find baby aspirin(or something like) for her kid because it was sold out, and her mother started literally yelling and berated for not having any in her home reserve.
Also people live in communities, not fortresses. Look at farmland villages in almost any country in the world and then see the US with sometimes literal miles between single houses. Suburbs are intended to keep other people out more than anything, but also don’t provide practically any services. There’s no corner store inside a suburb, one must exit first.
Not a great example. In the US, you can buy small quantities of drugs (or soap or whatever) in the travel section of a CVS, or in a dollar store. Usually this is held up as an example of the difficulty of being poor though (not a boon to the poor), since the unit price is, of course, higher.
The case I'm thinking of is informal. The pharmacist keeps a blister pack of pills behind the counter and will tear off as many as you want and sell them individually. The unit price is probably higher, but not exorbitant. It's probably against the rules, but the pharmacist deals with poor people all the time, and he isn't trying to gouge them.
And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.
I sometimes wonder if that event horizon is encroaching higher and higher up the economic ladder over time. Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it. I think increased stratification in terms of lifestyle and opportunity is not good long term for social cohesion or political stability.
This is very much the trend I saw over the 2000s-2010s.
Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it.
I know many people who were born into a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, pursued career paths that didn't involve the tech industry (because they were specifically encouraged to "do whatever you want"), and are now living below their parents' standards of living and will probably always be poorer than their parents.
They aren't bum artists either; they work in offices 8-6, and have 5+ years of experience and sophisticated professional skills. But they are being paid 2011 wages in a 2021 housing market, and it all strikes me as tremendously unfair.
Median house prices in the USA are now above their pre-crash peak, and have been increasing much much faster than the CPI[0]. Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.
In my peer group people are focusing on the monthly payments, rather than the loan amount. And mortgage rates are like half what they were in the last housing bubble https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
My peer group is probably a bit younger, and they/I are all renting or are relatively new homeowners. The "sticker price" on houses matters to my group a lot, as does monthly rent.
I'd love to find a FRED-like data source for median rental rates over time and/or an index thereof. I suspect that rents are generally correlated with sale prices on a multi-year time scale.
Serious question: why would they care about refinancing if their rate is low? Regarding dollar devaluation: I don't there there has been a single year since we abandoned the gold standard where the dollar didn't devalue. And the Fed has explicitly okayed higher inflation going forward.
> Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.
At first the suburban house as bottomless bank account was a result of “natural” forces like the baby boom and white flight. But people came to assume it, and then demand it. Politicians have obliged since homeowners are an extremely large and powerful demographic. Prior to 2008 we at least pretended to have a private mortgage industry. Now we don’t even bother with a fig leaf.
21st century is: we're turning everything into a market, far fewer easy but well-paid jobs, if older people had to actually face the brunt of it they would lose their homes.
People who can't handle technology don't have a chance nowadays.
I feel like this concept of turning everything into a market has much more downside than we would like to believe. It's often sold as democratization: i.e. "anyone can just go on youtube and be a content creator now - you don't need a production company as a middleman!"
But the thing about markets is they are great for the winners, and terrible for the losers. And one of the effects of technology is that it allows scaling such that fewer providers can serve the needs of many more consumers. The confluence of these factors is that you can have markets where a handful of winners can essentially serve the entire world. I don't know where that is supposed to leave the rest of the population.
The theory of it is good—-the more efficiently the human race can produce goods and services the better. If ten people can provide the entire world’s stand up comedy needs that frees up all those other people to do other valuable things. The issues are: 1) distributional (i.e. wealth gap) and 2) people get value out of the work itself and not just the compensation.
Although we fight a lot about #1, #2 strikes me as a thornier problem.
After the 2008 crash, it became politically impossible to let house prices drop, so the government will basically do anything to prop them up. Too many elderly voters who depend on their home equity to fund their lifestyles. I think we'll look back at 2020 as the moment the same political pressure happened to stock market prices.
Definitely. At least in my generation it feels like the boat is sinking and everybody's scrambling to be above deck. The majority of my high school class is going into tech or tech-adjacent industries for that reason.
>There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area
This just isn't true. The majority of the US has cheap housing. The person who wrote the article lives in Pheonix where you can get houses for 200k or under. Like this perfectly good 3 bed 2 br for 200k:
Housing costs are out of control in a handful of places in the US. In the rest of them it's as cheap as ever. Or even cheaper given the very low interest rates.
It can be stupid cheap to live in the US. Rent a room for $4-500, buy a late model Toyota for $5k, and eat like a poor person. It's pretty easy to accumulate enough money to break the cycle of poverty.
The big pitfall is health. If you're sick then yeah you're pretty screwed. But outside of that as long as you avoid unplanned kids, jail, and drugs it's pretty smooth sailing
I signed up just to respond to you because I live in Phoenix and there is no affordable housing here in a desirable neighborhood. There are no single family homes under 200K in Phoenix. A decent started sized home will cost you almost 300K and good luck finding one. That example you gave is a home that is in an area you wouldn't want to send your kids to the schools, walk around at night, and crime has been rampant in Maryvale since the 1990s and has been getting worse. There is a reason its priced like that. On a side note the home's yard is very small and is near Desert SkyMall which has had multiple shooting and deaths over the last few years. Just google desert sky mall shootings.
The author of the submitted article spent multiple paragraphs describing how it is not pretty easy to accumulate enough money to break the cycle of poverty, so if you want to maybe write a long form explaining how to effectively and realistically do so for people in this situation, that’d be great.
The author spent multiple paragraphs giving excuses why it's hard. The way out doesn't take that long to explain. Say we have someone netting 2k a month or 24k a year:
For a month:
Room - $500
Food - $200
Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies
Other Necessities - $200
Entertainment - $100
So we have $1,000 left over and have to deal with transportation. Our target is something like this 2009 Toyota Matrix with 100k miles for $3,900:
If we have $3,900 in the bank great. If not, life is going to suck for the next ~6 months while we save every penny and rely on the bus until we have the cash to afford it. Once we have it then we will have reliable transportation and can budget about $500 a month for car expenses including replacing this one when it breaks down. Leaving us:
Room - $500
Food - $200
Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies
Other Necessities - $200
Entertainment - $100
Car- $500
For a total of $1,500. $500 left over to accumulate some savings and/or pay for stuff we missed.
Next goal would be to use one of the many down payment assistance programs (https://www.arizonadownpaymentassistance.com/down-payment-pr...) to buy a home like the one I linked to. Then we rent out a room or two for ~$500 reducing our housing expenses while building equity.
As long as we don't get sick, don't have a kid, and don't start doing drugs we're going to be sitting pretty nice after a few years.
500 for car expenses a month? Seems crazy to put away 6k a year to maintain a car that is under 4k. If you need to spend 500 a month to keep the car on the road you need to get a different car.
A good used Toyota or Mazda or Honda will run for YEARS and huge mileages with only basic maintenance - like one oil change and new windscreen wipers every year levels of maintenance. Nothing breaks. These sorts of used civics or corollas etc that are maybe 5 -8 years old can be had for £3-6k or less (in UK at least). I've owned several over the past decade or two and they never have anything major wrong with them in terms of mechanical breakdowns. I have only got rid of them when I have "upgraded".
Running costs are negligible beyond the cost of fuel. Insurance is usually low as they are cheap to repair with plentiful parts etc. I pay about £300/year for my 2011 Toyota a(nd that was a year after a claim to replacing the catalytic converter that someone stole). Beyond that I estimate about another £250 a year for basic servicing, MOT (UK annual roadworthiness checks) and replacing consumables like bulbs or the odd tyre.
It’s hard to find any decent car for under $3500 in many parts of the US, which is a lot to save while paying rent and taking the bus. Those cars you’re mentioning are popular, especially right now and that drives the price up. Then you have liability insurance and to get the minimum with bad or no credit it’s usually around $100/mo. But yes $500/month on car expenses is too much.
Most of the US is rural with no housing, therefore no affordable housing by definition. In most small towns you're even more car-dependent than in a city, and there are no jobs.
As I think about it, if we define affordable as "costing under $500/mo all-in" (since that would be a little over a third of one month's work at minimum wage), it would surprise me if even 1 in 20 homes met that criteria.
>The US is a great place to live and work with tremendous upward mobility
Always confused by this notion. People act as if the US is the only place this is possible but not only is it possible in most of the western world, there is in fact BETTER mobility in the much of the western world relative to the US. The US isn't even in the Top 10!
For you, it seems that "tremendous" means best in class. Where is the cutoff, 1st, 3rd, top 10?
For others, being in the top 10 percent of 195+ countries is quite significant. For the average person in the rest of the world, being in the US would provide a significant and meaningful increase in their economic mobility.
Pretty confused by the downvotes. People don't like data?
I mean in fact it's worse than people think and you are no longer likely to make more than your parents when a few decades ago you had a 90% chance of doing so.
His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues.
It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition.
If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... lots of things. There's a spectrum with options all along it.
It is not true for housing, transport and a lot of other, unavoidable expenses. Housing is the extreme example. Say an average smartphone is $350. $700 buys a luxury phone. $175 gets you an decent phone. Say median rent is $1500. Going above $3k will get you a palace and $750 probably doesn't get you anything. Quality, below median prices is on an extremely steep curve.
Household economics are just completely different below and above a certain threshold... and this has gotten more pronounced over the last generation or two.
Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing.
Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.
The upshot of all this is that we underestimate how poor poor is.
> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing.
> Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.
And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor.
This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet.
Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.
They're days to weeks away from starvation, in some cases begging in the streets to survive, in others working themselves literally to death to avoid that fate for themselves and their families, while suffering from a variety of physical and mental ailments that they are unable to afford treatment for and struggling to keep the heat, power, and on.
If that's not the face of "really poor" in the modern age, nothing is. Just because the details don't look exactly the same as those of 19th century Irish poverty does not mean it's "not real."
Well you have read the description of the poor in the 19th century, so I'd say it still doesn't compare. Nobody starves in the west, unless they have a serious mental illness. But then the comparison would also be silly, as their problem would not primarily "being poor", but having a mental illness. Of course you can always find somebody who is worse off than somebody else. Those starving people begging in the streets have it really well compared to somebody who is about to die from a terminal disease within the next 24 hours.
And if there is such a huge amount of people with mental illness, as I said elsewhere, I suspect the real problem is drug addiction and not "the economy" or "rich people".
Who is starving, and why? I think if you can point to some starving children and make a public call, you would get lots of donations. If you are aware of such cases, please point them out, or contact the appropriate charities.
Families from my home state would use EBT/food stamps while struggling during the last recession. Under these social programs they always had enough money to buy basic needs from the grocery store. There is a cultural issue in the U.S. where a lot of people refuse to accept any help from those kinds of programs but never to the point where they would actually starve to death.
the problem with these programs in the US is that you gotta jump through hoops with beaurocracy and not every person has the mental stability to do that. same with healthcare. i need to register somewhere and meet some income quota to get free healthcare. to me that's ridiculous and not the case in many other countries. I personally experienced German healthcare without showing any paperwork when I had fallen on hard times in my life and it was very refreshing.
I personally know a poor guy in the States that was waiting to get to the psychiatrist for 4 months with his bipolar disorder episode because he simply wasn't able to get on the Medicare due to his anxiety. The task was too taxing for him at that time.
I thought about this too when I was reading Crime and Punishment recently. The protagonist is described as very poor, but they still have a room in a house, and their room even includes house meals. Similarly with other poor characters; sometimes their space was just a sectioned off area of a bigger room (maybe like a floor-ceiling cubical). But hey, that's gotta be better than sleeping under a freeway for most people.
The thing is, in the US the "sectioned off area of a bigger room" model of housing has been legislated and regulated out of existence. Similar for the other option the very poor (read: serfs) had in the Russia of the period Crime and Punishment is set in: just build something yourself to the best of your ability. The result was not always great, and there are all sorts of reasons (starting with fire-spreading externalities) for modern building codes, so I'm not suggesting it's necessaily desirable or viable to go back to where we were in the 19th century regarding housing. But the upshot is that building and health codes enforce a minimum quality on housing that surely feels unexceptionable to the people writing them while at the same time serving to price people out of housing.
Honestly, I think the role of stuff like this is exaggerated... if you look at real examples. Base level building cost per sqm at the low end is pretty low but..
1 - IRL, especially in urban markets... rental markets tend to have a pattern where not far below median prices, quality falls off a cliff. For every dollar you save, you lose a lot: sqm, finish, location, etc. By about 0.5X median prices, there is often nothing. Conversely, in suburban & rural markets, quality per dollar tends to explode somewhere not far above median.
2 - This is usually less true for owner-occupied or other types of housing.
I think the end of tenement-type housing has as much to do with culture as it has to do with pure economics or building norms. Most of those, originally, had live in owner-operators. It was a way to make housewifing into a business. Apartments didn't really exist yet.
It feels like we do our best to make poverty “invisible”. I often think of how much land would be taken up by slums. The US still is reeling from the idea of the “projects” in LBJs war on poverty - mainstream politicians literally won’t even use the word “poor” anymore. We still don’t have any sort of coherent policy for where to put poor people, especially the homeless.
From what I have seen, allowing worse conditions for a renter doesn't significantly change the price floor, it just changes what they are given at that price floor.
Healthcare and housing are two things that seem to crush those in poverty (with transportation being a distant, but important, third. On one hand you can keep a job with no house, but can't with no transportation; on the other hand, cars have gotten cheaper and more reliable pretty steadily over my lifetime).
A lot of families are a single injury to a non earner away from being bankrupt. Obviously an injury to an earner can be even worse. As TFA points out you can live in terrible conditions and maybe be a bit more financially stable, or you can live in passable conditions and be constantly short on money. Either way you are just trading one type of stress for another.
Maybe in the states this is true about transport. Here in ireland I would guesstimate the difference between entry level (personal car) ownership costs and upper-middle class car ownership at 1/1.5... maybe even less... maybe even negative.
Fuel costs, registration and insurance costs are, I'd wager, negatively correlated with wealth and much higher here than the states. Driving an older car can cost €100-€200 more per month than a new one.
1. Fuel and registration vary from state-to-state, but can be so cheap in the US that the purchase/repair/maintenance costs dominate.
2. As TFA states, many poor people have either liability only, or no insurance. The latter is illegal in most states, but "break the law or starve" has a fairly universal result of breaking the law.
It's not just that it's bid up, it's that the govmnt has paternalized what sort of housing-should be legal. The housing that the poor could get back in the day is now illegal because it's "inhumane". There's regulations around square footage, fixtures, etc. Of course the "unintended consequence" is those people sleep in their cars or outside/tents, which is obviously worse than a shitty apartment that has a roof and walls. Maybe the closest thing to the old way is renting a room on Craig's list.
I was poor for some time after deciding to quit my computer science phd for a career in art. I guess I still am compared to others, but it does not feel that way any more. When I was really poor, worrying about money and how to pay the next rent was a regular source of stress for me, which took quite a lot of emotional energy.
Now I still have much lower income than people, who have regular well-paying jobs, but I do not feel poor. I have no savings and there are some things, which feel totally out of reach like owning a car or house, but I do not have to worry about money and I can afford a lot of luxuries like visiting theatres very often and eating out.
Regarding housing: I remember living in a tiny room in a shared flat in the worst part of town, above a brothel, a shady car dealer and a Hookah lounge (which was often very loud, very late into the night). Sometimes I had problems paying rent, but there just was no cheaper less-quality alternative.
Regarding transportation: I am so glad, that I live in a place, where you can live very comfortably without a car.
Similarly with health care. I think the US is just an especially bad place to be poor in compared to Europe.
Financially switching from computer science to art has been a very bad decision, but overall it was the best decision in my life. It really helped me deal with my tendencies for depressions, because it allows me to feel more meaning in my life and suits me better. I do not think that I would have dared this switch in the US. I don’t know what would have happened if I had lived in the states, if I would have found other ways to cope with depression or if I would have slipped into deeper and deeper depressive episodes without a way out, but I am glad that I did not have to find out.
Ever slept in a bus station? I have, in the US. I went for 3 years without any healthcare, and then it took another 7 years and a lawyer (who took $16k USD) to get more permanent help.
One thing is for certain: with 99.99% of people, their friendliness (or meanness) is proportional to the size of your bank account.
If you want to know how people truly are, become actually poor, filthy, and seem depressed, then you will know their nature.
> If you want to know how people truly are, become actually poor, filthy, and seem depressed, then you will know their nature.
I guess it’s just that so many poor, dirty people act mentally unhinged and (potentially) dangerous that you start to assume that about all of them.
I find that I try to avoid them right up until they force me to interact with them and I find out they’re one of the (relatively) normal ones. Then I’m perfectly happy to buy them a sandwich (or two, if I’m going to buy you breakfast might as well have a decent one).
It works this way because people are, rationally, more interested in their own physical safety than they are in the feelings of strangers.
Anecdote: I was in San Francisco a few years back. There were homeless folks everywhere. Some were nice, even chatty. We felt at ease even when walking through areas that were full of homeless folks. But a couple of days into our trip, a homeless dude accosted a coworker on the sidewalk. He shouted violent threats, shoved my coworker, and told him not to come back. When I asked my coworker what set the guy off, he said that he had absolutely no idea.
That experience changed how I interacted with homeless folks for the remainder of the trip. I made no eye contact. I avoided areas with groups of homeless folks. I did not respond when spoken to. Is that fair to the average homeless person, who is perfectly normal, just down on their luck? To be perfectly honest, I do not care. My physical safety comes before your feelings. Full stop.
It matters quite a bit. The view that "it only takes one unhinged person" tells you to treat homeless people the same way you treat everyone else. The view that homeless people are much more likely to assault you than normal people tells you to be more cautious around them than you are around normal people.
"Rationally"? You mentioned you had all sorts of nice experiences with homeless people and then one bad actor caused you to choose out of all of the attributes of this person, their lack of a home, to be the one for you to blanket-label all people like this as dangerous enough to place them outside of your treat-like-a-human-being sphere.
Nah, there is not a rational way to blanket label groups like this from a sample size of 1. That's your trauma talking.
Yeah, it's the trauma. That's the point. The potential cost of a single violent interaction is extremely high. There is relatively no reward for being pleasant to the 99% who just happen to look an awful lot like the one who tried to stab you.
It is the same rationale behind profiling. Which is to say, it is rational, just ineffective and with a number of bad side effects.
All it takes is one to seriously physically hurt you. You wouldn’t leave your doors unlocked while away just because 99% of passerbys won’t check whether it is.
You can't deny that in terms of Bayesian probability, the odds are higher for a homeless person to be mentally unhinged than for the average person. Simply because mental illness is often the cause for homelessness.
Please don't overlook the people who are not dirty or mentally unhinged.
The guy sat on the same bench you walk past everyday, the guy you see sat in the library everyday, etc. Not every homeless person acts like a homeless person and you see them everywhere once you start looking.
This resonates with me as someone who has been homeless for a, thankfully, short period of time. I was given a chance to get back on my feet by someone who was almost as poor as I was, he did have a house and a couch I could sleep on though. Ten years later I have no money worries, and because we remain good friends, neither does he.
I have, I’ve also lived in a car, showered in gyms/public bathrooms and it sucks. Especially, if you’re trying to keep up an image at work and don’t want them to know you’re homeless.
> If you want to know how people truly are, become actually poor, filthy, and seem depressed, then you will know their nature.
You don’t need to be homeless to discover that some people lack sympathy. I lack sympathy. It doesn’t mean I’m an asshole. Sympathy isn’t empathy (huge distinction). Some people can’t tell the difference and everyone is just bad (cue the big tears).
This is especially true if you’re a freeloader. I imagine most people are just as honest about freeloaders regardless if they are homeless or supremely wealthy. This problem isn’t mean people, but rather poor self-analysis and playing a victim. Most people don’t want anything to do with that nonsense, which is extremely unsympathetic.
In my city the majourity of panhandlers you see have homes, and choose not to work and beg on the street. You can tell who's homeless because they don't bother you, they sit in silence, or in front of a shelter. Or they ask for food rather than money.
People harassing you for money? Panhandlers.
I'm sure it's different in cities that have higher costs of living s.t. a min wage earner can't afford rent anywhere.
It's nowhere near the majority case, but I have definitely met freeloader panhandlers when they were off duty. One was an older couple who made their grandkids put on ratty clothes and hold signs in the city, so they could continue living on the road in their very nice RV. I met them at a campground when I was a kid, and the grandkids accidentally let slip that "the bank" was code for panhandling.
The other was clearly a bit mentally unhinged. He pulled up in a very nice Mercedes with a bunch of weird slogans silkscreened on the back window that would put Qanon to shame, but this was in 2004. If I remember right he showed us his fine suits in the trunk of the car. Told us about his private compound where he lived. Then proceeded to dance and sing in the middle of the street in his bum clothes.
Most of the people I have known that I would label as "freeloaders" seem to have some combination of developmental emotional abuse and mental health issues that are either not diagnosed or not properly medicated. They tend to become homeless of their own accord and tend to blame people for the relationships they destroy.
At first it comes off as entitlement when they assume free access to other people's property, time, and resources when those other people are trying to help. But after a long enough period of direct social involvement it becomes frustratingly clear the behavior is something like a passive non-violent anti-social behavior. It can be sad to watch. Its worse if they have children.
in one specific case I will willingly describe where that is precisely the reality that needs to be faced. (hardly gladly will I recount my experiences, I am barely past the stages of pure shock, I became homeless as the result of extensive almost decade long criminal harassment following when I accidentally uncovered a systematic fraud in government. ironically - actually I am pretty sure intentionally - the fraud is in housing and crosses the institutional walls between central and local government and into the world of QUANGOS and charities ostensibly helping the homeless but inextricably involved.
the systematic enfranchisement of fraud in east London public housing authority and agencies intertwined and inseparable from hard drug dealing, is maintaining a permanent and pernicious status quo where under housing in consequence is denied by individuals who are officially homeless and who collectively by reason of being sufficiently well financially provided for by exceptional and exclusive permissive authority, exist en masse as a block preventing both the most needy to get housed from the street and the eligible and worthy to move on into permanent housing that they can sustain.
the situation is naturally more complicated than this, but essentially these are the conditions that have such a deleterious effect on the public : the mode of cash money available for spending to the majority cohort is greater than the average free for spending cash income in London as a whole ; the percentage of technically "homeless" people who are housed ostensibly only temporarily but effective permanently on the doorstep of the City's financial center who are habitual beggars is greatly in excess of 50% and I can attest closer to 90 percent in my own experience ; income from begging frequently exceeds USD 1000 per week. ; organised crime is permeated throughout every corner of the entire environment these people - indeed any homeless person - encounters.
I'll simply respond to any questions rather than drown you in the details straight away. of course, into this vipers' nest fell lil'ol'me who was raised by a Great Depression banker and brought up learning accounting from my pay dissecting the over valuation applied to the pension fund of his newly commercialized thrift which was paying their former board manager and one time gm responsible for their greatest historic growth, just 82 British pounds a week supposedly index linked... this ain't over quite yet due to the pandemic messing with case progression, so you might hear more yet.. I can rout out plentiful public sources meantime if you're particularly interested although if you are please forgive me in advance for being rather circumspect about who is who and the whys and wherefores, because this is long ago passed into the physical danger territory for not merely me but including anyone who has helped..
edited by necessity of brevity, excerpted text in profile
Your comment is very difficult to read and understand. The sentences are too long and borders on purple prose. There are too many strands of thought packed into a single sentence.
I understand you are saying that you discovered some potential government fraud, and that homeless Londoners are being recruited by organised criminals, but not how the two are related.
You may have missed the point, so I'll state it explicitly: almost all people lack empathy, it's just more than some have the self-control not to stab homeless people to death.
Sympathy, gratuity, and freeloading are somewhere off in the distance.
I hope you're not trying to slip in some duplicitous language to accuse me of being freeloader. What does it have to do with anything?
There isn't any empirical assessment that agrees with that. A lack of empathy is narcissism, which only applies to a small percentage of any population according to most of the research on this subject.
Thank you for sharing. Your comment highlights something important I believe when talking about poverty. One common argument against any type of government help is that poor people should just work harder and pull themselves by the bootstrap.
However the situation you describe above shows the many side-effects of being poor which impede life in general: lack of proper sleep (because you live in a noisy area with no other choice), constant stress (paying rent, maybe dangerous neighborhood, etc.), probably not affording good quality food, etc. etc.
