TFA said something cancel Netflix as "advice for getting through being broke". This is not in the "original" article you linked.
Could be AI (I honestly don't know), but it is not a "summary".
Now that I know what it means to be poor what should I do?
Imagine if they tried to do without coffee until they saved a few dollars for a can. It could take years!
You don't happen to have link do you? I couldn't find any obvious hits on a search engine.
A few accumulated years of those savings would let you buy a better-quality drier or washing machine - saving you from replacing them regularly, or replacing your damaged clothes.
Pets are a choice that's fairly high up the Maslow hierarchy. Get rid of them, get into a better position, build up some reserves, and leave your family in a better place than you started.
Also raise your family so they have the same mindset - they need to leave their children in a better place than they started.
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
They had a bigger TV than my middle class family, a premium channel package, and ordered pizza not infrequently. I get all the arguments, but when you're working 20 hours a week and living off food stamps and subsidized housing you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor. The person described in TFA as being poor is rare at best.
All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).
"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.
Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.
You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.
I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
Many people don't and never will.
There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.
Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, some of us will be short, have bad looks, be unappealing to women, etc. And some of us will not have the cognitive capacity to have a job that keeps you above water, forever.
The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out. Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability.
There's a lot of dumb rich people, too. Sometimes the wield a lot of power and are indeed bad people.
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
I am answering this question.
Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.
I'm not sure what is compelling you to be so rude to a complete stranger on the internet. I'm here to discuss, have my ideas challenged, and learn.
> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.
I take it you really mean:
"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
It was always a reverse slide down.
First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.
If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.
But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.
The answer is just ... luck.
When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.
No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
What's the point of society if everyone needs to bust their ass 70+ hours a week to get by? Might as well go homestead in the woods and be a subsistence farmer and do it on your own at that point.
Just fuck having time for creative pursuits and hobbies outside of working and making someone else rich?
Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this so everyone else should too."
The "prosperity bible" turn that America has taken is truly saddening.
Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily.
(leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valued so much more than another type of work is also fairly arbitrary in a very similar way to whether or not a human "deserves" free time)
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.
No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.
Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)
Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.
I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.
These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
Thanks for finding that.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-...
1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...
There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.
The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).
This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.
Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.
The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).
If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."
Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".
20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
So far as I know, every single UBI trial has had consistently positive outcomes. People get jobs, get training, get a roof over their heads.
Giving people money does in fact give people more choices, and helps make the poor less poor.
You're right of course. The problem is that such institution no longer exist in North America.
I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.
Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.
I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
You are disconnected from reality.
I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
Which country, though?
Because that's like 90% of the solution.
The other 9% is good health.
The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.
that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
If you completely ignore cost of living and public services, then maaaybe, but still quite a stretch ;)
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.
Suburbia has little to no community these days.
I'm not poor, but I had more of this sort of network in the city than I do now in the burbs.
They’re selling the stolen merchandise to a fence who then resells it to stores with looser procurement requirements at a discount or they box it and ship it to an Amazon fulfillment center and flip the stolen merch on Amazon.
Poor people don’t have enough cash liquidity to make stealing and selling toiletries worth it, it’s loosely organized crime.
The same sort of marker exists for diabetic test strips, people on Medicare get them for free, sell them for a discount for cash to someone who resells them for a profit.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
Start again please from the state of being homeless but assume this person has no family members, or has relatives, but they do not give a damn.
It crumbles, IMO.
What about low paying jobs? I’m sure some people on minimum wage have netflix - which automatically makes them non-poor according to TFA.
And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".
Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
This 2+ hour documentary partly talks about it, in particular from ~28m: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1584
Calvinism. Your poor because you're bad. Interestingly enough Calvinism serves as a lot of the basis for what became Capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
It's one of the classic subjects in sociology,
I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:
> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.
> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.
> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.
> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."
Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-real-protestant-eth...
If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.
I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.
Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."
I imagine there's an even "earlier" starting point most people don't have to begin at, which goes:
"My own circumstances are too different to truly empathize and understand, and I'm not too proud/delusional to admit it. The presence of that gap in comprehension is itself a reason for action."
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?
I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
> I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
Go ahead and just talk about it, I want to hear it. This isn't so easy a problem, even on an individual level as you put it.
* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor
* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.
Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.
If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
Paragraph level upvoting needs to be a thing.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.
And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.
Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
IMO good government (i.e. the government that I would want to live under) treats all citizens equally under the law, not because everyone is equally lucky or everyone who is poor is a terrible person or something but because it's not the government's business to do anything but enforce the law. Good government is not a caretaker and is not a bank. Communities should look after their needy members and give them a lift up, not the government. If our communities aren't tightly knit enough for that, then that's a different and IMO deeper problem.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
A lot of employers are pretty understanding if you have multiple jobs and will work around your needs as much as possible.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.
There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money.
I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night.
He said no. Just give me what you owe me.
He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him. Poverty is not a single static state. It’s a negative feedback loop that requires systemic change to get out of.
Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.
I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
Everything else was self-taught/learned.
There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).
And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.
I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.
If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.
Sounds for me like "I could do it on my own, so nobody should have to help you".
I really hate this mentality of not helping others. Everybody gets better when everybody gets help.
The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be regained and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.
You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
Strangely, she did that only with comfort foods.
I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
If repairing auto at shop costs $1000 one should op out to spend $300 in parts and own labor.....
Paying for the wrong utility makes you remain poor as the down car repair has a very low utility to you earning that higher wage while the shop repairs your car.
It would only make high value utility sense if you did that several times and then open your own car repair shop as business owner.
Warren Buffet implies this obliquely in his writing about the choices he has made.
It seems you have what matters man.
I have seen abject poverty growing up in India.. It is right in your face most of the times. I have friends from the other side of the street and pretty much, you live in very different realities.
This is an element of the argument for dismantling the nanny bureaucracy and instead going to UBI / cash payments.
1. It doesn't waste time, both of the gov't employee, but also of the recipient.
2. The author could buy better food, or car parts, or a bus pass, or ... with what otherwise might have been a more or less forced purchase in a single category. The flexibility returns agency and self-help behavior into the hands of the recipient.
All this needs to be tempered against the progress[1] we are making against poverty. I know it's a lot to ask the poor to be patient, but I do think there's an element of knowing that a lot of good people are trying really hard to alleviate the situation can help with the mostly mental elements of the article
> No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving.
eg: this statement is not actually a fact, it's a mindset
Overall, this is a big big testament to the overall worldview that I think is missing, just how impactful choices actually are. Some of these kinds of stories start generations ago, some of them start with the individual themselves having spent excess in the past that could have taken them through the low times (kind of "a waste not, want not" scenario). Some folks had opportunity and squandered it. Some flipped tails (failing scenario) 20 times in a row... People don't really want to help the former, but definitely the latter.
[1] - https://x.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072/photo/1
Now do chances a child makes it to their 20s over the past 20 years.
Now do suicides.
No, we are not making progress on poverty, at least not in the United States. We are simply trading one problem for another. Progress has entirely stopped since essentially the 1990s, and things have gotten much much worse in the past 5 years.
Ever since I was a child, that idea has been shoved down my throat. "The American Dream", "they're lazy", "they should work harder".
Spending some serious time in developing countries fixed that mentality up real quick. Being able to escape the circumstances you're born into is a rare privilege in any culture. And that aspect of life in USA seemed to end in the late 90s/early 2000s.
I've been lucky and accordingly I am able to take advantage of a number of financially advantageous situations. But the vast majority of those situations / tax benefits are for ... people who already have money.
I see people spit out what are one off "true" bits of financial advice at folks who straight up can't use it. The guy with $20 to his name is not saving for his kids college, opening a IRA, etc.
The amount of programs and incentives for the poor are numerous, but they get them to the next day, they often don't do much beyond that.
My only personal example is long ago I remember working my way though a fairly affordable college that I got to attend due to some benefits I qualified for, I'd get home from two jobs and I was just tired, just broken down. Sure I got to go to college, but I was dead at the end of every day. Not a way to go to college. If I had a family? People who depended on me then? Forget about it, no chance. For me being poor was being tired all the time. All the bootstrap advice means nothing when you're beat down.
You might think, hooray, I fixed the engine leak! And then suddenly your wife is leaving you and taking the kids. So you rush to court to deal with that, and park in the wrong place, and your car gets impounded; getting it out costs money you don't have. In trying to deal with all that, your mental health suffers, so you're rude at work, and now your job is at risk. So then you work on being more positive at work, you finally get dual custody of the kids, and pay for the car to be returned... and then the transmission dies.
It's that, but your entire life.
I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough.
If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary.
This is possible because we live in an era of abundance. This wasn't possible for most of history.
So to me, being poor, for those without major health issues and with the ability to work full time, is either a skills issue, or a mindset issue.
This guy has a car. I don't think we need to look further than that.
I grew up lower middle class because for most of my life my parents both had full-time jobs. (By the definition, you are not "poor" in the US if you have a full-time job) However, we grew up what I would call educationally poor. My parents struggled with financial woes constantly. In my mind, we were broke due to their ineptness but they were poor as far as this writer is concerned. That said, I grew up around much more poverty than most in the US can imagine. I went to (public) school four days a week because the local district couldn't afford the fifth day. My parents had no thoughts about college or me getting ahead. There was no planning for my future. I had to entirely self-drive everything. There's obviously a lot more dark parts of this that come with being educationally poor as well but no need to elaborate.
Anyway, my point about all that is that I think it's really a mindset more than anything else. I don't think everyone can do what I did but I came from such a bad background with no hope at all and I still managed to be early eng for an IPO, FAANG, competitive university, etc.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.
