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Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

sticerd.lse.ac.uk

151–160 of 310 posts

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - my mistake. I was going off memory. 2 times, including the principle. Looking here: https://finance.icalculator.info/mortgage-calculator.html I enter, Mortgage Amount: 100000 Annual Interest Rate: 5% Term of Mortgage: 30years The interest paid is 93255.20

But that is still cheaper than paying rent for 30 years

In our area average rent has now overtaken our mortgage payment. So glad we got off that treadmill.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#152
post #130
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…

> You have no savings to rent a vehicle Come on, U-Haul is like $50, including some mileage. > cost of living is pinned to these minimum wages That is true. That's also reason #3245 why UBI is a stupid idea.

>> cost of living is pinned to these minimum wages

>That is true. That's also reason #3245 why UBI is a stupid idea.

I actually don't think that is entirely true. For certain things, those most affected by modern supply chains, we generally aren't seeing a corresponding increase in costs to wages.

For other things driven more by scarcity such as housing, healthcare and education we are seeing a dramatic rise in costs.

Our economy is in a strange place and I don't think the obvious one-to-one rules of thumb hold currently.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#153
People stay poor because all the past unfairness never goes away. It clings to them. Real survivorship bias exists to muddy the reality of how bad it truly is to have bad things happen in early life. A lot of people can simply never recover when they were kicked so unfairly in early life contrary to their peers. I believe it’s why there used to be experiments with lsd to see if memories could be erased.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#154

Easy answer: because expenses are higher for poor people. Instead of buying a home, the lower class rent their whole life. Instead of their daddy giving them a home, the middle class pay interest on a mortgage most of their life. Instead of buying a 20-pack of $necessary_product that costs $20 and will last for months, the lower class buy a 2-pack that costs $5 and lasts a couple weeks because they need the $15 to pa…

Why have the poor gotten richer over time then? We don't have the same percentage of rich and poor as we always have had.

Consider the inverse: Why has life gotten cheaper?

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#155

Easy answer: because expenses are higher for poor people. Instead of buying a home, the lower class rent their whole life. Instead of their daddy giving them a home, the middle class pay interest on a mortgage most of their life. Instead of buying a 20-pack of $necessary_product that costs $20 and will last for months, the lower class buy a 2-pack that costs $5 and lasts a couple weeks because they need the $15 to pa…

Why have the poor gotten richer over time then? We don't have the same percentage of rich and poor as we always have had.

Poor people aren't really poor because they almost all have a refrigerator and an iPhone is not as compelling an argument as you may think. There are very real and very extreme examples* of poverty in this country that are inexcusable.

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#156
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…

I'd bet a significant number of people, upon turning 18, would learn that their trust fund had been emptied out by their parents.

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is still cheaper than paying rent for 30 years

I semi-regularly plug numbers into this Buy v Rent calculator by NYT [1]. They're pretty equivalent in the 10-30 year range and match housing prices I've seen. It's hard to beat the SP500's >8% average return [2]. [1] (paywalled) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

That can change depending on the area

Then, I live in Germany.

There is a 28% tax on stock market returns, but selling your home is tax free

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#158
Because we decided to place as many things in the market as possible, so necessities of life like housing and food can only be got via labor for the employer class who underpay (that's where profit comes from) and if they don't like you you can't even access that low pay and become homeless and either starve, live off charity, or eat extremely unhealthily which reduces your capacity to be useful to the employer class over time.

Redefining basic necessities as human rights and placing them outside the market will do so much to reduce poverty it will blow peoples' minds. However, this will of course come at the expense of the privileges of the powerful so such things are opposed.

It's helpful to think of this as a design question. Do we design a UI that many users fail at or is the problem the system design?

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#159

Easy answer: because expenses are higher for poor people. Instead of buying a home, the lower class rent their whole life. Instead of their daddy giving them a home, the middle class pay interest on a mortgage most of their life. Instead of buying a 20-pack of $necessary_product that costs $20 and will last for months, the lower class buy a 2-pack that costs $5 and lasts a couple weeks because they need the $15 to pa…

Why have the poor gotten richer over time then? We don't have the same percentage of rich and poor as we always have had.

I think we need to define terms. What is poor, what is rich. Are we measuring the delta between rich and poor? Over what time frame?

https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...

https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index

Re: Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]

#160
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA - I mean, my values, in terms of what I think my obligation – my personal obligation – Michelle Obama – is that it is not enough that I succeed on my own. I have to care about the kid in the desk next to me at school because he’s just as smart but his mom works. And my father always kind of taught us to take in everybody’s full story. Not to judge people, the drunk uncle or the cousin out of…

While this is excellent advice for consideration of others, it changes _nothing_ for drunk uncle or out of work cousin that there are "reasons". Maybe government can help, depending (likely the underlying motive of the quote. i.e. promotion of social programs over "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric). Or maybe government can not help but will try anyway at great expense and possibly make things worse. We h…

Government is a substitute for people whose social network cannot help them in hard times. It’s not perfect and it won’t solve everything, but it’s necessary because otherwise nobody will help these people.

The only way to be sure not to make any mistake is to do nothing, which itself makes things worse.

Whilst drunk uncle won’t be saved by the bare minimum a state can provide, he certainly will be worse off if he ends up on the streets. And sometimes all out of work cousin needs is a bit of money to pay rent and food for a couple of months until he finds some work. So yeah, a welfare program is not a panacea but it is useful, and also cheaper overall.

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