Poverty especially sucks when you're all alone like it seems this person was. Where I grew up, most of the people were poor, but we had rich lives for the most part. Lots of family dinners and outings. The people with more would let you take the leftovers home. You can't really train this and we all definitely need a social safety net, but I do think our closed off society prevents us from helping each other too.
Exactly - I’m from upper middle class and while this meant I was lucky enough to go back home when unemployed, all my peers were just career oriented and it’s very lonely to be ‘a loser’ - I recently moved in w some old coworkers/friends in a diff city who are from a diff socioeconomic background. At first they just let me stay in the apt, now I make more than them (though not a lot). We share like family and look after eachother. Sometimes I wish I made more, like the other day when we were all posting our salaries, or when I browse ‘Who’s Hiring’ - but other ppl are more important than anything (unless you’re like a genius or something), you can lose work, money, etc. The internet can make you feel more isolated, being isolated can make you crazy - you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn.
Yup, to some degree if you have the money you can buy yourself a safety net. If you neither have money nor the social safety net, the thing left is what government may provide.
I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.
We all have to do our part to extend safety nets to those in our spheres of influence. I have done very well in life, mostly through what I attribute to luck and being at the right place at the right time. In return, I treat checking in and providing a helping hand (temporary housing, an extra line on my cellphone plan, or in some cases plain old cash) to extended family, friends, and others I encounter as a second job.
Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
I think the recent decades turned us away from ~natural gathering/solidarity mindset. Consumerism drugs you thinking the best thing is to satisfy envy with things, and without a context of cultural sharing habits, many people end up alone struggling thinking people are selfish because today's mainstream is selfish and so it's hard to connect.
Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable.
Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way.
But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others.
And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk.
I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities.
This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
From anthropological research people in subsistence farming societies do not tend to accumulate. If there is surplus (which is mainly crops) it is put towards accumulating social capital (fiesta, wedding, social gathering, gifts to neighbors and family). The safety network is not accumulated capital but social relations (social capital).
In urban societies relations become more money based and suddenly people tend to accumulate wealth and there is never enough.
On the flip side, I much more fear poverty with a family than without. I didn’t need much to make it as a single person, but now I have responsibilities.
Not only is she alone (as in 'single' - not to equate 'single' with 'alone' or 'lonely'...), she adopted three special needs children, too (I got this from following the link to her blog and then the 'about' section). From reading between the lines, it also seems she moved from the British countryside to a big Canadian city, likely leaving behind most of her social support network.
Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?
Raising children is the primary function of society. Someone going beyond their means in order to raise more, harder to raise children should be celebrated. That we would see any fault is damning evidence that our society is malfunctioning.
Growing up in a poor immigrant family was a weird version of this. Most of us were poor and certainly provided emotional support in this regard. However from what I could see as a child there wasn’t a lot of material support. Maybe something with not wanting to trouble others.
Those people you're talking about, your friends, neighbors, and family used to be what we were referring to when we talked about the social safety net. Now we mean govt programs. I'm not saying it's a causation, but somehow we gained the govt safety net and lost the old social one. I think we're all really missing out on something great and I don't know if we can ever get it back.
I'd even argue that "relative" poverty at least (i.e. once one escapes actual, severe deprivation, which is mostly a factor in underdeveloped countries but not entirely unknown in the West, either) is all about the "being alone" factor. The best "anti-poverty" policy, once material abundance is achieved (and a UBI can help with that) is to promote social inclusion and to strenghten institutions that provide social capital.
Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.
A lot of conservatives see the value in private arrangements (ie social capital) over public programs certainly, but I think their pro big business policies and suburbanization, inequality etc drive social atomization at least as much as the lefts policies do. Its a complicated problem and as long as we remain deeply commited to economic growth and individualism its hard for me to see how we can solve it.
I've been where this author has: selling off stuff and wondering how to pay rent, waiting in line for free food, donating blood plasma for $15, walking everywhere because it's cheaper than the bus, getting arrested for not paying child support. Nonetheless apparently I had it ass-backwards in my head: rather than "poor" I mostly still considered myself what this author would call "broke" the whole time. Maybe it was denial, maybe I was just another "temporarily embarrassed millionaire." But I adhered to the thought that I didn't belong in that situation, that it was temporary.