Add these side-effects up and one quickly understand that getting out of poverty is an herculean task and I personally couldn't blame someone for not making it.
I’d go further—-why do all narratives around poverty have to revolve around the middle class? Either someone used to be middle class and is now poor, grew up poor and is now middle class or at very least is moving towards that end.
Where are the stories about people born into poverty, still in poverty, and not likely to be anything but poor for the rest of their lives? There are lots of people like this and cutting out their stories distorts our perceptions.
> Where are the stories about people born into poverty, still in poverty, and not likely to be anything but poor for the rest of their lives?
Thomas Sowell says that it's actually a pretty small percentage of people like that. Most poor people are young and most rich people are old. Young people become older and the vast majority work their way up the pay scale to some extent.
Seems like the thing to put some numbers on. If that perpetually poor narrative is only true for 1% of Americans, that's a population bigger than my hometown being forever mischaracterized and unrepresented. Ignoring the realities of others' lives is how we got rising fascism.
I doubt many are comforted in knowing they're a statistical minority.
> Financially switching from computer science to art has been a very bad decision, but overall it was the best decision in my life.
This reminded me of a friend who graduated with a BA in "design" (I'm not sure), got a high-paying job as a web designer, and quit that to become a teacher at some type of extracurricular enrichment place for very young children.
The new place didn't pay well -- or even reliably -- but she liked it more.
My wife is a case worker for the county welfare office. She deals with "those" people for a living and sees first-hand every day all the real and imagined shit spouted by righteous ideologues. She tells me that amongst those living in poverty, wealth is measured in terms of friends and family. Any money you come into is spent immediately, often on gifts to build status within your social network.
It's only when you move into the middle classes that wealth starts to be measured in terms of money. Budgeting, saving, trying to get more and planning for a future when you have none is not something someone in poverty does: it's something someone not in poverty does when they have no money. Trying to climb the social ladder by accumulating more money marks you as middle class.
The third layer has enough money (but of course always try to get more because that's the game). Their concept of wealth tends to be oriented towards legacy: collecting artworks, donating to cultural or research endeavours, political involvement. Wealth is measured by what you leave behind, and money is wasted if it just goes to trust funds or taxes.
When I was a student, and for many years after, I had no money. I had enough to keep a squalid roof over my head and three square meals a week. I had no money and no savings but I did not live in poverty because I had a plan to earn and save and move up in the world. I had no money but I did not live in poverty.
I think it's important for people who are trying to leave their legacy by getting politically involved in eliminating poverty to understand that their world is not the world. They need to understand how the definition of wealth for those in poverty is not the same as their definition of wealth, and without understanding that difference they are bound for failure from the start.
The reason you spend money as soon as you get it when you're poor is 1) because when you're poor you accumulate debts, both formal and informal, and 2) when you're poor you know other people who are poor and who need things.
Thinking poor people like being poor because they value what's really important - friends and family - is like poverty version of the "magical negro" trope. Poor people value friends and family because they need each other to survive. People with no money problems don't need anyone.
edit: I honestly believe in a harsher version of this, in that for me the difference between friend and acquaintance is that a friend has sacrificed their comfort or safety for yours when they didn't have to. A friend is an acquaintance that has been tested by your bad circumstances and passed. If you're wealthy, you are rarely in truly bad circumstances, so when they happen, you might find yourself surrounded by acquaintances. Poor people know who to trust because they've had to trust them before.
I think you’re arguing a bit of a strawman and you and the person you replied to probably agree with each other.
The accumulated debts, and helping out each other makes sense given the needs of the community and dependence on each other for survival. It’s interesting that could translate into a gift culture for social status hierarchy, and it kind of makes sense. Even if in the perverse case it can make it harder for any individual to get out of poverty - it makes it easier for them to survive while they’re in it.
Basically poor people have to have room mates and they have to interact with the people around them, so they tend to form quicker bonds of friendship. Middle class people can afford to go it alone.
> Thinking poor people like being poor because they value what's really important - friends and family - is ...
I didn’t read that poor people like being poor - I read they have a different value system (and reading into it, the different value system being rooted in being poor). You are injecting something else into the narrative.
> People with no money problems don't need anyone.
> Poor people know who to trust because they've had to trust them before.
I feel like this is what's been contributing to collapsing communities in the US more than political tensions or whatever other specter one could point to. The lack of real, repeated need of others. A relative abundance on wealth leads to using money-based services to fix issues instead of relationships (which have cumbersome overheads). That leads to the creation of more services and until we've generally forgotten how to have a community, only services and consumers.
If the movers and shakers are motivated by building a legacy of good works then they need to be seen to be building such a legacy. Bricks and mortar can be seen. Funding foundations can be seen ("brought to you by the Ford Foundation"). Someone no longer living on the dole can not be seen. Rich people have no motivation to get people out of poverty because there is no credit in it.
The middle class sees everything in terms of money spent. If someone is lifted out of poverty, no more money can be spent on them. The middle class has no motivation to get people out of poverty.
The poor have no motivation to get out of poverty because they're already wealthy.
This is what is termed a 'structural' problem. If someone were really interested in making change, they would try to alter the fundamental structure that shapes the system. I have some interesting anecdotes about such efforts but they're outside the scope if this discussion.
> Any money you come into is spent immediately, often on gifts to build status within your social network.
Rather, for immediate survival and whatever bill is the most urgent to make even a tiny partial payment to avoid cut-off and the occasional comfort food as a treat if you can afford it somehow.
Source: had a rough patch in my life a couple years ago (thankfully over now).
Living in a country where there is a better social net in place, but coming from a refugee background, i regularly notice a disconnect with my peers.
I do understand their financial worries and sympathize, but only because i am aware of my perspective. Oftentimes i have to remind myself that for others it is actually stressful to think about not being able to comfortably buy a house vs renting it.
Meanwhile i worry about my mothers retirement, how i can get her out of this shady living situation and how i can pay back everything she has done to bring me up despite circumstances.
Actually i wish for others that were better off their whole life to have my perspective for some time, since i think that it would really make them less stressed about their future.
What's jarring to me is the author's characterization of car repair as "poor-people skills". Knowing how to use tools can be part of being poor, or it can be part of being an engineer who designs things that can actually be manufactured and assembled.
Either that or I'm a lot poorer than I think I am!
> What's jarring to me is the author's characterization of car repair as "poor-people skills".
Car repair is a skill of economic importance of you are poor or employed in auto repair. Otherwise, it's obviously a skill someone might have, but far less critical.
I recall feeling it when I was younger and we were in a worse place. Now I feel it every time someone tells me the price for pruning a tree, fixing my house wiring, or making my pet more comfortable. There's a moment after they say the number where they are bracing for an argument. When I just say 'Okay', some of them seem a little startled.
Another aspect may be that I have in fact worked with my hands before. It's possible I might have done it anyway, but needing money is powerful motivation for getting dirt under your nails. So I understand the cost of parts and labor, whereas some of my newer peers may not. Yes, that repair really is $800, and yes I'm fine with paying it.
A while ago I read about a study that surveyed people with inherited wealth. IIRC they ranged from having inherited tens to hundreds of millions. No matter how much they had inherited, when asked how much they would need to have inherited to feel financially secure and not have to worry about money, they said they would need something like half again to double.
I may be misremembering the details, but that was the gist of it but I couldn't find the article again. I suppose expectations scale up with means.
On the other hand discovering people they know are actually very wealthy seems to have a massive negative effect on people's levels of empathy. Wealthy people who have suffered bereavement or personal tragedy report people who are less wealthy than themselves rarely offer sympathy and they often get comments along the lines of 'knowing what it's like for the rest of us now', or 'what it's like to have a problem you can't buy your way out of'.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a frugal household, but I have basically never felt like I needed more money since properly starting my career.
I mean it helps that I have tended to live in lower COL cities, but I have always saved a sufficient portion of my income, and I have never had the feeling that I want to buy something or travel somewhere and I can’t because I can’t afford it.
I don’t fly first class, and I rarely stay in luxury accommodation, but those things just don’t matter to me, especially compared to the freedom of always having extra money.
I feel like this is such a relaxing way to live, and I have never understood the lifestyle treadmill or conspicuous consumption.
Yeah, I pretty much ignore my bank balance and autopay my bills and mortgage and never have to think much about money. By the apparent standards of SV techs I'm well below the poverty line. I find it difficult to empathize with them.
Hi! I'll give it a try, though I didn't downvote you. My reading is that your comment is trying to argue with the one above it, even though you're both coming from the same direction.
GP says that "SV techs" are unrelatable because they always want more $, and mentions that they're satisfied with what they make. They don't try to say that they're not in a privileged position, just that they don't see the need to always be wanting more.
Your comment, then, is a bit of a non-sequitur - even though it's correct, you don't really have an argument to have with GP. Maybe it's just your phrasing that's throwing people off.
Thanks, I read it all a few times more and I think I can see what you mean, though it’s quite hard.
No matter how, I keep coming away with GP sounding like they’re humblebragging :) I don’t have issues with the literal content, just with the meaning I read into it.
Either way, thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a comment on HN flip flop around so much on score.
I've observed that brushes with mortality or ill-health can also quickly alter one's perspective. Once one gets the perception that there's a threat of being physically unable to work for much longer, I think the drive to have an increasingly large "safety net" can become very strong.
Death is one thing; a long life of fragility is another. The latter costs more, and I think can cause some people to suddenly look much differently at their wealth.
Or you realize you may not die at any moment and find yourself too old or infirm to earn enough support yourself and you need to not enjoy the money now so you might be able to scrape by later.
depends on your goals. I don't worry for myself. I save about half of my take-home (and I don't make an SV salary). unless the bottom falls out of the software market completely, I'll be fine. I do worry for my friends and my young cousins who haven't yet found their path in life. it's not my responsibility to do so, but I won't have "enough" until I can protect them too.
For me the feeling of needing more money does not come from wanting to spend more now, but rather a foreboding feeling that any moment jobs could dry up and I'll need to support myself and others via savings in an extended recession.
Interesting. I'm solidly upper-middle-class (typical income for this forum, I imagine). I don't think doubling my net worth would make me much happier or financially more secure. It would allow a new Tesla instead of a used BMW. And flying business class for vacation. With the state of health care/insurance in the US, despite being a ridiculous amount of money by most measures, it wouldn't allow me to retire in the 50s or remove the concern that I'm one bad car accident or cancer scare away from financial ruin.
Yep, the US healthcare system basically means you have to be a multimillionaire when you've retired if you want to have any semblance of a comfortable retirement, because any serious injury or health issue (which will happen at some point) will do a damn good job of sucking up most or all of that money away super fast.
If you're younger at least you might get lucky with GoFundMe "insurance", but that requires your story being sad or unusual enough to go viral, or you have a large family and friends network (starting a donation campaign on GoFundMe.com, what just about every American has to rely on for serious health expenses nowadays). If you're old you're probably not going to be pulling at enough heart strings to rely on this, though.
> Yep, the US healthcare system basically means you have to be a multimillionaire when you've retired
That's just not true. Everyone qualifies for Medicare when they are 65 years old. An extra $150/month gets you supplemental insurance, with a lower deductable than many work plans.
Also, and this is significant, medical bills can't collect against retirement accounts. The law is that they can't touch it. Same with your house and car. You can have $10k, $100k, or a million dollars in a 401k, an ira, or a roth, and withdraw it as you need it, to supplement your social security income.
Retirees qualify for nationalized health insurance. In theory, those 65+ would be mostly immune for health-related bankruptcy (although co-pays/deductibles can still be problematic).
Anybody younger has to pay for health care out of pocket or buy insurance. The cost of paying OOP is exorbitant. Even buying insurance on the open market is outrageously expensive. In either case, major medical issues can easily escalate to be financially disastrous.
Edit - in my original post, I stated doubling my net worth (or income or whatever) wouldn't allow me to retire in my 50s due to potential medical costs. This is what I mean - even with a few million in the bank, retirement isn't feasible due to the cost of buying healthcare in the US.
I had this conversation with an uncle who lives in Scotland. He didn't understand why my dad was still working (at age 60). Medical insurance was the only reason. As soon as he got Medicare, he retired.
For the benefit of others who may be reading I'll mention a couple of other programs...
There's Medicaid, the federally funded healthcare program for the poor. It is free. As a single person there are really low limits on how much assets and income you can have and qualify. Kids are more easily qualified, even if there parents may not be. Doctor choice is limited, there are lines, etc.
There's also the VA, available for veterans. I'm not sure of the rules around this. But those qualified get free care.
Throughout the country hospitals are supposed to patch up anyone who shows up with an emergency. The patient will get a bill after, but they won't be left to bleed to death. This doesn't help with slowly developing problems, though.
Beyond these free programs, (and Medicare for retired folks, talked about earlier), there's also Obamacare, which subsidizes medical coverage for those making too much to qualify for Medicaid. Someone working full time for minimum wage and making $14k per year (which is enough to rent a room and have a junk car), might end up with a subsidized plan having a $6k+ deductable (which they don't have!), someone making double that (enough for an inexpensive apartment and a used car) would pay $175 a month for the same plan. Obamacare details vary by state.
People with jobs making more than the above often have health care offered through work, and no longer qualify for Obamacare plans. At the low end these plans may not be as good as the Obamacare plans. Typically these plans might cost the employee $100-$200/month and up if there are multiple plans to choose from (the employer may be contributing 2-5x that, depending on the job), and have a deductable of several thousand dollars, with yearly exams and routine screening included for free. The problem becomes that you have to pay for everything else up to your deductable, then costs are shared up to a max limit perhaps $15k, then the plan covers all costs for all covered care. The deductable and maximum double for family plans.
One big problem with all the plans with deductables is that it is near impossible to find out what anything non-trivial will cost, which is discouraging when you have to pay some of these costs.
Government employees typically have the best plans, similar to what the average white collar worker had 20-30 years ago. Small copayments instead of large deductables. These plans were phased out by most private employers because they were too expensive, for both employers and most employees.
I would guess the typical example of this might be a working age person who lived paycheck to paycheck then had a non-trivial medical issue to deal with. They may have already had other house/car/student/credit-card debt. The medical problem may have interfered with their ability to work. They may qualify for other free-care programs after they burn through all their savings.
(That's where putting those savings in retirement accounts would have helped, but with few exceptions you can't access that money before the age of about 60, and also remember that it's a borrow and spend culture here, not saving for a rainy day.)
The best one could say is that bankruptcy is a way to get a clean slate, wiping out prior debts, and to be sure that the homeless statistic you are looking at doesn't count those who moved back in with family as homeless (some do).
The worst one can say is that the system is optimized to extract as much money as possible form as many people as possible...
After doing the math, it's looking like my rough estimate was a little high, but I suspect the numbers I'm about to share is higher than you're thinking.
Sure, they qualify for Medicare, but that doesn't mean they won't be still be spending serious money on healthcare. According to CNBC, if you were retiring in 2019, as a couple in good health you'll need on average of $390,000[1]. That assumes you're on Medicare as well. I'm guessing most people here are about 35 years old or younger, so not eligible for Medicare for at least another 30 years.
If I assume 2.5% inflation over the next 30 years (the default given in the following link[2]), that $390k in 2019 becomes $860k in 2051.
Granted that seems to be the average, and there will be people with less expenses. But that's just healthcare. While you'll probably own your home outright by then, there's the eventual assisted living that might be in your future as well, which already can cost up to $1500-4000 a month today (with monthly expenses another $2k+)[3], let alone 40-50 years from now. Although I suspect some people help pay for that by selling their homes at that point.
So okay, maybe you don't need to be a multi-millionaire when you retire to be comfortable, but you probably should try to be a millionaire, at least you and your spouse together (assuming you're going to have one).
One thing I didn't take into account was Social Security, which assuming it's still around in 2050 that will offset some of this. I do have a bad habit of assuming Social Security is going to be either severely nerfed or fall apart by the time I retire, so I tend not to account for it in my retirement planning. Maybe you could knock off $300k thanks to Social Security checks, I don't know and don't have time to dig further.
But retirement funding is so dependent on an individual's expenses, ability to generate income, expectations, risk tolerance, and available resources such as assets and family. These are all different for different people. Life expectancy and related health expenses are a huge unknown. Rich or poor we are all going to die, but we don't know when or how.
I think it's reasonable to retire as a healthy 50 year old with a million dollars. I know that may be unconventional around here. The existing (subsidized) obamacare and (supplemented) medicare options are a pretty good deal, in combination with savings to cover deductables, out of pocket maximums, and dental. Medicaid would be the backup for the
worst-case scenarios, typically long term nursing home care. But that'll bankrupt most people, in most countries [0]. Is it reasonable to expect otherwise?
I was curious about the $390k figure you quoted, there wasn't any detail provided. I wonder if these are expenses over and above what medicare covers, like elective surgeries, or if this figure includes money for private nursing home care, etc. It was for two people.
Back to your original post, it is easy to keep retirement savings in a qualified 401k/ira/roth account that, along with a primary residence up to a generous maximum, is protected from medical debt with the exception of long term care. A retired millionaire should have around half of their money protected in such accounts. Do other countries give someone in similar financial circumstances a better deal?
This is patently false and what mikem170 says is true. My mother has little-to-no savings and had a serious issue happen where she was in the ICU for a couple weeks and then in a rehabilitation facility for a month and a half, and paid nothing.
It's the US, so of course "free healthcare" still leaves you with lots of large bills if you actually use any healthcare. Usually one pays for "gap coverage" insurance, running low-hundreds of dollars per person (consider: married couples) to cover things that aren't covered, or are poorly-covered, by Medicare[0] and those still don't mean you aren't going to have a substantial hospital bill if anything goes wrong (as they usually don't cover 100% of a bill, just like normal US health insurance)
[0] Medicare is our insurance program for old people, and I think also kicks in for those who are disabled at younger ages. Medicaid is the name for our HC program for the very poor. People get these mixed up because the names are so similar. Then of course there's our coverage for the active military and their families (Tricare) and VA healthcare coverage for retired military. And programs for other government employees, and their families. By the time you add it all up, a huge percentage of the US population is already covered by government healthcare schemes, actually, which is reflected in our spending enough on publicly-funded healthcare that we should be able to cover everyone with just that money, if our costs were similar to the rest of the OECD. Instead we still have the costs of private insurance and bills to individuals even when covered by healthcare (these can run into the five figures per year, easily, on top of insurance costs) and, for some of the above, huge expenses in addition to the costs of the government portion of the HC program.
[EDIT] Medicare gap coverage tends to run low-hundreds of dollars per person per month, in case that wasn't clear.
They get free national health insurance, but it doesn't cover everything and dealing with the bureaucracy is a non trivial amount of effort. And there are still out of pocket deductibles to pay even with this national coverage. As a result people often purchase supplementary insurance.
Medicare is reasonably cheap (assuming you paid Medicare taxes for at least 7.5 years; if you did not, it's at least $471/month). To be clear, "relatively cheap" is "at least $148.50/month; more if you have more income during retirement".
But past the premiums, there are deductibles, coinsurance (e.g. for hospital stays longer than 60 days), you still have to pay for medicines (how much varies), etc. See https://www.medicare.gov/your-medicare-costs/medicare-costs-... and the links from it for details.
I remember reading it initially some time ago - and visiting it anew I'm surprised how high the multiple is. In my head it was "10% - 25% higher".
My personal hunch is too many of us "shoot just too high" in terms of what we can afford, be it housing, cars, whatever.
Granted there are plenty of disciplined individuals and families out there and it's certainly not impossible to live within one's means.
But human nature is what it is - why "settle" for a $400,000 home when the bank will give you a mortgage for $500,000? Why settle for a Ford, VW or Toyota when the car finance payment for a BMW or Merc are just a little bit higher each month?
As I become more wealthy, I have started to tackle problems that I never really thought about when I wasn't as well off, things that cropped up when I thought I'd finally have peace of mind. In retrospect, the insecurity was always there, but I had the luxury of ignoring it when I was poorer.
Once I started making enough not to worry about rent, the problem was then saving enough for things like retirement, setting up tuition funds for the family, etc. Now the problem is managing my mix of investments and having a big enough pad to insulate myself from the occasional recession. But, I think even if my net worth were to triple there isn't really anything I can do to avoid a great depression-level economic catastrophe. Beyond that, I know not what money problems people with eight or nine figure net worths are scared of but I would assume if I ever made it that far the anxiety won't go away.
Just remember that your anxieties are child's play compared to the anxieties of people worrying every day about paying for their place to live, food or health care. These worries are tally different.
People out there having bigger problems does not diminish your own. To me, getting my children into a good public school is a current problem which is giving me anxiety. Someone saying "that's not really a problem, at least you can afford to feed your kids" doesn't come off as helpful or ease my concerns.
Similarly, billions of poor people in developing countries would kill to swap places with the poorest American, but that doesn't mean the latter has a good life.
I once read something that resonated with me (though I can't remember where), in essence that everyone has a default level of stress and anxiety that they feel (a "stress bubble" if you will), and it does not matter so much what your particular life situation is, you tend to fill up the "bubble" with whatever is going on in your life at the time. The idea is that you feel the same amount of stress as a teenager with your social issues as you do as a successful adult with more than enough money to live comfortably.
This really impacted me because I definitely came from a poor-ish background where I lived month to month and only thought about paying rent and whatnot. I then went to community college at 29 to give myself a chance at something else and then ended up making well into 6 figures having worked up to a director of a software company (unheard of in my social circle growing up).
At the time that I read this I remember feeling just as stressed about work things and family issues as I was when I didn't have health care and could barely pay my rent. Looking back, I remembered that I would feel just the same way about friend issues as a teenager when that was my whole world - something I would now scoff at as unimportant and incidental. It helped me realize that a lot of my stress levels were "baked in" to me - but that also meant I could affect my stress levels by being aware of my bubble.
Now when I am feeling stress about my financial portfolio or my kids getting proper education during the pandemic, I make a conscious effort to compare it to the helpless feeling I had when I made no money and felt powerless and that allows me to shrink my stress bubble. I also empathize much more with my kids and when they are stressing about something that my adult self realizes is not consequential. I remember that this is just them "filling their bubble" and to them it is just as important as the things I am dealing with. It also makes me appreciate those people who have a naturally small bubble and realize that that is also often a factor in their success (e.g., though I don't know Elon Musk, I can imagine that he has a naturally small stress bubble that allows him to drive so hard for success).
This is not to criticize you in any way, on the contrary, I agree with you 100%. But it is an empowering way of looking at your life.
They're really not child's play. At least not for me.
I've been poor. Not homeless poor, but paycheque-to-paycheque, zero dollars in the bank, $1500 on some maxed out credit cards, just budgeted out the non-negotiable bills (rent, heat, credit card minimum payment) for this month and I need to find $8.47 in the sofa to break even and guess I'll hit up the food bank to feed myself again sorta poor.
I make... decent money now.
Is my life objectively better? Yes.
Does the stress of figuring out where my next meal comes from and the stress of figuring out where my meals 30 years from now and how to finance my child's education feel different? No.
Anxiety is anxiety. Just because in a global context it's not as bad doesn't mean it's not as bad to the individual.
This kind of dismissive attitude toward peoples' problems is unhelpful. Following your line of reasoning, there are people with crippling diseases in the world. People worrying about a place to live etc should remember that their problems are child's play compared to theirs. And those people should remember their problems are child's play compared to someone being targeted by genocide.
There are nearly 8 billion people in the world. You can always find someone worse off, that doesn't mean people are undeserving of empathy if they aren't the one single worse off human being. This sort of worst-off competition is dehumanizing.
That is really a terrible argument. I am sorry but I am not going to feel sorry about you just because you are stressed about which crazy expensive private school your kids should go to. It is not really a worst-off competition it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable.
> it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable.
I'm curious, how do you go about establishing that level? Do you think it's really absolute, rather than relative to the stressors the observer feels? In reality, I think that's how most people actually operate. Something (extremely roughly) along the lines of: T >= O, where T is suffering of the target and O is suffering of the observer, results in empathy.
That gets caught up in the fact that suffering is more about perception, and is itself relative. So maybe we have to say both are level of suffering as perceived by the observer.
