How poverty changes your mindset • Hacker News Board

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#151

Post by lighttower » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #133

jeffmould wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money It is interesting you say this. I have a friend who struggles to get by. Single mom, two kids, a father who does the absolute bare minimum to provide support to his kids, and she is unemployed. She does get support from the state (rent assistance, energy assistance, SNAP), but it is barely enough to squeak by and what little money is…

> It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something. That's not a far-fetched thing for a poor person to do. $1 can buy a can of beans and add nutrition to an otherwise hungry day. > Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar. Opportunities aren't unlimited, and the closer to poverty one is the shorter their term. S…

Your comment is good. The relevant question is what can I do right now to make money? Maybe Mechanical Turk? (can you make $1 in 2 hours?). The abundance of human potential sitting idle agonizes me.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#152

Post by aswanson » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

kraig911 wrote: post #69

I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could…

Sentiments like these are why I can't Fuck with libertarians. Even though I never experienced as much, I know there but through the grace of God go I. And I don't believe in god.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#153

Post by pitaj » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:42 AM UTC

bojackstorkman wrote: post #41

bojackstorkman wrote: post #30

I love how when this comes up, it's people either saying "Here was my experience when I was poor in the past." or "Here is what I think about economics or the wording of this article." Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on. But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?

As a followup, I am a Real Poor! I am self taught, underemployed (I make less than $200 per month in the USA), and have pretty much been the poorest person in the room for my whole life. I eat exclusively off of foodstamps. I am uninsured and partially disabled. I have been able to pay rent for the past few months by working off the books for a couple places, and cashing in on a very limited amount of goodwill that I…

1. What is your background?

2. What is your disability?

3. Do you have access to the internet?

4. Are you on disability?

5. You say you're self taught, in what?

6. What careers have you tried?

7. Do you have family or friends?

7. Are you depressed?

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#154

Post by MrLeap » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:43 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #119

dijit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "not enough lines of credit" thing bit me too, if you don't take debt you can't have debt, it's so bizarre. Regarding your AWS lambda aversion, I am also guilty of aggressively avoiding lock-in with cloud vendors... Now I wonder if that is related to my upbringing.

I don’t get the aversion to lambda. A lambda function is just a regular function that takes in a few parameters and outputs something. I always separate out the lambda interface from the main logic. Lambda is just another interface for business logic. Correctly structured, it is pretty easy to convert the core of your code to use any interface - a command line, pub sub, rest APIs etc.

This is what I see when I look at lambda:

Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance.

What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers.

lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that takes more discipline than I can ascribe to your average team that's willing to use AWS Lambda.

If AWS tripled its prices tomorrow, how long would it take you to migrate? Is it instantaneous? Does lambda linearly correlate with increased migration times? What if aws-sdk dropped support for all non lambda applications. Are you screwed?

Even if you don't subscribe to it, the aversion should be obvious.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#155

Post by princeb » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:47 AM UTC

not only do the poor make affected decisions we also know that the poor (1) have a restricted set of feasible solutions (2) face higher uncertainty in outcomes due to the impaired ability to execute solutions (3) have limited ability to mitigate the consequences of a failed solution.

in addition, public policy tends to strip the poor of their agency, not to mention dignity: (1) their choices are dictated without the context of their situation (2) the actual risks they face are ignored or treated as if a wealthier person were to face these risks (3) their actual utility curve is discarded in place of the utility curve of the policymaker or the general public... and then should the poor continue to fail to make full use of these programs that are not only difficult for the target group to take up, but also humiliating and undermining confidence in helping themselves, they are chided for continuing to make poor decisions.

the article offers a few examples that overcame some problems affecting these people. but the story is very different between communities in which members are equally affected by limited resources and unequal communities. the separation of classes of people within a community with elevated inequality blinds the group to the myriad problems the poor face and leads to a caricature of the poor as incompetent - and it is this warped public perception and conversation that is holding back effective poverty programs.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#156

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

adrr wrote: post #67

redm wrote: post #15

I'm sure how people deal with stress and difficult situations varies from person to person. My personal story and 2-cents: When I was 17 I went through a period of near destitute. I was living on my own, my father had passed away, and I had dropped out of school. Yet, I found myself with some very good jobs, such as GE Capital, a big Oil and Gas companies IT department, etc. Regardless of the opportunity, my arroganc…

100% of society can't be brought out of poverty. Here's an example: If we motivated everyone to get a college education, we would have people flipping burgers who are college educated making min wage and living in poverty while struggling to put food on the table.