Regardless, poor and rich are relative terms; it's a continuum. You can never be "poor" and you can never be "rich." You can only be poorER, or richER, than somebody else. But there will still always be someone else poorER or richER than you. Ask Steve McQueen if he's rich, and he'll say well I'm not as rich as Paul Newman. Both dead now of course, but they once squabbled over who would get top billing in The Towering Inferno.
I think what I'm saying is that in some way, "poor" is in your mind, and as soon as you consider yourself poor, you are poor. I still wouldn't fault the author's friends for saying they're "too poor" to afford something; it is literally true. They're "rich" enough to afford food, sure, and I guess that offends the writer's sense of victimhood. The whole drama of this piece takes place in the writer's mind. It's a story of falling tragically from a place of privilege. People are "poor" every day and don't feel the need to write an article about it and nobody asks them to.
Your last paragraph is spot on. I definitely had a "I'm too poor" mentality for most of my 20s (I did some similar things to the author of the piece, but without the kids), and that mindset was definitely a limiting factor in my life. I was always too poor to do anything I wanted to do. I even considered myself too poor to date anyone, so I just didn't. Now that I'm in my 30s looking back, and even though I'm more financially secure now it seems like I had a lot more freedom then and could have done a lot more then, possibly more than I can afford to do now (because now what I'm poor in is time and energy, not so much cash).
I still managed to do a few interesting things in my 20s, but not as much as I would have if I could reverse time but with the knowledge I have now.
I had the same mentality in my 20s, even though I made a fairly average young engineer salary (in Canada). But comparing myself to others around me I felt poor(er) and made me both limit myself and more risk averse. Looking back now that was silly of course.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..."
When you're young is maybe the best time to be poor. Your ligaments are still supple and you can sleep on a hard surface and still get a good night's sleep. And you tend to be surrounded by other young people who are poor too, some of whom will be idealistic about it, or at least not care. Those are the healthiest people to be around, while I have to assume those who formerly disdained poor people and now are going through their own private hell, must be the most tedious company of all. Though I have some sympathy for this author having been gouged by the medical system, which I thought was better in Canada.
Life can come crashing down on you sometimes, and it can do so very fast. My own life lesson has been that you're poor and broke (whether aware of it or not) until you're financially retired.
> Regardless, poor and rich are relative terms; it's a continuum. You can never be "poor" and you can never be "rich." You can only be poorER, or richER, than somebody else. But there will still always be someone else poorER or richER than you.
I say the same thing about the words 'liberal' and 'conservative'. Nobody is just one or the other, and everybody is both. Life is too nuanced to quantify like that.
> I think what I'm saying is that in some way, "poor" is in your mind, and as soon as you consider yourself poor, you are poor
It is very well known that people's perceptions of their economic status is well off. Including a very strong "reverse-into-the-median" effect on who is middle class or not.
I personally quite enjoy finding evidence that I'm poorer than I think I am, but I'm deep into the (upper?)middle class to that being a stressful realization.
I love this way of thinking about "poor" and "rich" as mental labels rather than objective monetary worth. It makes me wonder: Why is it easy to label oneself as "poor" or "rich", but not as someone on the middle of that spectrum?
I thought that the article was going to make the more relevant distinction between "transient low income/wealth" and "reasonable expectation of permanently low income/wealth". If we're going to specify a useful word, I think that's more interesting than what she's saying about "so little income it impacts your life stability" vs "low disposable income". I don't think it's useful for this woman to call herself poor, she had an explicitly transient state of unusually high outgoings and low income. She never looked down the barrel of 20 years of the same situation.
In my early 20's I had a girlfriend who was raised in Colombia and immigrated to the US in her teens. I remember one day recounting some bullshit middle-class slogan about how "it's better to be poor and happy, than rich and sad". She slapped me across the face and yelled at me. Passionate as she was she'd never done anything like that before. She told me what it was like growing up so poor you can't afford toothpaste. She basically gave me the whole "you know nothing John Snow". She described what a hard life it was. She'd take anything over that life.
She also wasn't poor in a 1st world country with community pools and libraries. Being poor in a 3rd world country is a whole other level.