Something along the lines of "if I perceive you as suffering more than I do, I can have empathy for you". For what it's worth, I think this gets at the heart of the difference between sympathy (largely pity) and empathy more generally.
If you have a reasonable level of wealth invested in a diverse range of products you really don't have much to fear from a great depression.
A brutal and unfair characteristic of recessions is that the pain is very unevenly distributed. I've lived through several severe recessions here in the Uk and myself and my family were fine because we had comfortable jobs and incomes. Our house prices didn't appreciate as much and our wages were stagnant for a while, but we were fine. The pain falls on people who lose their incomes, lose their investments and come out of college with no jobs to chase.
I'm in no way diminishing the real hardship that these events cause, it sucks.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There seem to be two "problems" to solve for.
1. A permanent loss of wealth.
When you've got more cash, you've got more to lose. People have more to gain from robbing/suing/hacking you. Being sued when you only have a year of savings is much different than being sued the day before retirement. The various life/house/health/car/umbrella insurances should hopefully put these worries at ease. Or at least that's what I've been telling myself. Being in the earlier part of my career, I've been looking more at life and disability insurance if fate messes me up before I've built up a nest egg.
2. A temporary loss of wealth (Plan for a rainy day. Then solve for an even rainier day).
This one gets me good, since there's always another increasingly more obscure edge case I didn't plan for. Like you said, these always existed before, but there were just larger problems eclipsing them. I think it's important to remember that there can always be a rainier day to plan for, and that it becomes a slippery slope into the prepper lifestyle (not a bad thing if that's your jam!). I think what's been giving me a break from this anxiety is a flexibility of lifestyle. If there's some sort of crash, I don't need to diversify to the magical ratio that happens to survive that crash - I need to keep from drawing a significant amount of money until the markets recover. Maybe this means dropping cost of living (where a more lavish lifestyle will have more fat that can be trimmed in difficult times). Or, if I'm still lucky enough to be employable at that time, I can work to ease the burden. This doesn't blanket over "world has devolved into chaos" scenario, but having stock in oil or a collection of gold bars probably wouldn't help much in those cases either. You'd have to go full prepper :)
> they would need to have inherited to feel financially secure
It seems ridiculous to most of us, but I can see how it happens. I grew up pretty poor - my father was a police officer and my mother didn't work because she had to watch the four of us. But I graduated with a degree in CS in '95 (if you're thinking about graduating with a degree in CS, try to do it in '95 because that may be the best possible year to do it) and am much better off financially now than my family was when I was growing up. Still, I keep worrying about my kids: I can pay to send them to college, but I can't afford, say Harvard or MIT. I have to keep reminding myself that they're far better off than I was at that age and I managed to turn out OK - I think part of it is that I end up comparing my situation with the people around me, many of whom are far better off than I am.
The average software engineer makes around 100k. If you have been working for 20+ years, has it been difficult for you to save up enough money for college?
I would argue that it's hard to save enough for college at any income, due to need-based financial aid (aka perfect price discrimination by ogopolists). Most need-based systems take into account parents' income and college savings, and children of software engineers in particular are going to be near the part of the curve where that starts to bite.
I randomly chose Princeton's financial aid calculator because it was close to the top of Google. For a family with two working parents, two kids (one entering college), and $250k in home equity in Illinois (the middle of the USA):
* For a $100k/year SWE + a $25k/year something else and no college savings the expected family contribution is $30k/year
* The same family with $250k saved in a 529 college savings plan is $45k/year
* For a $125k/year SWE + a $50k/year something else and no college savings the expected contribution is $50k/year
* The same family with $250k saved in a 529 college savings plan is $66k/year
* The same family with $450k in home equity is expected to pay $75k/year (I guess you're expected to take out a home equity loan to pay for college).
* Make the family renters with $50k/year income (30k+20k), and their contribution drops to $4.4k/year.
The point is: The more you save, the more you need to save. And the more you make, the more you need to make.
That's not to say need-based tuition is bad policy. But, it does mean that "surely it's easy to pay for college with your level of income" doesn't really come into play until you reach the top 1-2% of income.
Everyone below that is going to have their tuition adjusted to make the out of pocket cost painful but bearable, and the average SWE isn't a 1%-er.
Depends on the college. MIT says to expect to spend ~ $70K/year. $100K * 20 years = 2 million. Two kids * 4 years = $560K. That's a little over 1/4 (before taxes). So yes, it would have been difficult to save up that much money. I have enough to send them both to a public in-state school debt-free, but not an elite private school.
My kids are getting to college age and its worth considering that MIT has 11376 students whereas google claims there are 19.6 million college students in the USA at this time. So if distributed purely randomly, in the "everyone MUST go to college" USA, something like 99.942% of kids will not be paying MIT tuition.
Another thing to consider is if you're investing $280K in the MIT brand, do they offer any bachelors degrees worth $280K other than maybe CS and pre-med?
I get your point, but the bursars for those other colleges didn't seem to get the memo that they aren't MIT.
The thing is, MIT's tuition is fairly typical for a private university. If anything, MIT (and other elite private universities) offer better discounts than lower-ranked schools.
Professors don't make much these days, but check out the salary for university administrators in the US. The top of the food chain has quite nice compensation, and the amount of administrators is probably too high.
Universities also compete on who has the best food and nicest dorms. Prospective student often tour campuses, so having a pretty one with lots of rose bushes, ivy, and brick is good for recruiting. That all costs money.
Another thing is that elite private universities often have strong need-based financial assistance (discounts). MIT, for example, claims that the average need-based scholarship is about $47k (on tuition of 53k). They also claim 31% attend tuition-free.
Making a small inference: Those who actually pay the full $53k in tuition are helping those who pay nothing.
Yes, according to one of my old economics teachers, above the subsistence level, happiness is approximately how much better off you are than your neighbors.
If you choose to play that game. In my experience focusing on what you need to be happy and ignoring your neighbors is a better recipe for happiness and a whole lot cheaper.
I wonder how much of that is innate rather than being driven by consumerist propaganda though. Do I really want a new car because the Jones's next door have one, or because advertising makes me feel somehow inadequate because I don't have one?
I think advertising has a role but it’s amplifying an existing cultural value rather than creating one. A culture which conceives of itself as capitalist naturally encourages thinking of wealth as your score and at least in the U.S. we lack much counter pressure pushing other values as equally important. Even things like religions which discourage this have been distorted to fit, as anyone who’s ever seen a prosperity gospel believer try to talk their way around the clear meaning of the needle’s eye parable can attest.
I think this comes back to basic primate social dynamics. We evolved tracking our social standing relative to others and wealth is pretty easy to compare. Advertising exacerbates that tendency but I don’t think there’s any way to get rid of it with standard issue humans.
As someone from a former socialist country, I can confirm.
Situation has got a lot better in the last ~30 years, people have alot more, but since a few people got even more than that, some complain a lot. Average worker family has gone from bicicyles and maybe one yugo (or a "fico" - even smaller/cheaper) to two, maybe three european-mid-range cars + all the modern extras, but are not happy, because their neighbor has as 100k€ mercedes.
Here it's "let my cow die, just if two of neighbours' die"
But yeah... we earn relatively little (compared to you), and have better cars than most of the northern europe... most of them on long year loans... It's not rare to see an (eg.) BMW X7 owner at a gas station pump 9.85eur of gas, than slowly fondle the pump handle, because he only has 10eur for gas. The neighbors see the car, not the amount of gas inside :)
it makes some evolutionary sense tho - because objective wellbeing is only part of the competition. Relative wellbeing is what "counts" for real, esp. when competing for scarce resources.
This study maybe true. But there are levels of poverty where people don't just have a subjective desire to have more money but have real hard worries about paying for food, health care or a place to live. That's totally different from people wanting a nicer car or nicer house and way more psychologically stressful.
The lack of empathy for the wealthy goes both ways. The wealthy traditionally haven't had much empathy for people with less money so it's not too surprising that people with less money don't have much empathy for them. It makes me really angry when I see multimillionaires in the news warning about the risks raising the minimum wage. It's actually pretty sad.
The thing is, humans can't sense a constant velocity, we can only sense change. People always want more. Some people get addicted to the feeling of more and then a constant velocity actually feels like they are losing something. It's even possible to get addicted to the second derivative, ie. your upgrades getting bigger and more frequent. It's impossible to talk to people objectively about how good their life is because you just don't know what they are used to.
In all cases people struggle because they've absorbed things into their life that they now consider essential. The things you own end up owning you.
Isn't that social pressure? No matter how much you start with, if you end up with less than that, people see you as a failure. A person who inherits 10 million dollars and is afraid of going down to 1 million isn't as much afraid of selling his yacht as he's afraid of what his peers would think of him.
I know it doesn’t matter much but just to ground these numbers a bit - anyone owning or trying to own a yacht with “only” $10M is indeed heading towards $1M very quick.
Upper middle class know-it-alls sneer at the bad financial decisions of the guy living in the double wide with a brand new corvette in the driveway while the lower middle class looks up to his efficiency and prioritization.
A yacht is the same thing with the decimal moved a couple places. If your income is fat enough to give you 10m in the bank then you can definitely own a yacht so long as you don't mind living in the kind of neighborhood where your neighbors are plumbers instead of surgeons.
yes, but only in a rough sense. the ratio of maintenance cost to purchase price is much higher for a yacht (or really any boat) than for a mass produced car like a corvette. if you can afford to buy/finance a corvette, you can usually afford to drive it too. the same is not true for any boat larger than a canoe. there is a reason for the old joke about a boat being merely "a hole in the water that you throw money into".
One thing I learned as a parent is that kids always compare up the wealth scale, never down. I'm sure my parents noticed that, too.
I've never heard about the negative effect on levels of empathy. I suspect that it is unusual for people to have friends far poorer or richer, and it is easy to be dismissive of the problems of those one does not know.
The part about cars is pretty spot on, I'm upper middle class and I've been able to save so much money by getting rid of my car. On the low end you're going to hit 300 to 500 dollars a month for the privilege of driving.
The problem here is America simply isn't built for public transit. But since cars are a status symbol, people still go down to Toyota, or Honda and as long as they can make that first down payment they get to drive a new car. I was talking to a rather brash car salesman and he laughed about how he can tell who's going to get their car repoed.
Cars are the single biggest reason why so many people can't get ahead. You also have a gargantuan maze of cascading consequences when you really can't afford a car. You don't have insurance because you can't afford it, you get in an accident and lose your license. As the article states that doesn't stop you from needing to drive. Then you get pulled over and risk getting arrested.
I'm very lucky in that I don't need to drive a car, even when you can afford one driving to work every day can be a truly hellish experience.
>> I'm upper middle class and I've been able to save so much money by getting rid of my car.
Because you probably have job at a desk with a computer. You don't physically do much and so your per-minute presence at work isn't mandatory. If you are a few minutes late the world is not going to end and your workday rarely starts before 5am. You can handle the ins and outs of public transportation and/or you can afford to live close enough to walk/bike. I have a job that, while it pays well enough I have to be physically present (military, long story). While I am paid well enough I will get into real trouble if I am not on time every day. Sometimes I'm on call and have to get to work within 30-minutes of receiving a phonecall. I'd like to ditch the car, but I don't see any other reliable 24/7/365 transpiration options. Some of the people who work under me, and earn considerably less, are lobbying for "have own car" and "have own cellphone" to be listed work requirements. That might make at least some associated costs tax deductible.
I think the rest of their post after the part you quoted agrees with your point. So much of the US was designed or redesigned to only work for people who own cars but we still love to talk about them as if they were voluntary expenses ignoring the number of people who are one breakdown or accident away from unemployment & lack of access to healthcare.
What city has public transit that will get you safely and quickly to work at 3AM? What city design will still accomplish all that after your job relocates 15 miles further away?
That was kind of my point: switching to suburban living, heavily subsidizing roads and parking but not having effective transit (or only having it for, say, tourists and sports venues rather than something a commuter could rely on), etc. are all choices which were repeatedly made by planners. We can make other choices and, especially now, climate change is likely to force us to consider at least some of them since even an electric car has a significant lifetime carbon emission contribution disadvantage due to the inherent spatial inefficiency of the medium.
Not with public transport, but in my (Dutch) city I can get everywhere, safely, within a reasonable amount of time, at all times of the day, by bike. From one end to the other wouldn't be exactly 15 minutes, but it would be under 30. With an electronic bike you can probably make that 20 minutes.
The video game thing is interesting. If we one day get truly autodrive cars, would a long commute matter as much? If I can literally sleep as the computer does the driving I probably wouldn't care so much about a longer commute.
Wear and tear on the car would be an issue, even if you presume Tesla's can effectively drive themselves for free, Tesla still break down. I don't think I'd be okay with anything over an hour each way
I'm really curious to see what the longevity of future electric cars ends up looking like. In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE, and most other wear parts (suspension, breaks, etc) should be straight forward to replace.
The big question would be batteries, and in the case of Tesla at least right to repair issues.
>> In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE
Except that it is very rare for a car to be scrapped because of its engine. IC engines are mature tech. They last forever, longer than the body of the car. Extending the life of the engine further won't extend the life of the vehicle. And for such calculations one must include the battery packs. I think it safe to say that while electric motors might marginally outlast IC engines, I don't think that batteries will every have a functional lifespan longer than a gas tank (many decades, maybe even a century.)
Exactly. Cars get scrapped because the part costs $W, you can't run a compliant business for less than $X, the tech needs to be paid $Y, the service manual subscriptions cost $Z and they all add up to a number greater than what a 2002 Cavalier is worth.
An under the table side gig mechanic can perform many more jobs in an economically viable manner because the fixed costs are so much less.
This might narrowly be true if your definition of engine excludes other ICE-only components like the transmission or radiator (which is technically correct in specialist discussion but not general usage). The most common non-crash explanation I’ve heard people cite for turning cars into write-offs with is a blown head gasket, so I’m not sure about your thesis in general, and it’s certainly not something an electric car owner needs to worry about along with a slew of other cost/complexity increases specific to ICEs.
That's a one/two-hour job, a thousand dollars at most. I don't think they are selling the car because the engine is bad rather that the car is now worth more in parts than as a complete object. The engine isn't dead, just in need of repair. This happens to electric drivetrains too. Windings break. Bolts shear. Bearings fail. And many/most electric cars (tesla) still have transmission-type things between their motors and wheels.
1-2 hours if it doesn’t cause heat damage - maybe my relatives have been unlucky but a couple had warping from explosive failures.
(Disclaimer: I’m a software guy, might be misremembering – the key point was that basically all of the times I’ve heard someone mention involuntarily getting rid of a car it was either an accident or something which does not affect BEVs.)
Also, you can use special lanes and in California lane split. If you're willing to take on the risk, and live in a sunny place, motorcycles can compete with public transport in cost.
Where exactly is insurance not required for a motorcycle? Or do you mean moped? And it was -12c with two inches of snow on my car this morning. Anything on two wheels would be lethal. Good luck even riding a bicycle with two inches of new snow over a season's worth of compact ice.
I thought for my state there was no need for insurance, but turns out in 2019 they started requiring it. Seattle rarely gets snow so I didn't think about weather conditions.
I think a motorcycle couldn't work for your case, but some sort of one or two person on road / off road vehicle would still be cheaper than buying a car.
I don't have much confidence in most people being able to drive a car. While motorcycles do look really cool, it's just not something most people can safely do
The proliferation of moped-like vehicles that exist right below the "everything beyond here is legally a motorcycle and the state makes you obtain an extra license and insure it like a car thereby providing a massive dis-incentive to not just get a car" line seems to indicate plenty of people are fine with the risks.
Fine might not be the right term: there definitely are people okay with the risk, especially given how much faster they’ll get to their destination, but given how much more expensive cars are there’s also a financial push to take a possible risk over certain financial stress.
Add the numbers up and it's pretty hard to get TCO on a car driven 15,000 miles/year in the US much below about $3500/year, even if you do as much work as possible yourself, buy junkyard parts, etc. If you're capable of getting that number down very much, you're probably capable of making enough money that you don't have to.
TCO on a decent and highly reliable new compact, for comparison, is about $5000-$6000/year. (Check Edmunds) At $400-$500/month in TCO you should have no car worries. But if you don't have that extra $100+/month, or can't get into a new or certified used car for whatever reason, that does you no good.
Having been raised to be frugal, and having been broke, I totally sympathize with the car trouble thing. That said, a lot of people make irrational decisions about cars, and that can include trying to be frugal.
You think $100/mo for car insurance is expensive? The average car insurance rate is apparently $133, but I personally know it's not very hard to hit more than $100 (even on an older model car) if you want more than liability.
I'm nearly 40 and have been driving for decades. I recently downgraded to liability and it's still $55/mo for myself and my similarly aged significant other.
In my experience in the US, the cost of even essential coverage varies dramatically by zip code. For example, when I moved 1 mile from Cleveland Heights to Piedmont Ave in Oakland, CA, my rates went down by more than 20%.
So yea, significantly more expensive for poor people.
It's more expensive for people who haven't been continuously insured, who have had accidents, or who otherwise have a poor driving record. That's a larger fraction of poor people than it is of not-poor people, so yes, typically insurance is more expensive for poor people.
Liability-only insurance with minimum coverage for a good driver with a single car would be only $300-$400/year in my area. $1,200 is if you have collision and comprehensive
The cost varies dramatically from area to area though because each neighborhood has different loss risk, each state (and some locales) has different rules for underwriting, and different minimums for coverage.
Gas and insurance alone can easily hit 300 of you drive enough. Say you keep it at 200, 100$ a month to fix minor things isn't unreasonable. But that assumes you bought a car cash, from my experience people tend to finance cars just because they can't get three or four thousand dollars together at one time. Then you're paying $400 a month
Middle class perspective: if you can buy a car for cash, but you can get a good interest rate on a loan, you may be better off taking the loan. The opportunity cost of having cash sunk into the car can be greater than your financing costs.
The problem is most people buy more car than they can afford when they finance it. If I have to save $10,000, and I have it in my mind that I don't buy things on credit, I'm only going to buy a $10,000 car. But if I have $1,000 for a down payment and the car dealership talks me into a $30,000 car with zero down, I might take that deal.
True, but a complementary problem is that your $10000 used car is probably overpriced, driven up by the demand for lower-cost-up-front cars. Edmunds' 5-year TCO on a 2015 Corolla is only about $20/month less than that of a 2021 Corolla. There have been years where their estimate was for slightly higher TCO on the five-year-old car.
Yeah, that's another way it costs to be poor. But you can read that page as "a new car loan can be as low as 4.2%, even if you only have fair-to-good credit".
It can still make sense to hang on to the cash if you don't otherwise have a cash reserve.
I think the biggest threat to poor people, would be the ridiculous housing market. It's not just in big expensive cities, it's pretty much everywhere. Only places that are being spared, are those in destitute areas with some serious emigration problems - but those things happen for a reason (no work).
In my country (Norway), the housing market has appreciated around 5.5% ANNUALLY, compared to annual wage increase of some 2.5%. In some cities, that growth is much higher - almost 8%
We have a very decent welfare system, but a spread like that will surely create a hard class-divide between owners and renters. Renters will be forced further away from the cities, having to rely on longer commutes.
Some places it's already that bad. Certain normal salaried professions can not, and will probably never, be able to own even "starter" homes (as in small apartments), because they need to spend more and more time on saving for the down-payment (15% here) - and once they've reached their original goal, the goalpost have been moved. I'm talking about professions like teachers, nurses, etc. Not even legit poor people!
Having been raised by a poor-ish single mother, I can remember that at least in the 80s/90s, there was a lot less debt around. At least here, credit cards and consumer debt wasn't being handed out like free candy, back then. You had to rely on your salary, and then either get help from family/friends, or the welfare office. My mother had too much pride for that, even though my dads side were loaded.
These days, it seems like poor people are also getting trapped in debt. Everything is driven by debt, and every bill you fall behind on, is compounded by some fee, which is applied the second you're overdue.
I can absolutely understand why many poor people feel complete helplessness and apathy.
You can't have an eternally appreciating housing market and affordable housing [0], one has to give. Our current housing market appreciation comes from systematic housing shortage.
Rognlie finds out that the increase in return to capital (vs return to labor) observed by Piketty comes largely from the residential real estate sector [1].
It turns out, Henry George was right. We need to tax the value of land such that we capture all of the economic rent that rightfully belongs to the community and distribute it to the community as a dividend. The same tax will spur a more efficient use of land and, thus, more housing supply. The dividend will serve as a cash-based safety net for the community members.
Additionally, at some point we have to make the switch that Japan did in how we view housing: as a depreciating asset.
[0] Note that the only sustainable way to have affordable housing is if market-rate housing is affordable. Publicly owned/built/subsidized housing is useful for handling exceptions, but not for your main point of supply.
I've been thinking about this as well, and I think the crux of the problem is that housing is a prime investment. I'd imagine for most older Americans, real estate makes up a significant amount of their nest egg. In my circle, it seems like there is much more talk about housing investment than stocks or something similar.
If this is true, then it implies that the corrective paths are all things which will negatively impact the investments of anyone with a mortgage. I wonder what percent of the voting body they make up? I think this is part of why we aren't seeing change. It seems like somebody has to lose out.
I think these are the main solutions. As you see they are all legislation dependent:
1. As you mention, larger tax on housing, especially on those which are used as rental properties.
2. Saturate housing markets with government housing, which don't need to be priced at subsidized rates but only at a rate such that no rent seeking behaviour would be practiced in a 40-50 year window. A 0% IRR investment from the government would not cost taxpayers nearly as much as subsidized housing.
3. Relax building code standards and zoning regulations to drastically increase the supply of low cost real-estate opportunities.
4. Related to 3, relax laws relating to mobile homes/RVs/tiny homes and allow people to live in them if they have a place to keep them. I know in many places this is illegal, even in very rural areas [1].
There is no "systematic housing shortage." There are 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the US. [0] Even California has more than 9 empty housing units per homeless person. [ibid]
That's a bad indicator for whether there is a "shortage" or not.
You need a sufficiently high vacancy rate to be able to have a dynamic marketplace: if all houses were occupied then moving then moving houses would involve swapping houses with someone (or having a short-term stay... which means not all houses were occupied).
We live in a spectrum, the higher a vacancy rate the easier it is to find a house that meets your needs.
It really is not surprising that as vacancy rates go up prices go down [0]
This is known as “vacancy trutherism”, and it has about as much truth to it as q-anon. The vacancy rate is in the low single digits, and the less vacancy there is, the less affordable the market is. The vast majority of vacancies are units that are in the process of being rented or sold.
The idea that there is some Illuminati cabal of housing speculators holding vast numbers of units off the market is a crazy fantasy pushed by those who don’t want to face the reality that our society has not built enough housing.
The article you link shows how laughable this concept is. It contains a table of states ordered by their vacancy to homeless ratio. One would expect that the states with the worst housing crises would appear at the top of the list. But California appears at the very bottom of the list, since it has the lowest number of vacancies per homeless people. This would imply that California is doing the best out of all the states on housing!
Reported vacancy rates (the ones you’ll hear quoted in the media) are usually discovered by asking real estate agencies how many of the properties on their books are currently available to rent. It doesn't include houses otherwise unavailable for rent such as holiday homes or those being 'land banked'.
For some data on Low Use Properties (LUP's) and speculative vacancies in the UK and Australia respectively, see [1] and [2].
Also worth checking out official government statistics for NZ where the difference between the number of households and the number of residences is about 7.5% nationally. That compares with almost half that rate 25 years ago. This change has occurred amidst a property boom purportedly driven by a shortage of properties (really it is a speculative boom driven by a shortage of investment opportunities in the form of residential property).
The solution to this in my opinion is to remove the privileged tax status of property investors and introduce a wealth tax in the form of a Land Value Tax. Political suicide unfortunately.
Citations very much needed. A 59:1 ratio of available units to those in need of housing, which has been increasing over the years, prima facie shows there is no housing shortage. Moreover, with that high of a ratio, everyone looking for housing could have it, with plenty left over for those who have none.
I've offered facts. You offer nothing concrete. Which of our comments is more like the drivel Q-Anon spreads?
> Having been raised by a poor-ish single mother, I can remember that at least in the 80s/90s, there was a lot less debt around. At least here, credit cards and consumer debt wasn't being handed out like free candy, back then. You had to rely on your salary, and then either get help from family/friends, or the welfare office. My mother had too much pride for that, even though my dads side were loaded.