[deleted]

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#157

Post by protomyth » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

kraig911 wrote: post #69

I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could…

I know the feeling. Luckily my parents stayed together. We picked aluminum cans. Dad found some hard construction work and I did softball scoreboards in the summer. My brother and I still regard fish as poor people food. Commodity meat shouldn’t be feed to dogs much less people. Although the peanuts and cheese were good.

It affects your thinking forever. Even when doing consulting gigs, I still spent sparingly like it all could go away. Even after Dad got a decent job elsewhere, it took a few years to feel comfortable again.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#158

Post by jjeaff » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:49 AM UTC

MrLeap wrote: post #73

autokad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!" being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively…

Also grew up poor, and seen people of all income levels be cognitively lazy. I felt like I really started to get the way success works when I saw successful people waste money. I saw individuals make flippant decisions to throw away 50,000$ on software that their organization will never use. MSDN licenses for 100 people that can't and never will code. I've seen a salary man whose job it was to install software on tab…

But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons.

I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#159

Post by runako » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:51 AM UTC

linkmotif wrote: post #99

kraig911 wrote: post #69

I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could…

I don’t think there’s necessarily a conflict between having empathy for people unconditionally while still asking questions like: if times were at one point good or OK but you’ve fallen into hard times now, why did you not have savings? People ask these questions because being miserly to save is hard and unpleasant, and then when others seemingly haven’t saved, it’s emotionally difficult helping them. I see people us…

All of this modulo American healthcare means a lot of people who follow this script still end up with nothing. This is especially the case for entry-level jobs and other careers that are more available to the newly arrived.

If you work in a median-income job and are miserly for a long time and save up a year's income, you will have around $60k in the bank. Since you don't have a pension, materially all of this will be in mutual funds or the like if retirement is in your plans. But great, you have savings!

Now let anything happen that requires you to visit a hospital unexpectedly. Let's say your appendix bursts, so you couldn't meaningfully have avoided this calamity.

The average cost for an appendectomy in the US is $33k[1]. That's just the surgery, so assume you'll be out $40k or more. Now let your boss be a miser (like yourself) who decides to fire you because you can't come in. Depending on how quickly you find another job, how much it pays, and your ability to avoid another unexpected disaster (car trouble, sick kid, etc.) you could quite easily burn through the entire $60k of your savings from this one incident. So the very next time this happens, you're no better off than the folks who saved nothing.

But wait, it gets worse! Since your $60k was primarily in retirement savings, you will likely end up paying penalties and taxes for early withdrawal. So you will end up spending thousands of dollars to access your money. The rules are designed to kick you while you're down in this respect. And now you have no retirement savings, so people can talk about what a freeloader you are in your dotage.

(The probabilities get worse as you get older. For an example of how bad, check pricing for long-term care coverage or long-term disability coverage. Basically -- you can't reliably out-grasshopper biology.)

Our healthcare system in general makes the grasshopper approach more about luck than is apparent at first glance.

1 - Obviously, insurance currently will pay a large portion of the $33k, as the ACA mandates that health insurers sell a useful product. But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, and may not be the case again in the near future. It would be foolish to expect health insurance to function as "health insurance" in America for any extended period of time.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#160

Post by qaq » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:53 AM UTC

povertyworld wrote: post #122

bojackstorkman wrote: post #30

I love how when this comes up, it's people either saying "Here was my experience when I was poor in the past." or "Here is what I think about economics or the wording of this article." Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on. But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?

I usually just skim HN for links, but I this article and had to make an account. I've been making about 15k a year about the last five years. I live in a major metropolitan area. The section I live in is finally getting hit hard and fast with gentrification, and it's terrifying. Right now I can ride a bike to work, but if I'm forced to move somewhere that I have to pay to commute, my job won't even make financial sen…

One option is considering moving. Regardless of your eng. skills if you are able to discuss requirements and communicate well you would be an asset for any smaller consulting company in eastern europe.