The way they measured that was by having devices installed on peoples homes, that tracked TV usage, and all of it was planned around demographics as well. People would get a few bucks for having the device installed. But hey, if you wanted to measure the top 1% of income, what would you do? A few bucks meanth nothing, so it was always in terms of 'favors' and 'gifts'. A nice champagne here and there.
What about the bottom 5, 10%? Well, you can't give them any money, because that could effectively move them from one social class to another (not the US, but locally this would be moving them from Class E to Class D). So you took them to lunch.
I thought it was wild once I learned that.
I really cant think of why you could not get out of beeing poor, IF you have the wits and willpower. If you grind some shithole job for 6 bucks/hour you should think really hard on your choices. Where did you spend your check? Do you live in a too expensive appartment? Did you have kids without being absolutely fucking sure you can support them? Did you fuck up something like foolish debts? Do you drive a car when you can take the bus?
Im not really sure what to say, but i know what I would do if things webt south.
This author lays out the experience of being “poor” perfectly. It’s a case of doing all the right things, and still failing. It’s being constantly stuck in survival mode no matter how hard you work, because there’s always a new expense, a new hurdle, a new obstacle to reset your progress - because being poor means you can’t even afford the “save point” of insurance or redundancies or savings to fall back on.
It’s why even when I was scraping above the $200k mark at PriorCo in TC, I was championing more social services. More healthcare support, more housing assistance, more compensation. We could afford it, but shareholder returns came first. It was sickening knowing colleagues who lived in vans because despite pulling down six figure salaries, it simply wasn’t enough for rent when expenses continued to pile up for injuries or illnesses.
Those of means and privilege simply do not grasp how hard it is to exist in America without large sums of cash behind you. I was struggling on less when rent was still considered reasonable, in one of the cheapest states to live in. In the fifteen-odd years since, it’s just gotten exponentially worse, even as the stock market has exploded in value.
It’s why I never stop arguing for better, because I know how bad it can get.
I was just lucky enough to escape.
You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.
The truth is that humanity’s default state is one of “poverty”. It should evoke no surprise or confusion whatsoever, and yet it does.
Poverty is an entirely valid and normal state for a person to be in. There isn’t a vast shadowy conspiracy trying to keep you down; you’re just at the default state of humanity.
Humans improving their situation, now THAT is surprising and interesting, and it’s the thing we should be focusing our curiosity on. If you’re poor, emulate those who aren’t. Maybe they’re onto something.
The alternative is to blame the vast shadowy conspiracy, “capitalism”, etc, and remain poor. That’s an entirely valid mode of being. Nobody owes you anything.
rsyring•1h ago
It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
cluckindan•1h ago
rsyring•1h ago
cluckindan•1h ago
tome•1h ago
cluckindan•1h ago
cf.
”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
tome•1h ago
dugidugout•41m ago
tome•20m ago
rsyring•1h ago
There are more options than the "mindsets" given in the article. It is legitimate to ask someone who believes they are poor why they are poor. Maybe they truly are. But maybe they aren't and they just don't know it.
Questioning whether or not someone has a higher earning potential does not imply they are currently lazy.
rsyring•1h ago
He asserts that being poor is different from being broke. The former being tied to a permanent state.
But, if you have the skills and opportunity to make better-than-poor money, then in most cases, I presume, you aren't really poor. It's only a matter of time until you can make additional money. And if you need to charge the $300 of parts to your credit card, on the presumption that if you have a running vehicle you can go to an interview of do the next landscaping job, you have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay it off. It's an investment in that case.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might find yourself poor anyway for reasons outside your control. Health issues, weird economic situations, whatever. I'm not discounting them. And maybe they apply here.
I just feel like there is a disconnect between the earning potential of the skills he has and being truly "permanently" poor. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate reason, just that it wasn't clear to me what that reason would be.
You may not like the reasoning or think I'm being too critical, but it's hardly fallacious.
alaxhn•1h ago
Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.
nyeah•59m ago
philipwhiuk•1h ago
rsyring•1h ago
In that case, was he really poor? His whole argument is that being poor is a permanent state. If he's not poor now, was he ever?
QuadmasterXLII•42m ago
erikerikson•28m ago
wat10000•1h ago
switchbak•1h ago
I have a lot of empathy for people that are struggling financially, especially with how hard things are now. I grew up in a way that most would consider to be "poor", though I mostly never felt that way.
I do well for myself now, better than I ever thought I could, and yet still I had to think very hard about the financial implications and compromises that come with choosing to have kids. Making 6 babies then complaining that you're poor, come on man, wtf? If you're going to do that, you have to do absolutely whatever you can to bring resources in for your family. That means working the "boring desk job" if it pays more, even if you prefer to be outside wiring up sprinklers.
Where is the accountability, the locus of self control? Sorry, but I don't buy any of this.
billfor•1h ago
nyeah•1h ago
pixl97•30m ago
You're not going to make any money in this unless you have a ton of tools. Working for someone else with the tools generally doesn't pay crap. Also in the US it is/was common to use undeclared immigrant labor for these kinds of jobs.