> These days, it seems like poor people are also getting trapped in debt. Everything is driven by debt, and every bill you fall behind on, is compounded by some fee, which is applied the second you're overdue.
This all is a side-effect of the one-two punch of aging demographics and switching from pay-as-you-go to defined-contribution retirement schemes. Every debt is someone else's asset, so if the market is demanding more assets, interest rates will fall until asset values rise, debt loads increase, and the market clears.
The situation is just cursed, IMHO. If you want to ease conditions, you have to reduce the payments various debtors and tenants make to asset-holders, which is ultimately infeasible on the grounds of impoverishing retirees and ruining pension funds. If you use government spending on this, you either raise taxes or foist off the problem to public borrowing and/or inflation. At the end of the day, the real goods and services that the working public produces but does not consume is the same size as the real goods and services that the non-working public consumes but does not produce; at best you can redistribute spending within these demographics.
> I think the biggest threat to poor people, would be the ridiculous housing market.
I have heard this referred to as the "financialization of housing" in articles I've read over the last few years. Google that term to find out more..
Basically more and more multinational corporations (structured as REITs and similar) have turned their eyes towards the housing market, buying up stock in major cities and wherever there is arbitrage opportunity...
And of course this means maximizing profits and minimizing costs, which is squeezing the average person harder and harder as rents go up more aggressively than before (which also drives up home prices etc)...
The idea of treating people's homes as "assets" to be bought and sold and optimized for profit is, personally speaking, horrendous..
You can't arbitrarily set rent prices. You can only ask what people are also willing to pay.
People are willing to pay because they have high paying jobs and want to live near to where they work. And that is ultimately also a good thing.
Think about a brain surgeon, who under socialism would have to commute for two hours to his jobs, and under evil capitalism can live 20 minutes from the hospital. Under capitalism he will get to the job well rested and therefore have a higher success rate for his operations.
Not that I disagree with the notion that "you can't arbitrarily set rent prices", but this is an incredibly simplistic example and does nothing to address literal rent seeking.
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that grocery store workers, meat packers, and the supply chain workers that get food (and toilet paper) to our tables are far more important to society than most high paid white collar and knowledge jobs. Does anybody care how well rested the brain surgeon is when you can't even buy produce or rice or meat at the grocery store? Do these employees not have a right to live 20 minutes from their place of employment?
There are ways to address these issues without devolving to some simplistic "capitalism or socialism" (with no in-between) argument.
Groceries salespeople are cheap because there are many people with the skills to do that job. The same does not go for brain surgery. And you can also sell groceries just fine when you are tired - a little slower perhaps, but nobody goes hungry.
The example may be extreme, but in general people pay other people in relation to how much the value or need their services. So it seems the brain surgeon is higher valued than the groceries person, simply because of supply and demand (many groceries people, few brain surgeons).
As for "deserving to live 20 minutes away from ones job", that is where it gets interesting.
Who, indeed, deserves to live in a good location? Good locations are not in unlimited supply. Who determines who gets the best spots?
What would be fair, according to the ubiquitous socialist crowd? First come, first serve? Poor people first? Lottery? Rich people first? Socialist who worked the hardest to bring about the socialist utopia first (that is usually what it ends up with, but I think not what the poor supporters of socialism envision)?
Personally I think by and large the market does get good results in that regard - the brain surgeons get to live in nice places, because of their merit. I prefer brain surgeons living in nice places to socialist activists living in nice places. Just my personal preference.
I live in the Bay Area now, which everyone knows has absurd rental prices. In my home town, I can rent a comparable sized apartment to what I have now for around 1/3 what I currently pay. But, there's no way I could earn 1/3 the income I make as a Bay Area software engineer working at a non-remote job in my home town.
Even making 1/4 what I'm making would be highly optimistic. I just did a search on Google for "$HOMETOWN $HOME_STATE jobs," and pretty much everything I could qualify for was retail level jobs. In my home town, that means probably $10/hour, or, $20k/year, if you can manage to get full time hours. Even in retail management, it would be tough to hit 1/5 of what I make now. Add in student loans, which are a fixed expense, no matter where I go, unless I want to go to a repayment plan that depends on my income and never pay them off, and we see the advantage goes squarely to the Bay Area.
Now, imagine starting in my home town and actually making it to the Bay Area. If you move with a job already lined up, you'll need to have at least 1 month's rent + 1 month security deposit saved up, plus moving expenses. First month's rent and security deposit will be at least $3500. Think about how long it takes to save up $3500 making $20k per year. Then, think about how this doesn't include moving expenses, which, even if everything you own fits in your personal vehicle, is going to amount to another several hundred for gas and probably at least one night in a hotel if you drive. Call it another $500.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, at $20k per year in my home town, you're probably either spending 35-40% of your gross income on rent, or living with roommates. So, good luck saving up nearly 1/4 of your gross annual income just to GTFO.
Isn't that exactly what banks are for - so that you can get a loan? I would expect that you would qualify for a loan if you show evidence of your upcoming employment.
Many companies also pay for moves.
Of course if you do all that, and then your employment is suddenly canceled, you are stuck with some debt. I guess that happens to some people.
A loan against what collateral? What does someone making $20k per year have to put up as security for a loan? You're also assuming this person has little to no debt to begin with, so their debt to income ratio can sustain another loan. Banks don't lend money out of the kindness of their own hearts; you have to qualify, and that's much easier with a higher income than a below median income.
They have their work power - don't banks actually love it when people can't pay off their debt?
If your odds of making your investment back are so bad that the bank won't give you a loan, maybe it is the wrong plan to begin with. The job of bankers in theory is to evaluate the risk of your plans and offer you credit accordingly. (Not that I claim they are all good at their job).
Every time you get into it, hoping that it will start. And not just when it's been sat outside your house for a while. When you stop for petrol (gas), or in the car park after buying food, sitting behind the wheel and hoping it starts again. The restrictions that get placed on you when you just can't rely on the car always starting.
For your life, a mostly-starts car is in theory better than no car, but for mental health it's corrosive. Every plan you make carries the rider "unless the car doesn't start" and you end up restricting where you drive to places that, if you were suddenly carless, you could still get home from. Any time you're outside the safety zone, there is the constant fear "what if it doesn't start?" Being afraid, having that stress, all the time is just mentally corrosive.
If a better job comes up and it's not near public transport, every day is a gamble on being able to get to work, and get home again. Spending your evening worrying about whether you'll be able to get to work in the morning is a horrible way to live; perpetually unable to relax. At least once I simply sold it for scrap and gave up entirely on doing anything that needed a car. Such a relief, but I was in the privileged position of being able to live and work without one.
That moment when you come out of the grocery store and the car doesn't start on the first try...
I'm not in that situation anymore but I can still remember the absolute sinking feeling. And then the overwhelming sense of relief when it started on the second try. I've had my water turned off. I've had my heat turned off. I've scavenged wooden pallets on the side of the road to burn in a wood stove for heat. I've broken the seal on the gas meter so I could turn it on at my most desparate. I escaped those circumstances thanks to family, and church friends. But this article is spot on as to what it's like to poor or poor-ish.
This ties into covid too. Low paid jobs are more likely...scratch that. Low paid jobs always require physical presence, most often at strange hours not served by public transportation. There are no work-from-home days for tradespeople, for cleaners, for food workers.
For the wealthy, a car is expensive but mostly a convenient way to get around. For the poor, car maintenance costs can be ruinous. However, our society (excluding a few large cities) all but requires a car for day-to-day activities. Everyone drivers, but the poor bear the brunt of the cost, since they are more likely to live near noisy, polluted roads. Meanwhile, the wealthy can afford to live on quiet suburbs and cul-de-sacs. Cities and infrastructure designed for cars ("car dependency") disproportionately hurts the poor.
I'm really curious to see how electric cars work for the poor (maybe 25 years from now, not presently).
One of the big selling points of electric cars is simplicity - with far fewer moving parts, less can go wrong and you can hopefully expect a car to last longer.
That's the hope anyways, but the big maintenance item in an electric car is the battery, and of course that's an expensive thing to replace. Will folks be able to do DIY repairs like cobble together battery packs from various sources? Will a decades-old battery that is 50% depleted or more still allow that car to function properly, just with less range? Or will it refuse to "start"?
As is, electrical car means new car and new car means an inane amount of software components that break all the time. Just pick any specific model, say, the Tesla S: You can find people being confused how to turn it off, the car not starting due to software updates, the car being hacked, the being bricked by broken software or lacking connectivity, erroneous warnings, the car only driving backwards due to low battery.
The simplest car is something like a 1998 Corolla and given the current trends in automotive, that will stay that way for a long time.
That's the main reason I'm so excited for EVs with useful amounts of solar panels on top. Adding 5-10 miles of range per day is enough to cover a lot of people's commutes, especially those who live apartments that're more likely to be closer to the city. (Folks in sprawling suburbia likely have longer commutes, but also have a place to plug in and charge.)
Looking at the current trend, it's highly unlikely e.g. single casting, structural battery packs. Car companies are for profit, so they have every incentive not to make it repairable. What is more, they are some good arguments to be made against DIY when you have autopilot in the car.
Self-driving cars may help tough, probably 15+ years after it's legal.
As much as I think the solution is "get rid of cars" (or get rid of personal vehicle ownership), I do think reliable cars would make a huge difference for people struggling financially. Not having to worry about the most important tool in your life — the thing that allows you to get to work, to the store, and to appointments — would be a massive stress-reduction for so many people, and stabilize their finances. No more "I can't make it to work, so I lost my job" and no more unexpected $2000 repairs?
Honestly, more reliable transportation might do more to reduce poverty even more than food stamps. (Also, allows you to make your food stamp appointments.)
This has been my problem for years now. I'm in the middle of nowhere and I can't count on the thing. I don't know how many times I've been stuck and also almost towed because I couldn't move it. I've luckily managed to avoid it so far but I'd not be able to do much about it if it happened.
I once was interviewing at a company for a graphic designer position. My previous job was paying me just below $30,000 and I desperately needed to increase my income to keep up with my bills (college loans, rent, food, electric, etc.). My vehicle (1987 Chevy Blazer) was not very reliable (in ~2010) and wouldn't you know it - I broke down immediately after parking in a lot directly in front of a sign that said "2 Hour Parking, Vehicle Will Be Towed At Owners Expense".
I'll never forget the embarrassment I felt after a pretty underwhelming interview explaining that my car was broken down outside in their lot and asked they notify their security so that I was not hit with more expensive fees. I've had some pretty significant financial hardships - some much worse than this, but this moment in particular really had a lasting effect on me.
Dude this is so true, in the US reliable transportation is so important. Particularly given the abysmal, non existent public transportation in the majority of the country. Having an unreliable car is a major source of stress for a lot of people.
>while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back
This looks insane to an Australian. I have moved house 4 times in the past 5 years and I have never not got all of my bond back. Some states here have a rule that the bond money is held by the state so that the landowner doesn't just take that money for themselves. How can the poor ever break the cycle if no one is willing to help protect them from shitty rent-seekers?
Yeah, a bunch of things in this article strike me as very American (I'm British). No-one in the UK worries about not being able to afford healthcare if they're poor, nor do they need a car to get to the grocery store in under an hour (unless they live in an isolated home out in the countryside, which probably means they're rich, not poor.) There are many, many places you can live in the UK without needing a car to get to work.
The deposit thing looks insane to me too. My rental deposit is held in escrow by some third party; I've never heard of anyone not getting their deposit back when they move (unless they did something to deserve it e.g. trashing the place). The only issue around deposits is that you usually have to pay a deposit for the new place before you've received the deposit back for the old place, which can cause cashflow issues.
I've always thought of the U.S. as a great place to be rich, but a terrible place to be poor.
On the other hand, I find it laughable that this author describes a 900sqft apartment as "very small". 900sqft would be considered a decent-sized, mid-range apartment in London, and if you're poor you'll live somewhere MUCH smaller. Americans have such ginormous houses, even the poor ones.
>My rental deposit is held in escrow by some third party; I've never heard of anyone not getting their deposit back when they move (unless they did something to deserve it e.g. trashing the place).
This is only a relatively recent thing in the UK, introduced about 10 years ago, to tackle the problem described in the original post of landlords running off with tenants deposits.
When I was a student ~10 years ago, just before compulsory deposit protection was introduced, it was very common for landlords to invent or wildly exaggerate damages to keep the £1000+ deposit, especially because they thought that students would be a push-over.
On paper many states in the US actually have pretty strong protections for tenants for their security deposits. It's not uncommon for states to have fairly strict standards as to the valid reasons a landlord can take money out of a security deposit. If a landlord withholds money for frivolous reasons the tenant can be entitled to double or treble damages. (So if they withhold $1000 for no reason, you can get back that $1000 and an additional $2000 or $3000.)
The main issue is enforcement. If your landlord withholds the deposit, often your only recourse is to sue them (usually in small claims court). This is going to require paying some court fees, maybe on the order of $100 (which you may get back if you win, but you still need to pay them up front). Plus you're going to have to show up in court, which likely means missing work. And obviously you're not going to have a lawyer for this, whereas most landlords will.
When I moved out of my last apartment my landlord withheld $100 because he claimed there was dust on the blinds. (There was not, we specifically dusted the blinds before moving out.) But the only way I could get that money back was to sue them, and it just wasn't worth it for me.
I don't know about most states, but in Maryland, the tenent is automatically entitled to attorney's fees when the landlord improperly withholds a deposit.
Granted, if you are poor, this likely means that you need to find a lawyer willing to work on contingency.
For what it is worth, just threatening to sue along with citing the relevent law and possible damages is probably enough. Landlords don't like going to court either, so if you make even a halfway credible threat they will probably pay.
Rural poverty is a real thing, and often overlooked by politics / media / society. Rural villages no longer tend to have a shop or post office, the bus services can be erratic and infrequent, it's a real problem.
The student rental market 12 or so years ago was definitely full of horror stories about getting deposits returned, knowing which letting agents to go with useful insider knowledge. The Scottish deposit security scheme is only a few years old and has definitely helped improve the situation. The rental market is one in which there can be significant power/information imbalances and where some protections make absolute sense.
Student and tourism rentals are worse than the regular rental market because 9x/10 the people getting screwed out of their deposit can afford it so there's less latent "it might actually be worth someone's time to sue you" to keep the landlords in check.
>>On the other hand, I find it laughable that this author describes a 900sqft apartment as "very small". 900sqft would be considered a decent-sized, mid-range apartment in London,
Yep, we actually bought a 3-bed house(not apartment) in UK, and the total space is 950sqft(about 90square metres). And that's not a small house around here by any measure. American houses are like their cars - absurdly large.
American here that grew up in a 3 bedroom house with around 900sqft of space and 4 people, and now live in a 2500sqft house with just my wife and 1 dog..I don't know how we did it. Thinking back it was so insanely cramped, my parents bedroom was the 'big' bedroom and it was just large enough to fit a queen sized bed, a chest of drawers, a gun case, and then a night stand on one side of the bed. The kids bedrooms barely fit a twin sized bed and a small desk with room to stand. Tiny bathroom, living room just big enough for 4-5 people. Very tiny kitchen, not large enough for a dishwasher.
I mean, it isn't some weird flex with me going yeah it's cramped BUT WE LOVE IT THIS WAY. Like, yeah, this house would be too small for 4 people. But right now, with just me, wife, and a baby on the way - no problem.
>>my parents bedroom was the 'big' bedroom and it was just large enough to fit a queen sized bed, a chest of drawers, a gun case, and then a night stand on one side of the bed
That's exactly what ours is, minus the gun case ;-)
Haha I'm now quite disappointed the estate agent didn't try to advertise it as a safety feature.
I did once see a house listed as having "conveniant access to the motorway for commuting". It was actually directly underneath a bridge of the motorway :|
The US is a large and very diverse place, and very frequently you will find that there are very clear laws about what a landlord is and isn't allowed to charge for, as well as what proof they need to take a deposit. For example, Seattle has its own set of rules which are quite clear and don't allow contracts that would override them, in other places there are no rules, and what is in the contract is what you must abide by.
The problem, that the author alluded to, is that there is no one that will solve or mediate a dispute short of taking a claim to court in the US. This is generally pretty cheap and easy for small claims, if you know what you are doing. Most people don't know what they are doing, or have no idea that small claims is even an option.
As an American who now lives in a place with socialized healthcare, I can safely say that I'm not moving back until the US sorts out the healthcare crisis. I'm in Canada now, which is used as a punching bag by conservative Americans for how bad socialized healthcare can be. Anyone who has lived in both places knows how laughable that claim is. Canadians certainly have their complaints about this system, but I have never heard a Canadian ask for US style healthcare.
This comment was an aside about right wing news stories that pop up in the US about how Canadians are flocking to the US to get healthcare. It normally revolves around how some person was on a waiting list or couldn't get the procedure they wanted in Canada and had to come to the US. The truth is that there is normally an extenuating circumstance that isn't mentioned (e.g. the treatment is experimental or not approved in Canada. The patient is stuck on a wait list because it is a need-based system, so they might not 'need' that procedure more than the people ahead of them.)
>>The deposit thing looks insane to me too. My rental deposit is held in escrow by some third party; I've never heard of anyone not getting their deposit back when they move (unless they did something to deserve it e.g. trashing the place). The only issue around deposits is that you usually have to pay a deposit for the new place before you've received the deposit back for the old place, which can cause cashflow issues.
Anecdotal but myself (multiple moves) and most friends in London had to battle for a few hundred quid being attempted to stolen from the deposit before returning for various BS reasons. The dispute scheme was great as a tenant, but did mean months without the funds back.
In central London just 600sqft can easily cost you a million pounds... The place I rented when I lived there was a bit smaller and was for sale at 950k asking price.
I don’t know the statistics, but I live in the US, and had rented for 10+ years with 5 of 6 different landlords in 3 cities, and I always got my deposit back, and I don’t know anyone who was stiffed either. But I wasn’t staying in the worst places, but not the best either. One was an informal cash transaction rental from a Craigslist ad and it worked out.
Stay in a slum and you'll find those who are more than happy to break the rules if they know they can.
You probably have the mental fortitude to figure out how to fight back on your own. To read the docs, know your position, agreements, and how to take a landlord to court to win.
In low income, people don't know their rights nor do they ever believe that the system could ever be on their side. And, they're not unjustified in that thinking.
A lot depends on state and local laws. In San Francisco, for example, I get interest on the security deposit my landlord is holding credited to my rent every year. They cannot charge for reasonable wear and tear. So even though the deposit is large, I expect ~100% of it back when I leave. If not, there is a strong tenants union that will support my case.
Then you're lucky - I've had enough friends in QLD and WA who have had their bond partially kept back because the landlord company thought they could get a few hundred or thousand for free. Usually the trick is to say that pre-existing damage was caused by my friends. It's impossible to defend from if you don't claim the damage when you move in!
I've personally only had one huge battle with the company as they thought our place was dirty when we moved out, despite spending two full days cleaning it (townhouse). I now always pay a cleaning company to avoid the hassle, but that's $100-200 not everyone can afford.
I always take photos when I start a tenancy. More often than not, the property manager/landlord tries that I caused pre-existing damage and the photos always help.
Same in UK. I have moved 8 times in the past 11 years and I always got my full deposit back.
Also yes, the entire article just screams "the experience of being poor....in America". From the lack of social net, to the absurd costs of insurance and healthcare. I don't mean to say that life elsewhere is all rosy and there are no problems at all, but I can't even imagine worrying about costs of health treatments - it's just a given you will get them and you won't pay anything. I guess it's part of the author's point - that some people don't realize how good they have it.
The last place I rented from took my deposit for damage they knew existed before I started renting. (They literally painted over mold in the kitchen closet.) Then they tried to send me a $1000+ bill over a year later for “damages”.
In the US, there are sharp race and class disparities here: if you’re white and pass for at least lower middle class, you are much less likely to have an issue because even unethical landlords know the police and courts will listen to complaints. Go outside of those communities and complaints become more common, often with accounts of a rental company caving immediately after someone demonstrated knowledge of their legal rights and lack of fear to contact the justice system.
> caving immediately after someone demonstrated knowledge of their legal rights and lack of fear to contact the justice system.
Sounds like the solution. When I was younger, people would try to take advantage of me, but all it takes is a bit of standing up for yourself and they concede.
The post explained the problem with getting deposits back very clearly:
> This is because apartments at both of these levels quite accurately assume that you can’t afford a lawyer - while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back; the apartment complex has no reason to give back thousands of dollars they can simply keep.
When you were younger, were you (or your parents) able to afford a lawyer? Even if you couldn't, did you at least look or sound like you could? You seem to assume that this person has the same tools available to them that you do, and maybe that's the assumption the post is trying to get you to revisit.
The "tool" is to stand up for yourself. Actually having to get a lawyer is very rare. You can also simply take them to small claims court, no lawyer required.
The thing is, nearly all these people trying to take advantage are bluffing. Call the bluff, and they fold immediately. They're just testing to see if you're a sucker.
But if you did leave the apartment damaged, they're not going to cave and you're going to forfeit the security deposit.
Yes, but note that your standing to do so varies considerably — I've never had problems doing that as a white man but I know people who declined to involve the city / law enforcement because they had had past bad experiences due to being black, gay, etc. If the landlord threatens to call the cops and you know a history of people like you having been mistreated or simply blown off, you might give up and accept it as another example of the world being unfair to add to many others.
If you believe that nobody has tried to cheat me, steal from me, take advantage of my ignorance and inexperience, steamroll me, threaten me, con me, etc., you're very mistaken.
This varies on a state-by-state basis. In Chicago, rental protections allow for the rentee to sue for beyond the deposit, as well as their lawyer's wages, in the case of a security deposit being wrongly taken. I know because I won back a lot of money from bogus 'damage' claims. Other states have laws that lean towards favoring the renter.
Since we're throwing anecdotes out there, I've had my landlords attempt to wrongly and knowingly take money from my security deposit about 30% of the time. The lower-class the apartment is, the more likely the owner is a slumlord, and will try to scam you.
American here. I've always gotten my deposit back, but more often then not it involves work and knowledge on my part. Most tenets (even my wealthy peers) don't really know there rights and just write off the deposits as a cost of moving, so most landlords assume they can get away with stealing them.
I have always gotten payed after sending a letter to the effect of "I moved on XXX date. With interest (as required by the lease and state law) you owe me my security deposit of $YYY within 45 days or I am entitled to sue for 3x that amount and attorneys fees."
There are also some procedural rules around how to deduct from security deposits (among other things, you must send an itemized list by certified mail to the last known address of the former tenet within 45 days of the end of the lease). I'm pretty sure most landlords don't even follow that for otherwise valid deductions
Although bond is held by the RTBA (or whatever it's called outside Vic), it's pretty common for landlords/property managers to try and strong arm tenants into giving up part of their bond for "damages", most of which are either resonable wear and tear, pre-existing, or not the responsibility of the tenant. For poorer people, who need the money sooner than later, it's often easier to agree to get half your bond back than to apply to VCAT (not to mention a lot of tenants fear they'll get blacklisted if they do) and possibly get all your bond back several months later.
I'm currently in the process of trying to claw my bond back from my previous landlord, it's been over 3 months now. Luckily I can afford it, but I know a lot of people who can't.
Yeah some. Landlord pocketing the interest on it can happen, and if they're nasty they might argue re you can't get it all back cause of a scratch on the floor over there but just straight up refusal is insane
I'm American and my experience matches yours. I've always got my deposit back. However, if there is a country that embodies "your mileage may vary" it is the USA.
> You are also more or less forced to learn to do mechanic work.
You are forced to do all your own work, unless the landlord will help. I am no longer poor and broke, but I spent roughly my first three decades there. I recall a colleague saying they were redoing their walk way; it blew my mind they paid someone to do it — the concept of paying someone to do something for you is not something I experienced growing up. I now can afford contractors and it still is not my first (or second or third) thought when I need work done.
I think that interestingly, once you can afford to have someone do something for you, it is often (even usually) cheaper to do it that way than to do it yourself. If it is something you don't know how to do, then you are paying for the education in some way, either in your own time to learn how to do it, or in the lower quality that usually comes out of future value somehow (either resale value or it-needs-to-be-done-again cost). If it's something you already know how to do, then you're paying yourself for your own time rather than someone else paying you for that time. Of course there are lots of trade offs and balances to strike, but as a rule the bigger the project is the less I think I can save money by doing it myself.
