61–70 of 462 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually a thoughtful comment, irrespective of whether one "agrees with communism". Not sure why it's being downvoted.
Presumably amongst the 50 volumes of Marx/Engels Collected Works he was right in some places and wrong in others.
Poverty is profitable to other people. People who are in poverty often have to depend on services that are overpriced and predatory. From check cashing services, and payday lenders, to not being able to go to a grocery store where prices are better, but instead depending on smaller stores of convenience where the prices are often higher. The lottery depends on those in poverty. Sometimes I think even the police and c…
If you haven't seen it, look up the Last Week Tonight on municipal violations and prepare to get angry. However there are a few things that are more explainable than others; check cashing places exist because banks are not designed for the poor at all. Thankfully this is, I think, going to change in the next few years what with all the startups cropping up to offer financial services to lower income people, since mos…
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What is the alternative? These people aren't forced to live there. If there were a cheaper, better alternative available to them, they'd probably take it. Nobody is 'profiting from poverty' here. These landlords would make much more money if these people were wealthier! I'm sure they'd love to make nicer places and charge higher rents with higher margins, but they can't, because that's all these people can pay.
> they'd love to make nicer places and charge higher rents with higher margins, but they can't, because that's all these people can pay Nicer places require larger capital outlays. The landlords chose their market, not the other way around.
> The landlords chose their market, not the other way
> around.
You don't choose to make umbrellas for the umbrella market, and just keep churning out umbrellas, perpetually disappointed by the fine weather.
This market is profitable, but if it were wealthier, it would be more profitable. There's no incentive for a business-owner in such a place to somehow keep the locals in a state of poverty.
Everything is profitable to other people. > makes $400k a year renting out 131 trailers So, just over $3kpa each. Not a lot. It only sounds like he's profiting a lot because nobody would do that unless at scale - i.e. have 131 of them. At those margins (I don't know what the costs are, but with that little annual profit per trailer it really doesn't matter) there would be no reason to not want the poverty-stricken to…
My main problem is I just don't see what the alternative is. Any rental housing needs to be minimally profitable or no one will bother providing it. That applies at all ends of the pricing spectrum. So if a profit can't even be made, what is the alternative? Millions of people homeless because there are no properties rentable at a price they can afford?
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I'm not so sure the corner bodega belongs in the same category with the payday loan assholes. Yes, the corner bodega is more expensive than the full grocery store, but they also probably have way lower sales per hour of labor, lower sales per square foot, lower sales per other overhead (rent, insurance, security, utilities, taxes), higher credit card interchange fees, higher shrinkage and spoilage, and pay more for t…
> Yes, the corner bodega is more expensive than the full grocery store All your justifications are reasonable from a business standpoint. But if I'm so poor and my circumstances are so bad that a bodega is the only place I can realistically go for groceries, what difference does it make to me? This seems to be the exact point of the original article. Someone is making money off of bodegas, just like someone is making…
You're also still worse off if the bodega closes, right? I think we're just circling on "being hopelessly poor sucks in lots of ways".
People in poverty use services and consume goods. Someone provides those goods and services. Would they be better off if every business closed their doors to the impoverished, so as to not "make a buck off the poor"? Of course not! The trailer park owner in the article owns 131 units and "makes" (presumably grosses) $400K a year. Those units are about $250 per month, hardly the stuff of Viking-style pillaging, IMO. T…
Make of the anecdote what you will.
If we define the poor as a group which relies on regular labour to survive, and the wealthy as a group who does not, then many income sources of the wealthy dry up if the poor cease to exist.
One fairly obvious example is renting. The existence of a rental market is not undesirable. People will always want to live in a place temporarily, as a trial, as a holiday, as a stepping stone. But I'd imagine a huge majority of the rental market exists solely because the tenants either cannot afford, or have too little financial security to risk a mortgage.
More broadly, the cost of labour is reduced by the existence of poverty. The minimum wage is an attempt to alleviate this - in a world without poverty, a minimum wage would be unnecessary.
The question is whether we can do better. Axiomatically wealth inequality is good for those on top, at least in a direct sense.
There is an old saying that "if you took all the money away from all the rich people, and spread it around evenly to everyone else, within 2 or 3 years, all the formerly rich would be rich again having taken advantage of the poor who don't know how to make and keep money". This adage, although heartless to be sure, has some degree of truth to it in my view. The problem is twofold, 1) a lot of people become rich not b…
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And the people that provide goods and services now to the impoverished (especially the actual exploiters, like pay day loans and corner stores, and the manufacturers that supply the junk foods they eat and drink) have a financial incentive to keep people in poverty and grow their demographic. Combine that with an very easily corrupted government like the US has now, and you get corporations dictating policy to preven…
I'm not so sure the corner bodega belongs in the same category with the payday loan assholes. Yes, the corner bodega is more expensive than the full grocery store, but they also probably have way lower sales per hour of labor, lower sales per square foot, lower sales per other overhead (rent, insurance, security, utilities, taxes), higher credit card interchange fees, higher shrinkage and spoilage, and pay more for t…
Freakonomics did a pretty good episode discussing advantages and problems with it recently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the people that provide goods and services now to the impoverished (especially the actual exploiters, like pay day loans and corner stores, and the manufacturers that supply the junk foods they eat and drink) have a financial incentive to keep people in poverty and grow their demographic. Combine that with an very easily corrupted government like the US has now, and you get corporations dictating policy to preven…
I'm not so sure the corner bodega belongs in the same category with the payday loan assholes. Yes, the corner bodega is more expensive than the full grocery store, but they also probably have way lower sales per hour of labor, lower sales per square foot, lower sales per other overhead (rent, insurance, security, utilities, taxes), higher credit card interchange fees, higher shrinkage and spoilage, and pay more for t…