You're both right. Research shows that more money doesn't make you happier - after around 80k a year in family income. Before 80k a year (depending on location, etc, I think that was the average for the USA), every dollar absolutely makes you happier with a linear line graph.
This is also a great argument for more marginal taxation.
That’s funny, because when I read “every dollar absolutely makes you happier with a linear line graph” I immediately thought of marginal tax rates.
The fact is that marginal effective tax rate approaches 100% at various points on the first $80k of household income.
If you are a family of 4 and require any health care, the first $80k is practically treading water.
This is because you lose out on $500/mo in food stamps, at least $2,000/mo in healthcare subsidies, and pay over $17,000 in total taxes. That’s not including various other programs you might qualify for as a family of 4 with zero income versus programs you no longer qualify for after earning $80,000.
On top of that, it actually costs a lot of money to go out and earn that $80,000 (direct, indirect, and opportunity costs) which eat into the very little money that actually remains after taxes and disappearing subsidies.
Here’s a CBO analysis on marginal effective tax rates for a single parent with a single child which shows gross income vs effective income — see how it flattens out? [1] The marginal effective tax rate is higher the more children you have.
This analysis does attempt to take cost-sharing subsidies for health insurance into account, although it’s not clear what level of health care utilization they are modeling.
The most fascinating thing about the curve on slide 6 is how “After-Tax Income” starts at about $19k (the value of the govt subsidies) and by the time the parent is earning $60,000 has only increased to about $40k (66% effective tax rate), and there is a point on the curve where slope is negative — earning more leaves you worse off!
> I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window.
I'm pretty sure I've literally never heard someone describe that as being "poor". Maybe this is some regional language thing?
I think this article (and I've seen another before just like it about the poor/broke distinction that had a really powerful piece about mental math while buying groceries) do a disservice to themselves by focusing on the usage of two very common, widely used words. It's fine for words to have multiple meanings in different contexts and those meanings are defined by usage. If people say "I'm too poor to get a pool membership" then that's what poor means, at least in some contexts. Prescriptivism of common, mundane words is a terrible way to make a point. The author is hiding their real point, which would be still more powerful without this unnecessary baggage. See what we're discussing instead of what the author probably wanted us to discuss? If she wants a distinction, then there are other words or phrases (chronically poor, perhaps?) with more specific meanings. But it is fruitless to get "heartbroken" that people don't understand a distinction that isn't common use.
Seems like these kinds of articles always need to have a scold or a guilt trip associated, though I’m not sure it’s irrational of the author. We are discussing it, aren’t we?
Language evolves. People often say things ironically. Other times, they exaggerate for emphasis. A good example is "literally", which has evolved so much that the dictionary has literally changed its definition to indicate that it could be used metaphorically
Trying to police popular slang is a losing endeavor, and I don't think it accomplishes all that much. People already know that there's a difference between someone who's too poor to go clubbing, and someone who's too poor to buy food.
That said, I can empathize with the author's frustration, and I think it's sad that we don't hear such life stories more frequently. The stories we see on TV and hear in the media, are too often skewed in favor of those privileged enough to work in these industries, or to spend their time and money consuming them. That makes it all the easier to forget that people like the author even exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
(American from New York state and currently in NYC.)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the general-purpose definition of "poor" in English is used when discussing things from a life perspective -- economic background, current salary, job prospects, ability to go to college, etc.
When the context is how much money is in your bank account right now (e.g. to shop or take a trip), the general word is "broke" or just "I don't have enough money." And to be honest, "broke" seems outdated and rarely used these days, since it's usually fairly easy to have a credit card or ability to overdraft... so it's often more about your financial discipline than ability. I hear a lot more "I'm already over budget for the month" or just "I can't spend anything until next week" or "no money" than "I'm broke".
That being said, I've definitely heard "poor" used as a synonym for "broke", I'm pretty sure in the UK... but it does strike me as a regionalism.
I'm from the Midwest. I'm guilty of saying it. But that being said, 1) there was a time where I was seriously contemplating declaring bankruptcy, so I think that qualifies under the authors definition of 'poor', and 2) I don't see the value in making this distinction of 'poor' and 'broke' anyway. Sure there's a matter of degree of difference involved, but it just sounds like making an argument of semantics.