The article touches on this with “don’t by a spatula from Craigslist”.
No matter your income, what you’re really doing is trading time for goods and services, the money is just a token.
When “doing your own work”, be mindful of the opportunity cost of your time. What’s your rate versus the handyman’s rate? If you fix the porch, are you less able to pick up that overtime shift?
This needs to be genuine trade off, not aspirational. For example, one lots of folks don’t consider: what’s the cost of your commute time, and if you could live significantly closer for a little more rent or mortgage, could you and would you put that time to a use with payback/upside? In a recent datascience article, the author analyzed rents and locations to save a few pounds, tolerating a 50 minute commute. What could they generate with an extra 40 hours of productive time a month, and would they do that or watch the telly?
Reframe as: what can you do with your tradeoffs on time that adds pay-it-forward energy to your financial flywheel?
The key is whether there is actually opportunity cost. Unless I would otherwise be earning money, the monetary value of my time is zero. Usually, I'd otherwise be screwing around with a hobby, playing video games, or other things that don't earn me money. Therefore, I aim to DIY as much as I can. Paying someone to fix my car or the drain under my sink seems like a ridiculous expense if I can do it myself for free.
If instead I were constantly working on $100/hr contracts/gigs, and fixing something would take actual time out of that work, then I would be more tempted to pay someone $60/hr to do something I could otherwise do myself.
> When “doing your own work”, be mindful of the opportunity cost of your time. What’s your rate versus the handyman’s rate? If you fix the porch, are you less able to pick up that overtime shift?
There's more to it than just the money though, although that's certainly a big factor[0].
There's having control over your environment, being self-reliant, shaping it the way you want it shaped. I don't know about other people but that's really good for my mental health - particularly at the moment.
Other benefits:
- You don't have to go into it with a fully realised vision upfront. I can't do that for interior design - I have to iterate towards something decent.
- Inevitably along the way you encounter unanticipated problems and complexities (much like software development). If you've paid someone a shit-ton of money to sort out your house your only options are to throw more money at the problem or compromise in a way you may not like. If you're doing the work you are generally able to consider more options.
- You don't have to compromise in the way you would if you got somebody to do it for you. If I get somebody to design my bathroom for me then, because I don't and can't know the answers to all the questions up-front, at the very least I'm going to have to live with some of their answers. Those answers might start to wear on me after I've lived with the new room for a time.
- If I screw something up myself or decide I'd prefer it to be different I have zero qualms about undoing my own work, partly because I know I can redo it in the way I want, but also because there's less risk of sunk cost fallacy clouding my thinking.
- On the odd piece of work for which I will need a tradesperson they're not going to be able to take me for a ride.
Working on your own house is a real confidence building exercise that I'd recommend to anyone, and especially those who feel like they have no practical skills, for reasons that go far beyond the financial.
[0] In theory I could afford contractors; in practice I'd have to make sacrifices in other areas where I'd rather not make sacrifices to do it.
At some point though time doesnt really equal money. For many we can find a way to make money with that time. But if you are working a low income job that does not allow for overtime pay and you don't have skills you can use to generate income on the side... money is money and time is time.
That’s the gist of my second to last paragraph. For this time value to be real, could you and would you be able to redeploy the time? This scenario was premised on having the skills to do your own repair work.
To be clear, I’m acknowledging your position, but hold that it is, by and large, a trap to believe that time cannot be leveraged. For instance, can you fix someone else’s porch for more than you’d save by fixing your own? Probably.
What works to low end income advantage here is that if you’re at the left end of the income bell curve, there are many more people to the right of you who can compensate you for your time to free up theirs, while those still lower than you can be leveraged to free up yours. Not saying it’s easy to find one’s ratchet, but odds are high a ratchet is there.
I grew up poor (first gen immigrant family, the poor kind), so I empathize with the points raised. At the same time I don't really understand how some / a family can be (outside of some circumstances like health issues, disabilities etc) repeatedly behind on water bills or other necessities.
For the first few years my family had an income of ~$1000 / month (back in the 90s). My mother wasn't legally allowed to work and my father was on a stipend. The whole family lived in a studio apartment, that 900 sq ft place in the article would've been huge for us. Our car was a $1200 tiny little rust bucket, but it ran.
Sometimes I see documentaries about people living in poverty and going pay check to pay check, yet the kids are wearing Nikes and playing on iphones. Being poor was definitely stressful though, and I'm definitely grateful that stress isn't part of my life anymore.
All that you needed to break down was the car failing, or someone falling sick.
Minimum wage in the US hasn't kept pace with inflation for decades, and rents, school fees and the costs of medication have kept rising even faster. Banks charge even higher overdraft fees, so the small joys of a pair of branded shoes or a fancy phone are affordable, but the longer term gains aren't likely to be in reach.
> True the minimum wage hasn’t kept up. That’s mainly due to exporting manufacturing offshore.
That’s partially true but this trend has been widespread well outside of manufacturing, too. There’s no shortage of companies engaged in wage theft, converting full time positions to contract, changing benefits plans to shift more cost to the workers, etc. in every sector. Programmers are in high demand but even in tech, consider how many companies contract out core competencies or, especially, have things like helpdesk jobs which pay considerably less than they used to and no longer have a promotion path.
There’s been a well-funded push to roll back the New Deal since around the end of WWII. This has included funding libertarian think tanks, religious denominations which encourage self-reliance and distrust of the government, etc. One big factor feeding into demand for cheaper goods is that people are acting rationally in a world where their income lags behind their parents or grandparents at the same age.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about this a while back which is good for understanding some trends in the 20th century:
> the kids are wearing Nikes and playing on iphones.
This is investment. If your kids are socially rejected at school and can't get on the internet, are they going to be better off in the long term or worse off?
If you are poor, looking poor is not going to help you up, it's going to drive you farther into poverty. It's the same impulse that makes lower-middle class parents go into debt to put braces on their kids' perfectly functional teeth (in the US.) Your kids are going to have to impress fellow students, charm their teachers, get into colleges, and interview for jobs. A bunch of people who don't see class are going to see your crooked teeth.
Not to mention: an iphone (or any smartphone really) is a really efficient investment. I'm not sure, but for a few hundred dollars you have a very good device already.
Compare that to my own growing up, and we had separate costs for a TV, a radio, we would save up for a walkman or CD player, internet started off as dial-up at the library, then a PC. We'd buy CD's with games and things like Encarta, we'd record or rent films on a video recorder, etc etc etc. And all of those things had to be shared.
Now, with a smartphone, you have all of the above and then some - at a one time investment. Each of those individual devices back then cost the same as a single decent smartphone does nowadays.
I really don't see the issue. I mean I kinda get the objections, because for some reason smartphones are still considered luxury items (but only if you're poor), but it's such an empowering tool (and a source of distraction, which is something everyone needs).
But then you can't even browse the web properly with these, though. Not with all those fat Javascript-heavy pages and the whole "RAM is cheap" prevailing development mentality nowadays.
the 80/20 rule still applies. $50 is probably too low of a price point, but the example works if you compare a $250-400 android phone to a $1000 apple/samsung flagship. I could buy those phones if I wanted to, but I'm getting by just fine with my pixel 4a. hell, my pixel 2 was still perfectly serviceable but for the lack of security updates.
kinda, but kinda not. $1000 is still a lot more than $400. I consider $600 to be a meaningful amount of money. it's definitely not a good move to spend that much on a phone if $600 matters to you. in any case, this conversation is drifting off the rails (or was derailed from the start). the iphone SE exists and sells for $400. with apple's track record for updates, that might be the best value on the entire market right now. I wouldn't consider it irresponsible for anyone to purchase that phone. I'm also not sure I believe that large amounts of poor people are buying brand new $1000 iphones anyway. most poor people I know are using whatever cheap phone happens to be supported by a local MVNO.
perhaps. now that i think about it i was buying my kids $50 androids when they came of age, but with the last two that didn't seem to cut it. i spent more like $100 with an extra $20 for an extra SD card.
for myself i paid under $250 for my android and i'm a professional full stack developer with android as part of that stack. (essential ph-1 phone on clearance sale on ebay).
I understand there is social pressure, but then pretty much anything can be bucketed under investment by this standard. Is a nice car and nice house also investment so the kids don't get rejected at school? At certain level of income, sacrifices need to be made, and I would argue Nikes and iPhones are luxuries, not necessities. e.g. you can get a pair of good quality shoes that costs less than Nikes, and a functional smart phone for less than an iphone.
Some poor families handle it better than others. A lot has to do with the parents and how they manage the situation psychologically.
There is peer pressure on the kids (and even parents), so they upend Maslow’s pyramid to their detriment.
Some of it may be educational —home ec is not taught in many schools. Some of it is cultural (advertising) and some of it is propaganda (we’re Americans, we must have a TV and consume brand names!)
I recall in Japan if you went on the dole you first had to sell your ‘luxury’ items before getting government support. It indicated you had to be in need and not supplementing or aiding poor economic decisions.
> in Japan if you went on the dole you first had to sell your ‘luxury’ items before getting government support. It indicated you had to be in need and not supplementing or aiding poor economic decisions.
I agree with the theory, but what is a luxury? Cheap shoes are penny wise and pound foolish as i've discovered. (though some expensive brands last no longer than the cheap ones). You can't really do anything today without an internet connection - school or apply for a job, and you are expected to answer your cell phone when called, so some form of smart phone is required and if you have an iphone it isn't worth enough used to be worth selling to buy a cheaper phone...
I think it's also about trade offs that are made. For example, TV dinners (from an article in another thread here) for us was not a staple, it was a luxury. They kept for a long time, but they were also high cost to calorie ratio. We got the cheapest cut of meat we can in bulk and frozen it.
While I'm not suggesting your method isn't more economically efficient, it also requires time and money investment. When I was "poor", my parents would often both work late and it wasn't uncommon to not see them until later in the night if at all before bed. Many nights my brother and I would make our own dinners. Dealing with large cuts of frozen meat takes planning and skill that microwaveable dinners do not.
Also equipment: one thing working with our local mural aid group has really underscores is how many people have, say, a microwave or hot plate but not a working stove or enough capacity to store bulk food purchases. That’s definitely not true of everyone, of course, but it’s a real barrier for some people- especially, say, a newly-single mother who can’t feed an infant rice and beans.
If your parents immigrated like mine (wife legally not allowed to work, dad on stipend) then your father (and possibly mother) was very well educated in your home country, then immigrated to the US, finished his studies or did a temporary training and then took a well paying job.
When having a $1000 a month income is known to everyone to be temporary and you know a well paying job is on the other side, that's not the kind of poor the author is talking about. When you know you will have money soon you can make all sorts of wise choices to handle a period of low liquidity. When you don't know that, you can't make any of those choices.
We definitely weren't at the very bottom of the ladder. We had some stable income, a roof over our heads and food on the table.
Looking back the financial position we were in was clearly temporary. But at the time it wasn't so clear. It wasn't obvious that once graduated, my father would be able to find a well paying job (they were also pretty ignorant on the job market at the time). We definitely had financial stress in the family, which bled out to me all through childhood.
I consider myself fortunate and I had a legs up in multiple dimensions. Educated parents, stable home life etc. But like I said, very grateful that type of stress is not a part of my life now.
This is the kind of statement you hear from conservatives that blame poor people for their poverty.
There’s a number of reasons. Because when you churn through a dozen pairs of cheap no-name shoes, it ends up being more than just buying a better set of shoes. Maybe a relative gave you some Christmas money. Or maybe you got overtime for working an extra 20 hours.
Being poor, you are constantly judged on your appearance, and it has a huge effect on how you are treated by retailers, government (police, social services, etc), teachers/school admins, and friends.
When you’re poor, everything you own is half broken, purchased used, worn thin. You most likely live in an area that has a high crime rate, is loud, has a long commute to your job, is dirty. You have access to terrible, low quality food. You skip doctors appointments (can’t afford the time off or co-pays) and dental work. (American) society constantly blames you for your situation.
Whatever the reason, poverty is a daily assault on your human dignity. It’s incredibly difficult to escape. Sometimes, you have to say, “Screw it” and buy your kid the expensive shoes. That money won’t get you out of poverty, but it may make you and your child happy for a bit.
I read about half of this post and I've paused there. It screams to me "Let's have a Universal Basic Income" already.
> And one day your wife calls you and tells you the water is off, and there’s nothing you can do; maybe some family member can help you out, or maybe you live without utilities for a week or so until you get paid and start the next pay cycle that much more behind.
These are people with children we are talking about. Why can't there be simple equity for these beings who are facing their demise through no fault of their own? Like seriously, WTF?
I want to support:
- sustainable electronics
- living wages
- right to repair
- removal of slave labor from any supply chain I am involved in
What do I have to do to make this happen?
--
> When I’m trying to explain to my sons how a company decides what to pay someone, it usually goes something like this: A company is looking to pay a person as little as they can and keep them, so a person’s pay is determined by how rare their skills are and how much demand there is for those skills.
> [...]
> This isn’t evil on anyone’s part, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it - I’ve made a lot of choices in my life that led to this point and I have a lot of responsibility in terms of where I find myself.
_Yes it is evil._ I'm sure we cannot exist as a fundamentally secure, sane, healthy, fair, equitable, respectful, productive, diverse, healthy, robust society until this rot is done away with once and for all.
>It screams to me "Let's have a Universal Basic Income" already.
I don't think people want poor people to exist. However no-one has solved the supply side of "Give everyone free money". Every time I ask if someone has actually figured out how to do this that isn't 3-4 times the current Federal Budget you get a bunch of hand waving.
Handing everyone $10,000/year (not even UBI levels) requires gathering $10,000/year in either service cuts, or increased taxation.
Even if we presume everyone over the poverty line gets $10,000 added to their taxes to cancel the benefit out. That still leaves us with a $10,000 hole for every person under the poverty line.
12.5% of American's live below the poverty line. That's 41,025,000 people. Which is an insane number. The $10,000 a year would be around $410 billion per year.
So if America eliminated the Military budget, they could pay for $10,000 to each person below the poverty line... however odds are laying off 70% of the Military would result in more people living below the poverty line.
It's possible, however no-one wants to highlight what 410 billion dollars a year can be cut from a budget, or who wants to pay 410 billion dollars a year in extra taxes.. additionally that number is based on a _very_ low amount of $10,000. If you wanted to hand out top ups to the poverty line in America it would cost even more money.
Choose one of those and focus on it. Make a campaign around it, create a Facebook group. Study the topic and argue for it and finally try and get elected to make a change.
I'm surprised he doesn't know not to pay rent for the last month and make them use the deposit for it. That's what I always did when I was poor. No way they're gonna evict you in 30 days, especially if they know you're leaving anyway.
Maybe in the old days not paying your last month's rent would be an option but not today.
Nobody who is truly poor would skip out on the last month rent unless they were desperate, because the landlord will find things wrong with the apartment and will charge you the most or all of the security deposit. Then they will file an unpaid dept claim, turn it over to a debt collection agency and it will hit your credit score. Which means in the future you have to rent in the really scary parts of the city, and if you don't want to rent in the really scary part of the city you'll pay your last month's rent. Also a lot of jobs check credit scores, a bad report could keep the author from getting hired.
In regard to the car, the author doesn't have the credit score or income level to even qualify for the lease let alone, "the cheapest lease deals", not to mention the author certainly doesn't have the $3K down payment. If you are thinking that they can just roll the down payment into the lease, well they only let you do that if you have the best credit score.
upstanding citizen who briefly rented from a slumlord (NYC) here. When it became obvious my landlord wasn't gonna give me my deposit back I just didn't pay the last month's rent. never heard another word about it. I left the place spotless, as I would've regardless of anything related to the deposit.
You can't even get a lease with bad credit. And with poor credit you're not getting these "$200/month" offers for leases. Those assume pretty good credit scores, which you almost certainly won't have if you're poor enough you have to let utilities get shut off.
That came to my mind as well. If I don't expect the deposit back and cannot afford to claim it, let's just turn the tables and make them claim something from me.
Here in the UK that would destroy any chances of renting anything decent in the future. Any agency/landlord will always ask for references from your current landlord, if you dick them over like this you can forget ever renting something that isn't a slum where people don't care about references.
Also deposits are always(by law) held by a third party in escrow, and it's actually a bit of a pain to claim any money from that as a landlord, so it's really rare that people lose their deposits unless the place is absolutely wrecked.
In the US you can sue for anything. Smart landlords only confirm that someone lived there, and other easily verifiable information, since if they sometimes give a good reference and sometimes neutral that means neutral references are bad and they can be sued for that. If you get a anything more as reference from a landlord it is because you were bad enough that the landlord sued and won (it is safe to assume this never happens, though there are exceptions)
Don't confuse suing with winning. You can sue someone and lose, but the lawyers will still cost both sides a lot of money.
In reality (in the UK), those references precede your current landlord getting to check your apartment's condition out. By the time the landlord has ascertained the state of the property, the reference has usually been given.
There is a huge survivorship bias in people's theories of what it takes to succeed economically. Working hard improves your odds, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. Luck plays a huge role, starting with who your parents are.
Nonetheless, the ranks of the successful are chock-full of people who worked hard and who think that they can draw a straight line between their hard work and their success, and that if they can do it, so can anyone. If you are such a person, I urge you to read this:
I had no money and no resources as a child. I lived in a family of 8. We went clothes shopping once a year. Being one of the youngest, I just got hand-me-downs mostly. The first time I got a new sweater I was 14.
We had 3 books in the house growing up, all gifts from our 'city cousins' at Christmas. We had no TV until Dad brought one home from the TV repair shop - a 10-inch black and white deal. It smoked and dripped plastic on the floor first time we turned it on. Dad took it back and they gave us another one, which actually worked sort of. We did not live on a bus route, have any parks to play in, or any public library.
Were we poor? I suppose we might think so today. But all our neighbors were in about the same situation. We were happy, and didn't consider ourselves deprived in any way.
What made us content? We lived on a farm. There was always meat in the freezer and food on the table. We had the entire outdoors to play in including an ancient barn, a shop with tools and a workbench. Chickens and pigs and calves and cats and kittens. Tree swings and trees I could climb so high, I could see clear to the horizon. Creeks with frogs and fish and tadpoles.
I see folks living in cement boxes in crowded towns, kids who's entire life is the sidewalk and the mall. Parents working so hard you never see them. People next door so isolated you can't really call them neighbors.
When I grew up and went to college (full student loans, qualified for everything they had) and got a job in town and got married, I told my wife we had to raise the kids outside of town. Out of all that cement and worry. And we did.
We gave them a shop and motorized vehicles to maintain (mower, tractor, carts, bikes). Gardens to tend and cats to feed. Neighbors to visit and chores to do.
It was different from my growing up. They had hundreds of books and an unlimited budget for new ones. They had good schools and involved parents. But it also had the advantages I had. They could run heedless through the wide boundaries we set. They could spend a summer day on projects or books or Scouts or building something. Or just wander the creek and collect tadpoles.
I worry most of us are confused about what's important, and spend so much time pursuing somebody else's goals we forget to have any of our own.
This is such a different experience than being poor-ish in eastern Europe.
I grew up in a below-average household, my SO in outright poverty.
We couldn't afford shool books and clothes other than off brand stuff, her family had to buy appliances like a washing machine or refrigerator used.
The five of us lived in a 45m2(500sq. ft.?) apartment, the four of them in a 25m2 one.
My dad bought his car in 1992 new (back when we were better off), and accumulated less than 140k km over the 23 years he had it, both of her parents didn't have a driving license.
But with all that we could rely on public healthcare, transportation and the areas we lived in were relatively safe.
Another throwaway because I don't want friends to know, but another thing about being poor that people who are not don't really understand is how much family can keep you down.
If you are the only person in your family to go to college/make lots of $$$, there's this overwhelming feeling to want to help your immediate or even extended family as much as you can. Sending them a large chunk of your salary eats into your ability to save and reinvest that money into more wealth.
It's kinda like having someone in the family who is a drug addict and is incapable of keeping a decent job and providing for themselves. Except instead of drugs they're just trying to survive, and instead of it being a single person you can easily dismiss for being an "addict", it's your whole family.
Boy, does the stuff about cars hit home. When I was poor I had to drive on tires so old that the steel was exposed.
The worst was when my insurance got canceled because I couldn't afford it. This led to a chain reaction of absolute dumpster-fire awfulness:
- Can't afford insurance
- Insurance gets canceled
- This automatically triggers registration getting canceled
- I can't stop going to work, and there's no public transit where I lived, so what choice do I have but to keep driving?
- Highway patrol scans my plate, notices I'm not registered, pulls me over
- Car gets impounded for not being insured, which is actually the more lenient punishment, because (as I learned that day) not having insurance is a criminal offense
- Can't afford the ticket I got for not being registered, so my license gets suspended for non-payment
So because I couldn't make an insurance payment, my registration got canceled ($), my car got impounded ($$$), and my license got suspended ($). And is any of this money going to fund public transportation? Of course not.
I did eventually get my car back, got new insurance, re-registered, and reinstated my license, at great personal expense including the time it took to go to the DMV (the nearest one of which is in the next town).
But it was another year before I could afford to replace my tires.
> because (as I learned that day) not having insurance is a criminal offense
> Can't afford the ticket I got for not being registered
so here is where you got lucky, not having prior outstanding non-payment or not having prior potentially or actual criminal offenses on your record.
non-payment of the ticket would have led to harsher punishment upon your next infraction, which is much more likely to happen when your neighbors and the police are looking specifically at you all the time, which may have been your experience but just food for thought for anyone browsing this thread.
I know you didn't mean it this way but I would not describe any part of this experience as "lucky."
But you're right. The patrolman came right out and said that he was knocking down the no-insurance charge to an unregistered citation because I didn't have a criminal record. What he didn't know is that I do have a criminal record, just not in that state. Guess his systems don't connect to the federal ones.
So yeah. "Lucky" is right.
What galls me about this is that if you look at any of the individual steps in isolation, it sounds perfectly logical, or at least there's an argument to be had. And that's the level at which we argue about these things when it comes to passing laws.
But when you look at the whole thing end-to-end, it is crystal-clear that there is a sum greater than its parts, and that sum functions to drive people who are in poverty even further into poverty. In this particular case there's the additional unintended consequence of prioritizing the flow of money over actual vehicle safety.
yes, it takes an outside perspective to identity the luck involved because people in every socioeconomic class and background all have their own challenges that they faced whether they will receive empathy for it or not
for your post I was mainly aiming to point out to others how a cycle effects a large portion of American society, disproportionately affecting minorities relative to their population. The prior unpaid ticket and prior leniency leads to the harsher penalty for the next infraction, which is all more likely to happen when there is an assumption of suspicion and over-policing. This practically ensures that violent infractions become the only choices available to people and harms our collective society. Despite there no longer being racially exclusionary laws, and despite there (typically) being no individual person consciously trying to disenfranchisement someone, it is still easy to quantify how a result becomes so common.
> The value of their work doesn’t factor in as much - An administrative assistant might touch every department in the company every day and facilitate a massive amount of work, but they still don’t get paid much - it’s hard to justify when you could hire and train up someone to do the same thing nearly as well with very little difficulty.
This seems like it exposes a bias toward thinking in terms of large businesses. (That may be a reasonable bias, at least in the U.S. where it seems like big organizations are only getting bigger and small ones are going out of business.)
In a small business there is less likelihood that the administrative work is meticulously spec'd out. So if an administrative assistant in a small business touching every department, and they are good, chances are work has been offloaded onto them in a way that moves them further from "assisting" and closer to "inexpendable employee who is constantly fleshing out an underspecified business model and iteratively improving it."
I can think of examples where a small business didn't realize this (and some where they went out of business for that reason). But only a handful few where this didn't happen.
If competent administrative assistants in small businesses had any idea of their true value, they'd demand their salary be doubled.
Same logic wrt sales reps. Although in that case, companies at least seem to have realized it and responded by the weirdo pattern of a) providing incentives to attract the best reps, and then b) firing the best reps after a few years on the grounds it's too expensive to keep paying them for consistently hitting their goals and collecting the incentives!
