Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

sticerd.lse.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 310 posts

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#131

Post by badRNG »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #121

I’m not qualified to judge the technical merits of the paper, but their conclusion seems plausible. They concluded that in an illiterate rural population, there did seem to be a threshold effect in asset levels above which it seemed much easier to progress economically. But it’s unclear to me how applicable this is to the poor in the US or other developed economies, particularly when we’re talking about a population…

> by those measures there are no poor people in the US

That doesn't feel like a meaningful metric when there are as many as 17% of mothers with young children experiencing food insecurity [1]. Perhaps that's due to COVID, but 11% of households were food insecure as recently as 2018 [2]. Around half a million Americans are homeless, and 35% of them are shelterless [3].

Are all of these people "not poor" and are they "middle class"? This all to say that how we think about poverty should focus more on the outcomes that people actually experience (access to food, shelter, healthcare, etc) than key economic indicators. Claims like "the War on Poverty is over" and "there are no poor people in the US" don't seem to match up with the lived experiences of many Americans.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the-covid...

[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

[3] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#132

Post by quickthrowman »

woodandsteel wrote: post #105
drbojingle wrote: post #83

off the top of my head I think it depends on the type of poor you are. Some people are poor because of their situation and some situations are more difficult to escape than others. Some people are poor because of their habits and inclinations and they just don't change those habits (for one reason or another), so they stay poor.

>Some people are poor because of their habits and inclinations and they just don't change those habits (for one reason or another), so they stay poor. That's true. But often the reason they have those bad habits is they were taught them by the environment that, through no choice of their own, they were born in.

Absolutely. It’s not only bad habits they were taught, but the huge amount of things they weren’t taught.

I was taught how to budget, how compound interest works, and so on by family members.

I used to do rental property maintenance in places where people didn’t know to use a dish strainer to prevent sink clogs, nobody ever taught them. Now, spread that out over hundreds or thousands of other things they’re not aware of. There’s tons of useful knowledge that middle/upper class people pass down t their kids that poor people have no clue about.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#133

Post by ipnon »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #81
La1n wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And since the natural state of humanity is poverty (after all we all started as hunter-gatherers), breaking out of it on your own is extraordinary. The natural state was sharing resources and taking care of a small group of people. Not working for a boss.

According to Karl Marx, who had a reason to believe that; it backed up his ideology. Hobbes thought that man in the state of nature had a life that was "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Watching nature documentaries about the lives of lions (and other critters) have me leaning towards the latter.

Did you know that Marx invented the concept of ideology?[1] Do you think he was just being ironic?

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Ideology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#134

Post by ip26 »

imtringued wrote: post #103
q845712 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's super badass, but my recollection of having a commute slightly over 30 miles roundtrip is that it was thoroughly exhausting. Or in other words, the same difficult circumstances that inspire one person to remarkable success will still grind many other people down. We can all aspire to be great, be by definition most of us will hew pretty close to average for our circumstances. I think this thread is pointing ou…

Would an electric bike close the gap? It's not as expensive as a car. It's also better for the environment and your body. A $3k car might sound like a better deal than a $3k bike but then you'd have to pay for fuel and maintenance.

If we're talking broke, we're talking $1k cars and $100-200 bicycles.

My first car was $800 and I bought a few motorcycles over the years for around $400 each.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#135

Post by woodandsteel »

globular-toast wrote: post #125
woodandsteel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not read the article, but assume that their use of the term "poor" was carefully defined.

Yeah but my comment was more about the fact people here are talking about mortgages and things. Not really the same kind of poor.

Oh, ok.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#136

Post by ip26 »

nicbou wrote: post #39
asdff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of perspective is very important, especially here on HN where I see plenty of ignorance on this topic. When you work these jobs, often the local cost of living is pinned to these minimum wages, where you stagnate and are unable to save. How can you possible afford to move when your rent increases? You have no savings to rent a vehicle to move your things, nothing to put down up front for a new apartment, an…

People vastly underestimate how hard it is to do anything without capital/savings. If you are one missed paycheque from going hungry, you can't afford any risks. No going back to school, no going freelance, no interviewing, no investing in anything. You can't afford the means to make money, whether it's a car, a computer or nice clothes. You can't afford them breaking down, but you also can't afford maintaining them.…

you [...] can't afford maintaining them

Not sure I can entirely agree, when I was broke I had a fair amount of free time and I spent a lot of it learning to repair motor vehicles. Parts are not free, but labor & markup is most of the cost anyway.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#137

Post by luckylion »

rayiner wrote: post #88

This is why Booker/West-style baby bonds could have a significant chance to alleviate structural poverty. Beyond a certain threshold (and I think we’re past that in the US) equality of opportunity (better education, etc.) won’t make up for starting out poor. What people need is seed capital. For a fraction of the cost of universal healthcare, we could endow each child born in the US with a $250,000 trust fund at birt…

> For a fraction of the cost of universal healthcare, we could endow each child born in the US with a $250,000 trust fund at birth. That would be game changing.

But they'd still need to buy health care, only they'd now have to do with while also funding an extra $900bn (per year!) trust fund program, wouldn't they?

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#140

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

noch wrote: post #123

The paper says: > The question is whether the bimodality is symptomatic of a poverty trap, namely whether poor people do casual jobs and hold nearly no productive assets because they do not have the talent to do anything else or whether the fact that they are poor prevents them from acquiring the assets needed to climb the occupational ladder. The cause/effect inversion, of talent/ability => asset acquisition, is alw…

You really should read some criticisms of The Bell Curve style arguments. I'd start here:

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Her...

Post reply on HN