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What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

jonbischke.com

131–140 of 149 posts

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is hard to live in a place where life is hard to live. There is some push to discuss "food deserts" as a social problem subject to sociopolitical solutions. Thing is, a desert is what it is because there is little there to sustain life - and the prime way to deal with that, short of either imposing expensive infrastructure or accepting grinding bare-sustenance living, is MOVE: don't be there. Ditto these urban "…

Thing is, a desert is what it is because there is little there to sustain life - and the prime way to deal with that, short of either imposing expensive infrastructure or accepting grinding bare-sustenance living, is MOVE: don't be there. I wanted to work in high-tech and eventually be a tech entrepreneur. I lived in rural East Bumfuck, NC, where the dominant industries were: tobacco farming, golf courses, shrimping,…

I know nothing about you in particular, but your post in whole suggests that you weren't raised by drug addicts and foster parents.

My bigger point though, is to be very careful of people who say "I grew up in BFE, Kentucky" and then clarify that to say "really, on a farm, BFE was just the nearest town." Because the whole context changes when you find out they grew up on a Kentucky racehorse breeding farm.

In healthcare and the military, you find out that this whole thing about "moving" implies realizing that's an option. You're off in the toolshed telling your friends how other people would be better off shoveling snow with a sand shovel instead of a snow shovel. Meanwhile, our ancestors drawing animals in caves shepherded those genes to us through countless winters without ever knowing about the entire class called shovels. Never mind that shovels aren't very good for a lot hunting problems, berry-gathering problems, etc.

I understand that moving is legitimate way to recast your social network, but it's a long way from optimal for a lot of people.

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it does. The "geek's" stereotypical problems with women is a prison of his own design. Same with all sorts of health and diet issues.

I just lost 14 pounds. However, the instincts around body homeostasis are very, very strong. I don't think it's reasonable to presume that it's all self sabotage. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ab/akrasia_and_shangrila/

Sure, but people manage to do it all the time. Like this girl on reddit today: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hlgtb/iama_24_yo_girl_...

Btw, I lost 20 pounds in the last 6 months, so I know what it's like. That said, once you make it a habit, it's not that bad. The hardest thing with food is avoiding "just one cigarette". Just takes a few days of crappy eating / not exercising for your old habits to take over again. You really have to watch out for that.

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#133
post #35

Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never unders…

No offense, but you sound like a nouveau riche, on top of bad generalizations

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#134
post #84
post #13

The latest attempt in the UK to deal with the problem http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8540055/Schools-win-rig...

I read as much of the title as is in the truncated URL and really hoped it would be "Schools win right to use corporal punishment".

Your ass, first.

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#136
post #44
post #35

Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never unders…

"With many of them you risk violence, drugs, abuse, sexual abuse, racism, etc." This modern bugbear of racism is getting ridiculous. Did you really just equate "racism" with sexual abuse? What does racism even mean anymore? Is it only institutional discrimination, e.g. the refusal of the publicly funded government to hire some races? That's where it started. Now, you can be a racist if you have a type you prefer to d…

Way to not "risk racism."

http://www.reddit.com/r/longtext/comments/ga51e/what_is_is_r...

http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#137
post #102
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. My Chinese officemate greeted me with "I see you have more weight" when I came back after three months. Is it a popular thing in China too? Or was he just being a dick? (NB I really did have more weight, but everyone else was too polite to mention it...)

I dunno about China and Sri Lanka specifically, but in some cultures, being fat is seen as attractive. This is probably a signaling mechanism, being able to afford additional food and not needing to perform manual labor means that you are more successful. Being fat isn't so attractive in the West because having a sedentary job and access to excessive fat and carbs doesn't really signal anything much.

Fat is never regarded as 'attractive' at least in my native country (I'm from Vietnam. I believe Vietnam has a very similar culture compared to China.)

The most intuitive way to explain why 'being fatter' is regarded as a complement is this: People often say 'you look different' when they see each other after a long time. Now of course there are two way provided the person looks relatively okay, that is being fatter or thinner. However, thinner might imply that he/she was sick or something that caused him/her to lose weight. So saying 'you look fatter' is a way of saying you're doing well. In fact, Asian people tend to be thinner -- even in the US -- gttp://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparebar.jsp?ind=91&cat=2 . So it's _understandable_ why such Asian countries don't consider 'getting fat' as an offensive thing. Also it's more like a figure of speech now.

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#138
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first link is full of fail. You [a hypothetical poor person] don't have a car to get to a supermarket... 70% of the poor own a car, 25% own two cars. When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine... 64% of the poor do have that luxury. http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf It only gets worse from that point on. The poor can't get free supermarket discount card…

I’m not going to look for an answer right now in that 642-page book, but I suspect that a significant fraction of poor people live in suburban or rural areas, where owning a car is an absolute necessity for holding a job, and owning two cars would be damn near a necessity in families where both parents work outside the house.

The poverty rates for metro and nonmetro areas are not dramatically different (12.5% vs 15.4%).

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB59/EIB59.pdf

Some quick math suggests about 30% of poor people live in nonmetro areas.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/

Since you seem unwilling to browse any sources I cite, I'm not going to bother looking up suburban poverty.

If you are interested in understanding poverty in the US, you should skim that 642 page report. It's a fantastic report and it answers many questions one might have about the material conditions of the poor (and many other categories of people).

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a great comment on here by Mahmud, I think, about how he used to make a few hundred dollars per day with a bucket of water and some sponges washing windows. It is possible to make money with work ethic and no capital.

I'm sure there are many ways to make money with no capital, I was responding to what I perceive to be the flippant 'if only poor people just WORKED, they wouldn't be so damn poor' mentality. A hell of a lot of people work their ass off and are still poor. I'll go further than that. Hard work doesn't actually correlate with salary. I know this becuase I have an incredibly easy job while my cousin busts his ass everyda…

Some people are able to perceive that they are working hard but on a treadmill. They then do something to change that. It may work, it may not. If not they try something else, until they find a way to get a little more success out of the hard work. They then repeat the process. It's exactly the same as an entrepreneur who fails at a start-up attempt but learns and adapts the next time, only on a smaller, personal-income scale.

Other people never seem to realize they are running in place, or if they do, they don't have the drive to make any changes and just accept it.

Re: What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

#140

Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.

It's not a greed problem. Some people are driven to achieve. If that's greed, fine, call it greed. But others are satisfied to just get by, or subsist. They don't actively try to change anything about their situation. That's not caused by the "greed" of others. It's just their nature. So I agree, there will always be poverty because there will always be people who are satisfied to live in it. And by "satisfied" I don't mean happy, I mean not sufficiently motivated to change.
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