> This is because apartments at both of these levels quite accurately assume that you can’t afford a lawyer - while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back; the apartment complex has no reason to give back thousands of dollars they can simply keep.
This is a really key point and this behavior affects many many aspects of life.
Money is liquid power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. Unfortunately, power imbalances between people form an unstable equilibrium. As soon as you have a tiny bit more power over someone, the first thing you can do is use it to force them to give you more. This is, I believe, the seed of almost all inequality in the world.
One of the main accelerators of this imbalance is threat—applying power without spending it. If power worked exactly like money where to get you to do something I had to pay you, then there would be natural counter-balance towards equality. Any time someone had more power, the only useful thing they could do with it would to be spend it, which would lower their power and raise someone else's.
Unfortunately, you can often get what you want without spending any power simply by making it clear to someone that you could force them if you wanted to. They will capitulate and do what you want while you don't actually have to put any real effort in and squander any power.
In the example here, the apartment complex can afford a lawyer to argue about returning a security deposit and you can't. So you acquiesce to not getting your deposit back and they don't have to pay for a lawyer. They acquire a bit more power (cash) from you without having to spend anything to get it.
As another ex-poor person: some of this is OK and some of it doesn't really ring true.
E.g.
> That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.
I don't think this is true, and why would it be? Unless you're in an area where the housing market is cliffed for some legislative or regulatory reason. But most places, no, I've not seen this. You might have to put effort in to find nicer places on a budget, research areas, etc. but isn't that true of any purchase?
It's true that when you're poor you never get close to those naive 'this is how much of your income to spend on rent' suggestions, but there are places that cover the whole spectrum.
> Whichever you choose, a person of less-than-intermediate income has to be prepared to stick with the rental long-term, should things not go well. This is because apartments at both of these levels quite accurately assume that you can’t afford a lawyer - while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back; the apartment complex has no reason to give back thousands of dollars they can simply keep. This means every time you move, you pay something like a third to a month’s wages for the privilege. Since breaking a lease often means you lose your privilege to live anywhere non-hellish, this means if you don’t have cash reserves (more on these later*) at the exact right time of year, you might end up in the same place for another full year whether you like it or not.
You stick with a rental longer term because of overheads, yeah, but I wouldn't go into a rental contract expecting with certainty to lose 100% of my deposit.
Rather what happens is you get good at doing minor legal research and writing terse emails about it. Maybe many are scummy by default, but most roll when they see you've got even a little knowledge about what you're entitled to. That's a valuable skill for life in general, so it's something you should be learning to do regardless.
> a person’s pay is determined by how rare their skills are and how much demand there is for those skills. The value of their work doesn’t factor in as much
What's the value of a person's work that isn't just determined by the first part? What does the author think drives demand, if not the prospective value you provide to the various companies in the labor market?
I've seen this effect a few times with housing. When viewing either apartments or shared rooms, not being discerning enough at the advert stage has resulted in viewing some absolutely terrible places - damp, poorly heated, unmaintained, and the sense from interacting with the landlord that their MO is firmly "slumlord". The really surprising thing is that the rent demanded for these places is often not much less than the rent for a much nicer space in the same area of the city - maybe £50-£100/month.
I think when supply and demand meets minimum wage you get an incredibly non-linear effect in bang for buck. I'm sure there are exceptions (the property market definitely has a negative survivorship bias where the nice cheap properties are never on the market for very long while the terrible ones are).
> > a person’s pay is determined by how rare their skills are and how much demand there is for those skills. The value of their work doesn’t factor in as much
> What's the value of a person's work that isn't just determined by the first part? What does the author think drives demand, if not the prospective value you provide to the various companies in the labor market?
The value of your work is "how much money would the company lose if no one did the exact job I am doing". This generally has 0 correlation to your wage, because in general a company will think in terms of "how much money would the company lose if anyone else did the job this employee is doing", which is a very different question. This is how it happens that many absolutely essential jobs, without which society would simply stop functioning, are also among the lowest payed. Probably one of the best examples is nurses, but also warehouse workers, transport people, construction workers, farm hands.
I assume that when he talks about 'rarity' of skills he's talking about supply. Almost anyone can be a farm hand; supply is huge and individual workers are fungible. So wages are low.
"how much money would the company lose if no one did the exact job I am doing" seems a bit of a moot point when it's not even close to being the case that no-one would do the job in question. _Expected_ value then approaches price paid as you weight in the probability involved.
Well, this is exactly what he explains as the reality, and I agree that this is how the job market works.
However, that's not to say that it is a good state of affairs, or that it is the only way things could work. In fact, the purpose of workers' unions is exactly to stop this kind of thinking, and it seems like this may once again start spreading a bit, given the recent movements in Amazon and other places.
The problem with this is that the company is using its leverage over workers to treat them as a commodity. If workers had more leverage, they could refuse the job unless they were paid a fair wage (the value of their work as I defined it above), but as it is, they are forced to compete with other workers since not working would see them and their families homeless and maybe even dying of hunger.
With the current state of affairs, the company owners end up extracting much more value from their workers as profit, often by deliberately fixing the wage market (as we saw with the illegal SV "no poaching" deal for tech workers), or at least by seeking to attain geographical monopoly status in it.
I'm not sure it's ever going to be the case at the very bottom of the skill continuum that workers won't be seen as a commodity given just how replaceable they are to the company. For some jobs you could have your whole workforce strike, fire them, and replace them the next day with a minor blip in productivity. The only thing that stops that is regulation or wider organization than just that particular worker segment, neither of which seem forthcoming in the US, at least.
Well, showing up to work for someplace that did this used to be called "scabbing" and carried quite a bit of social stigma. But yes, this requires wider organization and some regulation. This type of organization and regulation do exist in many places in the world, and can work decently well.
I’ve lived in small towns in Illinois and Texas, mid-sized in North Carolina, and big cities in Texas and California. That’s enough to know that housing markets are wildly divergent across the US, and really can’t be generalized.
The author seems to be describing how things are in metro Phoenix. Having not lived there, I’d assume it’s as described.
I will say that my experience has been that there’s a paradox: it should be much easier to get by as a poor person in small towns as everything costs a lot less, but paradoxically there’s even less work to do so it’s hard to even come up with the low local costs. In the end, poverty is always relative to the local market.
There is definitely non-linear pricing in the London housing market as one example.
When I was last looking -
Studio apartments and one bed room apartments rented for similar amounts, and so did two beds and three beds.
But the price jump from one bed to two bed was much larger than any of the other jumps.
You can speculate on many reasons why this might be the case (smallest size apartment for a family in the city, smallest size you can split with a friend, smallest size with space for an office).
There are exceptions and I'm sure that more research time could help you find them.
But one of the points made convincingly in the artle is that if you are poor you don't have a lot of energy, time or gas-money to do that kind of research.
I mean, we can talk about price jumps between bedroom counts if you want but I'm not sure it's very relevant to the article, which is saying there's only "stabbyville" and "safe" places given other fixed requirements. If you need a studio in London, they exist all through the price spectrum, area spectrum, and other dimensions. I suspect the 'jump' you see from one bed to two is that, on average, two beds are in nicer areas, or they are houses rather than flats, freehold rather than lease, etc. Bedroom count is correlated with other features that also increase the average price. But that doesn't mean there aren't two beds in cheaper areas too.
The typical tradeoff in London is price vs proximity to work/transport. For most people. Safety comes in at the very bottom end, but still you can live far out and commute. I'm not saying that's a pleasant experience, or that being poor is a pleasant experience in general, but the tradeoff and choice exists. If you have a job in central London that you'd commute to though, fact is you are already probably well off compared to most of the country. It's a bit like how student debt mostly affects the middle class. Same with expensive season tickets for the train.
> But the price jump from one bed to two bed was much larger than any of the other jumps.
The jump between sharing and a one-bed flat is certainly larger. A two-bed on two incomes is a pretty decent arrangement in London (if you're a couple for example); a one-bed on a single income is much much steeper.
> But the price jump from one bed to two bed was much larger than any of the other jumps.
That price jump isn't particularly surprising given London's one bed flats are competing against a vast number of individual rooms in shared properties rented out (which is regarded as a normal living arrangement in London, including for professionals, somewhat older people and to an extent couples). Obviously people who need an extra bedroom aren't really in that market, and the second bedroom is also easily [sub]let out separately.
It's a maximum of two unrelated households (a household can consist of couple or single person) in a property unless the landlord has an HMO (Housing of Multiple Occupation license).
So a 3+ bedroom property still houses a maximum of 2 couples.
Value, not demand. A nurse who helps stop 50 people from dying each week is doing very valuable work, but a talented lawyer helping to defeat valid class-action lawsuits (negative value work) is probably paid more.
Healthcare is kind of a special case though, in that it's not really a free market (whether you think it should be or not).
So the value of what medical professionals do isn't really signalled through. The lawyer has high value to the company that pays them, so they probably meet the first part exactly: rare skills in high demand.
Okay, but now consider other monopsonies. There are plenty. What most people get paid is almost entirely decoupled from the net value they create, and oftentimes it's only tangentially related to the value they give to their employer.
The labor market isn't fully efficient but I don't believe it's "almost entirely decoupled" from the value employees provide. If you provide with certainty $100k/y of value and your employer pays you $30k/y, there'd be no shortage of entities willing to bid up that price. Who wouldn't take profit within their risk tolerance? What mechanism do you think would prevent this from happening?
• Job security – some people are just too poor to go on the job market for a few weeks or months, meaning they don't have much leverage to get their employer to increase their pay…
• Perverse incentives – some jobs are all about destroying value, e.g. loan sharks, most of the advertising industry… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8410489.stm (2009) has a short list.
• Monopsony – what if your employer is the only one currently in a position to make that much from you (or all the competitors have already filled their positions)?
I could go on, but I'm only scratching the surface of my surface-level knowledge.
I vigorously agree that some jobs destroy value on net, but the report described in the BBC's article is pretty unconvincing. I have the impression that the people who wrote it knew what conclusion they wanted before they began.
As an example, they claim that the UK's top bankers and fund managers destroy about £7.40 in value for every £1 they get in salary. How do they get that figure? They assign to those people ...
* 100% of the predicted reduction in UK GDP from 2008 to 2014 as a result of the 2008 crisis (as measured by the difference between IMF forecasts immediately before and immediately after)
* an "adjustment to reflect a loss of 5% of UK economic capacity between the onset of the crisis and 2020" (that sounds like double-counting to me, but I can't tell because they don't give any details)
* 100% of an estimate of increased debt as a result of the crisis, obtained as the difference between an IMF forecast immediately after the crisis and the UK government's forecast immediately before it (sounds like more double-counting to me, and I bet the government's predictions are systematically more optimistic than the IMF's)
* an "allowance for debt servicing costs on the additional debt incurred"
* 50% of 1/6 of the tax revenue from the UK financial sector (treated as a pure positive to weigh against the pure negative of value destroyed by the 2008 crisis). The 1/6 is because they guess 5/6 of the UK financial sector is retail rather than wholesale finance and consider the gains attributable to top bankers to be only in the wholesale part. The 50% is because not all of the tax paid by the wholesale financial industry is paid by, or otherwise attributable to, its top bankers.
* 50% of 2.5% of the UK's GVA or "gross value added" as estimated by the ONS. The 2.5% is the ONS's estimate of how much London financial services contributed to GVA. The 50% is because not all of that is attributable to the top bankers. I don't know why they're using GVA here but GDP when estimating value destroyed by the 2008 crisis.
* 50% of 50% of an estimate of post-tax earnings of finance workers in the City of London. Post-tax because they already counted tax revenue. 50% because not all the credit for those people having those jobs belongs to the top bankers. 50% because if they didn't have those jobs then they'd presumably have other jobs.
The costs of the 2008 crisis are considered as a one-off. For the benefits, which are a recurring thing, they assumed a 20-year career for those bankers.
Soooo many things about this look highly dubious to me. There isn't a 2008-scale crisis every 20 years. The 2008 crisis was a global thing and we have no idea what fraction of it was the fault of people in the UK, versus what fraction of its effects were suffered by the UK. It's not at all clear that it's entirely attributable to "top bankers". Their measures of value destroyed by the crisis look very susceptible to double-counting and other errors. If there's a good reason for using GDP to reckon the loss and GVA to reckon the gain, it eludes me. So far as I can tell, the ONS's reckoning of the financial industry's contribution to GVA is looking only at things like how much revenue the financial industry gets for the services it provides, whereas the claimed benefits of the financial industry to the economy are all about things like providing liquidity, more efficient allocation of capital, etc., which they don't consider at all. Almost all the key numbers in their calculation are low-effort guesses: look at all those "50%"s.
I would be 100% unsurprised if it turned out that top bankers' net contribution to the world is negative. But I don't think this report really tells me anything of value about whether that's so.
That was the first profession in the report. I haven't looked at the others. I strongly suspect they are just as terrible as this one.
If these reduce the value you provide then that's as designed. How can you provide value without skills? How can you provide value by _not_ doing things you find unethical? These aren't inefficiencies of the market for labor, they're facets of it working exactly as desired.
> • Job security – some people are just too poor to go on the job market for a few weeks or months, meaning they don't have much leverage to get their employer to increase their pay…
Do you... quit your job before you look for a new one? Increase in pay levels for lower skilled jobs is not really about individual cases, but the aggregate. If Profession X generates more value than the current pay level, that increases general demand for Profession X, and reduces the time needed to match up with a new employer. Sure there's some thresholding involved, but not enough to 'entirely decouple' price and value.
> • Perverse incentives – some jobs are all about destroying value, e.g. loan sharks, most of the advertising industry… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8410489.stm (2009) has a short list.
Eh this is pretty hand-wavey stuff. Loan sharks don't _destroy_ value from an economic perspective. Nor does advertising. Nor does banking. Societal problems though they might have.
This means that you can't model it as a liquid market.
> Do you... quit your job before you look for a new one?
I don't, because I don't work such long hours that I don't have the capacity to do anything after work. Some people have multiple jobs just to cover rent and food; adding a third (looking for new jobs) isn't always possible.
> Loan sharks don't _destroy_ value from an economic perspective. Nor does advertising.
Then economics is wrong. Wasting people's lives and attention is destroying value. Keeping people in debt, causing suffering… you're not extracting as much value out of people as they're losing. They're net negative.
You don't even need a nurse - a farmer is preventing multiple people from starving and a cleaner is preventing multiple deaths from parasites and infectious diseases.
Value is relative to the labor pool. If you hired me to inject vaccines instead of a nurse, after some light training I might be able to stop 40 people from dying every week rather than 50. That doesn't mean I would be 80% valuable as a nurse. I'd be providing negative value because there are plenty of nurses who are also willing to do the same job.
Also, if you consider class action lawsuits as overall positive value, then necessarily both sides of the lawsuit are producing positive value.
By “negative value“ I mean “the world would be better off if nobody did that”, not “negative relative to the counterfactual where you didn't do it”. The latter is good for individual decision-making, but it isn't very good for accurately compensating value contributed… unless we have some variety of UBI, but regardless, that's no longer capitalism; it's an inverse job auction.
> Also, if you consider class action lawsuits as overall positive value
I don't. But the vast majority of class action lawsuits I've seen have been valid, and the vast majority of class action lawsuits have paid out nowhere near enough to even discourage the behaviour, let alone compensate the victims. With a good class-action lawyer, class-action lawsuits just reduce your profit margin slightly, as a cost of “doing business”.
I can't imagine how you could think that I think that, unless we're working off drastically different models of how the world works.
>The latter is good for individual decision-making, but it isn't very good for accurately compensating value contributed
Why not? How could an economy function if it were based on real value as opposed to relative value? Farmers and water treatment engineers would all be billionaires and everyone would waste a lot of resources trying to become farmers and learning about water treatment. If you drive a truck of medical supplies, you'd make millions, but if you drive a truck of consumer goods, you'd make very little, despite doing the same work.
> and everyone would waste a lot of resources trying to become farmers
• There's only so much arable land, so people couldn't do this.
⋄ Thus, people who wanted to become farmers but didn't have land would either give up, or innovate things like hydroponics.
• There's only so much food people need to eat. Producing more than that isn't contributing value; in this case, markets approximate that reasonably well (though with other problems, so many governments subsidise food production in some way).
• People already waste a lot of resources trying to become tax-reduction lawyers or middle managers¹ or gain other high-paid, useless jobs.
> If you drive a truck of medical supplies, you'd make millions, but if you drive a truck of consumer goods, you'd make very little, despite doing the same work.
Good point! This hypothetical system that hasn't had hundreds of years to work out the kinks has some potential issues. I wouldn't say it's worth dismissing it out of hand because of that, though; they don't seem like fundamental problems. For instance, the current system already distinguishes between rapid medical transportation networks (e.g. organ motorcyclists) and regular ol' freight.
Before trying to solve these problems, we should work out how the (magical, instant, “everyone just decides to start doing it”) introduction of such a system would change society. It's entirely possible that it would change enough to eliminate this problem, and introduce others in its place.
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¹: Middle management isn't inherently useless – there can be useful hierarchies involving middle management, I'm sure. In my personal experience, I haven't encountered any, and popular culture agrees with me so it's decent shorthand, but if your job title is “middle management” and you have a genuinely useful job, this isn't a dig at you. (Tax lawyers, though… offence intended.)
I'm not entirely sure what you're suggesting. There isn't a middle ground between a market economy and planned economy. In a market economy, a corporation's tax-reduction lawyer is always going to make more money than a nurse. You can reduce this disparity by reforming the tax system. However, the problem is that it's not politically advantageous to do so, so nobody does it.
> There's only so much arable land, so people couldn't do this.
Rather than invest in stocks, people would buy a small patch of land to grow their own food. This would not be an efficient allocation of capital.
> There's only so much food people need to eat. Producing more than that isn't contributing value; in this case, markets approximate that reasonably well
What makes nursing any different in this regard? There certainly is a healthcare distribution problem in the US, but it's not because nurses are being paid too little. Nurses in America make the same, if not more, than nurses in the rest of the world.
>What's the value of a person's work that isn't just determined by the first part?
The value of the work done, either in a physical sense (because it produces something of value) or in a societal sense (because it involves doing something of value).
If you're the best hole-digger in the world, and people are constantly trying to hire you to dig holes so that they can fill them in, then you would be highly paid - but would your work be "valuable"?
Probably very few people are true free-market believers when it comes to the idea of fair pay.
IMHO the problem is deeper than that. Economists often wrongly and silently presume that free market equilibria lead to desirable states of society but there is nothing in their theories that would warrant this. It works for simple trades (bargaining) but once you're at the level of institutions there is no need for a match between institutional needs and the preferences and desires of individuals in a society. For instance, to build a certain product a company needs a certain distribution of different types of work. These needs of the larger institution need not match individuals' life choices at all. Some jobs can even be so desirable that workers are willing to lose money in the long run (that's e.g. how Amazon benefits from selling the works of self-publishers who often overall lose money). Consequently, since people need to make a living, even in a fully functioning free job market there can be a substantially large number of people who are pressed into choices that make their lives miserable.
yes, if somebody else would be willing to swap their hard earned "value" for it.
The problem is when people making decisions to swap is not swapping their own personal "value" they accumulated themselves, but someone else's (usually the tax payers').
> If you're the best hole-digger in the world, and people are constantly trying to hire you to dig holes so that they can fill them in, then you would be highly paid - but would your work be "valuable"?
If people get transcendent joy out of filling in holes, or the filling-in of holes otherwise matters to them, then this is valuable. In a real-world scenario, it's a bullshit job: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
I don't think this is true, and why would it be? Unless you're in an area where the housing market is cliffed for some legislative or regulatory reason.
I have a friend who works in real estate and he tells me people in difficult circumstances pay a premium because of the risk of default and damage. The landlord needs more margin to cover those extra risks.
He also told me you could never make money at the bottom end of the market if you have middle class sensibilities. It's pretty ruthless at the bottom.
Right, but there are presumably people at all levels of risk, not just risky people who pay a premium vs non-risky people who don't. Reduced variance is good for landlords too, so there's definitely an incentive to accurately predict and make granular the risk profile/credit check/etc.
>> That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.
>I don't think this is true, and why would it be? Unless you're in an area where the housing market is cliffed for some legislative or regulatory reason. But most places, no, I've not seen this. You might have to put effort in to find nicer places on a budget, research areas, etc. but isn't that true of any purchase?
The thing that I've noticed is that yes the sweet spot exists but the supply is always more limited. You have higher availability on living because it is so expensive that not everyone can afford it(or think it is worth it). And the cheap in not so good areas (not necessarily dangerous but gives e.g. longer commutes and has less services and so on) have a higher supply because of that. The sweet spot in good location and a good price is going to have all houses and/or apartments taken. Then the surprise happens, since supply is limited at this sweet spot the prices tend to rise so you get that cliff mentioned in the article.
I just watched episode 4 of Atlanta last night and Donald Glover's character had a really good monologue about being poor after finding out his friend had helped him turn 190$ into 2000$ but that it wouldn't be available right away:
Earn Marks: Poor people don't have time for investments, because poor people are too busy trying not to be poor. Okay? I need to eat today, not in September.
I very rarely read long Hacker News articles to the end. This one is fascinating.
A few years ago I watched a Netflix series about extreme cheapskates. (I think it was called "Extreme Cheapskates.") The thing that struck me were the older "cheapskates" who realized the kind of economics in this article. They retired young and follow many of the same habits described in this article, and are totally happy.
One guy bikes everywhere and only eats weird cuts of meat and fish that no one else wants. Then he scrounges loose change in parking lots to pay for his "vacations." Another family only buys "expired but good" food and has a creative way to replace toilet paper. They got into the habit when they needed to get out of debt and just decided that they'd rather put their money elsewhere.
The series made me NEVER complain about money again, even while I was unemployed during the pandemic.
I never was poorish, but thanks to the boyscouts (when I was young) and an NGO I helped that worked with housing in Brazilians slums, I had great in depth exposure to what a poorer life was. And the very first thing to notice is that even if those people live in very modest conditions they still managed to be happy and that is because they had no reference of what a richer life was. Usually their wealth targets were very close to what they had, they were always poor/modest so their reality was that.
The greater problem is when people live the wealthier life and makes the the movement to a poorer situation, something that seems to be happening in the US (I don't live there, so I don't have first hand experience). So people who had a taste of a better, more comfortable life, are suffering because of that.
That is the reason I live well under what my wealth can pay, it is still considered a mid-upper class but I'm avoiding at all costs the "quality of life trap". If were we (my family) are is comfortable, then all the extra money I get will go to savings) investments to allow us to keep this life as long as possible, not on luxury items or a bigger house/car/TV. Speaking to americans, I get that this is not a mindset that they have.
I've been "counting couch change for food" poor and "maybe I can retire early" rich and the thing that strikes me the most about both is how many facets of society are geared to punish the poor.
Your car broke down on the side of the road and you needed a week to get the money to fix it? Now you have a fine and an exorbitant ransom on your vehicle from a towing company.
Your employer made a mistake with your paycheck and it didn't arrive on time? Cool, now you have an overdraft fee, a bounced check fee and late fees for every monthly payment that hit at the wrong time. There goes your paycheck.
You need a loan for a car to get to work? No problem, you'll just need to pay 21% interest and insane late fees if you miss a payment.
You need to buy boots for work? Payless has $10 boots but they'll only last a few months, so you can rebuy them 5 times a year or maybe just destroy your feet instead.
Meanwhile, my insurance company will tow my car for free, I have a buffer in the bank such that nothing could possibly bounce and even if it did they would forgive me, I have a 5 year, zero interest rate loan on my car, points back on credit cards for buying things I'd buy anyway, free money for getting a new credit card or bank account, etc...
I've spanned the economic ladder from making $25k, to having enough money that I could retire before age 35. It wasn't that bad making $25k. I actually moved into my friend's large closet for 3 months. Life was more like the show Friends back then. I definitely made more stories and friends in that time period too. Now on the other side of the spectrum, life is more stressful and kinda boring. Maybe that is part of the pandemic's fault. My money is tied up in assets that I worry about at night. Part of me just wants to liquidate a lot of things and move into a nice van and tour the country.
I've heard that sentiment quite a bit that life is more interesting when you're just getting by and I agree with it to some extent. There's also an element of aging out of it. I'm saving so aggressively that my budget is tighter than when I was just starting out and renting a room at a stereotypical recent-grad party house, but my life is a lot more quiet and boring these days.