If the general usage is using your word wrong, invent a new word for it and popularize it, or just be more specific. Meaning of words gets co-opted and morphed by the public all the time anyway. I don't see this author creating any serious movement towards reclaiming the word "poor" for what they think it really means.
1. having little money and/or few possessions
2. to have very little of a particular substance or quality
Google:
1. lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society
2. of a low or inferior standard or quality
Dictionary.com:
1.having little or no money, goods, or other means of support: a poor family living on welfare.
2. Law. dependent upon charity or public support.
3.(of a country, institution, etc.) meagerly supplied or endowed with resources or funds.
4. characterized by or showing poverty.
5. deficient or lacking in something specified
Oxford Dictionary:
1. Lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society.
2. Of a low or inferior standard or quality.
3. [attributive] (of a person) deserving of pity or sympathy.
I have noticed there's been some progress on reducing the stigma when you're poor and are surrounded by those that aren't.
When I was young, free and/or reduced school lunch paper punch cards were a different color than normal paid ones. Similar for food stamps, WIC, etc. Now they are all plastic cards that don't look obviously different from the cards the people with money use.
EBT moved to discreet debit cards more for ease of accounting and disbursement than recipient dignity, but WIC still uses stacks of paper checks that have to be run as a series of discrete transactions. They're embarrassing to use, almost more trouble than they're worth.
It's obvious when people are paying with it-- the conveyor belt is lined with bunched groceries and paper slips while the line behind the customer backs up into the aisles.
As with many things in the US, varies by state. Many states do have WIC cards that work like a debit card and many grocers have support for a single checkout process with two swipes.
My impression from the author's description of her friends is that they aren't broke either.
>I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window.
The author didn't talk about the difference between wealth and income. That, to me is a key distinction in understanding people's choices and possibilities. I'd call someone who lacks income, broke, and one who lacks access to resources, poor. The article merely talked about different degrees of lack of income.
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Dead Comment
I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.
Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable.
Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way.
But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others.
And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk.
I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities.
This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
In urban societies relations become more money based and suddenly people tend to accumulate wealth and there is never enough.
Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?
Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.
Regardless, poor and rich are relative terms; it's a continuum. You can never be "poor" and you can never be "rich." You can only be poorER, or richER, than somebody else. But there will still always be someone else poorER or richER than you. Ask Steve McQueen if he's rich, and he'll say well I'm not as rich as Paul Newman. Both dead now of course, but they once squabbled over who would get top billing in The Towering Inferno.
I think what I'm saying is that in some way, "poor" is in your mind, and as soon as you consider yourself poor, you are poor. I still wouldn't fault the author's friends for saying they're "too poor" to afford something; it is literally true. They're "rich" enough to afford food, sure, and I guess that offends the writer's sense of victimhood. The whole drama of this piece takes place in the writer's mind. It's a story of falling tragically from a place of privilege. People are "poor" every day and don't feel the need to write an article about it and nobody asks them to.
I still managed to do a few interesting things in my 20s, but not as much as I would have if I could reverse time but with the knowledge I have now.
When you're young is maybe the best time to be poor. Your ligaments are still supple and you can sleep on a hard surface and still get a good night's sleep. And you tend to be surrounded by other young people who are poor too, some of whom will be idealistic about it, or at least not care. Those are the healthiest people to be around, while I have to assume those who formerly disdained poor people and now are going through their own private hell, must be the most tedious company of all. Though I have some sympathy for this author having been gouged by the medical system, which I thought was better in Canada.
Life can come crashing down on you sometimes, and it can do so very fast. My own life lesson has been that you're poor and broke (whether aware of it or not) until you're financially retired.
I say the same thing about the words 'liberal' and 'conservative'. Nobody is just one or the other, and everybody is both. Life is too nuanced to quantify like that.
It is very well known that people's perceptions of their economic status is well off. Including a very strong "reverse-into-the-median" effect on who is middle class or not.
I personally quite enjoy finding evidence that I'm poorer than I think I am, but I'm deep into the (upper?)middle class to that being a stressful realization.
