(This reply may come across as harsh. I don't think you're bad or dumb for your views. I think you haven't a chance to experience some of this stuff from the inside so you're making reasonable guesses about what's going on, and some of those guesses are understandably limited because you don't have direct experience with the issue.)
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This is a pretty patronizing view. You led with an intention to get "the whole story," but you only went one step further. I'd like to take it another step or two further than that:
> you only need to borrow if you don't have money. > you can only save if you have money.
>> Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment: Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.
I very much doubt they would--that group is used to saving more, yes, but they are also used to spending more, in absolute terms, than the poor who are not saving. Old habits die hard?
But actually since it's not possible to know what the results would be, I'd like to assume you're correct about the hypothetical results, and further point out that the proclivity to borrow and not to save may be adaptive. Middle class+ people obviously do better when they save, but I'd be surprised if that were true for most of the poor.
The marginal value of each dollar is still quite high when a person makes minimum wage, so it's a big stretch to save, say, $100 per month. After a year of saving at that rate you'll have approximately $1,200.
First of all, it's worth noting that saving $100 month consistently is super unlikely just on the basis of stability of employment. At this level, jobs and hours are unpredictable. But let's say that somehow you have a unicorn job that pays you a consistently $1100 a month (don't short your hours, or fire you without notice, isn't seasonal, whatever).
Next, consider that in this unlikely scenario where you have consistent income and can live off only $1,000/mo, then at the end of the year you've saved $1,200. My daughter recently went to the dentist, her bill was around $2,000. I've gotten bills higher than $1,200 for car repair. Heaven forbid an ER visit that year--$1,200 would be a tiny fraction of that bill.
So now we're in a world where not only do we posit super unusual job stability, but also no emergencies happening or major expenses coming up (eg. never having to move). Back of the napkin, assuming the market doesn't tank at some point, someone doing this impossible thing would save about $38,000 in 30 years. That's enough for about 3 years of living expenses at their poverty level, $1,000 per month.
The reality is that they would never be able to save such an exorbitant amount.
The reality is that bills and emergencies do come up, and that's what puts poor people in the hole. And when you receive that $9,000 ER bill it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether you had that $1,200 saved or whether you bought a flat screen with it, you're still deep in debt probably forever (or whatever, the 7.5 years it takes for the debt to fall off). Except it's obviously better to be fucked while you have a flat screen, instead of identically fucked without a flat screen.
The calculus here is that you are going to end up in an unrecoverable financial hole on a regular basis no matter what you do, so when you have some cash you spend it before the system takes it from you. I'm not so sure that way of thinking is wrong for those people.
On top of all that, many assistance programs aimed at the poor penalize you for savings, ie. if you have X savings you can't qualify for the assistance. But if you have a flatscreen and no savings you _can_ qualify.
All this can be true even if it's also true that saving is a good idea for middle class+ people.
> healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.
>> While an optimal diet does certainly cost more than a calorically-equivalent amount of cheetos, you can shop at walmart - buying only eggs, oatmeal, and bananas - with the probable result that your diet will be both healthier and cheaper than those of most low-income families.
I object generally to arguments in the shape of "if they just do something heroic and clever it'll be fine."
Let's assume generously that all people have the same basic time, energy, education, etc constraints around food. And let's further assume that the default outcome for middle class+ people is that that's fine because the money they have to spend on the problem buys basically fine food. So obviously the default outcome for poor people is not fine because the money they have to spend on the problem can only buy bad food that hurts them.
It's not ok with me on a systematic level to say to an entire population: this system is set up in a way that doesn't work for you through no fault of your own. All you have to do to route around that is educate yourself unrealistically, overcome ubiquitous social and media pressure, and put in special effort, time, and energy, and you'll be able to have food that is adequate nutritionally, barely. Probably.
Can an individual put in heroic effort to overcome systemic issues for themselves? Sure. Is that the last word in a conversation about systemic issues? Absolutely not.
> good attire costs money.
>> Maybe so, but anyone can get a dress shirt/jacket/slacks at a thrift store for probably less than $30 all told. It won't be high-end clothing, but will at least look professional.
Clothing is like accents--they mark your class pretty solidly. The thing is that if you grow up speaking a certain way, it's pretty hard to change your accent. Clothing is the same way. Your concept of what "professional" clothing looks like comes from a deeply ingrained cultural intuition. And for what it's worth, anyone with that cultural intuition can spot clothing in the uncanny valley of "trying to look professional, but obviously bought these clothes at a thrift shop" in a heartbeat.
I am a privileged white professional with this intuition and I promise that I would leave a Saks Fifth looking way more "professional" than I would leave a thrift store looking, even if I had an unlimited thrift store budget.
If your answer to this is for individuals to put in special effort to be unrealistically enculturated such they somehow have the intuition for it, plus heroically willing to spend extra time and effort locating clothing that's both cheap and nails the signaling, then see my rebuttal above.
> based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.
>> Idk about this one. What would a poor person write? Is this just a matter of whether they have good grammar? Nobody (almost nobody?) is conspiring to keep the poor stuck where they are. I don't think anyone would reject a qualified applicant just because they have no money.
This is maybe the most interesting response you made because the point seems to have bounced off you entirely. The person you're replying to is making a point about signaling social class. It's about our perspective from the lofty heights of privilege feeling from the inside like we can tell quality or lack thereof, when the reality is that it isn't about quality per se, but about signaling class. And in fact what we're calling a spectrum of "professional presentation ability" can just as readily be labeled by its opposite: "how poor this person sounds." That's not a fact about the universe, it's a fact about our culture.
If that doesn't make sense, I'm not surprised. Pretend like I just told you something profound, and sleep on it. If it clicks, I predict this whole thread will make a lot more sense to you.