I've had a few friends go van life. Some went in head first, but you can always buy the van and just use it for weekends/holidays to see how deep you want to go.
That is an average middle class apartment for a family where I come from (Israel). Thinking about it as being small is so American :) And BTW you don't get to live in a _house_ in Israel unless you inherited it, are rich, bought it >20 ago before the real estate boom, or willing to drive a couple of hours in each direction to get to work (which is ridiculous in a tiny country with a 100% tax on gas)
If you're poor you'll have to do with ~600 sqft or so for a family. And I know there are countries where even this is rather spacious.
I am not rich. I have never been rich, and it's likely that I never will be, but this:
> At the same time, I’m mostly happy. I have a wonderful wife who is very satisfying to be near, two kids who are about as custom-fit to my personality as possible, and dozens of friends online and off who would take a bullet for me, and vice versa.
describes my life pretty well.
I have lived low on the hog for almost my entire life, and that allowed me to save up enough, so that I can live in a fashion that is comfortable to me, while I do the kind of work I love (the kind that could make other people millions, but not so much for me). I just love doing this stuff. I'm living the dream (which I once described as "My dream is to one day, work for free").
I also grew up overseas (mostly Africa), and know what real poverty is like. It has had a huge effect on my outlook.
And, for my entire adult life, I have worked intimately with people that are on the shit end of the stick. I am constantly hearing (and seeing) what living rough is like.
I started working full time right after I turned 15.
My family had always flirted with extreme poverty. At one point all 6 of us lived in a tiny gulfstream on the back property of a church for 6 months. We had to carry our waste out in buckets. We got kicked out of section 8 housing by the sheriffs department. This was while living in a combination of DC, or the VA side.
My mother was diagnosed with cancer (which took her life 7 years later) when we didn't have insurance and my dad stopped getting out of bed.
Because of pre-existing condition laws at the time she was unable to get insurance outside of state medicare.
My very religious parents best option was to divorce so my dad's income wouldn't effect her status, they declined.
The summer after I turned 15 I worked my first 40 hour week (over a weekend) running networking cable and doing admin for a local medical home equipment company. I transitioned from small business network admin to SEO and "New Media" and on to become a developer.
I paid for rent and food for my family, anything I didn't spend on work clothes or essentials was taken by them each month. I didn't have a car.
I spent 1 semester in college and couldn't afford it, I couldn't afford not to make money and I lived in an active construction site, just a mattress on subfloor in a gutted husk. I was born with a couple heart defects that cost me thousands each year at a minimum, until ACA I could not get personal insurance and had to get company insurance.
I have started companies and done well for myself but the lack of access to capital, the lack of network opportunities meant I have had to scrap far harder than people can understand.
I've had to fake coming from a position of security my whole life just to have more leverage in negotiating. I've had to learn to code switch in ways people don't understand. I learned this all after my first (illegal) W2 job took maximum value from me and payed me a third of what my role, responsibility and output would have earned as an adult.
People who make it don't appreciate how lucky they had to get, people that have parents that aren't a net financial burden can't understand what that weight around your neck is like, people are far luckier than they appreciate.
Lack of access to capital, having to constantly bootstrap without any kind of family or other safety net, having no home to go home to is something most people don't understand.
1. being on the high end of poor while being oblivious and in a socially highbrow environment (STEM grad school, $26k/yr salary, high cost-of-living city). I also felt privileged because i lived in a "foreign postdoc ghetto" where my neighbors were a single family on a postdoc salary (probably somewhere between 27-30k) living in a one-bedroom with two kids.
2. the experience of being "service-collar" middle-class while having peers that have mostly emerged from being poor (Lyft driver, $56k/yr earnings)
Now I'm a dev, on the lower end of the pay scale for bay area devs but one thing is I'm pretty fearless about winding up poor again because I know I can hack it and still live happily.
Now I'm a dev, probably on the lower end of the spectrum for the bay area
Talleyrand related a story about Bourienne, who missed out on becoming the Prefect of Police of Paris and 200,000 a year because he travelled from Hamburg in a broken down carriage and lost 24 hours reaching the city to grab the opportunity:
"It shows why one should never be a poor devil"
And this is exactly why the rich get richer: they're in a position to take opportunity and to do so in a calm, orderly fashion.
Seeing this thread I understand why the "U"SA have become so fucked. Sorry to all those 90s kids who grew up in the illusion of a middle-class society.
Carrot for the well-situated, stick for the rest. The truly amazing thing is how this system creates its own proponents without any diction or explicit coercion like ideologies of old. And by obfuscating its workings with complicated black boxes in the form of financial and legal entities it can stay diffuse and difficult to pinpoint.
Gratz to those who made it, could have been much easier in the rest of the first world though.
I grew up poorish. Father made less than 100 dollars a week for a good chunk of my childhood. However we lived in a low cost of living area and it was relatively safe. My parents were, and still are, cheap despite making much more money now.
They did an incredible job not letting us realize we were poor. I thought we were upper middle class until I was in high school. Raising a family while poor is hard. I can't even imagine the life I would have had if I grew up in a higher cost of living or more dangerous place.
Queue my first truck. My uncle gave it to me. S-15. The bench seat didn’t lock, it slid forward and back when breaking or accelerating. Hard left hand turn and the keys would fly from the ignition and land on tue floorboard of the passenger seat (this did not turn off the truck). During the same hard left, some electrical thing would connect or un-short and my radio would temporarily turn on until the end of the turn. It ate oil and did not have a dip stick; thus you estimated how much oil to add daily. If the headlights were on, the gas gauge was zero. Oh, and it could only be pop-started (meaning I had to always park on a hill and get the thing rolling to get the ignition to pop start - it did not always work). A boyfriend of my mom’s showed me how to arc the starter bolts with a screwdriver- and I could now start it on flat surfaces! That was great. I eventually didn’t add enough oil and seized the engine. This is Southern California fwiw.
Does the US or California not have some sort of annual check to ensure that cars on the road are roadworthy? Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test
New York requires annual car inspections that include emissions testing as well as a basic safety check (tires, brakes, head/signal/brake lights, horn, fluids, and a few other things). They "only" cost $20 but they put a color coded sticker on your windshield that is easily seen by passing cops, who will pull you over if you have the wrong color. Getting the inspection done is a bit of a pain in the ass, too, as because at least for me it would usually require taking at least an hour off of work to drive the car to a garage who could do it. And the garages seemed to often run out of inspection stickers, as they're provided by the state and only allot so many to each garage that does inspections. It was kind of a nightmare in its own way.
And if your car failed inspection, you were obligated to fix it, of course. I knew a lot of people who would postpone the inspection as long as possible and hope they didn't get pulled over. When I was pretty poor I had a car that frequently had its check engine light on (an instant fail for the inspections). It was cheaper to buy an OBD reader online that could reset the check engine light long enough to get the inspection done than it was to fix the problem.
When I moved to Georgia which only does the emissions test (and only in the Atlanta area counties), I was surprised by how quick it was. Perhaps coincidentally, I see many orders of magnitude more cars engulfed in flames on the roads in metro Atlanta than I ever did in New York.
Would being forced to choose between a car that doesn't have government permission to drive and paying way more than market value for something that does from a BHPH lot make the situation of the person you're replying to better?
Also what he described is pretty out there even by poor person standards. What you usually see is people failing inspection for rust holes in non-structural areas, cracked light lenses, leaky exhausts and non-functional evaporation emissions systems.
In my experience: Lightbulbs are cheap and get fixed. Driving with bald tires sucks and people do get them replaced when they are showing cords. Brakes are important cheap enough and get fixed (helps that pretty much any shade tree mechanic will do them for parts plus a few bucks). People need to get to work. They don't try to put stuff off until payday because they like driving a car that might fail on them.
In the US vehicle registration and vehicle inspection are state-by-state. California, while known for its strict emissions requirements, has no other vehicle inspection. Surprised me when I moved there!
You have, in California, a thing called Smog Check. An attempt to remove old, polluting cars - you can’t register your car without it. Lots of these check centers will let you pay under the table to let them hook up a better car to falsify your results. If a car is obviously not road safe, a cop can pull you over.
in maryland you can just pay a nominal fee/fine each month to defer your emissions test. it adds up, but it takes a long time to equal the cost of replacing a catalytic converter.
> it seems like they hardly lie awake at night thinking about their iffy alternator much, if at all.
Sometimes someone can help someone and score big at the same time. Here's a story that I heard from someone who was there:
There was a small company that was in a position where they made money but not a lot so they saved on everything.
At one point the owner caught whiff that one of the employees, - a master craftsman in his traditional craft - was struggling extra because of the car.
So the ownwr told them to lease a brand new car to this particular employee.
Accounting said wait-a-bit, we are considering each and every expense twice and you want to lease a car for this guy to use off work.
Owner said yes.
Doing that gave him two things:
- his specialist stopped worrying about the car at work
- he stayed there for a long time
No, this time it is not a management-feel-good-story, I know the company and my friend was in the room arguing against the decision.
Of course this might backfire (jealousy from other employees, people who stop caring anyway etc) which is why it should be used with caution.
The employees who would be jealous are operating with a different definition of "fair." The common definition is that everyone gets the same thing, but a more humane definition is that everyone gets what they need. And if you switch from the former to the latter then the owner's decision becomes very fair. Everyone benefits from having the specialist focused on work. And the specialist gets what he needs too.
The hardest part for me was convincing my partner that price is not equal to value. It took me a decade of arguments and constant proofs to even begin to convince my partner that you can almost always find much better value for much less money.
Marketing does such an incredible job at convincing people that price and value are the same thing that it takes tremendous mental effort for people to acknowledge that it's not like that at all. People refuse to acknowledge how powerful advertising is at distorting our own perceptions. People think things like "I'm not that kind of person to use product x or drive car y or live in country z, I'm better than that" - These people are misguided.
Usually you have to move to a different country to get better value. You don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood next to money launderers who get easy money (you don't want your hard-earned money competing on the same playing field as their big easy-earned money). You want to buy a house somewhere where people work hard for their money. Sometimes these places don't have a very good reputation but the reality often has nothing to do with the marketing.
People also get caught up in group think. I was saying for years that the best value real estate was outside of big cities including in the surrounding areas. Nobody agreed with me, I often heard arguments like "We don't want to live next to the kinds of people who live there." The great irony is that "these people" are probably the best kinds when you judge them based on their character and personal values. Again, this is due to people confusing price with value. They think that people who earn a lot of money are better people, smarter people but there is no correlation - They are just lucky people with huge egos; in many ways they are more primitive. Since the pandemic now all the rich suckers suddenly decided all at once that they want to live outside the cities... I'm thinking to move even further out.
To me everything I see an ad for is automatically tainted forever. If I'm not paying attention, I won't even consider buying anything I've ever seen on TV because it automatically registers as "too expensive". With certain things I've trained myself that "I can afford this easily now", but those are exceptions.
I didn't grow up being poor (not rich either, solid middle class), but I did witness extreme poverty. I was a young boy when many Vietnamese refugees came to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War. A number of families came to my small town and some of them came to my school. These families had nothing (no food, no money, no clothes) and to make it many times worse, they couldn't speak the language and it was a foreign culture for them. The local churches helped them with housing and some basic necessities. What they did have though was strong family ties (they stuck together) and the will to survive (and later thrive).
Many of them eventually established successful businesses, learned to speak English quite well, and their children were educated. I have great respect and admiration for their accomplishments in the face of such incredible adversity.
> If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels.
America is hugely segregated by wealth and class. Where I come from you wouldn't need to read an article to describe what its like to be poor as there would be enough examples in your neighborhood, church or school. Americans live in these bubbles.
Its a problem where I would rather live in a working class neighborhood and send my kids to public schools when all my colleagues live in fancy towns with fancy schools. I like to keep my kids real but maybe I'm capping them.
Sorry we missed you does a superb job of showing the cycle of poverty and how it affects families. The accuracy of the film stems from interviews while director Ken Loach was filming I, Daniel Blake in Newcastle.
I can wholeheartedly recommend that film (and Ken Loach's filmns in general). The following review excerpt [1] is telling and heartbreaking:
The stakes of the film are simultaneously huge and small. The Turners don’t need much. Some stability; a steady income, of course; more time would be a dream. Really, though, the most precious thing they have is each other. But there’s no time for that because then there’d be no money.
There were a couple of years where I saw my wife for approximately 3 minutes a day. She worked nights and I worked days (plus school) and we saw each other as we handed off the kid as I walked in the door and she walked out. I was asleep when she got home and she was asleep when I left in tue morning.
That sounds terrible. Although I agree that life is complex enough to require sacrifices at times - it's simply unavoidable sometimes, I find it hard to swallow that people are required to go through this. Because you shouldn't have to go through this if we would've done a better job and organising society and economy.
You end up with some things that stick with you even if they make no sense anymore and are a lot more suspicious of people's motives because you've seen how parts of society get away with some crap.
I still won't eat fish willingly. In the USA, Check where police checkpoints are setup on the morning of the 1st in your area. Notice what is on-sale and what the displays are in the grocery stores on the 1st. Check the EBT signs in your local gas station. Just some examples of the odd things most people don't notice.
I grew up with my sisters in poverty. I didn't eat at a restaurant until I was 14 and paid for it myself. I started baking crackers, biscuits and pancakes that my younger sisters and I would eat for dinner with government peanut butter or cheese when I was 11. Having no utilities was a regular occurrence. Christmas was socks, underwear and a winter coat. Shoes were a touchy subject and I would have to have pretty big holes before they would get replaced. School hot lunch and food drives were awkward.
I decided what I wanted out of life in my mid-twenties and pursued it and now in my 40's I am doing better than I could have ever imagined. Everyone I know who was poor and wanted to better themselves was able to get out of poverty. All 4 of my sisters are middle class or better. Thats 5/5 that succeeded. All my friends across the states I had lived are homeowners and seem happy. All the people I met who bitched and didn't do anything to better themselves are still poor or dead.
I didn't get lucky and neither did my sisters and friends. We each made personal decisions and planned our way out of poverty. It didn't happen over night. A lot of set backs happen and everything is hard. Transportation and unforeseen expenses are the largest hurdles and access to credit is also difficult because of the length of time it takes to repair.
> Note: The hostess and her husband were both doctors. They had a combined income somewhere upwards of $200,000 a year
I find this a bit puzzling. If the couples are both doctors in the US, they certainly are making much more than $200K/year. The median salary of a generic doctor (internal medicine) in the US is ~$250K. I really wonder where this couple doctor is practicing at.
Other than that, I agree with the whole post. I came from a lower-middle class family (my dad died when I was 12; my widowed mom worked very hard and earned as much side income as possible--I remember having to send baked goods to nearby stores for my mom before going to school at 8am--to give me and my siblings as good an education as one can reasonably get in our third world country). Even to this day, I don't own a car. I live by $600/month budget for food, entertainment and other necessities. I am always saving and investing at least 50% of my income in case I become poor again.
European pro life tip: if you make 200.000/yr don't let anyone lend you money. Buy your car cash, no cc debt. Mortgage would be the only exception. I honestly find it crazy how most american are ok with living on someone else money and pay the interests just to have a current year car...
Often you can get no interest loans for new cars. In that case, it is cheaper to invest the cash and pay off the loan with less valuable money over the next few years.
Of course the car is still depreciating rapidly so I question the wisdom of buying a current year car at all. But it is comforting to have a newer car covered by warranty.
Yes, I agree with you. Specifically is the idea of considering the car a monthly cost instead of a capital investment is all in favour of financial and car companies. You will get a new model if your monthly cost does not change. In my experience, all of my cars were a great value if you own and hold onto them for 10 yrs or more (the first 10 years cars need almost 0 maintenance)
is it crazy? If you can get terms on low enough interest rate and long enough time horizon (aka, you're rich) it's not a bad choice because you are (safely) gambling that your earnings potential will go up over time, in both real and nominal terms, letting the cost of the debt decrease over time. Moreover, the opportunity cost of that cash not being invested and used for purchases is real.
You assume people are investing that money. What I see is people having a lifestyle that is only possible with lended money. Those are expenses and not investments and put you in a position where a minor change in your expected income growth will deeply affect your lifestyle.
Ok. Let's rephrase this. If you are in that category, you should take the loan on the lambo and invest whatever the principal WOULD have been and come out ahead instead of paying for the lambo in cash in one shot. Also goes for less frivolous purchases.
All I'm saying is your suggestion is a poor protip for the wealthy, and a better protip for the middle class e.g.
Also note that economists are mostly in the wealthy category and a good chunk of our socioeconomic woes come from economic policymakers (often implicitly [0]) normalizing harmless or good advice for the wealthy onto other stratas of society.
[0] e.g. "inflation is good because it decreases the real value of debt and lower classes benefit from that"
> a pretty bottom-barrel ford leases for 300-400 a month
Ford leases seem to be expensive for some reason, and not indicative of the overall market. For instance, a base model Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic can be leased for $160/month, with $0 down. With $1000 down, these figures are close to $100/month.
> A company is looking to pay a person as little as they can and keep them, so a person’s pay is determined by how rare their skills are and how much demand there is for those skills
> I mentioned this before, but I can work on cars, and I’m able to do anything less complex than a full engine or transmission rebuild
I’m sure becoming a mechanic has crossed the author’s mind at some point. I’d love to hear their thoughts on this.
Ever notice how those ads say something like "qualifying customers". If your credit score is in the toilet you're not getting any of those prices.
The domestics, koreans, nissan and mistu will lease to anyone with a pulse but if your credit is bad the monthly rate or requireed uprfront payment is gonna climb quickly.
You might as well need the president of the local yacht club write you a recommendation to get a sub-$200 lease on a Toyota, Honda or other middle class "look how financially prudent I am" status symbol. Anyone who doesn't have good credit AND the ability to put a good chunk of the lease down up front is going to be paying a "this is our polite way of telling to you to drag across the street to the Nissan dealer" price.
Also, those promotional rates are just that, promotional rates. Often times the details work out such that taking a higher rate on a lease and putting less down up front results in a lower cost per duration of ownership.
I have tried to explain this very thing to many people I have encountered in the past decade. The easiest way I can explain it is "Broke doesn't mean you can't buy a boat this year...it means you can't afford a coffee this week"
Good luck can cover for bad decision making, but good decision making can't cover bad luck. You can mitigate but Murphy will have his due.
- - - -
> That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.
This is more-or-less by design. It's what keeps people from "going native". (Literally, at least in the USA. We wouldn't even let the natives go native! Made them put their kids in our schools, wear our clothes, style their hair our way, and speak only our language. It was pretty fucked up. The open secret is that whites who got kidnapped by Indians and lived among them for a while tended to like it.[1] As in, they refused to go back to town or the farm. I'm not trying to say that the Native lifestyles and cultures didn't have problems, I'm saying that they had fewer problems than the European newcomers. For example: no homelessness. It wasn't until after the Europeans arrived that a man or woman in North America could become destitute.)
The give-away is the objection, "But who will pick up the garbage?", when one brings up the idea of a post-scarcity Utopia.
If there wasn't the specter of homelessness, we couldn't get anyone to haul our trash for us. That's the unstated assumption behind that objection. It's pretty ugly: "We need a lower class that can be kept in line with the threat of homelessness, vagrancy, and prison to supply cheap labor to do the things we don't want to do ourselves."
The obvious solution, don't have trash in the first place, doesn't get air time.
(But think it through: there is no such thing as trash or waste in Nature. The very concept of "trash" is human mental construction. There are plastics that biodegrade... etc.)
I was reading a post from etsy folks on 'blameless portmortem' and thats something places I worked in never did, but it would helped so much!
Reading this post, I could'nt help but think what if a person who was on hard times (quite often there is some role to be played by him, but also actors around him ) - if social orgs could come around, analyze the situation, encourage him to make better choices, or work around some obstacles, etc, it would make such a difference...
A new re-think of what our social services would be -- a mix of help, with a dose of fresh opportunities as well.
Currently, the alternatives seem to be between black and white..
TIL US actually turns off your water if you don't pay. More used to flow restrictions. i.e. You'll have water to keep you alive but good luck showering with 10% the normal pressure.
Fwiw, many water providers will continue services if any amount is paid in good faith. Also worth noting (at least in California): no water to the building means it is legally uninhabitable: you can be forced from the property.
This is highly refined (I'm gonna stop just short of calling if "pure") FUD.
In practice nobody gets their utilities shut off except people who were intending to pay their bill and slip through the bureaucratic cracks (elderly with kids managing it is a common scenario) or the person paying the bill doesn't live there and stopped paying (e.g. landlord in foreclosure so they stopped paying). I can't speak for literally every municipality but there are defined timelines and it takes months to shut utilities off. By the time they get around to shutting off your water or electricity you've already missed god knows how many payments on your rent and been through the full eviction proceedings. I've also never seen a utility provider that won't accept minimum payments. Providing some sort of financial assistance services, payment plans and doing everything possible to not shut people's utilities off is generally a requirement of getting a government granted utility monopoly in the first place.
Anyone who has to choose between utilities and something else should choose the something else. Utilities tend to be incredibly forgiving and willing to work with you if your financial situation doesn't permit payment in full. In some jurisdictions the debt doesn't even get reported (they just keep trying to collect)
Like anything else, this isn't a perfect metric. I know folks who have kept their water on all the way to eviction for non-payment.
That said, the author nails it when noting the dichotomy of "feeling broke" vs "being broke." I knew a lawyer that complained about "being broke" (feeling broke) because he "had to" sell two of his Porsches and couldn't make as many real estate investments as he would have liked to make that year.
Many people are just doomed to failure from the start. All that motivational talk and grooming goes to nothing if you came form impoverished background.
Just read this this morning before work and thought how I can relate to having to fix my own cars and now I am better off and don’t car stress any more but if forced me to learn a lot along the way. Then at work my coworker is telling me she was at the transmission shop and Toyota and car still isn’t running well. I look and knew right away she had a bad air filter. 25$ back on the road full power
The thing that most people, including those in this thread, don't understand about poverty, is that the side-effects don't magically go away after you are an adult.
Reading the replies here, I do get the typical sense of "well, they are people who made poor choices, sort of feel sorry for them, can't relate."
In reality, many poor adults were poor children. The funny thing, is that in the glorious US of A, the main distinction is worse than in other countries - if you are poor, you go to a school district where 95% don't go to college and you get stabbed and hooked on something.
That aside - no one tells you to study for the SATs, no one tells you to brush your teeth with an electric toothbrush and floss, while not drinking pop which destroys your enamel. No one tells you to do your cardio and no one evaluates your postural imbalances. No one has you studying Deutsch and Fancaise. No one takes you swimming, and you probably don't do a martial art unless you get lucky enough to get into a ghetto boxing gym.
So, by the time you are 18, you have ruined health and an under-developed mind, and then everyone looks at you and thinks - what a careless, lazy, adult. He/she isn't even going to college - what an embarrassment. And while there is the military, the poor don't even get properly told about that and what's available.
> That aside - no one tells you to study for the SAT
This is so true. When you are truly poor, nobody is grooming you to succeed in a competitive environment. Actually the people in your life don't even know how to prepare you, even if they wanted to. When I see people on HN talk about IQ this and GPA that, superior this and inferior that, I can tell they are in a bubble.
> Unless you really, really need everything in your house to clearly be part of a unified set, you are a sucker if you buy furniture new
I'd generally agree but some Ikea stuff is so cheap that it's not a big deal. $10 for a nice little table is fine. They also tend to have a discount section for returns and minor defects, those can be decent deals.
This is really touching. My impression was that in the US government is not going to step out to help the poor, but there is a lot of private charity that helps people. Isn't that the case? I guess I might have idealized picture of American society, but I always though that giving back to the others was consider to be some kind of duty?
The whole car section brings back memories of when I used to drive a car with one flat tire, but I would pump it up with a foot pump on the way out every morning and it would stay inflated just long enough to get to work, then the same on the way back. I used to get stressed out waiting at red lights, thinking, that air is leaking out..
I remember my first car having an oil leak as well as a bunch of other problems. During the winter I used to commute, 30 mins each way without any oil. It was just about cold enough that it could make it.
I didn't get it fixed because I was putting money together to buy a newer car that didn't leak. Worked out in the end.