She also wasn't poor in a 1st world country with community pools and libraries. Being poor in a 3rd world country is a whole other level.
This is also a great argument for more marginal taxation.
The fact is that marginal effective tax rate approaches 100% at various points on the first $80k of household income.
If you are a family of 4 and require any health care, the first $80k is practically treading water.
This is because you lose out on $500/mo in food stamps, at least $2,000/mo in healthcare subsidies, and pay over $17,000 in total taxes. That’s not including various other programs you might qualify for as a family of 4 with zero income versus programs you no longer qualify for after earning $80,000.
On top of that, it actually costs a lot of money to go out and earn that $80,000 (direct, indirect, and opportunity costs) which eat into the very little money that actually remains after taxes and disappearing subsidies.
Here’s a CBO analysis on marginal effective tax rates for a single parent with a single child which shows gross income vs effective income — see how it flattens out? [1] The marginal effective tax rate is higher the more children you have.
This analysis does attempt to take cost-sharing subsidies for health insurance into account, although it’s not clear what level of health care utilization they are modeling.
The most fascinating thing about the curve on slide 6 is how “After-Tax Income” starts at about $19k (the value of the govt subsidies) and by the time the parent is earning $60,000 has only increased to about $40k (66% effective tax rate), and there is a point on the curve where slope is negative — earning more leaves you worse off!
[1] - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2018-06/54093-taxrates.pdf
Dead Comment
I'm pretty sure I've literally never heard someone describe that as being "poor". Maybe this is some regional language thing?
Deleted Comment
Poor means you don’t have enough money. Too poor to do something means not enough money to do that thing.
Too poor to buy a super-yacht sounds normal usage to me even.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
Trying to police popular slang is a losing endeavor, and I don't think it accomplishes all that much. People already know that there's a difference between someone who's too poor to go clubbing, and someone who's too poor to buy food.
That said, I can empathize with the author's frustration, and I think it's sad that we don't hear such life stories more frequently. The stories we see on TV and hear in the media, are too often skewed in favor of those privileged enough to work in these industries, or to spend their time and money consuming them. That makes it all the easier to forget that people like the author even exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the general-purpose definition of "poor" in English is used when discussing things from a life perspective -- economic background, current salary, job prospects, ability to go to college, etc.
When the context is how much money is in your bank account right now (e.g. to shop or take a trip), the general word is "broke" or just "I don't have enough money." And to be honest, "broke" seems outdated and rarely used these days, since it's usually fairly easy to have a credit card or ability to overdraft... so it's often more about your financial discipline than ability. I hear a lot more "I'm already over budget for the month" or just "I can't spend anything until next week" or "no money" than "I'm broke".
That being said, I've definitely heard "poor" used as a synonym for "broke", I'm pretty sure in the UK... but it does strike me as a regionalism.
To me poverty has a longer-term temporal component vs having surplus money and choosing to allocate it to different optional goods or activities.
If the general usage is using your word wrong, invent a new word for it and popularize it, or just be more specific. Meaning of words gets co-opted and morphed by the public all the time anyway. I don't see this author creating any serious movement towards reclaiming the word "poor" for what they think it really means.
That's the dictionary definition of the word.
Cambridge Dictionary:
1. having little money and/or few possessions 2. to have very little of a particular substance or quality
Google:
1. lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society 2. of a low or inferior standard or quality
Dictionary.com:
1.having little or no money, goods, or other means of support: a poor family living on welfare. 2. Law. dependent upon charity or public support. 3.(of a country, institution, etc.) meagerly supplied or endowed with resources or funds. 4. characterized by or showing poverty. 5. deficient or lacking in something specified
Oxford Dictionary:
1. Lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society. 2. Of a low or inferior standard or quality. 3. [attributive] (of a person) deserving of pity or sympathy.
When I was young, free and/or reduced school lunch paper punch cards were a different color than normal paid ones. Similar for food stamps, WIC, etc. Now they are all plastic cards that don't look obviously different from the cards the people with money use.
It's obvious when people are paying with it-- the conveyor belt is lined with bunched groceries and paper slips while the line behind the customer backs up into the aisles.
Deleted Comment
>I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window.