Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.
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 replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
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.
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.
A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.
I find myself doing that. I'm not sure if it's just a silly habit I have because I don't like to run out of anything even if it is not important or if I picked it up from my dad who lived through the "great" depression as a child.
I remember watching something on BBC about minimalism years ago when I was doing my PhD and earning £13k a year and thinking that I just couldn’t do it because it relies on you having the money to repurchase something you need that you threw away
Exactly. And there's a complicating related situation that, if you have housing instability, there can also be pressure not to own anything more than you need, in terms of difficulty and cost having to move it or lose it on short notice.
Keeping stuff around and refusing to fix things are not necessarily correlated to being poor.
Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income.
It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
> they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
Specially because occasionally the usefulness of such saved junk appeared to prove the thought right, the rest of the unused pile of junk notwithstanding.
And the more skilled and richer and better tooled up you get over time the more potentially useful everything is so the more you feel like you have to save it.
As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.
Definitely agree on the mentality it creates and how long it lasts. I’m fairly well off now, but grew up very poor. First developing world poor where running water and toilets were shared with the whole building, the whole family crammed into a single room. Then western world poor, where my parents and some friends that lived together (to save money) would walk to get groceries, buy one bus ticket to have one person carry the groceries on the bus most of the way back, and the rest of the group walk to the bus station and help to carry the groceries the rest of the way home.
Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
Something I find interesting is that my mother grew up in similar conditions - poor in Borneo in the 50s, my aunt was literally born in the jungle while hiding from the Japanese
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
> 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.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
I think its more about having enough that you don’t spend all your cycles worrying about money; and more importantly that there’s a way to get on some kind of positive reinforcement treadmill whereby effort is rewarded financially.
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else
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.
Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture
> 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
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
> 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.
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
I recently got yelled at by a schizophrenic homeless man with serious anger issues that was hungry. And he’s better off than a large percentage of the world. Poor is relational.
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.
> I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success).
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution. I would never, personally, defend such worldviews.
Sounds like the optimism rhetoric of Steven Pinker. I suggest you read up on the numerous criticisms of his work. Most of the optimism is based on a ridiculously low global poverty line conjured out of thin air, and other nonsense like GDP.
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
I agree. I also don't know how that could realistically be achieved, with everything nowadays being lowest common denominator, aid budgets being slashed and drawbridges being raised. It would take an extraordinary initiative by an extraordinary person or group.
My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.
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.
That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
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.
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
Not sure why that comment got downvoted. I guess that "income inequality" is the Boogeyman Du Jour.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
Everyone worries about losing their job I think. Nowadays employment is a lot more unstable. Hell a large percentage of the workforce doesn't even have permanent employment.
Flexibility is great for companies but humans need stability.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
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.
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.
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.
I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.
There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.
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.
“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
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.
I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
It's honestly amazing how many people hold a powerful a conviction that the world is essentially fair; that the poor must have some moral failing which justifies their poverty. If it's happened to thousands of people—if you see the afflicted every day—then it must just be a plague of poor morals. We'll believe anything before we accept that we're lucky, and that we owe something to those who aren't.
I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty.
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.
While I understand the sentiment, you stated it yourself, "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?". This is a puzzling question to ask and it shouldn't stop there. The post is very much trying to add some depth here, however it isn't targeting solutions for "poor" people, it is hoping to provoke those who are not to take the problem more seriously.
> 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.
Gee. I wonder why people find a blogpost telling them to fuck off and acting like they don't know that quitting Starbucks is only relevant to those who go to Starbucks annoying?
He right. I’ve seen poverty in India, but I misunderstood it.
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.
My experience with the kids working in Laos was similar but I have a different interpretation.
Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.
Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.
What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.
I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.
It is also that, at 12 years of age, that kid may have had enough of harsh life lessons already, like when he was promised something instead of being rewarded on the spot and later it turned out he was just being tricked. I imagine that something like that may have had a much more direct impact on his OP described decision - that hard earned "street smarts" keeping him grounded in his (undesirable) reality.
Sometimes, a visible example does that. I know of numerous people in Mumbai who do servant jobs, whose kids have gone to engineering schools and gotten corporate jobs. This sort of story - 1st in my family to go college - needs to be prominent for a parent to want to aspire to that for their kids.
Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.
> He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him.
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 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.
I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.
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.
I feel that this experience can cause us to have less patience for the poor in the developed world. Something like, "How poor can you be in the USA? In Mexico, just outside a major city, there is a town without electricity, where people eat corn and raise cows, and they send their children to the city at night to beg because they don't have any cash and no way to make it." How many people live in that level of poverty in the US?
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
Poverty is a spectrum. Naturally, abject poverty is worse than regular poverty. I see too many people say "you're not poor, you have a phone" or "you're not homeless, you aren't sleeping on the sidewalk" (both of these have been said to me). There is a mismatch between what people imagine as poor and what poverty is, and of course, things could always be worse.
If I was in poverty a phone would be early on my list of things to get. First is enough food to eat, followed closely be enough shelter to live (sleeping outside in the snow is fine so long as you have a warm bed in the tend). There might be a few other things as well (I'm not in this condition), but a phone would be high on my list if I could afford it (including the monthly bill) just because of all the things you can do once you have one. For the price they are a great investment.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
> Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
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 know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
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.
> "Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
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.
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".
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...
I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges.
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.
My MAGA dad grew up dirt poor in a house with literal dirt floors in some rooms. Four kids. No dad. Government support. He got a job as a cop and raised me and thinks anyone can get out of poverty if they work hard. He’s a corner case but he’ll never see it tha way because he literally bootstrapped himself. How do I tell him he didn’t and just got lucky? He kinda has a point.
Well if you work hard enough silently lives out the important part: in a high demand area like say construction. But this applies to even high paying fields like IT. If you work really hard on things none cares about in IT you are not gonna make much ...
The most sinister part of it is that today many Americans are not doing well, but because they believe that meritocracy exists, they believe they must have no merit. Cue the graph of deaths of despair.
> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.
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.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
This view of the world puts everything on the individual. It might be worth reading up on structuralism to balance that perspective out a bit. I'm somewhere in the middle of the two extremes myself, but surely one must acknowledge that there are larger systems at play that can constrain an individual's ability to "optimize".
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
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."
I grew up poor, but with two competing narratives about poverty filling our ears at home. You see, my mother came from a well-off upper middle class ("prep") family, and my father came from generational poverty in Appalachia ("trailer trash"). They met in D.C. where he was a soldier and she worked at the Treasury.
Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.
His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."
I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.
Readit News
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 replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
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.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ
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Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income. It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
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Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
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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.
When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need, instead of hoarding five metric tonnes of crap that you'll never use.
If you haven't used something in the past 5 years, you can almost certainly toss it.
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
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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.
[0] https://blog.ctms.me/about/
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.
We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.
But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.
update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
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.
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.
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.
Copium for poors.
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
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.
https://cds.bie.edu/
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.
it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
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.
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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-...
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
These people are gross.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
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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.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
I am lucky to get out of the cycle.
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
If you have been there, you feel that one.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188
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.
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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.
Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.
Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.
What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.
I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.
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 think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
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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.
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
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.
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
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.
Calvinism. Your poor because you're bad. Interestingly enough Calvinism serves as a lot of the basis for what became Capitalism.
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.
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Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
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."
Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.
His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."
I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.