Many live in daily terror of becoming homeless or worse. I feel like social isolation matters more than wealth in making people feel secure. Many homeless people had money, good jobs, education, but most lacked community. Some say they find a family on the streets, for better or worse. It’s not all social, neither is it all financial.
I’m a bit late to the comment party and didn’t have a chance to read any but pertaining to this article. I’m sorry but I read halfway through and did a search for the word “food” simply that and didn’t find it. I can’t take this author seriously as someone who truly understands.
The car talk resonated with me. I'm always irked to hear someone bragging about their Volvo that's lasted them 20 years or whatever. To me, there's nothing to be proud of, you bought a luxury car and likely had it maintained by a trained mechanic regularly.
As a former used-car flipper I call it the "4Runner vs Grand Caravan" effect. And I mostly call it that because it gets under the skin of certain people.
The 4Runner starts its life in the hands of someone who can afford whatever maintenance is needs, whenever it needs it.
The Grand Caravan starts its life in the hands of someone who needs the cheapest minivan and can barely afford it let alone afford following the maintenance schedule in the manual.
The 4Runner will haul two kids and occasionally a youth soccer team.
The Grand Caravan will haul five kids and occasionally 1800lb of paver bricks.
Parts of america have really really high housing costs... like really high... and a bunch of people want to live there, and a lot of people there are poor (atleast compared to housing prices).
Why the hell do you still build single family houses, or one/two floor buildings in areas where you need to fit a bunch of people (eg. both photos in the article)? I'm from a former socialist country, and housing for working families back then looked (still does) like this:
I understand single or two floor buildings if you're building something in rural alabama... there's a lot of space there, and the land is cheap.... But places like san francisco? That, I don't get.
It's not the market; obviously there's demand for higher density housing, and were it allowed, people would make more of it. It's almost always local regulations that make producing such housing difficult, or more commonly, flat out impossible.
Most American residential land is zoned for exclusively large single family homes in big lots. This is true even in most major metro areas. You can read a little bit about this here in this article that compared American zoning with Japanese zoning: https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning...
The gist of how it got this way is: racism and classism. The racism used to be more relevant, these days the classism is. You see, if you require that to live in a neighborhood, you must be able to own or rent a property with a minimum amount of land, it's easy to keep out people of lesser economic resources. A poorer family that might be willing to live an apartment in a nicer area will find that no such housing exists there, and being unable to afford a full house, they are excluded, hence the term 'exclusionary zoning'. This also has the effect of keeping those poor kids out of local schools.
So yeah, it's economic segregation that America pretends doesn't count as segregation somehow, even though the effects are plain as day.
Short answer. The people who already live there don't want to be neighbors with those sorts of buildings and any politician that suggests it will be voted out of office.
> A counterpoint - You then get jerry built high rises built to minimum standards and smaller rooms which leads to tragedy's like Grenfell tower.
The old socialist buildings are made form reinforced (rebar) concrete... even the inside walls... and outside walls.. and sometimes even balcony ledges. Even occasional gas explosions usually just blow out some windows.
I'm a British immigrant to Bucharest, nearly 4 years, and I live in a slightly smaller version of the housing in your images, a 4-floor 1986 block in the south of the city, adjacent to Vacaresti park.
In London, this type of housing might be depressing, but here it is normal -- and when you take away 'neighbor envy', it's hard to express the difference it makes to one's own sense that you've reached some equilibrium in your environment and your life.
The TV ads here might be full of people in detached houses, but that kind of residence is very rare in this country - at least in cities like Bucharest and Cluj.
In short, Bucharest folk are used to it, and practically no-one in the US is. For them, it's 'the projects'.
In your first phot, In my country those sort of buildings would be viewed very negatively, many would expect the people in them to be poor, lower-class, living off benefits etc. There are lots of stereotypes about the sort of people that live in those type of buildings.
People would NOT want that sort of building near their home worried it would lead to more crime, lower property prices etc.
Now, your last modern building. People would pay a small fortune to live in something like that in a trendy area in a city...
They would probably be classed as luxury apartments, come with a large rents or buying costs.
But the idea is still the same... just the outside look has changed.
Build a 5, 10 story apartment building, underground parking, and fit hundreds of people in a space, that would otherwise be used by 5-10 houses (20, 30 people).
First photos are from belgrade, when that design was "modern" from 1960-1980s, and the last, modern one is from ljubljana, built recently.
> Why the hell do you still build single family houses, or one/two floor buildings in areas where you need to fit a bunch of people (eg. both photos in the article)?
Mostly bad regulations like rent control and zoning.
Lots of people want to live there. But do the people who live there (and own property there) want lots more people to live there? Not really no.
And in some cases definitely not anywhere near them.
Cities work well at a certain size and population, but the services and infrastructure never get upgraded to match big increases in population like tower blocks.
Not to mention the view from people's houses across the bay will be gone as soon as high rises are built.
If I'm happy with the status quo & I have lots of money, why would I ever stop doing everything possible to maintain it?
Never been poor, but happened to have a car that was unreliable AF. It's anxiety inducing to say the least when every time you start it feels like a roll of the dice. Especially when others are with you.
There’s also a difference in the way people handle money once they improve their financial situation. They tend to be cautious, and save money instead of spending it. There are exceptions, of course.
I've heard just as many people express the opposite. That because they were used to "having extra money to spend" being a fleeting thing, they threw caution to the wind and overspent after attaining a substantially higher income. That they had never learned about saving before (because they didn't consistently have extra to save), so it never became a habit.
It'd be interesting to see real data on which outcome is actually more common.
Anecdotally it seems to depend a lot on how they got the money. Based purely on people I've known; people who become rich after working long hours for 20+ years building up company or similar tended to be very frugal for the rest of their lives despite retiring millionaires. People who 'lucked' into a lot of money tended to wildly overspend and never achieve financial stability.
Low income people in the U.S still have a chance of improving their station in life, although it is very hard. It’s nearly impossible in other countries where poor takes on a whole new meaning.
We just need to make sure we don’t get “used to it” in the USA, lest we become a place where class becomes ossified in daily life, or descend into the aristocracy class hierarchy that plagued much of early European history.
I would love to understand how this is different in a metropolitan in Canada (e.g. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal). Is it much better than it is here in the US of A or more of the same?
The more over_head you have, then it's harder to get out of it.
You're unlikely to put your free time into math / computer science when you're after exhausting 8 / 12h shift in warehouse
Also your "environment" may not help you too.
Before I worked at gov't-ish job and my parents tried hard to convince me that "this is the greatest thing because gov't jobs offer ""safety"" and "decent salary"". Thanks god that I had access to the internet and knew the reality.
I speak "normally", as in to say I don't have a regional accent, and have "white collar" jobs working in IT. Many people assume I am a good middle class person.
I often get told I am naive, or stupid for saying things like "rent prices are too expensive" and that when the median income people cannot afford the median priced house we're just growing another bubble.
I had a playstation 1 and the original xbox as a child/teenager. That sounds like I must have been lucky/middle class and not poor? Surely!
All of my adult friends didn't know me as a child. My mother left when I wasn an infant and since then until his death my father never worked another day in his life. We lived off approximately £100 ($150?) a week for a family of three while my sister was sent to live with a relative.
There was also summers where I ate only bread and jam, cooked on a portable gas heater, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner 7 days a week. Our gas had mostly been shut off and so we couldn't use a cooker, or the central heating, and didn't have any money other than a few £ for bread & jam. When I was at school I had free school lunches. Sometimes there wouldn't be any food for dinner when I got home.
I lived below the poverty line until I was 19 and went to University. After which I moved to a city and got a job in IT. I am the wealthiest I have ever been, but my actual expenses are close to nothing: after rent and utility bills my only monthly expenses are my phone contract (£8) and audiable (£8). I don't buy clothes or shoes or any anything really unless there is a direct need to (i.e. my shoes have a large hole in them).
Because of my upbringing (the lack of food etc.) I probably have an eating disorder, and most of my monthly outgoings is probably on takeaway foods. That is still probably a maximum of £200 a month. I probably spend £100-£200 a month on normal food shopping (milk, bread, cereal, cheese, meat, ready meals, chocolate, etc.)
Everything else is shared with my partner out of a joint savings account (Netflix, Disney+, Car insurance paid yearly). My partner didn't grow up in the level of poverty I did - but now I earn twice as much as her she feels poor and "unworthy" compared to the amount of money I contribute to our savings.
My father ended up with MS and killed himself a year ago. He was living on disability allowance so his income was probably the highest he had ever lived on, but is equivalent to minimum wage. He killed himself when the current conservative government (UK) were following through with their disability reassements which meant his income would have dropped by hundreds of pounds a month.
I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do get frustrated when people call out my "white male IT privledgedness". I think I have more in common with any marginalised group than I do with the "normal white middle class" everyone assumes I am.
I currently have saved about £30,000 to go towards my first flat. This money has been saved by myself and my partner only. This will be the first property ever owned in my immediate family. (I was the second to go to university, after my sister a few years ahead of me.) I will not/have not inhereited anything from any of my family.
My brother, who had the exact same upbringing as me and is approximately one year younger than me currently rents a room from a family for £400 a month and works full time at McDonalds "flipping burgers". His future prospects aren't high. Breaking the cycle of poverty is a hard thing.
You say "privilege": I spent hours every day practising to speak like news readers on TV. I don't talk like anyone else in my family. But everything comes down to not having an outward appereance as a person from a marginalised or minority group.
Poverty is the great equaliser.
When everyone assumes you are the in the "privileged" group it's hard to get help.
This article should have been titled "On being Poor-ish in Phoenix" ... I don't think many of these issues apply to being poor in, say, a small town/a smaller city/a city with transit or in a country with a better social net.
There's definitely an American perspective there, where few cities have decent transit, let alone good transit. But you're not gonna escape the car problems in the states by moving to a smaller town. If anything, that usually makes things worse.
It's really interesting to read this and think about public policy. As someone on the left of center axis, I often imagine what an efficient government intervention would be. (I suppose a more right-wing person might imagine a charity-based solution? I'm not sure.) In this case, the author (who clearly is skilled as a writer and communicator) indirectly identifies a few "public goods" that I think are worth highlighting:
(1) Efficient public transportation that enables commutes on par with driving
(2) Health and dental care
(3) Improved policing/security (in the case of the neighborhoods that he describes as scary)
I think those issues (apart from 3) are directly reflections on American society. People don't value better public transport and universal healthcare because they are seen as the antithesis of the "American dream" and the idea that working hard brings you wealth.
Unfortunnately we're not in the 1950s and the uncapped growth isn't a thing any more (outside of cryptocurrencies perhaps).
I expect things to probably get worse. It seems everyone is concentrating on social awareness like trying to get women and black people into more high paying jobs, which is a good thing. However this doesn't actually stop the poverty cycle for the other millions of people (including the aforementioned groups).
I think it requires reframing what social care and living in a society means for meaningful change to happen. I think people need to stop seeing wealth as some entrepreneurial thing they can mine for themselves. This "spirit" doesn't improve anyone else's lives, Apart from the select charities and issues they choose to support which aligns with their own social agenda.
I do believe a billionaire shouldn't exist. Or a half a billionaire. That kind of wealth doesn't solve any issues for real people. A wealth tax on the ultra wealthy to pay something towards a healthcare for all (like most western countries have already) might help people though.
I completely relate to this. I was raised in a middle-class family. My parents worked their way through school. Our first homes were in social housing (or co-ops... I honestly have no idea whether they were publicly funded or not). Then a tiny apartment. Then a house in a tiny town way up north -- the only place they could both find work.
It paid off for them. They retired comfortably. But it took a lot of work to get there.
I took every advantage for granted and didn't leverage any of it. Didn't go to school, didn't develop my social network. Had kids in my early 20s. By the time I realized I was poor (and broke!), I was way over my head and working near-minimum-wage jobs. It just caught me off guard.
But once my kids showed up, I realized I needed to do better and changed things. I'm pushing 40 and have finally reached the point where I've cross the income threshold. I'm still not rich, and I've got money problems like everyone else, but I'm no longer wondering if I can pay my utilities bill. I have a mortgage, not rent. I have a reasonably decent vehicle that I can afford to take to a mechanic twice a year for basic maintenance.
And the result is that life is WAY less stressful. I rarely worry about the basic necessities anymore, and instead get to worry about the future, like whether my kids will be able to go to college. But it was a struggle and a half to get to this point. (Even buying a house was only viable because it was cheaper than renting a place big enough for my whole family. It required some financial ninjutsu to pull off.)
That small house and a Toyota Corolla? Absolutely freaking outstanding.
Now I get to complain about things like "I really don't feel like going to work today" instead of "I really don't have gas money to make it to work today".
TL;DR: I experienced both a lower and middle class childhood, then due entirely to my own life choices, experienced both of them all over again. I agree with the author. There really is a threshold, a tipping point, when it comes to income. Below that threshold, it feels like the entire economy is against you. Above that threshold, I wouldn't say the economy is working FOR me, but I at least feel like I'm a part of it.
The benefits cliff of health insurance is so real, and those cliffs exist all over the place (an example is in the SUNY system for tuition). Universal programs without means testing seem like such a better way to run things. If you have a somewhat right wing philosophy: it allows the truly exceptional individuals of every cohort to reach their potential. For left wingers: it is giving equally to everyone's shared needs from society as a whole.
Being poor means living with poor people that do not seem capable of understanding how harmful interruptions are to focus and concentration, thinking they are only taking one minute of your time each time they interrupt, but it is actually one minute plus 10-15 minutes to get back to where I was.
Being poor means having friends and family from lower classes the never talk about credit scores, and the impact they have on job and housing searches. I didn't realize until years later that my job search out of college was probably so difficult because of my low credit score (partly due to my often being a few days late, which I didn't realize is a VERY BIG DEAL for credit scores).
Being poor means living with people that always have the TV blasting near 100%, making it difficult to read or focus on anything. Not being able to afford headphones that can drown out the noise doesn't help.
Being poor means living in an area with more crime, so after you save for a year to buy a decent computer, it gets stolen. So you have to go to a thrift store and get a 10-15 year old computer, which is so slow that you have to spend 80% of your time looking at spinners/hourglasses.
Being poor and living in a poor neighborhood you spend more time waiting in lines. For example, it takes longer to use an ATM because there is only one outside the bank, so there is a line. In the wealthier towns 20 minutes away they have 3 or 4 ATMs all lined up in a row, so I've never seen anyone wait in line there.
Being poor in a poor area means things are more expensive. For example, the car wash charges $3.00, but the wealthy town 20 minutes has a car wash that charges on $2.00; the laundromat charges more in the poor neighborhood too. In the poor area, it costs $1.00 to inflate my tire at a gas staiton, while in the rich neighborhood it's often free. In poor places, sometimes business charge 50 cents to use a restroom, and there is often no mirror, and sometimes no TP. While the wealthier town the bathrooms are often free, with a mirror and plenty of TP. And some chain stores often have bathrooms open to the public in wealthy towns, but not in poor towns. If they exist in poor towns, you usually have to ask for a key, which looks like you can get 50K kinds of bacteria just by touching.
Being poor means no matter how hard you try to be a good driver, you can end up with a $500 ticket by a simple mistake, which you have to pay on-time or the penalties are aggressively insane and will bankrupt you. So you have to skip a bill and credit card payment, which further messes up your credit, making it more difficult to get a better job, housing, etc.
Being poor means your neighborhood is louder. Louder cars, motorcycles, music, etc. People doing their loud stuff very early in the morning and very late at night. People revving up their extremely loud cars and motorcycles in their driveways for 10-20 minutes at a time. There are more parties that blast extremely loud music outside until 2am. When I go to wealthier areas I'm always struck at how nice and quiet they are.
Being poor in California means that the yearly $250 car registration fee on my cheap car means that I'm going to have to not pay a bill or else start saving a few months ahead of time. Or worse, not pay for awhile and deal with the insane penalties, hoping the cops don't notice and pull me over.
Being poor means not knowing anything about negotiation, not knowing anyone that has every negotiated for a higher salary, and not even knowing early in your career that it is a possebility. So you get stuck in a $40K job in expensive coastal California. You start off your career with your morale low and depressed, thinking you should be wealthy by now, but realizing all your blue-collar friends are making more money than you. And you can't even start paying the full monthly amount on your student loans, so you'll be in debt for awhile. Things get better after 5 years of experience, but the first few years can be tough. And being somewhat poor as a developer, where everyone seems to eat out for lunch everyday, and not being able to afford it, and thus being seen as anti-social and out of the loop.
Being poor means lots of your family and friends are poor. If you live in the same area, they will need lots of free technical support with their computers and phones. You will also need to spend a lot of time helping your nephews and nieces with their school work because their poor parents cannot figure out to help them and cannot afford to hire a tutor. You will be out of energy and time that you could have used to advance your career. Your social connections tend to bring your down, putting breaks on your ambitions. You feel like your are caught in a spider web, that is dragging you back, only allowing you to move only so far.
Being poor means your brother or sister is poor and the financial stresses cause a divorce, and they move back in with your parents. And you also live with your parents because you are trying to save money by commuting to college. But now you can only get 3-4 hours of sleep because there is a newborn in the equation that screams so loud that everyone is sleep-deprived. You walk around campus like a zombie, try hard to process the lecture and notes, which you have to read over and over again. Your GPA goes from 3.7 to 2.3, and you have to retake a couple classes, and you can kiss your hopes of grad-school good-bye. You often think what's the point? No matter how hard I try my redneck friends and family will always pull me down.
Being poor means people see you as lazy because you grew up in a social class where you do what you're told and taking initiative is seen as bad. You are seen as taking control from others and full of yourself, so you do the minimum of what you are told. Then you get around upper middle-class people and your virtue is now a vice. People at work or college talk about what needs to be done and you are waiting for them to tell you what to do. But others are volunteering and being proactive and soon all the tasks are gone. You wonder why they left you out, thinking they don't like you or are not good enough. Several years later you realize you are supposed to volunteer without being told exactly what to do. You were seen as lazy and unhelpful, even though you were willing to work twice as hard as everyone else on a project. But no matter how much you volunteer after you learn the new rules, your reputation as lazy and not-a-team-player will never change until you change jobs.
And what boggles the mind even more than this sorry state of affairs in the USA is that a significant part of these "working poor" are voting for a party that angrily rejects any notion of a European-style welfare system that would help improve this situation as "socialism"...
Agreed. Not only are they poor but apparently quite stupid! I mean, who vote against a European-style welfare system? Who doesn’t want to be just like Europe?
I think this article was well written but stopped just short of where it needed to be in a few places.
>If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels.
I would have gone further and said most of the advice given about any topic people who haven't lived it is crap and shouldn't be listened do. Some yuppie with an engineering job has zero useful advice when it comes to telling a forklift driver how to get ahead. Someone who manages a $100 restaurant in downtown NYC is going to have little useful advice for a truck-stop diner owner.
> is that it’s usually assumed that the quality of things has a pretty linear association to the price.
They assume it because they have enough money to insulate them from having any good reason to tell the difference. How often have you heard something like "I've only replaced the gears in my Kithenaid mixer 3x and the frame on my Tacoma 4x" and then the people saying it turn around and defend those things as worth the price premium as though doing so isn't lunacy with a side of stockholm syndrome. At a certain point you can afford to get ripped off. It's like a form of conspicuous consumption where instead of being overt you pretend to be hapless.
>That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.
Author neglects to mention that through personal behavior you can largely avoid being affected by the worst parts of stabville and that when you know you can do so at little cost the extra $300/mo for "peace of mind" is kind of hard to justify and you need to use "but kids" type logic to do so.
>I am always consistently shocked by how little people living at a decent-to-great income level fear their cars... (I'm not gonna bother quoting the full paragraph)
The author should have rounded out this paragraph with "eventually you accrue enough tools and experience you don't need to worry about anything anymore because you understand the mechanical state of your car" and a lecture about how a car's utility lets you save money. Try buying used appliances or furniture CL with a bus pass. It just doesn't work. If it's a legitimately good deal you couldn't get it in the time it takes to arrange a rental.
>I think this is a fairly accurate way to look at pay, but it applies to other aspects of the job. If you got sick more often....(once again, not gonna quote the whole thing).
This is very much a two way street. If you're the guy on your shift who saves the line manager a whole lot of pain in the butt (e.g. transportation arrangements make it trivial for you to show up early as needed) they're gonna wink and nod and let you get away with some off the books allowances because they know that you can get another McJob elsewhere just as easily as they can replace you and that your replacement likely won't have whatever value-add you do.
They don't know the meaning of poor. And, who cares about some absolutely privileged, greedy, manipulative idiots who "can't live" on $200k/yr and take from people who make way less than them. Shame on them!
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If you can count your money, you're poor.
If you can count your money and it fits in your pockets, you're very poor.
If you can count your money and it fits in your left pocket with room to spare, you're extremely poor.
If you're wondering whether to buy food or gas with the money you have left, you're broke.
If you wish you could buy food or gas, you're absolutely destitute.
I always thought of “broke” as the transitory status of not having money, while “poor” is a socioeconomic status.
I.e. a university student could be too broke to buy beer before their next stipend comes in, but that doesn’t make them poor if they can still go home and drive mom & dad’s Tesla on the weekend.
Do you sincerely believe those situations are similar?
Exercise - you could pick Broke College Student, Broke Adult, Broke doctor/engineer/lawyer pulling 500k/yr.
Which one do you choose, repeatedly?
To me, there is almost no scenario where 500k/yr makes you actually broke where you do not have a level of control to rapidly change that situation. Cut your spending, if you have huge debts - get them refinanced, sell something. Aside from being in a debt to a person with a literal gun to your head, you have incredible amounts of flexibility to get out from having your water shut off like person who is truly broke.
I think the definition still holds up fine. The main difference between being a broke adult vs a broke college student is that being broke as an adult is almost always because you're poor.
I think of those words interchangeably. "Poor" is also ambiguous, i.e., "the poor" (economic class status) and "are poor" (having little money, orthogonal to any time period). Examples: "My grandparents grew-up poor, but became middle-class." and "Alms for the poor."
And, there are only so many relative modifiers, so one has to use synonyms to make a point. ;)
I still think the meanings are distinct. For instance, you could say: "I can't get a home loan because I'm poor", "I qualify for food stamps because I am poor", but attributing these things to being broke sounds a bit funny. By the same token, you wouldn't say "My grandparents grew up broke, but became middle-class"
My estimate, based on the approximate dimensions of my jeans front pocket and the size and thickness of a $100 bill, would be around 5~8 thousand dollars... Multiple times that if you REALLY stuff it in there...
> Take no guilt from this article - It’s informational, not a call to arms.
Why isn’t it a call to arms? Why should anybody have to live like that? I’ve done it. I was busting my arse to get by. Got out basically because of luck. Nobody should live in poverty.
I also find the “has your water been cut off” interesting. Due to the safety/health implications, cutting off water is illegal where I live. You can be restricted for a few specific reasons, but they can’t just turn your water off. Jesus. Absolutely atrocious that that happens to people. Australia is FAR from perfect but at least medical bills don’t bankrupt people and depriving people of utilities generally isn’t allowed.
I was glad to see a large section on cars. When I was poor this was a constant issue for me and it wasn't until the very end of my time in poverty that I realized I could just not have one. Obviously, you can't "just not have a car" while not changing anything else about your life. My realization was that I should change literally anything and everything about my life to maximize my ability to survive without owning a car. That is to say, owning a car for a poor person is far more onerous than changing your life around to not need one. This means choosing housing, employment, child care and everything else around the decision not to own a car.
This decision was life-changing.
Cars are very expensive. If you are poor, you cannot afford to own one. Full stop. Think of basically anything else that costs as much as a car costs and then ask yourself if a poor person should buy that thing. Your answer will be no. It should also be "no" with respect to a car.
The writer of course highlights the relevant tradeoffs. Owning a car is very convenient, so most poor people think, well, however hard it is to own this thing it's still a net win. My experience tells me this is wrong. It was not a net win and I wish I'd have figured that out sooner.
I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town.
Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade school, then got into college (full Pell Grant because I was so poor) and came out with a few degrees.
Everything I own is fully paid for. House, cars, etc. because I'm always afraid I'm going to be poor again. Of course, I only own modest things. Nothing fancy.
If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are.
My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.
Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.
I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.