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What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

theguardian.com

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Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#351

Post by jernfrost »

mantas wrote: post #253
gradstudent wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will those people be better off sleeping rough? Everyone should have access to basic housing. If they do not that's a failure of government to provide a sufficient social safety net.

What is basic housing? Today's poor housing would look like a damn luxury 100 years ago. Today's luxury housing will probably look bellow standards after 100 years

Adam Smith, father of free market economics, pointed out already 300 years ago the fallacy of this argument. He has a passage about how an Englishman was expected to wear leather shoes while a frenchman could walk barefoot without being ashamed. Further he talks about how in his day a linen shirt if considered a necessity even for the poor while the ancient greeks and romans could do well without it.

So the point is that following your reasoning there is really no end to the depravity you can reach and somebody would still be able to claim that is all fine, because only rich people in the stone age could afford such luxury.

The point Smith made was that poverty is always a relative phenomenon. What is a necessity is always defined in terms of the society you live in. There is no such thing as a universal definition of necessity.

I had an interesting conversation about this with my wife's American parents. Despite the fact that her parents were noticeably better off economically in their childhood than my parents, they felt a severe stigma of poverty my parents never felt. My parent grew up in a country where they were much the same as everybody else. In fact a little better off. They did not feel poor at all. They had a happy childhood both of them. But one of my wife's American parents had a bad childhood, plagued by a strong feeling of being lesser than everybody else. Never having people over on visit out of shame over their own poverty. She was used to seeing everybody else being better off and internet the idea they they were somehow lesser people.

Today my home country is richer than America by GDP per capita but comparisons of wealth and of people's feeling of wealth or poverty is difficult. Many of my american relatives enjoy bigger houses and cars than I do, but one always gets the feeling that their life is much more of a struggle than mine. I live in a smaller house and have no car. But I have no financial worries like them. I have long vacations, I am not constantly overworked. I don't worry about health care insurance, saving for college education to my kids, getting fired.

So I think one should have some respect for the desperation and despair the poor in America feel. Knowing that a surprising car repair or medical bill could send you onto the street in no time. Even poor in much less wealth western countries have to deal with quite that level of insecurity.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#352

Post by NoGravitas »

ubernostrum wrote: post #73
ctdonath wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, say those "exploitive" businesses didn't exist. That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). Is having no option better than having a bad option, when good options aren't available?

That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). The hidden assumption here is that producing the goods and services required to keep a single human being alive in relative comfort (fed, sheltered, educated, healthy) necessarily requires an expenditure of manual effort roughly equivalent to what that h…

You are my favourite HN commenter. I frequently have the experience of reading a well-written, insightful comment, looking up, and seeing that it was written by ubernostrum.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#353

Post by [deleted] »

jahaja wrote: post #339
sokoloff wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the top end is short of "billionaire", I think you get a world without Tesla, Space-X, Blue Origin, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and several other things that I believe are valuable and worthwhile. You may argue that the cost is too high and that we'd be better off without those things.

Maybe in a more equal world were people would not be whipped, I mean "incentivized", into working all the time, a larger portion of the population would be able to contribute their passions to society than just the elites of today? Hence maybe surpassing the results of the current aristocratic version of this.

[deleted]

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#354

Post by ebiester »

brianwawok wrote: post #327
anexprogrammer wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile using housing as much as an investment vehicle as housing (see London, SF, and numerous other cities) promotes the creation of shortages to drive up rents and capital gain. You can't seriously be saying that the housing market is working as intended in places where pushing 70-80% of the wages cannot rent a basic apartment there. The cost of those artificially inflated housing prices are paid for someewhere…

Well a sane person should cap housing expenses at 25% of income at most. If you can't afford a place, time to move. If you can't afford anyplace, minimum wage has a problem.

That's the problem. The places that are affordable don't have jobs, and the places that have jobs don't have affordable housing. As soon as a place has jobs, the affordable housing disappears.

This sounds like supply and demand, but is exacerbated by investment concerns changing the dynamics of the market.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#355

Post by fucking_tragedy »

erikb wrote: post #290

It's really hard for me to start reading. Yes, there are other reasons for poverty, and yes people make money out of poor people. But that doesn't really mean that this reasoning replaces the reason that many poor people don't know how to handle money, family, friends well enough to keep their head above the water. And most of the examples they use seem to underline that as far as I can see. Poverty has a lot of face…

> But that doesn't really mean that this reasoning replaces the reason that many poor people don't know how to handle money, family, friends well enough to keep their head above the water.

Do you have a citation for this opinion?

Seems you're shifting focus from the concrete cause of poverty, lack of money/resources, to one of character. The article points out that others profit from this lack of resources and contribute to that cause of poverty.

Why is it harder to read that than an article that speculates that the poor are poor because they are shifty and can't balance a checkbook?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#356

Post by yourapostasy »

yourapostasy wrote: post #292
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificially decreasing housing prices always creates shortages - that's already well understood. The more people who can take advantage of artificially lowered prices, the more pressure there is in other parts of the housing market to absorb excess demand. The cost of decreasing those housing prices are paid for somewhere else in the system.

Hm, how is a cooperative / mutual-aid-like financial/organizational structure imposing artificially lower prices? The profit is absorbed by the members in-kind in the form of lower shelter costs in exchange for the responsibilities of shared ownership, and as the shareholding owners it is their right to take out profits in the form they mutually agree upon. Just because the profit is not capital and not in the norm o…

To add to my comment since I can no longer edit, I see nothing incompatible between cooperatives and capitalism, even if the end result is cooperatives "destroy" the profit margin of profit-seeking equivalent enterprises offering the same goods and services. Cooperatives doing this are commoditizing the cooperative owners' complements, to borrow a concept from Joel Spolsky.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#357

Post by paulojreis »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #350
jacobush wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter counter point - is there much of anything official done in Italy which is not perverted by criminals/mafia? Seriously, not trying to be a dick.

eh, thought about it a lot, and the fact is, it's not the mafia. the whole society is like that. it's a cultural thing, where people expect other people to owe favors back as a natural way of doing business. it works at every level here, from groceries stores keeping freshest bread for friends and giving mellow salami to foreigners upward. it's easy to identify the issue with the big names, but it starts way, way bel…

Portuguese here. Same crap, everyday, everywhere. :)

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#358

Post by basch »

jakobegger wrote: post #266

Instead of giving money to poor people, who then have to spend it all on rent, why not provide affordable housing? In Linz we have something called "housing cooperatives" (the German word is "Wohngenossenschaften"). These cooperatives build apartments, and to rent them you become a member of the cooperative. The goal of these cooperatives is not to make a profit, but to provide affordable housing. And it's amazing ho…

> Instead of giving money to poor people, who then have to spend it all on rent, why not provide affordable housing?

You could probably make the same argument for prescription drugs and patent fees, no?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#360

Post by ryandrake »

mruniverse wrote: post #249
ryandrake wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". What a silly saying. Of course, if you redistribute all the MONEY to everyone, but leave all the means of production in the hands of a few, it's…

I don't think the "means of production" is implied. I think it means that the rich deserve to be rich because they can get rich. That it's not just luck that they are rich, but that they know how to get rich. Take it away and they'll get it back. At least that's my take on the saying.

That's why the saying is silly. Of course if you redistribute all the money, it will eventually all go back to the people who own the tools that collect people's money. That's all that separates the rich from the rest of us. It's not some mystical "know-how" that they have and we lack. It's simply ownership of wealth-concentrating physical or intellectual property.
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